Atari Computer Enthusiasts and User Groups
Atari Computer Enthusiasts and User Groups
For the summer I am switching to a single longer post each week. The first part of the post will be available for everyone. Paid members get access to the second part of the post with more details about the topic.
— Paul
I recently spotted these floppy disks on eBay and thought I’d take a gamble on them for about $6:
According to the label these are two floppies for MAST, which appears to be a Maine Atari ST User Group. These are the monthly disks from March 1988.
March 1988 was before I officially joined the Atari ST world as I was still in high school then and using my trusty 800XL. I bought my 1040ST in late December 1988 and it arrived in January 1989.
Unfortunately, gambles are a risk and this one did not work out. I am unable to read anything from the two disks. I just get disk read errors from them on my Atari Mega STE.
And not too surprisingly, my USB floppy is unable to read them from either my Mac or PC either.
If anyone out there with a Greaseweazle wants to give them a try, please get in touch.
I suspect the disks would have contained a collection of public domain software, which was common for user groups at the time, but I was hoping I might also find a text file with details about MAST itself. After all, these disks say #20 on them, which would imply the group had been around for a couple years at least.
I did some internet research, but came empty for anything regarding MAST and Maine, so I don’t have any further information about this user group. This story remains a mystery without an ending at this point.
I did find a listing for one user group in Maine from a June 1992 list in AtariAge magazine: Southern Maine Atari Users Group (SMAUG).
SMAUG (what a great name!) were located in the Brewer area, which is not usually referred to as southern Maine, but people can name their groups what they want and they probably really wanted that super-cool SMAUG acronym, so tried to come up with something that would fit. I can’t say I blame them.
I did find that MAST was also used as the name for some other user groups, including the Minnesota Atari ST user group, the Ft. Meade Atari ST user group (in Maryland) and the Milwaukee Atari ST user group.
If anyone out there knows anything about MAST in Maine, I’d love to hear about it!
I’m curious because I never belonged to a user group. To be honest, I just had never heard of any that were around my area (The aforementioned SMAUG was about a 2 hour drive north from me.) I knew of User Groups in general as one of my favorite magazines, Current Notes1, started as a newsletter for many Virginia-area user groups.
I was eventually able to get online around 1991 with my ST and like a lot of people (and to this day), the online forums and groups served as a great substitute for an in-person user group.
Where you ever a part of an Atari user group? If so, please share where and when in the comments!
After the break, paid members get to read about the OG Atari User Group: Atari Computer Enthusiasts of Eugene, Oregon. They pioneered the “ACE” term that was used by many other user groups over the years.