Atari ST User

~ the goodbye ~

Page 5 of the April 1987 issue carries a small box headed "We're on our own...". Until that month the magazine had been tucked inside another one. It began in March 1986 as 28 pages bound into Atari User, Database Publications' 8-bit monthly out of Stockport, and the launch note called the ST the most talked-about computer of the year, which in Britain in early 1986 was close enough to true.

The split worked out badly for the parent and well for the supplement. Atari User was discontinued in November 1988 and its name sold off; Atari ST User kept going for another six years. The publisher renamed itself into Europress and moved to Europa House at Adlington Park in Macclesfield. That detail matters only because the English Wikipedia infobox puts the magazine in London and the printed mastheads never did.

The thing that puts the most distance between it and now is what it was for. It ran DTP tutorials for Calamus and Timeworks, GEM and BASIC programming, a monthly cover disk and a column on the German Atari scene. Its reader had bought a computer in order to do one specific job with it and needed somebody to explain that job again every month. By the time any of that was my own problem, the reader it described had moved to a PC and was getting the explanation off a newsgroup for nothing.

Issue 106 went out in November 1994 at £3.99. Darren Evans had taken the editor's chair with the September issue, two before this one, after John Butters left for public relations. The person who signed the farewell had been running the magazine for about ten weeks.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the serious half ~

Britain had three glossy Atari ST magazines in 1994. Germany had one and the United States had none at all, which is the measure of how overbuilt the British end was. Future's ST Format took the games readers. ST User took the people with a MIDI rack plugged into the back of the machine and a page-layout program on the screen, and it took them seriously enough to run listings in C and Modula II.

It did carry games, but by the end they arrived as a supplement. ST Action had been a Europress games monthly in its own right until the end of 1993, when it was folded into ST User and carried on inside it as a 32-page section with its own staff writer. So the magazine that closed in 1994 had swallowed a competitor and was running it as a pull-out, which is precisely the format ST User had itself been born in.

~ the green goblin ~

The December 1990 cover disk shipped with a boot sector virus on it. The Green Goblin infected the ST's memory and then wrote itself to any disk in the drive that was not write-protected, so a magazine that mailed a floppy to every subscriber spent a month mailing out an infection.

The fix was public and reasonably graceful. From January the cover disks carried a custom boot sector written by Richard Karsmakers, author of the CRL virus killer, which sat on the disk and blocked infection, and the February issue ran a feature explaining the whole thing under the heading DISKS, VIRUSES AND IMMUNISATION. Wikipedia puts the virus on the January 1991 disk. The magazine's own account, written up two issues later, puts it on the December one.

~ fourteen months, three magazines ~

The merger took effect with Atari ST Review issue 33, December 1994, which came out eight pages fatter and carrying the ST Action section plus two writers off the dead magazine. Vic Lennard wrote in that issue that ST Review was now the largest ST magazine in the UK. It was also nearly the last: issue 35 appeared in January 1995 under a different publisher again, IDG Media, and was then absorbed by Future's ST Format. Three Atari magazines went into one inside fourteen months, and the survivor was the one that had been winning all along.

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