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After moving its cover date ahead one month "to give us longer newsstand exposure," this issue, along with its articles on telecommunications, had a long, unsigned editorial titled "Darkness at Noon" about the travails of Atari, blamed in part on the company's initial success.

Atari by Blake Larson

If you have an idea for a sketch, hit me up!

A friend gave me two Atari storage accessories and I couldn’t be happier.

More art here: https://www.facebook.com/pages/E-Jayne-DeMarco/108312535901827

A "High Noon" showdown between the Commodore Amiga and Atari 520ST featured in this issue. Tom Hudson did begin by recounting Jay Miner linking the Atari 400 and 800 with the Amiga, and how "everyone at ANALOG Computing cried, 'The next generation Atari computer—the 800's big brother!'" before he visited Amiga in California. After purchases and takeovers, though, now he was insisting the ST's graphics weren't that bad compared to the Amiga's, Atari's 68000 was clocked at 8 MHz where the Amiga ran at "around 7.16 MHz" (and, following on his own best efforts, "the software engineers at Atari" had programmed a "bouncing ball" demo that outclassed the Amiga's already legendary "Boing Ball"), and "the multitasking mode on the Amiga can slow down the primary program (the one that the user is currently working with), to the point that it's virtually unusable." Diane L. Gaw's editorial supposed that if "all of our readers" went out to buy an ST one week, "the sudden sale of over 100,000 machines would insure the success of the ST."

This issue's "Part 2" look at Atari's CES announcements began on the fourth page and was continued in the back of the magazine. It just so happened to note the Jack Tramiel-less Commodore was facing falling earnings and sales, dismissed the MSX computers from Japan as too late to make a difference now that Atari and Commodore amounted to the home computer industry, and reported a rumour Apple was about to make significant price reductions to the Macintosh, "understandably a little nervous" in the face of the Atari ST. Most of the CES coverage did happen to be of games. In other software news, the new "The End User" column took a look at the GEM operating system and graphical user interface, scheduled to be used on the Atari ST.