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Comment by UncleOxidant | Hacker News Reader

> (ST refers to Sixteen/Thirty-two, referring to the 68k CPU’s external and internal data width)

I thought ST referred to Sam Tramiel - Jack Tramiel's son.

ST was always "16/32" in conversation with Leonard Tramiel. I don't recall an instance where he admitted it might be anything else. I guess it's possible, but I think that Sam knew it would be unfair to the team.

I wrote this code in the ST BIOS. It's been 35 years, and I don't remember all the details, but I'm pretty sure it was a "Hail Mary" and was not well tested. It appeared to work, and we moved on to more important things. Certainly our really small QA staff (or 5-6 people? certainly less than 10) was not testing it. And we definitely had more important things to make work.

We put the ST together in about ten months; that was from absolutely zero software and no hardware to being available on shelves in stores. I still don't know how we did it. Most of us were working 80-100 hour weeks (and the software people like me were living away from our families, working with Digital Research in Monterey on finishing GEM and porting stuff over).

Every few years I run into Derek Mihockha and he gives me grief about this, and then smiles.

I loved the 1040ST that I bought at the bookstore at Berkeley, which I used throughout college. I had a color screen for games and MIDI, and a monochrome screen that I used for writing papers, programming, and rlogging into the VAXen (4.3 BSD) and Suns. I definitely appreciated the DOS data-transfer trick!

Oh boy, reminds me of the time this Atari fanboy accosted poor Sam in the Palo Alto Pizza My Heart and sputtered my confession of love for the ST at him. He looked at me like I was crazy and told me to leave him the hell alone.

Sixteen/Thirty-two seems to make more sense, especially if you look at the TT, which is Thirty-two/Thirty-two.

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