Path: utzoo!utgpu!watmath!julian!uwovax!35002_3025
From: 35002_3025@uwovax.uwo.ca
Newsgroups: comp.sys.atari.st
Subject: Re: What an Atarian is
Message-ID: <1951@uwovax.uwo.ca>
Date: 28 Mar 89 06:46:01 GMT
References: <22152@agate.BERKELEY.EDU> <10156@bloom-beacon.MIT.EDU>
Lines: 51
Organisation: University of Western Ontario, Canada

In article <10156@bloom-beacon.MIT.EDU>, mars@athena.mit.edu (Anita) writes:
> I'd like to know what the average Atari ST user is like.  The Atari ST
> users I know have a serious commitment to the machine(not the company)
> and to the Hacker Ethic in its purest form(joy of computers for the 
> sake of computing).  What motivated all you ST users to buy the ST?
> Personally, since the days of the 2600, I've been an Atari fan.  After
> seeing the 800, I became an Atari loyalists.  Everywhere I went,
> people called the Atari a game machine, and claimed it inferior, which
> made me very protective of Atari and furthered my loyality.  I
> followed Atari's every move.  I planned to buy an Amiga when Atari
> still retained control of it, but didn't purely because the name Atari
> wasn't on it.  When the ST came out, I snatched mine up.  That is my
> justification.  Why would any of you buy the ST when the IBM has more
> support, the Apple has more innovation, and the Amiga more power?


I bought my St simly because it is a ice, friendly machine.  More than that,
locally we have a delaer who sells and, horrors, rents programs - about 750 in
stock at the present time.  All of the important programs are in place - Word
Perfect, a Lotus klone, a Dbase klone, and lots of programming utilities.  Any
others are icing on the cake as far as I am concerned.  Also it is nice having
a proper VT-100 emulator.  I use IBM's at schoold all the time and I find them
to be klunky and unpleasant - I really miss my mouse!  The number lock drives
me up the wall and down the other side.  The cheap monochrome displays are
really cheap - and harsh on the eyes.  Sure there may be lots of software for 
the IBm and the Mac, but now that we have excellent emulators we are laughing.
The Ibm can not emulate anything very well at all - despite the fact that one
of our academic support services people (read computer instructor) tells me 
that emuation is "never any good".  Sounds like jealousy to me...

	The St is a nice achine to come home to - it greets me like a friend.
Gem is a godsend.  Word Perfect for the ST is a miracle.

	By the way, IBM's running Procomm - supposedly one of the best terminal
emulators for the IBM can not dislay a proper VT-100 screen and yet Uniterm can.
I think that this says something about the "lowly" ST.


Kevin-john Conway
...a librarian from hell...

School of Library and Information Science
University of Western Ontario
London Canada
"...deviants from the norm..."

"My ideas may be silly, but I'm not.  I'm positively skewed!"

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