Put pen to paper - or better still send us an email and have your say... The obituariesAtari RIPThe 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 RIPI'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 WorldDespite the magazine ceasing to appear Specialist Magazines Ltd. stillhasn'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. ![]() 65 Mill Road Colchester Essex CO4 5LJ England Or by email to: editor@ataricomputing.com |
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