Atari STu rediscovered!

Most of my early freelance writing for magazines was focused on the Commodore Amiga computer. But before that, I also wrote for one or two Atari ST magazines, and I was also a co-editor of the 16/32 area for Atari ST enthusiasts on Micronet 800, a popular online system based on British Telecom’s Prestel (Viewdata) service, before the internet!

Oddly enough, at the time I was writing about this kind of thing, there was no Atari ST software available to edit Viewdata systems like Prestel and Micronet 800, so I was forced to do 16/32 editing work (where I went by the nickname of STu) using a Sinclair ZX Spectrum with prototype microdrives and a Prism modem, and, later, a BBC Micro Model B with Weirdbeard software and a Nightingale modem. But that’s another story.

I had pretty much forgotten what I had written about the Atari ST until very recently, when a bundle of photocopies of miscellaneous past magazine articles came to light in my loft while looking for something totally unrelated.

Two of those articles were from ST Update, a magazine which seems to have been largely forgotten today, by the internet at least, as I’ve been unable to find any scans of it online, nor could I find any reference to it on Wikipedia. It does, however, appear in the form of four small cover images listed on the website of the Centre for Computing History, which apparently has issues for August, September, October and December 1987 in its collections.

pdf downloads

Since there seems to be some interest in ST Update, I have this evening taken the opportunity to scan my two articles to pdf, something which I will be doing with other future article downloads, and they are linked as downloads on a brand-new Atari ST page which is accessible from the main menu of AMIGA and other Micro Meditations. You are cordially invited to check it out!

I will be scanning and posting the other found articles as soon as I can, and will post about them separately.

Stuart Williams