Atari ST

A line of 68000 family processor based personal computers introduced in 1985 by the Atari corporation, they used the TOS operating system which is a version of CP/M with GEM running on top.

Porting issues

While the underlying CP/M system is not that dissimilar to the OS/2 CLI to make mapping and converting basic API and io calls all that difficult, the problem is that the command line was hidden away on the TOS system so almost all Atari applications even if they were small utilities had a GUI user interface that can be quite time consuming to port, it may even in many cases be easier to recreate the UI on OS/2 from scratch using some sort of RAD and just port the basic program logic over and rewrite the GUI interfaces. The system does however have surprising amount of IBM PC/DOS compatible features under the bonnet, for instance the system defaults to a CP/M style floppy format but will read and write DOS formatted floppies.

Care has to be taken in regard to data structures however since the 680x0 processors in the Atari ST/TT/Falcon line of computer have an opposite byte ordering to an Intel style processor like OS/2 runs on top of, however development tools see the processor as a 32 bit device so bit sizes are less of a problem than when porting from DOS for instance.

Versions

Atari ST Development System
Atari ST (1985)
Atari STM
Atari STFM
Atari STE
Atari Falcon
Atari TT
Atari Transputer Workstation (Atari TT plus a farm of Transputers
Atari UNIX Workstation