Editing Atari ST (section)

===Port connections===
The ST featured a large number of ports mounted at the rear of the machine.
*Standard ports:
**RS-232c serial port (DB25 male)
**Centronics printer port (DB25 female)
**[[joystick]]/mouse ports (DE-9 male)
**[[MIDI]] ports (5-pin DIN)
*ST-specific ports:
**Monitor port (13-pin DIN)
**ACSI (similar to SCSI) DMA port (for hard disks and laser printers)
**Floppy port (to add a second floppy drive)
**ST cartridge port (for 128 KB ROM cartridges)

Because of its [[bi-directional]] design, the Centronics printer port could be used for joystick input and several games made use of available adaptors that plugged into the printer socket, providing two additional 9-pin joystick ports.

Atari initially used single-sided [[floppy disk|disk drives]] that could store up to 360&nbsp;KB.<!-- Is this 360x10^3 bytes, or 360x2^10? -->  Later drives were double-sided versions that stored 720&nbsp;KB. Due to the early sales of so many of the single-sided drives, almost all software would ship on two single-sided disks instead of a single double-sided one, for fear of alienating [[early adopter]]s. ST magazines wishing to cater to the entire audience while still supplying a large amount of material on a single cover disc had to adopt innovative custom formats to work around this problem. Another sticking point was that while the Atari double-sided drive could read IBM-formatted disks, IBM PCs could not read Atari disks.  This was a formatting issue that was later resolved by third-party software formatters and TOS upgrades (1.4 and higher).