Just as the Macintosh platform quickly dominated the world of graphic design, the Atari ST found its strongest niche in music production. That's because Atari included two built-in MIDI ports with every ST shipped--a world first for mainstream PCs at the time.
MIDI allows electronic musical instruments to control one another, which meant that the ST could capture a performance, play it back, or generate a new one from scratch. Atari ST machines saw widespread use for audio-production work well into the late 1990s due to their stability and their excellent music software. A few studios still swear by them today.
Atari never fully utilized the ST's cartridge port (shown here), but third-party developers sometimes used it as a hardware expansion interface.
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