Antic Magazine Interviews Alan Reeve, the Creator of the Diamond OS (1990)

Summary

Time for another Atari-related interview. from the April/May 1990 issue of Antic magazineTalking with the creator of the Diamond Operating SystemReeve Software’s Diamond Operating System Cartridge (June 1989 Antic cover story) brought a mouse-operated graphic interface to the 8-bit Atari, complete with windows and drop-down menus. On this page is a small part of a lengthy interview that took place when Alan Reeve attended a Special Meeting of the Portland Atari Club (PAC). Interviewers were PAC Special Projects Director David Moore and PAC President Bill Pike. The rest of the interview will be published in a forthcoming Antic issue.from the June/July 1990 issue of Antic magazineBill: Diamond Paint was quite impressive when you demonstrated it at yesterday’s meeting. You seem to have duplicated just about all functions of most ST paint programs, and many more functions than most existing 8-bit programs. Is that a fair assessment?Alan: I think so. The feature that I like the best is the cut and paste. I haven’t seen that on any other 8-bit system. You can cut sections out of a picture and paste them onto another picture. You can even load and save that section as clip-art.Bill: About how many pages will Diamond Write let you work on in a 48K Atari?Alan: A 48K machine will be fairly limited, maybe one page (there’s not a whole lot of memory in there). In a 64K machine you’ll be able to work on about five pages. A 13OK machine has 64K of memory available, so you can get 30 or 40 pages. And it includes a Spell CheckerBill: You were talking yesterday about the possibility of coming out with multi-font capability on one document.Alan: You can use multiple styles, you can only use one font but you can have multiple styles of that font on each document.David: Will the program support graphics files?Alan: That is one of the limitations of this program. There just isn’t enough memory on the 8-bit Atari.David: Then you could mix and match fonts also?Alan: The big limitations of...