FaSTer: Atari ST Digital Magazine
A magazine on a floppy from 1986
One of the things in my big Atari ST haul from a couple months ago was an issue of FaSTer disk magazine. I had thought that it was a sealed copy, but although it was still in its shrink-wrap, it was not actually sealed.
FaSTer was a Canadian magazine and what made it unique is that it was distributed on floppy disk1!
I had never heard of this magazine and was not all that familiar with this type of magazine distribution, but I think it is pretty neat. Being a digital magazine, it’s a lot like Goto 10!
Each disk was single-sided and worked in both color and monochrome. Producing a disk magazine was certainly much less expensive than a printed one, yet the magazine itself did cost more than most printed magazines of the time. Although the price was in line with magazines that came with a disk, such as Compute!’s ST Disk and Magazine or STart. At $9.95 an issue, that is about $28 in 2024.
The magazine itself consisted of just a disk nested between two pieces of cardboard. The front “cover” highlights what is on the disk.
I have Volume #2, Issue #2. I’m not exactly sure how many issues were actually published, but ST News has a collection of some other issues, including:
The blurb from ST News says this:
F.A.S.T.E.R.: The magazine that started everything with regard to a neat user interface - one of the very earliest ST disk magazines, having started somewhere in the autumn of 1986. It was Canadian of origin, and started out bilingually with a set of English articles and their copies in French. Later issues were English only. They were the first disk magazine with a user interface, however they survived only a little over a year - probably because they were commercial, which tends to make things more complicated than they need be. The "F.A.S.T.E.R." user group lived on longer than the magazine.
Status: Commercial.
User interface: Yes. A custom one (the first one).
Latest known issue: Volume 2 Issue 5.
Language: Used to be French and English. Later issues were only in English.
Looking at FaSTer
Happily the disk I have actually worked and it even runs on my Mega STE! I was able to archive it and made it available to Richard at ST News. You can also download it from here as an MSA (Magic Shadow Archive):
Here is a walkthrough what the magazine actually looks like when viewing it on the ST in medium resolution color.
The File menu offers an option to print the magazine. This seems crazy to me today, but back then I do remember printing lots of things, especially program listings. So having a printout of the magazine to read outside on the porch would have been cool. I wonder how long that would have taken to print on a 9-pin dot matrix printer, though? Bzz… Brappp, Bzzz…
The about screen has a cute little devil logo. Not really sure what that has to do with the magazine.
The menu bar at the top is hidden until you move the mouse up to it. As you can see below, there are quite a few sections to the magazine. Overall, the app for interacting with the magazine is nicely done.
This is the main editorial, which is presented as slightly formatted text. I did not notice any embedded graphics in the articles. To read an article you have to scroll down using the scrollbar on the right. I sure do miss not having a scroll wheel on my ST!
This is the “centerfold” that is mentioned on the packaging. I guess it is supposed to be David Bowie?
The Personal Option column is about public domain software.
There is an interview with a company called Arrakis, a nice Dune reference.
The Pascal tutorial is about how to make it like C. Not sure why you’d want to do that…
There is a column covering new products and there would have been plenty in 1986, which was the ST’s heyday.
There is a review of the shoot-em-up, GoldRunner.
I’ve been meaning to play Sundog so I’m looking forward to more thoroughly reading this introduction to it.
There is also a column highlighting an Atari user group and the one for this issue is the original Atari Computer Enthusiast (ACE) group that I wrote about earlier this year.
These were the subscription prices for FaSTer. Don’t forget to factor in inflation, which makes the $50/year price be about $144 in 2024. Compared to that, Goto 10 is a bargain!
The cribbage game did not launch from the disk menu, but I was able to run it separately from the desktop. It has a title screen and large cards.
It’s pretty colorful and easy to play. The score is counted automatically. I did end up losing to the computer, although in my defense I haven’t played cribbage in a while.
You can try the FaSTer disk magazine using your favorite emulator just by mounting the disk images linked above. Enjoy!
There was a similar type of magazine for the Commodore 64 called UpTime.
This stirred up memories...
Alain Plouffe was publisher of the magazine. I did contribute to FaSTer back then though I can't remember exactly which issue it was.
This was a developer library to display and manage software-based "sprites" (ST didn't support hardware sprites), a project I undertook to learn myself assembly as a hobby. Back then I was active on the newsgroup, and Alain contacted me to feature the library in the magazine.
After the library was published in a FaSTer issue, Alain put me in contact with a local startup, Oktal, which needed someone able to write assembly code with knowledge on how to deal with hardware interrupts, etc.
I can say Alain *is* the person who got me started on a path to become a software developer (I was a manual laborer in a factory back then). It took many more years before I made a big gamble and quit my "safe" job (years later the factory closed).
Eventually after a few difficult years I did end up earning a living as a software developer -- it utlimately did start with Alain Plouffe and his FaSTer magazine, and I have no doubt it most likely would never have happened without him taking an interest in what I was doing.
The logo on the cover looks like the BSD Daemon, aka Beastie, the mascot for BSD Unix:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BSD_Daemon
That doesn't make it any less weird as to why it's on the cover of an Atari ST magazine, which had nothing to do with Unix.