The Atari colour screen was so ugly :( I loved the black and white display though. For the times it was really high-res and very smooth refresh.

I went from Atari 8-bit to the Amiga though. Never really was a commodore fan but I found out later that the Amiga was mostly developed by the Atari team and the Atari ST by the Commodore team - lol. A side-effect of all the business skullduggery by Jack Tramiel in those days.

I often wonder what the world would look like now if those companies had survived like Apple did. And also Sun Microsystems. I could see one of them partnering with Sun like Apple did with NeXT to bring their OS into the next century. Or BeOS perhaps.

Somebody commented in the post that the little devil logo is Beastie:

https://www.goto10retro.com/p/faster-atari-st-digital-magazi...

Interesting that it shows up on an Atari ST magazine. Maybe somebody there was a BSD fan in 1987?

Sun dog and gold runner !!!! I had forgotten about these, but they were somehow hidden in my brain.

I used to love diskmags ( Imphobia on pcs in particular ) but the format has afaik completely disappeared, and has been superseded by the web.

Thanks.

This is an interesting intersection between the printed magazines with cover disks and the floppy collections containing "public domain" software, but without editorial content (e.g. the famous Amiga "Fish Disks": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fred_Fish#The_Amiga_Library_Di...), which were both more widespread.

Growing up I had an Amiga but my uncle, who was a semi-pro musician, had an ST and this was connected via midi to an Akai sampler and a Roland synth that were mounted in a rack near the computer; in the rack there were some effects too. This was a dream setup in the late 80's. On the Amiga I would use tracker software[1] to make music and until I finally got a cheap sampling interface[2], I had to just use samples that I would find in the accompanying floppy of various Amiga magazines. Obviously my uncle's setup was extremely hi-fi compared to mine and so to this day I have this idea in the back of my mind that "ST is for people who have money" LOL.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Music_tracker

[2] it was something like this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5gTWf6IGCJM