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Apple 2000 Vol 3 No. 4 1988 08 BASUG GB

  • PublicationApple Periodicals
  • Date1988-08-01
  • Pages84
  • SourceApple_2000_Vol_3_No._4_1988-08_BASUG_GB.pdf
← Magazines Apple 2000 Vol 3 No. 4 1988 08 BASUG GB
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Source: Internet Archive — Aggregated Apple-era periodicals, 1981–2012.
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ple20004 THE NATIONAL APPLE USERS GROUP Bs pices ho have e' - promac All promac products share one objective. To be the finest you can buy at any price. No compromises have been made in achieving a thoroughbred design. Meticulous incoming component inspection, careful manufacture and rigorous quality control, comprehensively tested ROM and firmware to enhance performance, and error-free software combine to achieve our objective promac products are elegantly designed and unobtrusive. They are exceedingly fast and very. quiet. With the reliability that comes from superior engineering. They meet or exceed all safety and interference standards. You owe it to yourself to consider promac before accepting any other drive. They represent outstanding value. You can't buy faster or better. Q jurope supports the full range of promac protessional products, both internal and external. 20MB, 4OMB, 50MB, 80MB, 160MB, 300MB, 800MB SCSI disks, each the leader in its category WORM/CD-ROM, and the infinite capacity ProDrive, utilising removeable 10MB floppies. ProTape backs up to cassette at 3.3MB/minute. promac products are compatible with Unix and all other Macintosh environments, Ms softw: Europe provides engineering, warranty service, suppor. © updates and advice You can see the promac range at your MacEurope dealer. If yours doesn't have stock, or you don't have a dealer, please call us. We'll be happy to help. Call us for literature promac and ProDrive anc ProTape sre registered trademarks of promae GmbH Sytwisr 57 1000 Herlin 12 West Germany Apple is a trademark of and Macintc trademark registered to Apple Computer inc red by the Robin Ray Partnership on the Macintosh using This wshvertiscment pr JustText page composition software from MacEurope The Granary, Trowse Bridge, Bracondale, Norwich NR1 2EG, England. Tel: (0603) 630636 Fax: 0603 630374 Apple2000 P.O.Box 3, Apple2000 August 1988 “ yan 4343 Editorial Mick Knapp 2 MacSpin John Arnold 46 Sensible Grammar Keith Rookledge 4 News from Apple 50 Your Letters 6 Electronic Pen 816/Paint Mick Knapp 10 The Visual Arts 1& D Flaxman 52 More Letters 12 Getting Started with Hotline News Dave Ward 14 Mac Programming 54 GS Tips Ewen Wannop 14 Word 4.0 Jelf Meyer 56 Members Small Ads 15 The Reality of DTP David Hewson 60 Algol-60 Dave Miller 17 Network News 62 Apple II Problems The Boffin 20 ComServe Irene Flaxman 66 PlusDISK Dave Ward 21 AlphaPop Comments 68 IIGS Library Ewen Wannop 24 HyperEasy Irene Flaxman 69 Living with a Hypercard Info 70 SCSI Dise Ewen Wannop 26 ~~ TraflicdK 73 Apple News The Nibbler 28 Intro to MacTel David Nicholson-Cole 74 UDC Card Bryn Jones 30. Macintosh Books 75 AppleWorks Q&A's Simon Morrisby 31 Apache Strike Ceri Fisher 76 PC Transporter Steve Carter 38 Apple Concourse 77 What is your Format? Dave Ward 41 Mac Library 78 Mac2000 Norah Amold 42 Mebers Small Ads 80 Studio Session Norah Amold 44 — Advertisers Index 80 Important Contact Points There are a number of ways to contact Apple2000. Force users who have a query about the service can contact the administrator, John Lee, directly for help and advice. Call him on the number opposite or send a message to his box on the Force. If you wish to order goods or services from Apple2000, call Irene on (ifnilGitie—4 1419 or (during office hours) call Alison on (iF P4045, Both have An- safones, in case they're not around. Alternatively you can write to the PO Box or, if you use comms, you can leave orders on TABBS addressed to the SYSOP. If you are experiencing problems with Apple hardware or software Dave Ward runs the Hotline and will get you out of the mire. We are very interested in the activities of local user groups, and if you have any information which you would like publicised Tom Wright would like to hear from you. Moans and Groans - We don't get many of these, but Mick Knapp has broad shoulders (and stomach, and thighs...) so send these to him via the PO Box. A little praise for a few of our authors wouldn't go amiss. Send all comments via the PO box, especially suggestions about what you would like to see in your magazine. The Force John Lee (OH vate Administration Irene Flaxman GAR Bibeh 41 4s Advertising Alison Davies OFS PL Hotline Dave Ward idyapee Sat i Mon-Fri 1900-2100 TABBS Ewen Wannop - SYSOP Para Local Groups Tom Wright cee Figs August 1988 Apple2000 Editorial Legal wrangles leave UK pricing unfair The latest rumours about the “massive” legal action between Apple Inc. and Microsoft indicate that the whole action has been a ploy to attack Hewlett- Packard. This is very believable as it makes sense that two companies who have worked so very closely in the past would continue to be co-operative. Micro- soft and Apple are mutual parasites, and although Apple's Claris organisation could give Apple some autonomy in publishing software for the Apple range it is unlikely that users of Word and Excel on the Macintosh will ever switch (sorry about the pun Mac users). It would be totally illegal for Apple and Microsoft to officially "gang up" on another vendor, but if any of you have used Windows 2, the product which is supposed to have started all the fuss, you will appreciate how ludicrous the claims are that it is a copy of the Apple interface. It's rather like saying that a Lada is a copy of a Rolls Royce. They look similar and do similar things, but there is no copyright breach by either. The irksome thing about reading about the friendly relationship continuing while the lawyers’ fees pile up is the realisation that both companies make the money that pays those lawyers’ fees by charging their customers in the UK (you and I) a completely different price to their U.S. customers. An example of this was shown in the latest Micro- soft product release for the Macintosh, a cut down version of Word called Microsoft Write. This cut down version will be available at lower cost, and it is available to the U.K. public for “just £125". Now it's not my intention to give advice on where to buy your software but I did happen to pick up a copy of Word3.01 in New York for £99. A humorous virus Personally I'm running out of interest in viruses as I have been fortunate enough not to catch any, but one little story was passed on to me which made me chuckle. It's probably a sign of the strength of the human ego, as it shows that not all virus authors can accept the ignominy of spreading the infection with- out collecting the "kudos". I won't recount the whole story, but can a virus with a bug reporting procedure really be taken seriously? The virus in question is supposed to be benign, but really, viruses with an upgrade path???? This issues highlights The editorial team of Apple2000 magazine are at last beginning to feel a little more comfortable as a team, and in the near future there will be an article explaining how this publication is put together by a team spread all around the country. This issue carries an important review of the PC Transporter, the first product enabling an Apple// to run MS-DOS software. We consider this product so important that we are running a backup article next month. In the Mac section, we've included a selection of artwork from Electronic Arts. This is one of the first collections of PostScript artwork to be produced in Britain. PSPSPS SESS TESS STE SSS SPOTS eee % Annual subscription rates are £25.00 for UK residents, # %® £30.00 for E.E.C. residents and £35.00 for other overseas # ® members. * % — Apple2000™ is a trading name of BASUG Ltd, a non- # ® profit making independent company limited by guarantee. ® ® The contents of this journal are copyright of BASUG Ltd ® ® and/or the respective authors. Permission is granted for non- # ® commercial reproduction providing the author and source # # are properly credited and a copy of the relevant journal is ® % sent. The opinions and views expressed are those of the vari- # ®ous contributors, and are not necessarily supported bys e ® BASUG Ltd. % This journal ts published bi-monthly by BASUG Ltd as a # ® benefit of membership in February, April, June, August, # © October and December. The copy date is the 5th day of the # ® month preceding publication. Advertising rates are avaliable ® % ® on request. % — Apple™ and the Apple logo are trademarks of Apple ; * Computer Inc. Macintosh™ is a trademark of Macintosh * ® Laboratory Inc and used with the express permission of the * % owner. Telecom Gold™ is a trademark of British Telecom ple. ® ® The FORCE™ and Apple2000™ are trademarks of BASUG ® ® Ltd. td SCSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSAS PSPSPS PSSST Soe The Editorial team is: Apple Il Macintosh Ewen Wannop Norah Arnold Mick Knapp Irene Flaxman Many thanks to all those who work behind the scenes and who receive no personal credit. These people are the stalwarts of Apple2000. Additional thanks to Walter Lewis of Old Roan Press (051-227-4818) for our printing service, and to Ian Sharp of Sharp Studios (051-227-2788) for our cover design. (Graphics for the cover design supplied by Apple Computer UK Ltd, Adobe Systems Inc., Cricket Software.) Apple2000 are Founder Members and Whole- hearted Supporters of the Apple User Group Council 2 Apple2000 August 1988 ALPHATRONICS Floppy Disc Drive & Expansion Cards for the APPLE II family Floppy Disc Drive: 140k half height floppy drive, pancake motor high quality Japanese XM4 mechanism one for one replacement for the old Apple umit.......s.sssscscssscseessesceeenees £89 13/16 sector, twin port disc drive controller£25 Memory Expansion: 16K RAM expansion card for I/II Europlus/TIl+ ssessssessesssssesessssseresee £25 64K/80column extended text card for Ile ...£25 Coprocessor: Z-80 coprocessor card, to run CP/M software for I/II Euro/Tl+/Tle...ssssesesesees menreenoe ns 27 4, Printer Interfaces / Serial Interfaces: Epson/Centronics printer interface INCUAING CADICssssersersersessesnees Grappler + compatible printer interface including cable... RS232 serial printer card Serial plus-full software protocol selection also Suitable for MOdEM .sssessessscsessessecseesseeneenee £49 Hardware: HEAVY DUTY POWER SUPPLY for IL, I+ & THe 7.5A OUtput sessssssssssesssees ee £49 All prices exclude V.A.T @ 15% Customers wishing orders to be sent by post should add £3.00 plus vat for carriage. (@LPHATRONICS) GOLD BLOCKED BUSINESS CARDS (& HOT FOIL PRINTING MACHINES) TELEPHONE: 021 - 643 9866 WOLVERLY HOUSF . DIGBETH, BIRMINGHAM 100 MEG MAC SE £2995.00 . var >) Technical Specification: Mac SE fitted with 3.5” 100Mb internal SCS! drive. Drive Type: PRO SE100i Manufacturer: CMS inc Capacity 100Mb formatted Average Access Time 25ms Auto park/lock at power down Reliability: 20,000 hrs MTBF Upgrades to 100 Mb for existing Mac SE's are also available. SCSI drives available to 1.2 Gigabytes for Macintosh computers. CMS drives for Apple computers are distributed by Bidmuthin Technologies. Bidmuthin Technologies Ltd. Brent House 214 Kenton Road Harrow Middlesex HA3 8BT Telephone 01-907 8516 Authorised Apple Dealers Level 1 Service Centre Bidmuthin Technologies The Apple Enhancement Experts J iS Z \ August 1988 Appie2000 Sensible Grammar RQ aes eS Just the thing for Editors ... a review by Keith Rookledge All of us who use WP are faced by the problem of inability to spell and “typo’s”. There are a variety of spelling checkers available, perhaps the best option being as a desk top tool on the WP. Sensible Grammar have gone one step further and produced a package to check the text. Perhaps grammar is slightly misleading as it checks a variety of other faculties of one’s work as well. Anyway, what's it all about? The goodies come well packaged and al- though it was originally pro- duced in 1983 there is a update in 1986, The package consists of a ring back book which is well printed and packed and 2 discs, one 3.5 and one 5.25, You can send the size that you don't use back and get a copy of the other, which is a nice way of doing things. The system essentially compares sets of predetermined phrases with lists in memory. You are provided with some of these and can change them. The system is designed to be very flexible and it is, you are pre- sented with a number of prede- termined phrases and you can, add, delete, change or create new lists of your own at will. Sensible grammar is not a desk top tool. You have to create your WP file and it says that it will support a number of these, AppleWorks ( which I use), AppleWriter in Prodos, Format 11 again in Prodos, Mouse Write, Mouse Word, PFS Write Prodos, Word Juggler and Zardax. The book of words is fairly straight forward. and there is a comprehensive tutorial detailing all the options. To get things going it is first necessary to produce a WP document. You then have to load Sensible Grammar and you are off. The menus are friendly and some- what similar to Appleworks. The first option is to check punctua- tion, grammar or both. By using the arrow keys you move to the next menu which enters you into the phrase menu. This enables you to list all the phrases that one can check, add or delete phrases, set up your own lists of phrases or turn groups of phrases on and off. The last menu is a standard set up for the printer ete and con- tains a “quick Set up” option to help you on your way once you have set it up. Once you have loaded your WP document into the system and chosen both ( why not do both punctuation and grammar checking at once?) the system checks each sen- tence at a time and identifies phrases and punctuation errors. The latter is very good as it identifies extra spaces as well as punctuation problems. The list of phrases that one can choose from is : Cliche Expressions Contractions Faulty Phrases Informal Phrases Legal Terms Personal Terms Pompous Phrases Sexist Phrases Vague Phrases Wordy Phrases When the system identifies a problem with a phrase you are led to a prompt, which enable you to insert the suggested new phrase or word, ignore the problem, replace the phrase or word, mark it and print. With errors in punctuation changes are simple and in addition the facility” mark” actually puts a mare on the designated place so that you can go back to the WP system to view your changes. Once all changes are made then you can save the document and in so doing Sensible Checker renames the old document “Old” and does not write over it. What else can it do? Well lots says the book of words. You can create your own interpreter of words by creating a phrase list of the English and foreign equivalent for example. There are in addi- tion some options which enable those people who, can to alter advanced options by manipula- tion of ASCII codes. Powerful stuff this! One area where this package could be most useful is in the legal area. The capacity to change the simple to the legal is most impressive. I made just simple stuff very complicated for example: Where then there are problems by this use things get worse becomes: Wherein thereafter therein are problems in accordance herewith use things get worse!!!!! Problems, well very few. It is not at once apparent to an Appleworker who has desk top options how it works. The necessity to create you WP text, boot Sensible Grammar, check it and then reboot is a problem. In addition some of the suggestions built in result in grammar which is just not right. For example a number of is replaced by several and the text will then read “that it will support several these”. Obviously with use, these bugs can be ironed out. Sensible Grammar only checks what you do, it will not add punctuations but it is a useful product. info Product: Sensible Grammar Maker. _ Sensible Software Available from: Business Sense Computing 48 Priestpopple Hexham Northumberland NE46 1PP © (0434) 605925 Price : £79.95 +VAT+P&P Value : dda Performance : eddd Documentation : cede 4 &28 Apple2000 August 1988 AppleCentre Edinburgh Telephone: 031 558 3333 Contact: Mike Bradley AppleCentee Glasgow Telephone: 041 226 Contact: Janette ¥ AppleCentre New Telephone: 0661 Contact: Frank Langman AppleCentre Manchester Telephone: 061 834 7127 Contact: Arthur Barrow AppleCentre Liverpaol Telephone: 051 709 5959 Contact: Owen Hargreaves AppleCentre West Midlands Telephone: 05435 3 : ff a ep Contact: Berna AppleCentre West One Telephone: 01 631 5305 fi Contact: Howard Cole i Telephone: 0602 2 HERE fe ing, Contact: Carol Benner AppleCentre South Wales Telephone: 0222 465656 Contact: Alun Davies ; AppleCentre Bristol Telephone: 0272 225661 Contact Chris Doveton-Gerty Will you and your computer == dealer be compatible? = == AppleCentre Swiss Cottage What's so good about having 9,000 functions on a computer if none of them — fntehau sane meet your needs? AppleCentre Knightsbridge Telephone: 01 245 6555 Some computer dealers would be happy to sell you one. You'll need a phrase- book just to get through the sales chat. Unless you're at an AppleCentre We'll talk about your reasons for buying a computer in language that is intel- —appiccentre waterloo ligent not unintelligible. So the system you buy will suit your individual needs perfectly. Steve Gibs But the AppleCentre service doesn’t end there. We'll train you and your staff to get the most from your Apple computer systems. As your business grows we'll see that its increasing needs are met by the whole range of Apple hardware and software And because everyone’ needs are different our standard of service is the same - for all our customers, big or small If youre interested in our approach contact your local AppleCentre listed here, or dial 100 and ask for Freefone Apple. @ Apple” The power to succeed. August 1988 Apple2000 5 Letter Box We open the postbag this month to find an avalanche of letters ...... 2? Lesbert Bead, Titeametes, Sieterdeke aris har Dear Mick, What an interesting set of letters in the rather large letter section of the April issue of the Apple2000 magazine. I would like to com- ment upon some of the more in- teresting points raised in 3 of the letters :- Huw Price's first letter eulogises Open-Apple magazine with good reason; it is an excellent magazine and few others can match the density of Apple // information contained therein. One point from his letter which I feel is important in that one can purchase a sub- scription to Open-Apple with credit cards. No mention of this appears in any of the Open-Apple advertisements that I have seen. The ability for foreigners to pay by credit card is important in that it saves the potential subscriber time and money and must en- courage more people to part with their spondulicks. Huw Price’s second letter re- garding the loss of an AppleWorks file was, strangely enough re- ferred to in a recent Open-Apple magazine. The article in Open- Apple does not give a fix but does shed light on the problem. The article was mentioned to me by an Apple 2000 member who sub- scribes to Open-Apple and I have, unfortunately, forgotten the exact reference. I bet you are asking why I don’t subscribe to Open- Apple!! Well I've sent off my sub- scription but the magazines have not yet appeared at the time of writing. While we are discussing this let us look at some of the ways ot retrieving damaged or deleted iles :- One should, of course, always keep regular back-up copies in case of such problems. This mini- mises the amount of work one has to do to put things right. Its easy to say that and we have all been guilty of not taking back-up cop- ies, If you think you have a prob- lem the following comments may be of assistance :- 1} Wait until the disk drive stops. Any attempt to interrupt a disk that is being written to will only make matters worse. 2} Immediately remove the disk- ette and write protect it. 3}Try to make a copy of the disk, first using a standard disk copier. 4) If this doesn’t work format a new diskette and attempt to copy over as many of the files as pos- sible. Next attempt tomake a copy of the diskette using a nibble copier. Never to use the suspect diskette in your attempt to re- cover files etc. Always use a copy even ifit could only be made using a nibble copier - its better than nothing. 5} Using the copied diskette it may be possible to recover a de- leted file by using a utility such as the UNDELETE function from the Copy ][ plus suite or CATDOCTOR from the ProSel package, by Glen Bredon. Any files that you suc- ceed to undelete should immedi- ately copied to a newly formatted diskette. Then copy that diskette!! and use that copy to check out the files. 6} Huw Price's problem may be solved simply by undeleting the file; the diskette being otherwise intact. 7} Even diskettes with damaged sectors or blocks that seemingly cannot be read can sometimes be repaired using the editors sup- plied with nibble copiers. Indeed I have repaired such diskettes from time to time. Even if you fail first time save the diskette as your might get ideas later. Never give c a] 8} Sometimes problems that occur are very difficult to put right. One way is to reproduce the problem on another ‘known’ disk- ette (use a copy. of course) and then compare the effect. before and after. This information may well assist you in repairing the real problem. Peter Grant’s letter which pro- vides a ‘Basic Fix for Tom’ is most interesting in that he not only gives the popular method that is badly flawed but also gives the correct method. The first solution he gives is the one to use. Put bluntly it advises how to program correctly so that any DOS3.3 disk command always occurs as the first character on a new line. The problem simply arises through bad programming. The second method which most publish is badly flawed, in my opinion. Set- ting the D$ to CHR$(13)+CHR$(4) does always ensure that the DOS command occurs as the first character on a new line. Just consider what happens if you are writing to a text file and use the DOS command by itself to switch off writing to the disk so that you can write to the screen (see your DOS3.3 manual) - you write and extra carriage return to the file which may cause problems later when you attempt to read the file! What happens when you CLOSEa file immediately after writing? You get another unwanted car- riage return. Dave Ward 1? Meedearnie Me simesas- s i¢ ieee HR 6 Dear Apple2000, Thank you for the recent Volume 3(3) of Apple2000. My thanks go to all those who helped in its production - it is developing into a most interesting and useful magazine for those like myself who have not progressed to the ‘Mac’ and are still limited to the Apple Ile. Perhaps when time permits I shall put down on paper some of my own experiences with the IIe, which we have in regular commercial use within my office ! Sincere thanks again for your support. David A. Newham @& 6 Appie2000 ‘August 1988 fd Piames Reed Sertiesdemine Wi aw Dear Ewen Wannop, Iam an Apple IIgs owner and have recently become a member of Apple2000, and I would be very inter- ested in joining your mailing list for the Ilgs User Group. However on your Introductory Disk you say that I should contact Graham Attwood, but as he no longer appears to be on the editorial team, so I am writing to you. Could you also send me information on how to take advantage of the public domain software on the TABBS bulletin board. At present I have no experience of using a bulletin board socould you please advise me on what hardware/software I will require and where to obtain it, preferably as cheap as possible. MJ Conquest O Well now, a great deal in fact to cover. I have kept your letter and replied to it here in the magazine as I felt the issues covered were worthy of a wider audi- ence. 1) Graham Attwood did a magnificent job in pro- moting the IIgs for the group. I have now taken over this role. At the moment I have no plans to have a IIgs User Group as such, as I feel we are all in an Apple User Group already whichever of the many Apple machines we use, The lIlgs is given coverage both within the magazine and the bulletin board. I would like to promote all Apple machines, all the way from the Apple II to the Mac II. 2) To take advantage of the software on TABBS, you must have the appropriate hardware/software to ac- cess at either 300, 1200, 2400 or 1200/75 baud. After registering for the first time. you must leave a message for the Sysop to say you are an Apple2000 member. Give your membership number and he can check the database before giving you access to the libraries. Once registered. you will be able to download files using the Xmodem protocol. Many of these files are encoded with onc or other protocol. See the article on the ‘Software Cache’ in the June issue for further details. 3) If you send an SAE to the PO Box in Liverpool marked ‘TABBS User guide’, we will send you a copy of the help files from TABBS. These of course can be downloaded from the board and printed by yourself. 4) Any form of communication through the phone, whether it be to Prestel, the FORCE or a Bulletin Board, needs three things. A serial port, a modem and terminal software. The IIgs has a special serial port that is identical to that of the Macintosh and so you do not need a separate serial card. It cannot however produce the split baud rates of 1200/75 directly. Modems come in all shapes sizes and prices. The simplest and cheapest ones only have 300 and 1200/75 baud. You can only therefore use them at the slow speed of 300 baud on the IIgs. This is also true for the Mac by the way. More expensive modems use speed buffering to avoid this problem, and usually have auto dialling as well, Even more expen- sive are the high speed modems that have 1200/ 1200 and 2400/2400 baud rates. The cheaper modems are the PACE Nightingale and the Miracle Technology WS2000, these cost about £80-£100 ALL NEW!! Design Your Own Home Architecture, Interiors, Landscape New Features, New Intertace, Same Price! \ Architecture ‘Work with Appie I+, le, lic, and lIGS. (speciat NGS versions coming soon) All programs now have pull-down menus, and ew precision color-fil, ANd, as always. work ‘with 51 printers, (Architecture tor at your tloor plans, and \ side-view drawing needs. 4 types of overlays, repeater function with ellipse, arc, reguiar polygons: plans includes 154 architectural symbots and fixtures. Interiors tor room and furniture plans: automatic side views, 11 different rotations for ‘each furniture place. move, color schemes, and create custom furniture Landscape pians tor your propeny - ne ‘easy way: includes top views plus automatic ‘side views from all 4 directions, slopes, aging, two scale options, measurements, and even shopping lists. (Architecture, Interiors, Landscape: 6995 \ each. IGS versions 8995 each SS J, These prices include postage & VAT MSA MerSyitems (0233-83571) Pear Tree, Appledore, Kent TN26 2AR BR these days. Speed buffered modems such as the PACE Linnet and Miracle Technology WS4000 cost about £120-£150. The more expensive modems such as the PACE Series 4 and Miracle Technology WS3000 start at some £150 and when fitted with the faster options can cost up to £500 or more. The best buy at the moment is the PACE Linnet 1200, which has speed buffering, auto-dial, 300, 1200/75 and 1200/1200 baud. It costs around £160-£180. 5) You will also need terminal software. Because the Ilgs port is non-standard, you are limited to a handful of programs that can see it. There is a simple program ‘FreeTerm' on the IIgs library disc 25G002. This will give you simple access to most boards. However you will probably want to have more facili- ties than this can offer, such as an online buffer and macro capability. The IIgs programs currently avail- able are Access II, Mousetalk, PointToPoint, TalkIs- Cheap and Gazelle. All the programs except for Gazelle will give you only an 80 column text screen. Gazelle in addition gives you a Super Hi Res Vie- wdata or Prestel screen. These packages cost from £45-£120. Please support the advertisers in Apple2000 when you come to choose the system you decide. We have a close relationship with them that has devoloped over the years, and this relationship has become even more important now that Apple User has ceased to be. We work very much in parallel with them, and without their support, Apple2000 would not in fact exist. Many of these dealers will give a discount if you say you are an Apple2000 member. Ewen Wannop oc August 1988 Apple2000 7 ine : Deswgnes Reset Bane S27 ag il Dear Sir, I would be grateful if you would send me full details about the FORCE. If not specifically men- tioned in your literature, I would like to know the following:- 1) Are all BT Gold ‘Club' services available? 2) What is the relation- ship with PSS and is this charged extra from Sheffield? 3) Do you recommend particular modems? 4? Will Red Ryder on a Mac SE be OK for comms? Kind regards. David Durling O Again, I have decided to publish the reply toyour letter, as it covers a few points that will be of interest to others. 1) The FORCE is a closed user group on Gold. We have our own easy menu structure to help you find your way around our system, but if you leave the menu and go to the standard Gold prompt, you have all the facilities available to you that an ordinary Gold sub- scriber would have. These include access to Telex and the various databases. Other closed user groups systems, such as Micro- link, do not offer you all these facilities. 2) If you do not have a PSS account yourself, and access the FORCE outside of London, you must pay PSS charges. These however are simply added by usto your monthly bill, so you do not have to pay them separately. The bill is itemised to show each ele- ment that you are paying for. 3) See the answer to the previ- ous letter on this one. I would recommend the Linnet 1200 or the Series 4 or WS3000 for use with the Macintosh. These are all Hayes compatible and so will autodial from Macintosh terminal programs. 4) Red Ryder is fine asa terminal program on the Mac, and is avail- able from the Macintosh library here at Apple2000. You might also consider Microphone or MacTer- minal. To access Prestel, you will need Vicom for the Mac, or the Pretzel DA which is available for free downloading on the TABBS bulletin board. Ewen Wannop 3 118 Pas seeeee Peatrebens Cort €FS PTE Dear Sir, I have now had my Apple Ilgs for 18 months, and have decided that I would like to investigate the Apple Programmers Workshop ‘C’ compiler. Cardiff Apple Centre's list of Apple manuals does not mention the APW series, so I am writing to you in the hope that you might have some information. From the Apple IIgs ‘norm’, I assume that I would need to pur- chase the following :- 1. APW system 2, APW ‘C’ com- piler 3, APW manual 4. APW ‘C’ manual Perhaps you could tell me where I can obtain the above, and also the prices? Also could you recommend a book that fully explains the ‘Double-Hires’ graphics on the Ile/Iigs. I do not have any of the Ile manuals, as I upgraded straight from a II+ to the IIgs. MD Street Q The Apple Programmers Work- shop is only available in this country from the Apple Develop- ers Group. This group was set up as the official source of all devel- opers material in the UK. However to purchase material from them, you must first become a member of the ADG, this will cost you £25 for one years subscription, ADG Rosebank House Broughton Road Edinburgh EH7 4LE ® 031-557-5719 To use ‘C’ you will need the following: 1) Apple Ilgs Programmer's Workshop (APW) v1.0 ADGO61S £76.25 2) Apple IIgs Programmer's Workshop (C) Compiler v1.0 ADGO71S £50.00 All the required manuals are in these packages, and the APW shell also includes the 85C16 assembler. However you might also find that you require: 3) Apple IIgs Toolbox Reference Volume 1 ADGOS6B £23.95 4) Apple IIgs Toolbox Reference Volume 2 ADGO57B £23.95 5) Apple IIgs ProDOS 16 Reference ADGO29B £26.95 6) Apple Ilgs Hardware Refer- ence ADGO52B £22.45 7) Apple Ilgs Firmware Refer- ence ADGO25B £22.45 8) Programmer's Introduction to the Ilgs ADGO53B £28.75 The Hardware reference has a full description of ‘Double-Hires’ graphics and also has a full a de- scription of the IIgs Super Hires graphics as well as other hard- ware details. The Boffin é CGervicks (WES SR Dear Irene, Thank you for forwarding a copy of the April issue of the magazine.. lam the owner of an Apple IIgs and am completely new to the Apple/Macintosh computers. There are several things I do not understand and perhaps some- one in the Group can help me on those matters. 1) Can you run software written for the Macintosh on the Apple Ilgs? 2) How can I find out where my nearest Apple/Mac Dealer or Agent is? 3) As no software was included when I purchased the computer, I fairly urgently require the following, a) Word processor, b) Spread Sheet, c) Data Base, d) Accountancy, e) Form design. I do not wish to pay too much for the above software. I noticed in the April issue that MGA Microsys- tems are offering a TRIO disks which would be ideal for a. b. & c. requirement. The price is about right. how good is the system? 4) Is it possible to copy my present MS.DOS such as SAGE Account- ant, Wordstar, Calcstar, Report- star, Datastar, Mailmerge/Spell- star etc, This would save a considerable amount but would also help me to transfer all the masses of data that I am holding. My two Apple disk drives are 5.25 however I shall soon pur- chase a 3.5 drive. Thank you for you help, John H Sibb Q Welcome to the IIgs fraternity, you now own a machine that is 8 ‘Apple2000 August 1988 second only to the Macintosh. However in answer to your first question, the IIgs does not use the same microprocessor chip as the Macintosh so you will be unable to run software from the one machine on the other. In fact this is true across the wide range of computers, and so you cannot run any software de- signed for one system on another. This is also true of MS-DOS programs from your IBM or clone. The only exception to this rule is if you fit a co-processor card in your IIgs, this will make the machine look like another machine to the software. See the reviews of the PC Transporter in this issue for further details on how to run MS-DOS programs on the II series. This card will run all the programs you mention. Look in the pages of Apple2000 for the nearest dealer to you. Alternatively give Apple UK a ring on 0442-60244 and ask them, I would suggest AppleWorks as the ideal Word Processor/Database/Spreadsheet, but perhaps someone out there knows more about TRIO than we do? There are also programs such as OMNIS and MACPUTER which might suit you. You will certainly need at least one 3.5 disk drive in your lIlgs, and you should expand your extended memory card to lmeg if you have not already done so. Many programs simply will not run unless there is suffi- cient memory in the machine. Ewen Wannop é * Beerbtictd Geuze ashore! Sa gna tendon O93 1p Dear Sir, Welcome to your new job. It will be nice to have a more Apple II face on things. Dave Ward, whose help and articles, I find invaluable, mentioned a problem (in Apple2000 June 88) about entering Control-V's into an AppleWriter text file. It is possible. There is a file called CONTROLV on the AppleWriter System Disk. Place the cursor in your file at the position you want it and load the file. You could even create aglos- sary entry to do this, ie.: v[L]/A/CONTROLV] ([L] means Control-L ) ( /A/CONTROLV is the name of the file to load ) (the square Right Bracket at the end, simulates a Carriage Rtn ) With this glossary entry installed, typing OPEN- APPLE v, will do the job. The only problem then is that the filename at the right side of the Status line is changed. Writing a glossary as a standard text file is an excellent way of doing it. especially for more complex ones, as you have full editing capabilities. I only use the [G]? Glossary input “on the fly”. Did you know that you can use a lot of the WPL commands in glossaries? You can't use Variables or call Subrou- tines, however you can execute commands like the Control-L above. Here are the basic rules :- Normal letters and figures are entered as text. Control Characters by themselves are Executed. Control Characters brack- eted by Control-V's are embedded. (x PIRATE SOFTWARE — ¥& ) Well, not exactly; more like ‘Software from Pirate Country’... | Romney Marsh, . (the land of Dr. Syn, the fabled pirate turned smuggler), this is the location for an Apple Il products bonanza. MCA SoftCat is offering all its Apple Il stock at reduced prices during a one-day sale at Appledore. Many second-user items are available and all other Apple Il products in stock will be avail- able for purchase at discounted prices (typically 30% off). So, if you want to pick up some bargains, come on down to Kent | on Saturday 27th. August (Bank Holiday Weekend), in fact why not make a day of it with the family? There's plenty to do round here, and we can provide a copy of “Romney Marsh Guide: The complete guide to the land of Syn”, free of charge to all enquirors, (cover price £1.00). | Local attractions include: Romney, Hythe & Dymchurch Light Railway; Phillipine Village Craft Centre; sea fishing: Port Lympne Zoo Park with mansion & gardens; Romney Marsh Carden Centre; Windsurfing at Lydd WaterSports Centre; 10 different swimming beaches; Kent & East Sussex Steam Railway; coarse angling on the Royal Military Canal; Day ‘Trips to the Continent; Dunrobin Shire Horse Stud; Lympne Castle; Phoenix Amusement Park; 17 famous Romney Marsh Churches; and more... (all detailed in the free guide) We will be providing free refreshments (Appledore cider, lemonade and Kentish Apples). For Apple Il enthusiasts from further afield, full details of b&b, guest house, pub & hotel accomodation is given in the guide. Everything we've got in stock will be re- duced, so even if you live quite far off. it will almost certainly be worth a visit, (seven focal caravan/camping sites could make for a lovely weekend in Kent with your family). You might even go home with a second Il just for the kids... No more machine time conflict! Free gamepack to all visitors MGA ‘oliCat ext second-user items as well as the PEAR TREE. Marsh guide and trip-planning map. | APPLEDORE, Sw E.&0.E.| KENT TN26 2AR y Telephone now for a current list of LMS Bevbesiees Haas Weiss Timetes fewee HS Tid Dear Editors, AppleWriter II Glossaries form an integral part of the application I have developed on my Ile. so mention of them in the June issue of Apple2000 (Hotline News) immediately caught my attention. Building glossaries with [G]? and saving with [Q]F can be rather tedious, and while it is frequently a useful method of adding the odd definition or two, I invariably construct and edit a glossary by the Louis Baker method, viz. as a text file. There ts a file on the AppleWriter II boot disk which contains nothing more than a [V] which can be loaded whenever one is needed in a text file. This tedious and requires disk activity unless one is working in a ramdisk environment. Fortunately, there is avery satisfactory alternative which is to use AppleWriter’s “find and replace” facility. To do this, select a convenient letter or symbol which will not appear anywhere in the glossary. Let us assume an asterisk will do. Construct the glos- sary as a text file, but put * wherever [V] is required. Finally, go to one end of the file with [B] or [E] and use [F]/*/[V]/A to convert every asterisk to a Control-V. While we are on the subject, the same mechanism will work for most control characters, but not [@] null, [H] left-arrow, [M] return, [U] right-arrow, or Yours sincerely, [delete] to my knowledge. One can find a return by Jeremy Quinn. @ using the symbol appropriate to certain o August 1988 Apple2000 C] 16/Paint Baudville's latest creativity tool reviewed by Mick Knapp 816/Paint consists of a series of programs which run across the range of Apple// machines except for the //+. This review concentrates on the programs’ capabilities when run in colouron the //GS, but the manual states that all the programs are similar. Although not fully tested, a brief look at 816 running in double hi- res and standard hi-res on the Apple //e did indicate that the interface was identical to the super hires programs for the GS. Two ProDOS floppies are supplied, one 5.25" and one 3.5", together with a 50 page manual. The manual is very clear and provides a good tutorial which allows a user to start using the program straight away. The 3.5" disc boots to reveal the //GS program launcher, and the selection window shows five application folders, four offering different resolutions of 816 and one giving access to a range of file ulililies. This is a useful option to include on the disc as it allows good management of the data created with 816. Disc formatting, copying and deleting of files is fairly standard, but the utilities also allow some reformat options for picture files such as conversion from Double Hi-res to Super Hi-res or vice versa. Some care has to be taken in palette choices due to the dithering technique used by the GS to generate its 4096 colours in 640 mode. Double clicking on the file PAINT.640.SUPER boots that section of the program, and avery high resolution paint screen is opened, together with a toolbox of brush types, colour selections and painting tools. The painting tools include the usual freeform drawing, straight line, rectangle (open and filled) and circle/ellipse (open and filled, but also include some excellent and fairly unique curve generating tools. Lassoing and dragging is allowed, and a paintpot and spraycan are provided. Before we go any further I have to admit that I am not a great fan of “painting” programs in general. I do not like the pixel editing technique provided by most of the programs in this category; mostly they merely follow Bill Atkinsons’ Fatbits idea and I find that this can be confusing. 816 Paint hasa novel variation on this which does make the program more usable, and I will come onto this as I describe construction of a particular drawing. The drawing I wanted to do to test out the program was fairly simple, and chosen really because I happened to havea 3.5" floppy disc on the desk in front of me. I chose this because it was a simple shape with some variety of colour, text on the label, and it contained lines, fillets, circles and fills. I started by picking the rectangle tool and pulling a rectangle roughly in the proportions of the disc. I say roughly because, as is common with draw programs, there is no measuring facility. Ithen used the magnifying tool to window in on one corner of the rectangle. The screen splits in two to show the object in normal view on the left and the zoomed portion on the right. The level of zoom can be selected and changed at any time during the zoomed operations, and all of the tools are valid in the zoomed window. Hence I was able to use the arc tool to modify the corner of the disc to give it a fillet. This was done by clicking and pulling a straight line across the corner; releasing the mouse button allows the curve to float free as the mouse is moved, and whena suitable curve is displayed a mouse Click secures it in place. The zoomed window can be pulled around the main area so it is not necessary to de-zoom to construct the other four comers. Pixel editing removed the excess lines around the corners, and a chamfer was put on one comer. The zoom feature is one of the best I have ever seen in this type of program, and it is available in all four versions of the software. The rest of the detail of the disc was drawn using the same method of editing lines and rectangles, and the disc was copied to the clipboard and pasted back, then flipped about the vertical axis to produce a back view. This operation was virtually instantaneous, but showed up the weakness of editing pixel based graphics. I wanted to remove some of the lines used on the representation of the front of the disc, but the only way was to pixel edit out the unwanted elements in zoom mode. This can be a little frustrating but the excellent zoom feature of 816 Paint does help. I completed the picture by filling in the different areas on the disc (label, metal slider etc.) in different colours using the paintpot tool. The colours and patterns used to fill areas can be edited. and the palettes can be set 0 oa Apple2000 August 1988 Publish-It!. in less than an hour. Introducing PUBLISH IT! A full-featured, fully integrated desktop publishing powerhouse with word processing, page layout, and graphics! For all of its state-of-the-art ability, PUBLISH IT! is incredibly easy to leam— refreshingly $0. PUBLISH IT! combines the familiar Macintosh User Interface, Timeworks Quick-Start Mini-Manual, a full complement of Help Screens, and the Practical WYSIWYG (What-You-See-Is-What-You-Get) display—ail designed to get you up and running in less than one hour! SPECIAL FEATURES: * Macintosh User Interface: Pull- down menus, icons, scroll bars » Built-In Word Processor: All the features necessary for everyday word processing, plus most of the sophisticated ones found only in * Built-In Graphic Toolbox. and dialogue boxes help you learn ‘ +» Special Typesetting Functions: and use the program quickly. MOS SADE HOR AMS: Includes keming and leading. + Flexible Page Layout: You ¢ text Importing: Load documents automatic Text Flow and Word Available for: can overlap, reposition, resize, STREET WRITER* or ‘any other Wrap: Automatically flows text * Appie lic, lie, IGS and reshape text, columns and word processor in standard ASCil_ fm column to column on the + IBMPC & Compatibles graphics, format directly into PUBLISH IT! ‘same page, or carries it over to # Built-In Fonts: Over 1280 Subsequent pages. £99.95 incl. p&p/VAT possible type-style combinations, * Sraphics Importing: Directly = Multiple Page Views: View, MGA Opt for bold, italic, underlined, pel Liebe i anion edit and layout pages at actual, outlined, shadow, and superscri ny SanGNG ADDIS Sine: If-size. Pear Tree, or subscript cheaters Type and-double-highresolution drawing Gouble. orha Appledore. : rogram— including Broderbund’s » Pl worksheets, sample y Sizes range from 9 to 72 point. BALE RAN. Then crop and size sdeceontt spect timesaving Kent TN26 ZAR * Premium Quality Printouts to fit, features, and much more! (0233) 83571 in rotation to produce pseudo animation effects. I wanted to put text on the label but experienced some difficulty in reading certain font/size combinations. Six fonts are provided with accompanying size and style boxes, and the text can be coloured. The program does indicate which point sizes will look best by highlighting these in the size menu, and it rescales to provide "odd" sizes. On the //e and //c the size and style menus disappear as rescaling is disabled. I finally settled on 8 point Venice to complete my Nashua disc. As well as editing palettes and patterns, some of the actual drawing tools are definable. The option menu allows you to select a brush shape and edit it. A brush editing window with an eight by eight zoomed grid on the left and a normal size view on the right. The zoomed pixels can be tumed on or off by clicking on them, and when the desired brush shape is achieved it is loaded into the main tools menu by clicking OK. Some tools are provided which I did not make use of but would be valuable if the program was used in anger. In the palette editor, there is a spread command which allows a smooth blend of colours to be applied across a picture palette. This is used in the demonstration pictures provided with the software to show smooth colour transitions which give light and shadow efects. A mirror facility allows reflection of the painting about vertical. horizontal or diagonal axes, and the centre of symmetry can be moved to any position in the drawing. Printer and interface support is very extensive. Some 14 printers and 29 interfaces are supported including the GS printer port. The results on my FX-80 were not particularly exciting, but then it’s nota particularly exciting printer. The program does support colour printing on the Imagewriter and allows the printing of selected areas of the picture. Summary If 1 did not already possess a paint program that I am very happy with I would go out and buy 816Paint tomorrow. The program is fast in operation and contains some unique features. Pattems and colours can be edited, as can the brush shapes. The interface is easy to learn and the program fully exploits the colour and speed of the GS. If you are looking for a painting tool which is not object orientated this would be a suitable addition to your program library. 816/Paint is published by Baudville, and is distributed in the UK by MGA Microsystems at £65.00 including VAT (for mail orders, add £2.00 P&P). August 1988 Apple2000 Bau Letters continued from Page 9 delimiters, but AppleWriter’s [F] command seems blind to others. I can ease the burden of replace- ment with [H] and [U], but just how does a body go about detect- ing them with AppleWriter when it is they which need replacing? Yours sincerely. Jim Harle Q Thanks Jeremy and Jim, this kind of response to articles and problems, is the most valuable that you as members can provide. Articles on your favourite subject would come next! You all may be able to contribute something sometime, please get it down on paper/disc, as you think of it, and send it to us. Ed 18 Semek Wey Sesiemere Gases GUST Lm Dear Ed., I joined Apple2000 in May, and am most impressed with the magazine, the Apple Slices news- letters, and the various “bits and pieces” that I have received. Be- fore hearing about you. I was seriously starting to believe that I was perhaps the last user ina sea of IBM look-alikes ! I obtained a IIgs last year, to update my existing system of two //c’sanda //e.1 use Apple Pascal for all my work, and, at the time, was still using the old 64K ver- sion. To use the IIgs effectively however, it was obvious that I needed the 128K edition. Track- ing one down proved a major task, with several “Approved Apple dis- tributors” telling me that there was no such thing. In the process, I was introduced to MGA Mi- crosystems, and through them discovered the existence of Apple2000. I may Apple Slices, you suggest that the Apple // community is made up for the most part of en- thusiasts and hobbyists. I sup- pose this is true, if there are people still playing with the old 48K machines (I started myself back in the year dot with the ITT 2020). However, I think the //c and //e are still perfectly ade- quate to meet the demands of much professional work, al- though clearly they are impracti- cal for the more serious “number crunching” jobs. Before obtaining the IIgs. I had an old “SAGE” 68000 which I obtained in the Stone Age. when it was the last word in “super-mi- cros”. It operated in UCSD-Pascal and so was reasonably compat- ible with the Apples. I chose the Iigs because it gives a “number crunching” performance almost as good as the older 68000-based machines and it allows me to continue using the UCSD Pascal software library that I have devel- oped for the //c and //e over the last five years, and which amounts to some 300 discs of data. My system is used for profes- sional scientific programming/ mathematical modelling work. This entails the production of “tailor-made” programs, often to solve a “one-off” problem, the so- lution of which will be published in a report of, say, 20 to 100 pages. For this work, I find the Apple Pascal system ideal; the Pascal language can be used to solve the problem and produce data lists, whilst the UCSD Text Editor allows these data to be easily incorporated into final re- ports. I have tried using word processors, but find them unsat- isfactory, primarily because I have become so used to the Text Editor (associated with some easy rules for formatting and a simple text printing program) as a supe- rior sort of typewriter. Similarly, I have used “data base” software, like AppleWorks and Omnis, but, as a programmer, find it much easier and more flexible to pro- duce specific Pascal-based data crunching programs. The complete IIgs system (not including the //c and //e existing equipment) cost £3500. I would have thought that only the more superior sort of “hobbyist” would part with that number of notes ! You may be interested in how I use this system for really quite large technical analysis applica- tions. Obviously, the IIgs, espe- cially running the p-System inter- preter, is very slow, compared to, say, anIBM machine with a Turbo Pascal compiler. However, the answers to most of life's problems can wait a few days, and I solve the problem of speed simply by run- ning the IIgs overnight and at week-ends. Apart from speed, memory is the other important question. This is approached in the following manner :- The first consideration is the basic IIgs configuration. The sys- tem I use has the following mem- ory stores :- a) 3.5 inch drive : this contains the whole Pascal operating sys- tem, plus ample space for back- up files. b) twin 5.25 inch drives : these are used to interface to the //c and //e; they are also useful as “dump volumes” during large data processing tasks. c) 20 SC hard disc : really, all the back-up store you should ever need for anything. d) 512K RAM : this “RAM Disc” is very important, as detailed below :- The machine configuration has a considerable influence on the second consideration, which is the efficient use of the Apple Pas- cal ability to divide large programs into smaller, separably compil- able “Units”. Using the “Non-Resi- dent” compilation option, these Units are only brought into main memory when required. Now. a large application might swap Units in and out of memory many thousands of times, so the only practical place for them to live is on the RAM disc. Since this “disc” holds 512K and the Pascal system addresses 128K of main memory, then, effectively, one has a 640K system. Units (and data) which need not be accessed at high speed can be stored elsewhere in the system (on the 20 SC for in- stance), and hence one has the potential for an enormous pro- gram/data size! Actually, there is a practical limit, because Units must be stored in “libraries”, and only a certain number of libraries can be accessed from a single program. However, you could “chain” programs ...... I have tried alternatives to the Apple Pascal system, but have found none so reliable, (five years of use and no faults) well-docu- mented (1000 pages in a jumbo file for the 128K edition) or easy to use. The main disadvantage is speed - if a compiler of the p- System interpreted code were available, (like the compilers available for interpreted BASIC) then I would certainly add one to the system. Finally, I do not have a modem attached to any of my Apples, primarily because there has been no-one to talk to. Could you pro- duce an article on suitable mo- 12 Apple2000 August 1988 dems, and perhaps suggest a soft- ware communications standard for Apple2000 use? John Marks Q First of all thank you John for such an interesting case history. John's plea for a communications standard for Apple2000 is a tricky one. At the actual data level, Text files are a standard, and the FORCE and TABBS provided a means of information exchange using text. However to give advice on which software and which hardware depends on too many factors. There is the Mac. the II se- ries, the IIgs, Pascal, CPM, Dos 3.3 and ProDOS, all need different software and hardware combina- tions. I have written a few articles in Apple2000 over the years, and will continue to answer specific problems as they occur, but as the whole subject is too large for dis- cussion here, I think I need to leave it at that for the moment. Ewen Wannop Phe Siderney Petnery OBeese! pinsde Dear Editor. Please will you try to get someone to give a loud shout to the ‘comms people’ to get their act together. Why can’t non-technical people like me get a program or a ROM or something which knows its own host, rings the number I give it, looks down the phone line at the other person's machine, or ROM, tellsthem that there are some files ready to be sent, no receiving their acceptance, assesses the quality of the line and sends the files off at an appropriate speed. I don't want to have to become a communications engineer, I want to be able to throw away my Apple Access Reference Manual and let the machine do all the dirty work. Of course the micro twitchers will not agree. They are never so happy as when they can twiddle away setting things up, but that they may be because they are not interested in communicating, only in communications. I have waited seven years so far, so by the time they make it even as efficient as the telephone, J shall be in terminal mode ! Yours sincerely, Peter Arnold (no relation as far as I know ...) PS There follows the text ofa letter sent to ‘AMSTRAD PROFES- SIONAL COMPUTING’ Dear Sir, There seems to be an unwritten rule in the hype type of non-com- munication one reads in the jour- nals, even your's, that the punter’s letters should look as if they are written by a technical sub-editor. Crafty old Sugar probably gives a good deal of ‘help’ to those which are at first sight seem to be for ‘User Groups’. Of course Amstrad even run their own ‘captive’ ‘User Group’, but it is possible for the punters to run their own group and publish their own magazine. ‘Apple2000', the National Apple User Group is one such, whereas ‘Apple User’ was NOT. It seems a healthy sign that ‘Apple2000', a voluntarily run independent group. prospers and ‘Apple User’, published by Data- base, has died. I know of no evi- dence which could connect the two, indeed I discovered ‘Apple2000' (or ‘BASUG’, as they were called then) advertised and referred to in the pages of ‘Apple User’. My point is that Amstrad owners ought to be able to run a fully independent user group, and publish their own magazine, and perhaps like Apple owners, for £25 a year, less than is charged for membership of the AMSTRAD PROFESSIONAL USER CLUB, which certainly does not seem to have much independence from big brother. Surely it is fundamentally in everyone's interest, certainly in Amstrad’s, that an independent Amstrad users club should exist and be free to offer opinions about hard and software from people who are not in the pay of the traders. This means that Amstrad owners would have to discover a group of people with almost as much experience, dedication and enthusiasm as the Apple2000 team, and persuade them to do hundreds of hours of voluntary work, Incidentally, though I have the same name as two of their team, I don’t know either of them, and hasten to add that I am strictly a user of Amstrads and Apples, and know practically nothing about what goes on under the bonnet. Are all Amstrad users computer semi-literates like me? I hope not. Yours faithfully, Peter Arnold Q Thank you for your letters, you have really thrown the gauntlet down at my feet. TABBS our Bul- letin Board is very much about communicating, try it ... I wish life were as simple for me that I could do as you ask. With so many different host systems out there in the wide world, all differ- ent, you must have some settings to twiddle at some point in the program or you would get no- where fast. The software writers, try to make life as simple as we can, with macros and things. Sometimes we get it right and make it easy, sometimes we don't. What you ask for in a simple do- everything communications sys- tem, does exist at a price. At the moment only the Mac supports delayed remote dial up, as far as I know. Ewen Wannop € Beagle Bros Inc. 6215 Ferris Square Suite 100 San Diego California 92121 To: Jon Gurr MGA Microsystems Pear Tree Appledore Kent TN26 2AR Dear Jon, The review looks pretty accurate except for a few minor details that probably only I would be con- cerned with. He seems to think that when you are in a TimeOut application, you are no longer in AppleWorks, He couldn't be any further from the truth. Unlike Pinpoint, which actually swaps AppleWorks out to disk, TimeOut applications load in with AppleWorks (very similar to switching between AppleWorks applications such as the word processor and spreadshect ). Pinpoint is not interrupt-driven as PBI's Jeeves is. He keeps calling TimeOut Graph “SuperGraph”. He might have been confusing it with Su- perFonts. Sincerely, Alan L Bird This letter was passed on to us by Peter Davis who wrote the original review. Ed é August 1988 Apple2000 13 Hotline News Dave Ward reports on recent events from the Hotline Dave Ward - Mondays to Fridays 1900-2100 Hours Many users of ProDOS have felt that there is something missing even though, in many ways, it is far better an operating system than good old DOS3.3. Under DOS3.3 Applesoft users could quite easily initialise (Format) data diskettes even from within a running program. That is the fa- cility that was found missing when they moved up to ProDOS and for a long time the only an- swer was to keep a store of pre- formatted data diskettes ready. A number of utilities have, over the years, become available but none seemed to be ideal. Fortunately Glen Bredon has produced a package “PROCOMMAND” which contains a plethora of ProDOS utilities that include a diskette formatting command that works with both 3.5" and 5.25" drives. At the expense of 2048 bytes (2K) an extra command FORMAT is added to ProDOS and that com- mand can be executed from within a running Applesoft pro- gram, New versions can be ob- tained direct from Glen Bredon at the address below for $25+$5 for foreign shipping. Bredon does not accept credit cards, by the way. Professor Glen E Bredon 521 State Road. Princeton, NJ 08540 USA. It is best to obtain a genuine latest copy since a very early ver- sion contained a most peculiar bug that only allowed the utility to format diskettes that were al- ready formatted!! The response to two items in the June Hotline news has been enormous. First the creation of Applewriter ][ glossaries using the Applewriter ][ editor itself. We thought that it might not be pos- sible but Jeremy Quinn and Jim Harle both contacted me with methods of accomplishing this feat and both have taken the trouble to set out their methods in letters to the Editor which are printed in this issue. The second item regarding pro- grams for dental records etc. elic- ited a letter from Harvey Nyman who took the trouble to do an ‘on- line search’ and found references to 8 American systems. Unfortu- nately this magazine is too small to contain a copy of his letter! If this information will be of interest to you please contact me and I'll provide you with further informa- tion. Richard Kelly kindly ‘phoned me to say that he uses a British system on his enhanced Apple // e from ATTAR computing Ltd. Newlands Road, Leigh, Lanca- shire, WN7 4HN. Telephone 0942-608844. William Watson kindly informs me that the only desk-top pub- lishing program for the Apple ][ plus computer that he is aware of is the Newsroom program which is available from MGA Microsys- tems who regularly advertise in this magazine. On some occasions AppleWorks formatting routine will not format 5.25" diskettes claiming that the disk cannot be found. If this is the case the way round the ‘bug’ is to open the drive door to fool the program into thinking it has found a completely unformatted diskette. As soon as Formatting... appears on the screen close the drive door. The problem appears to occur where a diskette has been corrupted in some way - il has happened to a few members in- cluding myself. I checked this out with many diskettes and have found that the problem arises with partially formatted diskettes and ones that have been partially erased with magnets. GS Tips Section Print Shop Surprises Here's a nice one for Print Shop GS users. At the main menu hold down the open apple key then exit program with ether the mouse or the Return key this will get you into La La Land. Print Shop has some surprises for Apple II users as well. The Print Shop Companion has two of them. On the boot side at the main menu type STEVEN then press escape to turn everything upside down you can reverse this situation by doing the same thing again. Try booting the reverse side of the disk, when you get a message saying the disc is unbootable, type Ctrl-6 to play a maze game. Apple IIGS Tips When you see the rolling apple on the screen. That is when you try to boot without a disk ina drive hold down Ctrl open apple option keys then press N to see a list of names. When you want to change the display in the control panel get into the desk accessories press the down arrow key then the Return key press the down arrow key then the Return key change one of your settings then press Return key this will bring you back to the control panel try hitting the Esc instead of using the down arrow keys to Quit then press return twice to get back to the program you were running. This has saved you six key presses. When running some Prodos 16 programs you will get a file menu box for loading or saving files try double clicking on a folder instead of the OPEN box to open the folder. To close the folder try a single click on the Prodos path name at the top of the box this will close the folder. Double clicking on the file you want to open will work as well. The only boxes you should need are DISK and CANCEL. On my IIGS I have had the new roms-fitted, when I doa system test that is option open apple Ctrl Reset at the end of a BG Apple2000 August 1988 the test I get a rising note scale and a beep in- stead of the usual beep on its own. Perhaps this is why Apple needed to change the Troms. Here's a tip for Basic programers to change the cursor to any keyboard Character 10 PRINT CHRS(30);”*” : REM CURSOR = * Or with the Basic prompt press Ctrl Shift 6 then the character you want the cursor to change to press Return and there you have it. To change back use the Delete key for the cursor. Another tip. To change the screen text and background colours Here's a small program. 10 SA = 49186 : REM Screen Address 20 BA = 49204 : REM Border Address 30 SV = PEEK (SA) : REM Screen Value 40 BV = PEEK (BA) : REM Border Value 50 HV = INT (BV / 16) : REM Hardware Value 60 TC = INT (SV / 16) : REM Text Colour 70 BC = SV - (TC * 16) : REM Back- ground Colour 80 POKE SA, (1 * 16 + BC) 90 PRINT CHR$ (7) ;: POKE SA,SV 100 POKE BA,1 110 POKE CHR$ (7);:POKE BA,HV * 16 + BV This program will change your text to red beep reset the text it will then change your border to red beep and reset the border. Both the back- ground colour and the text colour are contained at location 49186. To get the text colour divide by 16 subtract this value from the total will give you the background colour. The border colour along with other system values are contained at location 49204. The reason for the beep is the screen changes to fast and you would not see the results. If you make a mistake in typing and you have no screen just press RESET to restore your colours from the control panel. Listed below are the colour values to change in line numbers 80 and 100 for a different colour. 0 Black 8 Brown 1 Deep Red 9 Orange 2 Dark Blue 10 Light Gray 3 Purple 11 Pink 4 Dark Green 12 Green 5 Dark Gray 13 Yellow 6 Medium Blue 14 Aquamarine 7 Light Blue 15 White Les Roberts é * Items for Sale Back issues of Apple magazines. Most Windfalls/ Apple Users since 1981, all Hard Cores and Apple 2000s, Call-Apples since 1981, several years of A+, Nibble, InCider, and other American titles. Offers for the lot. Telephone Bob Sather on (iii)! evenings. * Items for Sale Z-RAM Ultra 2 Clock/Ram card for the Apple //c. Full One MEG Expansion fitted. Offers around £250.00 SPECTRAGRAM RGB Card with Manual and Soft- ware £40.00 RANA Elite Three 652K Drive, complete with RANA 4 disk controller card, Manual and Soft- ware £85.00 APPLE IIGS SOFTWARE DeluxePaint II £50.00 Paintworks Plus £33.00 Paintworks Clip Art £17.00 Myraglen Tower £38.00 Mean 18 Golf £22.00 Mad Libs £13.00 Pinpoint Starter Pak £67.00 Music Construction Set £33.00 The Print Shop GS £33.00 Postage is included Contact Paul on 4 GDF Small advertisements for Sales or Wants are published free as a service to members. Please send copy to the PO Box in Liverpool for inclusion in the next magazine. COMTEC COMPUTER REPAIRS *FAST TURNAROUND - NORMALLY 2 DAYS *3 MONTH WARRANTY *COMPETITIVE PRICES ON ALL SERVICES EXAMPLES APPLE ][ + OR //e Power Supply: £32 APPLE ][ + OR //e Motherboard. £32 Apple Interface Card (most makes).£25 Disk Drive - cleaned & aligned. £25 Please ring for other repair prices or send equipment for free estimate. Quantity Discounts available. Repair prices include P&P and V.A.T. MACINTOSH UPGRADES 128K to 512K - 128K/512K to MacPlus MacPlus Extra Memory 1MEG TO 2 MEG 1 MEG TO 4 MEG RING FOR BEST PRICE NOW IN STOCK MacPlus Connectors, Serial & AppleTalk. Price depends on quantity. COMTEC ST GEORGES MILL, 3 ST GEORGES STREET, MACCLESFIELD, CHESHIRE. SK11 6TG TEL (0625) 34691 August 1988 Apple2000 4g 15 discounts — 24 hour delivery guaranteed. WORD PROCESSING DESKTOP PUBLISHING Word3 ———=«£175.00 MacPublisher Ili £199.00 Write Now £ 89.00 — Pagemaker 3 £344.00 WordPerfect £185.00 ReadySetGo 4 £305.00 MacProot £112.00 — Ragtime 2 Thunder Scoop MacWrite5 £9 Quark Xpress FullWrite Professional £265.00 GRAPHICS & DESIGN DATABASE SOFTWARE _ Adobe lilustrator £280.00 Reflex Plus. £155.00 — imageStudio £290.00 Filemaker Plus £135.00 Cricket Draw £180.00 Omnis 3 Plus £255.00 — MacMovies £ 75.00 Double Helix Il Laser Pain “£320.00 dBase Mac Canvas £130.00 4th Dimension ‘£520.00 Superpaint £6 BUSINESS SOFTWARE _—S Aldus Freehand £285.00 Powerpoint £170.00 — Fontographer £209.00 Excel. ——=~=~=«£175.00 © VideoWorks ii —=—«£120.00 Works 1.1 £145.00 MacDraw Ii CALL Trapeze £150.00 MacPaint2 CALL Microplanner Plus £335.00 Pixel Paint __ £285.00 Cricket Graph CAD/CAM Hypercard MiniCad £325.00 MORE _ "£150.00 MacDraft £169.00 Cricket Presents £255.00 LANGUAGES MacCalc £69.00 Turbo Pascal £ 55.00 MacProject 2_ CALL Lightspeed C £105.00 a ZBasic £ 69.00 CAMELOT COMPUTING Suite 100, Oxford House 2 Cheapside, Reading RG1 7AA Tel: 0734 393916 ACCESSORIES MacPlus/SE & Keyboard Oust Covers £ 15.00 MacPlus Carrying Case £ 55.00 Mac SE Carrying Case _£ 65.00 ImageWriter Carrying Caso £ 49.00 MouseMover _—£_ 15.00 MacTilt stand for MacPlus and Drive __ £ 68.00 MacTilt SE £ 68.00 Teak Roll Top Cabinet (45 disks) £ 17.00 Teak Roll Top Cabinet (90 disks) £ 25.00 Laser Toner Cartridges (Black) £ 79.00 __DISKETTES COMMUNICATIONS Red Ryder __£ 65.00 Tops (Mac) £122.00 Tops (IBM) £264.00 MacLink Plus with =m cable __ £165.00 UTILITIES/DA'S Super Laser Spooler £ 89.00 £199.00 Multiuser Version Grappler Copy II Mac Sidekick 2 Top Desk 2.3 Suitcase MUSIC & SOUND Master Tracks Pro Studio Session £275.00 £ 65.00 ane 10's 10's Sony/Maxell in boxes of 10 £17.50 £150 50's 100's 50's Sony bulk packed £70 «£130 £550 If you are about to purchase Macintosh products and know what you want, three things are important: to purchase at the very best price; to get delivery right away, and to enjoy ongoing technical support. Camelot offers all of this. Call us before 2.30 pm and, if the product is in stock, we guarantee delivery the following day by Post Office Datapost or your money back, and full technical support. All prices exclude VAT and are correct at time of printing. Add £20.00 per order for guaranteed next day delivery by Datapost or £2.50 per unit for delivery by insured parcel post. Payment may be by Visa/Mastercard, cheque or approved corporate account. International orders are welcome and exclude VAT. Add £4.00 per unit for postage and insurance Apple2000 August 1988 ALGOL-60 Dave Miller continues with the second of a three part series on Algol In this instalment I shall continue from the last instalment and discuss ALGOL-60 in more detail (if you have not read last month’s instalment then I suggest that you read it before reading on). Keywords in ALGOL-60 are marked by enclosing them in single quotation marks (called “primes”) so as to enable the compiler to distinguish between key- words and variable names. The compiler ignores spaces So it is possible to place spaces inside variable names and still write valid code. ALGOL-60 demands that all variables (and proce- dures, for that matter), be defined before they are used. There are only three types of variable sup- ported: integer, real and Boolean. A Boolean variable has only the values ‘true’ or ‘false’. ALGOL-60 allows arrays of any of the three types. Note that ALGOL-60 does not have character (or string) variables. ALGOL- 60 passes strings via integer arrays with ASCII values placed in each element representing each character. Literal strings, (i.e. string values such as “string”), are not delimited by the double quote, as in BASIC, but are delimited using one of two symbols: some versions delimit string values with braces: {string} while others delimit values with parentheses in primes (the most common): ‘(string)’ In this article the former method will be used. ALGOL-60 strings are made doubly difficult in that the compiler ignores blanks in the code. To include spaces in strings one of two methods has to be adopted: one is to indicate spaces by the inclusion of a special space character- ALGOL-60 uses either “%" or”_”. What ifyou want to include “%" or “_” in the text string as well? Don't ask! It’s too complicated. The other solution is to use ALGOL-60's special editing characters. Three editing characters can be included in text strings: p_ feeds a new page (or clears the VDU screen) c issues a carriage return and line feed s includes a space Editing characters can be preceded by an optional repeat count and are enclosed in string delimiters. An example of using editing characters is: {Test (s) space {4c}Four_CRs{2pc}2_new_pages_and_CR} The provided variable types are often augmented by non-standard variable types offered by ALGOL-60 compilers. The most common addition is character variables. ALGOL-60 Statements ALGOL-60 has the following type of statements: 1 The definition statement. This is used to define variables. It has the follow- ing forms: ‘integer’ inti, int2, int3, int4, int5; ‘real’ rl; ‘Boolean’ booll, bool2; ‘integer’ ‘array’ vector [1: 10]; ‘real’’array’ matrix [-10: 10, -10: 10) The last two statements define a one-dimensional integer array dimensioned from 1 to 10 and a two- dimensional real array with indices ranging from [-10, -10] to [10, 10]. ALGOL-60 allows initial values of variables to be specified: ‘integer’ intl ‘real’ rl = ‘Boolean’ t= 1, int2 := 2, int3 := 3; 2 The simple statement. There are six different simple statements: O The assignment statement. This assigns values to variables. Note that the symbol “:=" is used for this purpose. The symbol “=” is used only when comparing two values for equal- ity. To emphasize the difference between the two symbols the former is usually read as “becomes” and the latter is usually read as “is equal to”. E.g: a i= 2.3; n i= 2; f := ‘false’ Some unusual assignments are possible: ai=bimci=ed:=e := 0; The above assignment assigns zero to the vari- ables “a”, “b”, “c”, “d” and “e”. Q The GOTO statement. A label is used to mark the destination location, e.g: ‘goto’ dest; dest: ni=4+i O The IF statement. This allows code to be executed conditionally. An optional ‘else’ construct can be added. IF state- ments can be nested (see the statement labelled “IFstmt3"): IFstmt1: ‘if’ a= 1 ‘then’ 1 := 2; IFstmt2: ‘if’ a= 3 ‘then’ n:=1 ‘else’ n := 2; IFstmt3; ‘if’ a= 4 ‘and’ b = 2 ‘then’ 1 := 200 else’ ‘if’ a> 4 ‘or’ ¢ = 0 ‘then’ l= 19 Aspecial form of IF statement, called a conditional expression, is available. Examine the following IF statement which sets “b” to 2 if “a” equals 1 or sets “b” to 3 otherwise: ‘if’ a= 1 ‘then’ b:=2 else’ bi=3 This can be rewritten as follows: b := ‘if’ a= 1 ‘then’ 2 ‘else’ 3 This has the benefit of allowing the compiler to produce more efficient machine code. o August 1988 Appie2000 17 QO The FOR statement. This is the main form of looping construct. It has three forms: FORstmtl: ‘for’ i t= 1 ‘step’ 1 ‘until’ 10 ‘do’ a [i] 2= 0; FORstmt2: ‘for’ i :=1, 2, 3, 4, 5S, 6, 7, 8,9, 10 ‘do’ a [i] s= 0; FORstmt3: ‘for’ i := 1 ‘while’ i <= 10 ‘do’ ‘begin’ a (i) := 0; iced #1 ‘end’ All of the above for statements achieve exactly the same as the following BASIC FOR loop: 10 FOR I = 1 TO 10: A® (I) = 0: NEXT FOR statements can be combined into some very powerful constructs: FORst mt land3merged: ‘for’ i := start, ind [i] oo ‘begin something; somethingelse ‘end’ The above FOR statement steps along the array “ind”, starting at the element indicated by “start” until either a zero element is reached or element “maxlen” is accessed. Q The procedure call. ALGOL-60 calls procedures simply by placing the procedure’s name in the code as if it were a language command: ‘if’ a= 1 ‘then’ proc a is 1 ‘else’ proc a is not 1 The above IF statement calls “proc a is 1” if “a” be 1 and calls “proc a is not 1” if “a” is not 1 (note the spaces in the procedure names!). Parameters are placed in parentheses and sepa- rated by commas: proce (1, 2, vall, val2) ALGOL-60 supports two methods of giving parame- ters to procedures: call by value and call be reference. In the former, the procedure is given a variable’s value only (a ‘value parameter’) and in the latter the procedure is given not the variable's value but its address (a ‘reference parameter’). The upshot of this is that while the contents of both value and reference parameters can be examined, only reference parame- ters can have their values changed. This is because procedures do not know where a value parameter is placed in memory- only its value is passed. The usual method adopted by compilers is that the addresses of reference parameters are passed di- rectly but value parameters are copied into tempo- tary variables and the temporary variables’ ad- dresses are passed to the procedure. ALGOL-60 assumes that all parameters be refer- ence unless they are explicitly made value by the following statement: ‘value’ parameter; ‘while’ ind [i] ‘and’ i <= maxlen ‘do’ Functions are called by placing them in expres- sions (in the following examples “func” is a function): a i= func (param); ‘if’ func (param) = value ‘then’ dosomething Q The comment statement. Comment statements allow explanatory text to be placed in the code. Comments are totally ignored by the compiler and do not affect the machine code produced: ‘comment’ this is a comment; 3 The compound statement. This allows several individual statements to be regarded as one. This is necessary because con- structs like ‘for’ and ‘if only apply to one statement. Refer to the FOR statement labelled “FORstmt3” opposite. 4 The block. Blocks are compound statements with local vari- able definitions. The local variables are defined only when the block is being executed. Before and after the block is executed, these variables do not exist. ALGOL-60 Program Structure The structure of ALGOL-60 is surprisingly simple. An ALGOL-60 program consists of a main block, which is equivalent to the main program, in which is defined all the procedures called, the statements executed and the variables used. Like many other features of ALGOL-60, this defi- nition is recursive because each individual proce- dure can be considered a main block. Thus proce- dures can be declared inside procedures just like block statements can be declared inside other block statements. These “inner” procedures are acces- sible only the procedure in which they are defined. ALGOL-60 does not place any limit to this “nest- ing” (as it is called) although each individual com- piler will have some physical limitation. For example: ‘program’ noddy; ‘comment’ noddy program; ‘begin’ ‘integer’ value; procedure’ calculate (a, b, c, result); ‘comment’ procedure to perform some simple calculation; ‘value’ a, b, c; ‘integer’ a, b, c, result; ‘comment’ parameters “a”, “b” and “c” are value (nothing is returned) but “result” is reference (a value is returned) ; ‘begin’ ‘integer’ ‘procedure’ times (mplicand, mplier) ; ‘comment’ nested integer procedure (function) to multiply numbers - this is local to procedure “calculate”; ‘value’ mplicand, mplier; ‘integer’ mplicand, mplier; ‘begin’ ‘integer’ count, sum := 0; ‘for’ count := 1 ‘step’ 1 ‘until’ mplier ‘do’ sum := sum + mplicand; times := sum ‘end’ times; ‘comment’ this is the code of procedure “calculate”; result := times (a, b) +c ‘end’ calculate; ‘comment’ this is the main program; 18 ‘Apple2000 August 1988 calculate (2, 3, 4, value); print (value, 5, 0) ‘end’ noddy Note that the recursive nature of ALGOL-60 means that the structure of the main program and of any of its procedures is essentially identical except that the main program is headed by ‘program’ and a proce- dure is headed by ‘procedure’. On many implementa- tions of ALGOL-60 no program heading is given. Functions are provided by procedures which re- turn a value. Note that the type of result is indicated by prefixing the keyword ‘procedure’ with the type of the result. Summing up ALGOL-60 was the first structured language and, as a result, is an important development in language design. The language does, though, have many weak- nesses; the limited number of variable types (espe- cially no character variables), the absence of any standard method for text input and output and no file handling worth mentioning are the most glaring. ALGOL-60 also lacks the power of FORTRAN’s huge set of standard mathematical functions although later versions were designed to work with FORTRAN routines. ALGOL-60 has never been very common because of the above short-comings and also because the early compilers were generally very ineffictent: they took a long time to produce poor machine code. Although modern ALGOL-60 compilers are much more effi- cient than their predecessors, ALGOL has largely been replaced by newer languages which offer more facilities. As an academic exercise in language development ALGOL-60 was a great success but as a practical and applicable language ALGOL-60 was a bit of a failure! ALGOL-60 does live on in the guise of CORAL-66. This language is almost identical to ALGOL-60, (being developed from it), but has some of the missing features added. It is used as a real-time language for mainly defence applications. But this, too, is soon to disappear: CORAL-66 is due to be replaced by Ada in the near future. In the next instalment I shall complete the ALGOL story by discussing ALGOL-68: called by some ‘The best computer language developed to date’. Example program: The following ALGOL-60 program asks the user to type in a series of integer numbers and then writes them out after they have been sorted into ascending numerical order. ‘program’ numbersort; ‘comment’ this program reads in a series of numbers, sorts them and then outputs the sorted numbers; ‘begin’ ‘integer’ number; ‘procedure’ readvalues (sortlist, number); ‘comment’ this procedure reads in the set of numbers to be sorted; ‘value’ number; ‘integer’’array’ sortlist; ‘integer’ number; ‘comment’ note that array parameters are not redimensioned in procedures; ‘begin’ ‘integer’ i; ‘comment’ read in all values required; ‘for’ i := 1 ‘step’ 1 ‘until’ number ‘do’ ‘begin’ writetext ({Enter_ sortlist [i] := rea ‘end’ ‘end’ readvalues; ralue_to_be_sorted:_}); id ‘procedure’ sortvalues (sortlist, number); ‘comment’ this subroutine performs the Bubble sort; ‘value’ number; ‘integer’ ‘array’ sortlist; ‘integer’ number; ‘begin’ Boolean’ sorted := ‘false’; ‘integer’ i, maxnumbers; ‘comment’ “sorted” is initialised with the value false; maxnumbers := number - 1; ‘comment’ loop until the Boolean variable “sorted” becomes true indicating that the array is sorted- note the use of the FOR statement: the assignment to “maxnumbers” has to be performed to satisfy ALGOL-60’s syntax even though, in this situation, it is unnecessary (many compilers are bright enough to spot this and to ignore dummy assignments) this construct is often used to perform a series of statements while some condition remains true; ‘for’ maxnumbers := maxnumbers ‘while’ ‘not’ sorted ‘do’ begin’ ‘comment’ assume that all be sorted; sorted := ‘true’; ‘comment’ examine all the elements of the array in tum; ‘for’ i i= 1 ‘step’ 1 ‘until’ maxnumbers ‘do’ ‘begin’ ‘comment’ swap adjacent elements if the first be greater than the second; ‘if’ sortlist [i] > sortlist [i +1] ‘integer’ exchange; exchange := a [i]; a (i] t= a fi + 1); a [i + 1] := exchange; ‘comment’ array is not yet sorted; sorted := ‘false’ ‘end’ ‘end’ ‘end! ‘end’ sortvalues; ‘procedure’ writevalues (sortlist, number); ‘comment’ this procedure writes out the sorted numbers; August 1988 “Apple2000 19 ‘value’ number; ‘integer’’array’ sortlist; ‘integer’ number; ‘comment’ note that here one would expect “sortlist” to be a value parameter (because the array is not written to) but ALGOL-60 does not allow arrays to be value parameters; ‘begin’ ‘integer’ ‘comment’ i, count := 0; count is defined as an integer with an initial value of 0; ‘comment’ clear screen, write heading and feed two lines; writetext ({{p)The_sorted_values_are:{2c}}); ‘comment’ write out all the values; ‘for’ i := 1 ‘step’ 1 ‘until’ number ‘do’ ‘begin’ ‘comment’ print 10 values per line; print (sortlist [i], 4, 0); ‘if’ count = 10 ‘then’ ‘begin’ ‘comment’ move to next line; newline (1); count := 0 ‘end’ ‘else’ ‘begin’ ‘comment’ print four spaces; space (4); count t= count + 1 ‘end’ ‘end’ ‘end’ writevalues; ‘comment’ this is the main program; ‘comment’ clear the screen; paperthrow (1); readnumber: ‘comment’ ask for the number of values; writetext ({How_many values are to be sorted?}); number := read; ‘comment’ only allow for a number >1; ‘if’ number < 1 ‘then’ ‘begin’ writetext ({Please_type_in_a_number_greater_than_1}); newline (1)j_ ‘comment’ this is an example of how to use the GOTO statement - it is not an advocation of using GOTO's generally!; goto readnumber ‘end’; ‘comment’ define the array and then read in the values, sort them and then output the sorted values; ‘begin’ ‘integer’ ‘array’ sortlist (1: number]; readvalues (sortlist, number); sortvalues (sortlist, number); writevalues (sortlist, number) ‘end’ ‘end’ numbersort Dave Miller « on Be Apple2000 The Boffin answers more II problems EER Gna an ce Q. I cannot get Werdna to work properly on my GS, can you help me get it going? A. The Werdna 4th Scenario does not work on the IIGS unless you set the column width to 40 on the display panel. The IIGS sets to 80 columns automatically and this causes the problem. However you still will have an error message when quitting. Has anyone further ideas on this? Q. lam running out of usable slots on my IGS and so tried putting my Disk Drives into Slot 2. This did not work at first and so! tried Slot 1. Although it seerned to be reading the disks all I got was an 1/O error .... A, Remember that the IIGS runs at 2.75 Mhz flat out. All the disc operating systems require careful timing routines to read and write the drives cor- rectly. Putting a disk drive card in any slot other than Slot 6 will simply run the routines too fast. You will need to slow the system speed down to make it work. The reason that Slot 6 can run at full speed, is that it is seen as an extension of the Smartport. It expects disc drives to be in that Slot whether it is set to Disk Port or to Your Card. The timing is adjusted to slow the slot down in either of these modes, and it then reads and writes the discs correctly. Q. After I have initialised a /RAM drive from the Finder and copied system files onto it, I cannot boot from it, nothing happens at all. What should I be doing to make it work? A. For a /RAM drive to be bootable, block zero must contain the boot code that is found on a normal ProDOS disc. Some disc initialising pro- grams, including the Finder, will not write this code. A ‘quick and dirty’ solution is to copy block zero from any bootable disc using a sector editor such as Block Warden or Bag of Tricks. The more elegant solution is to initialise with the utility disc that came with your /RAM card. Q. I have acquired an old Apple II+ with an exter- nal UHF modulator. As hard as I try, I cannot get a colour picture on my TV set. A. All the II series computers have a phono video line socket giving composite video output. How- ever this output varies from one machine to another between PAL (European) and NTSC (USA) colour. On a TV set designed for the UK you can only display PAL colour. You would need a dual standard or American TV to display NTSC. The old ll+, the //c and the Ilgs all give NTSC video. The //c gives either PAL or NTSC depending on whether it was assembled in Ireland or the States. The //c has an optional extra PAL colour modulator that allows colour to be output at UHF level. Beware though, there was a smaller Black and White modulator issued with the early machines. The Boffin ¢ August 1988 plusDISK Dave Ward reports on the fastest disk drive to come from Scotland Cirtech who gave us the Flipper and plusRAM memory cards have now introduced plusDISK which is a battery backed memory card starting at 128K bytes and expandable to a megabyte. The plusDISK system arrives in the usual Cirtech padded yellow box. The card, protected in an anti-static plastic enve- lope, is accompanied by a clear comprehensive User's manual, 3.5" and 5.25" diskettes of sup- port software to modify Apple- Works & allows Dos3.2, Dos3.3, Pascal 1.1,Pascal 1.2, CP/M 2.20B & CP/M 2.23 to use the plusDISK card's extra memory. The 27 page A5 spiral bound manual gives comprehensive details on the installation of the plusDISK cards, how to add more memory chips and trou- bleshooting problems. The card used for this review was a full one megabyte card kindly loaned, by Cirtech, to us for a few months. Product description The plusDISK card is a mem- ory card using 256K bit cmos chips with a very small rechar- gable battery on board. The main card will accept a maxi- mum of 512K bytes but can be expanded to a full megabyte with a ‘piggy back’ card. The basic card is marketed with just 128K bytes which can be ex- panded to 512K bytes in 64K increments. The card can be made to look like a RAM disk or a ‘hard disk’ by simply the positioning of a two pin link over three pins on the card. The rather small battery is claimed by Cirtech to retain the data on the card for over 2 months even if the card is removed from the computer! The CMOS chips used on the plusDISK card are very much bigger than the normal DRAM chips on memory cards and whirling the standard 512K card, even fully populated, will fit in any slot. The plusDISK card fitted with its piggy back card is so wide that it is unlikely to fit into a slot with a card in the adjacent, higher, slot. The plusDISK can easily be used as a hard-disk for PASCAL 1.3, Cirtech CP/M plus and Microsoft CP/M 2.20B (56K) 2.23(60K) and DOS 3.3. You can also partition the plusDISK so that ProDOS and all or some of the other three operating sys- tems can be accessed from the same plusDISK. The card measures, in centi- metres, 23 long by 8 high and 1.3 wide for the standard card and 2.7 for the card plus piggy- back card. Installation The installation is relatively simple but Cirtech suggest care should be taken to prevent shorting of the battery and to remove static electricity by touching an ‘earth’ before handling the card. As usual this is comprehensively covered in the manual. You may place the card in any of slots 1-7 on an Apple ][ Plus (preferably 64K), Apple //e or Apple IIGS, how- ever there are some exceptions which should be noted: 1. You cannot use slot 0 in an Apple ][ plus which is reserved for the 16K memory expansion card. 2. Slot 3 cannot be used ina European Apple //e if an 80 column card is installed in the auxiliary slot 3. You are also advised not to use slot 3 in an Apple IIGS. I tried it and could not get it to work there under any conditions in slot 3 of the Apple Ilgs. 3. If you have an enhanced Apple //e it is advised that you place the card in slot 7 as it can be auto-booted from there. 4. Ifyou are going to use Pascal 1.3 you should place the plusDISK in slots 4,5 or 6 so that Pascal 1.3 will recognise it as a Ram disk. 5. In an Apple IIGS you may place the plusDISK card in 1-7 except slot 3. For slots other than slot 7 you must enter the ‘control panel’ to recognise your card. You can also arrange to boot from any slot in an Apple IGS. Slot 2 might prove a little difficult since the machine assigns drives to slot 2 after slot 5 has had its compliment of two drives. Therefore disk drives are not too welcome in slot 2. You could use slot 1 to hold your 5.25" disk ][ drives and then place the plusDISK in drive 6, remember that you will have to set the machine to slow proces- sor speed to use the drives there, though. The plusDISK card up to 512K bytes is a similar size to to plusRAM cards and will fit in any slot without baulking the slots either side. Note, however, that if you want a card fitted with the plusDISK piggy-back card you will almost certainly need to leave the next higher slot free. Therefore slot 7 in Apple ]{ plus and Apple //e computers is a good choice for the plusDISK card with piggy- back. Unfortunately you won't be able to do this on an Apple IIgs with a plusRAM-GS card in its special slot. Once installed it is suggested that you might like to try out the self-test program on the card. However, this can be done at any time providing that the machine is in Applesoft ] prompt or monitor * prompt. The self- test erases all data from the plusDISK. The following table shows what you enter depend- ing upon the plusDISK slot- @»- August 1988 Apple2000 Be 2 SLOT APPLESOFT MONITOR 1 CALL 49418 C10AG 2 CALL 49674 C20AG 3 CALL 49930 C30AG 4 CALL 50186 C40AG 5 CALL 50442 C50AG 6 CALL 50698 C60AG 7 CALL 50954 C70AG Of course you must press ‘return’ after entry ! As the plusDISK cards, like the plusRAM cards, are based on the new Apple standard for large memory expansion cards they should, therefore, be compatible with all future software unless Apple should move the goalposts! The two diskettes of software produce the following listing when a CATALOG command is executed, see Figure 1. The catalog listing above is taken from the 5.25" diskette but the one from the 3.5" disk- ette is much the same except for the number of blocks. Note that on the above listing there ap- pears to be too may blocks used! This is because the 5.25" disk only has support for DOS 3.3 , CP/M and Pascal which can be read by those operating sys- tems. It does not seem possible to do this on a 3.5" diskette, in the same way. Perhaps it might be achievable by partitioning the 3.5" diskette with HDMATE? When you boot the diskette the following menu appears on the 40 column screen:- PLUSDISK SUPPORT DISK V1.01 P) PLUSDISK PARTITIONING L) APPLEWORKS DESKTOP LIMITER A) APPLEWORKS STARTUP ENHANCE- MENTS F) PILER B) BASIC PLEASE ENTER CHOICE Let us have a look at some of these options :- B - takes you to Applesoft BASIC, F - is the Apple Computer Inc. Filer program to copy files etc. A- AppleWorks is modified so that you aren't prompted during its boot-up. Since AppleWorks is already on a ‘RAM card’ it isn’t necessary to load it into RAM even if some is found! This routine is just a trifle inflexible requiring that the volume name is /APPLEWORKS. So if you Figure 1 /PLUSDISK NAME TYPE BLOCKS MODIFIED CREATED ENDFILE SUBTYPE PRODOS SYS 30 18-SEP-84 0:00 <NO DATE > 14848 BASIC.SYSTEM sys 21 18-JUN-84 06:00 <NO DATE > 10240 PLUSTART BAS 9 14-DEC-87 18:21 <NO DATE > 3678 PLUs.O BIN 5 21-JAN-88 0:00 <NO DATE > 1794 A=$4600 PLUSDISK.SYSTEM SYS 3° 21-DEC-87 13:14 <NO DATE > 798 FILER sys 51 18-JUN-84 0:00 <NO DATE > 25600 STARTUP BAS 3 15-JAN-88 0:00 <NO DATE > 616 LIMITER BAS 6 15-JAN-88 0:00 <NO DATE > 2095 LIMIT.O BIN 1 8-JAN-88 0:00 <NO DATE > 300 A~$1800 ASTART BAS 6 16-JUN-86 0:00 <NO DATE > 2491 BLOCKS FREE: 2 BLOCKS USED: 278 TOTAL BLOCKS: 280 Figure 2 RAM] NAME TYPE BLOCKS MODIFIED CREATED ENDFILE SUBTYPE PRODOS sys 30 18-SEP-84 0:00 <NO DATE > 14848 PLUSDISK.SYSTEM SYS 3° 21-DEC-87 13:14 <NO DATE > 798 Dos SYS 1 <NO DATE > <NO DATE > $12 ceM sys 1 <NO DATE > <NO DATE > 512 PASCAL sys 1 <NO DATE > <NO DATE > 512 BLOCKS FREE: 474 BLOCKS USED: 1574 TOTAL BLOCKS: 2048 intend to use AppleWorks ensure that your plusDISK is named /APPLEWORKS. L - Limits the amount of the plusDISK that AppleWorks can use as its desk-top (plusDISK set-up as a RAM disk, of course) so that the rest can be used for files ete. P - Partitioning. Like the Flipper and plusRAM extra cards the plusDISK allows one to partition the memory on the card into separate areas for use by different operating systems. The plusDISK method of partitioning is different than that used by the other two cards and is, I suspect, similar if not the same as the method used by their HDMATE software package for partitioning hard disks. First the plusDISK must be ProDOS formatted. You can then boot one of the plusDISK sup- port diskettes and when the main menu appears choose the P option for partitioning when the following menu appears :- PLUSDISK PARTITIONING PROGRAM V1.01 PLUSDISK IN SLOT 7 IS SETUP AS FOLLOWS :- TOTAL SIZE LARGEST FREE SPACE PRODOS = 1248 PASCAL = 0 CP/M = 400 DOs = 200 = 2048 BLOCKS = 473 BLOCKS DO YOU WISH TO <C>REATE OR <R>EMOVE AN AREA, ‘O’ TO QUIT In the above you will notice that the PASCAL area is as- signed no space. On choosing the <C>REATE option you will be asked how much space you wish to assign to PASCAL 1.3. Like HDMATE the partitioning program cordons off areas of the ProDOS formatted disk which appear as ProDOS SyYStem files. To choose a particular system you just execute that file. This is a very friendly and effective way of partitioning the disk. See Figure 2 for a CATALOG listing of plusDISK with all three areas. From the Applesoft prompt | you just type -CPM to enter the CP/M system. Cirtech also supply a menu program - notice the PLUSDISK.SYSTEM in the above CATALOG listing - which lets you choose one of the three areas. For more a complicated set-up you could use ProSel to move between applications. For instance I created a plusDISK with AppleWorks in a directory, thirty other ProDOS utilities and the DOS, CP/M & PASCAL work areas. Moving from PASCAL to AppleWorks took just 3 seconds! The first time you try to acti- vate an area such as CP/M it will not boot and you will re- quested to place a CP/M start- up diskette into a suitable drive. When you have done this and 22 &e Apple2000 August 1988 the diskette has booted just place your plusDISK support diskette (5.25" only) into the drive. If you take a DiRectory of this diskette you will find that there is a utility PLUSDISK.COM and if you execute this your plusDISK partition will be formatted so that you can save files there and even boot-up the system. Setting up areas for DOS and PASCAL 1.3 is just as simple. Unlike the Flipper and plusRAM extra card

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