LETTERS


Put pen to paper - or better still send us an email and have your
say...

The obituaries


Atari RIP


The whole reason Atari pulled out the computer business was because
they could not make a profit from it. That's not would not, could not.
In 1990 or thereabouts, an ST cost £250, a PC £2500 and even then the
PC would be inferior in many areas. Two to three years on, the ST was
still much the same price but PCs had grown several times more powerful
and dropped to £8-900. Now you can buy Pentium 133s for well under a
thousand pounds.
Atari could have sunk cash into R&D and to an extent did, the result
was the Falcon which was far too expensive for the market. The ST
rapidly became a niche product.
Atari owe no-one anything. They made a product, it ran it's life and
finished. Sure, there are a good few thousand people who still use them
everyday, great, but it's not enough to run a company on. It would require
storage, inventory, staff, data etc just to provide minimal support for
existing stuff, let alone progress the situation.
Atari also had what Darryl Still used to refer to as the "Burden of
History". Many long term Atari users still think as if Atari have 50 world
wide sites, $1 billion plus turnover, R&D like you wouldn't believe,
20,000 staff etc. They haven't. They have maybe 100 staff worldwide (if
that), two or three sites and that's about it. Frankly, it's a miracle
they managed to get world wide distribution on anything.
If you feel Atari let us down, would you suggest we all hassle
Anamartic or whatever uncle Clive does these days because he flogged
off the Spectrum? Should we mail bomb whoever was responsible for
Nascoms, NewBrains etc.?
If there was anything to be made, people would have been buying all the
leftover TOS/ST rights. Has it happened? Nope. We have a slightly
improved and still highly priced Falcon from CLab and Wizztronics have
the rights to a few bits but haven't really done much with it plus a
few overkill TOS machines that you'd have to be mad to buy unless you
had a really huge legacy collection of essential software.
Anyway, with the Internet and the few 3rd parties left, who needs
Atari? Atari users always got by fine with little or no help from them.
Ever since I bought my first ST (1987), Atari were saying "we sell
computers in boxes. That's all we do. The rest is up to you.".
The result? A hugely creative, self-supporting and some may say
fanatical core of users who will provide more than enough impetus to
give the ST range a good few more years of useful service to those not
yet ready or willing to move onto pastures new.
I've owned Atari VCS, 400, 800, 130XE, STm, STe, Mega STe, Falcon, Lynx
and Jaguar and am as sorry as the next person to see how it all ended
up.

Iain Laskey, ilaskey@cix

STF RIP


I've just received the final issue of STF in the post this morning,
over the years I've seen this magazine shrink down to A4 size with less
pages. However this is also true of the Atari market in general, even
Atari abandoned us. STF has always tried to deliver an informative
magazine to challenge its readers to do more with their machines, they
had their knockers and I for one was not always happy with some of the
content, but they survived. Now we must survive, don't be pushed into
changing platforms, your machine is still more than capable of doing
all you want at a fraction of the cost and without all those sleepless
nights my PC owning friends seem to suffer from. I for one will be
sticking with my Atari and will continue supporting the remaining
companies and authors and of course Atari Computing.
To all the STF team, thank you for all your hard work, support and
encouragement for the Atari over the years - even in your final issue.

Les, lesliec@cix

Atari World

Despite the magazine ceasing to appear Specialist Magazines Ltd. still
hasn't (as we go to press) been finally wound up! The loss of an
excellent magazine was bad enough but both subscribers and writers lost
money which is unacceptable.
Atari Computing offers a money back guarantee to subscribers and until
we're certain the future for the magazine is secure we're all working
unpaid. If you'd like to write an article we would be pleased to
consider it for publication. Please note we simply do not have time to
reply to individual letters.


[] Please send letters and editorial contributions on disk to:
Atari Computing
65 Mill Road
Colchester
Essex
CO4 5LJ
England
Or by email to: editor@ataricomputing.com
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