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It was one of the only home computers to ever include MIDI in/out ports as standard equipment, which prompted the development of a wide variety of music composition programs. STs became very popular in the music industry, and some are still being used in production today.<ref>[http://www.synthtopia.com/content/2010/03/10/atari-ste/ "The Atari STe – Still The World’s Tightest Music Computer?" — Synthtopia]</ref>
One popular game, MIDI Maze, used the ports as an early networking device, allowing multi-machine multiplayer in a simplistic, but a vaguely Doom-like game. ST owners had "LAN parties" long before Ethernet became ubiquitous.
It was a reasonably competent gaming computer; the color graphics weren't exciting, but the simple architecture and relatively quick CPU gave it a fair bit of muscle. It came nowhere near the overall power of the Amiga, but was perfectly straightforward to program, where dealing with the Amiga's multiple independent co-processors was famously difficult.