but reduces cable clutter. The joystick and mouse ports, formerly on the right side of the machine, are in a niche underneath the keyboard. An "FM" variant includes an RF modulator allowing a television to be used instead of a monitor. The trailing "F" and "FM" were often dropped in common usage. In BYTE magazine's March 1986 cover photo of the system, the name plate reads 1040STFM but in the headline and article it's simply "1040ST". The 1040ST is one of the earliest personal computers shipped with a base RAM configuration of 1 MB. With a list price of in the US, BYTE hailed it as the first computer to break the $1000 per megabyte price barrier. Compute! noted that the 1040ST is the first computer with one megabyte of RAM to sell for less than $2,500. A limited number of 1040STFs shipped with a single-sided floppy drive. Mega Initial sales were strong, especially in Europe, where Atari sold 75% of its computers. Germany became Atari's strongest market, with small business owners using them for desktop publishing and CAD. To address this growing market segment, Atari introduced the ST1 at Comdex in 1986. Renamed to Mega, it includes a high-quality detached keyboard, a stronger case to support the weight of a monitor, and an internal bus expansion connector. An optional 20 MB hard drive can be placed below or above the main case. Initially equipped with 2 or 4 MB of RAM (a 1 MB version, the Mega 1, followed), the Mega machines can be combined with Atari laser's printer for a low-cost desktop publishing package. A custom blitter coprocessor improved some graphics performance, but was not included in all models. Developers wanting to use it had to detect its presence in their programs. Properly written applications using the GEM API automatically make use of the blitter. STE In late 1989, Atari Corporation released the 520STE and 1040STE (also written STE), enhanced version of the ST with improvements to the multimedia hardware and operating system. It features an increased color palette of 4,096 colors from the ST's 512 (though the maximum displayable palette without programming tricks is still limited to 16 in the lowest 320 × 200 resolution, and even fewer in higher resolutions), Genlock support, and a blitter coprocessor (stylized as "BLiTTER") which can quickly move large blocks of data (particularly, graphics data) around in RAM. The STE is