Question about Antic and START Magazine

[BoatofCar]

I am reading through the Feb 1989 issue of Antic, and in the editorial it is mentioned that all ST content will be moving into a new publication called START. But on Wikipedia and other online sources it claims that START existed since 1986. My question is, why did Atari keep ST content in Antic for so long after launching START? 

[+davidcalgary29]

Not all Atari users migrated to the ST platform after its launch in 1985. I didn't get my first ST until the 21st century, for instance, but used my 130XE as my "main" computer until 1993, alongside an AT clone. The Atari user base was shrinking in the late '80s, and the publishing company probably wanted to capture as much crossover market as they could.

 

Both ANTIC and ANALOG did readers a horrible disservice by not directing them to European Atari mags when they folded. I saw The New Atari User/Page 6 very rarely on Canadian newsstands, but had no idea that there were a host of other Atari newsletters and magazines that I could have read at the time. I think I first heard about Current Notes on here, in 2003(?), but would have loved to have read it in the '90s.

[bfollowell]

4 hours ago, BoatofCar said:

I am reading through the Feb 1989 issue of Antic, and in the editorial it is mentioned that all ST content will be moving into a new publication called START. But on Wikipedia and other online sources it claims that START existed since 1986. My question is, why did Atari keep ST content in Antic for so long after launching START? 

Well, you have to remember, Atari didn't keep anything in there. Atari had nothing to do with it. Antic/STart, Analog/ST-Log were Atari related magazine, not Atari owned or Atari published magazines. Atari as a company really had nothing to do with them. When STart started, it was published quarterly. It was a couple of years before it went monthly, and only stayed as such for a couple more years before going intermittent for a few months before finally closing up shop altogether. It seemed that there was always some overlap between the sister magazines, with more ST information being published in Antic than the other way around. Once STart started being published though, there really wasn't all that my ST stuff in Antic, at least not compared to STart, which was solely ST related.

 

[+Larry]

I don't know if that was a misprint or what, but in actuality, the Antic 8-bit material moved into to Start until Antic's demise.  IIRC, the very skinny Antic magazine, complete with front cover, was glued into the Start Magazine.  Pretty sure that Antic ended its run in 1989 while Start survived a bit longer -- maybe 1991.

 

At the beginning of the Atari 8-bit journey, I could not imagine that computer technology would move so rapidly.  I thought that 8-bits would be a mainstream computer well into the '90's.  Pretty naive in retrospect.  But here we are today, thanks to some good fortune from folks like the Tramiels (if it had not been for their purchase of Atari, we likely would not be having this conversation today), ABBUC, AtariAge, and several other key players that have helped keep our Ataris alive.  My take, anyway.

[Rybags]

https://archive.org/details/antic-magazine?tab=collection

 

A quick look through October 1988 edition sees a review of FA-ST (a HDD for the ST)

I would suspect that the information presented is probably right in it's summary but the dates probably aren't.

[bfollowell]

22 minutes ago, Larry said:

Pretty sure that Antic ended its run in 1989 while Start survived a bit longer -- maybe 1991.

 

Antic, as a magazine on its own, made it until 1990. There were only three issues that year though.

 

Edited January 31 by bfollowell

[BoatofCar]

Thanks everybody! I do have to keep reminding myself that Antic was not an Atari publication I do think it's weird that in the light of ST sales taking off the publishers didn't just make START a monthly publication earlier, instead of adding more ST content to Antic. 

[+davidcalgary29]

I think that the North American specialized home computer magazine market was rapidly disintegrating in the late '80s and just wasn't profitable enough to sustain anything by the early '90s. Just look at COMPUTE's Gazette: it had a (comparatively) massive circulation based on its massive installed hardware base, and it still died by '95. Or maybe platform-specific North American computer magazines just needed to get creative to survive tough times: didn't LOADSTAR last until 2005 or something like that?

[Rybags]

BBS became more popular around that time also, then the internet by about 1996.

Also, I reckon homebrew had a bit of a crash once the 16-bit machines came in and the trend has continued on contemporary computers since.

[zzip]

Yeah I started reading Antic around when they created START,  1986 sounds right.    But they did keep putting ST stuff in ANTIC.   It kind of annoyed me as an 8-bit only user and I switched to reading ANALOG because I thought they were doing a better job covering the 8-bit at the time.