Atari STacy Portable Computer

Atari announced the Atari STacy, a portable Atari ST, years before it actually hit the streets. Only about 35,000 were shipped so they are pretty rare. While the price of $2,299 ($5,427 in today's dollars) may seem high by today's standards, it was a downright bargain compared to the similarly featured Macintosh Portable which cost $7,300 ($17,200 in today's dollars).

There were four models of the Stacy:

• Stacy: 1MB RAM
• Stacy 2: 2 MB RAM, 20 MB hard drive
• Stacy 2: 2 MB RAM
• Stacy 4: 4 MB RAM, 40 MB hard drive

All versions included a 3.5" disk drive, 68HC00 CPU @ 8 MHz, and were expandable to 4 MB of RAM. The screen was a 10.4" passive matrix LCD.

While the Atari STacy was portable, you can't really think of it as a laptop. It could run on batteries but it needed 12 C cells and they would only last about 15 minutes. So while it was relatively easy to transport, you really needed to plug it in wherever you went. Except for thickness, the dimensions weren't terribly different from laptops today.

Other than gaming, the Atari ST was most used for its MIDI capabilities. The STacy featured MIDI input and output so could be quite useful for musicians. Other than the occasional hobbyist, I would imagine that most of the 35,000 STacys (STacies?) sold went to musicians. A professional MIDI extension was one of the few peripherals designed specifically for the STacy.

Although the STacy may have mostly been used by musicians, it had a standard array of ports, including parallel, serial and FDD ports, an optional modem, and could run most software the standard Atari ST could run so it compared favorably to other portables at the time for general purpose computing. There was plenty of software available including word processing, spreadsheet, database, and of course games. Certainly, for fans of the Atari ST, this would have been a great machine to have to complement your desktop setup.

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