The Atari ST Book is a super rare piece of Atari hardware, apparently only ever released in Europe. It was supposed to pick up where the STacy portable computer left off but was designed as a sleeker, lighter, less power-hungry machine. It was a pretty impressive machine back in the day (1991), sporting a 40mb IDE hard drive, internal midi ports, built in file transfer software on ROM and a touch pad system instead of a mouse which they called “Vector Pad”.

It also came shipped with TOS and GEM built it.

The ST Book was aimed primarily at musicians and was marketed thusly, despite the fact it could run all of the ST's high-resolution applications. This, combined with Atari's legendary commercial inability, was responsible for the downfall of the unit and as a result only 1000 or so ever shipped. The $1500+ price tag didn't help much either.

The ST Book was compatible with the ill-fated ST Pad, another beautiful piece of Atari technology. Both these items of classic Atari hardware are extremely rare and highly collectible.

Atari ST Book Specifications:

Released: 1991
Processor: 68000, 8/16 Bit
Mhz: 8
RAM: 1 MB expandable to 4 MB
ROM: 192 KB
Operating Systems: TOS 1.4, Basic, GEM
Graphics/Resolution: 640x400 2 Colors (Monochrome)
Text: 80x25
Colors: 512
Sound: 3 Channel, mono (Chip: AY-3-8910)
Ports: RS232, 2 Joystick, RGB, Midi
Internal Drives: 40mb Internal
Accessories: Hard disk, CD-ROM

---

Steve Anderson has a gallery with some nice pics of the ST Book and ST Pad: http://www.geocities.com/geosteve_99/gallery/stbook_gal.html