The first annual Atari Only fair, TARICON '84, was held August 25 & 26 just outside of Detroit, Michigan in the Southfield Civic Centre. This fair was sponsored and organized by two User Groups - CHAOS (Capitol Hill Atari Owners Society) and MACE (Michigan Atari Computer Enthusiasts). We were particularly impressed by the enthusiasm and courtesy of the sponsoring User Groups.
    Although Atari was unable to attend the fair, they sent their support in a letter and in monetary funds. OSS had a very busy booth because many Atari Users wanted to speak with Bill Wilkinson and Clinton Parker. OSS had three new enhancement toolkits to help write better programs in BASIC XL, ACTION!, and MAC/65. These three units have a number of programs and utilities on each single-sided disk. They were also demonstrating a new word processor called, "The Writer's Tool." Contained on one SuperCartridge, this word processor has many advanced features.



    AID (Advance Interface Devices) had three new pieces of software on display. They were "RVerter", a Seral Bus Modem Adapter, "Interfast-1", a buffered printer interface with custom character printing, and "Quill", a new BBS in ACTION!.
    Alpha Systems demonstrated "Atari Software Protection Techniques", this book shows ways to stop pirates from copying your software. It comes with a disk containing all the programs in the book.



    The fair had a number of seminars occurring during the weekend, including a special open forum by Bill Wilkinson called, "Everything You've Wanted To Ask. " During this seminar Atari enthusiasts asked all types of questions from "What's happening at Atari" to "What Makes The XL's Better." Another very interesting seminar was "ACTION!: It's done with Mirrors!!". This was presented by Clinton Parker its author. He demonstrated a lot of his own demos while giving a brief history of ACTION! and showed how simple it was to program. In future issues, ROM will be listing different ACTION! programs to help those people who have bought this language. These well presented seminars were no additional cost to people attending the fair.
    A special meeting called, "Atari User Groups: Their Future", was attended by a number of User Group representatives. A topic discussed in this session was whether to organize an International User group called AUGI (Atari Users Groups International). This group would be a common voice for the Users to communicate with Atari. AUGI will try to ask Atari questions that wouldn't be answered to a single user. If you are a president of an Atari Users Group and are interested in AUGI then write to:


for more information.



    One more thing about the fair before signing off. The fair organizers are looking for a User group or groups that are willing to sponsor next year's TARICON. I hope an Atari only fair becomes a common happening.