I never noticed it growing up but I see it now, TOS is profoundly flakey. My ST has a TOS 1.62 ROM built in and it does not play nice with hard drives.

There’s a simple solution to this, use the wonderful open source EmuTOS instead. Now I’m not resourceful enough to go writing EmuTOS to a flash ROM but my ST does have enough RAM that I can easily get away with loading it up from the hard drive.

It’s been a whole number of years since I owned an Atari ST. Well over 20. In my youth I (and by “I” I mean “my family”) had two, both of which packed in after some time, the last kicking the bucket in the mid to late 90s. Ever since then I’ve longed to have another, even as I moved briefly to the Amiga before joining the PC train in 1999.