A new Atari magazine!
Welcome to issue 1 of PAGE 6. The magazine has been put together by a
group of Atari enthusiasts who came together as the Birmingham User
Group, the largest independent Atari Computer Club in this country to
hold regular meetings. I was appointed Newsletter Editor but quickly
realised that we could produce a good quality magazine that could be
enjoyed by Atari enthusiasts throughout the country. This first issue
has involved a considerable effort by a small group of people and the
Editor in particular to try and establish a magazine that Atari
enthusiasts everywhere could be proud of. I hope we have succeeded -
tell us what you think.
The future of the magazine is now in your hands - the content of the
next issues needs to be supplied by YOU - the readers. Articles,
programs, views, letters and all contributions are invited. We are not a
profit-making organisation and therefore cannot normally pay for
articles but by contributing you will benefit from an ever improving
magazine which will help you get maximum enjoyment out of your Atari
computer. With your help, PAGE 6 will become THE Atari magazine.
JUST A GAMES MACHINE?
One of the aims of PAGE 6 will be to tell people that the Atari 400
and 800 are home COMPUTERS. True they are excellent games machines - the
best - but an image has grown up that that is all they are. Atari
themselves seem to be happy with this situation so it is up to Atari
enthusiasts to change the image. PAGE 6 will, through its pages, tell
people what these machines can REALLY do. Games will have their place in
the magazine of course, but we will also explore business and education
and other subjects. Many people will buy Atari computers this Christmas
and will then find that they have no-one to turn to when they want to
learn computing. None of the general U.K. computing magazines are of
much help and PAGE 6 will welcome new owners as well as old hands. If
you believe in Atari, tell your friends and when they have bought their
computer tell them about PAGE 6. Better still tell them about PAGE 6
first so that they can begin straight away to enjoy Atari computing.
PAGE 6 will be your magazine - if you want it. Write and tell me what
you think of the first issue - do you really need an Atari magazine? If
you do, take out a subscription or persuade your local dealer to stock
PAGE 6. As our distribution grows the magazine will get bigger and
better.
I would like to thank all those who contributed to this issue and in
particular my wife who provided many hours of help (voluntarily!).
And finally... thanks to Clive Thomason without whose efforts B.U.G.
would have not been founded and PAGE 6 would not have been born.
WHY PAGE 6?
Old hands at Atari programming will already know the answer. We
wanted a name for the magazine that you could easily remember, but more
importantly one that would specifically indicate that the magazine was
for Atari computers. For those who don't know, the memory inside your
Atari is arranged in 'pages'. Each page holds 256 memory locations which
contain the information necessary to make things work. Page 6 is a
location from decimal address 1536 which is set aside as a protected
memory area for the user. The most common use is for short machine
language routines for use in your Basic program. If you don't know about
page 6 yet, keep reading PAGE 6, you'll soon learn.
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