By Steve Ticehurst
 It has certainly been a long time and during this time I notice that a lot has changed. As a dedicated Atari STe owner it was hard for me to join the other sheep and buy a PC, but it had to be done. Throughout my five years of owning and using an Atari STe I had also used numerous PCs at school, college, work and university, and in the early days I would laugh at people who had PCs instead of an Atari or an Amiga. I remember first using an Atari in the music room at school and then using a PC to type work up in the library and thinking that the version of GEM on the Atari was much better than GEM on the PC. It was only a bit later when I realised that PC GEM was just sitting on top of DOS, an environment that once entered into, by selecting the wrong menu item in GEM by mistake, you were stuck with because no-one in the school knew anything about this DOS thing. In such circumstances you were forced to reset the computer and re-load DOS - all through lack of knowledge. By the time I started college I had bought myself an Atari STe and was very happy. To start with I had a number of small problems. For example, sometimes I could select Control Panel from one of the menus while other times when I booted-up it was not there! This was tracked down to the simple reason that sometimes I would boot-up using the Language Disk while other times I would use a different disk. My introduction to Desk Accessories! I remember when ST Format started putting their coverdisks onto double-sided disks and making quite a big thing about it. Surely I couldn't had been the only one to wonder how you accessed the second side and so attempted to put the floppy into the drive upside down! I knew I was being stupid at the time, but for some reason I tried it! The first ever Atari I used was an STf with 512K running Steinburg's Pro-24 and I liked it so much that I bought my own Ste with 512K running a number of MIDI sequencers until I finally purchased Pro-24. The first ever IBM compatible I used was a Commodore PC-10 with 640K running DOS 3.3 and Microsoft Works, and I can't say that I liked it that much. I continued laughing at PC owners and their text-only systems that could only make small beeps. Like all Atari owners I had people asking me why I used an Atari instead of a PC and I always asked them what I would want to do on a PC that I could not do on my Atari. For a long time this was always the case, while my PC friends would struggle with Microsoft Word running at a snail's pace and thrashing (or is that trashing?!) the harddisk, I would plod along on Protext, print to Postscript on disk and then take the disk to a laser printer and print. However, as time went passed I noticed the decline of the Atari market and the advances in PC technology and I started to think. It was when I started to become interested in Java and decided to base my degree project on Java development that it seemed that I would have to unplug my Atari and make room for a PC. This I did, and I have owned a PC for over a year now, my faithful Atari given to my sister so that she could make posters using TimeWorks. I must admit that I do like my PC. I have more power, memory, and diskspace, this I thought unbelievable when I bought my Atari. I am able to produce work at ease, every piece of software works with the operating system, not just ontop of it .... life is good. However, now that I've finished at university, now that I am no longer using my computer as a tool but instead as a passtime, I notice something missing from all this Microsoft-land. It may well be the case that I am typing this at work on a Pentium II system with 64Meg RAM and a 6Gig harddisk, such power that was science fiction even a couple of years ago, such power that certainly leaves any Atari based hardware far behind (or does it?), such power that will run endless large application at the same time without any problems. But there is still something missing. What is missing? Quite simple, you are missing! You, the reader. You who has discovered yet another publication run by an enthusiast for love and not money. You who is using a certain computer because you like it and not so much because the ad-man likes it. There is something about the Atari community that is missing from the PC world. I see Atari users as friendly down-to-earth people who know how their computer works and how to get the best out of it. I see PC users as sheep who do what they are told, they know that if they click their mouse on a button then a 2000 page glossy manuscript will be created, printed and bound within a blink of an eyelid. But do they know how or why? They certainly don't, but they know that if they do get into difficulties (heaven forbid - Microsoft wouldn't allow it!) then a friendly animated paperclip called a "Wizard" will show them what to do.... Where has the adventure gone and fun gone in computing? I want to do things manually, I want to have problems to fix and workarounds to devise. There is nothing wrong with that. During my time using a PC I have attempted to trackdown the PC equivalent of you, but with limited luck. I'm sure that they exist, they must do, they certainly did ten years ago before the mass PC commercialism. Because of this I have always kept a small connection with the Atari world. I may not have an Atari to use but I have carried on reading Atari newsgroups and the odd magazine when I could. I have recently been looking at Atari emulators and as I watched it boot up off my old boot disk it felt as if I had been away for a long time and I was finally coming home. As I read more newsgroup articles I notice the same names and it makes me feel even more like home. Certainly, the topics discussed have changed. Now everything is Internet based, how to setup the latest version of X Browser, or emulator based, how to setup Gemulator to use com2, for example. This doesn't mean that I will be getting rid of my PC, but now that I have this extra time I am looking forward to getting my Atari back off my sister. Instead of it being my main computer, I will use it mainly for MIDI. I will also have the chance to catch up, buy a harddisk, install Internet software, experiment with networking between the Atari and the PC, experiment with hardware and software, programming and so on. I can do my accounts, write letters, and perform other boring tasks, on the PC. Let's face it, the PC looks boring, the software is boringly helpful and complete, and some may even say the average PC user is just the same. I am certainly looking forward to using my Atari. Same Atari, but new era, a more educated user. I may even tell you about my "travels". I want to setup my Atari with my MIDI snyth (something I used to do), I want to network my Atari with my PC. I want to experiment with emulators and internet software. I've got a lot to do.
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