Refurb Weekend: Atari Stacy (opens in new tab)

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).

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.

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?"

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!

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

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!