Newsgroups: comp.sys.atari.st
Path: utzoo!utgpu!watserv1!watmath!lsuc!jimomura
From: jimomura@lsuc.on.ca (Jim Omura)
Subject: Publishers (III)
Reply-To: jimomura@lsuc.on.ca (Jim Omura)
Organization: Consultant, Toronto
Date: Fri, 7 Jun 1991 23:31:33 GMT
Message-ID: <1991Jun7.233133.2154@lsuc.on.ca>


     A long while back when the Atari ST was strong I wrote a
magazine article.  As is typical for me, it was an unusual article.
I started with a datafile which came from MS-DOS (dBASE III) which
wasn't being accepted by the programs I had available.  To do so
I moved the file to my Color Computer 3 and used a hexdump utility
to analyze the data and do what I had to do to make it usable.

     It worked.  In retrospect, I think I turned it into a
"comma separated value" file and read it into MasterPlan.  Or I
might have done something else with it.  I can't remember.  Whatever
I did, I remember it wasn't a particularly difficult problem.  But
I laid out the procedure and theory behind what I did so that people
could see that it was the approach that counted and that there were
a number of tools available for the Atari ST or any other computer
that could do the job.

     There were a number of very valuable lessons to be learned.
One valuable lesson was that there is NOT an isolated "Atari ST
world" which either survived or died and held us captive.  No, not
any more than there is a Color Computer 3 world, the "death" of
which would make my Color Computer 3 "obsolete".  Nor were there
specific tools necessary without which I could not get the job done.
Oh, in certainty, I had to have certain classes of capabilities,
such as an ability to look into a file in a Hex dump presentation
or some other way of seeing the ASCII values and binary values,
and possibly some computer language or other tool to modify or
extract data from the file.  Also I had to have the ability to
move the data "cleanly" between the two computers.  But any number
of tools could do the job, selectable from those broad classes
of tools.

     But the magazine I sent it to didn't want it.  They *loved*
the article generally, but they wanted me to rewrite it using the
tools available for the Atari ST specifically.  They didn't want
people to know that the *approach* was the key.  To show that
methodology was so important as to eclipse the brand of computer
you worked on was, well, "too much truth" for their readers.
I agreed to re-write the story.  But time being what it was, I
never got it done.  It's a pity.  They should have printed my
original story.  Maybe later people would not have been running
around with their heads cut off moaning the death of the Atari ST.
It's not dead really, but that's another matter.  Anyway, I won't
say which of the magazines it was.  But they made a choice a long
time ago.  They decided to shovel the brown stuff which was
their version of the "truth" about the Atari ST and computers
and software in general.  And for the most part, other "fan magazines"
in the computer industry and even in other industries, are about
as bad.  And now they, and many others like them are gone.  So what
I think I've seen over the years is that people pretty much get what
they deserve.

     It's not likely that I'll ever be a publisher in the
professional sense.  I've put out "newsletter" in the past, but
I'd really rather be writing or drawing, or even researching,
than doing the paste-ups and all the other details of publishing.
So I'm writing this with the hope that maybe someday someone
will make it into the publishing side, and keep it in mind.
Maybe you don't have to squeeze the truth through some strained
filter after all.  Maybe doing so isn't going to help you as
much as you think.  Maybe in the long run, your magazine
might even last longer if you aim for higher standards.  And maybe
it won't.  But then when it's over, at the very least, you will
be able to say, "I told the truth."
-- 
Jim Omura, 2A King George's Drive, Toronto, (416) 652-3880
lsuc!jimomura
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