In This Issue

For those of you who enjoyed Colin Covert's turbulent history of Atari's early years in our premiere issue, he has returned to our pages with an engrossing profile of a programming millionaire--and the company he works for. David Crane created Activision's most successful 2600 video game to date, Pitfall. Find out why he's smiling inside Hi-Res.

You 1200XL programmers might want to take note of Tim McGuinness's "Graphic Evidence" column. He's offered 1200XL bit map that a number of readers requested.

We've added Dorothy Heller's column "The Family Place" to our regular contributors. Dorothy will be talking about computers and their affect on the family, as well as reviewing pre-school programs.

This month kicks off the first of a serial of chapters from Kids and the Atari. The book, written by Michigan State professor, Ed Carlson, was produced by Datamost with support from Reston Publishing. The book comes with instructions to both parent and teacher and lists assignments for the student after each lesson.

Atari Corp. has taken much abuse in the press over the last quarter of 1983. Despite additional third quarter losses, the fiscal bleeding appears to have been staunched.

Some Wall Street analysts and members of the business press heaped a final dose of criticism on the company for not keeping to a production schedule on the 1400XL and 1450XL. But such stories stretch the credibility out of their criticism. Last summer, Atari promised four new computers, a 2600 add-on keyboard, the much touted expansion box and a CP/M add-on. Then, they lost nearly $350 million, changed chief operating officers, exchanged a division president and laid off nearly 3,000 employees.

Let's be reasonable, no matter how rife with waste a corporation is, you can't believe that 3,000 persons were simply standing around a water-cooler exchanging snappy chatter.

Eliminating employees out of a desire to survive as a corporation is bound to raise havoc with product schedule.

For those of you who are still trying to find the missing operands from our "Zounds Sounds" article last month, you'll find the corrected lines in this month's Perspectives section.

This month's reader-written programs include a Music Theory Drill by Duane Tutaj that will open his article series exploring music on the Atari. We've also included Number Maze by Sol Guber, a program that combines education with creative fun.

"Some Assembly Required" has you managing your own Post Office by the numbers. See Robert Peck's column for some beginner's insight into machine-language programming.

Enjoy our second issue!