B9AJ@CORNELLA.BITNET (jim mcwhirter) (12/18/85)
Whats happening out there? I have received no ATARI mail for some time? Did the list collapse due to the lack of a moderator? Or are people just taking a holiday break? In the off chance that net.micro.atari is still in existance, let me try to pass on some interesting tidbits I've come across recently. In the Sept. or October issue of BYTE, there was an article on CD ROMS. The article mentioned that the ST was the only ccomputer planing direct support for such a device. They also talked about the potentials of this storage medium. They mentioned a company that has a CD ROM with an IBM PC/xx interface (whof course) and they had some encyclopedia on disk. (world book, I think) They reiewer used it on his pc with software, and said he was able to do things like have it search for all references to "COMPUTER". Such a search (of an entire encyclopedia!!) took a very short time (< 1 min.). Also, this encyclopedia took up only 2/3 of the disk space, and they plan a future version with a complete dictionary and thesauris(sp?). I still have the article and can clear up the exact specifics if anyone is interested. I forget if they were planing to support the st or not. In this months creative computing, in the "OUTPOST ATARI" column, there s a good reviesw of the ST. The reviewer talks about the infamous problem with the ST chips coming lose in theeir sockets during transit. An even more interesting article was in the N.Y. Times buisness section, on Monday 12/16/85. Ther is an article about the "face off" between ATARI and COMMODORE overthe ST and AMIGA. One interesting note from this article, is that there is much more software currently available for the ATARI than the AMIGA. I find this interesting, since this fall, one of the common arguments I heard on why you should not buy an ST, and should instead buy an AMIGA, was that the software situation for the AMIGA was and would be mushc better than for the ST. Well, I hope this doesn't just bounce back to me with a "USER ID UNKNOWN TO HOST" or something like that. Ignore the typo's, I'm to lazy to correct them. Jim McWhirter (b9aj@cornella.bitnet)