A big difference is that the Atari probably wasn't connected to the internet 24-7. Your ST wasn't being probed around the clock by hackers across the country and around the world. It likely wasn't tied into your banking and probably didn't hold a lot of your personal communications and health data. The Atari probably had a lot of security holes but it didn't matter that nobody was fixing things and sending a frequent stream of updates.
That Atari had literally zero security holes.
Ataris had plenty of security holes. And were vulnerable to viruses spread on floppy disks.
It did seem like a big purchase initially. I used it for 6 years of college. I mainly used it for word processing. It never skipped a beat.
Once every two years, I would need to re-ink the ribbon with ink myself. Just dipped the ribbon into the bottle, and rewind. I was too cheap to buy a new ribbon.
Besides the initial outlay, I spent $2.00 days on ink in six years.
If I had foresight, I never would have thrown away a great computer. I miss the word processor program. I definetly miss that dot matrix printer. (I never told anyone at school about my about my computer. I felt like I was cheating. Not one professor noticed the dot matrix print type.
What people miss about old hardware from the days was everything was built like tanks.
The thought of buying a new computer every two years was unthinkable. In my world, it's still unthinkable.
I really believe we have been duped by the industry--on all levels.