Editorial
A lot is happening in the Atari world these days! From Atari, we hear that the company is finally pursuing an aggressive marketing campaign to make the ST line well-known, widely available and affordable. And production is way up!
And if you or someone you know continues to be a doubting Thomas, take them to a shopping mall this spring. Atari will be showing their products in 150 malls across the country in a joint promotion with Mitsubishi. You or your friend might even win a free system! Other plans we hear are for an aggressive and competitive leasing plan for small (and large) businesses and a consumer credit plan for the rest of us. Yes, Atari!
Finally, Atari is doing its best to make being an Atari dealer attractive again. They still have to overcome the residual resentment over some of their past marketing practices, but quite a bit of interest has been shown recently by dealers who previously had disdained Atari.
Not only do we Atari users need equipment to run and dealers to sell and service it, we also need software. Unfortunately, once again piracy has caused software publishers to look very cautiously at the Atari market. A case in point is what happened with Spectrum Holobyte's Falcon: a month after its release, it was already up on pirate BBS's. Read Gilman Louie's Open Letter in the Atari Arts Forum on CompuServe for the sad story. Please, do your part--don't pirate software yourself and discourage your friends from doing it.
In our continuing efforts to insure that START meets your needs, we're adding two new columns this issue--Business Applications and Programming in Pascal. Business Applications opens with the first in a series on spreadsheets; next month we'll turn to desktop publishing. Programming in Pascal is one of a series of our "Programming in . . ." columns on different ST languages. We won't forget BASIC, however (our publication of three commercial GFA BASIC programming packages should confirm this), and we'll be adding C and Modula 2 to the list in the near future. Let us know your preferences.
We think this is a good issue for you. If you're interested in using your ST in business, you can check out a wide variety of interesting possibilities --and some of the software you might need. We have screenwriting macros and more on disk, as well as features, reviews and columns on everything from games to graphics. And as a special bonus for disk purchasers, we've included GFA Vector on this issue's START disk. We hope you enjoy it.
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Andrew Reese |