ST owners had 'LAN parties' long before Ethernet became ubiquitous. One popular game, MIDI Maze, used the ports as an early networking device, allowing multi-machine multiplayer in a simplistic, but a vaguely Doom-like game. STs became very popular in the music industry, and some are still being used in production today. It was the first major home computer to include MIDI in/out ports as standard equipment, which prompted the development of a wide variety of music composition programs. It gained a strong foothold in the business and CAD fields. The monochrome screen was excellent and high-resolution for the era, giving a non-interlaced output of 640x400 at 70Hz and providing credible competition for the Macintosh at a much lower price point. The ST straddled the two worlds, offering separate color and monochrome screens, auto-detected by the computer's display circuitry. At the time, Macs were solely monochrome, and Amigas were solely color. The computer primarily competed with the Macintosh and the Amiga in most markets.

It ran Digital Research's GEM (Graphical Environment Manager) on Atari's proprietary TOS (The Operating System). 'ST' stands for sixteen/thirty-two, in reference to the 16-bit external bus and 32-bit internals of the 68000 chip. It was announced in January of 1985, and released in June of that year. The Atari ST was a microcomputer developed by Atari Corporation in the mid 1980's.

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