Eckhard Kruse's Pages
Atari ST
Once upon a time...
It was the year 1985: A graphical user interface with menus, windows, an amazingly easy to use device called mouse; the incredible screen resolution of 640x400 monochrome pixels, or even 16 colors to be chosen freely while still having 320x200 pixels resolution (well, of course, you needed an additional monitor to use this mode); and all that for a price of 3000 DM - that's what you had to pay just three years to get an Atari 800 with 16 KB RAM and cassette drive. It was the spectacular beginning of the age of the Atari ST!

So, in the mid of the eighties, I had to learn that I was wrong when thinking the years before that all my deep Atari 800 knowledge would be useful for decades.

The next years I spend quite some time programming the Atari ST: With the Atari Basic I wrote an 68000 assembler, which in turn I used to write a better assembler and then various other programs. Finally, my parents bestowed me a C-Compiler as birthday present (here is the story in the German ST Computer magazine) and things got really going: Ballerburg, winner of music program competition, graphics and sound demos and so on.

Lots of Atari ST enthusiasts are now reminiscing about the good old times. So do I! The next pages show some of the Atari ST things I did in the eighties and you can also download the original programs (and run them on PC using e.g. WinSTon).

October 2021 - timeless enthusiasm...

Atari Legend: A passionate retro computer fan from Belgium did an interview with me and produced a really nice video about the good old Atari times - including details and insights I did not even know about:


Some links: