A Rare Find: Have you heard of 'Processor Direct Magazine'?
A Rare Find: Have you heard of 'Processor Direct Magazine'?
A 1994-era Atari magazine
My retro collection has come from lots of places, but much of it is stuff I got from my Dad. Some of it is actual stuff we had from the 80s and other things are stuff he collected in garage and yard sales over the years.
He doesn’t have too many goodies left, but as I was scouring through his basement the last time I was visiting I found a small stash of magazines, so I grabbed them. They looked to be Mac and other generic magazines. A couple were large, tabloid sized magazines.
When I got home I saw that I had a magazine called Processor Direct which I’d never heard of. Upon closer inspection it was an Atari magazine!
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The magazine is dated March 1994, but I truly have no recollection of it. My Dad does not know where he got it.
In 1994 I would have been online using GEnie and Delphi, but still nothing rings a bell. This would also had been just before I took over as Current Notes ST Editor
.The only thing I could find in a Google search was a press release from March 9, 1993 (1 year earlier!) annoucing the magazine.
I cannot find a copy of the magazine itself on the internet at all. I also have no idea if this was the only issue published.
At the very least, I’d like to get this scanned, but given that it is oversized I cannot use the low-brow scanner in my printer for this. So for the time being, I did take photos of each page which I have collected here and converted to PDF (see notes). They are not great quality, but I suppose it is better than nothing.
The magazine itself seems focused on the Atari Falcon030, but some of the content would also apply to the Atari ST. There is no Atari 8-bit content, which is not surprising in 1994.
It is 26 pages, cover-to-cover. The large size is actually 11.5” wide x 13.5” tall. The quality is great. The cover and back are slightly glossy with the inner pages have a matte finish. I really like the large font size, which makes things easy on the eyes.
I did have a Falcon030 for a hot second back in 2005/2006. I picked it up on eBay for cheap back then ($300) when no one wanted them. Sadly I sold it. These days when they do (rarely) show up on eBay I’ve seen them sell for $2000 - $3000.
Considering this magazine was announced in early 1993 (along with the Falcon), but didn’t appear until 1994 (when the Falcon was already canceled by Atari), I would not be surprised if this was the only issue. The timing was just not great.
Do any readers out there have any additional information about this magazine?
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Thanks to Andrea Pachetti for posting a comment that Processor Direct was mentioned in Current Notes, April 1994 (although not in my column):
Hi Paul, an announcement about Processor Direct Magazine was made in Current Notes Volume 14, Number 3 (April 1994), on page 7.
Cool find, also never heard of it ?!