Atari TT

Atari TT030

Atari TT030 Computer
Manufacturer	Atari Corporation
Type	Personal computer
Release date	1990; 27 years ago (1990)
Introductory price	US$2,995 (equivalent to $5,490 in 2016)
Discontinued	1993; 24 years ago (1993)
Operating system	Atari TOS 3.0x
CPU	CPU: Motorola 68030 @ 32 MHz (system bus @ 16 MHz) FPU: Motorola 68882 @ 32 MHz
Memory	2/16 MB
Storage	1.44 MB (later version) or 720 KB (first TT version) 3½" floppy disk drive 50 MB hard drive
Display	VGA Monitor (analog RGB and Mono)
Graphics	Six Display modes Color: 320×200 (16 color), 320×480 (256 colors), 640×200 (4 colors), 640×480 (16 colors), palette of 4096 colors Duochrome: 640×400 (2 colors) Monochrome: 1280×960 mono TT high with ECL 19 in (483 mm) monitor
Sound	Yamaha YM2149 + National LMC 1992, same as in STe
Input	Keyboard (detachable) 94 Key 2 button Mouse
Backward compatibility	Atari ST
Predecessor	Atari MEGA STE

The Atari TT030 is a member of the Atari ST family, released in 1990. It was originally intended to be a high end Unix workstation, however Atari took two years to release a port of Unix SVR4 for the TT, which prevented the TT from ever being seriously considered in its intended market.

In 1992 the TT was replaced by the Atari Falcon, a low cost consumer oriented machine with greatly improved graphics and sound capability, but with a slower and severely bottle-necked CPU. The Falcon possessed only a fraction of the TT's raw CPU performance. Though well priced for a workstation machine, the TT's high cost kept it mostly out of reach of the existing Atari ST market until after the TT was discontinued and sold at discount.

The nascent open source movement eventually filled the void. Thanks to open hardware documentation, the Atari TT, along with the Amiga and Atari Falcon, were the first non-Intel machines to have Linux ported to them, though this work did not stabilize until after the TT had already been discontinued by Atari. By 1995 NetBSD had also been ported to the Atari TT.

Atari Corporation realized that to remain competitive as a computer manufacturer, they needed to begin taking steps to exploit the power offered by more advanced processors in the Motorola 68000 series. At that time, the highest performance member was the 68020. It was the first true "thirty-two bit bus/thirty-two bit instruction" chip from Motorola. Unlike the 68000 used in the original STs, the 68020 was capable of fetching a 32-bit value in one memory cycle, while the older STs took two.

The TT was initially designed around the 68020 CPU, however as the project progressed, Atari Corp. realized that the 68020 was not the best option for the TT. The 68020 still lacked certain important features offered by the next successor in the 68000 line, the new 68030. The new 68030 featured a full 32-bit address/data bus and internal registers; separate Supervisor, User, Program, and Data virtual memory spaces; built-in memory-management hardware; and 256-byte on-chip instruction and data caches.