SECOND LUSTRUM (10th ANNIVERSARY)
REFLECTIONS ON TEN (!) YEARS OF FREAKING OUT
by Richard Karsmakers
(with bits contributed by Stefan Posthuma)
This article originally appeared in the final issue of ST NEWS, in the summer of 1996. It's included here in a virtually unaltered form, except for its layout.
Top 15 of most influential CDs during & for the life of ST NEWS
| 1 | "...And Justice for All" | Metallica |
| 2 | "Rising Force" | Yngwie Malmsteen |
| 3 | "Metallica" | Metallica |
| 4 | "Perpetual Burn" | Jason Becker |
| 5 | "Revolutions" | Jean Michel Jarre |
| 6 | "Direct" | Vangelis |
| 7 | "Brain Damage" | Vendetta |
| 8 | "Awake" | Dream Theater |
| 9 | "Whistler Courbois Whistler" | Whistler Courbois Whistler |
| 10 | "Perspective" | Jason Becker |
| 11 | "Mystic Places of Dawn" | Septic Flesh |
| 12 | "Concerts in China" | Jean Michel Jarre |
| 13 | "Passion and Warfare" | Steve Vai |
| 14 | "The Angel and the Dark River" | My Dying Bride |
| 15 | "Alchemy" | Dire Straits |
A rare occasion like this, a full-fledged second lustrum I mean, of course calls for drastic measures with regard to 'getting the people to get some historical awareness'. That's why I have taken upon me the honourable task of reflecting upon the past ten years of ST NEWS, starting at its birth, in this article. I fully realise that this is not the kind of stuff that the average reader would like to wade through, but, hey, it's my last magazine so I considered it necessary anyway. Also, I just felt like writing something like this. Who knows, you might like to read it anyway.
ST NEWS has been a part of my life. As a matter of fact, I have spent well over one third of it dedicated wholly or partly to this magazine, I'll have you know. That's no longer peanuts or something. It's really like a child, only less oppressive and without nappies. Throughout the years it also made me feel proud. I felt great when once again we gained another distributor, or when people just wrote to say they liked it.
I have written an article very much similar to this one when ST NEWS celebrated its first lustrum in 1991's Volume 6 Issue 2. At the time it seemed like a giant part of my life had been spent doing it, but in retrospect it was nothing. Ten years is far more like it. And that's why I also decided it would be a great way to go out with a kind of "bang".
But before I continue with this lesson in historical awareness, I would like to pay homage to some of the other disk magazines that we've seen grow up and crumble away. Need I mention the brilliant Canadian commercial disk magazine "F.A.S.T.E.R." that ceased to exist by the end of 1988, one of the main inspirations for early issues of ST NEWS? AND "F.A.S.T.E.R." was, sadly, only the first to die in a very long sequence that further saw the rise and decline of "ACUSG", "Amazine, "Atari Explorer Online", "Atari Star", "Atari United", "Bomba", "CIP ST", "DBA Magazine", "Daily Error", "Discbox", Timo Schmidt's "Disk Magazin", another title called "Disk Magazin", "Disk Times", "Erotica", "Fair Play", "Falcon Magazine", "HP Source", "Inc Magazine", "INSoft Disk Newsletter", the highly unique "Interleave", "Lavarush", "Ledgers", "Magnum", "Massive Mag", "MAST NEWSdisk", "News Channel", "ONDisk", "Pure Bollocks" (or aren't they dead yet?), "RTS Track", "Scriba Communis Responsi" (though its editorial staff still labels it "alive"), "Skynet Time", the excellently initiated "STabloid", "ST Age", "STampede", "STatus Disk Magazine", "ST Digital", "STEN", "STench", "ST Info", "STink", the Norwegian "ST Klubben", "STop", "STOS Bits", "STOS Gigazine", "STuffed", "STunn", "ST Xpress" and "Undercover Magazine". I am sure there were even more than I mentioned here, disk magazines that were born only to be winked away after too brief an existence.
Even though it was for such a relatively short time, they have joined Stefan and me, ST NEWS, in the fight for acknowledgement of the disk magazine medium, and we are grateful to them - even though in some cases (most notoriously "News Channel", of course) we may have had our individual quarrels and envies. Forgive and forget, zand erover.
For those among you who are not easily impressed, please allow me to bestow upon you some statistics of all the ST NEWS issues that have been released including this one: The past 10 years of ST NEWS have seen the publication of almost 2000 articles in almost 25 Mb of uncompressed documents in 42 issues, containing about 465 reviews. 120 adventure solutions and almost 30 'walkthrough' articles. In these same issues, 34 excellent pieces of music programmer's craftsmanship have been offered (plus a 35th that was rather not as good). This was all brought to you on 38 disks, of which the first 21 were single-sided. Just to tease you, we also did 60 hidden articles - each of them more or less cleverly hidden. Just to amaze you, Stefan coded 4 monochrome- and 7 colour demos (true ones, not counting the simple scrollers), whereas ST NEWS published 4 colour demos supplied by alternative sources. Honesty compels me to tell you that these demos and other coding extravagancies have all been done prior to the first lustrum, when Stefan Posthuma was still in his coding prime and not lacking time and ambition at all.
Additionally, the first five years also saw three regular compendia, of which two were supplied on double-sided disks, and one Final Compendium which came on two double sided disks. Some of the compendia contained new music, some contained the odd new article, and one contained an update of an existing program (the virus killer at the time known as "Virus Destruction Utility" that grew into the "Ultimate Virus Killer" in 1990). After the Final Compendium, released between Volume 5 Issues 1 and 2, no further compendia have been released.
When Frank Lemmen (a close friend of mine, current employee at a computer wholesaler's and living together with girlfriend Yvonne) and myself bought the Atari ST, back in the grey times just prior to Easter of 1986, the machine was still in its growing times. There was virtually no software, virtually nobody could do anything on it, virtually nobody knew anything or anybody, and everybody was just about bored to death.
This was quite different from the scene on the Commodore 64 to which Frank and I had previously been accustomed (up to one day before we bought our STs, as a matter of fact).
I had my first ST computing experiences with doing "Synth Sample I", a music'n'pictures demonstration program for monochrome monitors that I finished on May 20th 1986. Some of the artwork was done by myself, but all the music was either stuff you got with Activision's "Music Studio" or stuff I got from that really early Activion retail demo that used to drop quite a few jaws back then.
I only had a single sided disk drive, a monochrome monitor, half a megabyte of memory and TOS on disk at the time, so it was quite poor working on the machine. My Commodore 64 had had all the knobs on I could have wished - 30 times faster loading with "SpeedDOS", about a dozen copiers/debuggers/tools on switchable EPROMs, various different system fonts selectable on EPROM, and I had all the hottest software I wanted. Of course I was a lot younger then, around 12, and all those things mattered a lot to me.
It was on a hot summer's night of that same year when I suddenly startled and looked around quite annoyed because some light had mysteriously appeared above my pathetically bored head. After looking around a bit, I eventually discovered that the light seemed to come forth from a little light bulb hanging above my head in a tiny, fluffy cartoon's cloud.
I had seen the light: I had had an idea!
Next day, I sat down with a word processor and starting to produce a disk-based magazine document that I called ST NEWS. I reckoned it was a good idea to write a magazine document that could be spread on disk; it would cost the readers nothing more than a certain amount of disk space, so producing the most perfect (and, as it would later turn out, the most underrated) medium on which to spread information. A non-commercial magazine on disk could, additionally, also have a deadline a mere couple of hours prior to it being finished (see Volume 9 Issue 1, for example, which featured an interview and concert experience from the evening of its release date!).
In my enthusiasm I think I even went as far as thinking I was the first to do something like it in those days, but it turned out that Apple MacIntosh users had known the disk magazine principle a longer time already. Too bad, really. I guess it's a classroom case of some idea particles crashing through the universe and striking the brains of a few individuals in the right place, with the right gear at their hands, and the right frame of mind.
Maybe Pratchett is right after all.
In 1986, the mortal plane was left by Phil Lynott (bassist of Thin Lizzy), Frank Herbert (author of the "Dune" books), Olof Palme (the Swedish prime minister, who was assassinated), Romero (the Salvadorian arch bishop, who was also assassinated), James Cagney (actor), Cliff Burton (that really cool bassist formerly in Metallica, who died when their tour bus toppled) and Cary Grant (actor).
The British beat the Argentinians at the Falklands, the Space Shuttle "Challenger" exploded not long after its launch (killing its 7 astronauts), the U.S. bombed Libya, and, perhaps the most terrifying thing to happen all year, there was the Chernobyl disaster.
In the world of disk magazines, 1986 saw the start of "F.A.S.T.E.R." (died 1987), "INSoft Disk Newsletter" (died the same year) and "Suomenkilieset Tieto-Sanomat". This last title is a Finnish-language disk magazine that appeared as little as once a year, and it is thought to have died in 1995. If it hasn't died yet, in January 1997 it will be the longest surviving disk magazine (and probably one of the most obscure) ever, anywhere.
My personal top 10 of musical releases in 1986:
| 1 | Metallica | "Master of Puppets" |
| 2 | Queensrÿche | "Rage for Order" |
| 3 | Malmsteen, Yngwie J. | "Trilogy" |
| 4 | Slayer | "Reign in Blood" |
| 5 | Sodom | "In the Sign of Evil" (debut album) |
| 6 | Kreator | "Pleasure to Kill" |
| 7 | Venom | "Possessed" |
| 8 | Racer X | "Street Lethal" (debut album) |
| 9 | Satriani, Joe | "Not of this Earth" (debut album) |
| 10 | Roth, David Lee | "Eat 'Em And Smile" |
Other (in)famous music releases were: Boston - "Third Stage", Genesis - "Invisible Touch", Iron Maiden - "Somewhere in Time", Jean Michael Jarre - "Rendezvous", King Diamond - "Fatal Portrait" (first solo album), Tony McAlpine - "Edge of Insanity" (debut album), Megadeth - "Peace Sells....But Who's Buying?", Metal Church - "The Dark", Sepultura - "Morbid Visions" (their first album), AC/DC - "Who Made Who", Judas Priest - "Turbo", Beastie Boys - "Licensed to Ill", Europe - "The Final Countdown", Nuclear Assault - "Game Over", Ozzy Osborne - "The Ultimate Sin", Queen, "A Kind of Magic", Mot"rhead - "Orgasmatron" and Venom - "Eine Kleine Nachtmusik". Somewhere in Tampa, Florida, a band called Xecutioner recorded their first demo, "Find the Arise". That was before changing their name to Obituary...
Worth-while films released were: "Aliens", "From Beyond", "Highlander", "Little Shop of Horrors" (the film musical), "Flight of the Navigator", "The Fly", "9 1/2 Weeks", "Platoon", "Ruthless People", "Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home", "Three Amigos" and "The Name of the Rose".
According to my data, no interesting books were released, except Jeanette Winterson's "The Passion".
The first issue of ST NEWS saw the light of day on July 26th 1986. It was just a plain 34 Kb document that could be loaded into "1st Word" or "1st Word Plus" (still works, albeit up to and including version 3.6TT only), and that was the way ST NEWS would appear throughout the first year of its existence. Back then, the Amazing Cracking Conspiracy (or, acronymized, ACC) used to be "an independent Public Relation section of the one and only Desaster Area", and the magazine had quite a few illegal connotations insofar that it offered lists of cracked and soon-to-be-spread software, and even a greetings section in which all notorious hackers and crackers of the time were greeted. Apart from that, of course, it also offered "Software News" (a column that is still present, although it was revamped as of Volume 9 Issue 1), "ST tips & tricks" and even the first ever tips to the magnificent Magnetic Scrolls adventure "The Pawn", a game that was on everybody's minds in those days. The first review was that of Activision's "Little Computer People", and what a nice game it was.
The second issue, published on August 9th 1986, was no longer written solely by yours truly. Instead it also contained some contributions by someone calling himself DSP - Jos Schilders - and my dear friend and earliest co-conspirator Antiware - Frank himself. The magazine still hadn't got rid of its highly illegal image, in spite of the fact that I had in the mean time been contacted by the Dutch branch of the Data Becker company for spreading one of their drawing programs - "Profi Paint" - with my phone number in it. I was young and wanted to make it big. I did weird things, but in retrospect I think all of it has been a very educational experience. An article about "Hackers'n'crackers on the ST" completed this.
Back then, we lived in times of considerable optimism. In the "Did you know that..." column I anticipated the ST release of some of the hotter then current and older 8 bit games, the likes of "Biggles", "Summer Games II" and "G.I. Joe". I even had a release date - September or October of the same year. These may have been legendary games on the Commodore 64 but they never ever appeared on the ST nor on the Falcon (which is, frankly, probably just as well).
The old (later sometimes called 'Vintage') issues were mainly launched on the meetings of the SHN (Stichting Homecomputers Nederland) at Nijmegen, Holland. I used to go there regularly, and ST NEWS soon turned out to be quite popular. I got a lot of good friends there, and made a lot of enemies, too, what with my constantly going around yelling Anti-Amiga proverbs and sayings.
Some of the guys back there have helped ST NEWS' growth considerably: Nijmegen was the place where I first met Mark van den Boer (who used to do things by the name of "666" and who later did the MC68000 course), who would later also get me into touch with Lucas van den Berg (Crimson's Column). These two belong to some of our more celebrated authors, and Mark has been possibly of biggest influence on my musical taste (he brought me into contact with Rush, Queensrÿche, Joe Satriani and Yngwie Malmsteen). Neither of them have written for ST NEWS in quite a while; Mark because he is now a system programmer at MacDonald Detwiller in Canada and Lucas because, well, we just seem each to have gone our separate ways.
On August 16th 1986, a mere week after Volume 1 Issue 2 had been launched, the next issue saw the light of day. Still, it was over 50 Kb long. This time, I had taken quite a radical decision: ST NEWS was to be become fully legal. Legitimate. The authors, including myself, still used pseudonyms, but we also featured a correspondence address through which people could send in articles for use in ST NEWS, enquiries, PD orderings (we must have been one of the first free PD libraries) and lots more. This correspondence address was around the corner of where I lived - the address of an elderly couple that I had explained things to and who consented to my using their address. In retrospect I can't for the life image what I told them nor why on earth they would have agreed!
We started right off with a "Synth Sample II" competition, and the same issue also saw the publication of our first adventure solution (to "Zork I"), though not yet written by our adventure wizard, Math Claessens. Further, we used to copy large parts of system documentation into ST NEWS; this particular issue featured all about the BIOS.
Although the correspondence address we had at the time was rendered no longer valid somewhere in 1987, mail was received there as relatively recent as 1992.
Fitting neatly onto one disk with the three earlier issues with its size of 90 pages, ST NEWS Volume 1 Issue 4 was made ready on September 7th. The project was now really beginning to look like a disk magazine, also featuring a 'list of contents' and the first "ST Software News" article in its original form.
Some more columns and initiatives were also introduced that would, however, not last long: The "Hi to..." column and the "ST Userbase" initiative (it is nice to see that something similar for the Falcon has taken off successfully in Britain). The first "Computer Story" was also written, but no second part was ever to be seen since we later stumbled upon quite some more professional
novels we decided to use instead (from the commercial magazine "Practical Computing"). It was but a slight hint at the introductory novels that would appear over a year later. When looking back, this "Computer Story" precursor to my later pseudo-literary babblings was appallingly bad.
It was also on an SHN computergroup meeting, but this time in Venlo, Holland, that I met adventure guru Math Claessens. This man proved to be one of the sources of early ST NEWS' success, solving adventures with the speed regular people use to drink a cup of tea (and, indeed, with just about the same frequency). In ST NEWS Volume 1 Issue 4 he wrote his first adventure solution for ST NEWS - that of "Zork II". He stayed with us until 1993, when he sent one enormous last batch of adventure solutions and left the ST scene to buy, of all things, a PC. This batch has lasted up to the final issue of ST NEWS, luckily.
Around that time, I discovered "F.A.S.T.E.R.". It was a Canadian ST disk magazine that had published two issues already, and that turned out to have been started only a little time after ST NEWS, in autumn. It was commercial, published once every two months, and looked extremely slick due to its own GEM environment and its incredible userfriendliness. It used a pull-down menu on top of a picture from which you could load and view the individual articles. Thus it came to be that I became rather dissatisfied with our own set-up. I slowly started work on ST NEWS' own GEM environment.
By the way, the first ever ST NEWS programs, though still written in that ghastly old and clumsy "ST Basic", were added to this ST NEWS issue as well. One of them belonged to a new (and quite long) series that was started: "GEM VDI Calls" by Manus (pseudonym of Herman de Vrees).
The next two issues, of which the first one (Volume 1 Issue 5) arrived at October 5th, 1986, were not yet to feature this GEM environment I was working on, and still had to be loaded into "1st Word", "1st Word Plus" or a compatible word processor. ST NEWS Volume 1 Issue 5 did, however, fill up an entire disk. Documents and programs, as well as other files were added. Around this time, I established contacts with Rastermouse in Amsterdam (later to become Commedia, which went bust somewhere early in the nineties). This company was the first to give ST NEWS review status. They supported us a lot, and I think we owe them, more than any other company, our early success.
In this issue, Mark van den Boer also wrote his first article, "Something about Interrupts", that would lead to his MC68000 machine language course to start in Volume 1 Issue 6 and to end well into Volume 2. The "Did you know that..." mentioned the fact that Commodore was said to be broke (some eight years ahead of when they actually did <grin>), and the official PD service was introduced. Still free of charge, of course. Later, due to lack of time and the enormous amounts of work it brought with it, the PD service would turn out to be cast off to ST Club Eindhoven, which probably still maintains this service to date under their new name of Stichting Computer Eindhoven. Not free of charge any more, though.
ST NEWS Volume 1 Issue 5 also saw the introduction of Rufus Camphausen's (Canopus Esoteric Research) writing. This director of an Amsterdam Meditation institute wrote articles about, let's say, 'less apparent computer use'. Sadly enough, Rufus would not write into the next Volume anymore, probably due to lack of time. One of the worst games ever, "Super Huey", was also crushed to death in a review that Antiware and Cronos (i.e. Frank and myself) wrote. Jos had also introduced an acquaintance of his to our working circle: Someone called Bitbuster (Paul "Oh Hell." Kolenbrander).
A very ironical thing was the fact that Jos wrote a very humorous article about "Are you a good ST owner?" in this issue. He slagged off the Amiga really badly there. Not half a year later he was to switch to that system, leaving the Atari community (together with Paul, actually).
The boundaries to foreign readers were officially thrown wide open with our first official foreign distributor, Gerardo Greco from Italy, to be announced in ST NEWS Volume 1 Issue 6 - the last document version of ST NEWS that was finished on November 15th 1986. This issue had a size that barely fitted into my half megabyte (with TOS on disk) system when loaded into "1st Word". Jos had now officially entered the ST NEWS editorial staff to join Frank and myself. Further, Mark van den Boer's machine language course started and good ol' Stefan wrote his first ST NEWS article: "How to write your own adventures". Stefan, who joined in because I had written about my hamster and he had one too, would soon turn out to become one of the most devoted writers - combining knowledge, humour, intellect and wit into a sparkling waterfall of articles and all kinds of small contributions on the software side as well. Later, Stefan would turn out to do more and more, even rewriting much of ST NEWS' code into assembler; of course, I didn't know that then, nor did I anticipate it. Soon, he was to become one of my best friends.
ST NEWS now wasn't the hackers' magazine of old any more. It was maturing into a true disk magazine, and I had fun doing it all along the way - and so, I suppose, did the other authors. Limits were beaten all the time: More people read ST NEWS, more articles were written, and we got more satisfaction out of doing it. In this issue, we also used our own names for the first time. Gone were the times of Cronos and Antiware, Bitbuster and DSP.
I spent more and more time programming the GEM set-up. "GfA Basic" version 1 was still having teething problems and I have to say that didn't particularly make things any easier for me...
In 1987, the mortal plane was left by Andy Warhol (overrated artist), Danny Kaye (UNICEF embassador and comedian), Fred Astaire (dancer/actor) and John Huston (director).
The year 1987 saw the Herald of Free Enterprise disaster (which killed 209 people), the Vatican condemning artificial fertilization with humans, 19-year old West German Matthias Rust landing his small plane on Red Square in Moscow, Matej Gaspar becoming the world's 5 billionth inhabitant, the Black Monday stock market crash, Irangate, 15 million trees toppling and 500 million pounds damage with a hurricane hitting England, Yuri Romanenko breaking the world record of time spent in space with his 326 days, the Enniskillen Poppy Day massacre (11 dead, 61 injured) and the INF treaty signed by Gorbachev and Reagan.
The world of Atari saw the release of the three early "TEX Demos I-III".
In the world of disk magazines, 1987 saw the start of "ACUSG" (and its death), "News Channel" (which died in 1988) and "ST Info" (which also died in 1988).
My personal top 10 of musical releases in 1987:
| 1 | Cacophony | "Speed Metal Symphony" (their first) |
| 2 | Rush | "Hold your Fire" |
| 3 | Sodom | "Persecution Mania" |
| 4 | King Diamond | "Abigail" |
| 5 | David Chastain | "Instrumental Variations" (his first) |
| 6 | Savatage | "Hall of the Mountain King" |
| 7 | Helloween | "Walls of Jericho" (their first) |
| 8 | Anthrax | "Among the Living" |
| 9 | Napalm Death | "Scum" (their ear-numbing debut) |
| 10 | Saga | "In Transit" |
Other (in)famous music releases were: Beastie Boys - "Licenced to Ill", Death - "Scream Bloody Gore" (their debut), Deep Purple - "House of Blue Light", Fields of the Nephilim - "Dawnrazor" (their first), Flotsam & Jetsam - "Doomsday for the Deceiver" (their first, still with current Metallica member Jason Newsted on bass), Testament - "The Legacy", Foreigner - "Inside Information", Kiss - "Crazy Nights", The Great Kat - "Worship me or Die", Impellitteri - "Impellitteri" (first EP), U2 - "The Joshua Tree", Kreator - "Terrible Certainty", David Lee Roth - "Skyscraper", Megadeth - "So Far, So Good, So What?", Metallica - "Garage Days Re-Revisited" (EP), Vinnie Moore - "Minds Eye" (debut), Joe Satriani - "Surfing with the Alien" (the first album that got him critical acclaim), Joey Tafolla - "Out of the Sun" (first), Venom - "Calm Before the Storm" and Vendetta - "Go and Live, Stay and Die" (their first).
Worth-while films released were: "Lethal Weapon", "The Last Emperor", "The Princess Bride", "No Way Out", "Roxanne", "Innerspace", "Akira", "Hellraiser", "Batteries Not Included", "Cry Freedom", "Dragnet", "Fatal Attraction", "The Lost Boys", "Outrageous Fortune", "Predator", "Prince of Darkness", "Robocop", "Spaceballs" and "Eddie Murphy Raw".
The most important book released that year was Douglas Adams' "Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency", though we didn't know about that yet.
The way to international 'fame' was laid out when the first GEM-based ST NEWS version appeared: Volume 2 Issue 1, launched on January 3rd 1987. Heavily inspired by the Canadian "F.A.S.T.E.R." magazine environment, a pull-down menu program was written using "GfA Basic" 1.0. Now the compiler was ready, nothing stood in the way of this version. Each tiny bit of the program was fully written in Basic, and some things were quite (or VERY) slow because of it. Jos never agreed with this setup, and editorial differences would be the main reason (as well as him buying an Amiga) that he was soon to leave the editorial staff.
Together with the launch of this issue, I launched a world wide offensive, sending ST NEWS to many user groups and magazines abroad, thus laying down the basics for a good relationship with the English magazine "Page 6", that was later to become our English distributor up to 1993. ST NEWS Volume 2 Issue 1 also featured a picture and some XBIOS 32 "Popcorn" music ("XBIOS 32 music" is music in a ready-to-use data file that can be played using the XBIOS 32 function in TOS). The presence of music in ST NEWS, however, was to disappear until the fifth issue of that year.
ST NEWS Volume 2 Issue 1, by the way, was the first to be mentioned in a foreign magazine - in "68000'er" of June 1986 (a German magazine). It was mentioned very favourably, luckily.
Math also displayed some of his true potential now, offering the full solution to "The Pawn", giving ST NEWS a world wide exclusive! We even broadened our perspective to cover the beautiful world of video and music that can be created using Fairlight computers, inspired by the fact that Jean Michel Jarre apparently uses them a lot.
But not all was fun. One of our authors who had started working with ST NEWS only a short while before, Rob "Softkill" de Swaan, died at the age of 34. A small "In Memoriam" was to put some seriousness in ST NEWS, too. Frank and myself dedicated our other current product, "Synth Sample III", to his wife Debbie and his little son Bruce whom he had left behind.
Some days after Volume 2 Issue 1 was launched, I received a phonecall from the guys at Commedia. "Why not publish some of the best articles of 1986 in a separate issue with that new GEM setup of yours?"
That's how the idea for an ST NEWS Volume 1 Compendium was born, which was eventually brought out on January 18th 1987. It was one single-sided disk filled to the brim (and the disk was formatted with 10 sectors per track, a trick that was not widely known at the time and quite revolutionary). I remember that we had a special formatting program to do 10-sectors-per-track disks, which we were not supposed to give to other people because it was too hot and all. It would actually not have been too difficult to write such a program myself, but of course I didn't know that at the time (innocence is a great excuse, sometimes).
On February 28th, ST NEWS Volume 2 Issue 2 was completed. There were five official foreign distributors now, the first interview appeared (with Jeff Minter of Llamasoft) and the "1st Word Plus File Save"-option was included in the pageview mode. The review of "Flightsimulator II" was also written for this issue. This very same review would eventually lead to Commedia ceasing its association with ST NEWS, allegedly because they claimed the review had been so extensive that it could be used as a manual, which would be for the benefit of people who had acquired an illegal copy.
Things went smoothly from ST NEWS Volume 2 Issue 3 on, which was published on April 11th 1987. Following Stefan's example (in his monochrome drawing program "The ArtiST"), I decided to dedicate this issue to someone. It seemed like a really cool idea. The 'victim' (though she never knew it) was Maryse, a girl at my school that I was very interested in back then.
Carel Janssen's "Forth Course" kicked off, and Lucas van den Berg also started writing his "Crimson's Column" articles, which perpetually excelled among the other articles through use of more than brilliant English. The Forth course remained running until ST NEWS went "undead" (although it was omitted twice due to health reasons of its author), and Lucas showed no signs of getting tired of writing his exquisite 'Walkthrough' articles until 1992.
The hottest review in this issue was by our (ex-)Italian distributor Gerardo Greco, covering the expensive hardware "ADAP Sound Rack". In the "Did you know that...", Stefan announced the release of a new version of his monochrome drawing program, to be named "The ArtiST+" (and what an original name that was!).
Around this time, someone called Rob Hubbard started programming music on the ST. Rob Hubbard had been (and atill was) one of the very best sound programmers on the Commodore 64, and I was happy to find out he had done the music for Microdeal's ST game "Goldrunner". I remember hearing the familiar music, I think it happened at a Limburg meeting of the SHN mentioned above. I think I might actually have had to swallow something.
Rob Hubbard's release of ST music, incidentally, started the development of a new music programmer's talent in Germany that was later to increase the quality of ST NEWS and the entire demo/hacking world on the ST considerably: Jochen "Mad Max" Hippel of The Exceptions (TEX).
But that, for now, is another matter entirely.
A longer time than usual passed on until the next issue was launched, which happened on the second birthday of the ACC (June 13th 1987). Jos had, in the mean time, definitely quit. Paul was to follow in Jos' steps, too. Amigas. Puh.
The concept of "human interest" was brought to its first height here, as I found it more and more necessary to tell people about which bands I liked and, more interestingly, which girls I liked. But it was nothing compared with what soon was to be introduced to ST NEWS: Willeke. But that's still an issue off, so let's not talk about that yet.
It turned out that people found some "human interest" very nice, although I am afraid that both Stefan and myself sometimes excelled to such enormous heights doing this that it sometimes went too far, most particularly in ST NEWS Volumes 3 and 4. But people even liked that. And I think that might just be one of the small keys to ST NEWS' success.
Then it happened. I fell in love. Not just ordinarily in love, but VERY MUCH in love. And the consequences for the ST NEWS reader were not to be underestimated: ST NEWS Volume 2 Issue 5, launched on July 25th 1987 was dedicated to Willeke (as would be the four next issues), and I seemed not to be able to resist writing about her all the time. How she looked. What I thought of her. How nice she was. Talking about 'overdoing' something: This was it.
A stream of very nice, sometimes plain lovely reactions poured down the post. Obviously, people found this kind of human interest endearing in a way, and they sometimes sympathised heartwarmingly.
Stefan was doing some re-programming now, and had succeeded in speeding up the scroller (it was now smooth, too). And that was but the first thing he would do! Also, the picture returned (not to leave ST NEWS again until 1993), and some great music was introduced by that musical prodigy whom we mentioned above for a bit already - Jochen Hippel. This first tune was "Monty on the Run", converted from an original Commodore 64 tune by Rob Hubbard. The text files were now also compressed, so that more data could be stored on the precious disk space. The display and de-compression of the documents now took an awfully long time, though, since that was still done in GfA Basic. The compression algorithm was designed by myself and therefore not very effective at all. Basically I only compressed all occurrences of more than two spaces in sequence, as well as combinations of those with the most frequent initial characters of words. Nonetheless, this got rid of about 25% of space needed for storage on average.
The big companies (Microdeal, Psygnosis and British Telecom - the latter of which was later bought by Microprose) now started to be interested in giving ST NEWS mailing list review status. That meant getting more software to review.
The ST NEWS program itself was getting to be more and more perfect, too. Suggestions of the readers were included, the user interface was improved, and Stefan did some more machine code programming, so that the document display routines were also getting faster and faster (faster than they have been in ST NEWS for the last couple of years, however, is virtually impossible and surely not measurable).
But let's not forget to mention some of the articles that were written in this issue. One of the people that regularly sent review software to us, the software wholesaler Harry van Horen of Homesoft Benelux, wrote an interesting article about the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Chicago. As Rob Hubbard was at the time active on the ST, we also published an interview with him.
The first ST NEWS that I really considered quite 'perfect' at the time was to be released on September 12th 1987: Volume 2 Issue 6. This issue did not only feature FAST machine code all over, music (the Rob Hubbard Commodore 64 composition "Chimera", converted to Atari by Jochen "Mad Max" Hippel as usual) and a gorgeous picture, but it also included a bonus "pop-up" menu bar that Robert Heessels of Eindhoven software company STRIKE-a-LIGHT had programmed for us. Also, all documents were now in one big data file, taking up even less storage space. Add to that the fact that Erik and Udo of The Exceptions wrote some pretty exclusive stuff about Raster Interrupts and 'vertical rasters', and what you had was what I then considered the best ST NEWS made so far. I even went as far as thinking it would be impossible to get it better now, and that every issue after this one would be one more closer down to the drain. I also started writing real 'introductory novels' in this issue, of which I consider "Tracker" to be the first one. I also wrote one called "The Story Behind Larry" (a Crimson-esque walkthrough kind of thing to "Leisure Suit Larry in the Land of the Lounge Lizards"). Quite naughty, that one, and fun to write!
The "Did you know that..." column also revealed some interesting bits: "Tempus Word" was announced, Rob Hubbard had gone to the States to work solely for Electronic Arts on MS-DOS machines (he would eventually make it back onto the ST, in a weird, way, by the music of Electronic Arts' "Powermonger", of which part was sampled off the PC version and replayed rather clumsily and ineptly in the ST version), and RAM prices were dropping to less than DM 2000,- for 4 Mb (!! to think that you pay less than 300 Dutch guilders for 4 Mb of SIMMs these days!).
We had in the mean time been contacted by Canadian competition "F.A.S.T.E.R.". They thought we were great! And of course there was Willeke. Present in every alert box...
ST NEWS Volume 2 Issue 6 was indeed a direct hit. Very positive reactions came from all over the globe, and it was very nice to know that people appreciated what we did. But then there was this fear: Could the next ST NEWS be equal in quality, or maybe even better?
On October 31st 1987, precisely in between the birthdays of both Frank and myself, the answer came when ST NEWS Volume 2 Issue 7 became public. Although we had strained ourselves to maximum capacity, this issue was no real match for its predecessor. Some of the small things, however, had still been improved: EVERY single time-consuming routine was now done in machine code, so that ST NEWS had now become a skeleton created by me with organs donated by Stefan organs as it were. Even the scroller was more perfect now, and I got some more experience thinking out plots for introductory novelettes. "K-Roget" appeared just in time for me to describe Willeke like she deserved to be described. Through the UK magazine "Page 6", we now also had distributors in Australia and New Zealand, resulting in a total of seven official distributors.
The creation of the best early mega demo ever, TEX' "BIG Demo", was also announced and advertised in this issue - I took the whole advertisement and promotion campaign on my shoulders for TEX, and would later spread it to all the people I knew, including Rob Hubbard who would turn out really to admire the effort.
The English magazine "ST World" published some very positive remarks about ST NEWS in November of that year, even going as far as to say that (quote) "ST NEWS is better than its rival, the Canadian disk magazine 'F.A.S.T.E.R.'"! Of course that was nowhere near the truth, I thought, although in the mean time I think we may indeed have surpassed them. Had they not folded late 1987 they would probably still have been the best. At the time, however, that was the biggest compliment achievable.
Other notable events in that issue: We got a reaction of a lovely man aged 62 who really liked ST NEWS: Ken "Ancient STatarian" Butler. He'd later write for us, and we'd even visit him! Claus Brod wrote a revolutionary article about "The Track 41 Protection", and we published a review of the hot new MEGA ST by SAG boss Eli Maas.
The last Volume 2 Issue (Issue 8) was to be launched on December 19th 1987. Something terrible had happened to the ST world, and ST NEWS was probably the first to cover the topic extensively (as well as to give the people something to fight this terrible thing): The computer virus phenomenon had appeared on the ST. I fear I really let myself go in an editorial article that would probably have had to be enormously censored had it been published in another magazine. Curses all over, hard-core anger. From then on, I started developing a virus killer program called the "Virus Destruction Utility" (or "VDU" for short), that was to be my main activity next to ST NEWS for the years to come (in the mean time the name of this program has changed via "Atari ST Virus Killer" to "Ultimate Virus Killer" and the rights went first to CRL and then to Douglas Communications).
Finishing this issue had been more than hectic. Some of the deadline articles had only been supplied the day before. STRIKE-a-LIGHT's Eerk Hofmeester, who wrote the "Tune Up!" review, was one of the persons who came bringing his article that evening - and he locked himself out of his car!
Ancient co-conspirator Frank Lemmen went into the army to perform national service as of December 1st. It was the beginning of a decline of his writing for ST NEWS, even though he would continue well into Volume 3. Around this time I got called by a couple of Amiga users who wanted my permission to start something like ST NEWS on the Amiga, called "Amiga News". I told them not to be silly and go ahead no matter what I thought of it, even though I thought it was a great idea...
Since the ST NEWS Volume 1 Compendium seemed to have been quite a success, it was obvious that a Volume 2 Compendium was also to appear. This one was completed at a user gathering in the basement of the Elektronikaland computer shop in Stefan's home town of Den Bosch, and was the only time when ST NEWS was finished outside the rooms of either Stefan or me. The finishing itself was in fact quite a hassle, with the first attempt crashing so everything had to be put together again, and it had to be put on a maxi-formatted (10 sectors per track), double-sided disk. All the best articles of Volume 2 were contained - the Magnetic Scrolls Adventure solutions, Crimson's Walkthroughs, the Forth-and MC68000 courses...and much, much more.
Looking back at 1987, I think it is fair to assume that it has been the year of ST NEWS' breakthrough. The program was now quite perfect and quite a stable quality was maintained. Microdeal, Telecom Software and Psygnosis poured out review software and there was nothing much left to wish for.
In 1988, the mortal plane was left by Enzo Ferrari and Roy Orbison.
Also in 1988, the first episode of "Red Dwarf" (the TV series) was aired, the British rioted over the poll tax, an American warship shot down Iran Air flight 655, three Italian stunt planes collided at a German Ramstein Airbase show, Ben Johnson (Canadian athlete) had to give back his Olympic medal due to use of drugs, a heavy earthquake hit Armenia (killing over 25,000 people and rendering another 5 million homeless), the Iran-Iraq war ended and Pan Am Flight 103 was bombed over Lockerbie.
The world of Atari saw the release of the "B.I.G. Demo" (TEX), the "Amiga Demo" (TEX) and the "FNIL Demo" (TNT Crew).
In the world of disk magazines, 1988 saw the start of "MAST Newsdisk" (and its death), the really excellent "ST Klubben" (which would eventually die in 1991), as well as the death of "CIP ST" (year of birth unknown) and "ON-Disk" (year of birth, similarly, unknown).
My personal top 10 of musical releases in 1988:
| 1 | Metallica | "...And Justice for All" |
| 2 | Queensrÿche | "Operation Mindcrime" |
| 3 | Jason Becker | "Perpetual Burn" |
| 4 | Sodom | "Mortal Way of Live" |
| 5 | Jarre | "Revolutions" |
| 6 | Malmsteen | "Odyssey" (first after his near-fatal accident) |
| 7 | Vangelis | "Direct" |
| 8 | Flotsam & Jetsam | "No Place for Disgrace" |
| 9 | Vendetta | "Brain Damage" |
| 10 | Iron Maiden | "Seventh Son of a Seventh Son" |
Other (in)famous music releases were: Cacophony - "Go Off!", Enya - "Watermark", Marty Friedman - "Dragon's Kiss", Death - "Leprosy", Stuart Hamm - "Radio Free Albemuth" (his solo debut), Greg Howe (self-titled debut), Living Colour - "Vivid" (their first), Mucky Pup - "Can't You Take a Joke?", Napalm Death - "From Enslavement to Obliteration", Nihilist _ "Premator Autopsy" (a demo, actually, of the band that would later call themselves Entombed), Anthrax - "State of Euphoria", Bathory - "Blood Fire Death", Dire Straits - "Money for Nothing" (collected hits), Marillion - "The Thieving Magpie", David Lee Roth - "Skyscraper", Scorpions - "Savage Amusement", Guns'n'Roses - "Lies", Pink Floyd - "Delicate Sound of Thunder", Judas Priest - "Ram it Down", AC/DC - "Blow up your Video", Racer X - "Extreme Volume Live", Slayer - "South of Heaven" and Gandalf's "From Source to Sea".
The following worth-while films were released: "Le Grand Blue", "Die Hard", the unsettling "Mississippi Burning", "Naked Gun", "Rainman", "Rambo III", the brilliant "Scrooged", "Willow", "Hellbound: Hellraiser II", "Bad Taste", "Beetlejuice", "Brain Damage", "Dangerous Liaisons", "Elvira Mistress of the Dark", "A Fish Called Wanda", "Gorillas in the Mist", "The Last Temptation of Christ", "Powaqqatsi", "Who Framed Roger Rabbit" and the absurdly witty "Coming to America".
Some books released were Douglas Adams' excellent "The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul", Stephen Hawking's popular scientific but still rather difficult "A Brief History of Time", Salman Rushie's "The Satanic Verses" and Stephen King's "The Tommyknockers" and "Pet Sematary".
The new year was entered with fresh energy, though it could be noticed that my inspiration was getting low. On February 16th 1988, in fact quite late for a first issue then, ST NEWS Volume 3 Issue 1 was published. All my own articles had practically been written in four days' time - the most hectic issue so far. It featured pull-aside menu bars as a bonus (again programmed by our talented friend Robert Heessels of STRIKE-a-LIGHT), and one of the earliest reviews of the "B.I.G. Demo". I was at the time already desperately seeking for someone to replace me as editor of ST NEWS because I was about to start studying at Utrecht University in August and my activities would have to be kept to a minimum then.
Volume 3 Issue 1 contained, by the way, one of Mad Max' most brilliant musical conversions ever: "W.A.R." by Rob Hubbard. We now also had distributors in France, the U.S. and Norway (Ronny Hatlemark, sometimes also referred to as Ynnor the Divine One!), now a total of eleven dedicated friends who helped us spread the message abroad. The German distributor, Stefan Colombier, was replaced by a friend of his (Guido Stumpe) when he switched to a PC. Guido would stick with us up to end very end.
An acquaintance of ours at the ST Club Eindhoven, Hubert van Mil, prompted us to try and make some money with ST NEWS now, which lead to us trying to get 1 Dutch guilder per sold copy through the Dutch PD libraries. This plan was not very successful and earned us only about 100 guilders in total - and started the historic event that would later rear its head as "The SAG War", that was to lead to an article about the things the SAG ("Foundation Atari Users", which went defunct not much later) done several issues later.
The Dutch semi-commercialisation of ST NEWS was grudgingly maintained through all Volume 3 issues and then happily discarded.
My follow-up had been found, and in ST NEWS Volume 3 Issue 2 (launched on April 6th 1988, which was in the Easter holiday just before my final exams that were supposed to allow me to go to University) it was to be read that this would be Stefan Posthuma, which wasn't a surprise to anyone, really. He didn't hesitate a moment when I asked. This Volume 3 Issue 2 was in fact my last issue (sigh), for a long while at least, which Frank and myself decided to dedicate to Jimi Hendrix. After five issues that had been dedicated to Willeke, it was about time for some change and we happened to have been very impressed with Jimi of late.
In this last ACC issue of ST NEWS for some time, the first 'real-time article' was to be published - an article covering a visit of German demo coder gods The Exception (TEX) to Holland. This was to become such an enormous success and gave rise to such stupefyingly cool reactions that we kept the thought in the back of our minds to write more of these articles at a later stage. In the mean time, the concept of 'real-time articles' has turned out to be very popular, as other disk magazines have done them by now as well (indeed, all of them seem to have done them at one time or another by now).
The "Did you know that..." announced the release of two new Atari systems, the Abaq (later ATW) and the TT. Even the Megafile 44 hard disk (then known as SR244) was announced.
Mark van den Boer wrote the last part of his MC68000 course. Less than half a year later, he would go to South America for a year and sell his ST, the first of a long series of travels that would take him through several years in Australia and eventually a settling-down and marriage in Canada in 1995.
This issue has also entered history, so we would find out a bit more than a year later, as the issue that set the notorious Lost Boys (TLB) going: Inspired by an article about scrolling in machine code by Stefan, Tim Moss (Manikin) started coding his first bits in assembler...
So then Stefan took over in May 1988. With that, a new era started - an era filled with zany articles, fresh inspiration, and finishing of ST NEWS at his place as well.
Stefan examined my source code and did some vicious recoding. Like I said before, the program was already significantly enhanced by Stefan's 'organs', but now the thing also got a better, healthier 'skeleton'.
The best thing he did for ST NEWS was the total reprogramming of the pageview mode. He did this in assembler, and the first version of it was already almost as fast as the "Tempus" editor - but with text styles and all that stuff where "Tempus" had none of that.
So when ST NEWS Volume 3 Issue 3 hit the street on May 16th 1988 (which was actually on Willeke's birthday), is caused only a great many positive reactions. Stefan was easily inspired by things like this, which was very good for his efforts to even further increase the quality of both the ST NEWS program and the articles.
By the time we started working on that issue, we had turned out to be quite good friends not only with Jochen of TEX, but also with the other members. This resulted in -ME- (Udo) writing an article about border obliteration - together with an assembler source file. That was, once again, a bit of an ST NEWS exclusive.
ST NEWS Volume 3 Issue 3, by the way, was dedicated to Evelien, who was at that time Stefan's girlfriend.
Some way or another, ST NEWS Volume 3 Issue 4 (released on July 9th 1988) was to go down in history as the best and the most notorious issue ever to be created - well, at least up to the end of that year. It contained quite some rather brill introductory novels as well as the alternative background story to the game "Obliterator" (by an English friend and later British FaST Club "ST Applications" enthusiast, Piper). It had been turned down by Psygnosis for reasons truly unfathomable.
This issue was finished at Stefan's place, and was to lay down the basis for a real-time article called "The Computer Orgy" that was to appear in the issue after that. It captured faithfully the atmosphere of the finishing of an ST NEWS issue. It featured the two of us and Stefan's whacky friend Peter doing stuff and listening to all kinds of music. This 'orgy' had us discover a delicious alcoholic beverage called 'Vieux' (that would be "Dutch Brandy" to you). From that issue on, alcohol was a prerequisite at the finishing of each ST NEWS issue. At that time "Lavaro" happened to be our favourite brand of Vieux, though some time later Stefan's father introduced us to "Plantiac". Plantiac was much better, warmer, smoother and, most importantly, we could drink a litre between the both of us in a single night without having a hangover the next morning!
Something that also happened in this issue was that I wrote a review of Titus' game "Fire & Forget", featuring a rather aggressively talented but dim-witted mercenary annex hired gun that I chose to call Cronos Warchild (Cronos because of the bass player of Venom, and Warchild because of a song called "Lovechild" by Deep Purple). Cronos would pop up in just about every later ST NEWS issue, up to his final appearance in 1995.
The issue as a whole was dedicated to Corinne "Vixen" Russell, with a competition where you had to guess her measures (five "Vixen" copies to be won, courtesy of Martech).
Ah. This issue also formed the height (or should I say depth maybe?) of the "SAG Wars". This point was formed by the most controversial article ever, which caused many readers to spew criticism - including one of our writers, Lucas, whom we nearly lost as writer and friend. It also caused me to get anonymous phone calls (the person didn't say anything and didn't hang up - I usually just left the horn in front of my speakers and had him listening to some pumped-up Kreator).
Both Stefan and myself read J.R.R. Tolkien's brilliant epic "The Lord of the Rings" and were greatly inspired to write a few articles with a lot of Tolkienish language. We decided to dedicate ST NEWS Volume 3 Issue 5 (which was released on October 16th 1988) to this Great Man. This was to be the first issue completely influenced by a writer. It contained the aforementioned 'Computer Orgy' article plus some special articles about J.R.R. Tolkien. In this issue, the tendency towards non-computer related articles became noticeable, which was to reach its temporary climax in the next issue.
Stefan had been to the U.S., which clearly impressed him deeply and caused lots of human interest in this issue. I started studying, the freedom of which caused me to lose total control of myself with regard to girls, sleeping late, and all the stuff you do when you're not with your parents for the first time in 21 years. A fair amount of alcohol was involved too.
A new distributor was appointment: Andreas Ramos in Denmark (the guy that was to write "Your 2nd Manual"). We also published the first of a series of articles including assembler source code by TEX - "The Wizards". This was an English translation of the German series called "Die Hexer" they had written for "ST Magazine" (the excellent German magazine that unfortunately went defunct in 1993).
After reading the completely absurd books by Douglas Adams, we decided to dedicate ST NEWS Volume 3 Issue 6 (released November 13th 1988) to this remarkable man. This ST NEWS issue was as absurd as Adams' writing. It contained a lot of non-computer articles like Stefan's extremely absurd "Piece of Mind" (involving a racoon), some articles about Douglas Adams himself, and some other stuff. Maybe we overdid it this time, but the result was funny. It was to be the most deranged issue of ST NEWS ever, and triggered one of our foreign distributors (an inconspicuous Norwegian by the name of Ronny Hatlemark) to write a long and very strange letter. This would eventually lead to Nutty Norwegians, Crazy Letters, Crazy Audio Tapes, the Norway Quest and a whole lot of other plain silly things, but that's not yet to be told.
According to a remark Stefan wrote in the scroll text, the "Climax of non-computer related stuff was reached here". What a lie this would turn out to be...
There was not much to program on the ST NEWS program anymore and when, one night after some heavy nightlife, Stefan came home, he sat down behind his ST, had to control himself not to slam any Metallica on his CD player (it was 2 AM) and started programming. Some hours later (a lot of hours it was, actually) a deafening cry shook his parents' house on its foundations and a scrolling message plus some rasters were to be spotted on his greasy, sweat-stained monitor.
He had done it. Finally, he had managed to write his first demo, containing some rasters and scrolling - the first ever demo to be contained in ST NEWS, that was to be proudly featured in Volume 3 Issue 7, released on December 24th 1988. This issue was more serious than the previous ones, though none the worse for it. It featured that what Stefan considers to be his best review ever, that of "Flying Shark". He wrote it in a dark mood, and it contains the an introductory novel where the main character dies at the end.
This issue was dedicated to a waitress in a Greek restaurant we had happened to be particularly impressed with. She was called Agapi, and she caused the height of our romanticism in the totally o.t.t. dedication article "The Greek Goddess".
The most interesting part of the "Wizards" articles was published in this issue - the one featuring a source listing of one of Mad Max' more recent synth routines. Further, it also contained a touching Xmas story based on a PD demo that Microdeal had been spreading called "The Snowman". This was, I believe, in turn based on an animated film.
Even though there had not been that much to improve on the ST NEWS program itself, Stefan had found time to speed up the page viewer significantly. This was achieved by placing text style (bold, italics, light, etc.) identifiers at the beginning of each line instead of just whenever they actually changed in an article. That way, the page viewer never needed to 'look back' in a document whenever it had to determine which text style to use.
Of course, after the Volume 1 and Volume 2 compendia, it was clear that an ST NEWS Volume 3 Compendium had to be made, too. So we did. As we thought there were quite a lot of decent articles contained in the Volume 3 issues, we had to resort to a double sided disk with 1 extra tracks and 11 sectors per track (!). It featured 924813 bytes of programs and documents (63 articles), and was launched on December 31st 1988. It even contained a new bit of music called "Phantoms of the Asteroid" (once more a conversion of a Rob Hubbard tune by the capable hands of Max the Mad).
In 1989, the mortal plane was left by Salvador Dali (amazing painter), Theodore Bundy (an American serial killer, who was executed), Hirohito (the by then already fairly ancient Japanese emperor), Lucille Ball, the Ayatollah Khomeiny, Laurence Olivier, Herbert von Karajan (conductor) and Bette Davis.
In 1989, Gro Harlem Brundtland became the first Nowegian female prime minister, the Soviets withdrew from Afghanistan, a huge asteroid missed the earth by a 'mere' 500,000 miles, the Exxon Valdez strikes the Alaskan shore and causes an environmental disaster, Oliver North got sentenced for the naughty things he did in the Irangate scandal, the Stealth bomber took to the skies for the first time, pope John Paul II declared that Galileo was right after all (i.e. that the earth was not in the middle of our solar system...), Steve Hogarth becomes the new singer in Marillion, the Tiananmen Square massacre took place, British Telecom designed computers that ran in light pulses rather than electricity, Intel designed the first RISC processor, the San Francisco Bay Area quake happened and the Berlin Wall fall.
The Atari world saw the release of the "Union Demo" (TEX, TNT Crew, Level 16, TCB and others), "Swedish New Year Demo" (Omega, Sync, and TCB?), "Def Demo" (TLB), "Whattaheck Demo" (TCB, Sync, Omega), "Genysys Demo" (AE) and the "Cuddly Demos" (TCB).
In the world of disk magazines, 1989 saw the start of "STatus Diskmag" (death year unknown), "ST Digital" (which died either that same year or the year after), "Syntax" (which is probably still alive) and "STUNN" (the "ST Unemployed Newsletter", which ceased to be in 1992).
My personal top 10 of musical releases in 1989:
| 1 | Malmsteen | "Trial by Fire" |
| 2 | Rush | "Show of Hands" (a video of this was released, too) |
| 3 | Faith no More | "The Real Thing" |
| 4 | Satriani | "Flying in a Blue Dream" |
| 5 | Sepultura | "Beneath the Remains" |
| 6 | Sodom | "Agent Orange" |
| 7 | Obituary | "Slowly we Rot" |
| 8 | Mucky Pup | "A Boy in a Man's World" |
| 9 | Annihilator | "Alice in Hell" |
| 10 | Jean Michel Jarre | "Live" |
Other (in)famous music releases were: Rush - "Presto", Acid Reign - "The Fear" (just heard it in the "Virgin Megastore" in London during the "LateST NEWS Quest" and bought it right away), Aerosmith - "Pump", Carcass - "Symphonies of Sickness" (first full-length album), Destruction - "Live Without Sense" (last album with vocalist/bassist Schmier), Dream Theater - "When Dream and Day Unite", Gwar - "Hell-o" (the illustrious debut), Howe II - "High Gear", Richie Kotzen (self-titled debut), Metal Church - "Blessing in Disguise" (excellent album, really), Morbid angel - "Altars of Madness" (their somewhat chaotic first effort), Nirvana - "Bleach", Queen - "The Miracle", Venom - "Prime Evil" and Vangelis - "Themes" (collection of soundtrack tunes).
Worth-while films released were: "When Harry met Sally", "Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade", "Lethal Weapon II", the endearing "Parenthood", "The Abyss", "Black Rain", the positively excellent "Dead Poets Society", "Erik the Viking", the blockbuster "Ghostbusters II" and "Honey, I Shrunk the Kids".
Only one interesting book appears to have been released in 1989, and that was "Red Dwarf", the first book by Rob Grant and Douglas Naylor, kindof based on the TV series that had started a year previously.
During Volume 4, it was to become apparent that we no longer had the abundance of time needed to more or less regularly publish ST NEWS - at least not whilst upholding what we reckoned was a pretty high quality standard. Up to the summer, everything went very much like it should, but after the summer an important thing happened to me: I was taken on as employee at the growing games software company Thalion in Germany. No longer did I have time aplenty to write for ST NEWS, and in the weekends I rather wanted to be with my girlfriend, Miranda, whom I had started going steady with since July 1989, instead of finishing ST NEWS. Stefan was also becoming increasingly involved with his work, so that didn't quite benefit the magazine, either.
Nonetheless, the first half of the year was spent making ST NEWS issues just like we originally intended - at a speed of about one issue per two months.
ST NEWS Volume 4 Issue 1 was released on February 18th 1989. It was dedicated to Alida, the creatress of the Divine Dessert (Chocolate Mousse) and Stefan's lady of his heart at that time. Even the recipe of Chocolate Mousse was given here. Though both his and my opinions about Alida changed drastically not too much later, I still think Chocolate Mousse might just be the most exquisite dessert achievable.
The most striking review was that of the most well-designed megademo that ever made it on the ST, the "Union Demo". I also reviewed the Cambridge Z80 computer, and this issue already mentioned that Great Things would happen in ST NEWS Volume 4 Issue 4, whetting the people's appetites for more to come...
The best thing of this issue, however, was the introduction of the monochrome demo. No demo programmer so far had bothered to do monochrome demos, but Stefan had really done some admiringly inspired demo coding. It featured double swinging scrollers and such. Of course, the colour demo was present as well - with bouncing rasters and logos, a scroller and Alida's signature subtly in the right bottom corner.
When we released ST NEWS 4 Volume 2, on April 1st 1989, it became apparent that we had written a bit too much. Again, just like with the ST NEWS Volume 3 Compendium, a format of 11 sectors per track had to be applied, as we still wanted to remain single-sided "for the sake of the English"; our main audience was located in the United Kingdom but this country chronically suffered from excessive presence of single-sided disk drives. Thank god (who I am afraid does not exist) this time is well behind us now.
This issue, which also featured the Unique Bootsector Scroll (or UBS), was dedicated to synth man Jean Michel Jarre. It contained an article about the Australian PC Show '89 by our then Australian distributor, Norman Pearce. It also contained the 'real-time' article of a visit to TEX, where the basis was laid for my forthcoming employment by German software company Thalion.
On the demo front, Stefan had again sought to stun the world. The monochrome demo featured sloping, double sloping, wobbling, sinussing and baby-sinussing scrollers in a kind of passively interactive scroll message. One of the best he ever did. The colour demo was brill too, with tracking sprites and rasters and a parallax scroll.
This issue also contained our first hidden article in what would eventually become a long sequence.
May 20th 1989 saw the creation of ST NEWS Volume 4 Issue 3, the "reli-nut" issue, during which event Stefan and me also made the cult "ST NEWS Home Vid'" tape - especially for the Nutty Norwegians to whom that particular issue was also dedicated. It came on another 11 sectors per track disk, which Stefan really hated as it was a bastard to copy, time-wise. As a result, this was never repeated again with Stefan still in charge of copying and distribution.
Again, a bootsector scroller was written for this issue. This time, however, it did not get the text from the bootsector itself but from a separate file it loaded from disk instead. The actual issue saw some articles called "Who are we" where most of our authors (both past and present) wrote something about themselves. Piper also wrote for just about the last time (for us that is). The Lost Boys wrote the first of an intended long series of tips'n'tricks articles about demo programming - the first part that, some way or another, never got a sequel. Mad Max had really strained himself, and had converted the music of the Commodore 64 game "Comic Bakery" - an ST NEWS exclusive, actually. This was, for once, a conversion of a tune by Commodore 64 sound programmer Martin Galway. Also, unlike most other tunes so far, it was not part of the "B.I.G. Demo" selection.
The demo screens had got even better. The colour one was alive with mass movement, even with nodding and rotating Pacman graphics by yours truly! The monochrome one contained a custom font and a starfield with sinus and the whole lot (another monochrome demo to set standards that, however, none was keen to follow...).
Around this time, Stefan and me wrote our first true long Crazy Letters, and this is what lead to this issue being known as the 'reli-nut' issue. Our Crazy Letters had featured strange adorers, worshippers and extollers, and this was bound to have its result on the stuff we wrote for ST NEWS. Stefan wrote an introductory novel for the review of the "Universal Item Selector II" featuring the first appearance of his spiritual child Korik Starchaser among a clan of fileselector return string worshippers. Hell, even the "ST Software News" column was invaded by worshippers of L.L. Cool J. (retch, vomit).
Technically, the storage of articles was improved. Whereas it previously only checked for appearance of double spaces and the like, the most frequent words were now stored at the beginning of the article file and replaced by a two-byte code in the actual text. This allowed quite an extra bit to be stored on the same amount of disk space.
Starting with ST NEWS Volume 4 Issue 4, the magazine became - and remained - double-sided. Too bad for the English, really. This particular issue (our 25th), which was released on August 12th 1989, completely covered a holiday Stefan and me had spent in England, visiting all the major software houses and many programming legends: The LateST NEWS Quest. It contained over half a megabyte of 'real-time' articles, as well as other articles concerning The Quest. Some of the people interviewed in detail were Alex Herbert, Jeff Minter, Steve Bak, Peter Johnson, Jez San, Ben Dalglish, David Whittaker and Pete Lyon.
The issue itself was crammed with four demos (one by Stefan, one by In Flagranti - later named Oxygene of TLB, who still further down the road joined Delta Force - and two by John M. Phillips, author of "Nebulus" and "Eliminator") as well as four musical pieces (three by Mad Max and one by David Whittaker (!)). The Quest had taken up three weeks (excluding the preparations, that is), and it had taken 10 days of intense work to get all the experience down in word processor files.
During the finishing of all those articles, I actually started to go steady with Miranda, the girl with whom I later lived together for three and a half years before we broke up in September 1994.
Before finishing this issue, I had already mentioned the fact to Stefan that there would be no better occasion of saying 'goodbye' and quitting ST NEWS than this issue. We were surely never going to beat this...
We continued, however, albeit not "alive" for long.
We did not make an ST NEWS Volume 4 Compendium, as we felt that the entire issue 4 would have to be on there, which would be quite impossible and beside the point, too.
In 1990, the mortal plane was left by Greta Garbo (ex-babe actress), Jim Henson (creator of the Muppets), Sammy Davis Jr., Robert Noyce (founder of Intel) and Roald Dahl (great writer).
Also, 1990 saw Nelson Mandela freed, Gloria Estefan having a near-fatal accident, Saddam Hussayn invading Kuwait, German Unification Day, Margaret Thatcher being replaced by John Major, the Cold War formally ending, the Hubble Space Telescope being launched, and Ireland getting their first female president (Mary Robinson). In June, former American distributor David Meile got a son.
The Atari world saw the release of "Swedish New Year Demo 1990" (TCB?), "Mega Demo" (Galtan 6), "Mindbomb" (TLB), "Life's a Bitch" (TEX, TLB and others), "Sowatt" (TCB), "Decade Demos" (Inner Circle), "Dark Side of the Spoon" (officially released at the "STNICCC", but actually published a few months later, by ULM), "European Demos" (Overlanders and friends) and "Syntax Terror" (Delta Force).
In the world of disk magazines, 1990 saw the start of "Maggie" (old style), the commercial shite magazine "STampede" (died the same year, thankfully) and "STOS Bits" (which died either the same year or the one after).
My personal top 10 of musical releases in 1990:
| 1 | Megadeth | "Rust in Piece" (with Marty Friedman now) |
| 2 | Obituary | "Cause of Death" |
| 3 | Entombed | "Left Hand Path" |
| 4 | Steve Vai | "Passion and Warfare" |
| 5 | Yngwie Malmsteen | "Eclipse" |
| 6 | Queensrÿche | "Empire" |
| 7 | Napalm Death | "Harmony Corruption" |
| 8 | Gwar | "Scumdogs of the Universe" |
| 9 | Led Zeppelin | "Remasters" |
| 10 | Fields of the Nephilim | "Earth Inferno" (great live album) |
Other (in)famous music releases were: Annihilator - "Never Neverland", Mariah Carey (her spine-shilling debut), Deep Purple - "Slaves and Masters" (with Joe Lynn Turner making out sound like late Rainbow, i.e. not too excellent), Mads Eriksen - "Journey" (debut of the excellent Norwegian guitarist), "Fields of the Nephilim" - Elizium (their best studio album), Michael Lee Firkins (this unusual guitarist's first album), Iron Maiden - "No Prayer for the Dying" (generally reckoned to be their 'beginning of the end'), Jean Michel Jarre - "Waiting for Cousteau", Kong - "Mute Poet Vocaliser" (first), Living Colour - "Time's Up", Pantera - "Cowboys from Hell", Paradise Lost - "Lost Paradise" (rather inept debut), Amorphis debut demo ("Disment of Soul"), Anathema's first demo ("An Iliad of Woes"), Alice in Chains - "Facelift", Biohazard - "Biohazard" (debut), Whitesnake - "Slip of the Tongue", Extreme - "Pornograffitti", Black Sabbath - "Tyr", ZZ Top - "Recycler", Gary Moore - "Still Got the Blues", Robert Plant - "Manic Nirvana", Slayer - "Seasons in the Abyss", Scorpions - "Crazy World" and Vangelis - "The City".
Worth-while films released were: "Delicatessen" (somewhat cult French film), "Die Harder", "Godfather III", "Gremlins II", "Highlander II" (which was rather a letdown), the suspenseful "Silence of the Lambs", "Flatliners", the excellent "Total Recall" and "Ghost".
Some books released were: Mark Carwardine and Douglas Adams' "Last Chance to See" (about endangered animals), "Better Than Life" (the sequel to Rob Grant's and Doug Naylor's "Red Dwarf") and Stephen King's "Four Past Midnight".
It was a disgrace. For more than half a year, no issues of ST NEWS were launched. I had started to work for Thalion and time decreased. Stefan was also getting ever more immersed in his professional duties.
ST NEWS Volume 5 Issue 1, released on the day Nelson Mandela was released, February 11th 1990 (the 42nd day of the year), did become the biggest issue we had produced so far, with almost 770 Kb of articles. And, incidentally, it also became our last 'alive' one.
Predominantly present was the 'real-time' covering of the Norway Quest, when Stefan and me visited our dearest friends, the Nutty Norwegians, for 10 days around new year 1989/1990. It made up for a massive 250 Kb real-time reading experience of some rather strange proceedings. We stayed at the place of Ronny Hatlemark, who was then our Norwegian distributor. As he must have had a hard time while his place was being trashed by two mad Dutchmen and a dozen Nutty fellow-Norwegians, we decided that this ST NEWS issue ought to be dedicated to him and his family.
This issue was actually very much to our satisfaction, even though it was our last one, officially. Introductory novels tended to get longer and I really felt good with that. The last decent piece of new Mad Max music was included here, a song called "Scoop", originally composed on the Commodore 64 by the excellent Maniacs of Noise. This issue also featured a devious April fools' joke, a 'software 68030 emulator'.
The colour demo in this issue was stylish as ever, and the monochrome one broke new ground as well. Shrinking and flopping and turning...there seemed no end to Stefan's ideas and capabilities. Article compression had also taken a turn for the better; whereas previously it had be some half-cocked concept of our own, this time we used a proper packer that had been used so far (and written?) by The Lost Boys in their megademos. It was the kind of modern packer that uses Lempel Ziv or Huffman or whatshamacallit. It improved significantly the amount of stuff that could be put on a disk.
However, there was sadness in this issue as well, as we knew it would be our last one. At least sortof.
After ST NEWS Volume 5 Issue 1, we died. Or, rather, we decided it would be better to have ST NEWS depart. Euthanasia, if you will. We were both very afraid that we would eventually not be able to make any more issues at all, so we decided to cast the towel in the ring before a quality decrease would set in. We wanted to prevent us from possibly getting a status akin to that of Elvis the years before he died (bad comparison, but I'm sure you get my drift).
We did, however, deliver a finishing blow with the ST NEWS Final Compendium (published on March 11th 1990 and dedicated to Miranda), a collection of over 100 of what we felt to be the most interesting articles ever published in all issues of ST NEWS - including the full version of ST NEWS Volume 1 Issue 1. It was two double-sided disks in size; 2 Mb of articles; massive by all standards. It also contained one or two new articles.
In "New Atari User" (the new name of our English distributor's "Page 6" magazine), editor Les Ellingham wrote that it was "the end of an era". An unexpected and gratifying honour!
To be honest, dying wasn't a lot of fun. The good thing was that we didn't have all those obligations any more, but there was also a bad thing: What to do now? What could we do to get rid of excessive inspiration once in a while?
So even when our death had been official only for a couple of weeks, Stefan and myself considered a possible revival. ST NEWS had, after all, been lots of fun and neither of us had really felt happy about giving all of it up. It was a choking feeling to no longer have the Purpose of finishing an issue of ST NEWS in our lives.
So we simply decided to arise from the grave as it were, and the undead issues of ST NEWS sprang to life. This was no surprise to the people who really knew us - they probably knew we would revive even before we did.
We reorganised the distributors (some of the old ones used to be not so good, to put it mildly), started with a subtle change in layout, and wrote more about non-computer related stuff.
So, on November 24th 1990, we did the first 'undead' issue: ST NEWS Volume 5 Issue 2. Although we had really put our hearts into the 'revival', we actually didn't like making this issue. The actual writing had been fun but the actual making of it lacked the old feeling as I really wanted to be with Miranda instead of finishing ST NEWS. I still worked at Thalion so I was only in the Netherlands in the weekends. My work damn nearly killed off ST NEWS. I am grateful that didn't happen.
There was no decent demo in this issue, either. The colour version was a scroll with a gorgeous picture by Tanis of TCB, but there was no monochrome equivalent. To top it off, the music ("Mega Apocalypse", originally by Rob Hubbard) was again by Mad Max, but it was clumsily prepared - obviously to him it no longer mattered whether we had good music or not. Reason enough to start looking for another musician.
This issue contained yet again many reviews with longer intro novels, and the first issue of a 'new and thrilling' submagazine: "JournaLYNX". In the issue as a whole, too, we did not shun offering some more programs.. After all, we were now permanently double-sided so we had twice as much space that we couldn't possibly fill with articles only (or at least so we thought at the time). Programs featured on this issue were, among others, the fabulously enhanced version of the original "NEOChrome" - "NEOChrome Master 2.19" - as well as the "Pack Ice" file compressor and an early of many versions of a swearing accessory written by me, called "Wowbagger the Infinitely Prolonged".
In 1991, the mortal plane was left by Steve Clark (guitarist of Def Leppard), Olav V (king of Norway), Don Siegel (director, among others of "Dirty Harry"), Rajiv Ghandi (who was assassinated in a bomb explosion), Frank Captra (director), Gene Roddenberry (creator of "Star Trek" and "Star Trek: The Next Generation"), Freddie Mercury, Robert Maxwell (tycoon) and Klaus Kinski (actor)
In 1991, the Allied forces kicked Saddam out of Kuwait, a cyclone devastated Bangladesh (killing 138,000 people and rendering homeless many millions), Slovenia and Croatie seceded from Yugoslavia, the communists tried a coup against Mikhail Gorbachev, the charges against Oliver North were dropped, and the Soviet Union disbanded.
The Atari world saw the release of the "Ooh Crikey Wot a Scorcher" (TLB), "Transbeauce Demo" (ST Connexion), the "Lightning Demo" (Pendragons) and "Punish Your Machine" (Delta Force ICC #2 megademo).
In the world of disk magazines, 1991 saw the start of "Daily Error" (and its death), "DBA Magazine" (who are still alive!), "HP Source" (might have been 1992, the year in which they died, too), Tom Zunder's unique "Interleave" (which died in 1991, too, unfortunately), "STabloid" (the pre-issue, which never got a sequel, sadly), "Toxic Magazine" (reportedly still alive) and the Polish "The Voice" (which died, presumably, in 1992).
My personal top 10 of musical releases in 1991:
| 1 | Metallica | "Metallica" |
| 2 | Fear of God | "Within the Veil" |
| 3 | Slayer | "Decade of Aggression" |
| 4 | Sepultura | "Arise" (their best) |
| 5 | Paradise Lost | "Gothic" |
| 6 | Fates Warning | "Parallels" |
| 7 | Mads Eriksen | "Storyteller" |
| 8 | My Dying Bride | "Symphonaire..." (debut EP) |
| 9 | Entombed | "Clandestine" |
| 10 | Pearl Jam | "Ten" (the best grunge band, I think) |
Other (in)famous music releases were: Guns'n'Roses - "Use Your Illusion I & II", Anathema - "All Faith is Lost" (their haunting second demo), Anthrax - "Attack of the Killer B's", Carcass - "Necroticism - Descanting the Insalubrious", Cathedral - "Forest of Equilibrium" (their super-slow doomy debut), Alice Cooper - "Hey Stoopid" (interesting only because Joe Satriani plays guitar on one or two tracks), Cranes - "Wings of Joy" (really strange depressing music), Gorefest - "Mindloss" (first album), Grave - "Into the Grave" (first), Morbid Angel - "Blessed are the Sick", Nirvana - "Nevermind" (overrated but pretty good), Pestilence - "Testimony of the Ancients", Queen - "Innuendo", Queensry¨che - "Operation Livecrime", David Lee Roth - "A Little Ain't Enough" (with Jason Becker on guitar), Red Hot Chili Peppers - "Bloodsugarsexmagik", Savatage - "Streets", Soundgarden - "Badmotorfinger", Ozzy - "No More Tears", Mot"rhead - "1916", Mr. Big - "Lean Into It", Yes - "Union", Stevie Ray Vaughan - "The Sky is Crying", Dire Straits - "On Every Street" (he reunion album), Genesis - "We Can't Dance", Skyclad - "Wayward Sons of Mother Earth" (first album) and Van Halen - "For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge".
Worth-while films released were: "Dead Again", "Scissors" (with a barely known Sharon Stone at the time), "Hook", "Hot Shots!", the impressive "Backdraft", the totally impressive "Terminator 2: Judgment Day", "The Fisher King", the unsettling "JFK" and "Naked Gun 2.5".
According to my research, the only good book released this year was "Needful Things" by Stephen King. But that one a really good one.
On December 21st to 24th 1990, Stefan and myself organised the ST NEWS International Christmas Coding Convention. More than 120 people, all of them demo programmers of the highest order, joined together for a couple of days in the town of Oss in Holland. It was a monumental gathering that will probably never be equalled on such a level of friendliness. Simply everyone was there, with the exception of TLB's Oxygene and TEX' - ME -. They were both tied up with stuff involving school, I seem to recall.
This gathering of ST freaks of the first order was covered exclusively in ST NEWS Volume 6 Issue 1, published on April 20th 1991. This was by no means a regular issue, as it omitted reviews and most of the regular columns in favour of coverage of this major event. Two pictures were contained in the program (the ones that had come second ex aequo in the Convention's Graphics Competition), and quite a few tiny 3.5 Kb demos were present on the disk (due to the 3.5 Kb "VIC TIMES REVISITED" contest that was also held at the Convention). One of these demos was written by our hero, Jeff Minter, who had himself done impressive stuff back in Commodore VIC 20 times (the VIC 20, as you may know, only had 3.5 Kb of RAM when unexpanded).
Oddly enough, Volume 6 Issue 1 was the first issue of ST NEWS that worked on all ST systems available at the time, regardless of the resident programs they had in memory. After Volume 3 the program had been 'illegally' programmed only insofar that it used a fixed absolute address to load the music ($72000), and that it checked the status of disk write-protection in a faulty way. The write-protect problem was discarded after Volume 4, but not until Volume 6 Issue 1 did we get the chance to load the music at any address we wanted instead of a fixed one. This was largely due to the fact that the music for this issue was done by another person: Laurens van der Klis (The Mind of the Quartermass Xperiment as opposed to Nap the Mad). Laurens was a new music programming talent, and Jochen was really getting too lazy and much too sloppy for his music further to be included. The colour selector, similarly, that had so far only worked on TOS 1.0 due to profoundly mysterious reasons, had now been rewritten so that it worked on all TOS versions. Later, it would turn out that the graphics nor the music would work on the Falcon.
This issue also contained a nice demo again - a 3D line character rotato-scroller by Manikin of The Lost Boys. A brill screen by all means. The articles themselves were now packed with "Pack Ice" for the first time (and we've kept on using it ever since, even though we change the identifier to ATOM or something similar to put "hidden article hackers" on the wrong track <mega grin>). Axe, author of "Pack Ice", had fitted the latest version of his packer with the possibility to pass parameters in its command line, enabling it to be used by the ST NEWS article packing- and gathering-software, "DISTURB" ("Digital Insanity's ST NEWS Utility Rewritten Blatantly").
Of course, the Gulf War that stunned the world didn't leave us unaffected, either. Both Stefan and me had our say on the subject in some deep articles.
The ST was selling less and less world-wide. It was dying, only to be partly replaced by machines like the (MEGA) STE and the TT. We kept on living - with renewed vigour, like someone barely having escaped from a deadly accident.
Originally, ST NEWS Volume 6 Issue 2 was to be released exactly five years after the start of the mag, on July 26th 1991. Due to Stefan being awfully busy at that time, this unfortunately couldn't happen.
Possibly thanks to that, this ST NEWS issue was to enter history once more as "the biggest so far" - 1032 Kb of uncompressed articles, 55 in total, made up the editorial contents of this issue that eventually became available on August 18th. A new temporary record. It was dedicated to cult programmer Jeff Minter, who had brought life to the shareware scene with his excellent shareware game "Llamatron".
Due to the delay, we had been able to include quite a huge 'real-time' article that was written at the Delta Force I.C.C. #2, held from August 1st to August 4th in Leutenbach, West Germany. So the delay turned out to work out for the better in the end.
The incredible amount of stuff put on this disk was possible because we had switched to "Pack Ice" one issue previously.
This issue also happened to enter history as the one with the worst demo ever in three years. Because Stefan had not been able to allocate the time needed to do a big one, he did a small scroll line that didn't even wrap around at the end (something we discovered when it was too late and all copies had already been sent out. 'Better something than nothing' had been all there was to say for it.
Contents of this issue were, among others, reviews of the excellent games "Gods" and "Lemmings", and the PROGRAMS folder contained the latest (and rather ST NEWS-exclusive) version of the excellent packer "Pack Ice" by Axe of Superior (and more, of course). Not too long after this, Axe's hard disk was purloined and he lost all his source code material including that of "Pack Ice". Good thing the latest version was on ST NEWS.
This issue got widely spread and was promoted through small advertisements; renewed vigour in the spreading and PR activities. Five years of ST NEWS should not go by unnoticed after all!
In 1992, the mortal plane was left by Isaac Asimov (great science fiction writer), Anthony Perkins (known from all those "Psycho" films where he played Norman Bates), Roger Miller and Marlene Dietrich.
Events taking place in 1992 included the "Freddie Mercury Tribute for AIDS Awareness", Windsor Castle catching fire and an El Al Boeing 747 crashing down on the Bijlmermeer area of Amsterdam.
In the world of disk magazines, 1992 saw the start of "Atari Explorer Online" (survived up to 1996, then died), "Magnum" (died that year, too), "RTS Track" (died that year, too), the totally insane "Scriba Communis Responsi" (which died in 1993, to all intents and purposes, even though the editorial staff claims spasms of life occasionally) and "STench" (died in 1992, too), as well as the presumed date of birth of "ST Enthusiasts Newsletter" (died in 1993) and the death of "Ledgers" magazine (date of birth unknown).
My personal top 10 of musical releases in 1992:
| 1 | Dream Theater | "Images and Words" |
| 2 | Paradise Lost | "Shades of God" |
| 3 | Megadeth | "Countdown to Extinction" |
| 4 | Joe Satriani | "The Extremist" |
| 5 | Pan-Thy-Monium | "Dawn of Dreams" |
| 6 | My Dying Bride | "As the Flower Withers" |
| 7 | Whistler Courbois Whistler | self-titled debut |
| 8 | The Gathering | "Always..." |
| 9 | Pantera | "Vulgar Display of Power" |
| 10 | Rage Against the Machine | self-titled debut |
Other (in)famous music releases were: Alice in Chains - "Dirt", Anathema - "Crestfallen" (debut EP), Black Sabbath - "Dehumanizer" (reunion line-up with Dio), Bolt Thrower - "The IVth Crusade", AC/DC - "Live", Mot"rhead - "March or Die", Donor- "Triangle of the Lost", Marty Friedman - "Scenes" (Friedman goes new age, excellently), Paul Gilbert - "A tribute to Jimi Hendrix", Gwar - "America Must be Destroyed", Iron Maiden - "Fear of the Dark", Kong - "Phlegm", Yngwie Malmsteen "Fire & Ice" (his worst album ever), Obituary - "The End Complete", Ship of Fools - "Visions" (debut EP), Bernd Steidl - "Psycho Acoustic Overture" (brilliant acoustic guitar virtuoso), Vangelis - "1492 - Conquest of Paradise", Vital Remains - "Let us Pray", Skyclad's "A Burnt Offering for the Bone Idol", Tori Amos - "Little Earthquakes" and W.A.S.P. - "The Crimson Idol".
Worth-while films released were: "Toys" (artsy and original film with Robin William", "Alien 3" (not any way as good as the previous two), "Passenger 57", "Patriot Games", "Sneakers", the zany "Wayne's World", "Aladdin" (animated film), "Hellraiser III: Hell on Earth", "Under Siege", "Reservoir Dogs", "The Beauty and the Beast" (animation), the excellently filmed "Cliffhanger", and the Oscar-winning clay puppet animated film "The Wrong Trousers".
Some books released were: Douglas Adams' "Totally Harmless" and Stephen King's "Dolores Claiborne" and "Gerald's Game".
The first Volume 7 Issue (which was, predictably, Issue 1) was released on January 11th 1992. Already well before we got down to actually putting the whole thing together, we knew this would be an new quantity record (again). In the end we turned out to have 75 articles, amounting to over 1300 Kb when not compressed! Needless to say, we were very proud of that fact. It was dedicated to Jason Becker, guitar talent extraordinaire, who was struck down by a lethal muscle disease called the A.L.S. Lou Gehrig syndrome. It was the start of virtually constant attention to the cause of this sadly incapacitated guitarist. With the demise of ST NEWS in 1996, he was in bad shape but still alive, and had succeeded in making a second solo album with the aid of friends, fellow guitarists and an Apple MacIntosh.
The music in ST NEWS, like in the previous two issues, was done by Laurens van der Klis. The most groovy thing about this issue, however, was the fact that Stefan had taken the trouble to recode it entirely in "GfA Basic" version 3.6TT. The program as such generally became better, and as a bonus he also included the D.I.P.D.M.S. - the "Digital Insanity Pull-Down Menu System". This allowed for cascading menus like they can normally be seen only on the Apple MacIntosh, Commodore Amiga, the much later AES 4.xx included on the Falcon and, of course, "Windows '95" on the PC. The user interface now looked really slick, and with the exception of it having to be adapted to the Falcon some time later it was never changed one bit. Functionality in favour of nuts and bolts, bells and whistles.
The weekend in which we finished it, which featured some snow, was spent in the proper fashion of the days of old. We both went staggeringly drunk (although I was drunk most, I guess, and I even recall staining Stefan's carpet with oral excreta and the hangover lasting from Saturday morning to Monday morning because we'd drunk Apfelkorn and Vodka and just about anything else alcoholic Stefan had handy) and generally did everything we needed to do. Apart from the actual finishing of the issue, this 'everything' implied playing games, watching videos, listening to music and eating some of Stefan's own recipes (even though this usually involved nuked food).
With regard to the editorial contents, the hottest article was probably the "Terminator II" film script. Awesome, really. On the field of computing, it offered the first ever reviews of "Lethal XCess", "Oh No! More Lemmings", "Revenge of the Mutant Camels" and "Barbarian II". We beat the entire official computer press there! There were quite a lot of non-computer-related articles as well, mostly novels of some kind.
Further, it contained the same crappy old scroll demo we had in the previous issue, but a record amount of nine hidden articles! The "READ.ME" was particularly silly (and rather long) too.
We simply loved doing it (but need I say that every time over?).
Relatively seen, ST NEWS Volume 7 Issue 2 was the easiest so far to finish, and it took place on May 9th 1992. There was only one bug that occurred during the finishing, and we had lots of articles lined up - making it the ST NEWS issue with the most varying contents so far. Lots of fiction, though still accompanied with the usual computer-related stuff.
And, yes, we still had the same crappy scroller. It looked pretty much as if we were never going to have another one, as indeed we didn't even by the very end.
The issue was dedicated to the prime metal band, Metallica. Among other things, this issue contained a full shareware game (Llamasoft's "Revenge of the Mutant Camels"), a report on the "LEIF Mega Convention" that had been held in Sweden, the penultimate disk magazine encyclopaedia, the ultimate cheat encyclopaedia (cheats to 300 games!) and the first of a new short series ("The Quest for the Purification of the English Language", that didn't last very long, to be honest). Reviews included "Speedball II" (late, but better late than never), Thalion's "Amberstar" and Arnor's "Protext" (probably the definite Atari word processing package). For "Amberstar" I'd written a seriously long and, even if I say so myself, quite good background novel. The reason behind this was the fact that, at my departure from Thalion, I had been told I could write the background novel for the real thing, something which in the end didn't happen (and not because of my fault). I wanted to show 'em that I could do a story that was just as good, or maybe better. I guess I had an ego bruise there. The music, an original piece called "Judgment Day", was done by Big Alec of the Delta Force - the first of what would turn out to be a sequence of many excellent aural experiences. Laurens had had no more inspiration, so he told us to be on the lookout for another music programmer, which we found quite quickly, thankfully.
During the creation of this issue we made the first Crazy Audio Tape (CAT) in ages - now aimed at our fellow writer and great friend Bryan Kennerley in England. Quite a load of fun we had doing it (including us singing along with Metallica's "The Unforgiven" and "So What").
But that's an entirely different story that need not be evoked here.
In 1992 we actually succeeded in publishing a 'massive' three issues, which became a fact on November 15th when Volume 7 Issue 3 was finished. There had been a small Quartermass-Xperiment-and-Honoured-QX-Satellites Party at my place to the honour of me having spent a quarter of a century on the globe we lovingly call earth, the weekend after which we got down to the finishing of yet another rather literary issue of ST NEWS. There was an all-
time quantity low in the review department, and the longest novel so far became a fact when I wrote "Cronos' Rather Zarjaz Experiences in Bafflement Country", an "Alice in Wonderland"-
inspired story over 120 fairly satisfying kilobytes long. Our literary friends Bryan Kennerley and Bryan H. Joyce also supplied us with plenty of literary material - and if you add to that various other entries (by some rather Nicely Nutty Norwegians) you got the most literary ST NEWS so far. On a rather lighter vein, this issue saw the start of an acclaimed column called "Perverts Monthly" by two British blokes. It was an unexpected success and was a lot of fun while it lasted, which was about three or four issues.
The most difficult thing to do when finishing this particular issue was the picture. Stefan had not coded for aeons (at least not on the ST, for he had concentrated on programming the Philips CD-I for months, at his work) so he got into considerable difficulty just trying to get the rasters in the picture to work. They say you can never forget to ride a bicycle once you've learned it. I'd place bets that Stefan could :-).
This issue was dedicated to Whistler Courbois Whistler, without a doubt the best European instrumental band. I had met the band backstage several times and I had even got down to an interview with them. Volume 7 Issue 3's music, called "Tubular Bells Remix", was once more by Big Alec of the Delta Force. The picture was by Scum, the last of the pictures that we still had in stock from the 1990 ST NEWS International Christmas Coding Conference graphics competition.
Incidentally, as could be expected, this issue still had the same rather crap scroller. I gave it a nicer name in the pull-down menu entry that selected it, and that's about it.
In 1993, the mortal plane was left by Rudolf Nurejev, Audrey Hepburn, Leslie Charteris (author of "The Saint"), James Hunt, Stewart Granger, William Golding (writer of "Lord of the Flies"), River Phoenix, Vincent Price, Chris Oliva (guitarist of Savatage, killed in a car crash), Federico Fellini, Bill Bixby (the Hulk when he's not mad), Ferruccio Lamborghini, Anthony Burgess (writer of "A Clockwork Orange") and Frank Zappa (highly underrated musician and guitarist).
Further things that happened in 1993 include pitbull breeding being banned in the Netherlands, terrorists bombing the New York World Trade Center, a gunman murdering South African Communist Party leader Chris Hani, the Keresh Sect being blown up in Waco, German neo-nazis burning a house in Solingen (killing 5 Turkish women), homosexuality being declared legal in Ireland, Michael Jordan retiring from basketball, the Maastricht Treaty being accepted, South Africa taking on a constitution without Apartheid, Pepsi breaking their contract with Michael Jackson due to the weird dude's painkiller addiction, and 20% of the Dutch province of Limburg covered by water in the winter floods.
In the Atari world, the last of the great Atari ST mega demos was released - the Overlanders' "Froggies over the Fence".
In the world of disk magazines, 1993 saw the start of "Falcon Magazine" (lasted a cool month, in which three issues were released), "Power" disk magazine (which I believe might still be alive), "Pure Bollocks" (which died the same year) "Undercover Magazine" (died 1995) and "STOSSER" (which is still alive, too, I believe), as well as the death of "Amazine" (year of birth unknown).
My personal top 10 of musical releases in 1993:
| 1 | Anathema | "Serenades" |
| 2 | My Dying Bride | "Turn Loose the Swans" |
| 3 | Mercyful Fate | "In the Shadows" |
| 4 | Paradise Lost | "Icon" |
| 5 | Metallica | "Live Shit Binge & Purge" box |
| 6 | Bjørk | "Debut" |
| 7 | Rush | "Counterparts" |
| 8 | Van Halen | "Live, Right Here, Right Now" |
| 9 | Gorefest | "The Eindhoven Insanity" |
| 10 | Meat Loaf | "Bat out of Hell II" |
Other (in)famous music releases were: Banished - "Deliver me Unto Pain", At The Gates - "With Fear I Kiss the Burning Darkness", Carcass - "Heartwork", Cathedral - "The Ethereal Mirror", Dream Theater - "Live at the Marquee", Death - "Individual Thought Patterns", Morbid Angel - "Covenant", Deep Purple - "The Battle Rages On", Entombed - "Wolverine Blues", Iron Maiden - "A Real Live One" and "A Real Dead One", Jamiroquai - "Emergency on Planet Earth", Jean Michel Jarre - "Chronologie", Kiss - "Alive III", Living Colour - "Stain", Misery - "A Necessary Evil", Nightfall - "Parade into Centuries", Pan-Thy-Monium - "Khaoohs", Phlebotomized - "Preach Eternal Gospels", Sadist - "Above the Light", Joe Satriani - "Time Machine", Sepultura - "Chaos A.D.", Vai - "Sex & Religion", Whistler Courbois Whistler - "Privilege", Type O Negative - "Bloody Kisses" and Z - "Shampoohorn".
Worth-while films released were: "Hard Target", the fantastic "Jurassic Park", "Wayne's World 2", "Fortress", "The Fugitive", "Hot Shots! Part Deux", "National Lampoon's Loaded Weapon 1", the beautiful "The Piano", the gripping "Schindler's List", "Demolition Man", "Judgment Night" (including an interesting soundtrack) and "Last Action Hero" (which flopped for some or other unaccountable reason).
In 1993, Stephen King released his book "Nightmares and Dreamscapes".
Stefan had ruled the ST NEWS editorial sceptre for exactly five years (remember, Volume 3 Issue 3 was released on May 16th 1988) when ST NEWS Volume 8 Issue 1 was finished on May 15th 1993 and hailed a new era where I was the editor again. Stefan originally intended to retreat back in a little love nest with a rather enchanting Guatemaltekan girl by the name of Ivette, but things sortof went seriously wrong so that he just retreated, without her, never to be heard of in any other capacity rather than that of special correspondent. Once more at the reigns myself, I swore to release more issues of ST NEWS - after all, no longer did two rather busy people have to match their schedules together to select an available weekend now. On top of that I had also taken upon myself the creation of "Twilight Zone", a quarterly (a later bi-monthly) ST NEWS spin-off fiction-only on-line multi-format electronic magazine founded because I had gained access to the wonderful world of electronic mail. This magazine would, by the end of the year, be renamed to "Twilight World" due to there allegedly being a trademark on the name "Twilight Zone" as a magazine as well, whereas I had previously thought it was just a TV series and a film.
To honour the departing editor and best friend, I had convinced Stefan to let this issue of ST NEWS be dedicated to him - even though we had originally intended to dedicate the whole thing to acoustic guitar prodigy extraordinaire, Bernd Steidl, with whom an exclusive interview was featured in this issue all the same.
To continue the new tradition of a rather long story involving Cronos Warchild I had this time written "Obviously Influenced By The Devil", heavily (and visibly) inspired by Terry Pratchett's Discworld novel "Reaper Man". A tendency to have less introductory novels attached to reviews and more regular separate fiction was becoming apparent. There was plenty of other fiction in this issue as well, but the computer-related part wasn't at all neglected. The latter was made certain by the first part of a new programming course, Ciaran Wills' "GEM Programming in Assembler" (of which, I seem to recall, there never was a sequel). In the review department there was even a review on none other than Madonna's controversial (but fairly boring) book, "Sex".
Stefan's editorial retreat was not the only thing that changed in the 'old traditions' department. Due to ever increasing inactivity on the ST, one of our very first and most loyal foreign distributors, Page 6, had to be let go in favour of the far more active ST Club (publishers of "ST Applications" and owners of a very large PD library, later FaST Club).
For the last time, ST NEWS was finished amidst an orgy of heavy metal music, watching TV and, worse than had been the case for a few years, the devouring of large quantities of the Divine Fluid. There were no problems during the creation of this issue - not at all. It was as if we were dreaming, almost. I had told Stefan to do some additional coding that would make it easier to finish any forthcoming issues on my own (due to the fact that I am rather a bad coder, especially where assembler is concerned). It all worked fine the very first time we tried.
Need I mention that this issue still had the same scroller? Need I also mention that all issues ever to be released after it were doomed to have it, too?
On the disk, ST NEWS offered a copy of Sinister Development's excellent shareware game, "Centipede".
ST NEWS Volume 8 Issue 2 - Octob