🚀 go-pugleaf

     Well, I've only had my 1040ST for three weeks, but I'll give you
my first impressions of the machine.

     (First, my background:  I work for NASA as an OS Guru, and work
with Cray, Amdahl, Vax, Sun and SGI Un*x systems every day.  I'm
writing this on a MacUgly (Lisa with MacWorks,) my officemate has an
AT, and other people here have Amiga's.  I have owned a (currently
broken) Heathkit MS-DOS (NOT PC compatible) machine for several years,
and was looking for a fast machine to use in music composition/MIDI
control when I bought my ST.)

     Let me try to answer your questions.

     1) Religious responses:  I have had my MacUgly for over a year,
and still find it difficult to get simple programs working, because the
interface keeps getting in the way of writing code.  I wrote a fairly
complete utility on the ST using OSS Personal Pascal in less than
six hours.  GEM has some drawbacks over the Mac Interface, especially
in renaming and moving files, but it has some advantages, especially
the way that folders turn into real subdirectories.

     As far as Amiga versus ST is concerned, the Amiga is a somewhat
better machine, but the cost difference is greater than the quality
difference.  Also, most of the quality difference comes in color
graphics, and I don't care about such.  I prefer the mono system.

     Of course, what clinched it for me was the MIDI port.

2) Religious responses from haters. (NOT APPLICABLE)

3) Availability of good word-processing software.

     Your choice of word processor is also a religious issue. There's
1-ST word, which is mediocre, and I have micro emacs which is a text
editor, not a word processor.  There are others, but I haven't tried
them.

4) Reliability (hardware, OS & applications)

     Well, a month isn't long enough to tell about the hardware, but
mine hasn't broken yet.  The software is reasonably reliable, GEM
doesn't seem to crash and most of the bugs visible to developers are
easy to work around.  I use OSS Personal Pascal, and it only has a few
bugs, and usually performs better than promised.

5) Sources of info

     Atari maintains a buletin board (The base number is (408)745-5308.
Neil Harris also appears to pay attention to all (CompuServe, Source,
Well, UUCP, etc) possible general networks and is reasonable about
answer questions.  I haven't tried ATARI user support yet.  There are a
number of good user's groups.  There is an ST specific magazine, and
START (a quarterly full of software published by ANTIC) as well as
Antic.  Of course there are the ABACUS books, and I suppose other
sources.

6) Comparisons with the Amiga, PC, IBM 1401 :-), etc.

     Well I don't know about the 1401, but my first computer was a
1620, and the ST blows it away. :-)

     As far as the AMIGA/ST comparison; The Amiga does better/faster
color graphics, but the ST does clearer mono.  The Amiga has a better
sound chip, but the ST does MIDI.  The Amiga has fancy custom
coprocessors, but the ST is more approachable.  The ATARI hard disk is
real.  There's currently more ATARI software available.  In all, the
Amiga is a better piece of hardware, but not enough better to justify
the price.

     As far as PC's are concerned, the only advantage a PC has is a
huge amount of software.  If you buy an AT (or clone) and max it out,
you can spend 5-6K and have almost as good a machine as 1500$ worth of
ST. . .

7) How fast is sofware becoming available (PD & Purchased)

     There is a huge amount of PD Software.  Much more than when the
Mac was a year old.  Most of it is very good, well written, etc.  I
have both the PD Forth, and XLisp and use both.

     I don't have as much experience with commercial software, although
it is certainly there.  The only thing I have is OSS Personal Pascal,
which I highly recommend.

     I have seen a lot of stuff in the ANTIC catalog, and most of it
exists. (I. E.  I've seen it for sale at my local ATARI dealer.)

8) Compatability of peripherals

     This is where the ST really seems to loose.  It isn't  big enough
(yet) for a big aftermarket in peripherals, so there aren't many second
sources, except for the hard disks.  The expansion kit isn't out yet,
so there aren't many places to put them anyway, and ATARI seems to have
gone out of their way to make it hard to substitute monitors, although
most of this was to make the machine cheaper to build.

9) Good dealers / mail order houses specializing in STs

     I don't know about mai order houses, but a local choice for good
dealer is San Jose Computer. (where I bought mine)  They are a small
outfit, so they don't have a lot of hardware variety, but they seem
willing to spend a lot of time talking, and they do have most of the
software.  I can send you their address if you can't find a better
choice close to you.

A) Anything else.

     If you are going to do your own programming, and you aren't
religious about C, try OSS Personal Pascal.  It's relitively clean,
runs relitively fast, produces good code, and all of that; but the best
part is the interface to GEM and the manual the OSS people have
produced.

     It's almost better than the development system, and costs about
1/4 as much.

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