At START we're determined to bring you the latest news, the best products and the most useful programs, whatever the source. This month you'll find our first European Report in this issue, written by Andre Willey, Technical Editor of ST User in England. This will be a continuing column that we hope will provide you with insights into Atari developments in Europe that you'll find nowhere else.

Have you ever wanted to buy a program, but just couldn't find the money? Well, we understand. That's one of the reasons we publish a magazine with a disk-to provide you with the best software available at a reasonable price When Gordon Monnier, President of MichTron, Inc., made GFA BASIC 2.0 available to us, we leaped at the chance to bring you a genuine commercial program on your START disk (We also are offering MichTron's manual by mail or telephone order at a ridiculously low price See page 31 for details.)

And now, the news:

Neil Harris, Atari's spokesman for years, tendered his resignation in late September and will be involved with marketing at Genie. We wish Neil all the best. There was more comment in his "No comment!" than in anyone else's at Atari! (Look for ST: 1999, Neil's thought-provoking article on the future of the ST in the next issue of START.)

We have mixed emotions about another change. Jon Bell, START's Associate Editor, has resigned to become the Managing Editor at Oracle, a multi-million dollar software publisher. Jon has been a part of the Atari world for years, both at Antic Publishing and before that at ANALOG. We want to congratulate Jon for his well-deserved success, but we'll certainly miss him. Jon still has his ST at home, however, and has written an excellent multi-part series on Special Graphics Effects for The Cyber Corner to begin next month.

And still another sad leaving ST Applications, published by Bill Perry, has ceased publication with the September issue. Bill has been a good friend dating back to the 8-bit days and we certainly hope his next venture is a success. But in every loss, there is gain and in this case, the gain is yours. Several of the authors from ST Applications will be published in future issues of START as we further broaden our ST coverage.

Our main feature this issue is Editor's Choice. Fifteen of START's Editors, Contributing Editors and contributors present their opinions of the best software in a wide range of applications, from games to programming tools. When we started the project, we thought that we might find one or two programs that were universally used. But we were surprised by the diversity of the results-computer users seem to be as opinionated as economists' (You know the old joke about laying all the economists in the world end-to-end? No two point in the same direction.) We hope you'll enjoy reading it as much as we enjoyed writing it.

Oh, by the way, have you been missing the Reader Service Numbers from the bottoms of the ads? To make it more convenient for you, we've moved them all to the Advertiser's Index at the back of the magazine.

We've filled this issue with our usual collection of great programs, columns and reviews. I'd tell you all about them, but we're out of space. We hope you enjoy this issue and may the best of the holiday seasons be yours.

Andrew Reese
Editor
START, The #1 Guide to the Atari ST