trb@stag.UUCP ( Todd Burkey ) (08/16/88)
Some random thoughts on Superquest's use of ATARI ST's: So, Did everyone see all those Atari ST's (Mega-2's) on CNN on 8/15? They were showing the Superquest students in their final competition for a supercomputer for their high schools (an ETA-10 Supercomputer). And, of course, we had 16 Mega-2 ST's handy for their use. Thanks to Atari, the kids and the teachers all ended up with their own Mega-2 ST's and the 5 schools each got their own Desktop Publishing System. Both Sig Hartmann and Sam Tramiel showed up at the awards banquet and I was happy to hear the president of ETA mention the Atari ST and acknowledge Sig and Sam during the presentations. The Atari's worked out VERY well for local Fortran compiling, acting as smart terminals (via UNITERM and Unix Windows), some spreadsheet work (VIP, ACALC), some documentation (EASYDRAW, Timeworks Publisher, First Word Plus, Fontz), and even some good heavy duty game playing the last day after the presentations were made (MIDIMAZE was the main attraction). I would estimate that these kids put in a good number of 80 hour workweeks during the 7 weeks that they pounded on their ST's, the Silicon Graphics workstations they were connected to, and the ETA-10 that they networked into via the SG. Aside from some frustrating problems with the Unix Windows software (losing the cursor quite often), I am happy to say that all the ST software worked out quite well. Some of the students still prefered the user interface of the Mac for desktop publishing, while others preferred the PC-portables, so a number of 'other' PC's were also made available to them. Two things that we saw that the ST desperately needs are 1) a much better user-interface to the desktop publishing and word processing programs (specially in relation to getting WYSIWYG vis-a-vis fonts and quick-draw type programs), and 2) more advanced math/statistical related graphing programs. -Todd Burkey trb@stag.UUCP