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From: david@looking.UUCP (David Rowley)
Newsgroups: net.micro.atari
Subject: 520 STuff
Message-ID: <284@looking.UUCP>
Date: Mon, 10-Jun-85 00:00:00 EDT
Article-I.D.: looking.284
Posted: Mon Jun 10 00:00:00 1985
Date-Received: Tue, 11-Jun-85 02:30:17 EDT
Organization: Looking Glass Software, Waterloo, Ont
Lines: 47

I finally saw a 520ST in a local store the other day.  It was running
some pretty impressive demos, such as hi-res b&w pictures of the ST,
Jack Tramiel and family, pictures of cowboys and a multiple bouncing ball.
The quality of the b&w monitor is excellent, the picture is really crisp.
Looking at the disk, it seems as though the capacity of the floppy is about
360K formatted, with TOS/GEM taking up about 206K currently (looks like they
have a bit of paring down to get it into the 192K ROM).  GEM looks much, much
better on the ST than it does on the IBM PC.  The keyboard feels good and
the keys are well placed. 

One thing I find annoying about the ST is that menus pop down when you move
the cursor onto the menu bar, instead of only when you click the mouse on
the menu bar, as in the mac.  I found I often popped down menus by mistake
and then had to click on the desktop to get rid of them.  I guess I can
live with it, though.

One of the desk accessories is a VT52 emulator (it looked fairly primitive...
no windows, no menus).  Other desk accessories were a control panel, clock
calculator, but no breakout game.

They also had DR Logo for it.  It looked reasonably complete, multiple windows,
support for mouse, graphics, etc.  good use of the menus.  It also appears
that GEM allows the use of control key equivalents for menu selections, as on
the mac (I hate having to use the mouse exclusively, especially for text-
editing).

The store said that they have already taken 100 orders for the machine, with
availability in about 2-3 weeks.  The cost: $1400 Cdn (includes floppy,
bw monitor, logo and basic).

Another store that had one was quite frustrated by the fact that the demo
units came with no documentation.  They had no idea how to use GEM and thus
could not demo the ST at all.  After showing them a few things, like double
clicking and how to select items from the menus, they caught on.  I guess
this shows that mac-like interfaces are good because they are consistent,
rather than because they are completely intuitive.

It looks like the ST might do quite well.  Maybe Apple will finally have to
reduce its inflated prices.

I would still like to hear more about Commodore's Amiga before I buy an ST.
I thought they might introduce it (finally) at CES, but I guess I'll have to
wait awhile.  Looks like they don't mind giving Atari a head start.
 
David Rowley.
Looking Glass Software
Waterloo, Ontario