Refurb Weekend: Atari Stacy

http://oldvcr.blogspot.com/2025/01/refurb-weekend-atari-stacy.html

by goldenskye • 2 years ago

78 8 2 years ago

oldvcr.blogspot.com

Nice article, basically a teardown guide, lots of details.

Portable electronics have come a long way. People kvetch about glued phone components but hey, better than exposed parts shorting out against the case!

jgrahamc2• 2 years ago

Interesting story just wished the author had skipped this metaphor: "and the entire laptop is an uneasy sandwich held together by a small set of screws in plastic races that all strip quicker than at a Hugh Hefner birthday party. So why do we tolerate this very bad, bad, bad, bad girl?"

emptiestplace• 2 years ago

I think they removed it.

jgrahamc2• 2 years ago

Yes. They appear to have changed it to: "and the entire laptop is an uneasy sandwich held together by a small set of screws in plastic races that strip and fracture with little provocation. So why do we tolerate this very bad, bad, bad, bad girl?"

nxobject• 2 years ago

Ah, yes, brittle plastics from the late 80s and early 90s :) PowerBook collectors are really familiar with this, but with STacys and their assembly I'm not sure I would have had any patience!

johnklos• 2 years ago

I was anxious the whole way through. I bet it's both wonderful and nerve-racking to own a piece of history like this.

outofmyshed• 2 years ago

I used a Stacy in a MIDI setup at college, whereas I had a standard 520STFM at home. They were pretty rare at the time even in the UK where the ST was relatively popular for a few years. I never dreamed of trying to take it anywhere - way too cumbersome.

A couple of years later someone showed me a PowerBook and that was that.

wkat4242• 2 years ago

The STacy was cool bit it was a bit of a brick (7kg!!), much akin to the first Macintosh Portable. The ST Book was much nicer: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ST_Book . It was only 1.9kg, similar in weight to a 2010 MacBook Pro 15". Only big drawback was that it lacked a backlight which the STacy strange enough did have. The ST Book did have a fairly long battery life despite running on only 7 AA batteries!

Unfortunately not very many were made of that one. Only 1000-1200 ST Books compared to the 35000 STacys. It was produced during the downfall of Atari. So they are pretty much unobtainium these days.

The STacy has a battery compartment but in the end Atari decided not to offer a battery option because the runtime was so miserable. They improved that massively with the ST Book (but by cutting the backlight, external video interface and floppy drive among others).

Refurb Weekend: Atari Stacy

Related Stories