Atari 260ST, SW monitor, floppy

Summary

The Atari 260ST and Atari 520ST form the first 16-bit computer of Atari with the Motorola 68000 processor, which contributes as 16/32 processor (Sixteen/Thirty Two) to the name “ST”. (The 68000 works internally with 32-bit, but has only a 16-bit wide data bus.) The Atari 260ST and Atari 520ST originally differed in the memory expansion (256 KiB and 512 KiB), but when it became clear that 256 KiB were too little for the graphical operating system TOS, both machines got 512 KiB. However, the blurring of the difference and the Atari 260ST disappeared relatively quickly. The Atari ST series became a great success, and musicians loved the computer because of the standard built-in MIDI interface. On the Atari 520ST followed the Atari 520ST+ with 1 MiB RAM.