EDITORIAL

IT'S A SMALL WORLD AFTER ALL

It's been a couple of days since World of Atari at the Disneyland Hotel in Anaheim (April 7-8) and I'm still debating whether the show was a success. For me it was, but I was there primarily to dig up stories and talk to readers. To most vendors, however, World of Atari could have been better. Even show coordinator Rich Tsujiki hedged on the number of attendees, though he did admit the final figure was lower than last year's. An optimistic guess would put it at 4,000.

Charles Cherry, head of TOS development, was the highest ranking Atari official there, although Antonio Salerno, vice president of Atari development, was rumored to be lurking about. At the developers' party on Saturday night, Cherry and Atari programmer Dan McNamee demonstrated Softsource, a worldwide database available to registered Atari developers for uploading product information and software/hardware demos. Atari chose GEnie as Softsource's online carrier.

On the third-party hardware side, Dave Small and Jim Allen showed off their 68030 upgrade for the ST. It's not as fast as the TT--yet. Depending on demand, Allen and Small hope to have the board out by fall.

START is Now 100-percent ST Compatible

START is now set up to do all of its pre-press production on an Atari system. The decision to go fully Atari was an easy one--desktop publishing on the ST has matured considerably, and it makes sense to produce the magazine on the same computer we feature.

The difficult decision was choosing a DTP program. In the end, we picked Calamus from ISD of Toronto. Not only is it a rock-solid professional system, but support, in the form of Transcoast Systems of San Francisco (415/296-2572), is literally a few blocks away. Omnicomp of San Francisco, (415/398-3377) is our service bureau for Linotronic output. The complete system is as follows:

Special thanks to Nathan Potechin of ISD without whom none of this would be possible.

TOM BYRON
START Editor