STart

~ the obit ~

On Wednesday 15 May 1991, after days of conflicting rumors, staff at STart confirmed that the magazine would not publish another issue. Editor in chief Tom Byron gave the formal version: STart had suspended publication pending a sale. The June and July edition was finished, he said, and was waiting for printing when the news reached him that morning. Nobody ever printed it.

The magazine had been a section before it was a magazine. Antic, the Atari 8-bit monthly published out of 544 Second Street in San Francisco, gave the new 16-bit machine a department called ST Resource in 1985, and in the summer of 1986 Antic Publishing printed it as a quarterly of its own. Volume 1 Number 1 carried a MIDI sequencer and a piece asking whether the ST was any use for practical work; issue three sat Jack Tramiel down for a candid discussion. It ran for 42 issues, the last of them Volume 5 Number 7, April and May 1991 together, with a man in a sweater on the cover under the words Fix It Yourself.

STart ended when I was seven years old, about a computer that barely registered where I live. The ST had its European run, strongest in Germany and Britain, while the machine that turned up in Turkish living rooms in those years was a PC clone running DOS. What survives this one is the arithmetic its own staff described: a magazine can be paying for itself and still be closed, if the people who own it would rather spend the money on something else.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ what the disk was for ~

Every copy of STart came with a floppy. The magazine was a distribution network for software in the years before there was one, and the disk was the reason a reader bought it rather than borrowed it. The December 1990 editorial promised readers the disk would go double-sided in January, and apologized in advance to anyone still running a single-sided drive. The final issue advertised over a megabyte of games and utilities on its disk, which was a lot of floppy for the $14.95 printed on the cover.

~ the news section that buried it ~

In December 1990 STart replaced its News, Notes and Quotes pages with Z*Net Newswire, a section bought in from Z*Net, the weekly Atari newsletter that circulated on GEnie and CompuServe. The editor introduced it warmly. STart needed a strong news section, he wrote, and Z*Net had the reputation for one.

Five months later the story announcing the magazine's death ran in Z*Net, written by John Nagy, one of the two men the editor had welcomed into the pages. His report notes that STart owed Z*Net several thousand dollars, and that the newsletter's monthly print supplement, which more than forty user groups relied on, had been counting on that contract to cover its own costs. The closure took both of them down.

~ what was owed ~

Antic had folded the 8-bit Antic into STart as a section in October 1990, and the plan was a bigger monthly, 120 pages. By the start of 1991 the magazine was bimonthly at around 80 pages instead. People close to it told Z*Net that STart was covering its own costs the whole time, and that everything it earned was going into the company's other projects, including a new title for the IBM market that the STart staff were promptly reassigned to produce. Dropping to six issues a year, they said, was about freeing up staff rather than saving money.

The debts outlived the magazine. Writers and programmers had routinely waited six months or more for payment on work already in print, and subscribers wrote in describing balances three to six years deep, accumulated from Antic subscriptions with the old ST-Log ones rolled in behind them. As late as March 1991 the publisher was still selling discounted STart renewals at $80 and up. Talk of class actions started within days.

A sale was discussed for a few weeks, with ST Format of England named as the likeliest buyer, and observers pointed out the obvious problem: the liabilities were probably worth more than the subscriber list, which Z*Net put at perhaps twenty thousand names. Nothing came of it. When it closed, STart was the last independent commercial Atari magazine printed on slick paper in the United States.

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