davecl@orca.UUCP (Dave Clemans) (09/24/85)
Attached is an article from the Antic Online magazine on Compuserve. dgc **** Start of attached article **** Permission to reprint or excerpt is granted only if the following line appears at the top of the article: ANTIC PUBLISHING INC., COPYRIGHT 1985. REPRINTED BY PERMISSION. ANTIC'S LONDON REPORT: ST RULES BRITTANIA UK SOFTWARE AHEAD OF USA by JAMES CAPPARELL, Publisher (ANTIC just returned from London, represented there by Publisher and President James Capparell, and Marketing Director Gary Yost. Here's their report.--ANTIC ED) 9/8-This article is being written on a Pan Am flight returning to San Francisco from London. What did we learn overseas? Well, there's five pence to a shilling...the people are extremely nice and the enthusiasm for Atari is excellent. But the weather in London is awful and pubs close at 1l pm. Our most exciting discovery was the extreme enthusiasm for the Atari ST we found at the Personal Computer World Show held September 4-8 at London's Olympia Hall. Over 50,000 people got their first opportunity to see the 520ST and the 130XE. This was the eighth show sponsored by Personal Computer World Magzine so far, and by all reports it was the most successful. The Atari booth was one of the largest and best attended at the show. In the UK and European market, the ST looks like a strong winner. Suprisingly, our British cousins have a leg up on developers in the States with stunning ST systems software, business software and games all ready for market. Perhaps because they are used to programming for the Sinclair QL, a 68008 machine, they were primed and ready for the ST. The QL was a big disapointment with its small memory and slowness. So for Britons, the ST seems like the QL that never was. And the British are much more open to developing for a new, unproven machine than American companies are. Big Blue Mania has not set in, as the British think the IBM line is far too costly. Atari Corp. was well represented with a large contingent from the states. Jack and Leonard Tramiel, Sig Hartmann, Sig Schreyer and Shiraz Shivji flew in from Sunnyvale. Additional support from Atari UK, (an excellent organization, I might add) came from Les Player, Robert Katz and Jon Dean. I was pleased to also see German, Swiss and French Atari representatives. We found some excellent languages and software products you will soon see from the Antic Catalog or other publishers. These included accounting and small business packages, LANs and a possibility of UNIX. We saw several languages including UCSD and ISO Pascal code compilers (very professional, very fast), super-fast macro assembler-editors, Lattice C, Cambridge Lisp, MODULA II, FORTRAN 77, and CPM 2.2 emulation. (I bought UCSD Pascal back with me so watch for a review soon.) For you telecom buffs, it's interesting to note that the first truly Hayes-compatible modem for the Atari was introduced at the show. It costs 399 pounds and contains six different protocols, including two for videotex graphics -- the one area in telecommunications where the English have a significant lead on us. An animated game called Brattacas from Psygnosis Ltd. drew major crowds at the show. It had already been in development for the past two years on SAGE 68000 systems. So it was ready to be ported to the Atari ST and was brought to beta level just a few weeks ago. Brattacas features cover art by fantasy artist Roger Dean. Better than arcade quality color characters move in a sophisticated scenario where the 520ST's graphics capabilities are exploited more than in any other program we've seen so far. In an enclosed glass room was a 260ST with one megabyte of RAM. Basically, it was a 1040ST with a built-in floppy, but still a prototype. Alongside it, a 520ST with color monitor attached to a 10 megabyte hard disk was displaying pictures at blinding speed during the entire show. As an interesting twist, an Israeli political cartoonist, Yakov Kirschen , (famous for his "Drybones" character in the Jerusalem Post) was featured in an front page article in the Sunday London Times. In the photograph, he was showing a 520ST interactive cartoon character which demonstrated how artificial intelligence can be applied to computers. His character can actually relate to the user. More on this after we interview Kirschen tomorrow during his visit to our office in San Francisco. Also upcoming is a story about all the Atari products at the show, not just what was shown at the Atari booth, including a Zoids game and a demo of Jeff Minter's psychedeliC Colourspace light synthesizer for the XL/XE and the 520ST. This does for color what the synthesizer did for sound, and gives you a light show on your micro. On the 8-bit front, we found out that the official Atari UK 8-bit software catalog of over 600 titles contains 54 Antic Catalog products distributed by Software Express International, Antic's European distributor. Additionaly, Atari UK issued a press release during the second day of the show with a list of 10 formally "Atari-approved" titles. We're proud to announce that the Antic Catalog's Earth Views and Space Base are among these first ten titles. Antic has signed a number of publishing agreements with UK authors. This means the Antic Catalog will soon be bringing you lots of ST packages including development languages, systems software, business and productivity packages, utilities and games. I would say that anyone who still doesn't believe that Atari and the ST are for real -- isn't for real. It's a great product at a great price (750 pounds in the UK) and has a growing list of developers. We saw a list of 450 developers in the UK alone. The day after the show closed, UK ST Product Manager Bob Katz returned to his office at 9 a.m. and found eight checks for development systems that had arrived by courier from developers who were itching to get started. We were introduced to many fine Atari friends during our stay and were pleased to discover that our Atari community is just as enthusastic and supportive in London and UK as in the United States. Those of us who have long been so loyal and dedicated no longer have to feel embarassed about being Atari fans. We have the fastest machine at the best cost and a growing development network. Watch Antic for ongoing Atari news from the states and around the world. **** End of attached article ****