USER SUPPORT?
I think everybody would agree that Atari is now a
totally different company from old but curiously there are some
things which Atari seems to want to carry over. The 'old' Atari were
renowned for their lack of support and concern for their customers
and one would think that the present company would want to change
that. Not so, it seems. Atari have recently announced its policy
regarding the long awaited ROM upgrade to the ST. Anyone who bought
a machine after 1st January will receive their upgrade free of
charge but those who bought before 1st January will be charged £25.
Now think about that for a while. The vast majority of people who
bought machines before 1st January were people like you and me, who
trusted the Atari name, who wanted to support Atari and most
probably have been loyal to Atari for some time. If it wasn't for
these people who bought the early ST's, Atari may well not have made
it into 1986. So who deserves the rewards, those who trusted and
supported or those who doubted and waited? Atari seem to think that
those early purchasers are not so important. To add insult to
injury, a batch of machines produced last autumn have a Glue chip
which is not compatible with the ROMs so what do Atari do? Give you
one free? No, they charge you £18 on top of the cost of the ROMs!
That's appalling.
'Thanks for the support suckers!'. Is that really
what Jack is trying to say?
THE SURVEY
Thought you might like to know a few details about
the readership survey now that the long task of analysing it is
complete. Firstly, equipment. Not surprisingly, the majority of you
own an 800XL - over 57%, but a surprising number own more than one
machine, 34% in fact! The old 800 has a healthy following o f22%
whilst the 130XE, despite its lack of publicity, is coming up with
20%.16% have 400's and 9% 600XL's but only 3% of readers have less
than 48k memory. ST's? Very few at the time of the survey, but 26%
say that they intend to buy one this year. Who says that the UK is a
cassette based market? An amazing 75% have disk drives and 13% do
not even own a cassette. Are you listening, software houses?
Telecommunications are still not popular here with only 6% owning
modems but a surprise is that 43% own printers!
Everyone knows the old adage that the Atari is
just a games machine, right? Well, PAGE 6 readers are out to prove
that wrong as the majority, 38%, use their machines for programming.
Arcade games come second with 26% followed by Home Use with 15% and
the rest fairly evenly divided. Overall though with main, secondary
and other interests taken into account, there is a remarkably even
spread of interest, but programming still comes a clear first. You
are a dedicated lot too. 66% rate their Atari as their main leisure
interest, with 32% indicating it as the secondary interest. In these
days of wide ranging and easily available leisure interests, that is
a testament to the attraction of Atari computing.
So how clever are you? 9% claim to be advanced
programmers with the remainder split between 48% intermediate and
43% beginners. That's a lot of advanced programmers, how about some
contributions? Finally, the actual readership. PAGE 6 sure gets
passed around with as many as 12 people reading one copy in some
cases! Overall the survey indicates a readership of just over 10,000
which, combined with the level of dedication, is highly respectable.
Conclusions? Well if everybody who actually reads
PAGE 6 would subscribe and if each of those 'advanced' programmers
would send in a program or article we would have no problem in
bringing you a top quality monthly magazine! But then, these things
don't normally happen. Or do they?
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