Atari ST in a box - Part 2

Last month was Matthew’s birthday and October is mine. I’ve only got him by 20 years though.

In last month's article I had received an old Atari 520 ST in pieces from my brother in a cardboard box. After carefully taking all the pieces and putting them back together, I couldn’t get it to work. As you may remember, the 512 KB RAM was missing from the mainboard.

I went on an adventure going to several older computer stores looking for replacement RAM. I did get RAM that was supposed to work, but the unit still would not come to life.

During this adventure I found a place called the “Goodwill Industries Computer Works” in Austin, Texas. This place takes computer donations and resells them to the public and the money goes to the needy. It reminded me of an auto salvage wrecking yard. All shapes and sizes of computers lined the shelves including the most modern to the "vintage" oldies of the 1980s. There between the Apple Mac’s and Apple II’s were a few pieces of Atari equipment.

To my surprise I found two Atari SC1224 color monitors and a broken up Atari 1040ST. All items are sold “AS-IS” so I bought them and hoped for the best.

Now I had a Atari 520ST, 1040ST and two Atari monitors to use in this article. As fate would have it, neither monitor had the 13 pin video cable so I had to order one from our Atari friends at B&C Computer Visions.

While I waited for the video cable to arrive I attempted to power up all three items (which they did). A few days later, the cable had arrived, so I tried it out the 1040ST. I guess sometimes you live right because the 1040ST and both monitors worked. (that's lady luck for you - Ed)

After our friends at H.A.C.E. had seen last month's article, they sent me an e-mail offering to donate their old BBS system, a 520ST with a couple of B&W monitors.

So, I took them up on their kind offer and drove down to Houston to collect yet another box full of ST stuff. My old friend John Hauser loaded me up with two SC124 B&W monitors, a 520ST with FDD, an Atari SCSI HD with case, CD-ROM drive for the ST, a 44 MB SyQuest Tape drive, a dual monitor selector box, a 9600 baud modem as well as some miscellaneous software.

He gave me two other items that will come in handy, a new 1040ST case for my other unit, and a copy of PageStream.

So what started out as an addition of one Atari 520ST has turned into several Atari ST items.

Of course, this Atari 520ST spent its life as the BBS server for the world famous H.A.C.E. BBS up until they took it off line a few years ago.

I will continue to try and get the first 520ST going, but now I have several new ST toys to hook up and test. I think my 8-bit stuff is going to collect and little dust over the next several weeks.

See you next month,

del@myatari.co.uk

MyAtari magazine - Feature #5, October 2002