My 1040ST was an earlier one. Not sure if it was a Rev D motherboard but it did have the 1mb of RAM along the front, under the keyboard.
Atari wanted quite a lot of money for their external 3.5" floppy drive (so that you'd have two - one for your compiler and one for the source/target files). There was a magazine article about how to create a cable (the ST used a DIN connector for the 2nd floppy) so that a Radio Shack 3.5" drive could be used, and it worked fine.
The really annoying part was their hard drive expansion port was proprietary (19 pin D-Sub connector), and wasn't SCSI. That really limited the available choices for mass storage.
The proprietary port was actually SCSI in a non-standard format. There were readily-available conversion boards. I had a self-build external hard drive case with a (20 MB?) SCSI hard drive that let me boot up my ST to MiNT and run the GNU development tools. So close to Unix.
Comments
My 1040ST was an earlier one. Not sure if it was a Rev D motherboard but it did have the 1mb of RAM along the front, under the keyboard.
Atari wanted quite a lot of money for their external 3.5" floppy drive (so that you'd have two - one for your compiler and one for the source/target files). There was a magazine article about how to create a cable (the ST used a DIN connector for the 2nd floppy) so that a Radio Shack 3.5" drive could be used, and it worked fine.
The really annoying part was their hard drive expansion port was proprietary (19 pin D-Sub connector), and wasn't SCSI. That really limited the available choices for mass storage.
The proprietary port was actually SCSI in a non-standard format. There were readily-available conversion boards. I had a self-build external hard drive case with a (20 MB?) SCSI hard drive that let me boot up my ST to MiNT and run the GNU development tools. So close to Unix.