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The secret of Borland’s success is
“Quality, Speed, Power,
Were one of the biggest software
companies in the world—and we
got that way by making “Quality,
Speed, Power, & Price” essential
characteristics of every Borland
software program. Look for
Borland software—then look
no further.
Turbo Prolog ™
Our new Turbo Prolog has drawn rave reviews—
which we think are well deserved—because Turbo
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Turbo Prolog is a high-speed compiler for the
artificial intelligence language, Prolog, which is
probably one of the most powerful programming
languages ever conceived. We made a worldwide
impact with Turbo Pascal, and you can expect the
same results and revolution from Turbo Prolog, the
natural language of Artificial Intelligence. Minimum
memory: 384K.
Reflex’ and Reflex Workshop”
No matter what business you're in, if you use
Lotus 1-2-3° or dBASE® you need Reflex and the
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384K
Superkey°
Turns 1000 Keystrokes Into 1!
If you use SideKick, you need SuperKey. They're
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Powerful desktop management program and the
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Traveling SideKick
It's the electronic organizer for this electronic age.
Neither you nor your secretary need to face 1987
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Whether you use your own personal computer or
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is the smart new way to take your computer with
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Minimum memory: 256K.
& Price”
Turbo Lightning*
Solves All Your Spelling Problems!
While you use SideKick, Reflex, Lotus 1-2-3, and
most popular programs, Turbo Lightning prootreads
as you write! \f you misspell a word, Turbo Lightning
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the word you just misspelled. Press one key, and the
misspelled word is immediately replaced by the
correct word. And if you're ever stuck for a word,
Turbo Lightning’s thesaurus is there with instant
alternatives. Minimum memory: 256K
Lightning Word Wizard™
Technical Reference Manual For
Turbo Lightning!
An important addition to Turbo Lightning, Lightning
Word Wizard includes fascinating and challenging
word games like “Akerue” (try reading that back-
wards), “That's Rite,” “CodeCracker,” “CrossSolver,”
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Lightning Word Wizard introduces you to the “nuts
and bolts” of Turbo Lightning technology, and gives
you more than 20 different-calls to the Lightning
engine. Minimum memory: 256K.
Turbo Pascal, the worldwide standard
in high-speed compilers, and Family.
Turbo Database Toolbox*
A perfect complement to Turbo Pascal, because it
contains a complete library of Pascal procedures that
allows you to search and sort data and build powertul
database applications. It comes with source code for
a free sample database—right on disk. Minimum
memory: 128K.
Turbo Editor Toolbox °
Recently released, we call our new Turbo Editor
Toolbox a “construction set to write your own word
processor.” Source code is included, and we also
include MicroStar, a full-blown text editor with pull-
down menus and windowing. It interfaces directly with
Turbo Lightning to let you spell-check your MicroStar
files. Minimum memory: 192K.
Turbo GameWorks"
Turbo GameWorks is what you think it is: “Games”
and “Works.” Games you can play right away (like
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strategies of game theory are there for you to learn.
You can play the games “as is” or modify them any
which way you want. Source code is included to let
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Turbo Tutor” 2.0
The new Turbo Tutor can take you from “What's
a computer?” through complex data structures,
assembly languages, trees, tips on writing long
programs in Turbo Pascal, and a high level of
expertise. Source code for everything is included.
New split screens allow you to put source text in the
bottom half of the screen and run the examples in the
top half. There are quizzes that ask you, show you,
tell you, teach you. Minimum memory: 192K.
Turbo Graphix Toolbox”
Includes a library of graphics routines for Turbo
Pascal programs. Lets even beginning programmers
create high-resolution graphics with an IBM®
Hercules,” or compatible graphics adapter. Our Turbo
Graphix Toolbox includes all the tools you'll ever
need for complex business graphics, easy windowing,
and storing screen images to memory. It comes
complete with source code, ready to compile.
Minimum memory: 192K.
SUPERKEY
NION
CIDE os .
ay
) iL
THE ANALYST
Turbo C: The fastest, most efficient
and easy-to-use C compiler at any price
Turbo C : The fastest, most
efficient and easy-to-use C
compiler at any price.
Compilation speed
is more than 7 000
lines a minute,
which makes
anything less
than Turbo C an
exercise in slow
motion. Expect
what only
Borland
delivers :
Quality, Speed,
Power and Price.
Turbo C: The € compiler for amateurs
and professionals
If you're just beginning and you've “always
wanted to learn C” now's your chance to
do it the easy way. Like Turbo Pascal,
Turbo C’s got everything to get you going.
If you're already programming in C,
switching to Turbo C will considerably
increase your productivity and help make
your programs both smaller and faster.
Actually, writing in Turbo C is a highly
productive and effective method - and we
Speak from experience. Eureka : The
Solver" and our new generation of
software have been developed using
Turbo C.
Turbo € : a complete interactive
development environment
Like Turbo Pascal® and Turbo Prolog”,
Turbo C comes with an interactive editor
that will show you syntax errors right in
your source code. Developing, debugging,
and running a Turbo C program is-a snap.
Turbo C: The C compiler everybody's
been waiting for. Everybody but the
competition
Borland’s “Quality, Speed, Power and
Price” commitment isn't idle corporate
chatter. The price tag on Turbo C isn'ta
“typo”, it’s real. So if you'd like to
learn C ina hurry, pick up the phone. If
you're already using C, switch to Turbo C
and see the difference for yourself.
Sieve benchmark (25 iterations)
Compile and link time 9.94
Execution time
Object code size
Microsoft® | Lattice C
16.37 13.90
29.06 27.79
5.77 13.79
301
e microCalc:
Fre readsnee
with Source code
Technical Specifications
Compiler. One-pass compiler
generating linkable object
Modules and inline assembler.
Included is Borland’s high
performance “Turbo Linker”.
The object module is
compatible with the PC-DOS
linker. Supports tiny, small,
compact, medium, large, and
huge memory model libraries.
Can mix models with near and
far pointers. includes floating
point emulator (utilises
8087/80287 if installed).
Interactive Editor : The system
includes a powerful, interactive
fullscreen text editor. If the
compiler detects an error, the
editor automatically positions
the cursor appropriately in the
source code.
© Development Environment : A
powerful “Make” is included
so that managing Turbo C
program development is
highly efficient.
Also includes pull-down
menus and windows.
© Links with relocatable object
modules created using
Borland’s Turbo Prolog into a
single program.
M ANSI C compatible.
© Start-up routine source code
included.
M Both command line and
integrated environment
versions included.
Benchmark run on a 6 Mhz IBM AT using Turbo C version 1.0 and the Turbo Linker version 1.0 ; Microsoft C version 4.0
and the MS overlay linker version 3.51 ; Lattice C version 3.1 and the MS objec! linker version 3.05.
2a%9
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Fantastic prices on BRAND NEW OLIVETTI systems with full manufacturers warranty. These
are guaranteed 100% genuine Olivetti units with no hidden third-party components and
the price we quote includes keyboard, monitor and DOS.
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Modems, Tap Backup, Monitors, Hardcards & Consumables
Service just a telephone call away!
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circle 135 on enquiry card -
COVER ILLUSTRATION: SIMON FELL
THE
INTEGRATED
OFFICE
The micro is no longer alone in
the electronic office. Fax and
telex are becoming intelligent,
telephones are growing up with
ISDN, and optical storage is
replacing filing cabinets. We
look at how it will all fit
together in the office of 85
the future.
INSIDE
Amstrad PC-1640 Past faults
made good — page 36.
Supercomputers A look at
the Cray 2 — page 76.
cam” PRACTICAL
AMSTRAD PC-1640
An upgraded PC-1512 with EGA-compatible
display and more memory. Glyn Moody
assesses its chances in the corporate market
386 AT clones The Mission
(above), Dell (below) — page 40.
IBM PS/2 MODEL 60
The Model 50 and 60 form the backbone of
IBM’s new business micro range. /an Stobie puts
the first Micro Channel machine through its
paces
LOW-COST 386s
How good are machines costing half the price of
a Compag 3862 We test 80386-based clones
from Mission and the highly successful US mail-
order company Dell Computer Corporation
Z-88
Sir Clive Sinclair returns with a characteristically
idiosyncratic product — a sleek, battery-
powered portable
PRINTER STANDS
Everybody uses printers, but do you need a
printer stand? Carol Hammond tries several
models for size
GEM APPLICATIONS
Susan Curran tests two applications that run in
the Gem environment: a word processor and a
mid-range desk-top publishing package =
ADOBE ILLUSTRATOR
PS/2 Model 60 — page 38.
NEWS
From the company which devised the Postcript
language, a drawing package for the Macintosh 22 pe ae ie EWS
SOFTWARE NEWS
DOS H ELPERS Encryption programs 11
No matter how sophisticated programs get, you MARKET NEWS
are usually stuck with the supremely unhelpful ee Se 17
DOS. Carol Hammond examines some 69 SAM eg US
programs that make it easier to use oh a NEWS 8
ita awards
ALVEY’S ACHIEVEMENTS
The Alvey programme was meant to put Britain
backin the forefront of computing. Mary Fagan FQ EDITORIAL
traces its origins, alms and achievements "="! Serendipity and the micro...7
ON-LINE
CRAY 2
Probably the fastest supercomputer around.
What future for email?....23
TECHNOLOGY BRIEF
Carol Hammond takes a guided tour Parl worlde: ces, 25
CONSULTANT’S REPORT |
DEFECTIVE SOFTWARE Mike Lewis on the survival of
Anne Staines explains how new legislation could | the oldest....... peaeeteeseeeees 27—
have a significant effect on who is liable for 81 BOOKS
damages arising from defective packages ¢ Business comms............ 103 —
a a i DOS UTILITIES
COMPUTER LANGUAGES Printer control.............. 105
STOP BIT
We survey the vices and virtues of the 10 leading
micro languages for business
The lure of Wordplex....112_
PRACTICAL COMPUTING September 1987
DAZZLING REPERTOIRE.
A Canon Laser Beam Printer paper
cassette has a capacity of 200 sheets.
So you waste less time re-loading. It can
handle varying weights from 60 to 135
gsm, plus envelopes, and there are
face-up and face-down modes for easy
collating.
A Canon Laser Beam Printer can
mix 32 different fonts and 64 shading
patterns on a single page. It has eight
resident fonts. But, if you want to be more
Creative, there is an expanding library of
slot-in cartridges which will soon give you
access to more than 100 type styles and
point sizes.
A Canon Laser Beam Printer has a
built-in memory of 512K for better
graphics and font downloading. For full
page graphics the memory is expand-
able to 1.5 MB.
A Canon Laser Beam Printer has the
ability to emulate just about any of the
most popular printer brands currently in
service. And that means it can use the
software they use.
A Canon Laser Beam Printer will go
on running for 300,000 pages before it
needs a major service. And its unique
maintenance-free toner cartridge will
print 4,000 pages before it has to be
replaced. A simple 30-sec job.
Dazzling enough?
STUNNING PERFORMANCE.
A Canon Laser Beam Printer gives
you typesetting and graphics perfectly
reproduced on the paper of your choice.
So silently, you hardly know it’s working. At
a speed of 8 pages a minute. Rea! printing
you used to have to go outside for.
Stunning enough?
(If not, you'll be knocked out by the price:
just £2,786)
LASER BEAM
PRINTER
POST TODAY ——= = ee a ><
| To: Canon (UK) Ltd., Text & Data Products, Canon House, Manor Road,
Wallington, Surrey SM6 OAJ. Telephone: 01-773 3173. a
Please beam me more information about the Canon LBP-8 1
laser printer. [SA |
| Name.
| Company.
Position
| Address
Type of Business.
Postcode__ Tee BGP/PC9
circle 147 on enquiry card -
tT O RI
A L
ti sa
EDITORIAL 01-661 3633 Telecom Gold 81:RPLOO2 > PUBLISHER/EDITOR GLYN MOODY
DEPUTY EDITOR (Production) JOHN LIEBMANN ART EDITOR HUGH ANDERSON ASSISTANT EDITOR IAN STOBIE REPORTER CAROL HAMMOND
EDITORIAL ASSISTANT LOUISE DUFFY CONSULTANTS JACK SCHOFIELD, MIKE LEWIS
ADVERTISING 01-661 3612 > ADVERTISEMENT MANAGER NEIL MARCHANT 01-661 3021
ASSISTANT ADVERTISEMENT MANAGER JANET THORPE 01-661 8626 ADVERTISEMENT EXECUTIVE PAUL TAYLOR 01-661 8425 MIDLANDS AND NORTH 061-872 8861
ADVERTISEMENT PRODUCTION CONTROL JACKIE PERRY 01-661 8649 BRIAN BANNISTER 01-661 8648
SECRETARY LYNN DAWSON CLASSIFIED SUSAN PLATTS 01-661 3033
THE MICRO AND SERENDIPITY
he battle seems to have been won. No longer is it necessary
to argue at length the case for micros., Increasingly it is a
matter of preaching to the converted. And no wonder; every-
where you go there is a growing presumption that a business
without micros is business without a future. Advertisements
assert it, magazines analyse it and Western society acquiesces
in it,
But just as the tide of computerisation is: flowing with
apparently unstoppable force, doubts are beginning to form.
Companies that try to justify the introduction of micros on a
rigorous cost-saving basis are bumping up against the painful
realisation that any such benefits may be marginal. This can-
not be dismissed as cold feet or special cases. A US study com-
pleted some while back suggested that the introduction of
executive computers actually lowers productivity. This negates
the vision of efficiency and low costs conjured up by the adher-
ents of the digital faith. If it is a real problem — and it seems
likely that it is — it needs explaining, or else disillusioned
companies are going to turn away from technology altogether.
The benefits from the introduction of the older computer
technology were real and quantifiable. Mainframes and
departmental minis were usually brought in to automate a
pre-existing function. Often those functions were labour-
intensive, slow and prone to error. An automated version of
essentially mechanical tasks is relatively straightforward to
implement and produces very clear gains in terms of increased
speed, efficiency and reduced staffing levels.
Compare the equivalent situation for the micro. As its name
suggests, the personal computer is by its very nature a tool for
individuals. The tasks it supports tend to be far more multi-
farious than those found on mainframes and minis, which
means that it is harder to translate across from the manual to
the micro system. Since micros ate normally introduced on a
large scale, compromises must be made in the provision of
software. Unlike the bespoke mainframe software, which is
written with the intention of mapping the old tasks on to the
new technology, off-the-shelf packages like dBase or 1-2-3
may be poor substitutes for personal filing or budgeting
systems which have been honed over the years. This is not a
reflection on the quality of such micro software but of the
simple fact that you cannot be all things to all people.
Even where a company has conducted a seemingly thorough
costing exercise on the introduction of micros, with positive
apparent benefits, it may find that in practice things do not
quite work out as intended. Again, this flows directly from the
very nature of the personal computer, which is decentralised
and ultimately uncontrollable.
For a start, people may get carried away by the technology.
Luddites are few and far between these days; far more danger-
ous afe the enthusiasts. Given their own shining new micro,
they take to it with such alacrity that it becomes a distraction.
They become obsessed with perfection where before they
would have made do with bare working solutions. They get
sidetracked into exploring interesting but ultimately irrele-
vant avenues of the micro world. None of this happens with
the mainframe or mini. Nothing could be more dull than the
terminal, nothing so restrictive as the software which lets you
do one thing only — the job in hand.
Allied to this dissipation of time, with its resultant lowering
of efficiency, the over-keen adoption of technology can have
knock-on effects, all of them bad for the bottom line. Once
you use a micro, you find you soon need more memory or disc
storage or better graphics or perhaps a faster machine
altogether. Sincé many of these purchases are relatively small-
scale, they may well be within the budget of individual
managers who can authorise them without reference to higher,
more sceptical powers. Taken across a company, such creeping
upgrades can cost worryingly large sums.
And yet most of us are sure micros ate good for you — and
for the company. So what is it that they offer if cost-saving is
doubtful at best? The answer has already been hinted at. The
enthusiasm which people often manifest, and their willing-
ness to experiment with ideas, is perhaps the most valuable
benefit of PCs, though the least obvious and quantifiable.
To justify large-scale computerisation at the personal level,
companies must learn to sustain and harness that enthusiasm,
and to be alert to the brilliant ideas when they appear. In the
end, micros turn out to be all about serendipity — the happy
chance discovery. The great new challenge for business is not
just working with new technology, which is relatively straight-
forward but learning to cope with the disconcertingly open-
ended type of creativity it engenders.
FVYEARS AGO.
Top Apple people were in London recently for a series of briefings to
prepare the way for what they term their Fourth Generation
machines. ;
Rumour has it that the new Apple IV will be a 68000-based 16-bit
machine, clearly aimed well up-market for Apple. It comes with
1Mbyte of RAM and 1.5 Mbyte of built-in floppy storage.
The most interesting thing about it is the operating system, which is
not the ubiquitous Unix but a special Apple-written product. The
user interface resembles that. of the cult language Smalltalk,
developed at Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Centre.
The very high-resolution graphics are not in colour. But the Apple
printer will be able to dump the 400-by-800 resolution graphics
directly to paper, which may be more important to professional
users.
The system is likely to come with a considerable body of software
included in the price; this probably means word processing,
spreadsheets, communications and some accounting applications,
as well as software development aids. Apple believes that fourth-
generation machines will only sell on the back of good software.
Volume 5 Issue 9
PUBLISHED by Reed Business Publishing Ltd, Quadrant House, The Quadrant, Sutton, Surrey SM2
SAS. Tei: 01-661 3500. Telex/grams 892084 REEDBP G. DISTRIBUTED by Quadrant Subscription
Services, Quadrant House, The Quadrant, Sutton, Surrey SM2 SAS. SUBSCRIPTIONS: UK £19.50 per
annum; overseas £36.00 per annum; selling price in Eire subject to currency exchange fluctuations and
VAT; airmail rates available on application to Subscriptions Manager, Quadrant Subscription Services,
Oakfield House, Perrymount Road, Haywards Heath, Sussex RH16 3DH. Tel: (0444) 459188.
PRINTED in Great Britain for the proprietors Reed Business Publishing Ltd by Ben Johnson & Co. Ltd,
PRACTICAL COMPUTING September 1987
Dunstable. Typeset by Lithotype Design, London EC1. © Reed Business Publishing Ltd 1987. ISSN
0141-5433. TERMS OF CONTROL Key specifiers of microcomputet equipment and software in
business in UK only. Would-be authors are welcome to send articles to the Editor but we cannot under-
take to rerurn them. Submissions should be typed double-spaced, and should include a disc of any
program. Every possible effort is made to check thar articles and listings are REED
correct, but we cannot guarantee that programs will run and can accept no re- [e] BUSINESS
sponsibility for any errors. PUBLISHING
The data
prorector
(A SOFTWARE LOCK ON YOUR
MICRO OR NETWORK)
s ‘personal’ data onyourmicro secured in
accordance with the Data Protection Act?
Is sensitive data secure on your micro?
If the answer to either of these questions is NO then you need
CLAM from MICROFT TECHNOLOGY. CLAM, as the name
implies, provides a software ‘shell’ around your computer to
prevent unauthorised access to programs and data. It can
be used to protect either individual files or subdirectories or
both. Each copy of CLAM includes a copy of Microft’s
popular menu generator MENUGEN, so that users, if
required, can be presented with a friendly menu interface.
On starting the computer users are asked fora
password. They will then be presented either with a menu
or the normal DOS prompt. In either case they will only be
able to access those files and subdirectories for which they
have authority.
Files are protected using ‘Dynamic File Encryption’. Under
this technique the files are held on disk in a permanently encrypted
form. When an authorised user reads the file the data is automatically
decrypted by CLAM after it is read from the disk but before it is given to the user. The time taken is
imperceptible. When a file is updated the data from the user is automatically encrypted before it
is written. This is the only failsafe way to secure data.
CLAM is available for most micros with PC/MS DOS version 2.0 orlater. These include the
MAIN FEATURES IBM PC and all compatibles. CLAM costs
* circle 121 on enquiry card -
£148 + VAT fora single user licence. Site and
1. All data held on ahard or floppy disk or anetworkcanbe | corporate licences are available. Existing
MENUGEN users may upgrade to CLAM
for £110 + VAT.
CLAMNET, the network version will
run on all PC/MS DOS based networks. The
costis £580 + VAT perten or part of ten
workstations on the network.
CLAM may be purchased from
MICROFT TECHNOLOGY LTD, The Old
Powerhouse, Kew Gardens Station, Kew,
Surrey TW9 3PS or from most dealers. To
order or obtain further information
telephone 01-948 8255.
kept secure from unauthorised access.
2. Security is by default and is failsafe. Once CLAM has been
set up the user does not have to take any positive action to
secure data
3. Access to all activities can be controlled via user defined
menus within CLAM.
4. Each user is given a user name and password. These
determine which menu options the user will see and which
files he or she may use. Each user needs to remember only
one password.
5. Protected files are kept in a permanently encrypted form
on the disk. Even if there is a power or hardware failure the
data will never be readable by an unauthorised user.
6. The algorithm that encrypts all files and subdirectories
uses the individual CLAM serial number in its key. One copy
of CLAM cannot therefore access files or subdirectories
encrypted by another copy.
CLAM
THE DATA THE DATA PROTECTOR
There are now over 10,000 users of Microft products worldwide.
How to make sure_a,
your Printer Ae”
doesn’t slow
your PC down.
Without a Megabuffer your Printer can
slow down the rate your PC outputs to ns
the rate your Printer prints. Turning a5
minute print file into half-an-hour. f
Which means that the PC can be
a
out of action for long periods.
Merely outputting. With a
Megabuffer the PC outputs at
its top speed into the ma Ss
Megabuffer memory, the PC
is then released for further
work, and the Printer prints at its own
rate from the Megabuffer memory.
© Allows you to use your PC more
© Can emulate special plotter handshake protocols
© Compatible with most computers, printers and plotters: IBM &
compatibles, AMSTRAD, HP ACT, SHARP, EPSON, CALCOMP
and many more e Can cut PC output time to one sixth or less.
© Software-independent
e Data Buffer and interface converter = ——_ Ti
e Pause, ‘reprint page’ and a |
multiple copy facilities | er .
Full range of memory sizes for
every ye 64K £160,
128K £216, 256K £278,
512K £388, 1MB £886.
Flexible Interfacing that
keeps them all talking
Eliminate miles of spaghetti and all those ‘T’ and ‘xX’ switches with
a simple Megaswitch which allows your PC to instantly connect to
a selection of printers and plotters.
MEGASWITCH AS — Serial Data Selector
e Single unit multiplexer and demultiplexer e 2K data buffer
© RS-232 and RS-422 versions « Can operate as RS-232/RS-422
converter e Diagnostic output e Megabuffer compatible
é Multiplexer — Ideal for printer sharing. 4 inputs and 2 outputs.
Can automatically select any channel supplying data
© Demultiplexer — Ideal for driving several different printers from a
PC. 2 inputs and 4 outputs
Software and manual
selection. Downloadable
code translation tables.
Hardware and XON/
XOFF handshakes
(RS-232) £189
5 PCs
“
MEGASWITCH S —
RS232 Serlal Selector
e Connects any of 5 inputs to
eitherof 2 outputs
e Universally compatible —
works with all baud rates
and handshake
arrangements ,
e LED indication of data flow
e Use it with a Megabuffer for
additional time saving £99
INPUT
UP TO
MEGASWITCH AP —
Paraliel Data Selector
e Connects any of 4 inputs to
either/both of 2 outputs
e Can automatically switch to
any channel supplying data
e |deal for laser printer sharing
@ Universally compatible —
works with all standard
centronics computer and
printer interfaces
e Use it with a Megabuffer for
additional time saving £169
OUTPUT PRINTERS
UP TO PLOTTERS
RINGDALE
PERIPHERALS
11 Decoy Road, Worthing,
West Sussex BN14 8ND
Telephone (0903) 213131
Telex 265871 rer: s8c2021
UK delivery £3/UNIT, cables from £15, VAT extra Dealer and Export Enquiries welcome
— circle 131 on enquiry card —
PRACTICAL COMPUTING September 1987
ue
HARDWARE
Removable discs are old hat, but Tandon has
come up with a new variant: removable hard-disc
units. Is this just a gimmick, or a real boon for
people who need to take large chunks of data
from place to place? We also take a look at some
of the new large screens that are becoming
available.
Word Perfect seems to be going great guns. The
latest in the range is Word Perfect
Executive, an all-in-one package which offers
word-processing, a spreadsheet, and a cardbox
plus other features. Is it the one we have been
waiting for?
There is a new breed of micros around — the work
stations. We look at the principal players and the
likely spillover into the mainstream market. Plus an
introduction to the intelligent building.
KNOWLEDGE AND
INFORMATION
Computers have led to a proliferation of data. The
trick lies in turning it into information. The
burgeoning CD-ROM industry could provide the
answer. And beyond information lies knowledge:
we find out how far expert systems are along the
road.
Comms ore all the rage so we pick out 10 of the
best communications add-ons.
Don’t miss the October issue of
“PRACTICAL
COMPUTING
On Sale at W H Smith and all good newsagents after 16 September.
Contents may vary due to circumstances beyond our control and are subject
to change without notice.
Apricot
upgrade
APRICOT COMPUTERS has announced
a special £999 upgrade for pur-
chasers of its 80286-based Xen and
Xen-i machines. For machines
bought after 15 June and until 31
August, upgtades to the standard
of the new Xen-i 386 machine will
be available for £999.
The upgrade will be to the
Nearest equivalent: for example,
the 20Mbyte 80286 system will go
to the 30Mbyte 386. Although the
386 machines do not usually offer
| mono display circuitry as standard,
a mono adaptor card can be added
for an extra £199 when upgrading
the machine.
For full details contact Apricot
Computers, Apricot House, 111
Hagley Road, Edgbaston,
Birmingham B16 8LB. Telephone:
021-456 1234
Hercules
for PS/2
HERCULES COMPUTER TECHNOLOGY,
the manufacturer of the Hercules
graphics card, has announced that
it will be producing a version for
the PS/2 system. Unlike many
other manufacturers who have an-
nounced cards for the new system,
Hercules has a tricky task since the
Hercules graphics must work with
the new VGA standard without
impairing it. No details have been
given of price; availability is from
this autumn.
More information from
Hercules Computer Technology,
2550 Ninth Street, Berkeley, Ca
94710, USA. Telephone: (US area
code 415) 540 6000.
Sirton PC
Mirror
SIRTON COMPUTER SYSTEMS has
launched PC Mirror, a device
which allows video images to be
captured and stored. The board
interfaces with standard CCTV
equipment. It can digitise images
in real time, displaying them on a
standard monitor. At any instant
images can be frozen and filed.
Each image requires 64K, and is
resolved into 256 grey levels.
PC Mirror comes with software
enabling images to be modified in
vatious ways. The cost is £775.
Details from Sirton Computer
Systems, 7 Greenlea Park, Prince
George’s Road, London SW19
2PT. Telephone: 01-640 6931.
10
AMSTRAD
PCW-9512
AMSTRAD has announced that it
will be launching an upgraded
version of the PCW-8512 word
processor in September, both in
the UK and the US. No UK prices
have yet been released, but in
America the price will be $799.
The main points that distin-
guish the new product from the
old are a daisywheel printer and a
white screen. Both are intended to
endear it to secretaries and other
office staff. A newly styled key-
board takes advantage of some of
the new features of the Locoscript
word-processing program.
The daisywheel is rated at 20
cps, and has a 15in. platen,
allowing it to handle paper up to
15.5in. wide. The parallel inter-
face allows other printers to be
connected; printer drivers for the
Epson FX-80 and Diablo printers
are supplied. The machine comes
with 512K memory as standard,
and one 1Mbyte disc, with a
second optional drive.
Locoscript II has a number of
new features. There is now a
78,000-word spelling checker and
user-definable dictionary. A mail-
merge program called Locomail is
supplied with Locoscript II.
The PCW-9512 will be
launched at the PCW Show at
Olympia on 23 September. For
more details contact Amstrad,
Brentwood House, 169 King’s
Road, Brentwood, Essex CM14
4EF. Telephone: (0277) 228888.
New modems
from Ha
HAYES has launched a new modem
‘and cut the price on its current
models. The Smartmodem 1200
now offers V-21 300 baud, full-
duplex, V-22 1,200 baud, and
V-23 1,200/75 baud. The last
option is an addition designed to
allow users to log on to viewdata
services. The external version of
the 1200 costs £499, not including
software. The internal card
version, the 1200B, costs £449.
A new comms software package,
Smartcom III, can be supplied
with the modems and operated
using either menus or commands.
There is also a simple communi-
cations programming environment
yes
(Scope), which allows repetitive
and unattended operations to be
automated by writing a script
which is stored for future use.
Following this launch, Hayes’s
older models have been reduced in
ptice. The external and internal
versions of the V-22 Smartmodem
1200 cost £449 and £399 tes-.
pectively. The upgrade to Smart-
com III from Smartcom II costs £20
until the end of the year, and £50
after that.
For more information contact
Hayes Microcomputer Products, 1
Roundwood Avenue, Stockley
Park, Uxbridge, Middlesex UB11
1AE. Telephone: 01-848 1858.
Low-cost network card
MICRO PERIPHERALS has announced
an eight-bit token-ring adaptor
catd for £399. It uses the Texas
TNS-380 chip set, which was
jointly developed with IBM, and
operates at a data speed of
4Mbit/s. There is also a multi-
access unit (MAU) which can
support eight adaptor cards, and
has the ability to daisy-chain with
other MAUs. The price is £499.
For more information contact
Micro Peripherals, Intec Unit 3,
Hassocks Wood, Wade Road,
Basingstoke, Hampshire RG24
ONE. Telephone: (0256) 473232.
hard-disc add-on unit is down
18 percent to £1,113. Details
on (0734) 868711.
@The Taxan Multivision
770+ will work with the new
IBM VGA adaptors and the
Mac II. The cost is £699.
Details on (0706) 217744.
@Compag has announced
that disc cacheing will be
standard on all its
80286-based models as well
as its 80386 machines. Details
on 01-940 8860.
@Computers Unlimited is
offering 2Mbyte RAM Simms
for the Mac family for £499
and 4Mbyte Simms for £998.
Details on 01-349 2395.
@Mekom Computer Products
has cut the price of the
Kyocera F-1010 laser printer
from £2,795 to £2,495..
Details on 021-454 2288.
@The Viglen family is another
group of low-cost clones.
Prices start at £499 for a PC
and £2,995 for an 80386.
More on 01-843 9903.
Apple Telex
APPLE has introduced a telex facility
for the Macintosh. Called Apple
Telex, the system consists of Vitex
software from AM Technology,
and a hardware telex manager
from Trend Communications.
Apple Telex uses the standard
pull-down menu approach to
control the programs.
The cost is £1,995 for the single-
user version, and £2,995 for a
multi-user system. Full details
from: Apple Computer, Eastman
Way, Hemel Hempstead, Hert-
fordshire HP2 7HQ. Telephone:
(0442) 60244.
Kudos
cards 30
KUDOS SYSTEMS has launched a
30Mbyte hard disc on a card for
£299. It is claimed to fit into one
expansion slot on most compati-
bles without encroaching on the
space above the slot next door.
Another product from the same
company is the Stradcom
V-21/V-22 modem offering Hayes
compatibility. It is BT approved
and costs £159.
More information on
these
products can be obtained from
Kudos Systems, Capitol House,
Capitol Way, London NW9 0EQ.
PC
Telephone: 01-200 6511.
PRACTICAL COMPUTING September 1987
New add-
ons for
Lotus 1-2-3
THE NUMBER of add-ons aimed at
Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheet users con-
tinues to grow. Seemore lets you
cram mote information on your
screen in a variety of compressed
display formats. You can thus see
double, triple or quadruple the
number of 1-2-3 cells displayed on
your screen.
The £85 utility requires no
special hardware and works with
CGA, EGA and Hercules adaptors
on old-style IBM-compatible
machines, as well as with the VGA
graphics of the PS/2.
Contact: In Touch, Fairfield
House, Brynhyfryd, Caerphilly,
Mid-Glamorgan CF8 2QQ. Tele-
phone (0222) 882334.
Deja is a pop-up that gives 1-2-3
users access to dBase III Plus files
without leaving their worksheet. It
lets you transfer data both ways
and gives you 11 new 1-2-3 func-
tions that allow you to reference
dBase information from within a
cell formula. Deja costs £100 from
Softsel dealers.
Mote information is available
from Softsel, Softsel House, Syon
Gate Way, Great West Road,
Brentford, Middlesex TW8 9DD.
Telephone: 01-568 8866.
Low-cost
DTP
WITH a UK price of £59.95, News-
master is one of the cheapest desk-
top publishing packages on the
market.
Newsmaster supports over 170
different matrix and laser printers,
and comes with 34 built-in type-
faces and its own library of over
280 pre-drawn images. Designed
mainly for producing newsletters
and notices, it can cope with lay-
outs of up to 10 columns. You can
import existing ASCII text into the
package, but it also has its own text
editor built-in.
More details from Polyrom, 2A
Davis Road, Poole, Dorset BH12
2BA. Telephone: (0202) 673777.
Meanwhile Fontasy, an
established low-end DTP product,
has been enhanced. The bare pro-
gram still sells for £70, but you can
now buy add-ons which provide
extra features, more founts,
you use EMS extended memory ef-
fectively.
Details from Ctrl Alt Deli, 44
Milton Keynes, MK14 6JH. Tele-
phone: (0908) 662759.
PRACTICAL COMPUTING September 1987
images for the image library or let
Brownbaker Court, Neath Hill,
EASIER WAYS
TO DEAL WITH
SECURITY
TWO NEW enctyption packages
and a backup system all attempt to
make the business of making
things secure less irksome.
Secret Disk works by setting up a
part of your hard disc as a security
area; you then access it as drive D
or whatever in the normal way.
You can put programs as well as
data on your secure disc and run
them from there.
The advantage of this approach
is that everything in the secure area
is encrypted, including programs
and temporary files. Without the
tight passwotd no access is per-
mitted. Secret Disk was developed
by Lattice Inc. of Lattice C fame,
and is available in the UK for £85
from Roundhill Computer
Systems, Axholme, London Road,
Marlborough, Wiltshire SN8 1LR.
Telephone: (0672) 54675.
MS/Crypt also adopts a
memory-tesident approach. It will
automatically encrypt and decrypt
designated files as you access them.
In addition to its security function
MS/Crypt provides several other
facing pages, Pagemaker
Pagemaker
ALDUS has announced a major new
release of its Pagemaker DTP soft-
ware for the Mac. Along with new
features like kerning, automatic
hyphenation and support for
2.0a
offers file compatibility with the
PC version of Pagemaker. In com-
panies with mixed hardware setups
disc utilities, including the ability
tocompress files, to search through
your sub-directories for a particular
file, and to display your directory
tree structure on screen. MS/Crypt
costs £195 from Javelin Systems, 29
Bell Street, Sawbridgeworth, Hert-
fordshire CM21 9AR. Telephone:
(0279) 726525.
Easyback is not designed for
enctyption, but instead enhances
security by encouraging you to take
backups regularly. The £140 pack-
age consists of a software utility
and a box of colour-coded discs to
go with it. You can get Easyback in
a PC version with 360K discs, in
AT format with 1.2Mbyte discs or
in PS/2 format with 3.5in. discs.
You set the backup software up
in various ways. For example, you
can choose only to back up files
that have been changed since the
last use. On-screen prompts guide
you through the procedure.
Easyback is available from RPS,
High Street, Houghton Regis,
Bedfordshire LUS 5QI. Tele-
phone: (0582) 867222.
upgrade
you will also be able to transfer
pre-formatted text files from IBM
word processors like Word Perfect
and WordStar across to the Page-
maker 2.0a running on a Mac.
Pagemaker 2.0a costs £450 and
is available now. Contact Aldus
UK, Craigcrook Castle, Craigcrook
Road, Edinburgh EH4 3UH.
SOFTWARE
SHORTS |
@ Xenix System V for the IBM
PS/2 Model 50 and 60 will begin
shipping in the third quarter of
this year, according to the Santa
Cruz Operation. For further
information contact Santa Cruz
Operation on 01-439 2911.
@Smart-pad is a £49 desk
accessory which is a kind of
souped up version of the Mac’s
existing notepad with fast search
and retrieve facilites. You can
store 32,000 characters on each
page and copy, cut and paste
text to and from other
applications. For more details
contact Blyth Software on (0728)
3011.
® Microsoft is offering users of all
other word-processing packages
a chance to move over to
Microsoft Word 3.1 for £200 —
which is £250 less than the
normal price. For details
telephone Microsoft on (0734)
500741.
@\n Touch has produced a
specialist catalogue containing
around 150 different add-on
products for dBase Ill plus. It is
free from In Touch, telephone:
(0222) 882334.
@ Supadupadir works just like the
MS-DOS Dir command but it
keeps a master list of all your files
on all your discs. It costs £10
from S&S Enterprises. Telephone
(02403) 28095.
@PC Blast Il is a £195 comms
program which emulates most
standard terminals. It claims to be
particularly good at transferring
files across bad telephone lines or
satellite links. Further details
available from Software Ltd.
Telephone 01-278 2377.
Stronger
rival for
dBase
ASHTON-TATE’s dBase III Plus
application generator and data-
base is likely to run into renewed
competition from Foxbase Plus
with the release of new versions of
the clone product. The high-per-
formance version for 80386
machines, price £595, runs with
the processor in Protected mode.
SCO Foxbase is a new multi-user
implementation running under
Xenix; it costs £795. For ordinary
MS-DOS users the new £395 Fox-
base 2.00 has several enhance-
ments, including a claimed doub-
ling in speed.
Contact: In Touch, Fairfield
House, Brynhyfryd, Caerphilly,
Mid-Glamorgan CF8 2QQ. Tele-
phone: (0222) 882334. PC
Sharp is PC USER SHOW - Taxan LCD
AS THE IBM bandwagon assumes unstoppable proportions, so the
show based around it grows in importance. And yet this year, despite
self-confident trumpetings from the organisers, the feeling on the
the
sharpest
ONE OF the best showings of new
equipment was made by Sharp on
a stand that was rather tucked away
to the side. In addition to old
machines, new vefsions and new
products, there were also several
future peripherals being shown for
| the first time in this country.
Perhaps the most exciting was the
| MZ-1VO1 image-processing ter-
| minal which could function as a fax
machine, image scanner and
copier — see page 91 for more
details.
Another exotic beast was the
JX-450 colour scanner with a
resolution of 300 dots per inch.
Each RGB element can recognise
64 shade variations, and the colour
tone capacity is over 260,000
shades. The price is expected to be
about £5,000.
| The QA-25 isan LCD projection
device, similar to the Kodak Data-
show reviewed in the June issue of
| Practical Computing. It weighs
| 6lb. and is just over 12in. square.
| The cost is around £750.
Sharp also showed its new port-
able, the PC-4501. This compact
unit uses the standard flip-up
LCD, supported rather precari-
ously on one side only. The LCD is
back-lit, and there is one 3.5in.
floppy and up to 640K of RAM.
The V-40 processor runs at
7.16MHz. Parallel and serial inter-
faces come as standard. The twin-
floppy version will be available
later this year, while the 20Mbyte
hard-disc version will not be
around until early 1988.
Finally, an upgrade to the
| PC-7000 series was launched.
Called the PC-7200, it is an AT
compatible with a 20Mbyte hard
disc. The internal expansion slot
will take full-size PC or AT cards.
It weighs 21lb. and costs £2,995.
For details on all Sharp products
at the show contact: Sharp Elec-
tronics, Sharp House, Thorp Road,
Manchester M10 9BE. Telephone:
061-205 2333.
CCA MICRO RENTALS was exhibi-
ting an IBM Personal System/2
Model 60 at the show. The com-
pany will be renting the machine,
with options ranging from one day
to a year.
The marketing director at CCA,
Graham Hallett, claimed that the
Model 60 had attracted a vast
amount of speculation in the
'PS/2 Model
ground was surprisingly subdued.
rows.
all PCs are essentially the same, and pretty dull too when lined up in
Mostly it was a case of first public displays for equipment that had
already been announced. For example, Amstrad was showing the
PC-1640, and its stand was probably one of the most popular at the
show. Not far away was Dell Computer Corporation, already bidding
fair to become Alan Sugar’s déte noire.
Olivetti was also displaying its new machines, reported in our last
issue. Alongside the established names there were countless hordes of
low-cost clones. Some stands were unabashed box-shifters: they even
had the boxes there to prove it — all of them. Some of the more inte-
resting products are described below.
x ee EE
Perhaps part of the problem is that
—|
PC-based typsetting
ALONG with 80386-based
machines, desk-top publishing
(DTP) dominated the show. This
was apparent not only from the
software exhibited, but the hard-
ware too — particularly high-
resolution monitors. One indicator
of how seriously the printing
industry is taking DTP was the
presence of a typesetting company,
Itek Graphix, at the exhibition.
Itek announced an enhanced
version of its Personal Typesetting
Workstation (PTW) software
package for the IBM PC and com-
atibles. PTW is a capable of com-
posing text at speeds of up to 6,000
characters per second. It offers
menus, prompts and over 100 help
60 for hire
industry about its capabilities and
the impact it is likely to have on
the market. CCA’s rental option
scheme for the Model 60 is
designed to allow users to test its
capabilities before purchasing.
The Model 60 will be available
at a rental price of £220 per week or
£500 per month. The rates for the
Model 50 are £140 per week or
screens, which together with a
tabbing capability designed to
simulate an electric typewiter, are
aimed to make the program simple
enough for those not experienced
in typesetting to use it.
PTW costs £35,000. It includes
over 100 typefaces on-line with the
ability to mix 128 faces in any job.
data for hyphenation and spell
checking. It is also available with
the PTW laser printer which uses
the same type library as the
Digitek typesetter.
For details contact Itek Graphix,
Westlink House, 981 Geat West
Road, Brentford, Middlesex TW8
ODN. Telephone: 01-568 9297.
£350 per month. The Model 30 is
also available at £95 per week or
£225 per month. Similar rental
options will be offered for the PS/2
Model 80 when it appears.
For further details contact CCA
Micro Rentals, Unit 7/8, Imperial
Studios, Imperial Road, London
SW6 2AG. Telephone: 01-731
4310.
A 50,000-word dictionary contains’
printer
ALSO tucked away was a new
printer on the Taxan stand. It
looks like a laser but uses LCD
technology instead. The Crystal Jet
has a speed of eight pages per min-
ute, and can emulate nine other
printers. The resolution is 300 dots
per inch and it comes with 2Mbyte
of RAM. The cost will be less than
£3,000, and the launch date will
probably be in the autumn.
For further details contact Taxan -
(U.K.) Ltd, Taxan House,
Cookham Road, Bracknell, Berk-
shire RG12 1RB. Telephone:
(0344) 484646. 5
Autoscan
monitor
MICROVITEC launched an auto-
scanning monitor and a range of
graphics system at the show. The
14in. Autoscan colour monitor can
adjust automatically to different
scan tates. This means that users
can upgrade to better graphics
standards or to one of the PS/2
micros without buying a new
monitor.
The Autoscan handles CGA,
EGA and PGC graphics standards
as well as the MCGA and VGA
standards used by IBM’s PS/2
range. It costs £600. For further
information contact Microvitec,
Futures Way, Bolling Road, Brad-
ford, West Yorkshire BD4 7TU.
Telephone: (0274) 390011.
Ellinor’s
Voicekey
ELLINOR PERIPHERALS launched a
voice-recognition package called
Voicekey. It is designed to enable
IBM PC and compatibles to recog-
nise words and convert them into
keystrokes.
The system consists of an expan-
sion board, a floppy disc and a
microphone. Ellinor claims that
Voicekey’s one-pass entry system
allows users to train and have the
system recognise words by
repeating them only once.
The system can also recognise
and edit voice commands without
exiting the current applications.
This means that users can enter
and edit new commands while in
an application program. Voice key
costs £995.
For more information contact
Ellinor Peripherals, Arkwright
Road, Reading, Berkshire RG2
OLS. Telephone: (0734) 863417.
PRACTICAL COMPUTING September 1987
Hill =
Bie,
Train your
computer to
deliver
the mail
That's electronic mail of course.
All you need is a Miracle modem and your
PC becomes a postman. A Miracle modem may
look unremarkable - just a small, black box beside
your computer. But it lets you do some astonishing
things. Take electronic mail...
It's faster than going via the post office. Our
slowest modem speeds your message at 1200
bits per second. That's 30 lines of text in just
ten seconds.
It's cheaper too. Each message can cost less
than a second-class stamp.
And with Miracle, you also get modem
features like ‘auto-dial’ and ‘auto-answer, so you
can send and receive messages when it suits you.
That's really just the beginning. There's also
software for telex, file transfer and access to
Prestel and over 200 independent databases. (All
~ circle 130 on enquiry card -
this, because Miracle modems support Hayes
protocols, the industry standard.)
Perhaps most remarkable of all is the price.
You can have a Miracle modem complete with
software for as little as £226. And if you buy
now, we'll give you a year's subscription to an
electronic mail service absolutely free.
To demonstrate exactly what Miracle modems
can do, we've produced a booklet: ‘70 new tricks
to teach your computer:
For your complimentary copy, complete and
mail the coupon. It'll be with you as quickly as
the post office allows.
MIRACLE TECHNOLOGY (UK) LTD, ST PETERS STREET, IPSWICH, IP! 1XB,
TEL: 0473 216141 6 LINES. FAX: 0473 50080.
TELECOM GOLD 79: KEY 001. TELEX: 946240 CWEASY G 19002985.
ve MIRACLE
RieciNoiocy
| TO: MIRACLE TECHNOLOGY (UK)LTD, ST PETERS STREET, IPSWICH. IP1 1XB.
PLEASE SEND MY FREE COPY OF ‘70 NEW TRICKS’ |
POSITION
BO MPANY,
ADDRESS a |
| POSTCODE
TELEPHONI
|
APPROVED
for connection to
telecommunication
systems specified
in the instructions.
for use subject to
the conditiona set
outinthem
Who would you expect to design the
ultimate power PC?
IBM
Honeywell
Apollo
Hewlett-Packard
ICL
sun
Digital
Who would you prefer?
Over the years the Apple“ name has become
synonymous with intuitive, easy to use computers.
So, when it’s Apple that introduce the ultimate
‘mma ~~ am
Yana
(ims! ‘wa! emp! ma! gaat) | a soa me soa ath me eh et
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ally
power PC, it has to be the perfect combination.
The Macintosh™ IH] has both the power and flexi-
bility to suit even the most voracious user, while still
retaining Apple’s famed point-and-click simplicity.
At its core is the new 32-bit Motorola 68020
microprocessor.
The beauty of selecting the 68000 series for
Macintosh really pays off in the Macintosh II. The
upward compatibility’ of this series means that over
2000 current Macintosh applications can already take
advantage of the Macintosh II’s power.
The Motorola 68020 allows you to run virtually
every Macintosh program at four times the speed of a
Macintosh Plus, while a new co-processor enables you
to perform mathematical calculations at a staggering
200 times the speed.
But speed is only part of the story.
The Macintosh II also offers incredible flexibility.
Like all Macintosh products it has a built in LAN
which allows information exchange and resource sharing.
With its open architecture and 6 expansion slots
you can customise it to serve virtually any purpose
you can imagine. Both now and in the future.
Because it’s not constrained by today’s technology,
your investment in a Macintosh II is an investment
in the future.
You don’t even have to limit yourself to one
Operating system as the Macintosh II can run all three
industry standard microcomputer operating systems,
Macintosh, MS-DOS® and UNIX® off one workstation.
2s There is also a choice of memory options - up to
16 megabytes of RAM. And, although our 40 megabyte
hard drive is probably sufficient storage for most users
you can employ an internal drive of up to 80 megabytes.
Add to all that its superb colour graphics, its high
resolution bit-mapped screen and its vast palette of
over 16 million colours and you have the ultimate PC.
You may not have expected a computer this
powerful to have come from the Apple family, but try
it out and we think you'll be glad it has.
Post to: Apple Computer (UK) Limited, FREEPOST, Information
Centre, Eastman Way, Hemel Hempstead, Hertfordshire HP2 4BR
or Dial 100 and ask for Freefone Apple. |
TITLE |
PC/9
| ‘
| =. Apple.” The power to succeed. |
COMPANY
| NAME
| ADDRESS
©1987 APPLE COMPUTER INC. APPLE, THE APPLE LOGO AND MACINTOSH ARE TRADEMARKS OF APPLE COMPUTER INC. ALLINDIVIDUAL TRADEMARKS AND COPYRIGHTS ARE ACKNOWLEDGED BY APPLE COMPUTER INC.
Q: 00 YOU WANT A COMPUTER
WITH MORE PERFORMANCE
OR BO YOU WANT TO SAVE
MONEY?
At Tandon we've always thought you can
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And to prove it we're cutting the price of
three of our advanced range even further.
The PCA20 is down to £1,795. The PCA30
has fallen to £2,095. And the PCA40 now
costs only £2,395.
But you won't simply be buying high-
powered computing at low-powered prices.
You'll be buying a micro that’s com-
patible with the reliable, familiar. established
industry standard,
To find out more fill in the coupon.
It could answer ali your questions on
computers.
ee send me more information on Tandon’ low price.
high quality PCA Range. Tandon (UK) Ltd.. Freepost,
Redditch, B97 4BR. Telephone: (0527) 46800.
Name
Job Title
Company/Addres:
Postcode
Nature of Business.
PRCI9IB7 |
No. of Employees
No. of installed PCs.
- circle 137 on enquiry card
|
SOFTWARE SALES BY TYPE
U.K. all channels, by number of units
Sources: Cootext
Top word processors by value
U.K. market share, ist Qtr 87
BRITAIN’s TOP-SELLING SOFTWARE
WORD PROCESSORS and spreadsheets still
dominate the PC software market, making up
half the non-accounting packages sold in the
UK, according to Romtec’s latest figures. Word
Perfect is the leading high-end word processor,
with WordStar 1512 taking the low-end
Amstrad market. Lotus 1-2-3 continues to
dominate the spreadsheet scene, although
Computer Associates’ Supercalc also makes a
strong showing.
Desk-top publishing packages now represent
nine percent by value of non-accounting soft-
ware sales, although only five percent of the
unit sales. Aldus Pagemaker and Ventura Pub-
lisher hold the number 1 and 2 positions
respectively, way out in front of anything else.
Romtec’s figures refer to sales made in the
month of May, and cover all the main dis-
tribution channels. They exclude the highly
fragmented accounting market, where a large
number of vendors continue to offer products,
often through highly specialised channels.
SOFTWARE BRAND LEADERS
U.K. ail channels, unit saies for.May '87
Top seller
s Wordstar1512
s Lotus 123
= dBase ill +
= Symphony
=» Pagemaker
= Freelance
s Chit-Chat
In ali categories the top-selling package by
volume also leads in terms of value, except in
the case of word processing, where WordStar
1512 sells more copies than anything else put
cannot match the revenue raised by the more
up-market products.
More details about the UK’s favourite word
processors are provided by another market-
research company, Context. Monitoring sales
through 700 UK outlets, Context confirms that
WordStar 1512 is the top-selling product.
Word Perfect is in the number 2 slot by units
sold but has a far greater share in value terms.
Context’s figures, which are collected on a
quarterly basis, show that Word Perfect’s
position is improving. It was number 4 in value
terms in the last quarter of 1986, but moved to
number 1 in the first quarter of this year.
While the low-end WordStar 1512 sells well,
it is not its publisher’s biggest earner. It is too
cheap to generate as much revenue as
Micropro’s more expensive products such as
WordStar 2000 and WordStar Professional, the
current incarnation of traditional WordStar.
But even these Micropro products are only at
positions 5 and 6 in the earnings league. Word
Perfect, Ashton-Tate’s Multiplan, Microsoft
Word and IBM’s Displaywrite 3 all take more
of the purchasers’ money.
Keyboard products in the U.K. office
Actual or projected purchases
(‘Sousand units
1000 -——
PRACTICAL COMPUTING September 1987
model as well.
continue.
last month.
SPREADSHEET SKILLS
RESEARCH conducted jointly by Lotus and the temp agency Manpower
suggests that substantial numbers of secretaries now use spreadsheets.
Over half of the 92 organisations contacted needed temporary sec-
retaries who could use Lotus 1-2-3, and just under 10 percent hired
them frequently. According to Lilian Bennett of Manpower, in most
cases the temporary is only expected to be able to enter information
into a model that someone else has built, but 10 percent of the firms
surveyed expected the temporary worker to be able to design the
HARD DISCS
AT LEAST 80 percent of the PCs going into UK corporates have a hard
disc, according to Wharton Information Systems. The average disc size
is 20Mbyte and the PCs typically have 640K of memory. Around 40
percent are AT-level machines. The PS/2 has not yet shown up in
Wharton’s figures, but the company thinks the strong trend already
evident among users towards mote powerful machines is likely to
NEC COLOUR MONITORS
NEC now commands 40 percent of the UK market for 14in. colour
monitors according to Romtec, not 14 percent as we incorrectly stated
Charts this month prepared with the new Harvard Presentation
Graphics. It costs £295 from Softsel; telephone 01-568 8866.
17
RITA SOFTWARE
PRODUCT AWARDS
PRACTICAL COMPUTING is sponsor-
ing one of this year’s Recognition j-
of Information Technology
Achievement (Rita) awards. There
‘are four categories-in all, covering
software, hardware, peripherals
and users. Practical Computing is
sponsoring the software category.
This year’s judges are Douglas
Eyeions, Director General of the
‘Computing Services Association;
Edward Cluff, Secretary General of
; the Institute of Data Processing
Management, Ernest Morris, Presi-
dent of the British Computer
Society, John Griffiths, Group
Marketing Director of the National
Computing Centre, and lan
MaNaugh«:-Davis. The awards will
be made at a dinner to be held in
Birmingham's Metropole Hotel on
19 January 1988, at the time of the
Which Computer? Show.
Last year the joint winners in the
software category were Ansa’s
Paradox and Direct Technology’s
PC Automator. To determine this
year’s winners needs input from
you. While the judges make the
final decision, it is based on a
range of software companies which
can be nominated by anyone.
Practical Computing therefore
invites you to submit the name of
either an entirely new software
package or one which is a sub-
stantial improvement to an estab-
lished product and which was in
use in the UK during 1986/87.
Entry is free.
Recognition
of Information
Technology
Achievement
AWARD
In addition to the name of the
nominated product, you should
give brief details of why you feel it
should win the software Rita
award. Also give your own name
and company, as well as your
address and telephone number.
All nominations must reach us
by 30 September 1987. They
should be sent to Practical Com-
puting, Room L309, Quadrant
House, The Quadrant, Sutton,
Surrey SM2 5AS. Envelopes should
be marked ‘‘Rita’’ in the top left-
hand corner.
‘More Telecom Gold facilities
TELECOM GOLD has added Kompass
Online to its range of on-line data-
bases. An electronic business direc-
tory containing information on
110,000 UK companies, it is com-
piled from directories such as
Kompass, Kellys, Directory of
Directors, Dial Industry, British
Exports and UK Traded Names.
Kompass Online provides access
to marketing and sales leads,
product and service availability,
and the contact names of agents
and representatives. The infor-
mation can be searched by com-
pany name, product, county or
number of employees. The service
currently offers 45,000 product
categories. It allows mailing lists to
be created which may be stored on
a Telecom Gold text file.
Telecom Gold has also an-
nounced that Italy has joined the
Dialcom stable, and is contactable
via Telecom Gold. Finland will be
joining in the autumn.
For more details contact Tele-
com Gold, 60-68 St. Thomas
Street, London SE1 3QU. Tele-
phone: 01-403 6777.
World
agreement
on piracy
A STATEMENT from the World
Computing Services Industry
Forum held in Munich has been
signed by 15 nations. The main
thrust of the statement is simply
that international copyright laws
should form the basis for pro-
tecting software, which in itself is
hardly earth-shattering. It does,
nonetheless, represent something
of an achievement, since Japan is
one of the signatories. Japan has in
the past been rather sceptical of
pushing copyright as the panacea
for piracy, but it has now fallen
into line with the rest of the world.
The countries taking part were
West Germany, United Kingdom,
Switzerland, Denmark, Belgium,
Sweden, Spain, France, Finland,
Austria, United States, Australia,
Canada, Japan and Taiwan.
Floppy-disc filing
ONE OF the problems with the in-
creasingly standard 3.5in. discs is
that they are untidy to store. The
Multiform range of cabinets from
‘Action Computer Supplies allow
large numbers of discs to be stored
in a compact and economical way. .
Each unit is capable of holding up
to 100 discs.
The Multiform cabinets cost
£34.75 for a non-lockable version
and £39.95 for a lockable one.
More details can be obtained from
Action Computer Supplies, Aber-
corn Commercial Centre, Manor
Farm Road, Wembley, Middlesex,
HAO 1WL. Telephone: (0800)
333333.
Company
results
OLIVETTI's end-of-year figures show
revenues were 19.2 percent up to
£3.45 billion, and profits rose 12.3
percent to £267 million.
Apple’s third-quarter sales were
up 42 percent to $637 million; pro-
fits were up 65 percent to $53.5
million.
Lotus’s second-quarter sales also
rose 42 percent to $94 million; pro-
fits were up 38 percent to $16.3
million.
Software Publishing’s third-
quarter sales were up a cool 80 per-
cent to $8.3 million. Profits were
$860,000, against a loss of
$737,000 in the previous quarter.
For Micropro sales rose by to 65
percent in the third quarter to
$11.4 million. Profits stood at $1.5
million, against a loss of $2.4 milli-
on last time.
In its second quarter, newly
merged Unisys reported a profit of
$76.2 million on a turnover of $2.3
billion.
Apple names
subsidiary
APPLE COMPUTER'S recently formed
software subsidiary is to market
applications under the name Claris
Corporation. Apple claims no
significance for this name, other
than that it can be registered
worldwide without problems.
The new company will take on
all the existing packages currently
published by Apple. According to
industry analysts, these alone will
give Claris starting revenues suffi-
cient to place it among the top five
personal computer software com-
panies.
SHORTS
@ Amstrad has announced
that it is forming an Italian
subsidiary. Contrary to
Amstrad’s usual practice it
will be wholly owned by the
British company.
@ Lotus is still on the acquisi-
tion trail. Latest in line is
Datext, a provider of business
reference information on CD-
ROMs. This fits in with Lotus’s
One Source CD-ROM pro-
duct.
@ Autodesk has announced
that sales of Autocad have
passed the 100,000 mark.
@ Javelin Software, the
designer of the Javelin
advanced spreadsheet, is
making its first public share
offering in the US. There will
be 815,000 shares, priced
between $6 and $8 each. [ll
PRACTICAL COMPUTING September 1987
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So, whether you are working stand alone or on anetwork, youneed only concern yourself
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Contact us today to find out more about DataEase — your friend at work.
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PRACTICAL COMPUTING September 1987
a oe
BY JACK SCHOFIELD
WHAT FUTURE FOR TELECOM EMAIL?
JUST AS THE EMAIL SERVICES ARE GOING FROM STRENGTH TO STRENGTH, ALONG COME
ANNOUNCEMENTS THAT CHARGES ARE TO INCREASE. WILL THE USERS STAY FAITHFUL?
Oo nly a month or so ago I was happy
about the future of email. Telecom
Gold had celebrated its fifth birthday,
improved all its documentation and was
growing strongly. Gateways had been
opened up to Kompass Online, and to allow
Micronet users on Prestel direct access to the
Gold computers, promising to enlarge the
user base still further. File transfer was
neatly here. The X-400 message-handling
software was being installed to allow the
public email system to be linked to private
ones, like DEC Vax networks and Data
General CEOs.
In the more mature US market, The
Source was taken over by venture capitalists
with big ideas. MCI Mail linked up to
Compuserve, British Telecom moved its
Dialcom subsidiary to new headquarters,
had a royal opening and looked to be doing
well. Internationally, Japan and Italy started
to get their Dialcom services together —
Mastermail was used during the Venice
summit in June — while Finland signed up
for the network.
If you can connect the major public email
systems together, link in the big corp-
ofations, and make a few international con-
Mections over the X-25 packet switched
network then suddenly the global village is
in sight. What could possibly go wrong?
Well, plenty. In the UK, Telecom Gold’s
new boss, Phil Madden, dropped a bomb-
shell by shifting to a character-based
charging system from 1 August. I did a bit of
crude arithmetic on my 1,200/1,200 baud
access and found that the worst-case increase
was some 570 percent. Even though Gold
argues that average increases will be nothing
like this, I face the horror of a monthly bill,
cutrently running at around £30, maybe
hitting £150. In addition, individual but
not corporate users have been landed with a
new £5 a month subscription charge, hitting
light users proportionally harder.
As I wrote in the Guardian article
‘Panning for Gold’’ on 9 June, it is
impossible to work out how real users are
going to be affected by the new prices.
Efficient users who upload files at 1,200
baud will certainly see their bills go up a lot;
inefficient ones who enter text at two char-
acters a second might see them go down.
Personally, I object to a charging schedule
that penalises the efficient user at the
expense of the wally who sits typing on-line,
degrading everyone else’s response time.
Furthermore, charging for all the characters
that go either to or from the Gold computers
will make it very hard to work out the cost of
any particular session, something that is easy
to do with a time-based charge. In my
experience, confusion about the cost of
using a service is not good for business.
Suppose Telecom Gold’s new charges put
its growth into reverse? The recent rescue of
One to One — which I never found of any
use when I had a box on it — the gingering
up of Easylink under its new Mercurylink
7500 label, the management buyout of Istel
and other market activity may mean that the
UK email battle is not over yet, as Gold’s
effective monopoly had led me to think. In
the US, the email market is much more
balanced between different players — see
table below. In addition, I believe The
Source has over 60,000 mailboxes, though it
is mainly used by individuals rather ‘than
businesses.
With a number of strongly competing
services, and firms that have no com-
punction about switching from one to
another, the customer must benefit.
However, in this case, the financial fly in the
ointment also comes from outside. It comes
literally in the form of a document known as
Interstate Access Charges Exemption for
Enhanced Service Providers CC Docket
87-208, from the US Federal Com-
munications Commission (FCC). The FCC
plans to stick around $5 an hour on top of
data users’ bills as from 1 January next year.
If you are on-line for, say, 20 minutes a day
or 10 hours a month, this will mean finding
an extra $50 a month or $600 a year.
The FCC originally introduced such
charges on long-distance phone traffic in
1982. Data services were excluded at the
time because it was feared that rate shock
would stunt the growth of national data net-
works and important value-added services
like databases and electronic mail. Now,
however, the FCC says that since data goes
down the same twisted-wire cable as voice,
data users must also pick up the tab.
The FCC argues that the extra charges go
US EMAIL MARKET
Service Mailboxes
Western Union Easylink 155,000
British Telecom Dialcom 120,000
US Sprint’s Telemail 100,000
MCI Mail 90,000
General Electric Quickcomm 70,000
McDonnell-Douglas OnTyme 60,000
Compuserve Infoplex 32,000
AT&T Mail 20,000
RCA Mail 20,000
Source: IRD
mainly to the Bell Operating Companies to
cover their fixed network costs. This will
enable overall charges to be brought down
in the long run — and indeed, another drop
in long-distance call rates is already
scheduled for next July.
Nevertheless, there is going to be a rate
shock when the extra charges are introduced.
This will mean that some email and data
users will drop out of the market, and some
service providers will suffer. In particular,
the little companies and individuals will get
hurt most, since no charges are applied
to the private lines used by the big
corporations. As GTE Telenet’s Philip
Walker put it, ‘‘Large companies and
information providers are exempted, while
those not able to afford their own networks
get banged on.”’
Walker points out that value-added
network service (VANS) providers buy
otdinary phone lines at standard business
rates, ‘‘typically $30 a month; it’s an all-
you-can-eat type arrangement’’. The FCC’s
access charges will have a staggering effect
on them, making many services
uneconomic.
Whatever the arguments, it is certainly
true that providing VANS, electronic mail
and database services has not proved to be a
licence to print money, even in America.
Easylink is reported to be losing money, and
services like Dialcom and The Source cannot
have made much.
This means there is an argument for a
sort of enlightened national self-interest.
Information industries are the key to the
future, so countries ought to encourage the
growth of a computer-literate, data-
friendly, network-using population. In
France they take this idea seriously enough
to lend out millions of free Minitel
terminals. The vast amount of data traffic
this now creates means that from the
operatot’s point of view the terminals
probably pay for themselves.
Neither the Bell companies in the US nor
British Telecom in the UK are exactly on the
breadline. Indeed, BT turned in over £2
billion in profits this summer. The extra
cash that might temporarily be generated by
network access charges in the US, and the
character-based charges on Telecom Gold, is
going to be invisible on that sort of scale. If
Telecom Gold users drop out in droves, or
defect to the much cheaper Mercurylink
7500, BT will soon find itself with lots of
expensive, newly upgraded Prime minis and
a reducing revenue to pay for them. And
that won’t be much fun at all.
a ee ee ee Se
PRACTICAL COMPUTING September 1987
23
COMPUTERS
TANDON
Tandon PCX Dual drive/10MB —_ £595/£550**
Tandon PCX 20MB/40MB £825/£1066
Tandon PCA Single drive/20MB £1169/£1325
Tandon PCA 40MB/80MB £1625/£1995
Tandon Target 20MB/40MB £1450/£1645
Monochrome monitor option ADD £125
EGA colour monitor option ADD £425
AMSTRAD
640K 1512 Single drive/Dual drive £369/£469
640K 1512 20MB/40MB £675/£875
EGA 1640 Single drive/Dual drive £723/£871
EGA 1640 20MB/40MB £1159/£1235
Addon 1512 mono/colour monitor £110/£265
PEACOCK
Peacock XT Dual drive/20MB £550/£699
Peacock AT 20MB/40MB £1099/£1335
Peacock mono/colour monitor £125/£275
OLIVETTI
M24 Dual drive/20 MB Mono £1095/£1335
M28 20MB/40MB Mono £2275/£2695
M24/M28 colour monitor option ADD £325
M15/M19/M240/M380 CACL
KAYPRO
Kaypro XT Dual drive/30MB £785/£1066
Kaypro 286 AT 20MB/40MB £1445/£1595
Kaypro 386 AT 20MB/40MB £2805/£3625
Kaypro mono/colour monitor £85/£260
All systems above use Tandon Seagate or
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PRINTERS
Epson FX800/FX1000 £346/£425
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Brother 1509/1709 £395/£468
Brother HR 20/HR 40 DW £360/£725
Amstrad DMP 3160/4000 £169/£299
Panasonic 1081/1092 £215/£319
Panasonic 1595/3151 DW £530/£425
Star SD-10/ND 15 £315/£385
Canon Serles I with toner £2015
Citizen 110 Overture with toner £1775
HP Laserjet series Il with toner £2299
Qume Laser 10+ with toner £2466
Other printer prices available on request
MODEMS & MATHS CHIPS
Minor Miracle WS 3000 1 £245
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PC Quattro card £599
Amstrad V21/V23 £149
8087 5 MH2/8MHz £120/£145
80287 8 MHz/10MHz £235/£269
Racer 286 XT to AT speed £565
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Eclipse EGA £165
Graphmaster EGA 256K £195
Everex EGA £205
ADI wonder £223
Video 7 Vega Delux £225
Orchid Turbo PGA £995
Ramsack AT EMS/LIM OK £235
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XT Multifunctlon 64K-640K £85
Memplus OK Ram board £87
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DIGITIZERS,PLOTTERS,MICE
Roland A3 880A/885A plotter £625/£858
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Hewlett Packard HP7470/7475 plotter £875/£1575
Hitachi A3 672-XD £555
Cherry A3 digitizer £456
Summagraphics A4 digitizer £395
Logimouse C7 £85
Logimouse with PC Paintbrush £130
Logimouse with Generic Cadd £169
Summagraphics Mouse £95
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24
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Mitsubishi 3.5" 1MB Floppy £86
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Mitsubishi 5.25" 1.2MB £99
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XT Hard Disk controller £69
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prepared using Ventura Publisher
PRACTICAL COMPUTING September 1987°
ee
“TECHNOLOGY
BY RAY COLES
PARALLEL WORLDS
ONLY BY ADOPTING COMPLETELY NEW METHODS FOR HANDLING DATA WILL IT BE POSSIBLE TO
BREAK OUT OF THE LIMITATIONS OF TODAY’S MACHINES.
e all think a lot of our PCs — well,
most of us anyway — and we are
always impressed by the seemingly endless
stream of innovations which bring wider
words, more storage and higher operating
speeds. Such were the thoughts that came to
me recently when I visited a travel agent to
enquire about some cheap airline tickets.
During the interminable delays while the
helpful assistant endeavoured to access the
often unobtainable databases, I‘had time to
ponder on the state of the art in data-
processing technology.
I forced myself to be objective, and to
imagine what a visitor from another planet
or another time might think of the tortuous
procedures to which we humans willingly
submit ourselves in order to obtain the most
basic kinds of information and services. I
quickly decided that despite our Worm
drives and our high-resolution graphics we
are really still in the paleolithic stage of data-
processing’ development. There has to be a
better way.
At present our horizons only extend as far
as improved versions of basically the same
machine architectures and programming
tools that we have been using for the last 40
years. While this limited thinking persists,
improvements will be incremental and un-
spectacular. So I decided to take a look
beyond the limits of current technology and
practice to see if the future can indeed be
made to work.
The most obvious route to data-
processing utopia is already being exploited
by chip designers. Microprocessors perform
calculations faster, memories get bigger and
faster, and there seems to be no end in sight
to the improvements being brought by the
shrinking geometries laid down on the
silicon wafers. Physical limits do exist,
however, and already there are signs of a
slowdown in the breakneck pace of size
reduction and speed increase.
Another route is provided by parallel
processing. Replacing a big, expensive
microprocessor with teams of simple, inex-
pensive ones working together sounds like a
great idea until the problems of co-
ordination are considered. Using con-
ventional microprocessors in this way is poss-
ible so long as the problem can be structured
to suit, but few systems exist. which can use
more than a dozen or so devices effectively,
and the costs of interfacing are high.
Alternatively, perhaps the answer to my
prayer will come not from the hardware des-
igners but from the software technologists.
Artificial-intelligence techniques appear to
promise a lot of the things I seek, and Al
programs could even be mun directly on my
own — or the travel agent’s — PC.
Taking the three routes in turn, there is
some minor cause for celebration. As speed
improvements arising from feature-size re-
duction on the silicon chip start to falter in
the next few years, a new semiconductor
technology will be waiting to pick up the
speed challenge.
Already with us are logic arrays and even
whole processors fabricated not in silicon but
in gallium arsenide (GaAs). Carrier mobility
is higher in the GaAs material, which means
that things happen mote quickly. A typical
chip using the same 1 micron design rules
currently used for silicon devices offers gate
delays of only 100 picoseconds, a 10-fold
improvement.
Experimental GaAs processor chips
running at 200 million instructions
per second have already been produced in
the US. Such processors, linked by optical
rather than wired connections, may provide
the ultimate in processing capability for
current architectures. Unfortunately, GaAs
is currently an expensive and power-hungry
technology, and the production and
packaging problems may never be overcome
in a way that is economical.
Perhaps the final word on speed will be
provided by the room-temperature super-
conductor materials now being widely
sought. For many years IBM pioneered work
on a high-speed superconducting logic
element called a Josephson junction, only
giving up when they could see no
economical means of routinely cooling their
cfeation to liquid-helium temperatures.
Room-temperature superconductors could
change our whole world — not just our
computers — but there is a long way to go
before the technology is usable.
Parallel processing has already been made
feasible by the amazing Inmos Transputer,
which features an architecture directly
supporting the concept of concurrent pro-
cessing. All the interfacing hardware is pfo-
vided on the chip so that large arrays of
interconnected Transputers can be built up
at low cost.
Systems using up to 100 of the Inmos
devices have been produced, and _per-
formance has been mind boggling. Un-
fortunately, the problem of writing practical
code for such a system remains formidable
despite the concurrency support provided
by the Inmos Occam language. On the
artificial-intelligence front, languages like
Prolog, Lisp and Smalltalk represent the first
faltering steps along a new path to smarter
non-numerical applications.
Put it all together and you have a high-
speed, parallel-connected, artificial-intell-
igence machine — the fifth generation in
fact — which should make its debut in the
early 1990s. While it is not the complete
answer to my quest for truly user-friendly
systems, such a machine would certainly
be a vast improvement, equivalent, perhaps
to the Neolithic stage in the development of
human society.
Anyone wishing to sample the delights to
come can already start writing their own
programs in Lisp or Prolog. The problem is
that ‘current conventional processors are
better suited to number crunching than they
ate to the manipulation of the incomplete
symbolic information which the true Al
machine — like we humans — must face.
Before long, however, it could be possible
to buy a plug-in PC peripheral card which
will bring a real taste of AI potential to
everyday applications. An American start-
up company called Symbolics has unveiled
its plans to market a microprocessor-like
device which will be optimised for AI pro-
gramming. The new chip, code-named
Ivory, will use a 40-bit word length which
includes a 32-bit address and data field and
an eight-bit tag field for Lisp data types.
Included on the chip will be a ROM array
containing a standard Lisp interpreter so
that it will ran AI source programs directly.
The company is aptly named, because art-
ificial intelligence is all about the man-
ipulation of symbolic data in the form of
lists or images, rather than the numeric data —
which is the basic diet of conventional
machines. Input data and program structure
can be described in terms which are already
familiar to the programmer. It will no longer
be necessary to reformat the data and the
problem into the numerical arrays and
arithmetic solutions necessary to prod con-
ventional processors into high-speed action.
Initially, chips like Ivory will act as peri-
pherals to conventional processors. But as
operating systems and applications pro-
grams are developed, the tables will be
turned. AI processors are potentially well
suited to providing the core of future
systems while numeric processors provide
the specialist number-crunching capability.
The Symbolics Ivory chip will not become
available commercially until mid-1988,
although prototypes are already running.
Whether it will revolutionise my travel agent
I cannot say, but it should provide a useful
bridge to the fifth generation. PC
———— |
PRACTICAL COMPUTING September 1987
25
THE NEW
APRICOT 386 and
VX SYSTEMS
Supplied by: The Computer Company.
Telephone: 01-882 8811
From {£2799
See the complete range of APRICOT systems SINGLE AND MULTI USER in our new showroom (car park to the rear, Southgate tube opposite)
Company Service include:
BESPOKE SOFTWARE
NETWORK PLANNING & INSTALLATION
ON SITE TRAINING
OWN IN-HOUSE TRAINING SCHOOL
CONSULTANCY
FULLY EQUIPPED IN HOUSE
MAINTENANCE WORKSHOPS
ON SITE MAINTENANCE CONTRACTS
AFTER SALES TELEPHONE SUPPORT
We can also provide telephone support for
computer users that have not purchased
systems from us using our annual telephone
support contracts.
The Computer
Company
2-16 Burleigh Parade
Burleigh Gardens
Southgate
London N14
Telephone No: 01-882 8811
| — circle 154 on enquiry card
APRICOT
PEGASUS ACCOUNTS
SOFTWARE
NOVELL NETWARE
XENIX 286/386
Authorised Sales Service &
Support Centre
-=¢C ONS UL T AN T'S
REPORTs
THE SURVIVAL OF THE OLDEST
WHY IS IT THAT WORDSTAR, DESPITE ITS MANY FAULTS, REFUSES TO DIE?
oO of the most difficult questions that
anyone can be asked is to recommend
a good word-processing package for com-
pany use. It is not that there is a shortage of
good software. On the contrary, between
Multimate, Microsoft Word, Word Perfect
and a few others there are plenty of excellent
products to choose from. The problem is to
select a package that a company can
standardise on without vast expenditure on
training. Having to send every new operator
on, say, a Word Perfect course can be a very
costly business. None of this will be news to
most WordStar users as it is the main
argument for continuing to soldier on with
this ancient package.
Now I know there is plenty to be said
against WordStar; I say quite a lot against it
myself. It is a product of the late 1970s that
never quite made it to the 1980s. But it does
have one overwhelming advantage: it is well
known. When secretarial agencies offer their
staff free WP training they give free
WordStar training. Ask your agency for a
temp who is an experienced word-processing
operator and you will get an experienced
WordStar operator. Advertise for an audio
typist with 12 months’ WordStar experience
and you will probably receive an excellent
response. Advertise for someone with Word
Perfect experience and your phone will not
ring.
It was therefore with some enthusiasm
that I read about WordStar 4 earlier this
year. Would this new version allow a
company to capitalise on the pool of Word-
Star experience, and at the same time deliver
the power of heavyweight products like
Word Perfect and Multimate? | ordered a
copy, used it for several weeks, and
concluded that the answer is no.
It is not that WordStar 4 lacks improve-
ments. At long last, you can store margin
and tab settings within a document; get at
files in other cirectories; convert documents
to and from non-documents; go straight to a
page number; use headers and footers of
more than one line; do proper conditional
printing; undo accidental deletions; and a
great deal more. I especially liked the
spelling checker. I used to use Borland’s
Turbo Lightning, which was itself miles
better than the old-fashioned batch
checkers. But it could only check one screen
at a time. WordStar 4 lets you check the
whole document in one shot. Its thesaurus is
also streets ahead of Borland’s.
But there was plenty that I did not like.
Customisation is an even bigger hassle than
before. The keyboard macros are clumsy.
You can no longer switch off the page break
display. And there is still no windowing,
which means that you can only work on one
document at a time; one of WordStar’s
main drawbacks has always been the contor-
tions needed to copy a paragraph from one
letter to another.
There was also a problem with speed. One
of the customisation options is to remove the
annoying screen flicker or snow that you get
with some monitors, but this is done at the
cost of slower screen updating. With the
snow suppressed the screen display on my
Olivetti M-24 ran very slowly. The old
WordStar was faster, and snow was never a
problem.
If you already use WordStar 3, the £95
needed to upgrade to version 4 is worth
paying. But for those just starting a WP
department the new release leaves all the old
problems unresolved.
Small outfits and individual users do not
have to contend with the same problems of
training and compatibility. Personally, I
have found no difficulty in choosing a word
processor for long documents like articles
and reports. But how I wish I could find
something suitable for knocking off one-
page letters and file notes.
My ideal would be a program that I could
load quickly — preferably a pop-up. It
would let me simply type a page, print it,
and forget it: no menus, a default page
layout, and no need to save the file to disc.
Sidekick nearly meets these needs, but its
lack of printer support rules it out.
One answer might be Topcopy. This is an
inexpensive word processor aimed at indi-
vidual users and small businesses. You can
use it as an ordinaty program or as a
memoty-fesident pop-up. It lacks high-
powered features, but it does have all the
basics like cut and paste, find and replace,
headers and footers, reasonable printer
support, and word counting.
Topcopy is window-based. You can have
up to six documents open at a time, either
Palomar Utilities Palomar Systems,
84 Cedar Road, Botley, Oxford OX2
9ED. Telephone: (0865) 723392
Smartkey NewStar Software, 200
North Service Drive, Brentwood, Essex
CM14 4SG. Telephone: (0277) 220573
Topcopy Innova Software, 8 Gloucester
Row, Wotton-under-Edge,
Gloucestershire GL12 7DX. Telephone:
(0453) 835379
WordStar Micropro International,
28-31 High Street, London SW19 5BY.
Telephone: 01-879 1122
on their own screens or in windows. Copying
text from one file to another is a lot easier
than in WordStar. There is also a mail-
merge option plus a separate program for
maintaining mailing lists. This side of things
is rudimentary, but would be adequate fort
occasional producers of mail shots.
The snag is that Topcopy refuses to run on
my Olivetti M-24. I have tried it on
Amstrad, Victor and Tandon machines, and
it works fine on them all. But the M-24
defeats it, which is a pity because this is my
main machine at present. Steve Brimley,
who wrote Topcopy, has promised to try to
find the bug. I hope he succeeds.
Another product J will use regularly is the
Palomar Utilities. It contains the sort of little
programs that everyone needs from time to
time — things that should have been built
into the operating system but were not. You
can name a floppy after it has been
formatted, move files between directories
without copying them and much more.
Several firms sell utilities like these for a few
pounds each, or you can pick them up for
nothing from a user group.
Palomar’s approach is to bundle the
programs into collections that they sell at
£19.95 atime. My favourite is a utility called
Index in the Disc Collection. All it does is
print the names of all the files on your disc,
in alphabetical order, showing the complete
directory paths. It might not sound much,
but it is a terrific help when it comes to
cleaning up the hard disc. It has certainly
been worth £20 of my money.
Finally, things seem to be hotting up in
the market for keyboard macros. A few years
ago I was singing the praises of Smartkey, a
utility that redefines the keyboard and
attaches sequences of keystrokes to single
keys. Then Borland’s Superkey came out: it
does the same job, but with lots of extra
features. Superkey has the big advantage of
being controlled entirely from menus that
pop up over your main application, while
many of Smartkey’s features were only avail-
able from the DOS prompt.
Now Smartkey is back in a new and
improved version. It too is now a full pop-
up, and it has nearly all the features of the
Borland product as well as a few new ones of
its own. It can, for example, format discs
and copy files while another application is
running. It also supports nearly twice as
many redefinable keys as Superkey. If you
already make heavy use of Superkey you
could be better off sticking with your
existing macros. But for anyone thinking of
buying a macro program for the first time,
the new Smartkey is well worth a look. [9
PRACTICAL COMPUTING September ! 987
27
Oe ee es
Taff, Winner of the 1987 Kinross Trial.
In looking for a dramatic picture of our new LaserJet
Series Il, we've allowed ourselves a little artistic licence.
Where you might reasonably expect to see our LaserJet
-printer, you see Taff the border collie.
Is this merely a ruse to catch your eye?
Not at all. We've recruited Taff because, strange though it
may seem, he’s a perfect embodiment of our new LaserJet.
For a start, you can give the LaserJet a command and it will
instinctively understand. (It’s compatible with over 600
software packages, as well as with any major business PC.)
Second, you can give the LaserJet an order and it won't
forget. (We've given it a memory of up to 4'4Mb, more than
double that of other desktop laser printers.)
Third, you can work to a few simple commands and the
LaserJet will obey. (It has the simplest controls you've ever
seen with everything grouped on a front panel.)
Fourth, you can trust the LaserJet to be dependable
throughout its long life. (Confident it won't let you down, we
include a year’s on-site service in our warranty.)
Finally, the LaserJet is as much a champion as Taff simply
because it outsells every other make of laser printer.
To see it in action (the Laserjet, not Taff) we suggest you
whistle up Hewlett-Packard on (0734) 696622 and ask
Chris Hewson for your nearest dealer.
circle 107 on enquiry card -
HEWLETT
WE CAN WORK IT OUT. | @ PACKARD
For over a year we
have been running a
20-machine IBM PC
workshop using Supercalc
3. We have found that
instead of using the Print
Graph facility from
function key f9 it is faster,
more convenient and more
economical on paper first
to use £10 to look at the
graph and then to dump
graphics from the screen to
the printer using Shift-
Prescr. When we
considered using Lotus
1-2-3 in our workshop to
| widen student familiarity
; with spreadsheet packages,
we were disgusted to find
that 1-2-3 seems to disable
the ability to dump
graphics from screen to
printer. When we tried it
paper was fed continuously
through the printer,
printing just one character
per page. Quite why Lotus
would disable this useful
facility I cannot imagine
— particularly since 1-2-3,
unlike Supercalc 3,
requires both the saving of
a Graph file and the
loading of another disc to
print a graph. How can we
get round this problem?
COLIN LEWIS
A We have no first-
| hand experience of
this problem but the Lotus
Support Group provided a
has not disabled the
facility you describe, since
DOS is not by itself
capable of dumping
graphics to the screen.
Lotus has provided a
separate package for
printing graphics, to
support a wide range of
printers.
It is nevertheless
possible to dump graphics
under certain
circumstances. Users with
an IBM colour card or
Plantronics, who also have
a suitable printer, will
probably be able to dump
the screen graph if they
run the PC-DOS Graphics
command first. This loads
the file Graphics.Com.
The situation with other
gtaphics cards is less
certain. Hercules cards
may be able to dump
graphics, depending on
the date of the HGC file,
which must be loaded
before entering 1-2-3.
You can contact the
Lotus Support Group on
(0753) 840281.
30
solution. Apparently Lotus ,
A § K
| your master discs and get the latest version for £99.
the Path command. Thus if you put
PATH C:\/WS
Bat. It will not find the Ovr files.
You simply put the command
APPEND C:\WS
for it first in che current directory, and then in C:\WS.
then change to drive D and load WordStar.
P ¢
MANAGING
SUB-DIRECTORIES WITH
WORDSTAR
I have used WordStar for some time for word processing, and Correctstar for
checking spelling on an IBM XT. WordStar is fine, except that it does not
understand sub-directories on the hard disc, and I have to keep copies of all three
WordStar files in each sub-directory that I use. Is there any way round this?
S STEVENS
We too use plain old WordStar more than any other program. We agree that it is
a pity that most versions of the program do not recognise sub-directories, since
this is important if you have a hard disc, but there are ways round this. Version 4 of
WordStar does handle sub-directories properly and without any fuss. You can turn in
WordStar 3.4 and earlier versions require that three files — WS.Com, WSovly1.Ovr
and WSmsgs.Ovr — are all in the directory you are using. The DOS command Path
sets a search path so that you can find WC.Com in another sub-directory named in
in your Autoexec.Bat file you can access WS.Com from the sub-directory WS on drive
C when you are working in any drive or sub-directory. Unfortunately the Path
command will only find executable files — that is those with extensions Com, Exe or
There are two ways round this: If you have MS-DOS version 3.2 you can use a
command called Append. It works like the Path command in that it defines a search
path with the difference that it operates on data files, including those ending Ovr.
in your Autoexec.Bat file, and when a data file is requested, the computer will look
If you are using a version of DOS before 3.2, you will not have the Append
command, but you can overcome the problem by copying the three WordStar files
into a RAM disc, that you designate drive D, as part of your Autoexec. Bat file. You
If you want to edit a file in a sub-directory on drive C you first use the CD
command to change to the sub-directory on the hard disc that contains the file you
wish to edit, then change to drive D if you are using the RAM disc method, load
WordStar, and finally change the logged-in directory to C, which will in this case put
you back into the sub-directory with the file you want to edit.
used. The eighth bit is
frequently wasted, but on
some systems it may be
used to make the parity
odd or even as required by
a particular machine. _
Though WordStar files
are mostly text that can be
represented by seven-bit
ASCII codes, the program
sets the eighth bit for
special purposes such as
marking bold or
isi ll is
(-] Iam having difficulty
transferring WordStar
files using Kermit. Basic
files stored in ASCII will
transfer, but WordStar
files will not. I think that
the problem may be
control characters in the
file, but I do not know
what to do about it.
M JOHNS
A The ASCII character
set compfises 128
characters, which include
the alphabet in both
upper case and lower case,
the numbers 0 to 9, and a
few extra symbols such as
punctuation marks, +,
-, *, / and soon. Each of.
these characters can be
fepresented using seven
binary bits. A Basic
program stored as ASCII
characters uses one byte to
store each character, but
only seven bits are actually .
using micro-justification,
the end of each word also
has its eighth bit set, so
the program knows where
it can add extra micro-
spaces.
To transmit a WordStar
file to another machine
you can strip and discard
the eighth bit, so that you
are transmitting a pure
ASCII file. WordStar
version 3.4 includes a
program called WSconvt
underlined text. If you are
that will strip any eighth
bits that have been set,
leaving you with an ASCII
In “Ask PC”
John and Timothy Lee
answer questions on any area of
serious microcomputing. If you have
a nagging problem, write to us, marking
“ASK PC” clearly on the top left-hand
corner of the envelope. Letters should
‘contain one question only. We cannot
guarantee a personal reply, but to be
considered your letter must include your
name ond address, together with a
.stamped addressed envelope. Answers
to the most representotive questions
of general interest will be
-published in these pages.
file that is transferable.
Another way to obtain
an ASCII file is to make
WordStar print the file
required, but instead of
sending the output to a
printer, send it to a disc
file. Both methods will
remove print enhance-
ments such as bold,
underlining, subscripts
and superscripts, as well as
micro-spacing.
If you really want to
preserve these attributes —
for example, when
transferring WordStar files
produced on a CP/M
system to an IBM PC
where you may want to do
further editing under
WordStar — then you
must preserve all eight
bits. This means that you
must instruct Kermit to
send all eight bits, as for a
binary file, rather than-the
text-file default of sending
seven bits.
Exactly how to do this
depends on what machine
you are using, and you
may need to consult the
manual. If you are using
Kermit-MS on the IBM PC
or one of the clones, after
loading Kermit type
SET EOF NO-CTRL Z
On a CP/M machine using
Kermit-80 you type
SET FILE-TYPE BINARY
and on a Honeywell
mainframe type
SET TEXT OFF
It is best to set both
machines to eight-bit
transmission, before using
the Send and Receive
commands as usual. We
commonly move WordStar
files in this way.
PRACTICAL COMPUTING September 1987
DISKS DISK
LU Microsight Fre
LOW COST IMAGE CAPTURE
ACCUTRACK
FLEXIBLE DISKS
Engineered for critical accuracy and reliability
by Dennison Magnetic Media.
top quality
certified 100% error free
lifetime warranty
MICROSIGHT I
The popular low cost image capture system for IBM
PC/XT/AT and compatibles capable of capturing
up to 512 x 512 resolution images at 255 grey
levels. MicroSight | includes camera, Microeye
Scanner Card and software.
A camera stand is included to allow images of a
variety of sizes to be captured £595 + VAT
MICROEYE SCANNER
Image capture card for use with your own camera/
video system, provided with software for image
capture, disk storage and printing. The microeye
scanner has a resolution of up to 512 x 512 pixels
at 255 grey levels.
Suitable for IBM PC/XT/AT and compatibles
£295 + VAT
Versions of MicroSight and Microeye available for
RM NIMBUS, Apricot, BBC Model B, HP 9816 and
Victor 9000/Sirius
post and packing free
why pay more?
Cash with order only. Please complete the order form
below and send it to: —
Moor House Marketing
Moor House,
Ratcliffe Wharf Lane,
Forton, Preston-PR3 OAN
or telephone 0524 792101 with Access Card No.
‘Per box of 10 disks Amount
Qty
Ere
48tpi SS/DD
DS/DD
96tpi SS/DD
DS/OD
HE (IBM-AT)
BH SS
ey” DS
Remember
post & packing
free VAT@ 15%
Payment
SS ae
MICROSIGHT RT
A real time image capture system for use with IBM
PC/XT/AT with capture of 512 x 512 resolution
images at frame rate. Complete with camera and
sofware £1,490 + VAT
MicroScale image processing and measurement
software available with MicroSight products.
Access Card No
Ao) LL)
For Further details contact:-
DIGITHURST wane
Digithurst Ltd.
Church Lane, Royston, Herts SG8 9LG
Tel (0763) 42955 Telex 818451 DHURST G
> circle 117 on enquiry card
. . 3}
| > circle 150 on enquiry card + |
BUFFERED SMART SWITCHES
¢ BOTH PRINTERS PRINTING DIFFERENT DOCUMENTS SIMULTANEOUSLY ¢
© SOFTWARE CONTROL ¢ OVERRIDE SWITCH ¢ RESET & MULTIPLE COPY FUNCTION ¢
EXPANDABLE ¢ SIMULTANEOUS DATA INPUT @ AUTO SELECT @
ACS- AUIO COMPUTER SELECT @ SI= SIMULTENAOUS INPUT @ C =COPY # SPS = SOFTWARE PRINTER SELECT
CENTRONICS SERIAL
PB-DP (64K) © 1 Centronics input and 2 output soft SB-4-2 (256K)e 4 Serial inout and 2 serial
£249 select with 64K buffer expandable to £415 output with 16K buffer at each
256K @ C/SPS input & a totalof 256K memory.
fa P8-4-2 (256K) 4 Centronics input and 2 output ACS/SUC/SPS
£345 with 256K buffer. ACS/C/SPS SB-7-1 (256K) e 7 Serial input and 1 serial
PB-6-2 (256K) 6 Centronics input and 2 output £595 output with buffer at each input
£495 with 256K buffer, ACS/SI and a total of 256K memory
3 PB-7-1 (256K)e 7 Centronics input and 1 output expandabie to 1MB. ACS/SI
W Ee V = G @) | FE £445 with 256K buffer. ACS/SI
UNIVERSAL BUFFER
P R ( ‘ ES YO [ J N i = D | e SERIAL & PARALLEL INPUT AND OUTPUT @ X ON AND X OFF SOFT AND OTR HARD
s
HANDSHAKE ¢ CENTRONICS ® 2 FRONT PANEL T SWITCH INPUT AND OUTPUT ® COPY
RESET e EXPANDABLE TO 256K @
UB (64K) £220
SMART AUTOMATIC SWITCHES
9 ¢ AUTO COMPUTER SELECT ¢ SERVICE ¢ REQUEST LED INDICATION ¢ MANUAL OVERRIDE
- SWITCH ¢ UNSEAVICED COMPUTER RECEIVES BUSY ¢
CENTRONICS SERIAL
CLIPPER 345 rrp MP-401 — ¢ 4 Centronics input and 1 MS-401 =e 4 Serial input and 1 serial output
- £150 Centronics output £180 - . ie
MP-801 @ 8 Centronics input and 1 MS-801 =e. 8 Serial input and 1 serial outpul
DATAEASE 385 Lite £200 Centronics output £230
EEE 252 rep INTELLIGENT PRINTER BUFFERS
DBASE Ill PLUS 369 RRP e SELF-TEST FUNCTION ¢ BUFFEFVPRINTEA READY INDICATOR e BUFFER RAM STATUS
INDICATOR @ RESET AND MULTIPLE COPY FUNCTION @ BUFFER BYPASS SWITCH @
DELTA 4 PRO 365 RRP P8 (64) © 1 Centronics input and 1 PB (256) © 1 Centronics input and 1
7 £140 Centronics output with 64K buffer £190 Centronics output ;
EW PB-2 (64) © Above with 2 way manual switch to PB-2 (256) © Above with 2 way manual switch to
FRAM ORK L 329 = £185 connect 2 micros to 1 printer or vice £235 connect 2 micros to 1 printer or vice
FREELANCE PLUS 249 versa versa
ACCESSORIES CABLES (6ft long) |
GEM DRAW PLUS 1 1 9 KSM 101 @ Serial RS232 to parallel converter KPC 104R ®@ Ribbon Cable 36pin-36pin £12.00
£65 with PSU KPC 104 F6 @ Flex Cable 36pin-36pin £16.00
HERCULES PLUS 179 KSM 104 @ Parallel to serial AS232 converter KPC 105-6 ¢ Flex !BM Paralle! printer
£70 with PSU cable ; £15-00
JAVELIN 95 KSM 110 @ Multi-link serial RS232 switch KPC-105-10 @ Flex IBM Parallel printer
£24 selectable cable secon aps me a + oes
ss CUSTOM CABLE-MAKING al © Flex (25 lines) 25pin—25pin :
LOTUS u 2 3 2.01 225 SEAVICE AVAILABLE KSC-101 ¢ Flex (10 lines) 25pin-25pin £12.00
LOTUS MANUSCRIPT 239 Aud postage: Swiches & Buller £3.00 each. & cable £0.75p each + 15%. VAT
MS MOUSE 125 si R ] Oral anton Bistros Centre
aoe ee! =
as elephone: VISA Broa
MS WORD 3.1 265 Raveers Telex: 881 13271'GECOM aes EN =
MULTIMATE 193
MULTIMATE ADV |I 299 | — circle 156 on enquiry card -—
PARADOX 199
QUICKSILVER 299
RAPID FILE 210
SAMNA IV 347
SMART 3.1 355
SUPERCALC 4 199
SUPERPROJECT PLUS 255
SYMPHONY 1.2 320
TURBO BASIC 55
WORD PERFECT 4.2 253
WORDCRAFT 3 316
WORDSTAR 2000 2.0 230
WORDSTAR 2000 PLUS 269
WORDSTAR PRO 4.0 202
AT SYSTEMS!
FROM
£799.00 . vat
NEW COMPLETE SYSTEMS
ALL 12 MONTHS WARRANTY
MODEL 4: SMART DESK TOP 80286 CPU, IMB RAM, | X 1.2MB
FLOPPY, 6/8/12MZH SWITCHABLE, 6— 16 BIT& 2—8BITSLOTS, 200W
POWER SUPPLY, 84 KEY KEYBOARD, REAL-TIME CLOCK,
PHEONIX BIOS, SERIAL/ PARALLEL
PORT, 14 INCH MONO MONITOR
£799.00
MODEL 5: AS MODEL 4 BUT WITH
30Mb HARD DISK £1099.00 MODEL
ST40: PORTABLE—AT 80286
20Mb HARD DISK, |.2MB FLOPPY 640K RAM,
PHEONIX BIOS,,6,8,12 MZH SWITCHABLE,
SERIAL/PARALLEL PORT, 5 INCH
MONITOR, BIG MONITOR EXTENSION
OUTLET, STANDARD EXPANSION SLOTS.
MOBILE POWER HOUSE. €1 199.00
® This is a small selection — call for details!
© Fast delivery!
@ Friendly professional service!
© Credit accounts available!
© Government/expor orders welcomed!
0480 : 53044/413122
Elite Computer Systems
UNIT 2 - HALCYON COURT - ST MARGARET'S WAY
HUNTINGDON - CAMBS PE18 6DG
(HUGE RANGE OF COST EFFECTIVE ADD—ON CARDS, MONO & COLOUR
MONITORS & HARD DISKS SEND FOR LIST). SOFTWARE BARGAINS:
MICROLEDGER II] ACCOUNTS SALES, PURCHASE, NOMINAL LEDGERS £99.00
PLUS VAT, DEMO DISK £10.00 + VAT(REFUNDABLE AGAINST ORDER) WITH
STOCK CONTROL & INVOICER £145.00.+VAT. EXPORT WELCOMED, ALL
MAJOR CREDIT CARDS WELCOMED, PURCHASE ORDERS ACCEPTED FROM
PLC CO'S, GOVERNMENT, EDUCATION. CASH ON DELIVERY CAN ALSO BE
ARRANGED IN THE UK. ILC’S ACCEPTED.
MILL COMPUTERS
18 CARDIFF ROAD, LUTON, BEDS
LUI IPP, UK TEL: (0582) 458806 & 56869 TELEX: 94016469=G
TELEFAX: (0582) 457113
ALL HARDWARE AND SOFTWARE MENTIONED AND PORTRAYED ARE
COVERED BY TRADEMARKS OF THE COMPANIES OF ORIGIN.
> circle 157 on enquiry card
32 PRACTICAL COMPUTING September 1987
Prices shown are for IBM/compalibles. All prices subject to
carriage and VAT and are correct at time of going to press
Wire MICRO-RENT
When you choose to rent - Micro-Rent
01-700 4848
IVIRX
MICRO-RENT
St. Marks Studios,
Chillingworth Road,
London N7 8QJ.
Excellent service @ Full technical
support @ Immediate delivery @ Wide
choice of computers, printers and other
peripherals @ Ex-rental machines
available for purchase.
And the most competitive rates for
rental by the day, week or month.
BREAKDOWNS? Ask about Micro-
Rent Sprint service that guarantees
delivery within two hours: Call
Micro-Rent GHiugigon 01-700 4621.
eee.
ae |
£45]
PER WEEK * i
‘APPLE: APRICOT -
- IBM PC. XT. AT. PS/2 -
OLIVETTI - MACINTOSH
- TANDON - COMPAQ -
SIRIUS - LASER PRINTERS
- DESK-TOP PUBLISHING -
‘FAX MACHINES:
TANDON IBM PC AT
| >| st
a!
mn
* Prices quoted are based on 3-month rental. excluding VAT.
H-P
LASERJET
£58 PER WEEK *
> circle 160 on enquiry card
YOU NEVER NEED TO LOOSE DATA AGAIN
LOSING DATA IS THE EASIEST THING TO DO
IN COMPUTING, GETTING IT BACK AGAIN IS
NOT SO EASY - UNTIL NOW! WE CAN GIVE
YOU TOTAL DATA RECOVERY WITH A
NEW SOFTWARE PRODUCT CALLED
SECOND CHANCE
ALL IT WILL COST YOU IS £75.00 (PLUS VAT)!
RETURN THE COUPON BELOW FOR YOUR
SECOND CHANCE IN DATA RECOVERY
NAME
POSITION
COMPANY
ADDRESS
TELEPHONE
TELEFA
[T fence IM} ET ES LTD.
62 KELVINGROVE STREET
GLASGOW G37SA
TELEPHONE 041-332 6636
TELEFAX 041-221 5318
PRACTICAL COMPUTING September 1987 |_~ Circle 125 on enquiry card <
PROTECT YOUR COMPUTER
AGAINST SPIKES AND
POWER SURGES
FOR JUST 57 Pie ARO fa
uSie FILTAN S85 2227859
A small price to pay to safeguard your
valuable data and expensive equipment -
~also used for telex and telephone |
systems worldwide.
* High Energy Absorption
x Instantaneous Response
* RF. Filtering
* Plug in/plug out
no hard wiring
Phone your order on 0462 36111
For immediate despatch !
sZ ‘Qe, New Bridge House, 33 Wilbury Way,
AG At C [fe A Hitchin, Herts. SG4 OTW England.
Be ] Tel:(0462) 36111 Telex:825244
Vi ELECTRONICS LTD Fax:os82) 420392
> circle 115 on enquiry card =
33
How to write your own software
without the help of a programmer !
tbs oS Manes
Mailing List Menu
Develop your first application
on day 1.
With TAS you can take any type of infor-
mation like names and addresses or stock
records and design an entry form by simply
“painting” the screen. TAS then writes the data
entry program for you.
When you run this program you enter your
information and store it on disk. This is a
database. And you can create as many as will fit
on your disk. With another function, the
“database browser” you can display this infor-
mation on the screen and browse through it
and change it.
Reports are just as easy. You tell the report
generator which file you want to report from
and then simply answer the questions it asks you.
When you've finished, TAS wil! generate a
program that produces the report you want and
you Can run that report time after time.
A Relational Database.
You may know that with any database
application you enter, store, retrieve and
manipulate data. “Relational” means that you
can simultaneously ‘‘relate’’; nore than one file
to another.
For example a sales order “relates’’ to both
stock records anda customer record. The
resulting invoice “relates” to the customer
record and a sales daybook record. With TAS you
can simultaneously access and relate more files
than any other database package and do so
with ease.
“How not to do it”’.
One thing is certain. After you finish a
database application, you usually know exactly
what's wrong with it. With TAS it is easy to
subsequently change and modify both your files
and your applications without having to
re-enter your data.
Excellent documentation and on-screen help
wili show you how to use the 4th generation
language, add more powerful features which
include extensive calculations, pull down
menus, multiple windows, business graphics,
128 colour combinations and much more.
Result . . . your applications are more user-
friendly, easier to use, look better and have more
“polish” than some of the very expensive
“professional” packages. And YOU have
written them.
TAS Plus is fast and easy to learn. All you need is a /ittle application and an IBM PC or
compatible computer (including the AMSTRAD PC1512) with 512KB RAM and a hard disk or
two floppy disks. TAS Plus Multi-User for MS-Net compatible Networks costs £349.00 plus VAT.
Date fatored: RYMWD!Scerce Cole: UL
Pesteode
Teleptose TEV]
Teles/Far: pwn
Cestect Mane. TIE
Job Title: PASM test
Correst Meher of Kenes to File: ST
Thiele PD-Chese Pe-Delt FS/A-Tied Bog/Tad F170 Feed teat Pre FE Tsed Fe kee
Entry Screen
We use it ourselves.
Our in-house fully integrated sales order
processing and financial accounting system (yes
it is for sale) was developed using TAS. Running
ona mult!-user network we can provide instant
answers to such questions as “who bought what,
when andat what price”. And that’s only part of it.
“Excellent value for money, especi-
ally for novices wanting to learn and
developers wanting economic runtime
systems.” Personal Computer
World Magazine
“There is no doubt that TAS is a very
capable product. It handles serious
sized applications and does so with
speed.” What Micro Magazine
“TAS manages to pack plenty of
power into its small price.”
PC Magazine
“On a value for money basis this
must be one of the most attractive
databases on the market.”
Accountancy Age
“If you cannot find a commercial
package to suit your organisation then
most certainly this must be one of the
first places to start looking in order to
produce a system of your own.”
Personal Computing with
the Amstrad
Never run out of steam.
TAS is so fast and powerful that most of the
TAS utilities are developed in TAS itself.
No other database is remotely capable of
doing this. And that is exactly where you
benefit. It’s simple enough for the first timer but
powerful enough for the professional software
developer. So you have little to worry about
whether TAS is suitable for your particular
application or not.
As PCW Magazine said in their review of TAS
Plus: ‘Excellent value for money, especially for
Novices wanting to learn and developers wanting
economic runtime systems.”
MmMeEOGsé reer Quote Ref: PRACOS
?
111-113 Wandsworth High Street, London SWI8 4HY. aad
DUAN EDC
Mase Type EU fab Mate 1S) BT
jvanced Processing Lintted 8 9801
et Ge
sige 1-67
Teler/Far TELE 21760
fr Jobe Bas Ley
Techsical Director
Co
M2 1TH Job Ti
ADVERTPLUS, Mane EU Start Bote 15¢ 6/8?
Mavertinveg Plea Lineted Teles! 1 389 214909
“1: Advertising Howse Teles/Far 01 MV 126
2 AT Longley fueme
- Sarhitos Contect fir Ted Pieseerh
BTb 7X Job Trt le Masegeng Dorertor
lage Tupe TU Start Dite 157 6/87
Condit coersg Systeus Telephone 1 M3 2HS
TE 2H?
fir Joba B bgnew
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2 Serrey BTL 20H
ATR MEAT Start Date. 15/ 6/97
fic Water Gas Controle Ltd Tela oS SD
tome ay bey t
Rypesibesitalesat ts PASPAC
Print out to Screen
Build a reputation for efficiency.
TAS is for people like you. You like using a
computer. You know that it is vitally important
to have accurate, up-to-date information
instantly available. You also know of many appli-
cations that can be done easier, better and
quicker with a computer. Cut down on shuffling
bits of paper. Cut down repetition. Everyone
performs better because the job is more
interesting and more fun. That's what TAS is all
about. With TAS you can make a computer do
what you want it to do.
Nothing else needed.
At £99.00 TAS-Plus is complete. It consists of
the Relational Database, Screen Painter, Program
Generator, Report Generator, Database Browser,
4th Generation Language, ‘Idiot Proof’ (no
disrespect) drop-down menu-driven Command
Editor, Runtime Compiler for fast program
execution, Tutorial and Manual.
Simultaneously access up to 16 files, each
with 16 indices. Each file may have 65,000
records of upto 10,000 characters each. Import
and export data with other software packages
including dBase-III, wordprocessing packages
and spreadsheets.
Multi-User Version Available.
This version supports full file and record
locking and works on all MS-Net compatible
networks. Software you develop now will run
without change if you upgrade to TAS Plus
Multi-User later on.
30-Day Money Back Guarantee.
The parcel you receive is fully operational
but limited to saving 250 records. Provided the
sealed, unlimited copy remains unopened you
can return the goods within 30 days (in good
condition) FOR A FULL, NO QUIBBLE,
REFUND. Have a go. Order your copy today with
the coupon below. We also accept purchase
orders from PLC’s and Government.
We despatch by Ist class post on
the same day we receive your order
cond to MEGATECH, Ref:PRACOS
111-113 Wandsworth High Street,
London SW18 4HY
at Please send me 1 Copy of TAS Plus. | enclose a
B vcs for £115 (incl VAT and P&P) made payable to
MEGATECH or charge my Access or VISA card
Number: Expiry Date:
Signature
(Card) Name:
[ (Card) Address
Postcode: Tel:
PRIORITY ORDERS
01-874 6511
A VAT invoice will be
included in the parcel.
Enclose a company letter-
Use Access/Visa Card f head if invoice name and
address are different from
Quote Ref: PRACO9 J cargname and address.
oR Raa awe we we
“PLUG IN AND GO!”
NEW BREED OF
MULTI-USER
COMPUTER
The Bromcom QC is a totally new breed of
computer, achieving tremendous breakthroughs
in price, size and ease of use. A highly versatile
| four user multi-tasking computer capable of
expansion to much larger configurations; the
Bromcom QC also acts as a file server to any IBM
PC, the new Amstrad PC and most clones.
HALF THE PRICE!
Accustomed to high prices for multi-user systems? The Bromcom QC is
under half the price of traditional multi-user systems and is cheaper, per
user, than many PC’s. But the Bromcom QC doesn’t cut corners — 20MB
hard disc, full 16 bit processor (running at 1OMHz) and 1MB of RAM are
standard; 2 or 4 MB RAM memory, 40 or 80 MB hard disk options are now
available. Four high specification VDUs, cables and FREE user-menu, diary
and electronic mail software complete the package. And all for half the
price of a traditional multi-user system.
QUARTER THE SIZE!
Are computers taking over your office? The Bromcom QC is "shoebox"
size — making it the smallest and most attractive multi-user computer
ever.
PLUG IN AND GO!
Yes it's true! Simply plug in and switch on. Usermenus ensure even
the most inexperienced of computer users get the most from the
Bromcom QC.
NETWORKING!
The Bromcom QC is the first system specifically designed to act asa file server to the Amstrad
PC and is also an ideal file server for IBM, Olivetti, Ericsson and a host of other PC’s.
* subject to available RAM — 2 and 4 MB RAM options are available.
Dealer enquiries circle 128 on enquiry card
BETTER MULTI-USER COMPUTING
The Bromcom QC allows you to do four things at once! By using Digital
Research's Concurrent DOS/XM operating software, any of the four users
can run four’ programmes simultaneously. That's 16 tasks In all. And
you can change from doing one task to another instantly, at the touch of a
single key. Because Concurrent DOS runs almost all CP/M.and MS DOS
programmes there's no shortage of software to choose from. You can run
Pegasus, Omicron, Wordstar, — Solution, Dataflex, Tas
and many, many others,
BETTER EXPANDA ILITY
The Bromcom QC has numerous options for add-on expansion:
@ Industry ste ARC-Net networking
@ 4 extra serial synchronous/asynchronous ports
@ 40 r 80 MB Winchester option (instead of 20)
@ 20, 40, 80;150.0r 200 MB Winchester add on
@ 20 or 45 MB tape backup subsystem
@ 2 or 4 MB RAM option (instead of 1 MB)
BETTERFORYOU
Bromcom QC’s are great for any size of business. In small companies a QC
can handle all data and word processing activities in one, easy to use,
machine. In larger companies and institutions, a QC makes an ideal
departmental unit or for communication-between departments. Only a
few of the software packages available for the Bromcom QC are listed
above — there are over 1000 other possible applications.
ar wa
The Bromcom QC really is the natural progression from the PC. For further
details, or for demonstrations, contact us today.
BROMCOM :
THE Best DEA STN@E THE RC
oS,
Xx
Bromcom Computers Limited, 417-421 Bromley Road, Downham, Bromley,
Kent BR1 4PJ. Telephone: 014613737 Telex: 926012 BCOMG
[ ~ circle 129 on enquiry card i |
AMSTRAD PC-1640
MAKING AMENDS
By Glyn Moody
The unpleasant colour screen of the old PC-1512 been
replaced by an EGA-compatible display, but will this be
enough to give Amstrad its sought-after success in the
business market?
You can switch instantly from the old CGA-style display
(top) to the crisper EGA display (above).
tok 715 help
“ath ht ams Oo!
if contrested eochea |
e serly into commeplecs sith this avfal res Por
scar!
rly Into commmplace contrasted with
Tale t phones, te
labags ge loeraphs, loconct Ieee, cotton
i
ne thing you have to grant Alan
Sugar: he certainly seems respon-
sive to customers’ demands. First
he added what he himself claimed was a
completely superfluous fan to the PC-1512
following widespread worries about possible
overheating. Now, not only has he come out
with an upgraded version of the same
machine, the PC-1640, but he has even
brought it out in the UK well before he had
ofiginally intended — al! apparently
because potential customers had asked him
to.
This is hardly altruism, though. Sugar has
admitted that corporate sales of the PC-1512
have been disappointing; he has failed to
breach the Big Blue citadel. The latest
model is an attempt to address some of the
criticisms which the earlier machine
attracted, and in the process make it into the
business-micro big time.
Those criticisms centred around the dis-
play. Amstrad chose to put the power supply
for the whole PC-1512 system in the moni-
tor. This means that you cannot upgrade to
higher-resolution screens made by other
manufacturers. In particular, it acted as a
considerable obstacle to those who wanted
to install an EGA card, which in any case is
incompatible with the original system. This
has proved unfortunate for Amstrad, since
many companies have standardised on the
EGA display. Compatibility problems
apart, the PC-1512’s graphics look ropey in
comparison.
The PC-1640 has solved this at a stroke by
offering enhanced colour graphics that
Amstrad claims are fully EGA compatible.
This has been achieved by buying in a design
from Paradise, a firm that makes graphics
boards, and incorporating the new circuitry
on the main board. At the same time the on-
board memory has been increased to a full
640K. Prices are pitched at around £150
more than comparable PC-1512 machines,
and the top-of-the-range 20Mbyte hard-disc
colour system now costs £1,199. No mono-
chrome versions will be available.
Externally the new micro is very similar to
its predecessor. The only noticeable changes
over the old PC-1512 are some extra ventila-
tion holes in the system box and a row of
DIP switches at the back. The new holes are
there to allow the fan to function. And to
forestall any possible worries about the high-
resolution monitor overheating there is
even a fan in the VDU.
The DIP switches allow the video resol-
ution to be swapped between EGA and
IBM-standard CGA graphics and the same
effect can also be achieved using the Display
utility that is supplied on one of the discs
accompanying the machine. Swapping be-
tween different resolutions is easy. From the
DOS prompt you simply type.
DISPLAY EGA
to obtain EGA-compatible graphics. More
than a dozen different display options can
be selected in a similar way.
Apart from incorporating Paradise’s BIOS
for the enhanced graphics, the basic ROS —
Amstrad’s name for the ROM operating
system — remains unchanged, bar some
tidying up. There are four expansion slots,
one of which is occupied by the hard-disc
controller. Digital Research’s DOS Plus
operating system, which was bundled with
the PC-1512, is no longer included but Gem
Desktop and Gem Paint are still being
supplied.
In operation the PC-1640 is almost iden-
tical to its older sibling, though the two fans
are slightly obtrusive. Running the Basic
Benchmarks produced a figure of 7.0
seconds, practically the same as we found for
the PC-1512. The floppy disc also turned in
a comparable figure, though it did seem
much more noisy: one person in Practical
Computing’s office compared it to the
sound of knives being sharpened.
When reviewing the PC-1512 we were un-
able to test the hard disc. On the PC-1640
supplied this time there was a 20Mbyte hard
disc from Tandon. It turned in a very accept-
able time of 97 seconds running the Bag-
shaw Benchmarks, almost as fast as the hard
disc on the new IBM PS/2 Model 30. The
Amstrad is bound to be seen as one of the
Model 30’s main competitors, though on al!
AMSTRAD PC-1640
&
Performance
Ease of use
Documentation
Valueformoney [] [| OF @&
Even better value for money than the
PC-1512, but probably still not right for
corporate purchasers.
but the most irrational grounds there is
precious little reason to consider buying
IBM’s non-machine.
The main difference between the two
generations of Amstrad machines is in the
graphics, and here the Paradise technology
does Amstrad proud. The image shows no
sign of wavering, and text and graphics are
sharp and displayed in bright colours.
When the PC-1512 was launched it was
available at prices that were previously
undreamt-of. The down side was that the
overall standard of construction was inevit-
ably less than first class. For the personal
user, this is not likely to be too much of a
problem: after all, if you pay out your hard-
earned money on a piece of kit, you are
likely to look after it. But it is a sad fact of
working life that people in large companies
show precious little respect or consideration
for institutional machines.
Company micros need to have a higher
standard of construction to withstand daily
wear and tear. The PC-1640 is certainly a
successful upgrade as far as the display is
concerned, making it an excellent-value
budget machine. But there are no new con-
cessions to basic company needs in the area
of build quality. As a result, it cannot be re-
SPECIFICATION
MB REVIEW
CPU: 8086 running at 8MHz
RAM: 640K
ROM: ROS firmware
Mass storage: one or two 360K
floppies, or one floppy and one 20Mbyte
hard disc
Display: enhanced colour display
offering both EGA and CGA
compatibility :
Keyboard: standard old-style IBM PC
layout; separate numeric pad combined
with cursor keys
Interfaces: serial and parallel as
standard; mouse port and monitor
output; three full-length expansion slots
Dimensions: 372mm.(14.6in.) x
384mm.(15.1in.) x 135mm.(5.3in.)
Weight: 6kg. (13lb.)
Software in price: MS-DOS 3.2, Gem
Desktop, Gem Paint, Locomotive Basic 2
Prices: single-floppy version £799; twin-
floppy version £899; hard-disc version
£1,199
Manufacturer: Amstrad Consumer
Electronics, Brentwood House, 169 Kings
Road, Brentwood, Essex CM14 4EF.
Telephone: (0277) 230222
Available: now
commended as a workhorse business micro
unless the usage will be relatively light.
These worries about reliability are put in
an interesting light by persistent rumours
that Amstrad will bring out an AT compat-
ible in the not too distant future, possibly
80386 based. The AT is well established as
the standard business micro, and it could be
here that Alan Sugar’s chance to hit the cor-
porate market really lies, The PC-1640 ts not
sufficiently differentiated from the
PC-1512: both are best suited for personal
use. But a rather more stoutly made AT
compatible, combined with the same agres-
sive pricing shown on the existing machines,
could be a winner.
If it seems implausible that a company
should bring out a machine which effec-
tively supersedes a model launched only a
few months previously, bear in mind that
Amstrad did exactly that in the ‘home
market. So if you ate tempted by the
PC-1640, hang on a few months to see if the
Amstrad AT materialises.
If you must buy an Amstrad now, by all
means get the PC-1640. It is well worth the
price difference over the PC-1512. Despite
the company’s protestations to the contrary,
it is hard to see the PC-1512 still being in
existence at the end of the year.
CONCLUSIONS
The Amstrad PC-1640 is an upgraded ver-
sion of the PC-1512 with EGA-compatible
colour graphics and 640K of RAM.
WThe colour graphics are superb. Otherwise,
the performance remains unchanged.
MThe biggest problem with Amstrad PCs
remains their relatively low level of production
quality; in the rough and tumble of company
use they cannot compete with the more sturdily
built machines.
The PC-1640 seems almost certain to re-
place the PC-1512, which it thoroughly
surpasses for little extra cost. PC
Sr SS
PRACTICAL COMPUTING September 1987
37
MBREVIEW
IBM PS/2 MODEL 60
AHEAD OF ITS TIME
By Ian Stobie
One day the Model 60 could
become the standard business
micro, but as yet it does not
do much more than an
ordinary PC/AT.
Personal System/2, the new machines on
which its continued dominance of the
business PC market depends. The Model 60
is one of the key members of the range, a
kind of up-market replacement for the IBM
PC/AT. It has just gone on sale in Britain,
priced at between £4,500 and £5,000 for a
typical working system.
The Model 60 is very similar to another
PS/2 machine, the Model 50 which is about
£1,000 cheaper and of conventional desk-
top design. The Model 60 is meant to be
used propped up on its side in a vertical
position; feet fold out from the main system
box’s base so you can stand it on the floor. It
is about two feet high so it will fit under
some desks, though not unfortunately the
ones we were using.
Both machines have sufficient power to
run the new OS/2 operating system when it
becomes available at the start of next year.
At present IBM is shipping the machines
with PC-DOS 3.3. Both also use IBM’s new
Micro Channel expansion system; this
means they will take cards conforming to the
new standard but not old PC or AT ones.
It is much easier to get all the PS/2 models
apart than previous IBM machines. You can
remove the whole side panel of the Model 60
by metely twisting off two large screws witha
coin. For security there is also a lock on the
panel which. you undo with a key. Inside,
the Model 60 has twice as many expansion
slots as the Model 50: eight instead of four.
They are the 16-bit version of the full 32-bit
Micro Channel offered on the top-of-the-
range Model 80. For all but specialist users
16-bit cards are likely to be the norm for the
next few years.
On the PS/2 series graphics, comms and
pfinter support are supplied on the main
board, so you only lose one slot for the hard-
disc controller. If you want a mouse, the IBM
offering, which costs under £60, plugs into a
socket on the back of the machine, so you do
not need a slot for this function either.
We had the base Model 60 machine,
which comes with a 44Mbyte hard disc and
one 1.44Mbyte double-sided 3.5in. floppy
drive. There is room for an extra hard disc
inside the box, and another 3.5in. floppy
[: April of this year IBM announced
below the existing one on the front of the
machine. Both disc drives are fairly quick.
The hard disc is about 20 percent faster than
the PC/AT drive at our standard Bagshaw
Disc Benchmarks, which puts it in the same
league as most good AT clones.
The Model 60 and the Mode! 50 are also
similar to the AT when it comes to pro-
cessing power. They are based on the Intel
80286 chip, as opposed to the more
powerful 80386 used on the Model 80 and
many of the more up-market AT clones. The
new IBM machines run the 80286 at a
slightly faster clock rate than the AT, but
they are still broadly similar in performance
terms. Running the SI command in the
Norton Utilities, for example, the Model 60
comes out at 10.1 as opposed to the 7.7
attained by a standard IBM PC/AT witha
8MHz clock. This makes the Model 60 only
about 30 percent faster than the AT.
IBM PS/2 MODEL 60
Performance
Ease of use
Documentation
Valueformoney []) # OF) OJ
O Possibly destined to be a top-selling
office machine, but with few practical
advantages at present over an AT ora
cheaper clone.
The VGA display chip inside the Model
60 takes over the functions of the EGA or
CGA display card used on previous IBM
systems. IBM offers a range of new monitors
to go with it. With our system we had the
8512, at £505 the cheapest of the new colour
monitors IBM is offering.
The VGA standard has had a good press,
but we were disappointed with it. The
characters seem very upright on the display,
and you get little distinction between letters
like m and n. The screen also had a kind of
grey tinge to it, which we did not like.
IBM has not preserved full compatibility
with its previous character set. Loading up
PFS Professional Write we noticed vertical
stripes running down the opening screen. It
emerges that this problem is caused by a
small change in the graphics character set.
Some of the grey-scale characters are one
pixel narrower, hence the stripes. This
problem does not appear to affect solid or
line characters, and the program itself still
worked quite happily. But it is irritating, as
it is a completely unnecessary source of
incompatibility which must be laid at the
door of IBM itself.
Where the new display standard does
come into its own is in graphic applications,
particularly those especially written for it.
We had a PS/2 demo version of a drawing
package called Dr Halo, and the effects
available were impressive. While the VGA
maximum resolution of 640 by 480 is not
that much of an advance on the EGA, what
makes the difference is the range of colours
you can choose from: up to 16 at a time at
top resolution or 256 at 320 by 200 dots. The
active colours can be selected from a palette
of over quarter of a million hues.
The Model 60 keyboard is the now
standard IBM type, with 12 function keys
atrayed horizontally along the top and a
separate set of cursor keys in addition to its
numeric keypad. The layout is therefore
identical with recent AT keyboards.
Following normal IBM practice the keyboard
is not lumped in the price, so you could buy
a third-party product instead.
With the PS/2 range IBM has now fully
embraced the 3.5in. floppy-disc format.
IBM provides two ways of transferring data
from the 5.25in. format. The first option is
the obvious one — a second external floppy
disc for the PS/2 machines in 5.25in.
format. IBM currently only offers a 360K
version, so you cannot transfer data from
1.2Mbyte AT floppies in this way.
More elegant and also much cheaper is the
grandly named data migration facility. It
costs £24 and consists of a small box-like
adaptor that you plug into the parallel
printer port on the back of the PS/2. You
then use an ordinary IBM printer cable. to
connect up to the printer port on another
PC. This system lets you transfer files from
1.2Mbyte floppies, 360K floppies or the
hard disc.
We had no trouble getting both programs
and data across in this way from our AT to
the Model 60. It was quick too. The only
problem with the migration facility is that it
is purely one way. PS/2 machines have a bi-
directional printer port, but most other
machines and third-party printer cards can
only send. If you want to send files both
ways you would need to use the external
drive or resort to the RS-232 serial ports and
a conventional comms package.
Software is beginning to arrive now in
3.5in. format, though most of it is standard
38
PRACTICAL COMPUTING September 1987
MBREVIEW
Above: Good colour graphics are the
Model 60’s main claim to fame.
Below: The data-migration facility.
PC-DOS stuff. Many publishers are
following the lead of Microsoft and putting
both discs inside the box when they sell
retail packages. To get some kind of feel for
how the Model 60 might look when OS/2
applications are run on it we tried out
Guide, a newly written hypertext program
which runs under Microsoft Windows and
makes extensive use of the mouse and the
PS/2’s graphics. The combination had a
remarkably Macintosh-like feel to it.
The documentation that IBM supplied
with our copy of PC-DOS 3.3 was pretty
feeble. As with the earlier PC-DOS supplied |
with the AT you get an introductory user's
guide full of patronising pictures of parrots.
But instead of the full DOS reference
manual you only get an abridged version
about a quarter the size. Apart from a slim
manual for the monitor, we received no
other documentation with the Model 60,
although a DOS technical reference manual
is available if you pay extra for it.
Perhaps the key distinction between the
main members of the PS/2 range and earlier
IBM systems is the Micro Channel expansion
bus. The first cards will mainly be from
IBM itself: the company has announced
network adaptor catds, 3270 terminal
emulation, and an optical-disc interface. So
far third-party suppliers have mainly
announced memory products. At the
moment this shortage of expansion cards
puts all the PS/2 machines above the Model
30 at a severe disadvantage compared to a
conventional AT or clone. The Model 60 |!
suffers particularly on this point, as its whole
rationale is that it has more Micro Channel
slots than the cheaper Model 50.
aoe
SPECIFICATION
CPU: 80286 running at 1OMHz; optional
80287 co-processor
RAM: IMbyte, expandable to 16Mbyte
Expansion: eight16-bit Micro Channel
slots; seven normally free to user
Disc¢s: one double-sided 3.5in. floppy
drive plus one 44Mbyte hard disc
standard; 70Mbyte and 115Mbyte hard
disc also available, plus additional built-in
3.5in. floppy and external 360K 5.25in.
floppy drive
Display: built-in VGA controller offers
compatibility with MDA, CGA and EGA
and maximum 640 by 480 resolution in
16 colours; monitors are sold separately
Interfaces: bi-directional parallel
printer port, RS-232C serial port, mouse
port
Dimensions: system box
597mm.(23.5in.) x 483mm.(19in.) x
165mm.(6.5in.)
Price: £4,075 for system box with
40Mbyte hard disc
Extras: keyboard £185, PC-DOS 3.3
and Basie £70, mouse £58
Monitors: 12in. monochrome £201;
14in. colour £505, 12in. high-definition
colour £583, 16in. very high-definition
colour £1,204
Manufacturer: Made in UK by IBM
Corporation of Armonk,. New Jersey
UK supplier: !BM UK, 414 Chiswick
High Road, London W4 5TF. Telephone:
01-995 7700
Available: now
CONCLUSIONS
The Model 60 is a well-made system broadly
comparable in power to the existing IBM
PC/AT. Its key distinguishing features are its
use of the VGA graphics standard, the Micro
Channel expansion system, and its floor-
standing design.
M@For graphics work there may be some point
in standardising on the new VGA graphics
standard — the colour in particular is very
good — but for ordinary text work it offers
little.
The Model 60’s main claim to fame is its
seven free Micro Channel slots. But until more
cards are available to put in them the Model
60 is at quite a severe disadvantage compared
to a conventional AT or clone.
The Model 60 is really a machine for the
future. For the time being, anything that runs
MS-DOS software and contains an 80286 chip
can do most tasks equally well. PC)
PRACTICAL COMPUTING September 1987
a9
~
. A
Though 80386-based PCs have been around for less than a year, it is already low price rather
which newcomers to the market stake their claim.
than technical specification on
ith the lower end of the PC
market now going through a re-
latively calm period as far as
both technology and pricing are concerned,
the cut-throat battles have moved to the
more lucrative arena of the power-user
market. First to be hit were the conventional
AT compatibles. Prices tumbled from an
initial £5,000-plus to the current low of
around £1,200 for a fully equipped unit.
Now machines using the Intel 80386 pro-
cessor have been drawn into the war zone,
and the prices being asked by the big names
like Compaq, IBM and Zenith are already
beginning to look rather silly.
But before parting with any cash for a
budget clone it is worth asking some search-
ing questions. This ts especially the case
when the hardware involved is so advanced
as to be years ahead of its applications and
operating-systems software base. Hardware
and software standards to support the
powerful 32-bit processor are still emerging,
and there are no guarantees that the smaller
manufacture will still be around to maintain
the development of their particular imple-
mentations of the standard.
The two machines reviewed here are just
the first salvo from the price-cutters to be
aimed at the big boys precisely where it hurts
them most — at their corporate and power-
user base. The Dell 386 is the brainchild of
22-year-old American entrepreneur Michael
Dell. In just three years he has expanded his
US mail-order PC business from $1,000
start-up capital to a turnover of almost $70
million. He now plans to tackle Europe with
the same mail-order techniques and is start-
ing with the UK from his Bracknell head-
quarters. The machines will not be available
through dealers but must instead be ordered
by phone, to be delivered by courier to your
door in around a week. The Dell range also
includes conventional 80286-based AT
compatibles.
Mission is a company that made its name
in esoteric hi-fi. In recent years it has diversi-
fied into PC networking, and now offets a
range of PCs. The Mission 386, which is the
subject of this review, is designed and
manufactured by Advanced Data Logic, an
American company, but it will be fully
supported in the UK by Mission from its
Huntingdon base. This powerful machine
40
PRACTICAL COMPUTING September 1987
took the recent PC User Show by storm as it
sported a sub-£2,000 price tag. Quite who
would be interested im such a high-per-
formance machine without a hard disc is
hard to imagine, but hats off to Mission fora
great publicity stunt.
Both the Dell and the Mission machines
follow the bulky three-box approach and are
of a similar size and weight to IBM’s
PC/AT. There is no evidence of design ele-
gance in either model, but the Mission does
have a useful stand which will allow you to
get the monster system box off the top of a
crowded desk and on to the floor.
The Dell 386 has a 1.2Mbyte 5.25in.
floppy drive mounted on its front panel
above a blanking plate where a second
floppy can be fitted. Alongside the con-
ventional AT keylock is the most eye-catch-
ing feature of the Dell: a four-digit green
LED indicator panel that the company has
christened Smartvu. It bursts into life as
SPECIFICATIONS
DELL 386
CPU: Intel 80386 running at 16MHz
RAM: I Mbyte static RAM
Mass storage: 5.25in. 1.2Mbyte
floppy; 40Mbyte, 70Mbyte or 150Mbyte
hard disc
Display: Hercules mono or EGA colour
Keyboards: 84-key old-style AT layout
Software in price: MS-DOS
Price: monochrome system complete
with 40Mbyte hard disc £3,264
Manufacturer: Dell Computer
Corporation, Farley Hall, London
Road, Binfield, Bracknell, Berkshire
RG12 5EU. Telephone: (0344)
863420
Available: now
4
v ae
soon as the machine is switched on, and can
therefore be used to display messages before
the screen has warmed up. In normal use it
displays information about hard-disc
activity or confirms the current processor
operating speed, but its most useful role will
be for diagnostics. In truth it is a gimmick,
but one that has some beneficial spinoffs.
The Mission, on the other hand, has no
flashing lights to alleviate the tedium of the
standard AT design. Once again a 1.2Mbyte
5.25in. floppy is a standard fitment, but in
this case there are apertures for a further two
half-height drives.
As you would expect from machines
aimed at the power user there is a wide
variety of mass-storage options. The Dell is
sold with either 40Mbyte 70Mbyte or
150Mbyte units. The first two have an ex-
cellent 28ms. average access time, and the
last an even better 16ms. access time. The
base-model Mission has no hard disc at all,
MISSION 386
CPU: Intel 80386 running at 16MHz
RAM: 2Mbyte
Mass storage: 5.25in. 1.2Mbyte
floppy; 40Mbyte, 80Mbyte or 130Mbyte
hard disc
Display: Hercules-compatible
monochrome
Keyboard: 102-key new-style AT
layout
Software: MS-DOS, Desqview 2
Price: monochrome system with
40Mbyte hard disc £3,290
Manufacturer: Advanced Data Logic
UK distributor: Mission Electronics,
Stonehill, Huntingdon, Cambridgeshire
PE18 6ED. Telephone: (0480) 57477
Avallable: now
but serious users will be relieved to hear that
40Mbyte, 80Mbyte and 130Mbyte units are
available with access times of 28ms., 23ms.,
and 19ms. respectively.
With the covers taken off the boxes it is
the Dell that once again attracts attention.
The distinguishing feature this time is the
small motherboard, a result mainly of the
Dell’s remarkably low chip count. The
Mission machine uses a more conventional
approach, but in terms of performance it
loses nothing in the process.
Both machines run their Intel 80386
processors at 16MHz, a clock speed which
has become the norm for 80386-based
computers. The one notable exception is
IBM’s PS/2 Model 80, one vetsion of which
runs at 20MHz. To ensure compatibility
with existing IBM packages the Dell’s pro-
cessor can be made to emulate the PC/AT
running at 12MHz or the IBM PC running at
4.77MHz. Hardware compatibility with
PC/AT expansion cards is assisted by the
ability to switch the expansion bus, which
normally runs at 12MHz, down to a more
AT-like 8MHz.
The Dell 386 contains 1Mbyte of RAM on
a special memory board that plugs into its
32-bit expansion bus. The bus runs at the
full 16MHz, and to maximise its speed ad-
vantage over the competition Dell has fitted
static RAM, which does not require a refresh
cycle to maintain its contents. Since the
Dell’s static RAM chips are manufactured
using CMOS technology they also use less
power and as a result produce less heat than
normal dynamic RAM (DRAM) chips. Static
RAM is more expensive to fit in the first
place, and is more expensive than DRAM to
expand, but it does give an edge to the
Dell’s performance. The standard memory
board just has 1Mbyte, but memory can be
expanded to an impressive 6Mbyte by
plugging in additional strips, each con-
taining nine 256K CMOS chips.
Mission’s approach is more conventional,
utilising high-speed 80ns. 32-bit memory
chips. All machines sold with hard discs are
fitted with 2Mbyte of memory as standard.
There are two full-speed 32-bit slots, so users
can expand memory to 8Mbyte without
occupying any PC or AT slots.
Both machines have the basic features of
battery-backed clock/calendar as well as
serial and parallel ports — two of each in the
Sa
PRACTICAL COMPUTING September 1987
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(continued from page 41}
case of the Dell. Display-adaptor options
confirm the feeling in the industry that the
CGA standard is no longer acceptable. The
Dell offers just two types: a Hercules-
compatible monochrome system and an
EGA system based on the Video 7 adaptor
card. Mission has yet to finalise its display
options, but the review machine was
supplied with an ADC EGA card driving the
superb but pricey Taxan 770 colour monitor.
In a welcome move, Dell is making the sys-
tem unit available without keyboard and
monitor, so you can choose your own display
system and keyboard if you wish.
When it comes to keyboard design the ad-
vantage goes to Mission. Although Dell
offers the superior expanded AT layout in
America, this unit has yet to find its way
across the Atlantic. Users will have to make
do with the adequate but dull 84-key old-
style AT layout. Mission users on the other
hand get a full 102-key ATE unit, which is
both better made than the Dell keyboard
and has a more satisfying key action.
It is not surprising that both these
capacious machines perform well as card
cages. In most cases memory will be placed
in the 32-bit slots leaving the remaining
eight-bit and 16-bit slots free. The Dell
starts with one 32-bit, five 16-bit and two
eight-bit slots; with all the necessary support
boards in place three 16-bit and one-eight
bit slot are left vacant. Mission’s bare 386
board has two 32-bit slots, four 16-bit slots
and two eight-bit slots, and ends up with
one 32-bit, one-eight and two 16-bit slots
available to the user.
Both machines also offer good mass-
stotage expansion potential. A further three
half-height devices can be fitted to either
machine. But while the Mission allows front
access to two of them, the Dell gives you
access to only one.
It has long been obvious that machines as
powerful as these desperately need an
alternative operating system to the MS-DOS
that currently encumbers them. The
memory-management capability of the
80386 chip is in excess of the 8Mbyte
maximum that the machines currently offer.
Yer there seems little point in going even
this far when MS-DOS can only cope with a
measly 640K. Dell and Mission both
promise that their machines will come into
their own when Microsoft’s OS/2 becomes
available, but only Mission has bundled in
software that can exploit advanced memory-
addressing capability.
It is when you come to processor-intensive
tasks that the 80386-based machines really |
score over even the fastest 80286-based AT
compatibles. In the Basic Benchmarks tests
the Dell came in at 1.69 seconds and the
Mission at 2.07 seconds. It seems that Dell’s
efforts in providing high-speed RAM have
paid off, as it mow ranks as the fastest
machine we have tested. But even the
Mission is well within the range that is
normal for 80386-based AT clones. The
Kaypro 386 manages 2.03 seconds in the
same test, and the Zenith Z-386
1.86-seconds timing. The current record
holder is the Apricot Xen-i 386, which
turned in a timing of 1.75 seconds.
The speedy processor performance also
comes through loud and clear when the ma-
chines are actually being used for day-to-day
applications. Tasks that otherwise take a
second or two, such as searching a spelling-
checker dictionary, are completed more or
less instantly, and complex spreadsheets no
longer take an age to recalculate.
Running the Bagshaw Disc Benchmarks,
the Dell’s hard disc achieved a total timing
of 27.2 seconds, marginally faster than the
Mission’s Priam unit which managed 28.8
seconds. The difference is so small as to be
imperceptible in practice, and both are fast.
DELL 386
&
O
2@)
Performance Oo
Ease of use oO
a
Documentation
Valueformoney []) [] OF @
( Good-value high-performance
machine available only through mail
order but backed by a one-year on-site
maintenance guarantee.
MISSION 386
GIVERDICT y é
> S 2
& £€ § F
Performance Bo OC
Ease of use a wa oe
Documentation HOF OF DO
Valueformoney [] (1) OD
CO Good value and high performance;
available through conventional dealer
outlets.
The 40Mbyte hard disc on the Zenith Z-386
was timed at 32.4 seconds. It would be un-
wise to attach too much importance to these
figures as hard discs fitted to production
units may change from time to time. Users
should, however, beware the Mission, as
some unauthorised dealers may get hold of
the basic unit and fit cheap — and much
slower — hard discs. This would make a
nonsense of buying an 80386-based ma-
chine, as for most applications the per-
formance of the processor and support chips
would be completely drowned out by the
long access times of an inferior hard disc.
The Dell Computer Corporation has
written its own BIOS for the 386, but it does
not seem to pose any special problems. We
found that most packages will mun at
16MHz, though Lotus 1-2-3 and a limited
number of other packages have to be
ofiginally loaded on to the hard disc at a
slower speed, as on most 80386-based
MBREVIEW
machines. Mission’s 386 uses a 386 ROM
BIOS from the established Phoenix
Compatibility Corporation. Once again we
encountered no problems running main-
stream software, and as on the Dell there is
always the option of slowing down to
12MHz from the keyboard if necessary.
Comparing the display qualities of the
two EGA machines it was immediately
apparent how much crisper the Mission’s
screen was. But this feature must be mainly
attributable to the advanced monitor
supplied as part of the review system. Both
machines are noisy, so it is worth keeping
them on the floor rather than in front of you
on the desk — for the sake of your ears as
well as to leave some desk space. A floor
stand is supplied with hard-disc Missions,
but as yet no such extra ‘is available for the
Dell.
If you are fussy about documentation you
will usually find that it pays to buy a PC
from an established manufacturer. These
two machines underline the point: the Dell
was supplied with a couple of brief hardware
booklets, one covering the basic PC and the
other covering the EGA display adaptor. If
you purchase MS-DOS you will get the full
Microsoft documentation, which must rate
as some form of consolation. The Mission
fared little better in the hardware area, and
for the multi-tasking environment you have
to make do with a small booklet.
If his business in going to succeed in the
UK, Michael Dell is going to have to over-
come the traditional British reluctance to
spend large sums of money by mail. To
order the machine you simply phone
through your precise requirements, taken
from the options listed on Dell’s price list.
Included in the system price is a one-year on-
site watranty arranged through Honeywell
Bull, with a promised response time of one
business day. Operating problems short of a
complete breakdown will be dealt with by
an unlimited telephone hotline service avail-
able from Dell’s Bracknell head office
during normal office hours.
The Mission setup is altogether more con-
ventional as the hardware is only being sold
through authorised dealers. The Mission 386
has a two-year warranty on the basic system
unit and one year on drives and other
mechanicals. Maintenance agreements will
be available from dealers as an extra-cost
option.
| CONCLUSIONS
MBoth machines offer high performance
levels. The Dell is marginally faster, but you
will need a stopwatch to detect the difference.
Hardware and software compatibility .are
excellent in both machines thanks to switch-
able processor and expansion-bus speeds.
Dell and Mission are new names to the PC
world and have yet to establish themselves.
This may not be a crucial factor in 8088- or
80286-based machines where the design of
the architecture is now fixed; but it should be
given greater weight in 80386 designs as
standards have yet to emerge in this area.
BDespite Mission’s show-stopping £1,999
claim, it is the’ Dell that looks better value for
money, thanks in the main to its one-year on-
site warranty.
PRACTICAL COMPUTING September 1987
43
WALTERS AT
Standard model. Price includes:
@ CPU 80286/clock speed 6 MHz/8 MHz
switchable
@ 8-slot motherboard
@ 640k memory on board
@ |.2 mbytes floppy disk
@ floppy disk controller
@ keyboard
@ clock/calendar
@ mono monitor
@ high resolution mono and parallel printer
card
Spec as above with 20 mbytes Winchester
£1375
Spec as above with 30 mbytes Winchester
£1700
Spec'as above with 40 mbytes Winchester
£1720.
Spec as above with 80 mbytes Winchester
£2190
fier ,
ye wk nD +
HIE
If you’re in business and looking for an AT compatible, you'll
want a machine that is not only very competitively priced,
but also highly |BM compatible.
You'll be looking for something with the potential to
expand and adapt — to add more storage for example, or a
colour monitor and high resolution graphics card. Or
perhaps you're looking for a machine to fit into a network.
And you'll want to buy from a reliable, well-established
company that knows the marketplace.
Then you really should be looking at the Walters
International AT range. Ring Walters for further
information today or send off the coupon and you could be
in business.
| — circle 133 on enquiry card ~
Meee al.
Portable. Price includes:-
@ CPU 80286/clock speed 6 MHz/8 MHz
switchable
@ 6-slot motherboard
@ 640k memory on board
@ | .2 mbytes floppy disk
@ floppy disk controllei
@ keyboard
@ clock/calendar
@ 9” integral mono monitor
@ high resolution mono and parallel
printer card
International
Job Tithe: <.. aaa... ati aex..... =
PA GROSS iscmerenteove.: memrere ccc cnc sce:
Please send to:
Walters international Ltd., Matrix House, Lincoln Road,
Cressex Industrial Estate, High Wycombe, Bucks HPI2 3RD.
£1130
| would like to find out more about PC compatibles from Walters
|
|
| GO Mmpany) semeses ec see ese. 2 ees
|
|
___ChooseWalters _
and you’re in business
£1060
WALTERS BABY AT
Small footprint model. Price includes:—
@ CPU 80286/clock speed 6 MHz/8 MHz
switchable
@ 8-slot motherboard
@ 640k memory on board
@ |.2 mbytes floppy disk
@ floppy disk controller
@ keyboard
@ clock/calendar
@ mono Monitor
@ high resolution mono and parallel
printer card
Processor casing measures |7” wide x 16”
deep X 6" high
Spec as above with 20 mbytes Winchester
£1445
Spec as above with 30 mbytes Winchester
£1770
Spec as above with 40 mbytes Winchester
£1790
Spec as above with 80 mbytes Winchester
£2260
WALTERS
PORTABLE
AT
Spec as left with 20 mbytes Winchester
£1515
Walters’ machines have a !2-month
warranty. An optional 2-year maintenance
contract is available for 12% of the system
cost,
MS-DOS with GW-Basic is available for £60.
These are just some of the products in the
Walters’ range. Others include a selection of
XT compatibles and portables; a 386
machine; networking and multi-user options;
a variety of printers; and a wide choice of
peripherals and add-ons.
WALTERS
INTERNATIONAL
——— eT ee
All prices quoted are exclusive of VAT and correct at time of going to press. IBM is the registered trademark of International Business Machines.
250 Kbits/s
.. 11.3 Mbits/s
. Standard Atari connector
standard Atari connector
* cant rt . 128K
lias types : oi oubour (ao0ST: FM) us yi
DMA (Direct Memory Access) OPERATING SYSTEM
* real time clock as standard
* TOS with GEM environment in ROM
GRAPHICS * hierarchical file structure with
* full bit-mapped display a sub-directories and path names
* palette of 512 colours user interface via GEM, with setf
explanatory command functions
* multiple windows + icons
* window resizing, re-positioning and erasing
* drop down menus (selected by mouse)
Using Atart Monitors (on 520 & 1040):
640«400 high resolution - monochrome
* 640*200 medium resolution = 4 colours
* 320%200 low resolution - 16 colours "GEM 1 devil tert
* 80 column text display (40 col low res) GEA el casice Mites?
Using Domestic TV (on 520): COMMUNICATIONS
° 640200 medium resolution - 4 colours ® RS-232C serial modem port
* 320*200 low resolution - 16 colours * 8-bit parallel printer port
* high precision
* 2 button contro!
* tree with 520ST-FM/1040ST-F
* non stip bali motion sensor
* MIDI port (also tor networking use)
¥ * VT52 terminal emulation
_
KEYBOARD
* 40 columns * 25 line text display
SOUND AND MUSIC
*3 programmable sound channefs_
* frequency programmable 30Hz - 125KHz * removable bail for easy cleaning * standard QWERTY typewriter format
a geerammebie Hass = oar viet stroke keys
wave lynamic envelope shaping I inction keys
* programmable attack, decay, sustain, release STANDARD SOFTWARE * 18 key numeric keypad + cursor keys
* Musical instrument Digital Interface (MIDI) * GEM desktop + TOS operating system * variable auto-repeat & key click response
iJ
© MIDI allows connection of synthesisers etc. * ST BASIC interpreter/an. e system * keyboard processor reduces CPU overhead
guag
ON LY | ROM The affordability of Atari computers Is refiected inthe price ol the For the businessman and the more serious home user, Atari have
Finally, there’s a personal computer that not only solves problems lke other computers, but also solves I 520ST-M keyboard, which is a mere £259 (Inc VAT). This version of their most powerful model, the 1040ST-F with 1028K RAM. This low
the one problem that other computers have created. Atfordability. Silica Shop are pleased to present the am the ST comes with 512K RAM, as well as a modulator and lead for cost powerhouse can be introduced into a business environment as
ST range of personal/business computers from Atari. The ST was designed utilizing the most recent direct connection to any domestic TV. The price does not include a a stand-alone system, or can support a mainframe computer as a
breakthroughs in semiconductor technology, producing a personal computer that performs tasks with mouse. In addition, when you buy your 520ST-M from Silica, you terminal, The 1040ST-F not only features twice as much memory as
fewer parts, Which means it costs less to make. And less to buy. The latest ST computers now include Mm Will also recelve the FREE Silica ‘ST Starter Kit’. During 1987, many the S20ST-FM, but also Includes a more powerful built-in disk drive,
built in power supplies and built in disk drives. The TOS operating system and GEM window environment IM Software houses will be producing games software on ROM cart- The drive featured on the 1040ST-F is a one megabyte double sided
are now on ROM chips which are already installed in the ST keyboard. This enables automatic instant ridges, which will ptug directly into the cartridge slot on the 520ST- model. The extra memory facility of the 1040ST-F makes it ideal tor
booting when you switch on. Silica Shop are pleasad to offer the complete Atari ST range. Our mail order aM keyboard, giving instant loading without the expense of purchasing mm SpPlications such as large databases or spreadsheets. Like the
department is situated In Sidcup and we have 4 retail outlets at Sidcup, Orpington, Lion House 8 disk drive. With the enormous power of the ST, you can expect 520ST-FM, the 1040ST-F has a mains transformer built into the
(Tottenham Court Rd) and Selfridges (Oxford Street). We have eight years axperience of Atari products, mm sOme excellent tities to be produced, making this the ultimate games console opis a compact and stylish unit with only one mains lead,
longer than any other UK company, and are well established as the UK's No.1 Atari specialist. With a machine! If your requirement Is for a terminal, then the 520ST-M can 1040S7-F is also supplied from Silica Shop with a tree software
group turnover of over £5 million and in excess of 70 staff, we provide unbeatable service and support. We fulfill this role too. Leads are available to connect the ST to a variety package and ‘ST STARTER KIT”. In the USA. the 1040ST-F has been
provide several facilities which you will find invaluable during your Atari computing lite and most of these of monitors, and with the imminent introduction of terminal software sold with a TV modulator like the 520ST-FM. However, for the UK
facitities are available ONLY FROM SILICA. We suggest that you read through what we have to offer, a on ROM cartridge, the ST provides a low price terminal for business Mg 8’ket, Atari are manufacturing the 1040ST-F solely with business
before you decide where to purchase your Atari ST. use if you wish to take advantage of the massive range of disk use In mind and it does not currently Include an RF modulator, this
Srp software available for the ST range, you will need to purchase a disk means that you cannot use It with a domestic TV (Silica Shop do
FREE STARTER KIT - Only From Silica drive. Atari have two floppy disk drives available. a 4 Mbyte model offer a modulator upgrade for only £49). The 1040ST-F keyboard
When you purchase any Atari ST keyboard, you will‘not only receive the best value for money computer MM £149 and a tMbyte model £199. Full details of these drives, as well MB COSt® only £599 (Inc VAT) and, unless a modulator
on the market, but you will also receive the following from Atari Corporation as part of the package as the Atari 20Mbyte hard disk are available on request If required J UP9'ade is fitted, will require an Atari or third party monitor. There
* BASIC Language Disk ‘BASIC Manual * ST Owners Manual * TOS/GEM on ROM at a later date, the mouse may be purchased separately. are three Atari monitors available and the prices for the 1040 with
if you buy your ST from Silica Shop, you will also receive: these monitors are as follows ’
* NEOchrome - colour graphics program * 1st Word - Word Processor 1040ST-F Keyboard Without Monitor ~ £599 (inc VAT)
In addition, we at Silica would like to see you get off to a flying start with your new computer, so we have 1040ST-F Keyboard + High res mono monitor - £699 (inc VAT)
put together a special ST STARTER KIT worth over £100, which we are giving away FREE OF CHARGE 1040ST-F Keyboard ¢ Low res col monitor - £799 (inc VAT)
with every ST computer purchased at our normal retail prices. This kit is available ONLY FROM SILICA 1040ST-F Keyboard + Med res col monitor ~ £899 (inc VAT)
and is aimed at providing users with a valuable introduction to the world of computing. We are continually The 1040ST-F comes with a mouse controller and includes tMbyte
upgrading the ST Starter Kit, which contains public domain and other licensed software, as well as books, of RAM. it has a tMbyte double sided disk drive and mains trans-
magazines and accessories ail relevant to ST computing. Return the coupon below for full details former, both built into the kayboard to give a compact and stytish
DEDICATED SERVICING - Only From Silica a
At Silica Shop. we have a dedicated service department of five full time Atari trained technical staff. This
eam is totally dedicated to servicing Atari computer products. Their accumulated knowledge, skill and
experience makes them second to none in thelr field, You can be sure that any work carried out by them
is of the highest standard. A standard of servicing which we believe you will find ONLY FROM SILICA. In
addition to providing full servicing facilities for Atari ST computers (both In and out of warranty), our
team is also able to offer memory and modulator upgrades to ST computers.
Mb RAM UPGRADE: Our upgrade on the standard Atari 520ST-M or 520ST-FM keyboard will
increase the memory from 512K to a massive 1024K. It has a full 1 year warranty and is avarlable trom
Silica at an additional retail price of only £86.96 (+VAT = £100).
TV MODULATOR UPGRADE: Silica can upgrade the 1040ST-F to include a TV modulator so
that you can then use it with your TV set. This is an Internal upgrade and does not involve any unlidy
external boxes. A cable to connect your ST to any domestic TV is included in the price of the upgrade
which is only £49 (inc VAT). The upgrade is also available for early 520ST computers at the same price.
THE FULL STOCK RANGE - Only From Silica
We aim to keep stocks of all Atari related products and our warehouse carries a stock of £% million. We
import many software titles direct from the USA and you will find that we have new releases in advance of
many of our competitors. Unlike dealers who may only stock selected titles, we have the full range. In
addition, we carry a complete line of all books which have been written about the Atari ST. A range as
wide as ours is something you will find is available ONLY FROM SILICA.
AFTER SALES SUPPORT - Only From Silica
Rest assured that when you buy your ST from Silica Shop, you will be fully supported. Our free mailings
give news of releases and developments. This will help to keep you fully up to date with what's happening
in the Atari market. And in addition, our sales staff are at the end of a telephone line to service all of your
Atari requirements. If you purchase an ST from Silica and would like any programming or technical
advice, we have a full time technical support team to help you get the best from your computer. Because
we have both the staff and the systems specifically dedicated to providing after sales service on Atari ST
computers, we are confident that our users enjoy an exceptionally high level of support. This can be
received ONLY FROM SILICA.
FREE CATALOGUES - Only From Silica
At Silica Shop, we recognise that serious users require an In-depth Information service, which is why we
mail free newsletters and price lists to our ST owners These are up to 48 pages long and are crammed
with technical details as well as special offera and product descriptions. If you have already purchased an
ST and would like to have your name added lo our mailing list. please complete the coupon & return it to
us. The information service is available ONLY FROM SILICA.
FREE OVERNIGHT DELIVERY - From Silica
Mos! orders are processed through our computer within 24 hours of receiving them. Most hardware
orders are sent by the overnight METRO courier service FREE OF CHARGE to customers within the UK.
This method helps to ensure minimum dejay and maximum protection,
PRICE MATCH - Only From Silica
We hope that the combination of our low prices, FREE UK delivery service, FREE Starter Kit and FREE
atter sales support, will be enough to make you buy your Atari equipment from Silica Shop. If however,
there is something you wish to purchase, and you find one of our competitors offering it at a lower price,
then please contact our sales department, providing us with our competitors name, address and
The 520ST-FM with 512K RAM and free mouse, represents a further
breakthrough by Atari Corporation In the world of high power, low
cost personal computing. This model is the latest addition to the ST
family, and is not only powerful, but compact. It is priced at only
£399 (Inc VAT) a level which brings it within the reach of a whole
new generation of computer enthusiasts. When purchased from us,
it comes with the FREE Silica ‘ST Starter Kit’ see paragraph on the
left. To make the 520ST-FM ready for use straight away, Atari have
built into the keyboard a 4 megabyte disk drive tor information
storage and retrieval. allowing you easy access to the massive range
of disk based software which is available for the ST. This new
computer comes with all the correct cables and connections you will
need to plug it straight into any standard domestic television set
You do not therefore have to purchase an Atari monitor. If you do
require a monitor however, these are avaliable with the 520ST in the
following money saving packages:
520ST-FM Keyboard Without Monitor - £399 (inc var)
520ST-FM Keyboard + High res mono monitor ~- £499 {inc VA
520ST-FM Keyboard + Low res cofour monitor ~- £599 {inc VA
520ST-FM Keyboard + Med res colour monitor - £699 {inc VA.
Because the 520ST-FM has its own power transformer built Into the
keyboard, there are no messy external adaptors to clutter up your
desk space You are left with only one mains lead, serving both the
disk drive and the computer. You couldn't ask for a more stylish and
compact unit.
@SeEEEE Be EERE EEE
To: Silica Shop Ltd, Dept PC 0987, 1-4 The Mews, Hatherley Road, Sidcup, Kent, DAI4 4DX
telephone number. If our competitor has the goods in stock, we will normally match the offer (on a ‘same
product - same price’ basis) and still provide yqu with our normal free delivery. We realise that we are not [) |
the only company who will match a competitor's price. However, if you come to us for a price match, you ae. " <
will also be entitled to our after sales service, including free newsletters and technical support. This Mr/Mrs/Ms: hls Initials: aes Sumame: ..........
makes our price match promise rather special, something you will receive ONLY FROM StLICA We don't
want you to go anywhere else for your Atari products. So shop at Silica, the U's No1 Atari Specialist r Address: I : eens : ere es,
SIDCUP (& Mail Order) .... 01-309 1111
1-4 The Mews, Hatherley Road, Sidcup, Kent, DA14 4DX
LONDON ; ee 01-580 4839
Lion House (ist floor), 227 Tottenham Court Rd, London, W1
LONDON - ee 01-629 1234 ext 3677
Selfridges (1st floor), Oxford Street, London, W1A 1AB
ee wy =
It so, which one do youown? = _.
om Sw se
| — circle 122 on enquiry card —
MB REVIEW
CAMBRIDGE Z-88
THE WRONG MIX?
By Carol Hammond
Compromises are inevitable when you set out to build a cheap
battery-powered computer that is small and light enough to be
used anywhere.
under the name of Cambridge Com-
puter. Any micro from the man whose
previous company, Sinclair Research, spear-
headed the home-computer boom with the
ZX-80, ZX-81 and ZX-Spectrum would be
interesting. What makes the Z-88 worthy of
note is that it is a lap portable, complete
with software, which costs about £250. If the
machine fulfils Cambridge Computer’s
claim to have produced ‘‘the first portable
with full personal-computer facilities’ then
it will certainly have proved to be a price
breakthrough.
The Z-88 comes in a grey carrying case
which looks as though it is made of plastic-
coated cardboard and has a black plastic
handle. Flimsy though it is, you could use
the case to carry the Z-88 around in as the
machine is very light. However, the case
does not look as if it would last very long,
nor does it fit in with an executive image.
Most people will probably just pop the Z-88
into a briefcase.
One of the advantages of the Z-88 is that
it is truly portable. It is light — weighing
just under 2lb. — slim, and takes up about
as much space as an A4 pad. The casing is
made of black plastic and has a built-in
T he Z-88 is Clive Sinclair's first offering
screen in the top face. Below the screen lies a
stick-on panel which lists the most com-
monly used key combinations, and below
that is the keyboard.
On the right-hand side there is an RS-232
serial port and a plastic panel that pulls out
to reveal the Z-80 expansion bus. On the left
is a mains adaptor port, a dial to adjust
brightness, and a small hole which houses
the Reset button. To reset the machine you
poke a piece of wire or a paper clip into the
hole and jab twice.
On the front edge there is a clear plastic
window covering a row of three cartridge
slots. You flip out the window to insert
RAM or EPROM cartridges. On the bottom
face of the machine is another plastic panel
which you can pull out, enabling you to rest
the Z-88 at an angle of 12.5 degrees. Below
this is a smaller panel that covers the battery
compartment.
.The Epson-built LCD screen is clearly
legible. The background is a sage-green
colour and text appears in purple. Unfortun-
ately, youcan only display eight lines of data
at time. This is a common problem with lap
portables, and one that Cambridge Com-
puter has been unable to solve. There is
plenty of space underneath the existing dis-
Below: The four LSI chips on the mother-
board are augmented by a large number
of discrete components.
Below right: EPROM cartridges are
used for mass storage.
PRACTICAL COMPUTING September 1987
BUILT-IN SOFTWARE 5
To switch on the Z-88 you press the two Shift keys at the same time.
The machine comes with applications and pop-downs built-in. The
applications are Diary, Pipedream, Basic, Import/Export, Terminal
and Printer Ed. What Cambridge Computer calls pop-downs are
what most people call pop-ups: they can be called up within an
application and perform simple tasks. They are Calculator,
Calendar, Clock, Alarm, Filer and Panel.
} When you first turn on the machine you are met by the main
menu or Index. You can return to the Index screen at any time by
| pressing the Index key. The screen is divided into four parts. The
‘| application you are in is displayed on the left together with a list of
| the menus available within it. To the right is a box listing the
applications and pop-downs that are available.
Another box, titled Suspended Activities, lists the activities
| being held within the machine. For example, it gives the name of
the application, along with the date and time you last looked at it.
You can re-enter a suspended activity by selecting it using the cursor
and pressing Enter. Finally, there is an area which will give messages
telling you if your batteries are low or if the alarm is set. You can
| select an application or pop-down using the cursor keys and Enter,
or by hitting the Square key and the appropriate letter — say, P for
Pipedream.
Pipedream provides the Z-88's word-processing and spreadsheet
facilities. Here the screen is divided into three parts. To the left is
| the list of menus available, which you select using the Menu key.
You carry on pressing the menu key, and the relevant menus appear
as each menu is highlighted. In the middle is the text area, where
up to six lines of text can be displayed.
he right isa page-display map
uch gives you an overall view
Be current page of the
Each character in the document is represented by a dot on the map.
I did not feel that this was really of much help: it is so small it can
only give a vague impression of what the page layout looks like. It
also squandets a substantial chunk on the display area. I would have
preferred this space to have been given over to an enlarged text area
orto displaying the menu options. As it is, calling a menu brings
up a list that covers the screen, obscuring the document you are
working on.
Menu options are selected either by using the cursor keys and
Enter or by using the Diamond key followed by the appropriate
letters. Unfortunately, some of the key sequences are three or four
letters long, which is quite a lot to remember. At first I got into
strange contortions trying to press five keys at the same time. When
this proved unsuccessful I realised that a sequence was required.
Sometimes you have to press the same key twice in succession, say,
Diamond, L,L,C,R
which still calls for some agile fingerwork. In some cases it took
several fist- banging attempts to get what I wanted done because the
keyboard did not seem to be responding.
There are over 70 such combinations you could try to remember.
Some of them were fairly easy to remember, like
Diamond, E,J,L
to join lines in the Edit menu. But with so many options, the need
to avoid repetition means that a lot of them do not have obvious key
combinations:
Diamond, P,O
means Print, for example. The stick-on label lists most of the
commonly used options and their key combinations.
The built-in software covers an ambitiously wide range. The word |§
processor and spreadsheet provide a good selection of useful
features and the pop-downs are a valuable bonus, though the
conversion facility on the calculator did not seem to work on our
machine. Ona few occasions the Z-88 also put up error messages
which we could not find listed in the manual.
play to house a larger one, should that
become a possibility. Nevertheless, the Z-88
can display a full 80-character line, which is
a lot for the price and its size. Though the
characters are of necessity small, I had no
problem reading them.
The keyboard is said to have been speci-
ally designed to be silent. In fact it is a mem-
brane keyboard of the same ilk as that found
on the ZX-Spectrum. The disadvantages of
this is that its rubber surface feels something
like a pair of well-used Wellingtons — some
people call it ‘‘dead flesh’’. I did not find it
difficult to use for short periods but I would
not like to have to type a long article on it.
On the plus side, it does succeed in being
PRACTICAL COMPUTING September 1987
quiet, and emits only a muffled thud when
the keys are depressed. This could be an
asset if you want to use the machine in lec- |
tures or meetings, or anywhere else where
the clatter of a conventional keyboard might
Prove irritating to people around you. You
can adjust the keyboard to make a clicking
sound if you wish, using the Panel utility
which is part of the built-in software.
The keyboard has 57 alphanumeric keys
and a space bar, as well as Esc, Tab, Shift,
Del, Enter and Caps Lock keys. It also has
two Shift keys, four cursor keys, Index,
Menu, Help, Square and Diamond keys.
The keyboard on the machine supplied to us
was different to that exhibited at the Which
Computer? Show last February. The show
machine had a Topic key instead of an Index
key, and some of the keys have moved
around. Cambridge Computer says the Dia-
mond key has been moved to make it easier
for touch-typists to reach, and that Topic
was felt to describe that key’s function more
clearly than Index.
The stick-on label on the Z-88 we had was
also different to the one that appeared on
the original version, with different key
combinations for commands. This is an indi-
cation that the software has changed since it
was first shown. Cambridge Computer says
that it is delays in developing the software
that account for the late appearance of the
Se SS SS SS ninved on pege 49)
47
The new Minstrel 4EP computer with 8 users-
* including laser printer.
£18,469 complete [leans iaclcesced Riki)
The new Minstrel 4EP is leading the way in the field
of multi-user computing performance. Its well proven
multi-processor architecture has the power to replace
mini-computers in those demanding multi-user applica-
tions. It surpasses networked PCs as a solution, and is
unparalleled with regard to price, performance, and
reliability. An outstanding range of multi-user software
is available to meet your precise requirement.
But dont just take our word as to how unbeatable
the Minstrel 4EP is, ask some of our users: British
Telecom, British Gas, MOD, BUPA, DHSS, Banhams,
Mardev, DTI, Alton Towers, numerous hospitals and
many small and medium companies.
| “i
SPECIFICATION
@ 3-19 IOMHz processors per EP each with 512Kb or IMb RAM,
® Internal Winchester drives of 20-300Mb capacity.
Average access time 16.5mS on larger drives.
@ SCSI interface.
@ Maximum 40 serial ports.
@ Tape Streamer 60Mb in 12 minutes.
@ Maximum processing power 95mips
@ ARCNET local area network.
@ 254 other 4EPs, PCs or APRICOTS may be connected toa4EP. }
Pg eae Gis STARTER SYSTEM £6950"
including 20MB Winchester, 20MB tape
streamer and two users with terminals.
can solve your
computer prob-
lems call us today on 01-209 0911 or return the coupon
below.
HM Systems plc,
220 The Vale, London NWII 8HZ.
Telephone: 01-209 O9II.
HM oystems PIC telex: 266828-HMS G.
Each additional 2 users inc. terminals £2260*
“All prices are exclusive of VAT.
Name |
Title
Company |
Address ‘ 7 |
|
| Phone Pcie |
SS ———_—————————— a
— circle 123 on enquiry card —
(continued from page 47)
Z-88. It was originally intended to be
shipped in April, and at a lower price than
that now being asked.
The ROM and EPROM cartridges that slot
into the front of the machine are a similar
size and shape to the Sinclair QL’s Micro-
drives, measuring about two inches square
and a quarter of an inch high. They slot into
place easily. Any programs written for the
‘Z-88 — apart from those already built-in —
will be supplied in cartridge form.
The EPROM cartridges are the nearest the
Z-88 gets to a conventional mass-storage
device. EPROMs store text and other data
semi-permanently. They are available in
32K and 128K cartridges — our machine
had a 128K EPROM — up to three of which
can be plugged in at once. Cambridge Com-
puter says that 1Mbyte EPROM cartridges
should be available in September. Also
available is an ultraviolet EPROM eraser that
wipes existing data, allowing a cartridge to
be used again.
BATTERY-BACKED RAM
The Z-88 comes with 32K of RAM, of
which 10K to 15K can be used for data.
Additional RAM is available — our machine
had 128K of-extra RAM — and once again
this comes in 32K and 128K cartridges with
a IMbyte version due in September. Data is
erased from the RAM cartridges when they
are removed, or if the machine is deprived of
power. Normally the machine goes into
Sleep mode when you turn it off, and all the
data in the resident RAM cartridges remains
intact.
But problems arise when you change
batteries. The Z-88 uses four AA batteries
which are meant to be enough for approxi-
mately 20 hours normal use, or about a year
when the micro is turned off. To conserve
battery power the Z-88 will automatically
turn itself off and go into Sleep mode if the
keys have not been depressed for a given
amount of time — you can choose how long.
Turning the machine on again returns you
to your application at exactly the point
where you left it.
When you change batteries it is advisable
to safeguard data in RAM by temporarily
connecting the Z-88 to the mains; an
adaptor is supplied at extra cost by Cam-
bridge Computer. Otherwise you are going
to have to be pretty nifty when changing
batteries. The manual includes a table
showing how much time you have, de-
pending on the number of RAM cards
fitted. With one 128K RAM card you have
four minutes to change your batteries; with
three fitted you have a mere 60 seconds.
Of course, it should not take that long to
change a set of batteries, but you could be in
trouble if your power ran out unexpectedly
while you were stuck in the middle of no-
where with no spares to hand. The Z-88
gives a warning on-screen when the batteries
are low, to help you avoid such accidents.
On one occasion we could not get the Z-88
to switch off by the normal means of pres-
sing both Shift keys simultaneously. Rather
than waste a new set of batteries by leaving it
SPECIFICATION
CPU: CMOS Z-80 running at 3MHz
ROM: 128K containing C-DOS operating
system and applications software together
with BBC Basic
RAM: battery backed; 32K as standard,
expandable using 32K, 128K and Mbyte
cartridges to 3Mbyte
Display: Epson super-twist LCD screen;
eight by 80 characters, 64 by 640 pixels
Keyboard: 64-key QWERTY-layout
membrane keyboard
Dimensions: 293mm.(11.5in.) x
209mm.(8.25in.) x 23mm.(0.87in.)
Weight: 0.85kg. (1.87!b.)
Mass storage: up to 3Mbyte
removable storage using 32K, 128K and
1Mbyte EPROM cartridges
Interfaces: three cartridge expansion
slots, RS-232 serial port, mains adaptor
port, Z-80 expansion bus
Software in price: spreadsheet, word
processor, simple database selection,
diary, calendar, calculator, clock and
alarm
Optional extras: mains adaptor,
£9.95; RS-232 cable, £9.95; I/O software
cable for IBM data transfer, £14.95; 32K
RAM cartridge, £19.95; 128K RAM
cartridge, £49.95; 32K EPROM cartridge,
£12.95; 128K EPROM cartridge, £49.95;
ultraviolet eraser, £29.95
Price: £249.95
Manufacturer: Cambridge Computer,
Sidney House, Sussex Street, Cambridge
CB1 1PA. Telephone: (0223) 312216
Available: now
on overnight we removed them and wiped
out the data being held in RAM.
The Z-88 is not meant to be opened up by
users, and there should not normally be any
reason for doing so. We managed to get at
the inside by undoing 11 screws. The dis-
play’s innards lie at the top, directly con-
nected to the one and only board. Below the
display lies a plastic battery housing and L-
shaped board. The board curves around the
box for the cartridges, which is held in place
by a long strip of brass.
Four large chips are mounted on the
board. From left to right they are an NEC
1Mbit EPROM, a 256Kbit static RAM, a
logic array, and the main processor — a
Zilog CMOS Z-80. Below them and to the
left is a small loudspeaker. The substantial
logic array helps to keep the component
count low, but there is still a surprisingly
large number of discrete components in the
form of transistors and fesistors.
Cambridge Computer was unable to
supply a printer cable in time for us to try
MBREVIEW
out the Z-88’s printing capability. The Z-88
uses an RS-232 serial port for printing,
which is also slightly worrying. Cambridge
Computer claims that it can be used with
most popular printers, though the cheapest
models usually have a parallel port as stan-
dard. To convert a printer to serial operation
could cost you about £30, possibly adding a
hidden cost to buying a Z-88.
The documentation was fairly helpful,
though it 1s not without errors. One tutorial
instructs you to press the Square and Down
Arrow rather than the Diamond and Down
Arrow when using the Calendar, which con-
fused me for a while.
The Z-88 is said to be aimed at business,
professional and educational users. Its
closest rival is probably the Tandy 102,
which costs £299. The Tandy machine
displays fewer characters on-screen and has
slightly less memory but it does have a full-
travel keyboard, and parallel and serial
printer ports. It also has a built-in modem
— though it is not approved for use with the
UK phone network — along with a separate
modem port. Software in the form of a text
processor, Basic, and address and scheduler
programs is also standard. The Multiplan
spreadsheet is available at extra cost. For
business users it could well prove a more
appealing option than the Z-88.
CAMBRIDGE Z-88
&
O
L
Performance oO
Ease of use ‘Gl
Documentation (]
Valueformoney () @# OF O
{\The budget feel of the machine will
probably prevent it frem finding
favour among business users.
CONCLUSIONS
WOn paper the Z-88 looks good value for
money. Its spec is impressive, especially the
built-in software; it is light and easy to carry
around, and has o clear display. But it is let
down by the membrane keyboard, the lack of
a parallel port and the messy way in which you
access menu options within the software.
MWhen assessing the machine it is worth
adding in the price of extras like a mains
adaptor and printer cable, and possibly also
the cost of adapting your printer to serial oper-
ation; its price may then be less appealing than
it appears at first sight.
MIBy spending a little more money on its
machine, Cambridge could have removed its
faults. Its cheapness will no doubt attract a lot
of interest, but giving the machine such a
budget feel could well prove its downfall.
For simple data capture the keyboard is
probably bearable; for writing, the benefits of
a full-travel keyboard are likely to be missed.
MThe Z-88 may prove suitable for educational
use, especially by students, but business users
will probably prefer something more’ refined
like the Tandy 102. PC)
PRACTICAL COMPUTING September 1987
49
MBREVIEW
PRINTER STANDS
HIGH-TECH ORANGE BOXES
By Carol Hammond
Continuous stationery is cheap and convenient but for one problem — what to do with the
stream of printout spewing forth from your machine. Printer stands are designed to keep the
problem under control with printer, paperstack and printout supported on one neat unit.
problems of using a printer: where to
put the paper. They store the paper to
be used and come with a tray to catch the
printed output. However, for those using
more humble printers, paper handling still
presents a problem that many people look to
printer stands to solve.
If you use continuous stationery you need
to position your printer so that there ts a
clear path for feeding paper into it, and
somewhere for the resulting output to go,
where it can be neatly folded. Otherwise you
may find that the printout gets crumpled, or
that it starts feeding itself back into the
printer mechanism. To avoid this you may
have to rig up your printer in a way that
takes up quite a lot of room. Even then you
may feel that it is necessary to stand over it
while it is in action, in case any paper gets
caught.
People buy printer stands to overcome
these annoyances. Stands cost anything from
£10 to £300, so it seems there must be many
different ways of solving the problem. We
looked at a variety of stands, from the cheap
to the expensive, which adopt different ways
of housing printers and paper.
The first one we looked at was the Uni-
versal PC Printer Stand; at £12.75 it was also
the cheapest. The Universal consists of five
pieces of smoked plastic, complete with
slots, which you put together yourself. It is
quite easy to assemble. A diagram is pro-
vided, and each section of the stand has
letters embossed on it so you know to
connect each piece to another with the
matching letter.
One piece sits horizontally, and two other
pieces are placed vertically at either end of it.
The horizontal piece has four slots; the two
outer ones are for housing a 132-column
printer, and the two inner ones for an
80-column printer. You rest your printer on
this horizontal base. There is another piece
which acts as a lip to prevent your printer
from sliding off, since it will be lying at an
angle, sloping towards the front. The re-
maining piece is the paper guide, which
slots in at the back. It has two cut-out shapes
at either side of it to feed printer cables
through. The Universal is meant to have
stick-on rubber feet but ours arrived without
} aser printers solve one of the awkward
them.
Although the Universal stand looks
flimsy, it proved to be quite sturdy. Un-
fortunately, it did not seem to be of much
use. You can put your paper underneath the
stand in order to save space, and you can
feed it through the paper guide to the
printer and then out quite easily so that it
does not get creased. But the stand has no
mechanism to fold the paper or catch it, so it
is still free to go awry.
The Amaray stand consists of one piece of
smoked plastic suitable for an 80-column
printer. The stand has three sides to it, the
largest having a hole in it to feed paper
through for bottom-feed printers. The stand
we used had a crack in the front, so it
obviously did not travel well through the
postal system and must have been quite
brittle. With the Amaray stand, again, you
just put your printer on top and your paper
beneath, so you save some space and make a
clear path to feed paper into the printer.
The Datasafe Printer Carrier comes in
80-column or 132-column models. Both are
made up of two pieces of plastic: the main
stand and a catcher tray. The 132-column
model can be used with bottom-feed
printers. One piece is box shaped but with
two side pieces missing. One of the re-
maining side pieces has a hole in it from
which a panel pokes out to form a paper
guide. The top edge of this side of the stand
does not join to the piece of plastic above it,
but has a rubber edge. Paper is stored inside
the stand and feeds through this open edge
to the printer, which rests on top of the
stand. The output falls into a catcher tray
which fits on to the back gf the stand below
the paper guide.
CURLED PAPER
Although the Datasafe stand makes some
attempt at catching the paper and keeping it
in one place, when we used it the paper
started to curl around itself and did not fold
up neatly. A carefully positioned cardboard
box with a hole in one side would have been
just as efficient. There is the advantage,
however, that as you move the stand you can
move the paper stored inside it.
At this point we began to feel that printer
stands were largely a waste of time and
money. Unless the printer stand actually
folds the paper coming out of it, there seems
little point in having one. On all the models
we tested up to this point the paper could
still get creased, and we would not have
been happy to leave the printer to its own
devices during a long printing session.
The Misco Micro Fold stand, however, has
a paper-folding compartment which worked
successfully when we tried it. The Micro Fold
stand costs almost £60, but it works so
efficiently it is probably worth the expense if
you doa lot of printing. It is certainly one we
would use in our office.
The Micro Fold is supplied in eight
separate pieces plus a bag of screws. It
looked as though assembly might be a
complex and frustrating task, but in fact
very clear instructions are provided and we
were able to put the Micro Fold together in
about 15 minutes. The small piece of plastic
that was left over when we had finished
proved to be a clip to hold the printer cable
in place.
RECUMBENT V
Once assembled, the Micro Fold looks like
a V lying on its side. Your printer rests at an
angle on the raised part of the V shape.
Underneath the printer lies a wire tray where
your printout is refolded. Beneath this tray
there is room for an input stack about 1.5in.
thick. If you want to do a print run that
requires more paper you can feed it in from a
bigger stack at the front of the Micro Fold.
A metal plate at the back of the stand
separates the incoming paper from the
printout. It can be adjusted according to the
type of paper or printer used to ensure the
paper feeds through at the right tension. A
helpful diagram of how to feed in paper is
stuck on to the stand. The Micro Fold can be
used with bottom-feed printers too.
Encouraged by this, we moved on to use
the Inmac Desksaver, which employs a
similar vertical arrangement to store and
fold paper. It is supplied as three separate
pieces of plastic which, once assembled, are
claimed to form a printer stand with a
smaller footprint than the printer itself.
The largest piece resembles a four-sided
box. You place one piece at the bottom of
the box to form a tray for the stack of new
paper, while the last piece hooks over the
edges of the large box to form a deep tray to
(continued on page 52)
50
PRACTICAL COMPUTING September 1987
MBREVIEW
PRINTER STANDS
PRINTER DIMENSIONS | MATERIAL SUPPLIER | PRICE
WIDTH (mm.} i |
Universal PC Printer Stand 132 col 450x475x110 plastic PAS £12.75 :
| oe ee eee .
Amaray Printer Stand | BOcol_ | 400x349x108 | plastic PAS | 2368 | battam-feed
Space Maker 80 col 400x 300x115 metal Inmac £29 | paper stored beneath stand and folded beside it; suitable for top-
| feed printers
Datasafe Printer Carrier > 80 col 381 x 450x 140 plastic PAS £46.80 i paper stored beneath stand; printout feeds into tray behind
- +
Misco Micro Fold 80 col 415x 460x380 metal Misco £59 paper stored and folded beneath stond; suitable for top and
bottom-feed printers
Datasafe Printer Carrier 132 col 597 x 450x140 i. plastic | PAS £61.80 suitable for top- and bottem-feed printers
Desksaver 80 col 280 x 571x365 plastic | Inmac £65 paper stored and folded beneath stand; suitable for tap- and
LI bottom-feed printers
Ergo Lowstand 132 col 600 x 800x410 metal Inmac £139 paper stored and folded beneath stand; suitable for top-ond
_ bottom-feed printers; optional castors
Autofold 132 col 680x800 x720 metal costars cost £7 extra
DIMENSIONS are quoted as width x depth x height
Top row: Ergo Lowstand (left), Desksaver
(middle), Misco Micro Fold (right).
Middle row: Database Printer Carrier
(left), Space Maker (right).
Bottom row: Autofold (left), Universal PC
Printer Stand (below), Amaray Printer
Stand (right).
| inmac 16 Silver Road, London W12 7SG. Telephone: 01-740 9540
Misco Computer Supplies 4 The Western Centre, Western Rood, Bracknell, Berkshire RG12 1RW. Telephone: (0344) 482121
PAS Computer Products Datasafe House, Unit 4, Central Trading Estate, Staines, Middlesex TW18 4UP. Telephone: (0784) 62781
PRACTICAL COMPUTING September 1987 5]
MBREVIEW
{continued from page 50}
take the printout. The printer rests on the
top of the box, poking out from either side
of the stand. We found that paper fed into
the printer without any problem, but it did
not fold up easily and had a tendency to curl
up. Moving the bottom tray to the front,
back and middle of the stand seemed to
make no difference. There were no in-
structions to tell you where to position it,
and the Inmac catalogue shows the tray in
three different positions. We felt that users
would not be getting much for the £65 that
they would have to pay for a Desksaver.
Disillusioned, we moved on to the Space
Maker stand, which comes with a foldaway
basket to save space. The Space Maker is
supplied fully assembled, looking rather like
a wire cage shopping trolley.
The main unit has two levels. The top part
is a square piece of plastic on which you sit
your printer; underneath it there is a wire
tray where you store the paper stack. A
second wire tray, connected to the first, nor-
mally dangles down vertically — say, beside
your desk — but it can be pulled up and
slotted into position to accept printout. We
found that the Spacemaker performed satis-
factorily — both as regards feeding paper in
and in folding the output. It also had the
virtue of not taking up much room. How-
ever, the movable basket should be
positioned where passers-by cannot bump
into it, since it might rip clothing. Unless
you want to move the printer and stand
every time you use it, you would also have to
leave room to swing the basket up into
place, so perhaps you would not save much
space after all.
At £269, the Autofold stand was the most
expensive we tried out. As you would expect
for that sort of price, the Autofold was big
and heavy. Opening up the box it came in
revealed something that looked like a cross
between a desk, a cooker and an exercise
bicycle. Assembling it was straightforward,
but it took two people because many of the
parts were heavy and awkward to position.
The sheet of instructions supplied was
reasonably helpful, but did not show clearly
how to position the wire divider tray. Once
screwed together, using the tools provided,
it certainly looked built to last. We fitted
castors because it would otherwise have been
far too difficult to move around.
The Autofold has three levels. The top isa
flat, plastic-covered surface on which the
printer rests. Underneath it lie two metal
trays for the paper stack and the printout.
The trays can be positioned at six different
heights according to the amount of paper
you need to accommodate.
In use, the Autofold did not quite live up
to its impressive appearance. We found our
printout did not fold very easily, and there
seems to be little reason to pay so much
money for a stand unless you do a great deal
of long-run printing. It might also be
appropriate if you use a very large or heavy
printer and want to be able to wheel it round
the office.
The Ergo Lowstand, the second most
expensive stand we tried, looked like a cut-
down version of the Autofold. Like the
Autofold it is robustly built, but it has only
two levels: the upper houses the printer and
the lower the paper. A wire tray protruding
from underneath the top level can be ex-
tended to take printout. The stand worked
well when we put it to the test, folding up
paper without any difficulty. It is more
expensive than the Misco stand, but has the
advantage that it can be wheeled around on
castors and is very well built.
If you have decided on a particular printer
stand, try to see it in use before you buy it —
photographs may paint a flattering image of
a particular model’s capabilities. If you buy
from a catalogue, check that you can get a
full refund if you are not satisfied. Finally,
keep an eye open for empty crates or card-
board boxes. With a little bit of time and
ingenuity you might even be able to set up a
suitable arrangement of your own.
CONCLUSIONS
@ Overall we were disappointed by the printer
stands we tried.
@ Price seems to bear little relationship to the
functionality of the product; if anything it
depends on the material from which the stand
is constructed.
Wilf you are buying a stand, go for a model
that will fold up your printout.
WAvoid the temptation to overspecify: some
of the more expensive models are so.soundly
built that they will still be as good as new long
after your last continuous-stationery printer
has been replaced by a laser.
FONTASY
Doing for desktop publishing what Borland have
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Riera 7 App Os Fonts
; DISPLAY GROUP 2. DECORATIVE & ORNATE
GROUE Soe i
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i ERIGATS H Rotunda ses vai
wg “ih cing, MM Femttices
. A600 son neta tn Sate
. ¥ LARCH LPBRE
°° ** Mee tet te ue
Scgcgsa
FONTASY brings affordable desktop pubilshing to the IBM PC. Your
newsletters can use different typefaces, Include drawings and reserve
room for photos. FONTASY shows you an on screen, "what you see Is what
you get" Image. Page size Is limited only by memory, not by screen size.
Since Its launch FONTASY has won wide accialm in the UK computer
press with comments such as:
"Where FONTASY really scores Is on pricing. There is nothing comparable
at the price". PERSONAL COMPUTER WORLD: Dec. 1986.
"it is simple to use and easy to learn. For once a program seems to have
been written with the end user in mind.”. PRACTICAL COMPUTING: Nov.
1986.
"FONTASY Is easily the best budget desktop publisher that | have come -
across" PC USER GROUP May 1987.
Menus for novices.
CN
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Free-hand drawing.
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A realistic price tag.
FONTASY FEATURES
On-Screen fonts as you type.
Includes 28 great fonts.
Includes 60 pleces of Clip Art
400 more fonts available.
Over 2000 Clip Art pictures available.
Select and position Cilp Art easily,
250 page tutorial style manual.
Two handy quick reference cards.
Extensive on-screen help.
Magnify and shrink on-screen.
Magnify at print time.
Smoother print time magnification.
Sideways banners many feet long.
Multi column newsletters.
Proportionally spaced text.
Centring and right justification.
Kerning and word wrap.
Lines (rubber band style).
Rectangles (boxes).
Draw with keyboard or mouse.
33 user defined "Soft Keys".
Move things around (blocks)
Turn an area sideways, upside down or mirror image.
Black and white reversals.
UNDO (and UN-UNDO).
Read text from ASCII flies.
Save and restore Images on disk.
Combine several image files.
Fill-in with any of 95 patterns.
Drivers for a wide range of dot-matrix and Laser printers.
Font editor avaliable.
Free Technical support.
Lots of examples included on diskette.
NEW FONTASY PUBLISHER AVAILABLE PHONE FOR DETAILS
THE CTRL ALT DELI, 44 Brownbaker Court, Neath Hill, Milton Keynes, MK14 6JH Tel: (0908) 662759
52
> circle 138 on enquiry card <
PRACTICAL COMPUTING September 1987
Prospero Software
y, LANGUAGES FOR MICROCOMPUTER PROFESSION?
Prospero Software is dedicated to languages and to customer support.
For an opinion ash a colleague; for information call 01-741 8531 or write to
Prospero Software Ltd, 190 Castelnau, London SW13 9DH, England.
HB SOFTWARE REVIEW
GEM APPLICATIONS
LOW-END DTP AND WP
By Susan Curran
Digital Research’s mouse-driven front end has so far not found
much favour with the writers of applications software, but some
home-grown programs have now arrived to fill the gap.
to play a major role in the PC market it
will have to be well supported with app]i-
cation packages. Of course, any min-of-the-
mill PC applications can be called up from
the Gem front end, but what are needed are
proper Gem-style applications with mouse
support, windows, slide bars, pull-down
menus and the rest. Not many independent
software suppliers have produced the goods,
and it seems that Digital Research has
cottoned on to the fact that it will have to
ptoduce some of these packages itself, if
only to get things started.
The results of this thinking are Gem
Desktop Publisher and Gem Ist Word Plus,
a word processor. Desktop Publisher is a
low-end product as desk-top publishing
(DTP) packages go and was developed by
Digital Research itself. The word processor |
was bought in and adapted. Both have the
Gem format. They interrelate with Gem
graphics packages and are very competitively
priced. It is essential to have graphics capa-
bility in order to use these programs, and
colour is desirable. It is also more or less
essential to have a mouse: though keyboard
alternatives to the mouse commands are
provided, they are fail-safes and do not add
up to a true alternative interface.
Gem ist Word Plus has been packaged by
Digital Research with the Gem Desktop
itself, including the usual range of output |
drivers. You also get Gem Paint, a pleasant |
little painting program. Amstrad owners are
presumed already to have Desktop and
Paint, and can buy Ist Word Plus alone at a
lower price. Separate discs and manuals for
all three come together in a hard slip case.
The standard Gem manual style is soft-
covered and spiral bound. The cover
graphics are pretty and the reference
material is reasonable, though the writing
style is rather leaden. More seriously, the
authors seem to have no idea of what consti-
tutes a proper tutorial.
1st Word Plus comes on two unprotected
floppy discs. One holds the main program
and the spelling checker, while the other is
for the mail-merge package. Using the usual
Gem procedures it is easily installed on a
hard-disc machine; it would be very hard
work to use Gem applications with floppies
alone.
4 f Digital Research’s Gem front end is ever
The program opens with a document-
selector screen, which then leads to an
editing screen. Gem applications can never
be clean-screen programs as all the usual
mouse-and-windows clutter has to be dis-
played. In 1st Word Plus there is also a note
of function-key assignments at the bottom
of the screen, totally hemming in a little text
window, though you can pull down the text
window to hide it if you wish. The key-
assignment strip indicates whether boldface,
underline and the like are toggled on or off,
but it is less useful than it might be because
it displays only unshifted key assignments.
The program uses shifted function keys as
well, but no Alt or Control combinations.
Most function-key assignments are in any
case duplicates of the menu functions.
There is no automatic context-sensitive
help, but among the pull-down menus there
is a help menu which provides a list of
topics. On the start-up screen there is a
fount table which provides very easy access
to mon-keyboard characters; it is also
accessible from the main screen if you shift
the text windows. There is also a key box
which allows you to click with the mouse
instead of pressing Space, Return, Delete
and various other keys. To keep it on-screen
while typing, though, would mean losing a
hefty chunk of text space.
Ist Word Plus works by default in an
insert mode, without automatic refor-
matting. It displays italics, boldface and the
like, and justifies your text on-screen.
Although the program handles a small range
of fount sizes, this is not reflected in the dis-
play. It is painfully slow in responding to key
presses: it is not difficult for a moderately
fast typist to race several words ahead of the
display.
JERKY SCROLLING
The usual mouse-type cursor afrangement
is provided to get you around the text
screen. You move a pointer with the mouse
or the cursor keys and then click on its
position to move the text cursor. This works
well, and text highlighting that is necessary
to define blocks or change type styles is also
smooth. Horizontal scrolling is rather jerky
and vertical scrolling is even worse, as the
whole screen is continually rewritten.
1st Word Plus does not handle files that
are too long to fit into memory, but it will
handle multiple documents up to the full
SPECIFICATIONS
GEM 1st WORD PLUS |
Description: mouse-orientated word |
processor with spelling checker and mail-
merging
Hardware required: |BM PC, PC/AT,
PS/2 or compatible with at least 512K
RAM; Hercules or compatible graphics
card; suitable mouse or pointing device
Copy protection: none
Price: £149.94, including Gem Paint
and Gem Desktop; Amstrad version with-
out extra Gem programs £69.50
Publisher: Digital Research, Oxford
House, Oxford Street, Newbury,
Berkshire RG13 1JB. Telephone: (0635)
35304 i
Available: now
GEM DESKTOP PUBLISHER
Description: page makeup program
with limited editing facilities; requires
separate word processor and graphics
package
Hardware required: IBM PC, PC/AT,
PS/2 or compatible with at least 512K
RAM; IBM, Hercules or compatible
graphics card; suitable mouse or pointing
device
Copy protection: none
Price: £295
Publisher: Digital Research, Oxford
House, Oxford Street, Newbury,
Berkshire RG13 1JB (0635) 35304
Available: now
extent of memory capability, and you can
‘move text around from one document to
another.
The menus are sensibly arranged and pro-
vide most of the usual commands, including
block move, copy and delete, and delete
line; there is no delete word command.
Automatic footnoting, left, centre and right
headers and footers, and search and replace
are available, along with the usual options.
There is a background print facility.
Variable rulers are held within the file and
saved with it, and you can set up format files
with starting rulers or text to be associated
with files that have different suffixes.
The spelling checker has an in-built
40,000-word dictionary — that puts it on
the smallish side — and you can set up
vatious supplementary dictionaries. An
unusual feature is the possibility of
amending the main dictionary. Words are
checked in context, after a lengthy wait
while the dictionary ts loaded, but the
checker is oddly uninformative. It simply
SS SSS
54
PRACTICAL COMPUTING September 1987
VORDPLUS
1ST WORD PLUS
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Top: Ist Word Plus can handle as many documents as there is room for in the memory.
Above: Desktop Publisher’s double-page display shows how graphics and text will fall.
stops the cursor next to the questionable
word, leaving you to correct it by hand.
Though 1st Word Plus does not offer
much in the general direction of DTP, it
does allow you to combine pictures with
your text. The graphics must be available as
Img files on disc — that covers Gem Paint
files, but not images from Gem Draw — or
have been copied to disc with Gem Desk-
top’s Snapshot feature. Pictures can be
moved, but you cannot crop or scale them.
You can also superimpose text or other pic-
tures over a picture. The program has a
graphics mode that shows the full pictures,
and a non-graphics mode in which a box
defines the space the picture fills.
The mailing-list organiser, called Ist
Mail, will merge letter outlines with data
files created either in Ist Word Plus itself or
with most databases. Ist Mail is a free-
format program, with no fixed address tem-
plate. It works on a command basis, which
makes it reasonably flexible, but possibly a
little confusing for novices. It will auto-
matically reformat text around variable
data, and data from the same record can be
used several times. Form letters and com-
mand files can be nested or chained. The
only thing it lacks is a selection facility.
All in all, 1st Word Plus is a neat little
package. It lacks the in-depth capabilities of
the top word processors, but it does have.a
good basic range of capabilities, and it could
appeal to many people who like mouse-
based word processing. It is a pity about the
slow responses, though.
The version of Gem Desktop Publisher we
saw was a beta-test release with a draft
BB SOFTWARE REVIEW
manual. All the indications are that the final
documentation will be just as pretty as the
1st Word Plus manual, and equally heavy
going for the reader. This program itself did
not have an output module, though there is
no reason to suppose that there will be any
problems here. But I did encounter a few
reliability problems, and in one morning
session I crashed the program nearly 20
times. Its idiot-proofing will, I hope, be
improved by the time it is released to the
public.
By DTP standards, Gem Desktop Pub-
lisher is a compact program. It uses just two
floppies, though of course it also relies on the
printer drivers and the like that are included
in Gem Desktop. Gem Desktop Publisher
has no graphics or word-processing facilities
of its own, so you have to use it in con-
junction with a separate word processor and
graphics package.
Gem Desktop Publisher supports word-
processed files from WordStar, Word
Perfect, Multimate and Displaywrite, as well
| as from the Gem word-processing packages
ist Word Plus and Write. Documents from
these sources can be imported in their
normal formats, though they are stripped of
their bold, underline and other display
codes. You can also import ASCII docu-
ments from any other program capable of
producing them.
COLOUR CAPABILITY
The only graphics programs that are sup-
ported are the Gem packages Paint, Draw
Plus and Graph. Gem Desktop Publisher
will handle colour, but it does not translate
colour into shades of grey on monochrome
machines.
The program comes up with a standard
Gem-type screen, with menus along the top
and a toolkit along the left-hand side; the
toolkit can be suppressed to give more screen
space. Apart from the clock and other little
Gem goodies it is a one-window program,
but it does allow you to switch between a
number of views of the document. For
example, you can view two adjoining pages
or one full page with normal-size text
rendered illegible, or you can select any part
of the page to be displayed at either actual
| size or twice actual size.
For laying out pages, Gem Desktop
Publisher works with the basic concept of a
rectangle; the same thing is known as a
frame in the parlance of some other pack-
ages. Before doing anything else, you must
define and place a rectangle on the blank
page. All text and graphics — even the page
numbers — ate enclosed within rectangles.
You can locate as many rectangles as you
| need on a page, overlapping them as neces-
sary. Once your rectangle is in place, you
grab the contents from a suitable file to be
read into it.
Rectangles are defined in the usual Gem
way: you set the mouse pointer at one
corner, and then stretch the box out. It is
possible to display grid co-ordinates on-
screen to ensure accurate positioning, a
feature which ts more or less essential, since
Gem Desktop Publisher cannot define page
een nnn eennnecnnnnnnc ee eee nrc nnncccecee cee eee Ce ontinued on next page)
PRACTICAL COMPUTING September 1987
55
HB SOFTWARE REVIEW
(continued from previous page)
margins in any other way. Rectangles and
text will normally be positioned precisely as
defined, but you can also arrange for them
to snap to the nearest grid section. The size
of the grid is adaptable.
Each rectangle has to be either a graphics
rectangle or a text rectangle: which type it is,
is determined by the nature of the file you
read into it. A rectangle cannot be filled
with matter from more than one file, but the
contents of a single file can spill across
several rectangles if necessary. This is not
quite as restrictive as it sounds, since
graphics rectangles can include text that has
been generated as part of an illustration,
and rectangles can be superimposed to
combine text and graphics.
The real problem is that it is only possible
to designate a rectangle for graphics or text
by reading in a file. If you leave a rectangle
as an empty phantom you cannot locate the
cufsor in it to type in any fresh text. Nor is it
possible to paste text cut from a text rec-
tangle into an empty rectangle; there has to
be some text there first, even if it is sub-
sequently deleted.
Of course, most of the time you will be
importing chunks of text that have been pre-
pared using a word processor. But most DTP
users still need to add an occasional headline
to an existing piece of text, and will not take
kindly to having to call up their word proces-
sor in order to do so. Gem Desktop
Publisher makes this simple operation —
and several others — seem like hard work.
Rectangle attributes are defined from a
pull-down menu of options, one of which is
column layout. Rectangles can have from
one to four columns of text, and the space
between them can be selected. Each column
has to be of the same width, and you have to
define a separate rectangle for a heading
that is.intended to spread across the head of
two or more columns of text. This causes
some problems if you want to include text
from several different files on a single page.
Each slab of text has to be fed into a separate
rectangle, so you have to do all the columnar
calculations by hand.
NO GRAPHICS
The background inside a rectangle can be
set to appear in any one of eight colours and
nine patterns, including plain; it can be
either opaque or transparent to underlying
rectangles. There is no built-in facility for
setting borders around rectangles. If you
want a border you have to import one from a
graphics program or superimpose rectangles
of slightly different sizes. There is a com-
mand for setting vertical lines between
columns, but otherwise there are absolutely
no built-in graphics capabilities.
Only as much text is read into the rec-
tangle as will fit; the overflow is ignored. If
the rectangle or the text in it is resized, the
contents are adjusted automatically and the
flow to subsequent rectangles is auto-
matically corrected.
Text is invariably chained from one rec-
tangle to the next in a straight sequential
way, depending upon its position on the
page; you cannot override this ordering. To
some extent this is handy, but I did find it
difficult to adjust my rectangles to the right
size so that only the headings of a file
appeared in a heading rectangle. Gem
Desktop Publisher did not seem particularly
helpful here: time and again I got a ‘‘word
too long for rectangle’ error message when I
did not want the word in question to appear
in the rectangle anyway. And when I picked
too large a fount size for my heading, the
program seemed very reluctant tc give me a
chance to choose again. I would also have
liked a clearer way of indicating whether —
and when — there was overflow from a rec-
tangle. It has no automatic method for
pointing from one section of a file to the
next.
GEM 1st WORD PLUS
MEVERDICT
AQ
e ¢ SI $
Ss €&§ OF g
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Performance GK: Bae
Ease of use aU ee
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Valueformoney (1) OF @ O
DA decent mouse-based word processor
with good extras.
GEM DESKTOP PUBLISHER
Se
¢€ SS €
ef
Performance O @ OOD
Ease of use O @ O ODO
Documentation [] [| DD OD
Valueformoney [] [) : 0D
CIA reasonable DTP program that strikes a
fair balance between power and ease of
use.
A good feature of Gem Desktop Publisher
is its handling of illustrations. You do not
have to define spaces for illustrations before
reading in text: you can do this at any point.
If you define a graphics rectangle in the
midst of a spread of text, the space for it will
be cleared automatically and the text flowed
around it. Flowing takes place automatically
in a simple newspaper-column format so
that text will not read right across the illu-
stration even if it is placed in mid-column or
within single-column text.
As well as defining rectangle attributes,
you can define attributes for sections of text
within a rectangle. These blocks can be
existing paragraphs or a section of text that
you have defined with the cursor. Paragraph
attributes include the Swiss and Dutch fount
styles and sizes from 7 point to 72 point.
You can also specify various indents and
spaces along with ink colour and text align-
ment; range-left, range-right and centred
styles are all available. You give each set of
paragraph attributes a name of your choice,
and save the set of names used within a
document as a style sheet.
Individual character attributes are applied
to defined blocks of text, and are limited to
the basic set of bold, underline, italic and
normal styles. You can enter both paragraph
and character attributes into your original
text files. The command
@subheading =
for example, will set the rest of the para-
graph into sub-heading style, assuming one
exists in the style sheet being used. This ts a
very handy feature which. greatly simplifies
and speeds the design of long documents.
Gem Desktop Publisher’s general
facilities for handling multi-page docu-
ments are at least adequate. Some attempt is
made to carry forward the initial layout to
subsequent pages, and it is possible to insert
and delete pages at any point.
Though text cannot be entered from
scratch, it can be edited within the program,
and there is a facility for assigning the
editing keys so as to mimic those of your
originating word processor. I found the text-
editing cursor to be a clumsy beast, which
rarely located itself exactly where I expected.
Gem Desktop Publisher lacks automatic
hyphenation facilities, so if you want to
insert soft hyphens you have to do so man-
ually. It also lacks any kerning facility, so
you cannot adjust the spacing of characters
to improve the look of the type. I also found
that supposedly justified text sometimes
falls short.
Headers, footers and even simple page
numbering are handled as graphics files.
The advantage of this approach is that it
allows you to incorporate a logo, but it does
make adding simple headers an unneces-
sarily complex business. A basic selection is
provided, to simplify the task.
Gem Desktop Publisher’s file handling is
complex since the program cannot save all
your text and images ina single file. In order
to produce or reproduce a document you
need a bewildering variety of files on disc,
including various versions of the text files,
graphics files, style sheets and the special
files that the program itself generates. All of
them must be present on the same disc.
Though this arrangement ts economical on
disc space, it does make it a major chore to
do simple tasks like copying a document to a
floppy in order to carry it to a remote
printer. The program does make a small
attempt to simplify this procedure.
CONCLUSIONS
Gem 1st Word Plus and Gem Desktop Pub-
lisher are decent attempts to exploit Gem’s
very pretty front-end. Both programs imple-
ment the Gem features well.
MBoth programs are mid-range to low-end
programs with a relatively limited range. of
features, and both are very competitively
priced.
MThough both programs are perfectly
competent, neither is so exceptional as to pro-
vide an overwhelming reason for choosing
Gem as a front end. (ke
nein Anim =e iit eee
56
PRACTICAL COMPUTING September 1987
roomed for
top management.
Finally there is a productivity
software package that perfectly
fits your executive management
style. Carefully tailored to
enhance executive productivity,
WordPerfect Executive is easy-
to-use business software that
lives up to its name.
WordPerfect Executive skilfully
weaves the elements of word
processing, spreadsheet analysis,
calendaring and information
management into one compact
package. It is ideally suited
for laptop PCs, with the entire
| program on one 3/2” diskette,
— circle 127 on enquiry card --
yet it covers the many business
computing needs of executive
computer users.
Create a business plan. Manage
your time. Organise your
thoughts into memos or letters.
Even generate an itinerary or
travel report. WordPerfect
Executive lets you do it all on
your desktop PC, or take it with
you for your laptop.
Get the productivity software
tailored for top management: |
WordPerfect Executive. For more
information, telephone or write
to Sentinel Software.
yaResutive
SENTINEL
Salo Fae Tees FR
Wellington House, New Zealand Avenue,
Walton on Thames, Surrey KT12 1PY.
Telephone: (0932) 231164
Telex: 916005. FERGUS G.
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— circle 113 on enquiry card
Bl SOFTWARE REVIEW
ADOBE ILLUSTRATOR
TRAC
By Carol Hammond
While most drawing programs force you to start with a blank
screen, this Macintosh package is designed specifically for
those who want to adapt existing images.
s its mame suggests, Adobe
Illustrator is a drawing package.
Like others of its kind it can be used
fo create images, but it really comes into its
own as a tracing tool to modify existing art-
work. It is intended primarily as a tool for
graphic artists, technical illustrators and
suchlike. Its tracing facility also allows the
less artistic to produce reasonable looking
artwork.
Adobe Illustrator comes from Adobe
System, the company which originated the
Postscript page-description language. As
you would expect from a program with such
a lineage, Illustrator takes advantage of Post-
script. Rumour has it that Illustrator is a
development of an in-house tool originally
used by Adobe to create Postscript founts.
Unlike painting programs such as Mac-
paint, Adobe Illustrator is object orientated.
When you use Macpaint to create an image,
the image is specified as the dots or pixels
that appear on the screen. But artwork
created with Illustrator is automatically
specified as a collection of lines and curves,
each of which has its own mathematical de-
finition. The definitions that make up a
piece of Illustrator artwork comprise a Post-
'scfipt program, which is executed every time
you print the artwork. It is this that makes it
possible for Illustrator to create high-quality
artwork.
You can use Illustrator to generate images
or to alter existing images created with Mac-
paint, Macdraw or any other software that
creates Macdraw Pict or Macpaint docu-
ments. You can also modify scanned images
stored in Macpaint or Macdraw Pict format.
They could be existing images like a photo-
graph, map, cartoon or technical drawing,
or a drawing you have done yourself on
paper and scanned in.
Where you want to use an existing image’
as artwork, IIlustrator imports it as a tem-
plate and displays it on-screen as a bit map.
What you see is a copy of the scanned image.
You then trace around whatever area of the
image you like te form a new Illustrator
document. For example, you could scan in a
photograph of a man beside a tree in a field
and just trace around the silhouette of the
tree. You could then outline the tree, fill it
with a tint, add some text and use it as a
company logo.
On-screen Illustrator initially appears like
other Mac drawing packages. There is a win-
dow complete with a drawing area, scroll
bars and a tool box down the left-hand side.
Some of the 13 tools are familiar ones: an
arrow is used to select objects, a hand tool
moves objects, and a magnifying glass
zooms in on objects.
But the spray can, paint pot, eraser and
pencil icons found in Macpaint are missing
from Illustrator. Instead there is a pen tool
which you use to draw and trace around art-
work, plus several others which allow you to
add type, draw rectangles and squares, draw
citcles and ovals, split paths, transform
objects by scaling, rotating, reflecting and
shearing them, and finally subdivide the
drawing area into pages for printing. These
ADOBE ILLUSTRATOR
Documentation
Valueformoney [] OF #@ OO
A useful tool for modifying existing
images, but too complicated to
contemplate for drawing alone.
Kiv ERDICT a
oy Ss
s¢ § §
O & C
€ « & F
Performance Oo OF 8B DO
Ease of use O @ O DO
D B68.
tools show where the strength of Illustrator
lies: in manipulating images.
To trace round an object you select the
pen tool and place it at the point where you
want to start. You then negotiate your way
round it by building up a series of lines or
curves, as appropriate. You do not use a
mouse to draw lines; instead you set up a
sequence of curves and lines by specifying
points which Illustrator then connects. It is
rather like the drawings children construct
by joining numbered dots. For the novice,
the process of tracing is rather fiddly, but
with practise you can build up a very precise
copy of the object you are tracing.
To draw straight lines you click on the pen
tool to bring a pointer up on the screen. You
move the pointer to one end of the line and
click again. A solid black square called an
anchor point appears. You then move to the |
NG WITH POSTSCRIPT
SPECIFICATION
Description: drawing package which
allows you to generate and modify art-
work
Hardware required: Mac Plus with
800K floppy-disc drive, hard disc
recommended; scanner and Postscript-
compatible printer
Software required: software to store
scanned images in Macpaint or Macdraw
Pict format
Copy protection: master disc
required to use backups
Price: £450
Publisher: Adobe Systems of Palo Alto,
California
UK distributor: McQueen, Buckholm,
Galashiels, Selkirkshire TK7 3NL.
Telephone: (0896) 4866
. Available: now
other end of the line and click again to draw
the line and set another anchor point, from
which you can carty on to draw another line.
Squares, rectangles, circles or ellipses can be
drawn from scratch by selecting the square
and circle tools from the toolbox.
To trace a curved line round an object you
first establish an anchor point as before.
Using the mouse to drag the pointer causes
the anchor point to become a small hollow
square with two lines sprouting from it in
opposite directions. As you drag, the lines
change orientation to indicate what the tan-
gent to the curve will be if you stop dragging
and release the mouse button to establish
the second anchor point.
With the second point fixed you can start
dragging again. This time the directions of
the pointer lines at the two fixed points
change, while the curve adjusts itself to re-
main tangential to them. In this way you can
make sure that any curved line will fit snugly
to its template. The whole process is like
using an infinitely variable French curve,
and is correspondingly hard for the beginner
to learn.
The difficulty of drawing curved lines is
my main grouse against Illustrator. Nifty
(continued on next page)
PRACTICAL COMPUTING September 1987
59
Wi SOFTWARE REVIEW
BUILDING AN IMAGE WITH ILLUSTRATOR
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Top left and right: Building up a curve.
Remaining pictures: To produce finished
artwork, you use Adobe Illustrator to trace
over a template. You can preview the final
version on screen.
@ file fait Arrange thew Style
Untitied art:Pande template is
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(continued from previous page)
fingerwork is also required to use the Shift,
Option and Command keys and the space
bar in combination with the various drawing
tools to vary their effect. This gives you a
lot of options, but the assignments are hard
to remember. Somehow Illustrator does not
have the intuitive feel that makes many
other Mac packages so pleasant to use.
Once you have traced round or drawn an
object you can zoom in on it to make any
fine adjustments, or add type to it. You can
also transform objects by rescaling, rotating,
duplicating, reflecting or shearing. You can
also paint objects with tints, and apply con-
tinuous or dashed outlines of varying
weights. If you are running Illustrator on a
Mac II you can allot colour as well.
To look at what you have created you
select Preview from the View menu. You can
preview what you are doing as you go along
by dividing your screen into two windows,
and set one aside as a Preview window and
one as an Artwork and Template window.
This is still not entirely satisfactory, as you
lose half your drawing area. You can, of
course, print out as you go along to an
Imagewriter to get an idea of what your
finished artwork will look like.
You can save Illustrator documents in
three formats: Postscript Only, Encap-
sulated Postscript (Macintosh) or Encapsu-
lated Postscript (IBM PC). While the code of
a Postscript Only document is accessible to
the user and can be edited, this cannot be
done with the others. They are designed to
be used with page-composition systems that
support the Aldus/ Altsys/ Adobe Encapsul-
ated Postscript file format for IBM and Mac
products. Systems that support this format
display the previewed image on-screen for
positioning, scaling and cropping, and send
the transformed Postscript to the printer. A
PC version of Illustrator is expected next
year.
Illustrator’s documentation includes a
video tape in addition to the conventional
manual. The tape takes the form of a
tutorial led by the president of Adobe
Systems, Charles Geschke. It is rather like a
sales demonstration, in that it fills the
viewer with enthusiasm about the capa-
bilites of the package. Alas, as in a demon-
stration, users are left to find out that using
Illustrator is not as easy as it looks. But the
video does serve the purpose of giving you a
comprehensive grounding in what the
package can do and how to use it. |
The manual tries very hard to explain how
to use what is a fiddly package, and comes
complete with copious diagrams. I found I
had to reread passages over and over again
before I understood them. But this is prob-
ably an inevitable result of the complexity of
the package.
CONCLUSIONS
B Adobe Illustrator will be useful to graphic
artists who routinely tinker with existing
images.
WThe facility for tracing over artwork will
endear it to those who are less artistic.
Wlllustrator is fiddly.to use. It is not something
for the casual user: even tracing over existing
artwork is not easy.
You will need to contemplate heavy use of
the package to justify the cost of such a special-
ised graphics tool — and the time and effort to
become adept at using it. (ka
SS
60
PRACTICAL COMPUTING September 1987
ACTION PACKED
The new Qume LaserTEN Plus arrives with all you need for instant action
Now with 512k memory as standard and simple plug-in emulation the new
configuration Qume LaserTEN Plus printer gives you flexibility with simplicity
Just specify whether you require to emulate Hewlett
Packard* laser, matrix or Qume daisywheel printers,
and we'll supply the package you need —including
integral font styles. With the extra advantage
of its no-fuss front panel controls, the LaserTEN
Plus is ready, willing and able to win the »-—
confidence of even the least computer
literate person in the office.
Leader pedigree
Leading the second generation of
laser printers in clarity of type, the
LaserTEN range is now successfully into
its second year of service in many of
Britain’s most selective companies.
So if you want the quiet, ten-page-a-
minute performance of a laser and the
simplicity and type quality of the
world’s leading daisy-wheel
supplier, there’s only one printer
with the real pedigree. The
LaserTEN Plus from Qume. ,
At your nearest authorised
dealer.
poster Bay 10"
opr og Hhe
\ as
né
be
e ® 9 ® _ 6 ® 6
QUME Quality. Simplicity is just part of it.
Marketing and Sales: Qume House, Park Way, Newbury, Berkshire RG13 1EE Telephone: (0635) 523200 Telex: 846321 Telefax: (0635) 521011
Service and Training Centre: Bridgewater Close, Reading, Berkshire RG3 1JT Telephone: (0734) 584646 Telex: 849706
*Hewlett Packard is the registered trade mark of the Hewlett Packard corporation. **Postscript is the registered trade mark of the Adobe Systems Inc.
| -* circfe 140 on enquiry card -
A dozen steps to
the right decision.
When you’ve seen one printer you really
haven’t seen them all. That’s why, when
you’re trying to choose your first or your next,
you really need all the help you can get. Here
are a few steps to get you started.
1 Compatibility. You needn’t
worry about matching any of our
“ printers with
heed
F (Se — aa,
your present system.
Asimple slot-in interface means that any
Star printer can be used with virtually
any terminal or PC set up. And, equally
important, the software command sets
are switchable.
os Value. Getting more doesn’t
mean you have to pay more. All
our printers are proof of that. Whatever
your budget, the Star 9-Pin printers start
well below £300 while prices.for the
Letter Quality Star 24-Pin printers begin
at less than £600.
3 Simplicity. The Front Control
Panel on all Star business print-
ers gives you total control at the touch of
a button. Selecting a typestyle, draft or
one of the Letter Quality options, print
pitch, margins and paper control are
sheer simplicity. No mess, no fuss and no
more fiddly DIP switches for all your
usual daily needs. All our machines have
For more important documents, where
Letter Quality print is essential, any of
the three 24-pin printers offer the ulti-
mate in razor sharp Letter Quality print.
oe - - 7 — a
cal | Sn
semi-automatic single sheet feeding too.
Simply drop your page into the top, press
alever, and the printer advances it to
the correct position ready for printing.
Choice. The Star range features
4 models with both 9-pin and 24-
pin print heads. (The more pins you
have, the better the print quality.) So if
you need a printer for simple statements
and invoices and don’t need the ultimate
in Letter Quality printing, you can save
money by opting for any of the high
speed draft machines in the 9-pin range.
Print Quality. The Near Letter
Quality of the NL-10 through
to the NR-15 is
and perfect for everyday office use.
The NB24-10, NB24-15
and the NB-15—
all 24-pin printers
extremely crisp
— produce the
ultimate in
Letter Quality
print
that’s ideal for the
discerning professional
who has previously been
limited to a daisywheel printer.
6 Paper Width. The suffix 10 or 15
in each printer’s name indicates
its carriage size. So the NL-10 and the
NB24-10 can accept paper widths of up
to 10 inches wide (80 col), while the
ND-15 and NB-15 for example can
accept paper up to 15 inches wide (136 col).
7 Performance. The 9-pin mod-
els are all ideal for printing draft
text at superb speeds. The NR-10 and
NR-15 can reach 240 cps with an excep-
tionally crisp Near Letter Quality at 60
cps. The NB24-10 and NB24-15 are ideal
for important business documents. Both
can clock up 216 cps in draft mode and 72
cps in letter quality. The top of the range
NB-15 can produce Letter Quality
print at a very impressive 100 cps while
maintaining its excellent drafting
capability of 300 cps for more informal
documents.
Paper Handling. A_ built-in
GQ push feed tractor unit gives the
paper saving advantage of short form
tear off. Paper feeding can either be
continuous or single sheets and all our
printers have the option of a low cost,
totally automatic sheet feeder—just clip it
on and it’s ready to work without any
additional hardware or software
selection.
9 Optional Upgrades. Each Star
printer has a host of facilities to
widen its use. The machines have a selec-
tion of plug-in interfaces
for compatibility,
plug-in font cartridges
(on our 24-Pin models) and expandable
buffer memories.
THEIL
CQ
PRINTERS FOR BUSINESS
Star Micronics U.K. Ltd. Craven House,
40 Uxbridge Road, Ealing, London W5 2BS.
Telephone: 01-840 1800.
A division of Star Micronics Co., Ltd., Japan.
1 () Commitment. To maintain
the standard of excellence
throughout the Star range, we’ve made
sure there’s a Star for everyone’s needs.
But we haven’t compromised on quality
in any department. In fact, our
printers have built-in features not even
found on more expensive makes.
1 1 Support. When you buy a Star
printer you buy superb back-up
too. We’ve a national three-level support
system which operates through all our
Star dealers backed by the finest
distributors in the country.
—< Seis 3
Ragistered eater
They’ve all been registered by us at Star
and we’ve had over 40 years experience
servicing the business world. Should you
need any help at any time our dealers will
give you all the friendly, knowledgeable
assistance you need.
~ circle 120 on.enquiry card ~
eo 2” pe ees a ae !
; If you still can’t decide which Star
1 printer to choose, fill out this coupon.
1 We'll send you our brochure so you
: can discover even more about the remarkable
'
'
'
i
Star range of printers.Or just call Belindaon
01-840 1829.
: Name
Company -
!
Address
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i]
!
i]
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4
i]
1 Postcode
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wee wwe we oe ee ee ee ew we ew ew HK ew eK eK ee
| Telephone
IF YOU KNEW
THE TRUTH ABOUT
THIS PRINTER,
YOU’D GET
AN AWFUL SHOCK.
\\\\\ Leta
\\ \
Please send information on the following:
ont get us wrong; it’s a very fine printer, one of the finest
you can buy, in fact. It’s called the Fujitsu DL3400.
It’s made by the number one computer maker in Japan,
and so, as you might expect, it comes with a range of excellent
features.
Like speed (amazing speed: it’ll do 240 CPS in draft mode,
and 60 CPS in letter quality).
And clarity (remarkable clarity: its 24-wire printhead pro-
duces diamond-sharp printouts).
And variety (wondrous variety: up to eight different type-
fonts and a color printing option).
It also comes with a smooth and effortless paper handling
system (featuring a built-in rear-feed tractor unit), instant hardware
compatibility with just about any name brand computer on the
market, heart-warming reliability, and a shocking price.
Shocking?
Even worse! Downright unbelievable! No printer offering
all of this could have a price like this one. Could it?
Now you know the truth. To find out what it means,
call Fujitsu on (01) 573-4444. Or write to: Fujitsu Europe Lid.,
2, Longwalk Road, Stockley Park, Uxbridge, Middlesex,
UB 1AB, England.
Japan’s No. 1 computer maker
I'd like to know more about Fujitsu printers. i el
FUJITSU
0 DL3400 (24-wire dot matrix) Name:
LO DL2600 (24-wire dot matrix) Title:
C DL2600 Color (24-wire dot matrix) Company:
UO DL2400 (24-wire dot matrix)
CO DE2400 Color (24-wire dot matrix) got
O DX2200 ( 9-wire dot matrix) City: Country:
UO) DX2100 ( 9-wire dot matrix) Phone: Fax:
Send to:
Fujitsu Europe Ltd. 2 Longwalk Road, Stockley Park, Uxbridge, Middlesex, UB11 1AB, England. Phone: 01-573 4444
r F
i » circle 102 on enquiry card -
The sensible way to store data
MICROPOLIS
Micropolis 1330 Series high-performance
Pard... Pitre t vf
MATT Tire rae eT
a ae ‘ 5 %-inch Winchester drives feature high capacity, high
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Key Features
@ 53 to 85 MBytes capacities
@ 30 ms seek time with unique FASEEK
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The sensible way to protect data
CIPHER
Cipher has been a pacesetter in computer tape
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Surprising that the Cipber name has become
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The P&P Micro range of CIPHER STORAGE
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LAAGALESS ER te TT coos suas Me accstes As cmvomeveweea te
If you want to know more about these products
complete and return the coupon for an information
pack and details of your nearest P&P Dealer. | Carrs Industrial Estate, Haslingden, Rossendale, Lancs, BB4 5BR. |
|
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| GOMIP aN Vaemiane oe. 55002. -.63 ... went pee yas wTtes nee abe
|
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Ee at a
Return to P&P Micro Distributors plc. FREEPOST,
Pe) (P) circle 112 on enquiry card :
Todd Hall Road, Carrs Industrial Estate, Haslingden, Rossendale, Lancs. BB4 SHU. Tel: 0706 217744 Telex: 635740 PETPAM G Fax No. 0706 211401
1 Gleneagle Road, London, SW16 6AY. Tel: 01 677 7631 Telex: 919220 PPMICR G Fax: Ext. 308
Dale Street, Bilston, West Midlands, WV14 7JY. Tel: 0902 43913 Fax: Ext. 32
P & P MICRO DISTRIBUTORS|PLC
FOR THE
EXECUTIVE The portable a —
ON THE MOVE _ TH 4E MOVE _ it’s a desktop PC!
Operating sysiem © MS-DOS 3.2
Processor © %80C86 running at 7.16 MHz or
4.77 MHz
Memory @ 640K
Disk drives © Two 3.5" 720KB offering 1.4MB
| total storage
——e a a Display Supertwist technology
OP ; = 80 characters x 25 lines
/ ——— 9.1 x 4.7 inches
81 keys, full size
IBM compatible parallel printer/
5.25 disk drive
RS-232C serial communications
el Seis cated
Position adjustable a full 90°
Keyboard
Standard interfaces RGB colour monitor
Monochrome composite monitor
VO bus for Expansion Box
D E S | ( N Dimensions © 12.1" wide, 2.6" high, 12" deep
Weight © Less than 10tbs
Power @ Built in rechargeable NiCad bi Ly
batteries
a
TOSHIBA Included accessories @ sia SEES for 2 caleed 7 é
IBM COMPATIBLE + MS:008 mano | lh :
bo i}
Owner’s manual
PORTABLE COMPUTERS © Carrzcate with grap handle and or
ATGULTRONICS —_ aoe
toe ae "
approved)
External 5.25" floppy disk drive
NOW AVAILABLE tions ALT EDUCATIONAL
PC disk drive
— T1000 & T1200 nies CORPORATE &
~ xpansh ox with fiv
TOSH AT SPECIAL LOW \eeoumeniaaaags VAIL ORDER
‘bes % ~ Bi-Synchronous Communica-
PRICES. ova © NQUIRIES TO
01-580 9116
Features e The hard disk—a standard feature of
e Enormous processing power—this the 73100 — provides even greater
is the main feature of the T3100. storage capacity than the diskettes.
e The basic version of the T3100 @ The enormous storage capacity,
comes with 640 KB of main memory the hard disk offers two
which can be expanded to 2.6 MB. other important advantages: con-
@ The T3100 also has a built-in 32” siderably faster access to stored
drive with 720 KB storage capacity for data, which means much faster
exchanging data and programs with response time for the computer, and
other computers. greater data security.
ie = circle 152 on enquiry card ~
223 TOTTENHAM COURT ROAD, LONDON W1 Tel; 01-323 2838/323 4612 TELEX 295358
London’s main stockists for Amstrad, Atari, Commodore, Epson, Brother, Citizen, Star, Sinclair. Also extensive range of software,
Modems and peripherals.
All offers also available at: 43 Church Street, Croydon, Surrey. Tel: 01-681 3344/01-681 0528
Communications
Software for IBM PCs and compatibles
Prestel and Telecom Gold
You will have heard of Contact
and will know that it gives
simple and trouble free access
to the world of information and
data communication. Contact
allows access to Prestel,
Telecom Gold, and many other
electronic mail systems, as
well as providing a micro to
mainframe link. However, you
may not be aware of just.how
powerful and easy to use it is.
So here are a few of its
escape sequences removed So you get a text file that
really can be edited by your word processor or fed
—-
features in more detail:
Automatic Sequences
With Contact we provide powerful Automatic
Sequences to enable your computer to
automatically login to Telecom Gold (or One
to One, Link7500 etc.) collect your mail and
logoff. It can then print the
into your database.
Programmable
Function Keys
The menus can be pulled
down with a mouse or by
pressing function keys. In
addition you can program
each of the 10 function keys
with a sequence of
commands. For example you
could set F5 to contain "Mail
Scan Unread" or, for Prestel,
F5 could contain *72195# to
take you straight into "Datasearch". Not only can
each function key contain up to 80 characters but all
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unlimited number of different services you may want
mail out, properly paginated, (
at any time of the day or night
you choose. Of course you
can easily write your own
sequences too.
VT100 and
Viewdata
Contact offers both a high
to contact.
And the price?
£79.95
quality VT100 emulation and a
full screen Viewdata display.
For those with Amstrad
PC1512s or IBM PCs with an
EGA card the display is in full colour.
The VT100 emulation is extensive. With
VT100 you can move away from scrolling
screens - giving much faster screen update.
Files can be captured to disk with all the
— circle 143 on enquiry card <
tc Please send me Contact for IBM PC or compatibies
(cD Please send me Contact for Amstrad PC 1512
- (> Please send me more information about Contact
I wish to pay by cheque / postal order / Access
Piease debit my Access account with the amount
of £79.95 - My Access number is
UTS) el
Signature
Contact costs £79.95
=
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XON SOFTWARE
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Telephone
DOS HELPERS
FR
By Carol Hammond
The forbidding facade that MS-
DOS presents to the world
discourages most users from
using many of its functions.
These programs set out to
make them more accessible.
he DOS operating system does not
provide the easiest of interfaces, par-
B ticularly for first-time users. With this
in mind, a number of software houses have
started producing DOS helpers — programs
which set out to help you use MS-DOS
and PC-DOS. They adopt a variety of
approaches. Some simply provide a disc-
based tutorial, while others augment the
standard operating system to make it easier
of quicker to use.
A program called Using the IBM Personal
Computer Disk System is in the first
category. It comes from Science Research
Associates (SRA), the educational subsidiary
of IBM, which has a long history of pub-
lishing educational materials. This pedigree
shows in the product, which is both useful
and easy to use.
The package is made up of two 5.25in.
discs, one 3.5in. disc and a leaflet telling you
how to insert the discs and what kit you need
to run the program. It is no more’ than a
gesture towards documentation, but you do
not need any more than this because the
program is designed to be completely self
documenting.
To run the SRA program you switch on or
reboot the machine with the disc in place.
From then on you simply read the text which
Q-DOS Mae ue
Fath »)
— pits
The Q-DOS directory’ map.
Se
PRACTICAL COMPUTING September 1987
END OR FOE?
it displays and answer the multiple-choice
questions that it poses at appropriate points.
I found it simplicity itself to use, and
comprehensive paper documentation would
have been superfluous.
The program covers the most basic
concepts of computing, from what hardware
and software is, to what an operating system
is and what different DOS commands do. It
also covers topics like what a virtual disc does
and why you might want to use it. Beginners
will find it extremely helpful as an intro-
duction to DOS.
Experienced users may well benefit from
it too as it allows you to learn about the
Operating system's many powerful com-
mands in an interesting and structured way.
For many people, their introduction to DOS
comes from reading the manual, which can
be boring and time consuming. There must
be plenty who have given up not much after
Dir in the alphabetical command list.
USING THE IBM PC DOS
KAIVERDICT ie
& =
¥ e oy s
O N23 OC
£ c S &
Performance Ele fa
Ease of use O O OO @
Documentation [] [] # OO
Valueformoney [] [1] BB OF
DO An excellent introduction to DOS,
which old hands may also find instructive.
ts 1a
- Sort Files
G - Gut
e current directory,
Q-DOS -- Version 1.21
Copyright (c) 1985
Praline Frovo, Utah
Mi SOFTWARE REVIEW
Others just learn how to cope with DOS as
they go along.
Anyone who has never sat down and
learned how to use DOS in a systematic way
is likely to remain unaware of handy com-
mands like
TREE /F
which lists the directory paths of all the
directories on the current drive, together
with the names of the files they contain.
Obviously the program does not totally
replace a DOS manual, but it is certainly a
valuable supplement to it.
The program is divided into chapters,
each of which covers a distinct area. The
treatment of separate topics within each area
concludes with a set of exercises. For
example, the section explaining PC hard-
ware is followed by an interactive question
and answer session in which you are told
whether your answers are right or wrong. I
found completing the exercises helped me
remember what different commands did
and what syntax to use. It is more effective
then just reading about them in a manual.
The sessions are never dull, since the
form they take varies. Sometimes they are
multiple-choice exercises in which you fill in
the right word in a sentence, for example. In
others your answers are used to build up a
comparison between two items: the session
on the advantages and disadvantages of hard
and floppy discs is one example. At the end
of each exercise you are given a tally of how
many questions you have answered success-
fully, with or without help.
The screen is divided into three areas. The
chapter and exercise number are flagged at
the top while text and diagrams appear in
the middle, which is also where you put your
answers. The area at the bottom is used to
display help information and the response to
your answers. If you get an answer wrong
you are told why it is wrong and the program
makes suggestions to put you on the right
track. You use the function keys to get help,
display the solution, skip a question, re-
display a question, return to the index, end
a session or access a glossary of terms.
The only serious problem with the
program is that it is copy protected, so you
(continued on next page)
pera TAC VIEX COPY WOVE FIND ERASE ROWME SPACE ATTRIBUTE XECUTE
9 wake or remove directory, see directory tree
ae Size
- Previeas Directory
~ Set Search Spec
The main menu of the Q-DOS.
69
MA SOFTWARE REVIEW
{continued from previous page)
cannot make backups or install it on the
hard disc of more than one machine. It is
also not cheap, and some people may be un-
willing to pay £80 for a glorified manual-
cum-tutorial, however useful it may be.
The Q-DOS program, also known as
Quick DOS, is a file manager for DOS users.
It aims to help novices by enabling them to
understand disc organisation, and experi-
enced users by performing DOS functions
more quickly than can be done by addres-
sing DOS directly. It does this by cutting
down on the typing you need to carry out
different functions, and presenting a less
inscrutable face to the world than does DOS
itself.
Q-DOS comes on a single unprotected
floppy disc with an installation program that
copies all the relevant files to a separate
directory on your hard disc. You then run
the program in the conventional way. You
can also run Q-DOS direct from the floppy
drive, but if you want access to its help infor-
mation you have to keep the Q-DOS disc
present in the drive.
lV ERDICT x
&
Sot AS oe
O & CO
€ ¢ & ¢
Performance OO 8 OD
Ease of use Go fee
Documentation [] [|] @ O
Value formoney (]) () oO —'
{1 Will help veterans and novices to use
DOS wisely. Its directory map is a boon.
Operations are carried out from Q-DOS
main menu. Listed at the top are the main
commands: Directory, Tag, View, Copy,
Move, Find, Erase, Rename, Space, Attri-
bute and Xecute. Commands can be se-
lected by pressing the first letter of the
command or by highlighting it with the
command cursor — which you move by
using the left and right arrow keys — and
pressing Return. Beneath the command list
lies the path name from the root directory.
Many of the commands perform functions
broadly similar to their like-sounding DOS
equivalents.
The body of the main menu screen lists
files and directories vertically, giving file
name and file size, plus the date and time it
was created. To copy, erase, rename or move
a file you have to tag it first. This is done by
selecting a file, using the cursor keys, and
then pressing the space bar. If you tag more
than one file the operation can be per-
formed on the whole group.
To the left of the screen are five boxes
which show the number of files in the direc-
tory, the total size of those files, rhe number
of sub-directories, the number of tagged
files in the directory and the total size of the
tagged files in the directory and the total size
of the tagged files. Function keys and their
assignments are shown below the boxes. If
> Disk Usage 4
2 Hidden files
3S User files
19142656 bytes left
751616 bytes used
21178176 bytes total
Hk===| ore se | [oem [mie [mtr brio 9
The 1 DIR Version 3.58H - Copyright ¢
c) Bourbaki, Inc. 1984, 1985
Above: !-DIR shows how much memory is available.
Below: Window DOS shows path name of directory viewed.
oohuaty
you run a program which takes over- the
function keys for some other purpose you
should still be able to execute the Q-DOS
functions by holding down the Alt, Shift or
Ctrl key and pressing the desired function
key.
The on-screen help that forms part of the
program is a useful addition that will be
helpful to DOS novices. Having the com-
mands listed on-screen also means there is
less to remember in the way of what com-
mands there are and what syntax to use, so
you do not have to type so much.
Q-DOS’s Directory command is partic-
ularly useful. When you select Directory the
program asks you to specify a drive. Pressing
Return then displays a directory map of the
disc in the specified drive. This consists of
directories sorted alphabetitally and con-
1, 198@
GL 2
nected by lines showing their hierarchical
relationship, and immediately makes clear
the tree-like structure of DOS. You can
move afound the directory map using the
cursor keys. This feature will help novices
understand the concept of a hierarchical file
structure, and perhaps encourage experi-
enced users to organise their files more effi-
ciently than they otherwise might.
You can also perform various functions on
the directory map. For example, using the
Make command you can make a new direc-
tory just by highlighting the directory you
have chosen as its parent and keying M. An
input box appears, you enter a DOS file-
name, press Return and Q-DOS will update
and display the directory map. You can also
copy files to other directories, copy direc-
tories to other drives, and move files around
a a a
70
PRACTICAL COMPUTING September 1987
| SPECIFICATIONS
USING THE IBM PC DISK
OPERATING SYSTEM:
Description: introductory:
screen tutorial for the IBM PC
disc operating system for PC and
PS/2 users
Hardware required: IBM
PC, PC/AT or compatible with
256K of memory and one
double-sided dis¢ drive
Copy protection: one
installation on hard disc;
program disc cannot be copied
Price: £80
Publisher: Science Research
Associates, Newtown Road,
Henley-on-Thames, Oxfordshire
RG9 EW. Telephone: (0491)
575959
Available: now
Q-DOS
Description: file manager and
or higher
Software required: DOS 2.0
Copy protection: none
Price: £39.95
1-DIR
Description: memory-residenf
file manager and menu system
Hardware required: IBM
HB SOFTWARE REVIEW
Price: £59
Publisher: Bourbaki Inc. of
Boise, Idaho
UK supplier: Qubie, 7 Ferrier
Street, London SW18 ISN. Tele-
phone: 01-871 2855
Available: now
WINDOW DOS 2.0
Description: memory-resident
file manager
Hardware required: IBM
PC, PC/AT or compatible with
256k of memory and one floppy-
disc drive
Software required: DOS 2
or higher
Copy protection: none
Price: £49.95
Publisher: Window DOS
Associates of Arlington,
Texas
UK supplier: In Touch Com-
DOS enhancer
Hardware required: IBM
PC, PC/AT or compatible with
256K of memory and two drives
Publisher: Gazelle Systems of
Provo, Utah
UK supplier: Ideal Software,
Tolworth Tower, Surbiton, Surrey
KT6 7EL. Telephone: 01-399 2206
PC, PC/AT or compatible with,
192K of memory and two floppy-
disc drives
Software required: DOS 2
or higher
puter Solutions, Fairfield House,
Brynhyfryd, Caerphilly, Mid-
Glamorgan CF8 2QQ. Tele-
phone: (0222) 882334
Available: now
Available: now
from one directory to another on the same
disc with the help of the directory map.
It does not take long to get familiar with
Q-DOS and the documentation is helpful in
explaining how the program is uséd. Its
descriptions are clear for beginners, while
managing to be pithy enough not to be
boring for experienced users. However, the
manual would benefit from a few screen
dumps to illustrate what is going on.
The other two programs we reviewed,
1-Dir and Window DOS 2.0, are both vari-
ations on the same theme as Q-DOS. They
both include a file manager and try to give
DOS a friendlier face by dispensing with the
need to type file names and commands. I
did not find them to be quite as easy to use
as Q-DOS, and I particularly missed the Q-
DOS directory map. But they both have use-
ful features, and it is worth considering what
facilities you would like out of a DOS helper
before deciding which one to choose.
For example, with 1-Dir you have a choice
of ‘modes: Basic and Expert. If you choose
Basic mode the program asks you to verify
any command you enter before it executes
it, which is handy for new users to the pro-
gram and for DOS novices generally. It also
has a screen saver facility which sets the
length of time the screen is displayed after
your last keystroke. You can even use it to re-
program existing menus or create new ones
to meet your requirements.
Features like the menu builder reveal the
true colours of this program: it ts not really
intended for novice users. The real targets
for 1-Dir are confident users who would like
to customise DOS to suit their special needs,
and at the same time maybe make it easier
and quicker to use.
The price you pay for the wealth of fea-
tures provided by 1-Dir is that it is not
particularly easy to get used to. It comes with
an extensive A5 manual, and there are a
TAVERDI
Performance
Ease of use
Documentation
Valueformoney [1] | @ O
(J Designed for experienced users who
want to customise DOS.
WINDOW DOS
Performance
Ease of use
Documentation
[JA handy addition to DOS.
large number of key combinations that you
need to remember to use it effectively. If you
want to add hub caps and go-faster wheels to
your operating system, 1-Dir will probably
repay the effort you have to expend to get to
know it. The danger with any program of
this type is that you could end up replacing
one difficult environment with another that
is equally complex.
I did not find Window DOS 2.0 quite as
Copy protection: none
easy to use as Q-DOS, and it has a profusion
of key combinations that you have to know
before you can make use of its functions. It
has a number of endearing features, partic-
ularly its screen-saver facility, password pro-
tection and Tree window. Its documentation
is brief and comes complete with diagrams.
The Tree window is like Q-DOS’s direc-
tory map, though not quite as graphic or as
versatile. It lists the sub-directories of a
drive, with the root first at the left edge of
the window and each following letter of
subordination indented two spaces to the
right. When the cursor is over a sub-direc-
tory the number of files and bytes of storage
space occupied by the files in that sub-direc-
tory are displayed on the second line of the
Tree window.
CONCLUSIONS
As anaid to getting to know how to use DOS
for the beginner, or as a refresher in how to
use DOS more efficiently, SRA’s Using the IBM
Personal Computer Disk Operating System is
certainly worth a look. | wish | had seen it long
ago. Shame about the copy protection.
MQ-DOS is easy to use, making DOS more
approachable for the novice and helping
veterans use DOS more quickly and wisely. Its
directory map is a particularly helpful feature.
MFor more experienced users who want to
customise DOS, 1-Dir could be a real asset.
Less confident users may find getting to grips
with all its features as much of a burden as
acquiring a thorough knowledge of DOS itself.
BWindow DOS does not have the plethora of
sophisticated features provided by 1-Dir, nor
is if as easy to use as Q-DOS, but may provide
the right mix for some users.
How you make your micro easier to use is a
very personal matter, analagous to deciding
what maps, diary or paraphernalia to put in
your Filofax. Itis worth looking around at DOS
helpers before you buy one: different levels of
expertise and requirements will influence your
choice substantially.
OO —= — _—_s__an
PRACTICAL COMPUTING September 1987
vl
RESEARCH
Britain’s research effort in infor-
mation technology (IT). Collaboration
between industry and academic workers has
been one of the key features of the
programme. Joint project teams are drawn
from industry and from academic insti-
tutions.
The academics receive full government
funding, while industry pays for half its
involvement. The programme has cost £350
million, £200 million of which has come
from various government departments. The
remaining £150 million has been provided
by the IT industry. Most of the money has
been allocated to some 200 collaborative |
projects.
The idea was that all the projects should
be based on pre-competitive research. The
difficulties of getting companies to co-
operate with each other and with academics
were considered too great for more market-
orientated projects to be considered. In spite
of this, many of the individual companies
involved have already exploited work carried
out under the Alvey scheme as marketable
products and service.
The programme has been divided into
several smaller units, each dealing with a
different kind of enabling technology. The
aim is that work from one project should be
able to feed into others. The individual areas
include ‘very large-scale integrated circuits
(VLSI), software engineering, intelligent
| knowledge-based systems (IKBS), archi-
tectures and the so-called man-machine
interface (MMI). To focus the work and inte-
grate the results, a series of large-scale
demonstrator projects has been set up to
bring together research from all the areas.
One of the most important demonstrator
projects is an effort led by ICL to develop a
decision-support system for the Department
of Health and Social Security (DHSS). The
task of encapsulating in software the legi-
slation, case histories and procedures that
tule how the DHSS works is immense. The
aim is to help decision making by DHSS
staff, freeing them for more direct contact
with clients.
An equally important goal is a very easy-
to-use computer to help clients fill in the
department’s daunting claim forms. It is
hoped that clients will eventually be able to
use a machine rather like an arcade game to
72
find out what their entitlements are. The
first version, called the Forms Helper, has
already been demonstrated. A mote
advanced product will guide people through
an electronic form on the screen. Trials will
begin next year to see how DHSS clients
feact to using a machine instead of wrestling
with paper.
Further up the ladder, systems are being
developed to provide clerks with a database
of the legislation and case histories they
need. For policy makers, the aim is to help
them to keep abreast of the continually
shifting legal framework, identify problems
with existing rules, and evaluate hypotheti-
cal alternatives.
All these schemes will need to draw on the
IKBS and software-engineering research
going on in individual Alvey projects. But
even more important will be the MMI issues.
A sophisticated support system will be use-
less unless the decision makers take it on
board.
Equally ambitious, and infinitely more
glamorous, are the efforts at Edinburgh
University to build a speech-driven word
processor. It has as its objective the develop-
ALVEY'S
ACHIEVEMENTS
With the Alvey programme due to come to an end next year, the
direction of IT research in Britain is once again coming under scrutiny.
Mary Fagan looks at what has been accomplished by the existing
programme, and what is likely to replace it.
ince it began in 1984, the Alvey
programme has been at the centre of |
ment of a wofd processor that recognises
connected speech in real time, and with a
reasonable error rate. Imperial College and
the Husat centre at Loughborough Uni-
versity are also involved in the work but the
ofiginal industrial partner, Plessey, has
dropped out.
The first prototype was built last year. It
consisted of a series of software modules
running on Masscomp and Xerox com-
puters. Phoneme recognition rates reached
92 percent on a limited test set, and rose
from 46 percent to 76 percent ona larger set.
A 46 percent recognition on phonemes
corresponds to only 10 percent on words,
but the team’s goal is to understand 20,000
wotds of continuous speech. The system
should also be speaker adaptive so that it can
be used by more than one person.
The eventual aim is to get things right
first time 50 percent of the time, and a fur-
ther 30 to 35 percent right after some inter-
action with the user. Unrestricted automatic
speech recognition would mean that the
machine would have to understand rather
than just recognise the speech. This is out of
reach for the moment so something has to
The VLSI project has brought feature sizes below one micron, as in this mask.
EE ——————E—E—=—E——————————E
PRACTICAL COMPUTING September 1987
go. It is full automation that has been sacri-
ficed, but with an interactive system it is
possible to get away with less than perfect
performance.
The project on mobile information
systems demonstrates how work begun
under Alvey can be converted into some-
thing of practical use. The overall objective
is to bring the benefits of IT to the mobile
user. In practice this means the development
of a cellular phone that can go anywhere in
Europe to transmit and receive both speech
and data.
Chips for the high frequencies used by
cellular phones are being made by Ferranti.
They are the result of the one micron CDI
process which Ferranti developed as part of a
separate Alvey project. Other sub-projects
feeding into the mobile-systems work
include a traffic-information collator, a fault
diagnosis IKBS and a secure electronic mail
network for mobile phones, known as
Locator.
At present it is easy for anyone to listen in
to cellular radio, and the problem will be
exacerbated when data is added to voice
transmissions. The Locator represents an
attempt to devise the architecture and
encryption techniques for secure X-400 elec-
tronic mail. Racal’s partners in the project
ate Hewlett-Packard, Ferranti, Cambridge
and Sussex Universities, and Thames Poly-
technic. In a parallel project, Husat in
Loughborough is trying to assess the needs
of users of this type of system.
The demonstrators also include a hybrid,
called Ansa, which in some ways could be
the most far-reaching of all; the name stands
for advanced network systems architecture.
Ansa is unusual in two respects: it has a large
foreign input and, instead of being spread
around, all the work takes place in Cam-
bridge, at a single site. Ansa’s project
manager, Andrew Herbert, believes it is the
first attempt to develop a generic standard
for open distributed processing (ODP) in
which applications can talk to each other
without intervention from the user.
The distributed system can be different
computers in different locations, different
chips in a single box, or different functions
A 3D representation of speech patterns,
part of the project to develop voice-
activated word processing.
Alvey’s greatest feat has been in persuading companies to collaborate with each other and
with universities. The companies involved say that even where they would have carried
out a certain line of research themselves, Alvey has accelerated the process. And where
there are several possible research paths to follow, working with others spreads the risk of
choosing the wrong one. On the academic side Bill Mitchell, director of the Science and .
Engineering Research Council, maintains that Alvey has given researchers more belief in
themselves and the contribution they can make in IT.
But there have been problems too. There are still those in industry with suspicions
about the value of academic work, and there are academics who prefer to remain aloof
from industry. More serious is the problem of contractual arrangements that have to be
worked out between the partners. Reaching agreement on precisely who has the right to
exploit particular fruits of a joint project has caused many delays, and much anguish for
on a single chip, all working towards
completing a common job. The Ansa pro-
ject takes a global approach, and is even
being taken as the basis of a working group
on ODP systems within the International
Standards Organisation (ISO). Herbert is
confident that Ansa will become the basis of
an ISO standard.
The final Alvey demonstrator applies
artificial-intelligence techniques to
designing, manufacturing and _ selling
products. The project, called Design to
Product, addresses an entire product life-
cycle from design through process control to
after-sales service. It will assess how design
changes can affect manufacturing, assembly
or sales, for example. The project will
culminate in a computer-integrated manu-
facturing (CIM) demonstration at a factory
owned by Lucas that makes parts for diesel
fuel pumps. But it should be possible to
exploit the results in any short-run manu-
facturing that relies for its success on a fast
response to changing customer needs.
The large demonstrators give a global
view of the aims of the Alvey project, but
there have also been many smaller successes
along the way. Much work has been done to
develop whole processes for manufacturing
VLSI components with sub-micron feature
sizes. STC is producing very high-speed
random-access memories with 1.25 micron
geometries, the result of a process developed
with British Aerospace, Racal and the
small companies and universities who lack access to the necessary legal know-how. The
Alvey directorate’s Brian Oakley concludes that there is no simple formula, but the
directorate will nevertheless be publishing a guide to contracts and intellectual-property
tights that should help in any future programmes.
There lies the basis of a complicated argument. What should be the form of future
collaboration in IT? A report written last year by the IT 86 committee headed by Sir
Austin Bide recommended that basic research and development should continue to be
funded in a £300m follow-on programme, and that it should have a scheme of appli-
cations alongside to pull the fruits of Alvey work through to the market. The idea is that
under the scheme of applications, funding should go to companies that use IT in
products and services, rather than to those that supply the technology.
This has caused concern in some quarters. No one disputes that R&D should be turned
to economic benefit, but some workers are worried that fundamental research may be
neglected if the government opts for a more market-orientated approach. The Trade and
Industry Minister, Kenneth Clarke, has said that the nearer work gets to the market, the
more industry should pick up the tab. Even Brian Oakley himself acknowledges that
public money for one successful programme does not automatically imply more for the
next. It is also likely that some of the work from Alvey will be carried forward ona
European scale under the banner of Esprit or Eureka.
Mike Watson of ICL voiced the feelings of many when he said: ‘‘Alvey isn’t a subsidy.
It’s very smart government investment in getting an important industry up and running.
We cannot afford to give up what we’ ve done. It would be delinquent to give it all up
now — the next phase is to take it all out into the marketplace.”’
University of Leuven in Belgium. Ferranti is
well advanced with work on one-micron reti-
cules for producing very fast gate arrays, and
Plessey is in pilot production with a 1.5
micron CMOS line at its new Roborough
plant.
One major success story is Ella, a
computer-aided hardware-design language
which originated at the Royal Signals
Research Establishment. A firm called Praxis
took up the development and is now taking
it to European and American markets. Less’
well known are products such as the generic
associative memory (GAM) chip for know-
ledge processing, developed at Strathclyde
The chip is now to be commercialised by
Deductive Systems, a small Glasgow firm.
A common thread running through the
schemes is the application of expert systems.
One of the great achievements of Alvey is
that it has increased the pool of skills in arti-
ficial intelligence (AI) in the UK and has
done a lot to bring AI out of the academic
world and into industry and commerce.
According to Brain Oakley, who heads the
Alvey Directorate, ‘‘The academic teams
have been overwhelmed by demand from
industry, and it is most encouraging to see
that this co-operation has led to the wide-
spread establishment of teams in the major
firms.”’ re
Mary Fagan 1s Technology News Editor on
New Scientist.
rr ES SS a a ee
PRACTICAL COMPUTING September 1987
73
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PRACTICAL COMPUTING September 1987
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THE CRAY 2
SUPERCOMPUTERS
The Cray 2 has become a byword for computing power.
Carol Hammond reports on her tour of inspection of
o look at the Cray 2 is like being
beamed up to the bridge of the Star-
ship Enterprise. The horseshoe-shaped
main unit stands nearly four feet high and is
more than four feet in diameter. At its outer
edge can be seen row upon row of silver- and
gold-coloured circuit boards stacked several
layers high. Viewed from its inner edge it
appears to be crammed full of blue and
white wiring. Closer inspection reveals that
the whole unit is full of a gently bubbling
clear liquid, giving the impression of a high-
tech cauldron.
The Cray 2 is a product of Cray Research
Inc. The company was founded in 1972 by
Seymour Cray, and by 1986 it had gained a
64 percent share of the supercomputer
market. Over 10 percent of all Cray ma-
chines are installed in the UK — nearly twice
as many as in any other country apart from
the US.
The machine we saw was installed in
| March of this year at the Harwell Laboratory
of the UK Atomic Energy Authority. It is
valued at £13 million. Crays are not new to
Harwell. It bought a Cray 1 in 1981, and up-
gtaded it to a Cray 1S in 1982. This was fol-
lowed by a Cray X-MP in 1986 and finally
the Cray 2 in 1987.
The Cray 2’s main unit is accompanied by
two free-standing support cabinets for the
power-supply control unit and a cooling
unit, along with a number of Perspex stand-
pipe towers down which liquid coolant
cascades. The towers of the Harwell machine
are bathed in blue light, further enhancing
the futuristic look.
If you want to run a Cray 2 you do not
simply plug it into the mains. The machine
consumes several hundred kilowatts of
electrical power, and motor generators are
needed to provide it with the 400Hz supply
that it requires. Apparently the higher
frequency is necesary to give sufficiently
smooth d.c. supply.
The Cray 2 at Harwell has 12 DD-49 disc
drives. Each one provides 1,200Mbyte of
storage, giving a total of 14.4Gbyte. It is
possible to have up to 36 disc drives on a
Cray 2 though as yet no one does — even
Nasa restricts itself to 34. The drives run at a
sustained rate of 9.6Mbyte per second. A
modified AT&T PC serves as an elaborate
on/off switch, acting as a system-control
console to stop and start the main machine.
The main unit of the Cray 2 is built up
from 14 columns like slices of a pie. The
upper part of each column contains a stack
the machine.
of citcuit-board modules, while the lower
paft contains power supplies for each
column. Up to 320 circuit-board modules
can be -accommodated. :Each one contains
about 750 integrated circuits to give the
Cray 2 a total of around 240,000
components, of which 75,000 are memory
chips. Each module is made up of eight cir-
cuit boards. The chips on the modules we
saw were Japanese, but Cray Research now
has its own chip-making facility at
Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin, where all the
hardware is assembled.
Circuit interconnections are made in all
three dimensions within the module. In a
supercomputer, component packing ts
important because one of the main con-
straints on speed is the time required for sig-
nals to pass from point to point within the
machine. It takes about a nanosecond for
electrical pulses to travel 10cm. through
ordinary witing. The distance that electrical
signals have to travel along the data path is
therefore crucial to the performance of the
machine. The longest wire in a Cray 2 is
25in., with 10in. being the average length.
About 36,000 pairs of wires are hand wired
into the machine.
The problem with such a compact design
is that the power consumption of the
machine is huge in relation to its size. The
Cray 2 is rated at 195kW, which is of the
order of 1,000 times the power consumption
of a PC. Nearly all of this energy ends up as
heat, which is carried away by the 200
gallons of coolant that bathes the machine’s
components.
The coolant used is a colourless, non-
toxic, non-flammable fluorocarbon liquid
The Cray is capable of modelling the
dynamics of a crystal lattice.
———$$_—$_{— eee re ss ee
76
called Fluorinert, made by.3M. It is a good
electrical insulator, has high thermal
stability and good heat-transfer properties.
It circulates up one column of the main unit
and then down the next in direct contact
with the integrated-circuit boards and
power-supply components.
Placing the coolant in direct contact with |
the components to be cooled helps to
stabilise the operating temperature, and |
improves the reliability of the system by pre-
venting chips getting hot. The liquid enters
the main unit at a temperature of around
70F and leaves at about 80F.
If a module fails, diagnostic software
isolates the problem to the failing module
or, in the worst case, to two or three
modules. Indicator panels on the top of the
machine display information about the
status of key components. Before defective
modules are removed the coolant must be
pumped up into the standpipe towers, and
then pumped back into the machine after a
replacement module has been fitted. Cray
claims that the operation only takes a few
minutes.
Faulty modules are diagnosed and re-
paired by on-site maintenance staff. Where
a fault can be pinned down to a particular
chip it is removed from the board, repaired
or replaced and then soldered back on. In its
pfeventive-maintenance scheme Cray Re-
search stresses the machine outside its nor-
mal operating limits to expose any incipient
| faults.
PRACTICAL COMPUTING September 1987
Above: The Cray 2’s main unit, with the
standpipes for the coolant visible in the
background.
Below: Each module contains eight circuit
boards and around 750 ICs.
'cr Tele —
To achieve its high processing rates the
Cray 2 uses scalar and vector processing
and a large common memory in a multi-
processing environment. The scalar pro-
cessing used by conventional computers
handles information sequentially. Super-
computers attain their increased speeds by
handling data which has been assembled in
vectofs or afrays. Vectors are expressed in a
computer as a string of 64-bit numbers that
PRACTICAL COMPUTING September 1987
can be processed in parallel as a single entity.
A special set of instructions is used to process
vectors, and only one instruction need be
issued to cafry out the processing of the
entire vector.
Each Cray 2 has four identical CPUs which
tun at 1,700 million floating-point
operations (1.7Gflops) per second. The
common memory holds 256 million 64-bit
words and there is an integral I/O controller
and a maintenance control-console. Each of
the four CPUs contains registers and
functional units to perform vector and scalar
operations. The I/O controller controls I/O
devices like disc drives and the front-end
interfaces. The large size of the common
memory allows users to run programs that
would be too large to run on other systems,
and it allows several jobs to reside con-
currently in memory.
The Cray 2 comes with an operating
system called Unicos, based on AT&T Unix
System V. Fortran is the main language
used, though Cray also offers an automatic
vectorising Fortran compiler and a C
compiler. A large number of applications
packages are available from third-party
suppliers.
The Cray 2 at Harwell is connected to IBM
and DEC machines as well as various work
stations, including Sun and Apollo units.
The IBMs are linked via a front-end inter-
face which acts as a channel-to-channel
connector and sorts out the differences
between Cray and IBM channels. The Vaxes
afe linked via a Network Systems Corpo-
ration Hyperchannel, which also links to one
of the work stations and an IBM. The work
stations also use one of the Vaxes as an Ether-
net gateway.
The high cost and small market for super-
computers has meant they have hitherto
been the domain of government, research
and military establishments. But their
number-crunching prowess and real-time
computing ability has taken them into
other fields. Harwell’s Cray 2 is used for
applications in aefospace, computational
physics and structural analysis.
Harwell hires out time on the Cray 2 at
around £1,000 per hour. If this seems
expensive it is worth bearing in mind that a
problem which could be solved in an hour
on the Cray 2 would take something like a
month on a DEC Vax 11/780: Put another
way, 10 days’ worth of calculation on an IBM
PC would be completed in just one minute
on the Cray. PC
77
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40, HIGH ROAD, BEESTON NOTTINGHAM NG9 2JP Tel: 0602 252627 = An Company
— circie 145 on enquiry card -
78 PRACTICAL COMPUTING September 1987
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Tel: (042 873) 4834 » Fax: (042 873) 6676
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——————
letter
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DEFECTIVE SOFTWARE
It seems likely that anyone sold defective software will now have
a stronger case for claiming damages, but it still all depends on
whether software is properly classified as goods or services.
Anne Staines explains how the law relating to this area is still
ina muddle.
E <otheah 4
a ey
( A or 4
I LING
ei
6"
BEE
"ct SII I
at “a
CONFUSED?
YOU WILL BE
omewhere in the gathering dusk, a
voice is heard to whimper: ‘‘Well how
should I know why all the missiles
suddenly launched like that? There must be
a fault in the system.’’ This is hardly an
original scenario; in fact it is one so hack-
neyed it could even lie at the root of an act of
Parliament, as indeed it does. It is an
extreme but feasible example of the risks
inherent in modern technological pro-
duction.
The EEC Council addressed its directive
on product liability in 1985 to these risks.
The directive ordered all EEC member states
to implement national laws giving effect to
the principle that, irrespective of fault, pro-
ducers shall be liable for damage caused by a
defect in their products. The deadline for
such laws to come into effect was July 1988.
In the UK, the directive was implemented
on 15 May 1987 by means of the Consumer
Protection Act 1987, which turns the former
product liability law on its head. Before, a
person claiming damages in respect of
injuries caused by a defective product had to
prove that it was more likely than not that
the defect resulted from negligent manu-
facture. Since 15 May a litigant need only
prove that he or she has suffered damage for
which the courts would award more than
£275 in compensation; that the product is
defective in that its safety is not such as
petsons generally are entitled to expect; and
that the defect was the cause of the damage.
If a court can be satisfied on these points, the
producer will be held liable for the damage
unless it can successfully raise one of the
statutory defences.
Such defences appear numerous, but they
are limited in effect. The most important
defence is likely to be that of state of the art.
A producer will not be liable under the act
if, in the words of the act, it can be shown
“that the state of scientific and technical
knowledge at the relevant time [usually this
will be the time at which the producer
supplied the product] was not such that a
producer of products of the same description
as the product in question might have been
expected to have discovered the defect if it
had existed in his products while they were
under his control.’’ This tortuous use of
language is typical of the whole act.
The state of the art defence is the closest
approximation in the Consumer Protection
Act to the theory of negligence, which it
replaces in the case of defective products. A
negligent producer is one who takes less care
in its production process than the mythical
so-called ‘‘reasonable man’’ would take in
the same circumstances. That objective
standard does not take into account the pro-
ducer’s actual degree of technical know-
ledge, but the degree that the reasonable |!
producer would have. So it assumes that
producers keep reasonably abreast of the
times.
The new act uses the same test in its state
of the art defence, but reverses the burden of
proof. Now the producer must demonstrate
that reasonable care was taken, rather than
the consumer proving that it was not.
Product liability is only one aspect of
consumer protection with which the act
deals, Elsewhere in the same legislation are
provisions consolidating the Consumer
Safety Act 1978 with the Consumer Safety
(Amendment) Act 1986. The new act also
regulates the giving of price indications, by
amending Part I of the Health and Safety At
Work Act 1974 and sections 31 and 80 of the
Explosives Act 1875; it also repeals the Trade
Descriptions Act 1972 amd the Fabrics
Misdescriptions Act 1913.
The provisions relating to product
liability appear in Part I of this hotch-potch.
The opening words make it clear that Part I
is intended to comply with the EEC product
liability directive. The directive, referring
specifically to the problem of increasing
technicality in industrial production, clearly
covers computer software, either as a
product itself or as a component part.
Whether or not the UK law does is less clear.
The problem lies in the definition of
(continued on next page)
PRACTICAL COMPUTING September 1987
81
MIKE GORNALL
DEFECTIVE SOFTWARE
(continued from previous page)
the word ‘‘product’’. According to the
directive, product means all moveables,
including electricity but excluding primary
agricultural products and game. Moveable
property is anything other than land. The
Consumer Protection Act, on the other
hand, defines a product as being any goods
or electricity.
For several years lawyers have debated
whether or not computer software can be
said to be goods. Interest in this question has
so far centred on the applicability or other-
wise of various statutory warranties. If soft-
ware is goods, it must comply with the
requirements of fitness for purpose and
merchantable quality laid down in the Sale
of Goods Act.
There is a widely held view, however, that
the supplier of software is providing services
not goods, since it is the information con-
tained in the program that the user wants
rather than the medium on which it is fixed.
Information, it is argued, cannot be classi-
fied as goods, and sufficient legal precedents
can be called in support of this argument to
make it very persuasive. It may be that some
programs are easier to define as goods than
others, the most obvious distinction lying
between off-the-peg packages and specially
commissioned, bespoke software.
But arguments of this kind only serve to
confuse the already complex area of liability
for defective software, which this legislation
was supposed to clarify. There is really no
excuse for the government’s failure in this
4
Zod: the most part, it is safe
to assume that software
falls within the ambit of the
Consumer Protection Act.
Predictably, consumers will
be the main coger) 4
act to grasp the nettle and finally declare on
which side of the fence computer software
falls,
Despite the strength of argument that
software is services, it is likely that it would
be defined as goods within the meaning of
the Consumer Protection Act, should the
point arise in a UK court. The New York Bar
Association recently deliberated on the
matter, and in the resulting report con-
cluded that software should be deemed
goods. The legal arguments in favour of its
conclusions are not wholly convincing; at
times they are contradictory and confused.
But what swayed the writers of the report
and may be expected to sway its readers were
policy considerations. Both producers and
users, the report concluded, have an interest
in uniformity and certainty of legal treat-
ment. In an area of the law where everything
is often uncertain, that isa hard argument to
refute.
For the most part, it should be safe to
assume that software falls within the ambit
of the Consumer Protection Act, although
there will be some exceptions. Software
supplied as part of a telecommunications or
cable. program service ts undoubtedly part of
a service. In. addition, there will be some
contracts in which the emphasis on
continuing support, revisions and updating
make the agreement more clearly one for the
supply of services than goods.
As might be predicted from its title, the
main beneficiaries of the act will be con-
sumers — that is, private as opposed to busi-
ness users of defective products. Where a
business causes damage to a consumer as a
result of using defective software in its
manufacturing process, both the business
and the software supplier will be liable as
producers. Of course, the consumer will
invariably sue the manufacturer, who must
then seek a contribution from the software
producer. It is advisable for all manu-
facturers in this position to ensure that their
contracts with software suppliers contain a
provision indemnifying them against loss or
damage in the event of a defect in the
software.
The act does not improve the lot of busi-
nesses that suffer loss themselves as a result
of using defective software. Producers are
not liable under the act for loss of or damage
to the product itself, or for loss of or damage
to property that: is neither of a type
ordinarily intended for private use, nor
intended by the injured party mainly for
private use. Injured businesses must con-
tinue to prove negligent manufacture.
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PRACTICAL COMPUTING September 1987
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84 Siege ouondviny card PRACTICAL COMPUTING September 1987
r TOn0:
OFFICE
4K10743J
GETTING IT
TOGETHER
IS THE INTEGRATED OFFICE WITHIN REACH AT LAST? GLYN
MOODY EXPLAINS WHAT STILL NEEDS TO BE DONE TO ACHIEVE
THIS ELUSIVE GOAL.
, Nce upon a time, when the computer
Wa revolution was still young and people
‘ were uncorrupted by practical expeti-
Fence of its impact, some bright spark
R ) came up with the phrase ‘‘the paperless
office’’. It seemed obvious: as computer
technology moved out of the air-conditioned rooms
where it was tended by dedicated DP professionals, and
into the office, so the medium of information transmis-
sion would pass from paper to electricity.
As we now know, it did not quite work out that way.
To be sure, the migration of technology from DP
department to desk top proceeded even mote rapidly
than the most sanguine of predictions. But in the
process, the amount of paper generated has increased
enrormously. The micro has become a tool for doing
what was done before, only more so; and that includes
aiding and abetting global de-afforestation.
A paperless office may be utopia — at least until a
paper-like and paper-thin display is devised — but the
truly electronic office remains an achievable goal.
Recent developments suggest that it is at least getting
PRACTICAL COMPUTING September 1987
nearer. Perhaps the most crucial progress in the
enabling technology has been the continuing increase in
processor power. With 80386-based machines available
for under £2,000, almost any office worker can have
what is to all intents and purposes a minicomputer on
their desk. Given that the pattern of working with the
personal computer remains essentially single-user, this
leaves a grossly underutilised computational capacity.
That capacity might easily and usefully find itself
channelled into handling other office equipment in an
integrated environment.
To use that surplus power, networking will need to be
routine. The full benefit of an integrated office —
where all the functions can work together in a very
natural way — will only occur if there is ready com-
munication between the component parts. Networking
of micros is still in its infancy, though there are some
signs that IBM’s Token Ring system is on the way to
turning into another de facto standard. The sooner that
becomes so — and the teething troubles of what are
com plex and fiddly systems are sorted out — the sooner
progress can be made in wiring up the office.
(continued on next page)
85
86
IN T E®°G®RPA T E D
eb iC b
Allied to straight computer networking, the ordinary
telephone network will play a key role in any future
office environment. Again, changes which have
occurred over the last few years make the necessary con-
vergence of technologies look much more likely. This is
partly a reflection of the modernisation of exchanges,
which itself is a harbinger of the switch to a fully digital
telephone network. Although digital networks can be
set up locally within a company to integrate computers
and communications, the full benefits only come once
that network can be extended through to the outside
world. In particular, the adoption of the Integrated
Services Digital Network (ISDN) standard will accel-
erate changes in this area enormously. As the discussion
on page 92 shows, progress is already being made, with
the UK apparently well ahead.
The convergence of micros and telephones is likely to
lead to anew breed of integrated work stations, of which
ICL’s One Per Desk and BT’s Qwertyphone were less
than successful early implementations. Indeed, the
coming together of the various component parts of the
fully electronic office will only succeed if this kind of
synthesis takes place. After all, even a micro takes up a
substantial area of valuable desk space.
As Ian Stobie reports in the article opposite, there is
already some movement towards combining some of the
key elements in one box. Putting together a fax machine
with a scanner is an obvious step. Incorporating an intel-
ligent optical character recognition device would be
another. And given the fact that a laser printer and a
photocopier are very similar in mechancial design, it
surely cannot be long before there are combined photo-
copiers and printers, which then add intelligence to
become scanners and fax boxes too. Add a telephone
handset and a screen and you have the beginnings of the
ultimate office work station.
The earlier vision of the new office foundered on the
failure to cope with raw data. The integrated work-
station solves the problems of communication, but
leaves that of storage untouched. But once again, recent
developments, this time in the field of optical discs,
may come to the rescue.
The write once read many times (Worm) technology
has come a long way in recent years. The fact that IBM ts
now offering its own variant can be seen as the final seal
of approval on the whole approach. Potentially it could
allow rows of filing cabinets not only to be replaced but,
more importantly, to be integrated fully into the office
environment. The data stored in them would become
live rather than dead reference material. The technology
for doing this is discussed in greater detail by Carol
Hammond on page 94.
Clearly much new technology is atound which could
help turn the dream of the integrated office into a
reality. But perhaps even more important, there is a
world of difference in office workers’ attitudes to that
new technology. The paperless office pipe dream of a
couple of decades back was conceived as some grand
scheme which would be imposed on workers with little
reference to them or their readiness for it. Today's
moves towards an integrated office environment are
taking place against a background of increasing
acceptance of micros, advanced PABXs, fax and net-
works as a matter of course.
As a result of the accumulated experience of the last
decade, manufacturers too are far better prepared; in
particular, they have a clearer idea of what will work in
practical everyday situations, Ultimately it is this spirit
of realism on both sides, rather than any fancy new tech-
nology, which will determine whether we will move
closer to the truly integrated office — with or without
paper.
he integrated office is a metaphor as yet
only inadequately supported by real
products. But the concept is gaining
greater currency at the moment because
of two developments. One is the growing
number of local area networks: com-
panies are finally getting beyond the planning stage and
are actually installing the things. The other is a growing
convergence in the technology of computing itself, par-
ticularly as it affects peripherals.
The integrated office is really what networks are all
about once you shift your focus from the details of the
technology to the wider view. For a long time user
acceptance of networks was held up by technical issues,
lack of standardisation being the main one. But ever
since proper network support was added to MS-DOS in
version 3.1 the basis of the future standard has become
clear. Further recent clarification by Microsoft and IBM
of their plans, along with a shakeout among the
hardware suppliers, has removed most of the un-
cettainty from the technology itself. The emphasis has
therefore moved from the technology to the things you
can do with it.
The central idea of the integrated office comes from
recognising a key feature of ordinary offices. Here one
task leads naturally into another, whether or not it is
performed by the same person. This means that for a
computer to be truly helpful in a typical white-collar
environment you need to be able to do many more
things with it than you can today.
Integrated computer systems are already well
established in some specialised vertical-market
applications, especially those involving an accounting
function. But the integrated office is really about
generic tasks — the kinds of things a high proportion of
office workers would wish to do. At present most of the
major generic tasks, such as word processing or using a
Forward
Jas Hall to be Gsened encomtng Me
jeceived: Enctosure:
2678 9
20/05/85 11'S
A networking system like Torus tapestry allows you to
attach data or program files to your electronic mail
message.
| Create Mail List Mail Status
Customer support
Product launch
Sales figures
New contract
PRACTICAL COMPUTING September } 987
I
N T E®G®R®A T E D
Orr ICE]
WHEN TECHNOLOGIES
CON VERGE
LINKING PCs TOGETHER AND TO OTHER ELECTRONIC DEVICES GIVES YOU
SOMETHING THAT IS QUITE DISTINCT FROM THE OLD BIG-COMPUTING DP, AS IAN
STOBIE EXPLAINS.
spreadsheet, are still implemented on an individually
ofientated basis. There is also still a wide range of
human tasks that the computer cannot help with.
While personal computing was about enhancing the
productivity of an individual, the integrated office is
about enhancing the productivity of the group. But
suppotting a group is different to supporting an
individual. The two approaches are not in competition
— the integrated office is an extension of the
philosophy of the PC. Both are interactive forms of
computing, unlike traditional data processing, and
both should fit into an existing division of labour
without disrupting it too much.
People are still feeling their way into this particular
future. Part of the excitement of the integrated office is
that it is not yet clear precisely which technologies and
functions will end up working together in a sensible
way. But already many of the possibilities are clear:
networks, mail, communications, document pro-
duction and possibly expert systems will all be involved.
One virtue of the integrated office concept is that it
forces you to lift your eyes from the technology and
concentrate instead what it is all for in terms of goals at
the organisational level. A key idea is that it functions
with a work group by helping the group members
interact with each other more productively. This makes
network mail a central feature of the integrated office.
Network mail complements the ordinaty voice
telephone, as you can use mail when people are not
sitting by their phone. Other advantages are that it gives
you a permanent record if you wish; it is quicker than
ordinary paper mail; and you can be more confident
that your message gets through. Reading network mail
is also generally quicker than getting the same message
by phone as you can scan through it and pick out topics
and headlines.
A typical modern integrated mail system is the one
provided with the Torus Tapestry networking software
for IBM local area networks. It provides a similar
interface for all your text-editing jobs, including routine
over 200 countries.
S TELEX — STILL GOING STRONG
TELEX has a long history. The first telex machine was installed in 1933, and the —— aT
system was already established in pretty much its present form by the start of PROCOM
the Second World War. Telex now has about two million users worldwide in =.
Because of its relative antiquity as a business communications medium, telex
COMMS COSTS COMPARED
cost in pence of 200 words
sent up to 65km in U.K.
Electronic mail
ist class post
2nd class post
Fax
source: Communicate
fax at pm daytime rate
Telex
word processing, creating network mail, or sending
telexes to the outside world. For detailed editing you
can use a normal word-processing package such as
WordStar. Once you have sent a message acfoss the
Tapestry network you can check if it has been read. You
can also copy mail to other network members very easily.
With Tapestry and other network mail systems such
as Top Mail on the Macintosh you can attach any kind of
file — a spreadsheet, a chart or even a program — to
your mail message. This is already a very powerful
feature, but in future facilities of this kind are likely to
go much further. For example, you could add
comments inside an attached file. You could flag
proposed changes in a document or spreadsheet in some
way, and send them to your colleagues for comment.
Perhaps you could superimpose pop-up notes on it, ina
kind of network version of Note-It. Or, as on the Discus
a
has several limitations. It is fairly slow, with messages transmitting at 50 baud.
This translates into a top speed of about 60 words a minute. Telexes use the old
five-bit Baudot encoding scheme rather than ASCII, so you can only send
messages consisting of upper-case letters and numbers. Graphic images,
programs or bulk data are out of the question.
On the plus side, telex lines are separated from the normal voice telephone
system, which gives you some protection against casual hacking. But the main
reason for using telex is that it is the most established real-time business hard-
copy medium. True, it is something of lowest common denominator, but there
is no problem finding people with compatible kit to talk to.
The BABT-approved Procom
PC telex board.
(continued on page 90)
PRACTICAL COMPUTING September 1987 87
7
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The Company in question is Opus and its class-beating compatible is the PC II
Turbo, now being built in Britain in monochrome, colour and EGA versions. ‘PC User’
Magazine which conducted the comparison test said of the PC II Turbo:
“Even in its basic £499 form, it is a superior beast.
This is a great machine.”
. their words not ours
But what really makes the PC II Turbo stand out from the compatible crowd?
The answer it seems depends on which computer magazine you read.
“Performance is above average, thanks to the NEC V20 chip. The PC II exhibits | |
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‘What Micro?’
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‘Which Computer?’
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— circle 101 on enquiry card <—
I N T E®°G®R®A T 1
system described on page 94, you could attach voice
notes which are played back to your recipients when
they open the document.
Ideally you would be able to also do this noting and
commenting in real time. This means that once your
recipient has read your message and its attached
documents you could open up a simultaneous channel
for achat, perhaps in the form of a pop-up text window.
The technology also exists to allow you to point with
your mouse at documents displayed on the other
system's screen, of to open up a simultaneous voice
channel.
This gives you a powerful kind of electronic confer-
encing, with the relevant documents readily to hand.
And there is no reason why such conferring has to be
restricted to two participants. The number is limited
only by the resources of the system and the space
available on your screen for windows for all the
patticipants.
Powerful as these mai! and conferencing systems are,
they still only mark the beginning of what linked
computers could achieve in assisting routine office
transactions. One problem when dealing with someone
outside your immediate work group is that you do not
know what they require. Systems based on simple app-
lications of artificial intelligence, should hold out great
advantages in such circumstances.
FAX — THE UPSTART
FAX is growing much faster than telex. At the moment there are about the
same number of fax and telex machines installed in the U.K. — around
100,000 each, according to market research company International Resource
Development — but fax sales are outstripping telex by a factor of at least 10 to
one.
Fax a visual medium. A document is transmitted line by line, as an image
rather than as a series of characters. This means it can handle handwriting,
graphic images and the character set of any nation, all with equal facility. On
the other hand it cannot transmit programs or bulk data; they require a
completely error-free transmission method such as X-25. Fax is fast compared
to telex: an A4 page typically takes under a minute to send.
In the past fax has suffered from compatibility problems, and this has led
some people to think of it as a workable medium only within an organisation,
where purchasing policy can be standarised. According to this view telex still
reigns supreme for general business use, despite its technical inferiority. But
things are changing fast, as mew fax machines upgrade the quality of the
installed base. All modern group 3 machines can talk to each other, and also to
most of the earlier group 2 machines.
A dedicated stand-alone fax machine consists basically of a scanner, modem
and printer mounted in the same box. Current fax machines typically work at a
resolution of 200 by 200 or 200 by 100 dots to the inch. This is rather lower than
the 300 dots per inch achieved by PC laser printers and the image scannets used
in desk-top publishing.
Group 4 fax machines will have higher resolution. This standard is still
emerging, but as well as offering compatibility with earlier group 2 and 3
machines it is likely to use a resolution-independent coding scheme, so
manufacturers can go to 300 and 400 dots to the inch as soon as it becomes
economic to do so.
The earliest facsimile machine was rather surprisingly developed back in the
1840s, by a Scotsman called Alexander Bain. This makes it almost as old as the
penny black stamp and the Royal Mail. The current fax boom started in 1980,
when group 3 fax came in. What is really pushing fax forward is its runaway
success in Japan. There, because of the complex nature of the Kanji written
character set, instant hard-copy business comms has had to wait for the arrival
of fax. The release of this massive pent-up demand has driven the cost of fax
down fast, and is incidentally fuelling the development of related scanner
technology.
- Unlike telex, fax machines use the ordinary voice telephone line. Sending
short messages can be vety cheap, especially at night-time rates. This is one way
a PC-based fax system scores over the dimmer dedicated machines, as it can
store non-urgent fax messages on disc and transmit them at cheap times.
E D
In fact you do not even need to go this far/At its
simplest level, each network user could simply establish
a help file which says things like when they can be
contacted, on what issues and in what sort, of way. It
would be available to anyone interested through a
network help function.
Many people have core functions which involve some
formalised procedure, and in many organisations
dealing with them involves using appropriate memos
and forms. This again is very amenable to some sort of
computerised help function. A simple system could be
built up from a personalised series of help screens which
tell you what to say in the memo, or which forms to use.
The obvious next step is to have the mail user fill the
memo or form on-screen, there and then. An interactive
form-filling system could give help simply by checking
on the arithmetic and fetching values from a reference
database. But logically it should go further, and provide
the sort of help the originator of the form or procedure
would be able to provide if they were actually present at
the form filler’s side.
This is where expert systems come in as they are ideal
for giving help, especially when the problem is
governed by well-known rules or procedures. The logic
involved is well within the capacity of present-day
expert-system shells. You could ask things like, ‘‘Should
I claim now under section 6B, or would I do better
under 7D, and am I eligible?”’
The advantage of an expert system over more
traditional help screens is not just in the complexity of
the problems that can be tackled. Its real asset is that the
system itself can ask the questions: it can scan the form-
filler’s input and start asking for clarification if it spots.a
problem. Otherwise it can keep out of the way. Ideally
expert-systems shells will become sufficiently easy to use
to be programmed in a personalised way by the
responsible individual, rather than at a departmental
level. This will make the computer-assisted form much
more human than its paper equivalent.
THE OUTSIDE
WORLD
Most organisations have facsimile (fax) machines and
telex, but the procedures involved in using them are.
often so cumbersome that they are used far less than
they should be. Because the fax machine resides in
another room or on another floor people do not bother
to use it; instead they end up making unnecessary
journeys across town. Similarly, people waste time
making fruitless phone calls to people who always seem
to be out, whereas a short telex would probably get
through.
Once you have a network of PCs set up the cost of
adding telex and fax is very small — a matter two or
three thousand pounds at the most to provide a facility
that can be used by everyone on the network. Obviously
running costs have to be controlled, but they are easily
monitored on a computerised system and are often
exaggerated anyway. The cost of not using fax or telex
when it is appropriate is often far higher.
The point is that in the integrated office, telex and
fax become far more convenient to use. People can do it
for themselves, without involving secretaries or telex
operators who have to type everything out laboriously a
second time. Ideally you should be able to use your
existing word processor to prepare the message. Then
you just tell the system that you want it sent as telex or
fax, giving the recipient’s fax or telex number — or
perhaps just their name if it has been previously entered
in the system’s directory.
90
PRACTICAL COMPUTING September ! 987
I
To operate a telex system of your own you need to
rent a telex line from British Telecom, which costs about
£90 a quarter. A PC telex card incorporating the
necessary telex modem can be obtained for under
£1,000, with multi-user network versions costing a little
more. You then pay British Telecom charges based on
use, but they are comparable with other forms of
electronic mail.
The cheapest way of getting computerised telex is to
use the services of a bureau. You can do this through an
electronic-mail system such as Telecom Gold. But if the
volume of your telex business is likely to go beyond a
dozen telexes per week it is probably worth investigating
leasing your own telex line and getting an add-on telex
board for your PC. As well as reduced costs you get other
advantages: you will know instantly whether your telex
has been received, something that a bureau takes time
to tell; and you will have your own unique telex number
for incoming messages, which you will receive with no
delay.
As with telex, the initial crop of computerised fax
products was really aimed at large existing users who
wanted extra features. A computerised fax lets you do
things like store messages and send them at cheap times
of the day. It also makes it easy to send out batches of
personalised messages — junk fax, in other words.
British Telecom's Merlinfax PC-100 at nearly £7,000 is
an example of such a system.
However, the same technology makes fax very
attractive to PC users. The cost is much lower, as they
already have the PC and a suitable printer. Both
Comwave and Communicate do single-user fax boards
with built-in high-speed modems for under £1,000. For
just under £2,000 Communicate will sell you a mullti-
user fax board capable of supporting eight users. To this
you need to add the cost of a scanner if you wish to fax
existing paper documents. All scanners aimed at the
computer market are very high quality by fax standards
so a £1,000 machine would easily do the job.
Even if you do not have a scanner you can still send off
messages from a computer-based fax unit. You can
convert both text and graphics files into fax format
without having to print them out first. Your fax board
will come with software to handle the conversion, which
it does using abit-mapped character set. This produces a
much higher-quality fax compared to a conventional fax
machine as there are no scan errors. The main point of
sending an ordinary text file by fax is that, like telex, it is
a priority medium. It is also quite cheap.
Incoming faxes can be stored on disc, then printed
out. If you wish, it is possible to go a stage further, using
optical character recognition (OCR) software to convert
the incoming message to ASCII. In the truly integrated
office this step would be very desirable, allowing you to
make use of the message immediately with word
processing or other standard software. Communicate
says that it intends to offer OCR as an option with its fax
system.
But there is a problem. At the moment most con-
ventional fax machines scan at rather too low a res-
olution. The OCR software needs as much information
as possible to work on. It is also likely to be thrown by
any transmission errors. A few blobs or lost scan lines do
not make much difference if you are reading a printed
fax image by eye, but they make OCR very difficult.
This means that OCR is unlikely to be used much in
conjunction with fax until group 4 takes off, chough the
technology does work if you use good-quality fax
equipment and transmit at 300 by 300 resolution. It is
already a viable option for communications within an
organisation, where you can make sure all the kit is up to
N T E®°G®R®PA T E D
(aE?
‘ — Zo gen
- i
the job. Despite its advantages in other respects, fax is
not the ideal medium for text messages that are destined
for further processing within your computer system: an
ordinary electronic mail service like Telecom Gold, the,
X-25 data network and even telex are all much more
suitable.
Another obvious application for high-grade, high-
resolution fax is in desk-top publishing. Artwork or
complete made-up pages can be sent far more quickly
than by post or courier. Again, at least 300 by 300
resolution is required, along with a low error rate, so
good-quality kit is essential.
Sometime towards the end of this year or the
beginning of 1988 Sharp will introduce the MZ-IVOI.
This device joins together the functions of a fax
machine, an A4 image scanner, a thermal printer and a
photocopier; it will probably cost around £2,000. The
scanner and facsimile transmission can both operate at
300 dots per inch, and though the printer works at lower
resolution, images can be transferred to disc and printed
out on a laser printer if desired.
This sort of technological convergence is likely to be
very important to the future of the integrated office.
Facsimile requires both an image scanner and a
reasonable quality printer; the same elements are also
required in photocopiers and for many desk-top pub-
lishing tasks. An image scanner simply converts a
document into a bit pattern. In a fax machine the
pattern is transmitted down a phone line and printed
out at the other end. A digitial photocopier holds the
image in memory, cleans it up a little with its built-in
software, and prints it out on the spot. A scanner in
desk-top publishing use transfers the image across to a
PC, where it may end up incorporated into a document
as an illustration. As the Sharp machine quite clearly
shows, one machine could do all these jobs.
SUPPLIERS
er
a nT {cantinved on next page)
PRACTICAL COMPUTING September 1987
The Sharp MZ-IVOI
combines the functions
of a fax machine, an
image scanner, a printer
and a photocopier.
71
I Not
he integration of computers and com-
munications is already commonplace at
one level. Electronic mail is growing fast,
and more and more people are sending
data down their phones. But at the
moment the transmission process is slow
and clumsy. At one end the digital data ts converted to
audio signals which can be transmitted over ordinary
twisted-pair cabling, through the telephone network,
and on to the other end, where it is laboriously con-
verted back into digital form. In an ideal world you
would be able to plug your micro straight into the tele-
phone network and send digital data directly.
The Integrated Services Digital Network (ISDN)
allows you to do just that. Moreover, it permits far
higher data-transmission speeds than at present. Once a
standard digital pathway has been defined over the tele-
phone network — which itself must be upgraded to
handle the digital data — it is not just micros which will
plug in. The quality of voice transmission will be
improved, fax will be faster and slow-scan CCTV will
become increasingly common. And once intelligence is
married to the digital standard, a whole new world of
facilities becomes available — see box below.
FUTURE PHONES
The introduction of the ISDN standard will not only allow computers and'com-
munications to work together more closely, it will also transform the humble
telephone. With the network fully digital, a wide range of new services and
facilities will be available.
Some of the most advanced resatch in this area is being carried out at
Bellcore, an independent consortium funded by the seven regional telephone
companies which were split off from AT&T. The advanced telephone services
which they are developing are not dependent on ISDN, and would work with
any digital environment. However, ISDN does provide a very natural setting
for them, and their development is likely to go hand in hand with its progress.
The system beng developed at Bellcore is the Modular Integrated
Communications Environment (Mice). It exists in 2 prototype form in the
laboratories at Morristown, New Jersey. One of the features offered by such
intelligent networks is voice dialling. You can either speak the number you
wish dialled, or‘alternatively give a command such as “‘ring John’; the system
will recognise the name John, and retrieve the previously stored number. Voice
recognition can also be used for security purposes to ensure that only authorised
personnel use certain phones.
Advanced message handling is also a feature. The network will respond
intelligently to callers, and allow you to pre-program its behaviour. For
example, you can specify that certain numbers — say your boss and your spouse
— get put through straight away, while others are diverted to a secretary or
dumped to an answering machine. Message retrieval will allow you to listen to
messages left in voice banks, and it will be possible to retrieve text messages too,
using a voice synthesis program.
One important feature of these intelligent telephones is that the number will
be line independent. You will be able to pick up a call from any telephone, or
arrange forcalls to be routed through to any handset. In the future, the number
will refer to the user, not to the piece of equipment and the line to which it is
attached. ;
And of course such telephones will routinely send data as well as voice. For
the full benefits of this capability a screen will become 2 normal part of the
telephone. It might be used in addition to set up call forwarding in a graphical
way, drawing lines between incoming calls and their eventual destinations. A
| screen would also allow on-line databases, telecommuting and teleshopping to
grow substantially. i
It also opens up the possibility of videophones once the rate of transmission
down the line increases sufficiently to cope with the enormous data throughput
tequired — something like 150Mbit/s. That in turn will probably require a
second-generation refurbishment of the telephone system, including the use of
fibre optics at all stages. The combination of later developments of ISDN with
the kind of data capacity such a network would provide opens up the possibility
for unimaginable changes in the office environment,.not to mention the office
telephone itself.
E°GOR®,A T E D
ISDN
AS THE CURRENT ANALOGUE PHONE
NETWORK IS REPLACED BY A FULLY
DIGITAL SYSTEM A VAST NEW RANGE
OF COMMS OPTIONS IS OPENING UP.
GLYN MOODY LOOKS AT THEIR
IMPLICATIONS FOR INTEGRATED
OFFICE SYSTEMS.
The ISDN standard has been defined by the inter-
national CCITT body as the X-21 protocol. In its basic
form, it specifies that the user transmits data in a digital
form at 144Kbit/s. — way above the 300bit/s. or
1,200bit/s. currently offered by standard modems. But
even more important than the gain in speed is the
structure embedded in the system.
There are in fact three channels: two of 64Kbit/s. and
one of 16Kbit/s. The latter is used purely for signalling
information, and is invisible to the user. The other two
can be used for either voice or data transmission; since
both channels operate simultaneously, this opens up
possibilities for sending data between computers and
offering a voice commentary at the same time. This twin
data plus signalling arrangement is known as 2B+D.
There is also a higher level of access, known as primary
access — as against the basic access just described —
which provides for a 30B + 2D-arrangement.
Clearly there are enormous potential benefits for the
computer user, and for the concept of the integrated
office. Under the ISDN approach, ordinary voice
communications become just another data signal, and
computers are seamlessly linked in with the external
telephone network. As well as having access.to the
otdinary public switched telephone network, ISDN
links up with Kilostream and the Packet Switched
Stream (PSS) service.
Unfortunately, between this dream and reality there
stands a great deal of work to be done. At the user’s end
this involves replacing the office PABX with a digital
version which can cope with ISDN and provide the full
range of facilities under that system. An even bigger
task is the countrywide replacement of old analogue
telephone exchanges by digital systems.
As the table opposite shows, work is already under
way in many nations, at least at the pilot stage. The UK
is currently well advanced along this road, and offers
ISDN as a commercial service while most other countries
are still conducting non-commercial trials
There is a price to pay for being ahead of the field.
When BT started up its digital service there were no
agreed international standards, and it was necessary for
one to be devised. Instead of the standard 2B + D, BT
opted for a single 64Kbit/s. voice or data channel. This
service was introduced in June 1985 as the Integrated
Digital Access (IDA). As far as the user is concerned
there is little practical difference frorn the full ISDN
standard. In addition to this basic access to IDA there is
also a version called Multi-line IDA, which allows 30
simultaneous 64Kbit/s. voice or data channels, plus two
for signalling. Now that the CCITT has defined ’a stand-
ard, BT has said that it plans to offer the full 2B+ D
service from next year, while maintaining the older
system for current users.
‘Currently there are about 50 business centres based in
the major cities which offer IDA, and a total of 1,000
| lines using IDA. The present total of 500 local digital
92
PRACTICAL COMPUTING September 1987
Computing centre
Complex interfacing (above) needed to connect
digital devices the analogue network. With ISDN
(below) things are simpler.
[ Computing centre
Executive/Sectetary
SESS Switch with ISON
exchanges will go up to about 750 next year, of which
around 200 will offer IDA. By the end of 1990 it ts
expected that half the lines in use will be digital, with
IDA available on a high proportion of them.
BT makes two types of charge for the service. There is
an initial payment of £500 for pure data use, or £560 for
mixed data and voice, plus an annual rental of £516 for
data and £526 for mixed data and voice. The usage
charge is unchanged.
A number of other countries are involved with trials,
though they are not as far advanced as the BT pilot. The
table opposite shows the state of play for the European
PTTs. In the US, after some initial reluctance to follow
what was perceived as a purely European standard,
ISDN received a big boost when the 20 Bell operating
companies, which run the local telephone networks,
decided to back the system. Nearly all of them have or
are planning trials of ISDN.
Much work has gone into experimenting with ISDN
at Bellcore, the central research facility of the Bell
companies. Areas studied go way beyond simple
implementation of ISDN, and touch on all aspects of
the telephone in the future, particularly with regard to
its integration with the micro and the use of computer
intelligence within a telephone network.
=
2
6
=
c
g
a
2
been working on its Information Network System
(INS). It started back in 1982, well before the ISDN
standard was establised, and hence used its own paftic-
ular variety, which was similar to the British IDA. Since
then it has affirmed its support for the international
standard. ISDN is now available in four cities, including
Tokyo and Osaka, and will be available across the whole
of Japan in the next 10 years.
Pilots are all very well, but until they are turned into
full-scale commercial versions, users are likely to remain
sceptical and aloof. The market research company IDC
has done some work in this area as far as Europe is con-
| cerned, and it predicts that full services will appear in
Britain and France in 1991-92, in Switzerland and Italy
a year later, followed by West Germany in 1995.
As an international standard ISDN must be almost
unique in that it appears to have gained worldwide
acceptance with little opposition. This is partly a reflec-
tion on the strategic importance of the whole concept.
Communications and computer equipment manu-
facturers both recognise that this is an area where
agreement is vital. The fact that there is this unanimity
suggests that manufacturers at least believe in ISDN as
the glue which will bind together tomortow’s integrated
office. Now that the first services are beginning to come
through, it remains to be seen whether the users will
share that vision and commitment.
EUROPEAN DIGITAL NETWORKS
are [CONN
france | 1986.87_|
italy | 987-00
Sweden| 1987-00
Belgium 1988-89
Netherlands 1988
Line status monitor
Network
Inevitably, Japan too has advanced pilot projects. For NOTE: The UK service is offered on a commercial basis; the others are
some time Nippon Telegraph & Telephone (NTT) has non-commercial. SOURCE: International Data Corporation
(continued on next page)
PRACTICAL COMPUTING September 1987 93
I N T
E®°G@R®A T FE
lob PCE]
D
DISCUS 1000
THE DATA-MANAGEMENT TECHNIQUES THAT WORK WITH TODAY’S STAND-
ALONE PCs WILL BE OVERWHELMED BY THE VAST AMOUNTS OF INFORMATION
THAT WILL BE GENERATED IN A FULLY ELECTRONIC OFFICE. CAROL HAMMOND
LOOKS AT AN INTEGRATED SYSTEM THAT IS DESIGNED TO HANDLE IT ALL.
n the integrated office — when it eventually
arrives — micros will no longer work in
isolation. Instead they will be linked to other
devices like scanners, printers and modems,
harnessing their facilities to transfer, store and
manipulate information. Video Media’s Discus
1000 neatly fits this scenario, as it provides a facility to
create a multi-media database of text, data, images and
sound.
The Discus 1000 system links together a PC, a
scanner, a laser printer, a CD-ROM player and a Worm
optical drive. In addition it allows you to develop and
use applications.in MS-DOS which take advantage of
the large amounts of data which can be stored on optical
disc, free of the normal 32Mbyte restriction on disc-
volume size. You could use it to scan printed documents
or drawings, store them on an optical disc and retrieve
them under the control of a database.
The system that Video Media supplies is based round
a PC adaptor card and driver software that allow one or
more Micros to communicate with a number of periph-
erals. An image-compression/expansion card and
software compresses images at an average ratio of one to
30 to save disc space. The card complies with CCITT
standards for fax groups 3 and 4, so it may eventually
allow you to use your micro as a fax terminal. You can
also buy a board plus software package which digitises
telephone-quality voice signals and stores them in MS-
DOS format.
WORM JUKEBOX
OPTICAL discs can be linked together within an optical library or jukebox-like
player to provide even greater mass storage than is available from a single drive.
The Kodak 6800 optical-disc library is a Worm system which can store over a
terabyte — that is 1,024 Gbyte — of information. By way of illustrating what
this means in practice, Kodak claims that a terabyte is sufficient to store over 12
years’ worth of x-rays, CAT scans and ultrasound examinations for a 250-bed
hospital. f
The Kodak system is made up of a drive, controller and interface housed in a
single unit that can accommodate up to 150 14in. optical discs: Conventional
double-sided 12in. Worm discs can hold 2Gbyte, but each Kodak disc provides
6.8Gbyte of randomly accessible on-line storage. The complete set of 150 of
these discs adds up to a capacity of around a terabyte. The Kodak discs hold
more information than conventional 12in. discs thanks mainly to the use of a
variable speed recording technique which writes data at a constant density and
so maximises the utilisation of disc space.
The Kodak 6800 is available in four configurations, allowing combinations
of up to three optical-disc drives containing from 50 to 150 optical discs. The
base unit comes with a caddy loader which accepts discs inserted from the
outside and then loads them into the 50-disc library. A robotic elevator
mechanism retrieves and replaces discs in the library and conveys them to and
ftom the drive. Kodak says it takes 12 seconds or less to access any piece of
information held within the jukebox. Discs with a capacity of up to 340Gbyte
can be housed in the base-unit cabinet, which measures 58in. wide by 34in.
deep by 71.5in. high. The unit is sealed against dust, so caddies are not needed
within the libraries to protect the discs.
The Kodak 6800 system is supplied by Kodak Ltd, PO Box 60, Hemel
Hempstead, Hertfordshire HP1 1JU. Telephone: (0442) 61122.
At present the Discus 1000 requires the following
hardware: an IBM PC/AT or compatible, a Dest or
Canon scanner, an MDS Genius monitor, a Canon or
Hewlett-Packard laser printer, an Optimem or Alcatel-
Thomson 1Gbyte Worm drive, and a Philips CM-110
CD-ROM player or equivalent. You also need an MS-
DOS database or indexing package such as dBase III
Plus, Foxbase, Status or Clipper. Video Media will
provide a tailor-made database or indexing software to
suit individual applications.
Users who already own the appropriate kit can just
buy the necessary cards and software. If you need to add
to your existing setup you can either buy the necessary
components from Video Media or go direct to the
appropriate manufacturers. Video Media estimates that
the complete setup will cost around £45,000, but one of
the advantages of the system is that it may well be able
to make use of equipment that you have already
installed.
The Discus 1000 system can also be incorporated into
an Ungermann-Bass token-ring network, allowing the
Worm disc and CD-ROM to provide mass storage for
several users in the network under the MS-Net network
operating system. These optical-disc drives can also be
linked together or configured within an optical library
or jukebox to provide even greater mass storage. Data
can be downloaded from a mainframe via a commun-
ications link to a PC that forms part of a Discus 1000
system, and then stored on a Worm disc. The system can
also be configured with a nine-track, 0.5in. tape
handler.
You can choose to have a number of different per-
ipherals and applications tn your setup, and to support
them you create your own main menu to the system. A
library of symbols is supplied by Video Media to
represent functions or applications such as word search,
word processing, database, print and others.
Once you have chosen the appropriate symbols you
position them on a sheet of paper and use the image
scanner to feed them into the Image Icon Designator
program supplied as part of Discus 1000. From then on
you can select programs or applications just by pointing
to the appropriate symbol using a mouse.
A typical use for the Discus 1000 would be to scan in
an image, display tt on-screen and then manipulate it in
some way — say by using a drawing package to edit it or
magnify it. You could then compress and store it or
print it out. With a voice digitiser you could record and
store a voice message which could be linked to the
scanned image under the control of a database. This
opens up a multitude of new ways of working. For
instance, you could alter a technical drawing and attach
a voice message to explain why.
Discus 1000 also allows you to send two images to
yout laser printer at the same time and print them on a
single sheet of paper. For example, you could scan in a
business form and overlay it with information from your
micro or mainframe database, then print the combined
image. In this way it would be possible to dispense with
pre-printed forms.
94
PRACTICAL COMPUTING September 1987
Any compressed image and its related data can be
stored on a hard disc, 12in. Worm or CD-ROM. A
single-sided 1Gbyte Worm disc can contain up to
50,000 A4 scanned images, 500,000 pages of text data,
72 hours of recorded speech or any combination of
these. A 500Mbyte CD-ROM disc will store half the
quantity.
Users with a Worm and CD-ROM connected to their
PC via an SCSI interface simply treat the Worm as drives
E and F and the CD-ROM as drive G. Normally MS-
DOS has a disc-volume size limit of 32Mbyte but the
manufacturer of Discus 100, Advanced Graphic
Applications, has got round this by manipulating the
sector sizes so that the disc volume size is increased to
500Mbyte.
Increasing the sector and disc-volume sizes usually
brings in a time penalty, making access slower. This
does not matter when you are trying to access graphics as
the data itself is usually voluminous and thus takes a
long time to transfer. With text files the difference may
be noticeable since the files themselves are relatively
small. A large number of text files can therefore be
crammed into the same space, making the time
overhead in the starching process more significant.
Video Media claims that by dividing up your optical
media into more directories and sub-directories than is
usual on a hard disc you can achieve acceptable access
times. It quotes times of seven seconds to scan or print a
PRACTICAL COMPUTING September 1987
Above: The full Discus
piscus 1000 1000 setup includes a
Siencsc bane CD-ROM player, a
COGIC CIC OICR ICCC atone and a
a= | oO | || | | |< |
Left: You set up your
own menu screen
using icons supplied
with the system.
= WORD es IN-LINE
ea ee INFO
SERVICE
DISPLAY
oe |e ei ea
(continued on next page)
95
FG PC
Systems Systems
CD-Rom
tsees Sconner
A typical setup for the
Discus 1000 system.
SIMULTANEOUS
Data Transfer Control
Between Computers & Peripherals
Tope
hondler
document, retrieve a file or store a document on a
Worm disc.
Because Discus 1000 is run straight from MS-DOS
you can use standard software to access data on CD-
ROM. Video Media says it will have no difficulty incor-
porating OS/2 within Discus 1000 when it arrives
because it complements the concept of a system which
integrates data between different machines.
Advanced Graphics Associates has come to an
agreement with the 3M Corporation to enable Discus
1000 users to use the Worm drive as a pre-mastering
mechanism for CD-ROMs. This would allow CD-ROM
data to be prepared totally in-house and would give the
user complete control over what goes on toa CD-ROM,
saving time as well as money. The mastering cost of
around £2,000 per disc would remain, but pre-
mastering on Worm might prove particularly attractive
to large corporations who need to distribute the same
data to a limited number of key staff dispersed over
several locations. PC
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oF
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> circle 162 on enquiry card =
98
PRACTICAL COMPUTING September 1987
he number of languages suitable for
use with micros has grown consider-
MS ably over the last few years. Para-
doxically, this is making life increasingly
difficult, both for existing users and for new-
comers to computing.
Deciding which language to learn or
which to use for specific applications is diffi-
cult without detailed knowledge of the
strengths and weaknesses of each one. It is
not even very helpful to talk to experts on
particular languages since most people are,
understandably enough, prone to consider
their own favourite to be the best thing since
the abacus.
All digital microprocessors are controlled
by streams of instructions representing
machine code stored in the machine’s
memory. Higher-level languages differ only
in the methods which they adopt to generate
this stream of numeric instructions. Each
one represents a different strategy for
enabling programmers to communicate
their ideas and requirements most effec-
tively to the hardware.
Above machine code, the lowest pro-
gramming level uses assembly language
which puts the programmer more or less in
direct touch with the microprocessor chip: It
does so using simple mnemonic commands
to generate the stream of machine code that
the hardware needs. The problem with
assembler is that while the language is quite
straightforward, program construction can
be complex because of the need to maintain
control of all the machine's lower-level func-
tions.
INTERMEDIATE PROGRAMS
Higher-level languages seek to make the
construction of programs more easily
understandable by human operators; and
leave the generation of machine code to
intermediate programs. This can be done by
introducing a’ series of commands that
approximate to normal language:and then
_ adding a number of rules on how they may
be used. It is the intermediate programs that
have the capacity to understand these new
commands, and this is where the real power
lies. Their effectiveness controls the pres-
entation, accuracy, capacity and speed of the
final program. ’
There are two main ways of implementing
a higher-level language. In the first, you
load into memory a list of all the available
commands, together with code to check that
_the rules are observed. You then provide
and maintain an area of memory for the
commands to be entered into. You also
need to make provision for saving and
loading this list of program commands to
and from disc. As commands are entered in.
this system they are stored in memory. Upon
request from the operator, each command in
turn is interpreted and executed.
This is called an interpretive system. Its
big advantage is that it can be directly inter-
active during program development without
needing special provision from the pro-
grammer. If the program contains an error,
either in syntax or data, program execution
will stop-and the interpreter will indicate the
TOP
As more and more languages
suitable for micros are
appearing, so it is becoming
increasingly difficult to choose
which one is right for a given
application. Jim Bates
explains how they work and
what tasks each is best at doing.
type of error and where it occurred. The pro-
grammer can examine the program for the
error condition and make whatever correc-
tions may be necessary. It is even possible to
display the values of program variables,
since they still exist in memory at the time
that execution ceased. Unfortunately,
interpretation of commands on an indi-
vidual basis takes up a lot of processor time
so interpretive versions of languages are
usually quite slow.
The second approach completes the trans-
lation from high-level commands to
machine code by using a compiler. In this
method, the high-level program is written
using a word processor or text editor and is
saved to disc. The compiler is then loaded
into memory and instructed to process the
text file. Compilation consists of reading the
text file and writing a new file which con-
- flavour;
tains the series of high-level commands
translated into machine code. In practice,
compilation may be a little more involved
than this, but the principle remains the
same.
Once compilation is complete, the new
file can be loaded and executed to perform
the functions specified in the original text
file. An advantage of this method is that
since each translation of a high-level
command only occurs once, compiled pro-
grams tend to run much faster than
interpreted ones.
Unfortunately there are also serious
disadvantages to this method. For one
thing, errors of command syntax in the
original program will not be discovered until
the compilation stage. Errors in data
handling may not become apparent until
the program is run, and even then may only
appear under very special combinations of
circumstances. Once errors are detected,
program execution may cease, returning
control to the operating system and thus
losing the values of all the variables. In
extreme cases processing will go into an
infinite loop, making it necessary to reboot
the machine.
Software manufacturers are aware of the
advantages and disadvantages of each
method and have recently tried to combine
the best of both worlds by providing all that
the programmer needs in one package.
Some of the more popular languages now
provide a text editor along with compiling,
error-checking, debugging and _ linking
facilities all in one program environment. It
thus becomes possible to return immed-
iately to the program text if errors are
encountered, thereby simplifying program
construction.
DECIDING FACTORS
Program-development time its a most
important consideration, and can be a
critical factor in deciding which language to
use. The actual commands and structure are
what give the high-level language its
strengths and weaknesses are
decided when a language is inittally
designed and developed. The command
structures of languages vary enormously and
afe nearly always a compromise between
program readability and the efficiency in the
eventual code. Some languages are so well
suited to their particular purpose that their
popularity continues to grow; some remain
alive simply through the inertia of having so
many users; yet others emerge briefly and
then fade away. If you are new to pro-
gramming, the languages that you choose to
learn can set your programming style for the
rest of your days.
Good professional programmers will have
knowledge of at least two or three high-level
languages and an adequate grounding in
assembly language. Knowledge of assembler
can often be put to excellent use to improve
or extend the existing capabilities of some
high-level languages. In this way, know-
ledge of differing syntax, structure and capa-
bility can be acquired and applied to the
evaluation of new languages as they arrive.
SS ee SSS em
PRACTICAL COMPUTING September 1987
99
APL
APL has been around for a long
time. It was created by Dr
Kenneth Iverson in 1962 as a
problem-solving language. The
name simply stands for A
Programming Language. It uses
complex algorithms which may
be expressed in a_ highly
compacted and succinct form.
As a result, APL tends to place
emphasis on ‘the shape and
structure of data rather than the
quantity. The notation and
command syntax is extremely
concise, which makes programs
very difficult to read. Itis a good
example of a highly specialised
language.
FOR: Excellent data type
specification.
AGAINST: Difficult to
read. Does not handle high
volumes of data very well.
BASIC
INITIALLY designed as a
teaching language, Basic
proved so successful that it is still
number one in terms of the
number of users. The name is
said to be an acronym derived
from Beginners’ All-purpose
Symbolic Instruction Code. Its
initial advantages were English-
like commands, a fairly relaxed
command syntax and no
structure to speak of. With Basic
running in an_ interpretive
environment it is easy to type in
a quick program and run it to
see what the effect is. It was
much maligned at first because
its lack of structure made it easy
to write untidy programs.
Recent versions like Borland’s
Turbo Basic and Microsoft’s
Quick Basic have provided lots
of extra features, including the
speed of a compiler and the
ability to build structured
programs.
FOR: Easy to learn and
easy to read.
AGAINST: Can be slow in
comparison to some other
languages.
MIKE GORNALL
PRACTICAL COMPUTING September 1987
C
THIS compiler-based language
was’ developed at Bell
Laboratories in the 1970s. It is
closely associated with the Unix
operating system — most of
which was written in C — and
has grown in popularity along
with it. C is a general-purpose
language which resembles
Pascal in its structure but has
several unique features.
Command syntax and structural
requirements make it quite
difficult to learn, but it does
allow close access to the lower-
level functions of the hardware,
giving power and flexibility to
the programmer.
FOR: Fast. Economical with
memory.
AGAINST: Difficult to
learn and read.
COBOL
COBOL is one of the old
warhorses — a compiler-based
language originally developed
on mainframe machines by the
US Department of Defense. The
name is an acronym of Common
Business Oriented Language. As
this implies, Cobol was designed
to handle large amounts of data
as efficiently as possible. The
syntax of Cobol is largely self-
documenting, which makes
programs reasonably easy to
read. Many versions for micros
have now been introduced, with
some changes to handle
differing hardware
requirements. Cobol requires
large amounts of memory, and
this effectively prevented its
spread into micros until very
recently.
FOR: Excellent file
handling. Handles large
amounts of data.
AGAINST: Memory-
hungry.
Telephone: (0635) 32646
Basic Microsoft, Excel House, 49
(0734) 500741
Telephone: (0908) 606667
PRACTICAL COMPUTING September 1987
APL IBM (UK), 414 Chiswick High Road, London
W4 STF. Telephone: 01-995 7700
CIS Cobol, Personal Cobol Micro Focus Ltd,
24 West Street, Newbury, Berkshire RG13 1JT.
Basic, C, Cobol, Fortran, Lisp, Quick
Road, Reading, Berkshire RG1 8LP. Telephone
Lattice C Softsel, Softsel House, Syon Gate
Way, Great West Road, Brentford, Middlesex
TWB 9DD. Telephone: 01-568 8866
Living C Living Software, 34 Bramble Avenue,
Conniburrow, Milton Keynes MK14 7AP.
Turbo Basic, Turbo C, Turbo Prolog,
Turbo Pascal Borland International, 1 Great
FORTRAN
ANOTHER of the older
languages, although it is. still
quite popular. The name is a
contraction of Formula Trans-
lation. Fortran is a compiler-
based language. It was
developed by IBM In the 1950s
and, as its name implies, it is
extremely powerful at number
handling. As with most of these
older languages originally
developed on mainframes, it
requires: large amounts of
memory; full implementations
have only recently become
available on micros. Developing
Fortran programscan be quite a
long-winded process.
FOR: Powerful number
handling.
AGAINST: Difficult to
read. Poor alpha string
handling.
LISP
LISP is a list-processing
language developed at the
Massachusetts Institute of
Technology. It is available in
interpretive and compiler
versions and is structured in a
similar way to Prolog, which it
pre-dates by about 10 years.
Lisp offers the ability to
manipulate lists of symbolic
alpha and numerical data
recursively. Recursive proces-
sing is a relatively new idea in
programming: it means that a
routine can repeatedly call itself
until particular conditions are
satisfied . This is a powerful
concept, but it can be a difficult
one for new programmers to
grasp. Lisp is excellent for
artificial-intelligence (Al)
applications and knowledge-
based — or expert — systems.
FOR: Powerful symbolic
processing capabilities.
AGAINST: Mainly useful
for Al applications.
De Montfort
47707
Cumberland Place, London W1H ZAL.
Telephone: 01-258 3797
Zorland C Zorland International, 144 Griffin
Road, London SE1 7QA. Telephone: 01-317 7240
Pro Pascal, Pro Fortran 77 Prospero
Software, 190 Castelnau, London SW13 9DH.
Telephone: 01-741 8531
Fortran 77, Pascal MT + Digital Research,
Oxford House, Oxford Street, Newbury,
Berkshire RG13 1JB. Telephone: (0635) 35304
Occam Inmos, 1,000 Aztec West, Almondsbury,
Bristol BS12 4SQ. Telephone: (0454) 616616
Smalltalk AT Artificial Intelligence Ltd,
Intelligence House, Merton Road, Watford,
Hertfordshire WD1 7BY. Telephone: (0923)
OCCAM
THE most recent of the
languages listed here, Occam is
highly specialised and was
developed for the Inmos
Transputer chip. It emphasises a
parallel-processing capacity
that will be best realised in multi-
Processing environments. This
emphasis on concurrence of
operation naturally makes
Occam somewhat strange to
learn, but it appears to be a
language of the future; a
working knowledge could repay
handsome dividends as multi-
processing Transputers become
more widespread in their
applications.
FOR: Statement
concurrency and multi-
processing.
AGAINST: Limited to
specific machines.
PASCAL
NAMED after the 15th-century
scientist and mathematician,
Blaise Pascal, this rigidly
structured language demands a
disciplined and organised ap-
proach from the pro-
grammer. Pascal was dev-
eloped by Dr Niklaus Wirth
from a mathematically based
language called Algol — the
name is a contraction of Alge-
braically Oriented Language —
in the early 1970s. It originally
had rather weak user I/O
facilities, and being compiler
based it was quite slow during
program development.
Borland’s Turbo Pascal and
upgrades of older implement-
ations have improved on this,
and on the programming
environment.
FOR: Good file- and
number-handling features.
AGAINST: Awkward to
learn.
PROLOG
PROLOG — short for Pro-
gramming in Logic — has been
called the European version of
Lisp, having been developed at
the University of Marseilles. But
this notion does Prolog a dis-
service: although there are
superficial similarities, Prolog
has a power and style all of its
own. Like Lisp, it is intended for
use with artificial-intelligence
applications and knowledge-
based systems. It is usually a
compiler-based language, and
the programming methods can
be difficult to grasp. This is
because where most languages
provide a sequence of
operations to be performed on
data, Prolog declares a number
of rules, and data is checked
against them to ascertain the
truth or falsehood of program
statements. Turbo Prolog, the
recent implementation by
Borland, has boosted the pop-
ularity of this language
enormously.
FOR: Logical structure.
Easy to read. Powerful
knowledge-statement
handling abilities.
AGAINST: Awkward to
learn. Poor number
handling.
SMALLTALK
THIS seminal language was
developed by the Learning
Research Group at the Xerox
Palo Alto Research Center in
California. It is unusual in that it
consists of objects that interact
by the sending and receiving of
messages. The programmer
implements a system by
describing outgoing messages
and the results of particular
message reception. Smalltalk
uses an object-orientated point
of view for normal data but uses
a standard data/procedure-
orientated process — similar to
Algol — for number handling. It
is a structured language and
uses a modular program-
development approach.
FOR: Excellent graphics
capabilities. Good data
handling.
AGAINST: Difficult to
learn and read.
101
J ead Practical Gomputing
because it Gives me the very best
coverage on how touse my ne- Fe
nbus whats nen, Don't oelay- |
use the subserintion cardin this
issue 00 GU the Latest miczo
business inyormation-
every month,
"PRACTICAL
COMPUTING,
ans busines
Just use the subscription ©
card in this issue to get
the best business micro
computer magazine
around.
Forthcoming Features
not to be missed
October 1987 November 1987 December 1987
KNOWLEDGE AND THE WORLD OF APPLE SUPERMICROS
INFORMATION Apple has emerged as a real A year ago you would have called
From out of the data flood there is alternative to IBM. Where is it them minis; now they are desktop
emerging information — some out today, and where is it going in the machines — but for power users.
of it down the phone, some of it on future? We investigate the world of multi-
CD-ROMs. In the future we will see Also; Top 10 word processors — user micros and beyond.
knowledge too, in the shape of the best text manipulators. Also; Top 10 printers — the pick o
expert systems. dot, laser, and the rest.
Also, Top 10 comms hardware —
addi nne far crammiinicatinn
‘| and implement a system. Tips on
DATA
COMMUNICATIONS
FOR BUSINESS
heaton B Rea
COMMUNICATIONS
DATA COMMUNICATIONS
FOR BUSINESS.
By Bennet P Lientz and Kathryn P Rea
@ Published by Blackwell Scientific
Publications, £24.50 @ ISBN
0 8016 3023 4
THIS IS an American book,
primarily intended for college
und:rgraduates studying the
business applications of tech-
nology. However, at no time is the
tone condescending and Data
Communications for Business
succeeds in covering its subject
matter thoroughly.
It is divided into two parts,
complete with informative dia-
grams and photographs, Part 1
covers the technical aspects of com-
munications technology, such as
the different types of hardware
and software available. Part 2 dis-
cusses how to go about putting
them into use. Each partis divided
into chapters which end with exer-
cises and problems — the book’s
one obvious display of its academic
intention.
To finish, there is a useful
glossary of terms and a list of
abbreviations, acronyms and
definitions; there is even an index
of minicomputer models. The
reference section gives the names
of books and magazines to look at,
the latter unfortunately being US
publications. But on the whole,
the American origins of Data
Communications are not apparent
and British readers do not suffer
from a lack of information.
The authors are communica-
tions consultants and this is
obvious in the way they approach
writing their book. They start off
by giving detailed explanations of
what options there are and what
each one can be used for. For
example, they explain what a
packet switching network is, and
discuss the pros and cons of
twisted-pair, coaxial and fibre-
optic cabling. They even say what
each pin on an RS-232 interface is
used for.
They go on to assess the advant-
ages and disadvantages of different
approaches and how to buy, plan
how to evaluate a manufacturer’s
proposal and how to compare the
estimated cost of one system
against another are also given. The
authors acknowledge that readers
need to look after, say, their LAN
once it is in operation and alert
them to the need to think of
security, maintenance, training
and disaster recovery. There is also
a section on forward planning and
what to do once a setup becomes
obsolete or fails to meet changed
requirements.
If you are thinking of installing a
network and would like a primer to
help you decide how to go about
doing it, this book could prove
useful, though it obviously cannot
help you with specifics like which
kit to go for. CH
THE UNIX" FOR BEGINNERS BOOK
A Step-by-Step Introduction
RATA SAAS SPSP ABP
Bryan Strong - jay Hosier
THE UNIX FOR BEGINNERS
BOOK
By Bryan Strong and Jay Hosler @ Pub-
lished by John Wiley and Sons, £27.50
@ ISBN 0 471 80666 8
THERE IS something faintly para-
doxical about a book called Unix
Jor Beginners. \t is a bit like Arc
Welding Made Easy: somehow it
seems unlikely. Yet this book is
aimed not just at the Unix ignor-
ant, but even at the non-com-
puter-literate, and is designed to
give a thorough grounding in the
basic Unix system. Amazingly, it
largely succeeds.
The background of the authors
probably has something to do with
this: Strong is a lecturer in psy-
chology, while Hosler has the
detailed computing experience.
Between them, they have put
together a book which is designed
to be used very much as a hands-on
guide. In addition there are
chapter reviews in the form of self
tests, and spaces for notes.
After a slighty superfluous whiz
through the history of computers,
dragging in poor old Babbage
again, there is a basic introduction
to the procedure for starting up a
Unix system. This is followed by
sections on Vi, the text utility, as
PRACTICAL COMPUTING September 1987
well as the mail and interactive-
dialogue facilites. The book is
rounded off with several parts on
- file structures and text formatting,
Although inevitably designed for
the user of the larger system, it has
a useful appendix for PC-based
Unix, followed by Unix command
summaties, a good glossary and
index, and command reference
cards. In addition to all this, the
book is clearly written and un-
patronising. Who could ask for
mote? It is enough to make you
believe that Unix might almost be
usable.
DICTIONARIES
SCHNELLMANN-VERLAG
BILINGUAL DICTIONARIES
OF COMPUTERS AND DATA
PROCESSING
Volumes available for two-language
combinotions of English, German,
French, Dutch, Italian, and Spanish @
Published by Schnellman-Verlag of
Widnau, Switzerland. @ Available
from Grant & Cutler, 55-57 Great
Marlborough Street, London W1V
2AY; £16.50 each. @
ISBN 3 907971 63 9 English/German
@ ISBN 3 907971 70 1 English/French
OTHER Western European com-
puter markets are now just as active
as Britain's. The products are still
mainly American or Japanese, but
the computing terms which also
arrive suffer a variety of fates.
Some are imported unchanged,
but others are rejected in favour of
a local term or are so tadically
altered as to become unrecognis-
able.
As computer terms are increas-
ingly turning up in the course of
ordinary business transactions
there is clearly a need for a range of
good bi-lingual dictionaries. The
computer field moves too fast for
ordinary dictionary publishers, so
this is an ideal niche for the
specialist publisher.
Schnellmann- Verlag of Switzer-
land produces a daunting range of
such books. Its Computing and
Data Processing series alone con-
sists of around 100 separate books,
each one a two-language combin-
ation of German, English, Italian,
French, Spanish or Dutch.
We looked at two: the
English/French and English/
German volumes. Each book is
about 120 pages long, in two sec-
tions so you can translate both
ways, with a page or two at the end
of each section dealing with units.
Production is pretty basic: the
books appear to be computer
printed rather than typeset, and
are paperback. But this will not
matter if the information they con-
tain is the stuff you want.
For the needs of personal-com-
puter users, the hit rate of ap-
propriate terms seems low. There
BOOK
are no RAM or ROM, spreadsheets
or floppy discs, but lots of things
like card punches, Or-circuits and
take-up reels. But even given the
data-processing bias — which is
acknowledged in the title — we |
still found plenty of relevant terms
that you would be unlikely to
guess.
Matrixdrucker might be fairly
obvious as German for matrix
printer but you would be unlikely
to guess Zugriff, which means
access, ot Aufzeichnung, which
means record, or even Formular-
vorschub, which means form feed.
But there was a wofrying
problem with the French volume:
many of the terms given seem
archaic or even incorrect. ‘‘Com-
puter’’, for instance is given as ca/-
culateur, wheteas the usual term
now is ordinateur; PC is OI in
French, standing for ordinateur
individuel. We checked with the
French Technology Press Bureau
who confirmed that ca/culateur is
just not what the French would
say.
The French take their language
seriously, especially when it comes
to the introduction of foreign
terms. A special body, the Associ-
aion Generale de Usages de la
Langue Francaise (Agulf) regulates
their use and oversees the coining
of new French terms to take over
the role of foreign imports. Some
of them are especially apt: RAM in
French is memoire vive, ROM
memotre morte, which both seem
rather better than the originals.
Agulf has the power to take
people to court for the use of
unpermitted terms, and often
does. The regulations apply to any-
thing printed — invoices and
headed paper as much as maga-
zines or newspapers. This makes it
especially important for any
French technical dictionary to be
up to date and accurate. Perhaps
Schnellmann-Verlag falls down
because it is Swiss; certainly the
German volume is better.
To go with the computer boom
there is flourishing European com-
puter press. Some of the maga-
zines are well worth reading,
(continued on next page)
103
BOOK
(continued from previous page)
| expecially if you are interested in
reading reviews of the latest hard-
ware, as American and Japanese
machines do not always artive in
Britain first. Best German maga-
zines ate the monthly C4zp, and
Computer Personlich, which
comes out twice a month. CAip isa
thick magazine which has program
listings and game reviews along-
side reviews of up-market business
hardware.
Computer Personlich is a pure’
business magazine, and has been
getting steadily better over recent
months. It has particularly good
printer reviews. Both magazines
concentrate on IBM-compatible
kit, but they cover Commodore
and Atari machines mote than we
would do here, reflecting their
strength in the German market.
The equivalent French maga-
zine is probably L’Ordinateur
Individuel. This monthly gives the
Macintosh more coverage than
most British magazines, and has
more general features and inter-
views than Practical Computing,
but again coverage of the IBM
world predominates. IS
OFFICE AUTOMATION
MANAGEMENT GUIDE TO
OFFICE AUTOMATION
By Joseph St. John Bote @ Published by
Blackwell Scientific Publicotions, £7.95
@ ISBN 0 00 383353 4
THE cover of the Management
Guide to Office Automation
claims that it isa guide to planning
and managing office automation.
It also says that it is aimed at senior
and middle management in com-
merial, administrative and finan-
cial organisations. Its audience
certainly does determine the way
the book is written, since it is as
much about dealing with staff
during a changeover as about what
to buy.
The book is very much con-
cerned with evaluating what staff
do, how they will fit into an auto-
mated office and how their jobs
might change in the future. It even
looks at how computefising an
address quite complex marketing
:
office will affect people’s future | problems.
career outlook. It really is what it
says it is: a guide for managers who
have to computerise an. office. It
looks at what types of application
would be needed to replace the
functions of different staff, with
little emphasis on particular pack-
ages or how to choose them.
Worthy as the book is, I found it
long-winded. It contains a lot of
useful information, but it could be
better organised. I also felt it could
have explained the technology ina
more comprehensive manner. But
that said, it does at least approach
one problem often forgotten
about: the people who have to use
the kit. CH
SPREADSHEETS
SPREADSHEET MARKETING
By Alon West @ Published by Gower,
£29.50 @ ISBN 0 566 02663 5
EVERYONE knows that spreadsheets
are wonderfully adaptable
perhaps too adaptable. Yet when
it comes to the crunch, few people
are prepared to spend much time
using the full range of facilites to
set up applications which fit
specific needs. Spreadsheet
Marketing is welcome for that
reason, because it shows how
spreadsheets can be used to
There are 14 chapters containing
listings for constructing spread-
sheets which cover marketing areas
such as product viability, export
pricing, marginal profitability and
many others. After an intro-
duction to the field in question,
there are pages of typeset output.
This is slightly worrying, since it is
hard not to introduce a few errors
when typesetting; direct dumps to
the printer would have been far
better.
The writing is occasionally
sloppy, but the author seems to be
well informed; he worked for
Unilever and Mars, and draws on
these companies for examples.
Ideally, this book should come
with a set of templates, presum-
ably for Lotus 1-2-3; the price
certainly seems to demand it. As it
stands, it is hard to see hard-pres-
sed marketing managers tapping
all this stuff in. This is a pity, since
the aims of introducing some syste-
matics into the subject and using
the humble spreadsheet in an un-
usual area ate good ones. A near
miss. GM
Reviewers this month: Carol
Hammond, Glyn Moody and lan
Stobie,
OASIS VIRTUAL INSTRUMENT SYSTEM
* The OASIS Virtual Instrument System (VIS) emulates conventional DVM,
OSCILLOSCOPE, CHART RECORDER, X/Y PLOTTER and DATA LOGGER in one
easy touse package and also provides sophisticated data analysis tools.
* The ViS data acquisition module and instrument emulation software turns the BBC
micro directly into a versatile and flexible laboratory measurement system which can
out-perform andis easier toimplement than iEEE 488 linked systems.
| * VIS professional, ready-to-use instrument emulations include:
| Multi-channel DVM with real time numeric and graphic displays, storage SCOPE with
| on-screen measurement and waveform zoom, DATA LOGGER with logged data
compression algorithm and X/Y PLOTTER with programmable integration periods.
HARDWARE
VIS is based on a precision computer controlled 16 channel A-D converter, with
six programmable ranges and read rates of 50k samples per second at 8 bit
resolution, 25k at 12 bit.
This simply installed unit has proven long term stability and reliability.
SOFTWARE
The menu-driven acquisition, analysis and display programs combine on screen
set up of measurement parameters, SPREADSHEET data manipulation and a
range of data display formats, including 8 trace CHART RECORDER and
oscillogram.
Total data mobility from measured information to memory, disk, screen and
HARD COPY output.
The OASIS VIS carries full documentation to allow the beginner or professional
ace dng to create new interface applications or personalised instrument
emulations.
PRICE
At £399 (ex VAT), the price of the complete VIS system is less than any one of
the instruments it replaces. Performance enhanced versions also available, e.g.
higher acquisition speeds.
For fast delivery, phone your order on 0603 747887.
Technical queries answered and requests for
further data on this number.
Design Consultancy
The Street, Old Costessey, Norwich NR8 5DF. Tel: 0603 747887
104 PRACTICAL COMPUTING September 1987
UT itl
[| TF | E §
THIS MONTH’S program is a true
pop-up resident utility which I
have called Ppop. It intercepts the
keyboard-handling routine, inter-
rupt 9, to give you instant control
of the printer direct from the key-
board.
When the Alt and Caps Lock
keys are pressed simultaneously, a
pop-up box appears on the screen
which offers options to send pre-
attanged control characters direct
to the printer. Provision is made to
indicate if the printer is busy or
off-line. Pressing the Esc key
removes the box, restores the
screen and returns you to your pro-
gram at the point that you left it.
When pop-up programs first
began to appear on the software
market, I was fascinated to know
where the contents of the screen
behind the box were stored until
required for restoration. I am still
not sure, but for this program I
| have developed a simple swap
routine that takes data from the
buffer‘Box__Buf and swaps it with
the contents of the screen at the
appropriate point. The screen is
restored simply by calling the same
foutine and swapping the data
back.
BASIC LOADER
I have had a lot of letters from
people who use the Basic loader to
get the utilities in this series on to
their machines, so I have made
some slight changes to the layout
in this program to cut down the
number of lines needed for the
Basic loader. By placing the
uninitialised buffer and data areas
at the end of the program, these
bytes do not need to be entered on
the loadet listing. The program
will simply grab as much memory
as it requires — around 1.5K —
when it is installed, effectively pro-
tecting beyond the end of the
existing data area. The eventual
resident section of program code
will take’ up more space than it
strictly needs, butit is only an extra
500 bytes or so, and it saves Basic
users an extra 51 lines of listing.
This month I have made more
extensive use of equates than
before, and I have used the assem-
bler’s ability to complete simple
calculations. The first three
equates afe all attribute bytes
which will produce certain colours
and effécts when placed in the
PRINTER
CONTROLLER
Jim Bates presents a pop-up utility that offers direct ‘control
of your printer from within any application.
correct locations of screen memory.
These colour details are noted in
the remarks.
' LF, FF, CR and Esc refer simply
to the numeric value of the indi-
vidual characters. Box__Wid and
Box__Len refer to the actual size,
measured in characters, of the pop-
up box that will appear on the
screen. Box_Lin and Box__Col
are only used in the calculation of
Box_.Pos and Box__Cur; they
indicate respectively the line and |
column where the top right-hand
corner of the box will appear.
Remember that MS-DOS for the
IBM counts screen lines and
columns from zero.
Box__Pos is the actual value
used by the program to locate the
box on the screen. Each character
shown on the screen actually occu-
Pies two bytes in video memory, so
one 80-column line on-screen
occupies 160 bytes in memory. The
position, in bytes, from the start of
the screen can thus be calculated
by multiplying the line number by
160 and adding the column
number multiplied by 2.
The Box__Cur value is used by
interrupt 10hex to set the position
of the cursor inside the box. This
interrupt requires line and column
positions to be placed in a register
as a word in which the high byte
contains the line number and the
low byte the column number.
Multiplying the line number by
256 to make it the high byte and
adding the column number gives
the position of the top right-hand
corner of the box. An additional
h/c_ Name
line and column figure is added to
correct for the position of the
cursor within the box itself.
The Msg__Len equate indicates
the length of the ‘‘Printer not
ready’’ message, and the final two
equates indicate the segment
addresses: of mono and colour
RAM. Using equates in this way
makes it easy to change both the
the screen: you only need to alter
the Wid, Len, Lin and Col
equates.
The code section starts with the
usual jump to the Install routine,
which sets up the program and
links it into the system by hooking
the relevant interrupt. The Install
routine first displays the Sign__On
message and then goes on to pre-
pare the buffer area with the inter-
leaved Scnbox message.
MESSAGES
It would be possible to write the
message area with interleaved
character and attribute bytes, but
this makes the assembler code
much more difficult to read. |
therefore decided to leave the
message area in plain text and add
this little routine to interleave the
appropriate attribute bytes into
the Box__Buf buffer area.
Normally the Box__Buf buffer
and all the data bytes and words
would be located before the Install
routine, and the ScnBox message
would be lost along with the Install
routine when the terminate and,
stay resident (TSR) protection was
applied. However, in this instance
hildress [pd te
Name & Address
Printer Controller |
| R - Reset Printer
Line
Forn
Pica
Feed
Feed
Size
- Elite Size
Comment
S|
The Ppop program overlays a printer-control menu on your screen.
size of the box and its position on |
there is a loop with the number of
words to transfer in CX, SI point-
ing to the message area Scnbox, D1!
pointing to the beginning of
Box__Buf and the attribute in AH.
Taking a byte at a time from [SI]
into AL, and then transferring AX
to [DI], gives the correct charac-
ter/attribute interleave. During
this loop the source must be incre-
mented by 1 — equivalent to one
byte — while the destination is
incremented by 2, equivalent to
one word. Once this loop has com-
pleted, the current interrupt 9
address can be collected by using
function 35hex of interrupt 21hex.
Into this address is placed code at
O!lld =. 1nit,.9 —4O'f fa nid
Old_Int9_Seg for use by the
new interrupt routine.
The address of the routine is
now placed into the vector table
using function 25hex of interrupt
2ihex. The final step is to protect
the code from subsequently being
overwritten by DOS.
The Protector label
instance is marked as
$ + (BOX__WID*BOX_LEN +2)
This is actually way beyond the
end of the code as generated by the
assembler: the expression trans-
lates as the current memory loca-
tion — shown by the $ sign — plus
twice the number of characters
required by the box. Thus
Protector indicates a location
which is 506 bytes beyond the end
of the code. Since these bytes are
initialised it does not matter what
their value is when the program is
loaded. It is these bytes which
users of the Basic loader do not
need to enter.
KEY PRESS
The program is now loaded and
functioning. Each time a key is
requested interrupt 9 is called and
the routine is invoked from
New__Int9. The first task is to
ensure that other interrupts are
enabled. The flag register must
also be saved on to the stack to
allow the original interrupt 9 to be
called.
Like all interrupts, this routine
will terminate with an Iret instruc-
tion, which takes the top two
words off the stack to form the
return address and also takes the
next word into the flag register. By
pushing the flags on to the stack
(continued on page 107)
in this
PRACTICAL COMPUTING September 1987
105
COMMENT #
This program sets a resident printer controller routine
into memory which can be called by pressing ALT CapsLock.
Routine produces Pop-Up Menu with LF and FF options for
Other Options may be added as required.
printer.
NORMATT
CMNDATT
(BOX_LIN#1608)+ (BOX _COL#2)
(BOX_LIN#256)+BOX_COL+2923H
17
®BSSBH
@BBSBH
RESIDENT CODE AREA
ees
CODE
MAIN
SEGMENT
PROC FAR
ASSUME CS:CODE, DS:CODE,ES:CODE
ORG
START:
JMP
QUITSTEP:
JMP
NEW_INT9;
on
PUSHF
CALL
INZ
MOV
PROCESSS1:
PUSH
Mov
POP
MOV
MOV
MOV
ADD
PUSH
MOV
PUT_BOX:
Mov
CALL
POP
ADD
PUSH
DEC
INZ
POP
mov
CALL
MOV
106
102H
INSTALL
INT_RET
DWORD PTR CS:OLD_INT9
ES:17H,8
QUITSTEP
BYTE PTR
QUITSTEP
BYTE PTR
BYTE PTR
QUITSTEP
AX
DS
cx
DX
$1
DI
BX,CS
DS, BX
CS:PROG_FLAG, 1
DX, ES:63H
DX,6
PORT_ADD, DX
BH, ES:62H
CRNT_VPAGE, BH
AH, 3
10H
CRNT_CUR_MODE, CX
CRNT_CUR_POS, DX
AX, COLRAM
CURSOR _TYPE,687H
BX,ES:10H
BX, 39H
BX, 39H
PROCESSS1
AX, MONRAM
CURSOR_TYPE, 6B@CH
CRNT_CUR_MODE, 687H
PROCESS@1
CRNT_CUR_MODE, ®BSCH
ES:18H, 46H
ES:17H, 48H
AX
AX, ES: 4EH
ES
VPAGE_OFFSET, AX
S1,OFFSET BOX_BUF
Di,BOX_POS
DI, VPAGE_OFFSET
DI
BX, BOX_LEN
CX, BOX_WID
DX, BOX_CUR
SET_CURS
AH, 1
Gileel setae news ae
CS:PROG_FLAG,@ ;
; Swap BOX and Screen (1
Return from interrupt
Must enable interrupts
Prepare for interrupt return
ile ; Call original INT 9
Save registers
Point ES to Data Area
Cheek ALT Key
Not pressed
Check Caps Lock
Not pressed
Reset Caps Lock
Check if PPOP is running
Yes it is - so quit
Save Registers
Ensure that DS = CS
Mark Program Active
= Video Controller Port Address
Set to Access Indicator
Store it
= Current Video Page
Store it
Get current Cursor Position
Store it
Set for Color Ram
Set Cursor type
= Hardware Check
Gate out unwanted bits
Check Video Mode
is Color so continue
Set for Mono Ram
Set Cursor type
Is it Color Type
No - so continue
Set to standard
Set Page Offset into Screen Ram
Point ES to Screen Ram
Store it
Point SI to BOX
Point DI to Screen Position
Make sure it’s the right page
Save it
Set Box Length for line count
Set Box Width for character count
line)
Restore Screen Position
Bump by 1 line
Save it
Decrease Line Count
Go again !f more
Clear the stack
Now set Cursor into Screen Box
Turn cursor off
aie
MOV
MOV
MOV
MOV
MOV
CALL
QUIT_CHAR:
MoV
INT
CMP
INZ
MOV
MOV
MoV
MOV
CALL
IMP
GC4:
CMP
JINZ
MOV
MOV
GCPRINT:
CALL
MOV
CALL
MOV
MOV
INT
MOV
POP
Pop
POP
POP
POP
POP
INT_RET:
POP
POP
{RET
MAIN ENDP
CX, 2008H
12H
DX, 2
AH,2
17H
AH, 98H
GET_CMND
BL, FREDATT
BH, CRNT_VPAGE
CX,MSG_LEN
S1,OFFSET PRT_BUSY_M
Dx, BOX_CUR
PRT_MSG
AH, &
16H
AL, ESC
QUIT_CHAR
BL, NORMATT
BH, CRNT_VPAGE
CX,MSG_LEN
DX, BOX_CUR
SET_CURS
GET_CHAR
AL,CR
QuIT
AL, ESC
QuiT
AL, @DFH
AL,*R?
GC1
S1,OFFSET PT_RESET
Cx,2
GCPRINT
AL,’*L’
Gc2
S1,OFFSET LIN_FEED
Cx,1
GCPRINT
AL, °F?
Gc3
S1,OFFSET FRM_FEED
CX, 4
GCPRINT
AL, °P?
Gca
SI,OFFSET PICA
CX,2
GCPRINT
AL, ?M*
GET_CMND
S1,OFFSET ELITE
Cxn2
LPRINT
GET_CMND
S1,OFFSET BOX_BUF
DI, BOX_Pos
DI
BX, BOX_LEN
CX, BOX_WID
DX, CRNT_CUR_POS
SET_CURS
CX, CRNT_CUR_MODE
AH, 1
18H
BYTE PTR PROG FLAG,@
G ;
Get Printer Status
Check Selected and not Busy
Printer OK so continue
FLASHING RED Attribute
Current Screen Page
Characters to display
Point to message
Position in BOX
Display message
Ask for Character
Escape?
No - so ask again
Normal Attribute
Current Screen Page
Number of characters
Position in BOX
Set the Cursor
Display CX characters
Make them spaces
Character from Keyboard
CR?
so quit
Escape?
so quit
Convert to Upper Case
Silt Rae:
No - so continue
Point to LF character
Character count
Go and LPRINT
Hee Oh See A
No - so continue
Point to LF character
Character count
Go and LPRINT
BEEN SI Ri
No - so continue
Point to FF character
Character count
Go and LPRINT
MH SMe. Mise?
No - so continue
Point to PICA sequence
Character count
Go and LPRINT
Dsrity ies
No - so go again
Point to ELITE sequence
Character count
Go and Print string
Go again
Prepare to restore screen
Point SI to Buffer
Point DI to Screen
Save DI
Set line count
Set column count
Swap 1 line
Restore screen position
Bump by 1 line
Save it
Decrement
Go again
Clear stack
line count
Reset original
Reset original cursor type
Mark PPOP as inactive
Restore registers
Return from INT 9 call
PRACTICAL COMPUTING September 1987
cursor position
; Get current Video Page
PRT_MSG:
PUSH
CALL
MOV
MOV
CX.
SET_CURS
ex nt
AH,9
AL, BYTE PTR CS:{S1I]
Set cursor according to
contents of DX
Collect character
from keyboard into AL
Save loop count
Set cursor from DX
Send 1 character
and attribute (in BL)
to screen at cursor
; Bump cursor
PRT_MSG
eee ==
LPRINTs
DX, @
AH, &
AL, CS:(S1]
17H
SI
LPRINT
; Print
Bump message pointer
Restore loop count
Go again CX times
Select Printer 1
Print character in AL
Get character to print
it
Bump Pointer
3 Go again CX times
SEceesccecceczs
BX
DX, CS:PORT_ADD
AL, OX
AL, 1.
WAITOB
AL, DX
AL, 1
WAITOL
BX,ES:(D1]
OS:(S11,BX
AL, DX
AL, 1
WAITO2
WAITO3:
IN
TEST
JZ
Mav
sTl
INC
INC
INC
INC
LOOP
POP
RET
AL, DX
AL,1
WAIT@3
ES:(D1),BxX
Ss!
s!
DI
DI
WAITOS
BX
SBRS ENDP
{continued from page 105)
the old interrupt 9 can be called as
an ofdinary subroutine, and the
Iret instruction will simply pop the
flags back when it returns. The
normal work of interrupt 9 having
been completed, BX and ES are
saved on the stack. ES can now be
pointed to the data segment at
location 40:0hex and the program
checks the bytes at offsets 17hex
and 18hex, the two bytes that store
the state of various keys.
Save line count
Get Video Controller Address
Stop interrupts for next bit
Read status
Check Video Access bit
Loop until access denied
Read status
; Check Video Access bit
Loop until access allowed
NOW access screen (READ)
Exchange words
Read status
; Check Video Access bit
Loop until access denied
Read status
Check Video Access bit
Loop until access allowed
NOW access screen (WRITE)
Re-enable interrupts
Bump buffer pointer
to next word
Bump screen pointer
to next screen position
Go again CX times
Restore line count
If either the Alt or the Caps Lock
key is not pressed, the program
jumps via Quitstep to the end of
the routine where the ES and BX
registers are restored, and an Iret is
executed to allow processing to
continue. If they are both pressed,
the program checks to see if the
routine is active by looking at the
contents of the Prog__ Flag byte. If
it is 1 then the program is active
and it quits as before.
If Prog__Flag contains a zero the
PRACTICAL COMPUTING September 1987
INST PROC NEAR
INSTALLs
LEA
MOV
INT
MOV
MOV
MOV
MOV
SERUP ?
MOV
MOV
INC
INC
INC
LOOP
MOV
MOV
INT
MOV
MOV
LEA
MOV
MOV
DX, SIGN_ON
AX, 909H
21H
S1,O0FFSET SCNBOX
CX, BOX_WID#BOX_LEN
D1,OFFSET BOX_BUF
AH, NORMATT
OLD_INT9_OFF,BX
QLD_INT9_SEG,ES
DX, NEW_INTS
AH, 25H
AL,9
21H
DX,OFFSET PROTECTOR
27H
OB
DB
S1GN_ON "BATES Associates -
; Screen Box {is 11
SCNBOX DB
Point SI
Width and Length of Screen Box
Position of Buffer
Background Color for .Box
Set protect
Terminate and stay resident
*Pop-Up Printer Controller
3 Display Sign on Message
to Screen Box
Set up Buffer with message
interleaved with attribute bytes
Move source (S1) ane byte
Move destination (DI) one word
3 Go again for whole box
; Callect
INT 9 Vector
Save Offset and
Segment
Set our NEW_INTS start address
as
INT 9 Vector
limit
Version 1.108"
lines high by 23 characters wide.
; Cursor rest position is at line 19
col 8 of box.
Printer Controller
’
’
L Reset Printer
¥ Line Feed
5 Form Feed
" Pica Size
5 Elite Size
A
5
,
;
ae
i
re
:
,
i
a)
he
;
We
H
’
;
’
;
’
;
PRT_BUSY_MSG
LIN_FEED
FRM_FEED
PT_RESET
PICA
ELITE
Un-initialised Data Area
pee emasseseseseccse cle et ces sese=s ese
DB
DB
PROG_FLAG
CRNT_VPAGE
PORT_ADD
CRNT_CUR_MODE
CRNT_CUR_POS
CURSOR_TYPE
VPAGE_OFFSET
OLD_INT9_OFF
OLD_INT9_SEG
BOX_BUF
PROTECTOR
INST ENDP
cODE ENDS ;
END
START 3; End of program.
; execution at the
program can continue by saving all
the registers and ensuring that the
DS register points into the current
code segment. The program must
also be marked as active so that
future interrupts will bypass it.
The next task is to get a couple
of video addresses that will be
needed later. The first is the
address of the current video
controller chip, which is stored at
offset 63hex into the data
segment; the second is the number
$+(BOX_W1ID*BOX_]
*Printer not ready’
Line Feed Character
Form Feed Character
Reset sequence
Set to PICA Size
Set to ELITE Size
LEN#2)
End of the CODE SEGMENT
Instruct assembler to start
label, START:
of the current display page, stored
at offset 62hex. Both these
addresses must be stored in the
program's own data area. Details
of the current cursor position and
type are collected by using func-
tion 3 of interrupt 10hex, and
these too are stored in the data
area.
On the assumption that a colour
monitor is in use, the program
moves the address of colour
(continued on page 109)
107
He probably
didn't know a VAN
from a LAN
either
But Einstein had an excuse.
Fortunately you dont any longer.
The new easy to use Breaking The
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This new lexicon is based
ona series called
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simple again to
understand the full
meaning.
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18
11
12
13
14
15
16
te?
(continued from page 107)
RAM into AX and the settings
for a colour cursor into the
Cursor__Type word. Once again it
accesses the data area for details of
current hardware at offset 10hex.
The program checks two bits of the
data to see if a colour monitor
teally is being used. If so, it con-
tinues at ProcessO1; otherwise it
resets the address in AX to mono
RAM, and the cursor type to a
mono setting.
If memory other than page 1 of
colour video is being used, the
video processor will be accessing
memory which is offset some dis-
tance into the colour RAM area.
This number is read into AX from
offset 4Ehex in the data segment.
Since AX was first pushed on to
the stack, this value for the video-
RAM address can now be popped
into the ES register, which will be
used for all direct accesses to the
screen memory from now on. The
video page offset amount is stored
in the Vpage__Offset word.
SHOW BOX
The program is now ready to
pop the box on to the screen. The
first step is to point the SI register
to the start of the Box Buf
message and the DI register to the
relevant point on the screen. Any
offset from Vpage__Offset must
be added in case the machine is not
using video page zero. DI is then
saved on the stack and the number
of lines is put into BX to allow one
line to be transferred at a time.
Execution has now reached the
Put__Box label in the program. It
puts the number of characters per
line into CX and then calls the
Swap routine. This swaps a line of
characters between the screen and
the Box__Buf area each time it is
called. Once one line has been
swapped, the program must
testore the starting value of DI and
increment it by 160 bytes or one
whole screen line. The process of
saving and decrementing the line
count in BX can be repeated until
BX is empty.
Once all the lines have been
swapped the value of DI must be
cleared from the stack. Now the
Set__Curs routine can be used to
position the cursor inside the box
on the screen and then turn the
cursor off.
The next part of the program
checks the printer condition by
using the printer status function 2
of interrupt 17hex. It returns a
byte of information indicating
whether the printer is on-line,
busy, etc. This byte is checked and
if the printer is available the
program continues at
Get__Cmnd. If the printer is not
available a message must be dis-
played to that effect.
First the Fredatt attribute is
loaded into BL and the current
page number is loaded into BH.
Then the number of characters to
display is loaded into CX, SI is set
to point to the Prt_Busy__Msg
message and the cursor position is
put into DX. The program now
calls the Prt__Msg subroutine to
display the message in flashing red
in the correct position in the box
on the screen.
The program is now at
Quit__Char in the program, where
it asks for the Escape key to be
pressed before the program can
terminate. Once the Escape key
has been pressed the screen must
be restored before exiting.
A minor problem here is that
the screen and Box__Buf must be
swapped back to clear the ‘‘Printer
- mot ready’’ message; otherwise
Box_Buf will be left containing
this message after swapping is
completed.
CHARACTER DISPLAY
Fortunately, this is easily accom-
plished by using function 9 of
interrupt 10hex, which allows up
to 255 characters to be displayed
from any point on the screen.
After positioning the cursor, the
attribute and page number are
loaded as usual into BX, the
number of characters into CX and
finally the character — in this case
a space — into AL. This function
will then display [CX] spaces on
the screen at the appropriate place,
and with the appropriate attri-
butes. The program continues to
Quit where the box will be
swapped back off the screen.
If the printer checks out as avail-
able, processing will branch to the
Get_Cmnd label. This is where
you can make changes to accom-
modate differing printer require-
ments. At Get__Cmnd, the
Get_Char routine is called to
collect a character from the key-
board. Return or Escape at this
point will cause the program to
terminate. Other characters ate
checked to see if they are accept-
able command characters.
The checking process is in the
form of the chain GC1 to GC4. Ifa
particular section finds that the
character is a valid command, then
SI and CX are loaded accordingly
before processing jumps out of the
chain to Gcprint. Here the relevant
characters are sent to the printer
via the Lprint subroutine. If a
character is not valid the processing
returns to Get_Cmnd from the
end of the chain at GC4.
This method makes it compara-
tively easy to add more command
characters, simply by adding more
links into the chain and more
strings of code sequences to send to
the printer. In this simple version I
have included just the five
sequences noted at Lin_Feed,
Frm__Feed, Pt_Reset, Pica and
Elite.
On entry into Lprint, SI is set to
point at the appropriate string of
characters, and CX has the
number of characters to be sent.
Once the call to Lprint has
completed, processing returns to
Get_Cmnd for the next
command character. This will con-
tinue until Return or Esc is pressed
to terminate the program by a
jump to Quit.
(continued on next page)
—_—— rr ee,
PRACTICAL COMPUTING September 1987
109
(continued from previous page)
Between Quit and Exit, exactly
the same process is performed as at
Put_Box and the contents of the
screen and Box__Buf are swapped.
The final steps necessary to put
things back as they were are
restoration of the cursor position
and type, and then marking
Prog__Flag to indicate that the
program is no longer active. The
registers can then be restored and
the program exits via an Iret
instruction to whichever routine
called it in the first place.
The Set_Curs, Get__Char,
Lprint and Prt_Msg routines are
| all very simple, and should require
no further explanation than that
provided by the comments in the
listing. The Swap routine uses a
special technique to prevent snow
on IBM CGA screens. When acces-
sing the screen memory directly
there is a clash of interests between
the main processor and the video
processor. On CGA systems this
will cause random flashes on the
screen as the two processors access
the same area of memory at the
same time.
The effect is avoided by making
the main processor wait until the
video processor is not accessing
memory. The video processor is
constantly scanning the screen
RAM atea and sending the data to
4 WAY AUTO
PRINTER SHARER FOR ONLY
UT {I
the monitor, only pausing during
the time that the monitor is in
vertical retrace, so the timing of
this operation is quite critical.
The video processor has a
number of registers which can be
accessed from within the program,
one of which gives an indication of
when the vertical retrace is taking
place. It takes the form of a single
bit which constantly switches
between 0 and 1. When this bit is
1, the video processor is accessing
memory normally; when it is 0,
vertical retrace is taking place. To
locate the earliest point at which
the 0 period starts it is necessary
first to wait until it switches to 1,
and then wait for the switch back
to 0. Once this happens, there is
just time to sneak in and access one
word of screen memory data with-
out causing snow before the video
processor comes along again.
The actual swap process works as
follows. The first step is to save the
line count BX on the stack and
load the port address of the video
processor status register into DX.
Since the next piece of coding is so
timing-sensitive, the interrupt flag
CLI is cleared to prevent software
interrupt from occuring. The port
is now read and the access bit is
tested.
The program loops until the bit
becomes a 1. Once this has
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110
— circle 164 on enquiry card <—
happened, the program goes to the
next loop, which waits in a similar
fashion for the bit to become 0.
When that occurs it immediately
treads the required word from
screen memory.
The screen word is now in the
BX register and can be exchanged
with the corresponding word in
Box__Buf, putting the original
screen word in Box__Buf and the
original Box__Buf word into BX.
Processing continues, with another
couple of wait loops similar to the
first, until the contents of BX can
be written into. screen memory.
BUILT-IN ROUTINE
Once this is done, interrupts can
be allowed to operate once again,
and both the SI and DI registers
are incremented to point to the
next words to be transferred. The
whole routine repeats until the CX
register is empty, indicating that
the whole line has been swapped.
There is an instruction that allows
direct exchange between ES:[DI]
and CS;[SI], but it appears to take
longer than the time allowed
during vertical retrace so some
snow still appears on the screen.
To create the box on the screen
the program makes use of the box-
graphics characters within the IBM
character set. The characters are
numbered from 179 to 223, and
>. zh “l
can prove extremely useful in
giving a final polished appearance
to the output of utility programs.
If your word processor or text
editor does not make special pro-
vision for these characters, they can
usually be entered by holding
down the Alt key while tapping
out the character number on the
numeric keypad.
Some printers will not repro-
duce these characters correctly, so
your printed program listing may
not display them correctly. Even
on printers that do handle these
characters, no difference shows
between double- and single-line
characters. This means that charac-
ters 201 and 218 will appear
identical when printed. If you use
the Basic loader you will find that
the screen box appears as a natty
combination of double and single
lines.
All the programs in this series
are available on IBM-formatted
discs at a cost of £5 for each
program. Each disc contains the
assembler source code, the
assembled program and a doc-
ument file describing the
operation of the code in detail.
Please send your order to Jim
Bates, c/o Practical Computing;
cheques should be made payable
to Jim Bates.
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£120
CLIPPER Compiler £150
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Telephone: (0273) 727119
~ circle 159 on enquiry card — | . PRACTICAL COMPUTING September 1987
Desktop Publishing is a method by which documents can be
Produced using a computer, software and a printer. These
documents are near professional appearance and cost only a fraction
of the price which you might otherwise pay to a designer, artwork
studio and printer. Because the ‘middle men’ are eliminated from
the production process, desktop publishing allows the user to retain
total control over his or her documents, making last minute updates
without panic and without incurring extra charges for ‘rush’ work.
WHAT CAN | USE IT FOR?
As we all make use of the printed word in one way or another
in our dally lives, the applications for Desktop Publishing are
all around us. If you belong to a club or society or if you run your
own business, the possibilities are endless! Our list of example
Advertisements
Application Forms
Brochures
Business Contracts
Charts & Tables
Club Certificates
Club Newsletters
Dance Tickets
Invitation Cards
Invoices
Labets
Menus
Office Forms
Order Forms
‘applications will give you some other ideas.
Distribution Leaflets
Fayre Programmes
O/nhead Transparencies
Personal Cards
Personal Letterheads
Presentations
Price Lists
Speciai Offer Leaflets
Technical Sheets
Work Estimates
PUBLISHING PARTNER
Publishing Partner, from SoftLogik Corp™, includes all of the
features which you would expect in a good Desktop Publishing
package. It combines word processing, page layout and graphics
facilitles all in one program, allowing you to create ‘stunning’
documents on your Atari ST. First you can do a rough page design C 4 ‘
and start adding blocks of copy. See how it fits. See how it looks. | * Print to paper vertically or horizontally
See how it flows onto the next page. Make some changes. Try a | * Read & merge any ASCIl file
different type style, or a different size, or some borders, some
shapes, or even some pictures. Because Publishing Partner incorpo-
rates WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get), you'll see
instantly if your new idea works or not. The computer's screen will
/show you just how the page will look when it prints - no more
“guesswork, You can adjust fonts, character sizes and even character
Spacing, anytime and anywhere on the page. Watch an ordinary
letter transform into a professional looking piece right before your
eyes, 4S you experiment with mixing graphics and text. And, when
you want to see a ‘hard copy' of your masterpiece, just send it to
any one of the printers which the program supports (the list is
growing all the time).
SoftLogik Corp™
SoftLogik Corp™ was set up in the USA by Shawn Fogle and Deron
Kazmaier to produce quality desktop publishing software with |
uncompromising power and features. Publishing Partner was
developed after 1% years of research, working with typesetters and
printers and the results achieved are outstanding.
SIMPLE, POWERFUL, AFFORDABLE
Printing and publishing is a fairly complex business which
takes years of training and experience to master. You wouldn't
think so with Publishing Partner, which takes full advantage of the |
ST's user friendly GEM environment. It is so user friendly and easy
to understand, most people find they can produce their first
document without even opening the fully comprehensive 159 page |
manual which accompanies the program. Using the mouse to
manipulate the self explanatory pull down menus and windows, you
can be up and running in no time, creating a variety of documents |
quickly and easily. In addition, the flexibility of Publishing Partner
allows you to choose between mouse or keyboard operation,
whichever suits your personal preference. Although simple to use,
Publishing Partner is by no means a simple program. Quite the
contrary. Behind the user friendliness of GEM, Illes a most complex
and powerful publishing tool. The combination of Publishing Part-
ner and Atari's powerful low-cost ST computers has brought an
affordable alternative to the desktop publishing systems currently
available from Atari's competitors.
THOUSANDS OF TYPE STYLES
This is no exaggeration. Unlike most other desktop publishing
software packages, which offer you 2 or 3 different fonts,
Publishing Partner gives you true flexibility of over 4,000 type styles
per font. Publishing Partner offers you 14 variations of each font:
BACKSLANT
BOLD
DOUBLE U/L
ITALICS
LIGHT
MIRROR
OUTLINE
REVERSED
SHADOW
STRIKE THROUGH
TALL
UNDERLINE
UPSIDE DOWN
WIDE
And you can 'mix and match’ any number and combination of styles
to your own requirements. The total number of possible permuta-
tions is over 4,000. And that's not all, each style can be used in any
one of 216 sizes in one point increments from 1 point to 216 points!
All this is achievable on an unexpanded 520ST with just 512K RAM!
Other competing packages require 1024K RAM just to get the larger
sizes above 72 point and still can't match all of the variations
available.
Publishing Partner is a trade mark of SoftLogik Corp™
— circle 158 on enquiry card —
DESKTOP PUBLISHING
WITH PUBLISHING PARTNER’ ON THE ATARI ST
WHAT IS DESKTOP PUBLISHING?
WORD PROCESSING
Publishing Partner contains the power and fea-
tures that you would expect to find on a dedicated
word processing package. In addition it includes facil- |
ities which a professional typesetting machine would
offer. For example the program can cope with 216
different type sizes, with over 4,000 style variations of
each one. The following are some of the facilities you
will find within the capabilities of Publishing Partner:
* Adjust margins for any column
* Change block to uppercase or lowercase
* Change margin indents
* Character spacing from -128 to +127
* Copy text to and from the buffer
* GEM based
* Import and export files
* Insert and delete pages
* Justifies right/left/centred as you type
* Justifies to the character/word
* Kerning from -128 to +127
* Line spacing/leading in % points from -64 to +57
* Link columns together
* Macros
* Manual Hyphenation
| * Merge files together
* Optional grid & ruler display
* Over 4,000 type style variations of each font
| * Page numbering
* Pica, Inches or Centimetre measuring system
* Search and replace
* Tabs for charts/tables
| * Unlimited headers & footers
* User definable page size
* User variable superscript/subscript characters
PAGE LAYOUT
Whatever you require, custom logos, unique
er is your solution. After all, It was specially designed
by professionals who realize that there’s more to your
computer than just typing letters.
* Accurate to 3 decimal places
* Adjust character size from 1 to 216 points
| * Auto text flow between columns
* Change columns on finished page
* Display 15%-1500% of original size
* Display actual size
* Display multiple pages/rulers/text routing
* Layout multiple columns
* Print to disk
* Set auto text routing
* Snap to guides
* Superimpose text on tint or tint on text
SEEING IS BELIEVING
We have already told you how powerful Publishing Partner Is and
|] work. The true test of any Desktop Publishing software is in the
output it produces and it is here that Publishing Partner excels. With
its graphics capabilities and the thousands Of type styles it produces,
there is no end to the design possibilities which you can create. And,
with drivers for a v8riety of printers, including Postacript at no extra
charge, you can be sure that you will be able to output in the quality
your work deserves. The output quality Is truly remarkable. But don't
Just take our word for it. Before you go any further with your
enquiries into Desktop Publishing, return the coupon below for sampl-
es of Publishing Partner's output on a variety of printers. We will also
send you details and prices of each printer as welt as further inform-
atlon on Publishing Partner and the Atari range of ST computers. We
|I don't expect you to take our word for It. We want you to see for
yourself how Publishing Partner outshines the competition. So, comp-
lete and return the coupon today. Remember, SEEING IS BELIEVING!
Mi/Mrs/Ms: Initials:
Adoaress:
i | am interested in the Atari ST
| already own an Atari ST
borders, unusual letterheads etc. Publishing Part- |
how easy it Is to use. However, the recipients of your finished work | |
will only be able to gauge Ihe package by the end results of your} |
Surname.
GRAPHICS
Not only can you load any Degas, N-Vision,
Neochrome or digitized pictures into your Pub-
lishing Partner files, you can also enlarge or reduce
| them for an exact fit. Or, you can copy just a section
of a picture and then paste It into your document as
many times as you want. You can still go back and
resize it at any time or crop it to delete unwanted areas.
*3 types of line ends, square/rounded/pointed
*7 types of line which are all editable.
*7 weight lines ranging from ‘pt to 6pt
*40 fill patterns each with a border option making a
total of 80 fill options
“Ability to produce separations for 2 colours
"Copy graphics to and from clipboard
“Cut, paste, copy or crop graphics
“Import graphics from third party graphic programs
such as Degas, Neochrome, N-Vision or any art pro-
gram that produces compatible ASCIil files
*Select colours to use and print with
“Toolbox features include: Circles, ellipses, boxes,
rounded corner boxes, horizontal/vertical lines, di-
agonal lines, polygons and free hand drawing
OUTSTANDING OUTPUT
Publishing Partner is a unique program with a
large variety of printer drivers for both laser and
dot matrix printers. Dot matrix is supported in both 80
column and 132 column mode, so you could even
produce a tabloid width newspaper (11%" wide) ona
wide body printer. Drivers are also available for the
new technology 24 pin dot matrix printers which can
give a fine resolution of 360x360 compared with laser
printers at 300x300, The current drivers (included
FREE with the program) are as follows with new ones
being written on a weekly basis:
9 PIN DOT MATRIX
* Atari SMM804
* Blue Chip M120/10
* Cal Abco Legend 880
* C Itoh Prowriter
9 PIN DOT MATRIX
* Citizen MSP
* Epson RX/FX/EX
18 PIN DOT MATRIX
* Okidata Microline 292
24 PIN DOT MATRIX
(Various Res)
* Mannesman Spirit-80
* NEC 8023
* Panasonic KXP.
* Star Gemini & SG
(240x216 Res)
* Mannesman Tally MT
* Star NX/SD
(240x288 Res)
* Okidata Microtine 293
(360x180 Res)
* Cltoh C-715 * Epson SQ
* Epson LQ * Toshiba P32
| 24 PIN DOT MATRIX (360x360 Res)
* NEC P6/P7 * NEC XL new series
| LASER PRINTERS (300x300 Res)
* Centronics PP-8 In Epson or H.P. Laserjet mode 1%4Mb RAM
“ Any other H.P. Laserjet compatible with 1'4Mb RAM
* QMS PS800 or Apple LaserWriter - Postscript
* Any other Postscript compatible printer
| OFFICIAL UK VERSION
The official UK version of Publishing Partner has a pound
(£) sign as a standard part of its character set, Othe
versions have also been imported unofficially trom the USA
and have a doilar ($) sign instead of a £ sign. These version:
will not be supported by the UK distributors or thelr dealers:
The UK version also contains clip art, different fonts and a
full range of printer drivers. Ensure that you buy the official UK|
version, not an unofficial import with incorrect characters.
£139.00
Publishing Partner is available from Atari ST Dealers throughout the]
UK. If your local dealer does not have Publishing Partner in stock, it
can be obtained by mail order (Postage & Packaging free) from:
SILICA SHOP Ltd, 1-4 The Mews, Hatherley Road,
Sidcup, Kent, DA14 4DX Tel: 04-309 1111
SS
INFORMATION REQUEST FC
| To: Silica Shop Ltd, UPDAT 0687, 1-4 The Mews, Hatherley Road, Sidcup, Kent, DA14 4DX
Please send me further details on: DESKTOP PUBLISHING
Postcode:
C]
C
PC0987
a eA ae ee
W12
Ss T ©@ P
Ce SSS Ls eee
@WHAT it is to be wanted.
Wordplex Information Systems, an
11-year-old manufacturer of word-
processing equipment, seems to have
some secret attraction. Everyone and
their dog has been queuing up to buy
into it.
The saga began back in June,
when Wordplex was trying to put
together a refinancing package with
Octagon Industries to inject some
sorely needed capital into the man-
ufacturer, which lost £4.5 million in
the last financial year.
Just as it seemed that the deal was
likely to go through, in stepped
Apricot with an offer of shares or
cash to shareholders. After much
squabbling between the two man-
agements, it looked as if Apricot
would get its way.
But then along came Norsk Data,
the highly successful Norwegian
manufacturer of minicomputers, with
an even better offer. At the time of
writing it seemed likely that the Norsk
package would be accepted by the
shareholders. On the other hand, it
could be time for a fourth suitor to
show up.
Perhaps the biggest mystery in all
this is why companies should want to
buy Wordplex in the first place.
Hasn’t anyone realised that dedi-
cated word processors died about
five years ago? Those who haven't
should look at the current Wordplex
line. Its 90 Series starts with a twin-
floppy machine plus daisywheel. The
price — a mere £6,000. You could
buy an IBM PS/2 Model 80 for that.
The explanation usually invoked is
that both Apricot and Norsk want
Wordplex for its user base. But this
amounts to not much more than
1,500 sites in the UK and around the
same abroad. It also ignores the like-
lihood that anyone daft enough to
buy word-processing systems these
days probably couldn’t cope with the
kind of shiny new technology Apricot
and Norsk have in mind.
@The sceptically minded may be a
little concerned about OS/2 — the
operating system of the future, as we
are continually being told. After all, it
was initially launched by only one
company, and many people
remember the bad old days when
each manufacturer seemed to have
its own incompatible operating
system.
However, Compaq has acted
swiftly to put potential users’ minds at
rest. Together with Microsoft, Lotus
and Ashton-Tate, Compaq held a
press conference in New York on 6
July to set the record straight.
America’s leading clone maker was
at pains to emphasise that OS/2 does
not belong to the company which
launched it, and that Compaq will be
supporting it fully, even producing
one or two extras which will be sent
out to users of the OS/2 development
kit.
Anyone contemplating buying
equipment in the future will find this
added backing for OS/2 comforting.
Such wholehearted support
emphasises that it is increasingly
likely to form the next standard for
corporate computing. What is less
useful is that this press conference
follows earlier comments from
Compag that what the world really
wants is DOS, not OS/2, and that the
latter is something of a wild goose
that no one should waste time
chasing.
To quote Rod Canion, president
and chief executive officer of
Compaq, on 28 April: ‘Only the
users who really need the capabilities
of OS/2 will switch to it. Everyone
else will continue to be happy with
DOS” Not much enthusiasm there —
and yet by 6 July OS/2 has become
“a revolutionary advance in the
benefits to individuals and organ-
isations by personal computers.’’ It’s
a fast-moving world, computers.
@ICL has been doing well lately.
Profits are up, and far from being
propped up by its parent, STC, it is
doing most of the supporting itself. A
recent announcement by ICL may
indicate the secret of this success.
It’s all about niche markets. So
your mainframes and micros aren’t
making much headway against Big
Blue? Never mind: all you have to do
is to find some nice little specialist
area, and corner the market. For
Britain’s biggest mainframe manu-
facturer it’s games — or to be more
precise, management games. ICL
has set up a joint venture with
Cranfield School of Management to
organise and market business
games. They will include both off-the-
shelf packages, bespoke games, and
the running of a national man-
agement game competition. Has ICL
found its true forte at last?
@ Eagle-eyed readers tempted by Sir
Clive Sinclair’s latest piece of
consumer gee-whizzery may have
spotted that the advertisement for
the Z-88 in our May issue is different
from the one which appeared in the
previous month. Cambridge
Computer no longer lists its full
address or invites readers to send off
for goods by mail order. Instead it
suggests that anyone wishing to
place an order or obtain more
information should ring its hotline.
The change could be the result of a
complaint to the Advertising Stand-
ards Authority by an aggrieved
member of the public who objected
to Cambridge Computer’s advert-
isement and its direct-mailing leaflet.
The grounds for the complaint were
that the ad did not include the full
address and that expanding the RAM
to 3Mbyte was not possible. The com-
plainant also questioned whether the
computer was available at the time,
and pointed out that the ad failed to
explain that there would be a
delivery delay in excess of 28 days.
The ASA has since upheld the
complaint.
@ln the sophisticated world of
computing it seems that companies
are prepared to put forward some
very convoluted arguments to
market their products. A Hampshire-
based firm, CBT, claims that its Easy-
reader monitor could save UK com-
panies millions of pounds, and gives
figures to prove it.
The argument goes like this. An
estimated 900,000 users of traditio-
nal computer VDUs suffer from eye-
strain, headaches and, as a result,
absent themselves from work from
time to time. The cost to industry is
estimated to be £12 million a year.
Ordinary screens are small, and so
people are forced to run off copies to
see what their work looks like. The
cost is estimated to be around 60p a
wasted copy, not counting the cost of
corrections.
The Easyreader is claimed to solve
the eyestrain problem, and because
its screen is A4 size and upright — just
like a piece of paper — it solves the
trial copies problem too. CBT says
that on this basis savings could
exceed £20 per week, so if only one
in 10 of the estimated 900,000
screens in use in Britain today was
changed over to an Easyreader,
industry could save itself £1.8 million
a week, that is without looking at
absenteeism costs.
@Sadly we can’t get round to re-
viewing every product that comes
our way on Practical Computing.
One of the more bizarre items that
slipped through the net is Inmac’s
Alarm Box. It lurks on your desk
under the guise of a floppy-disc
storage box with a beige base and
smoke-coloured lid. But once the
alarm circuit is switched on and the
lid is locked, moving the box will
trigger off a 15 second alarm blast of
98 decibels. Would-be thieves
should get a nasty surprise and the
cleaner will at last have the perfect
excuse for not polishing your desk.
a -S ET,
PRACTICAL COMPUTING September 1987
CLASSIHED
PRACTICAL COMPUTING
REED BUSINESS PUBLISHING
QUADRANT HOUSE
THE QUADRANT
SUTTON SURREY SM2 5AS
TEL: 01-661 3033
MEDIA CONVERSIONS —
DISK /DISK © TAPE/DISK « TAPE/TAPE.
We con transfer your data between over 1000 different
| Minis, Micros and Mainframes.
Tape
Ya" —800, 1600, 3200, 6250 BPI
Ya" -QIC-11 .QIC- 24, (QIC-02)
DEC’DOS’, TAR, ANSI, CPIO, IBM Labelled/ Unlabeled.
Floppy
8", 514", 32", 3" CPM, CPM86, MDOS, MSDOS,
PCDOS, UNIX, XENIX, IDRIS, TAR, RT11, IBM, BEF, ISIS,
FLEX, OS9, APPLE, ACORN, TORCH, VICTOR-SIRIUS,
ATARI etc <
WP/Typesetting
Many farmats including DISPLAYWRITER, OLIVETTI,
WORDPLEX, LINOTYPE etc.
Overnight ~| — Most formots returned by next doy’s past.
Prices from £10 per disk.
Usual terms C.W.O.
Ring or write for a full format list.
A.L.DOWNLOADING
SERVICES
VOYSEY HOUSE
BARLEY MOW PASSAGE
LONDON W4 4PT
01-994 5471
20Mb Winchester
we.
co PC/XT Upgrade Kit
3
£289
excl delivery and VAT
* Seagate ST225 Drive.
* Western Digital Controller,
* Cables, screws, etc.
% Instructions.
Suitable for PC/XT and compatibles {not Amstrad).
Also from: Scotia Computer Services (041-221 9737)
Olympic House, 142 Queen Street,
‘GLASGOW, G1 3BU
By Post: Send cheque for £336.95 (inci. ey del, and VAT) to
PO Box 312, Wrexham Clywdd, LL12 OX
Allow 7 days for cheques to clear,
By Telephone: Ring 0244 571677 with your Credit Card
Number.
Gov Depts, Schools, PLCs, Send Official Purchase Order. Dealer
Enquiries Welcome.
Western Technology
PO Box 312. Wrexham, Clwyd, LL12 OXX
Tel: 0244 571677.
RAIR BLACK BOX and ICL PCs (8 bit).
Bought sold exchange repaired advice
given. Ring 0734 668951 (Reading). 267M
dBASE li/IIi Custom Software Development.
Easy telecommunications for speedy file
transfer. Low rates, quick application
development. EasyLink 6290 9922. KN
Associates, 114-8th Street, Ann Arbor,
Michigan 48103. 462M
ATARI ST OWNERS — Write now for a free
copy .of our latest Newsletter and Public
Domain Library Catalogue: St-Club, PO Box
20, Hertford, SG13 8NN. (stamp app-
reciated).
WANTED SPRINTER. RS-232 Centronics,
IEEE buffer, interface or similar, any cables
also needed. Collection arranged. Mr
Scarth, Day 021 747-8305, Even. sara 2
478M
EPSON QxX(16. Twin drives. 512K RAM. Runs
MS-DOS and C/PM software. For sale at
£1,250, Call Roger or Adrian on Oe
4 ;
FUTURE COMPUTER wanted by existing
user. FX30, preferably 30mb. Also FX20. D.
Emery 0707-330101 daytime. 481M
IBM PCs/ICOMPATIBLES and _ printers.
Bought and sold. Call Ideal Software Ltd on
01-390 6722.. 482M
PRACTICAL COMPUTING September 1987
EXPANSIONS AND UPGRADES
30110 Fopey Dest Controter tor XT. 2» 360% Orla ISO
30130 Colouw Graptacs Card, 320 200 fete... i ABS DD
30140 Monoehvome Video Card, 80« 25 Characters ORY wu
30150 Monochrome Ge aptec sIPrettEt C8 dace rane
90180 Enhanced Graphecs Card...
20200 Mut WO wrth Floppy Contr aller...
30250 Mut 110 Cord
30220 Seri Card, 1+ 1 optional.
0290 Farailel Printer Cord
30240 fk Sutfovad Printe Card with 15% RAM
30250 Game HO Cord, 2 Channets
30260 384K Muttitunetion Card supped without RAB
30270 Serial Pa alle Cord tor AT...
30280 576K Memary Expansion Card swooked wothout RAM
30290 Clock Cloner £8 nme
30300 2 5b RAM Card for AT. supphed wethout FAM.
30310 2 5Mb Mutttunc Card for AT. supphed without RAM...
30320 Hard Dest Contvotes, for XT
A100 ADIOA Card, 12 Bit emer
1150 Eprom Writer...
31160 Eprom Write 14 Textod sockets).
31180 PAL Programmer Cord___.
21210 $255 9 Card...
38220 4 Channa RSZ32 Cord tor PEAT
31225 4 Chane ASZ32 Cord tor AT, =
‘31290 8 Channel AS232 Card for POAT.
31235 8 Channel AS232 Cord for AT.
39240 Be Syretronaus RS23Z Commuric ations Card
34010 Joystech
34020 Mawes
A100 PCIXT Standecd Keyboard Type S050. PCAKT ony
JA10S AT Style Keyboued Type 5051, PEITIAT nmen
34110 Satectree Style Keyboord Type 5151, PCAATIAT.....
34200 XT 8 Sot Cabwret
34310 150 W Powe Supply Un fos POT.
34320 200W Power Supply Uret for AT
38120 PCIAT 20M8 Upgrade Kin, B5mS, with ctr, chis, e1...—. =
38130 PCMKT OMB Upgrade Kit, with Ctl, CBOE, Ib wennnene nem
38.120 PINT 20MB Hardced......
38330 PCIKT 30MB Nerdcard = ae 499.00"
Preasa add C1 par Rem (£4 par Nem martes *) ond 15% VAT and rend your order (ar phone mith VISA or
ACCESS umber! ie
Western Technology
SPECIAL OFFER
Company in Malaysia sells by mail
order all IBM PC compatibles.
Softwares at discount rates.
PO Box 342, Weesham, Clwyd, (112 OXK
0264 671677
ex: dBASE Ill +
LOTUS 1-2-3 | £26
WORDSTAR 2000 £12
NORTON UTILITIES
QUICK BASIC
For information and catalogue
write:
TWINSTAR COMPUTER SERVICE
LOT 242, WISMA HLA, JALAN RAJA
CHULAN,
55100 KUALA LUMPUR, MALAYSIA,
PUBLIC DOMAIN software for Amstrad
1512, IBM PC's. £2.95 per disc. Word-
processors, spreadsheets, databases,
accounts, games etc. Send 26p stamps for
reviews, lists. Apex Software, PO Box 174,
Battle, TN33 9AQ. 483M
APPLE, IBM,-Amstrad (etc) stuff with no
nonsense prices! Disks, software, books,
accessories, machines, etc. Send large
S.A.E. for list to: Chamelon Software, M.O.
Dept, 51 Bowgate, Gosberton, Spalding,
Lincs PE11 4LL: _ 484M
“BBC WITH Torch Z80 twin disk drive;
monochrome monitor c/w plinth; Perfect
Writer, Perfect Filer and Perfect Calc Soft-
ware, £490 ono. Contact David Hawnt on
021-784 2485 during officehours. 485M
DIGITAL RAINBOW. 100 system with Xerox
Daisy Wheel printer, 54K but capable of
expansion. Select Wordprocessing and
Multiplan. Spread sheet software included.
Around £1,250 secures. Call Ashbon
Associates Ltd. 01-584 4748. 479M
a Soe ee
— coord
DISK COPYING SERVICE |
Moving data and program files from
one machine to another is often made j
difficult because different
manufacturers have adopted different
disk format standards.
We can copy your files to and from
over 250 disk formats including
CP/M, CP/M-86, MS-DOS, PC-DOS, ISIS,
APPLE, SIRIUS, TORCH, APRICOT, HP150,
DEC RT-11, and IBM BEF. 4
i
Disks are normally despatched on the
day they are received. j
Our charge is £10.00 + disk + VAT.
Special prices for quantities. |
For more information call us. 4
4 Prigg Meadow. vient Devon 7013 7F ]
TEL. (0364) 53499 10
COMPUTER PROBLEMS?
WE HAVE THE SOLUTIONS
Not all data switches and converters are the same.
Check these features when selecting your next
purchase.
DO THEY INCLUDE: Them
*Computer and Printer Cables
Direct from manufacturer from stock
ic
wo
Attractive styling and small size
No quibble guarantee
Experienced technical support
Competitive pricing
1st class postage and packing
Customised versions available
A a a
WV
WE DO!
*Converters include printer cables. Additional Cables
at reduced prices. Ring us for quotation or further
information about our comprehensive range of data
switches, data converters and low cost computer
| cables; or write to (no stamp required).
TYEPRO LIMITED
Freepost, 30 Campkin Road,
Cambridge CB4 1BR
Telephone: (0223) 322394
8
dhase demystified with the dBToolkit
A booklet on disc with chapter on — How to start dB
programming — An approach to database design — Dealing
with Dates — Speeding up your programme — 50+
Programming Hints and Routines — 30+ working programmes
include:
create/amend/enquire any file, autamatic documentation for
dbf & prg, ‘standard’ letter writing, automatic computer ,tog, 3
different types of menu, the ‘complete’ fabel utility, ‘special’
reports, pseudo dot prompt.
For your own copy specify your version of dBasell, I+
ar foxBase, and send £35.00 with an IBM formatted disk
to Gerry Hughes, Furnace Mill Farm, Water Lane,
Hawkhurst, Kent. TN18 5BA,
DEADLINE
SEPT 2nd
FOR OCT ISSUE
13
PC/AT COMPATIBLES
BREAKING THE PRICE BARRIERIITI II!
MANUFACTUREDIN THE UNITED KINGDOM
USING HIGHEST QUALITY JAPANESE PRODUCTS
PC/XT £355
PC/XT, 20MB,
MONITOR TTL £700
8088/V20 * 640k ss “a
+ “NEC” FLOPPY DRIVE * “SERIAU/PARALLEL” PRINTER PORT “nt
4+ HERCULES GRAPHICS DISPLAY ADAPTOR * KEYBOARD NUMS +
CAPS LOCK *% 8 SLOTS * FLAT SCREEN MONITOR
AT/TURBO £700
WITH 20MB
MONITOR £950
* DYNAMIC SPEED CONTROL *
*% 80286 6/8/12 MHZ * 512K RAM EXPANDABLE TO 1M
*% LEGAL BIOS * FLOPPY DRIVE 1.2M
*% PRINTER PORT * GRAPHICS DISPLAY ADAPTOR * AT STYLE KEYBOARD
WITH SEPARATE CURSOR PAD
MONITOR, 20M8 HARD DISK, 640K RAM, 1.2MB FLOPPY KEYBOARD, DOS 32
ALL SYSTEMS ARE TOTALLY one
ih REST TTL MONITOR MB Hi DISK £299
BILINGUAL SYSTEMS EXPORT ORDERS WELCOME
12 MONTHS WARRANTY AND SUPPORT EXCLUDED PRICES EXCLUDING VAT
FOR ORDERS AND ENQUIRIES PLEASE CONTACT
C.A.S. COMPUTER POINT LTD
TEL 01-708 3775/01-708 2734
TLX 8952387 ANSWER G
IT HOUSE
COMPUTER VILLAGE
A quality office refurbishment providing
ideal business environment for small
computer-related companies at Vauxhall
SE11, close to station.
Paul Prender Partnership
72/75 Marylebone High Street
Tel: 01-486 1571
ft
> circle 146 on enquiry card <—
[ - circle 166 on enquiry card ~ |
“PRACTICAL
COMPUTING
Advertisement Index
A F P
ABC Systems Ltd 20 Fujitsu Europe Ltd 64/65 Peter Nelson 84
AC Interactive 97 P&P Micro Distributors 66
AMA 78 G Prospero Software 53
Apple Computers 14/15 Gultronics Computer Centre 67
B H Q
Bits Per Second Ltd 84 Hewlett Packard Ltd 28/29 Qume UK 61
Borland International fone Homestead Data Products Ltd
Bridgen Technology 84 97 R
Brom Com Computers Ltd 35 HM Systems 48 Ringdale Peripherals 9
Cc . s
Keele Codes Ltd 22 ,
Cambridge Computer Solutions 75 Key Zone 32 Sapphire Systems 19
Canon (UK) Ltd 6 Sentinel Software Ltd 57
CAS Computer Point 114 LE Silica Shop — 45/111
Geratech Electronic (td 22 Logitek Ltd 82 Star Micronics (UK) Ltd 62/63
Compumart 4
Computer Deal's 24 om Li 5 ‘t
Croton Electronics 33 Mac Europe 98 ancoy
CTRI Alt Deli 52 MCS 36 Taxan(UK) Ltd 83
Computer Express 58 = Mekom Computer Products go ‘Technical Media Services 33
Microft Technology Ltd g 20/20 Technology Ltd 104
D Micro Peripherals Back cover _‘/ fisoft Ltd ue
Damson Computers 97 A peat ro 32 0«C«WwW
j j u
BoTuns A a Miracle Techie 13. Walters International Ltd 44
faite ; 7 Moorhouse Marketing ol
Disking International 9 iedeiinione 97
Mega Tech 34 -on Software 68
E
Elite Computer Systems 32 oO Zz
Elonex (UK) Ltd IBC Opus Supplies 88/89 Zorland Ltd 21
114
PRACTICAL COMPUTING September 1987
XT-Compatible
17H8 it £795
“SAL prices excluding VAT”
The PC88 Turbo
Legal BIOS
NEC V-20 Super Processor
Switchable 4.77/8 MHz Clock
640K RAM
20MB Half Height Hard Disk
360K Half Height Floppy
Parallel Printer + RS232 Serial Ports
Clock/Calendar with Battery Back-up.
AT-Compatible
axon ~SA29S
0 or 1 Wait States ‘*All prices excluding VAT”
Monographic/Printer card
130W Power Supply
Professional Keyboard
**Hi-Res 12”’’ Green Monitor
MS-DOS 3.2
Full Set of Manuals
8 Expansion Slots
12 Months Warranty
@ The PC-286 Turbo M@ Monographic/Printer card
@ Legal Bios @ 200W Power Supply
@ Switchable 6/8/10 MHz @ Professional Keyboard
@ 640K RAM @ ‘‘Hi Res 14”’’ Green Monitor
@ 20 MB Half Height Hard Disk @ MS-DOS 3.2
@ 1.2 MB Half Height Floppy @ Full Set of Manuals
@ Parallel Printer + Two RS232 Serial Ports MH 8 Expansion Slots
@ Clock/Calendar with Battery Back-up @ 12 Months Warranty
OPTIONS ™ 30 MB Hard Disk Drive @ 14” Hi Res Colour Monitor
Upgrade £265 and EGA Card Upgrade £395
@ 40MB Hard Disk Drive @ EGA Card £165
Upgrade £265
@ 14” Colour Monitor Upgrade
Pie)
ym ~) ‘ON SITE MAINTENANCE AVAILABLE’
Wf ‘‘All prices excluding VAT”
ELONEX (UK) Ltd.
Please feel free to visit our showroom for demonstration
RAYS HOUSE, NORTH CIRCULAR ROAD, STONEBRIDGE PARK,
LONDON NW10 7XB TELEPHONE: 01-965 3225
[ — circle 109 on enquiry card « |
MP 165 DOT MATRIX
This proven best selling NLQ printer
offers the user the very best in low cost
matrix printing.
Speed: 160cps (Draft), 35cps (NLQ).
Columns: 80. Compatibility: IBM/
Epson. Price: £229.
MP 200 DOT MATRIX
A fast NLQ quality printer, usingthelatest
state of the art technology — IC Font
Cards.
Speed: 200cps (Draft), 40cps (NLQ).
Columns: 80. Compatibility: |BM/
Epson. Price: £329.
This 136 column, 200cps, NLQ printer
offers the best value in the market place —
you can’t buy better. A range of Font
Cards are available.
Speed: 200cps (Draft), 40cps (NLQ).
Columns: 136. Compatibility: {BM/
Epson, Price: £349.
[ame 59 a
SOLS
TI 2D
MP 135 DOT MATRIX
A low cost, high performance printer
using the latest technology to produce
print that makes draft quality look like
NLQ.
Speed: 135cps (Draft), 27cps (NLQ).
Columns: 80. Compatibility: |BM/
Epson. Price: £169.
MP 480 DOT MATRIX
Another prime example of Micro
Peripherals bringing fantastic value for
money in a 480cps dot matrix printer at
less than a pound per character per
second.
Speed: 480cps (Draft), 74cps (NLQ).
Columns: 80. Compatibility: IBM/
MP 26 DAISY WHEEL
A feature rich very quiet (57dB) printer.
Universal compatibility with almost all
personal computers at an unbeatable
price.
Speed: 26cps. Columns: 132.
Compatibility: Diablo 630 Interface:
Parallel + serial. Price: £259.
MP 40 DAISY WHEEL
A very fast, quiet printer packed with
features and compatible with virtually all
computers and at a fantastic price.
Speed: 40cps. Columns: 132.
Compatibility: Diablo 630 Interface:
Parallel + serial. Price: £379.
~ Our printer’s produce
words faster than you can say them
(at prices/we like to shout about).
Producing words isn‘fthe only thing Micro Peripherals printers do fast. With qualit
features you'd normally find on more expensive machines, they sell fast as well.
Whether you want high speed performance, high resolution graphics or a choice o
type styles to make you look good onpaper, the Micro Peripherals range has the printer t
suit your needs and your pocket, as Well as a full 2 year warranty”
Micro Peripherals printer$jare compatible with most mi¢ros, including Amstrad, IBM
Acorn and Compag. For more information call us for free on 0800 521111 now.
Intec 2, Wade Road, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG24 ONE.
Telephone: 0256 473232
Telex: 859669 MICRO P G Facsimile: 0256 461570.
Units 5 & 6,Newhallhey Road, Rawtenstall,
Rossendale, Lancashire BB4 6HL.
Telephone: 0706 211526 Facsimile: 0706 228166.
* The 2 year warranty excludes printheads and ribbons All prices are RRP Ex. VAT. IBM, Epson & Diablo are trade marks and are recognise
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