The ST allegedly stood for "Sixteen/Thirty-two bit" which refered to the 16 bit processor with 32 bit registers. Other theories exist that ST stood for "Sam Tramiel" one of owners of the Atari corporation.
The Atari ST was a competitor to the Commodore? Amiga systems. Where the Amiga had custom hardware which gave it the edge in the games market the ST was generally cheaper and thanks to its built-in MIDI ports enjoyed success as a sequencer and controller of musicial instruments. In some markets, particularly Germany, the machine gained a strong foothold as a small business machine for CAD? and [Desktop publishing]? work.
Like the Amiga, the Atari ST was based on a Motorola 68000 processor running at 8 Mhz. Initially shown in 128 kB (130ST) and 256 kB RAM (260ST) models, these were quickly dropped in favour of the standard 512 kB RAM machine with a built-in floppy drive and TV modulator (520STFM).
The ST featured a graphical user interface, GEM (Graphic Enviroment Manager, which was also available for the IBM PC and clones) and an operating system named TOS (The Operating System). It had a display of 640x400 pixels on a monochrome monitor, or 640x200 / 320x200 pixels on a color monitor or TV display, with 16 colors as standard from a palette of 512.
Later models included:
There was also some unrelased prototypes: Falcon 040 (based on a Motorola 68040), and STylus (palmptop)
Since Atari pulled out of the computer market (?and got bought by Hasbro?) there has been a market for powerful TOS based machines (clones). Like most retro computers the Atari enjoys support in the emulator scene.
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