From: ljdickey@watmath.waterloo.edu (L. J. Dickey)
Subject: Toronto Atari show
Organization: University of Waterloo
Date: Mon, 6 Apr 1992 16:40:39 GMT

	One person's review of the Toronto Atari show

		Lee Dickey
		April, 1992

Lets start with what I saw at the Atari booth.  (1) The TT was front
and center here, with several set up in various configurations and a
few with very large screens.  There were music applications and so
called workstations being shown.  There was also a new monochrome
screen, a bit bigger than the original Atari mono screen being shown.
I liked the look of it, but someone near me noticed that the number of
dots is the same as with the original, so up close the resolution is
not as good.  But if you sit back a bit from the screen it looks
better.  Maybe this product is for the aging population of Atari users
who need to sit back from the screen because their lenses are
hardening in their eyeballs.  (2) The notebook sized computer is bigger
than a palmtop and smaller than a laptop.  I saw two of these when I
arrived, but one was not working, and the other had a low visibility
screen and it did not have a floopy drive.  Several folks standing
around me wondered how they would load their programs into this machine
if they were to get one.  (3) There was a big crowd of kids around the
Lynx section.  I dont share their enthusiasm for this product, but then
I don't generally play games on my ST either.  (4) There was no Stacy
in sight.

There were some good software sellers there.  Codehead, Gribnif,
Brumeleve, Double Click, Joppa, HyperLink, Soft-Logic, Step Ahead, and
Sudden, for example.  Local Toronto dealers were out in force, and
there were some US vendors were here for the first time, such as Toad
Computers, Best Electronics, and Goldleaf.

Toad Computers was showing their hard drive packages, which use the ICD
controller boards.  The ICD franchise holder for Canada was there, in
support of his dealers, and this year he had a list of dealers, and
this year, he was more polite to those Canadian folks who had purchased
ICD products before he got the Canadian franchise.  Speaking of ICD, I
saw one of their tape backup systems.  Surprisingly, this system still
seems to be the only one available for the ST, albeit at an outrageous
price.  They do use data cassettes, which I think of as being cheap.
One user told me that the downside of this product is that it is
painfully slow to find and restore a single file from the tape.  When I
heard the process described, it seemed to me that it would be faster to
restore a whole partition to the hard drive, and then copy the sought
file to the right location.

When is someone going to develop the software to support the use of
off-the-shelf video cassette recorders?  This stuff should not have to
cost an arm and a leg.

Mike Vedderman, of Double Click software, was there showing off his new
Data Diet, a boot program which gives full and automatic file
compression on the fly.  You can specify, if you prefer, not to
compress certain kinds of files, but why not compress?  This product
can extend the capacity of your disk drive.

Nevin Shalit, author of Tracker/ST was there.  This program is a
mailing list and mail merge program which looked pretty nice to me.  As
he demonstrated, I could not think of a feature that anyone could want
that he did not already have.

Joppa Software Development was there, showing their new STraight FAX!
product that allows the ST or TT user to send/receive faxes.  To
demonstrate the two-way capability, they had installed a miniature
telephone system with the Atari set up on one line and an ordinary fax
machine set up on another.  As for sending faxes, STraight FAX! has
drivers that can convert to fax files an ordinary text files or any of
several forms of files, such as Calamus, Pagestream, FSM, etc.  Faxes
you receive may be printed on your favorite printer, such as a dot
matrix printer or an Atari Laser printer.

Two accelerators were shown.  One is the SST by David Small, and the
other is TinyTurbo030, from Turbo Technology.  These run, I think, at
about 33 MHz and 40 MHz respectively, but SST claims to have the
fastest Atari ST.  Sounds like a mystery to me.  Both products allow
RAM expansion to over 30MB.  These products seem cheaper and more
powerful than products directly from Atari themselves.  David Small
gave a talk about the SST.  One fellow who heard it said that he came
away with the feeling that this guy sure can ramble on about everything
except what he wanted to hear.  I did not attend, because I that had 
been my impression last year.

The Gemulator from Branch Always Software was shown.  It is a program
that runs on an IBM PC and emulates an Atari ST.  Derek Michoka was
there with a 33 MHz clone runs the Gemulator at about 85% of the speed
(my timings) of an 8 MHz ST.  One surprise for me was that the
Gemulator can run inside window on the PC.  I won't be running out
right away to buy the Gemulator, cause my Atari is still going fine.
When the day comes that I want to double the speed of my ST programs,
it may make more sense to get a 16 MHz Atari than a 70 MHz PC clone.
But, it is nice to know that there is some insurance out there, because
if (when?) Atari folds up, there is a path in the PC clone line that
would allow me to run some of my favorite Atari software.  If someone
is forced to move to a PC and they still want to run their Atari
programs, the Gemulator provides a way to do it.

There was a lot of music stuff.  One attendee that I talked to was
quite excited about the direct to hard drive recording technology.  He
told me that it takes uses about 10 megabytes to hold about a minute of
music.   He was looking at a product with price tag of about 5000
dollars.  He said that if he had had this thing a couple of months ago,
he would not have had to sub-contract some work for his current
project.  Now can not wait to get his hands on one.

Goldleaf of Larkspur, CA had a quadruple booth and a great demo, but I
saw no bumpf, no glossy handouts describing the characteristics of
their system.  They were showing picture editing systems.  They had
everything.  Start by scanning a color image, then use the full editing
capability on your TT, and finish by producing any form of hard copy
you can imagine:  color prints, transparencies, film negatives, or
decals that you put on your tee shirt.  I suppose that it was with a
system like this that National Geographic created the scandalous
"photograph" of the pyramids.  The prices I heard in this booth were
like those that one might hear in a new car dealership.

-- 
Leroy J. Dickey, Faculty of Mathematics, U of Waterloo, Canada  N2L 3G1
Internet:      ljdickey@watmath.UWaterloo.ca
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