Australian Apple Review The Vol 1 No 6 1984 07 Gareth Powell AU

~The Independent Magazine 1e oS A Gareth Powell _ _ Publication om oe =e. _ Registered by Australia Post Publication No NBG6313° | : | *Recommended retail pice Applicard a new generation in CP/M" for your Apple” II, II+, //e, or /// @ Shift key modification @ 6MHz Z-80B processor @ Optional counter/timer chip @ 64k RAM on-board @ 64k &/or 128k RAM extender @ 2k EPROM (expandable) @ 64k or 128k RAM disk under e@ CP/M 2.2 + utilities CP/M @ 70 Column Hi-Res capabilities @ 64k, 128k or 192k RAM disk e@ 80-column video board under Apple DOS support e@ Supports most Apple peripherals @ Interface for networking and @ Up to 90k printer buffer (with 80- communications col extended board) SAMS CP/M primer e Fast//e video driver Fullinstallation manual e //e programmable function keys @ OEM documentation available e@ Apple /// Applicard comes with WORDSTAR free & has many features utilizing the unique features of the Apple ///. @ Support of CORVUS, RANA & other mass storage devices e@ DEALER ENQUIRIES WELCOME e alphaSyntaur The computer music system that enhances your ability to: O CREATE. O LEARN 0 IMPROVISE O PLAY O EDUCATE O EXPLORE O COMPOSE COMPUMUSIC PO Box 57 - 103 St. Johns Rad, Glebe, NSW 2037 692 9293 PHONE 692 9875 The Australian Apple Review The Australian Apple Review Top Rear, 4 Carrington Rd, Randwick NSW, 2031 Phone: (02) 398 5111 Published by Gareth Powell Pty Ltd Editor: Gareth Powell Art Director: Roy Bisson Production Manager: Brenda Powell Photographer: Gary Williams Subscription Manager: Tina Spathos Advertising Enquiries: Craig Hoskinson Gareth Powell Pty Ltd, Top Rear, 4 Carrington Rd, Randwick, NSW, 2031 Phone: (02) 398 5111 Typesetting: Printaction Pty Ltd Distribution: Network, SYDNEY Printed by: fan Liddell Commercial Printing CONTENTS 2 EDITORIAL 3 APPLE NEWS 6 LOGO - TURTLE INTO APE 8 THE INCREDIBLE JACK 1 re) SAY IT AGAIN SAM 1 2 FURTHER THOUGHTS ON THE APPLE ITC 1 4 THE NEW SCRIBE COLOUR PRINTER l WHY YOUR APPLE IS FAR FROM OUTDATED 20 WHERE ELECTRONICS ARE GOING 2 2 ASILENT PRINTER FOR THE APPLE 2 4 THE AGE or THE MICROFLOPPY HAS 26 LEARNING THE LANGUAGE 27 THE PROBLEM WITH POWER 29 LETTERS 29 MORE ENTRIES IN “THE AUSTRALIAN APPLE REVIEW” PROGRAM CONTEST 33 WORM IN THE APPLE 36 ADVENTURES CORNER 37 AUSER’S VIEW OF THE MACINTOSH EDITORIAL legal battle worldwide is, in a strange way, a back-handed compliment to Apple. If the original machine was not so well designed, if the concept had not been so brilliant, then no one would have bothered for one moment to copy it. There are dozens of computers out there that no one has even thought of copying. Will Apple win in the end? Without stepping on any judicial toes, | have to say that | think so. | am well informed on the situation as | spend so much time in Singapore, Hong Kong and Taiwan - territories where pirates abound. What is happening is that the major manufacturers are giving up the unequal battle and are concen- trating on other projects instead. (The fact that the other projects in the main consist of ripping off IBM, who are replying with unrivalled ferocity, is somewhat beside the point) Apple’s belated but thorough legal defence is beginning to show Tie continued saga ot Apple's results, and although the latest Wombat development is an interest- ing one, | truthfully feel | have heard the death knell for imitation Apples being made by major manufacturers. This does not mean for one moment that there will not be imitation Apples. There will, by the hundreds. But they will be made in half dozen lots to sell to tourists and enterprising smugglers rather than to the United States - where the US customs takes great pleasure and delight in smashing them with sledgehammers — or Australia, or Europe. Everything in the garden would, one would have thought, been lovely. But there is no such thing as a Hong Kong or Taiwanese entrepreneur who is willing to see his business fail over a simple legal formality. They have turned their sights on the biggest potential export market of them all. Already a consignment of MedFly has been bought “for evaluation” in the Peoples’ Republic of China. And the man responsible for the sale is a previous distributor of Apples in Australia. In Beijing at the end of last month | saw several fake Apples which had _ plainly originated in Hong Kong. (For political reasons, Taiwanese mach- ines would not be welcomed with open arms). Effectively, there is no_ real copyright law in the People’s Republic of China and it would be extremely easy for Hong Kong fake manufacturers to move across into the PRC and set up business with the government's blessing. It will be a most interesting development. Nothing is ever boring on the Apple front Gareth Powell MEMOREX THE DISC FOR EVERY APPLE 8” 5.25” 3.5” -2211 Melb. (03) 267-2955 Adel. (08) 79-9951 Bris. (07) 376-5677, (07) 52-7333 Perth. (09) 446-6100 Cnbra. (062) 81-1977 Remember: For your Data... ‘When it matters make it Memorex’ Drunken Apples Psychopharmacology research unit at Rozelle Hospital. The fests there are run through an Apple computer. According to John Crawford, a psychologist who has been design- ing tests of the units: “With the tests developed for the microcomputer much more detailed information can be obtained, such as the times taken to obtain correct and incorrect answers for individual items Ts University of Sydney has a Beginning to the end of the test.” We would have thought one of the best ways of testing for drug and alcohol effects would have been to ask the patient to pronounce *Psychopharmacology’. We can't even do that when we're sober. The form of programming on the Apple appears to be extremely sophisticated. Said John Crawford: “If a person is entering the wrong answers the Apple can automatically go back to easier questions; or on the ‘other hand, skip to harder ones if the person is having no trouble answering.” The unit is currently using 5 Apple les, the hardware of which has been slightly modified. And the machines are linked by modem to the university's mainframe so that a large quantity of data can be saved and analysed. In a moment of noble self sacrifice we phoned them and said if they wanted volunteers experienced in drinking the cooling amber fluid, we would be only too willing to offer our services for nothing. They explained ‘2 us that they already had enough wolunteers. Pity. lore law suits There's been an announcement Apple Computer has come to a lution of the law suit filed against companies in Texas who lly manufactured and distribut- =a computers violating Apple's ‘epyrights and patents. and how performance varies from the Apple News The month before last the US district court in Southern Texas entered a consent decree and a final judgement against the companies in Apple's favour. A consent decree in America means that the two companies being charged say “Sorry, guy, its a fair cop, I done it” or words to that effect. Albert A. Eisenstat, Apple's Vice- President and General Counsel, who has been having a fairly busy time just recently, said: “Enforcement of our intellectual property rights, including copyright patents, continues to be top Apple priority. Recent favourable court decisions have further encouraged us to continue pursuing legal methods of discouraging infringement of our copyrights.” It will be interesting to see how many further cases of a similar type appear in the United States in the near future. Communication protocols Some years ago we sat down and tried to link up an Apple II to a Wang 5. In this we had little or no help because there was no data available. We found out that on the Wang communications disk there were an immense amount of protocols available. Far more than we had thought were humanly possible. It took us six months and a major effort to get the two things to talk to each other. They now do it extremely well and we sometimes wonder what all the fuss was about. Basically what the fuss was about was the fact that there are so many forms of communications available. Let's look at some of the standards generally available. For example there are RS-366, RS-423A, RS-499, V.10, v.24, and God knows what else. Those with an RS prefix (the letters, I promise you, do not stand for ratshit) come from the electronic industry's association in the United States and those with a V or X prefix come from CCITT which is responsible for our telephone system standards in Australia. If you've ever wanted to know what CCITT stood for, it is Comite Consultatif Internationale Telefonique et Telgraphique. Quite so. By and large the RS standards are the ones used in the US, which is why we find them on so many American computers, while the CCITT standards are in theory world-wide recommen- dations, but the United States continues to believe that it is not part of the wide world outside. The standard that's used most widely on home computer applications is, of course, the RS-232C. If you want its official title again it is “the interface between data terminal equipment and data circuitterminating equipment employing serial-binary interface.” We always knew that. Just couldn't string the words together properly. The RS-232C standard has four parts - the electrical signal character- istic, the — interface-mechanical characteristic, a functional description of the signals which are involved and a list of the standard sub-sets of signals for a specific interface type. If you don’t understand that, don't worry. We trust all will become clear a little later on. The RS-232 standard was never designed for direct connection of two computers, and if you use it in such an application you'll find that most of the electrical connections which are builtin are unnecessary. RS-232 was originally designed for transmissions over distances with speeds of less than 19.2K bits per second. In fact 9,600 bits per second is the standard practical rate for most applications, and if you're using a modem with the telephone you're going to be stuck at either 300 bits per second or, if you're lucky, 1,200 bits per second. On the RS-232 there are 21 different signal lines. Sometimes you only need to use three lines, for example when you're connecting it to a video display terminal. The lines used here are signal ground, transmitted data and received data. If you are using your RS-232 for a serial printer the received data line is taken out and the data set ready (DSR) is added. This allows the printer to tell the computer that it cannot accept any more data because its buffer is full. As the standard buffer on most printers is something of the order of 2K, that happens fairly early on. This data set ready line can actually be used for other purposes. If you're using it with a modem to communicate with the outside world it can tell the modem that the computer is ready to accept data for transmission. Another data control technique is to transmit in ASCII code, and for all of those who have wanted to know what ASCII stands for, it is the American Standard Code for Information Interchange. In this case the received data line is connected instead of the data set ready, and the printer can transmit the appropriate code when it is full or ready to accept data. As you can hopefully see, the first application works with a direct connection between the computer and the printer, while the second can be applied using telephone lines. This means you could, if you wanted to, drive a printer at a remote location over the phone, assuming always that your computer can switch off its data flow fast enough to prevent an overflow at the printer. Think of it like a tap with a long hose filling a bucket at the other end and you will get the rough idea. With RS-232 in full duplex the lines used are protective ground, signal ground, transmitted data, received data, received line signal detector and, possibly, data set ready. The received line signal detector, which is often called the carrier detect, says, in effect, “I can hear a noise which says that somebody is trying to talk to me.” This noise is the carrier signal. In a duplex stage there has to be a carrier signal going out from the modem and coming into the modem, otherwise the connection will be cut. In half-duplex modem applications two lines are added to the full-duplex lines and these are request to send and clear to send. If you can imagine two cars approaching each other on a single lane bridge you will have the idea. “Request to send” comes from a car that flashes its headlights to ask can it go ahead and cross the bridge filling up the single lane. The other car flashes its headlights with a “clear to send” to allow the on- coming car to come through safely. These lines control the direction of the half-duplex separation. The “request to send” is the computer's way of saying it is ready to start talking and the “clear to send” is amodem’s way of saying it is ready to listen. The “request to send” causes the modem at that end to turn on its transmitter and when its finished sending its information it turns off the request line and the modem switches off its transmitter. All this fascinating information we got from an article by Dave Crounse which appeared in “Bytelines” volume 2 number 3. It was a fairly technical article and we have re-written it to make it easier to understand. Our greatest hope is that we have not stuffed up any of the essential information. No doubt some reader will quickly let us know if we have. | hear a symphony The latest improvement on Lotus 1-2-3 - currently the fastest selling program in the world - is Lotus Symphony which will be launched in Australia at the end of July at a price around the $1,000 mark. The President of Lotus Development said: “We have taken special care to ensure that currency, time and date format, special characters and other fundamental features of the program are totally under user control. By doing all this, we intend to fully support national and multi-national uses of Symphony.” Symphony is what they call “an open-ended product’ in that users are able to add in programs which are appropriate. As it stands it combines word processing, data base, com- munications, spreadsheets, graphics and window management. And what does this momentous news have to do with Apple enthusiasts? Further news is that Lotus 1-2-3 should be available on the 512K version of the Apple Macintosh which is due in Australia at the end of this year. At least that’s what the timetable says Copying Hong Kong It's a case of art following reality. In Hong Kong for some time we have been using small batteries on the top of RAM chips in order to keep the memory intact when we switched off. Now we see that Mostek Corporation have announced what they call a new solution to the non-volatility problem. Their idea is to stick a pair of miniature, long-lived lithium power cells in a packet onto the top of standard 24-pin ics. They call their piggy-back battery package a lithium “top hat”. In the news story we read it said that this new development represents a major advantage in solid state memory technology. In fact we've been doing this amongst the happy home hobbyists in Hong Kong for the last three years. Mostek, who have a nice way of mangling the English language, refer to it as a “completely pre-engineered solution to a nasty problem” If only they'd phoned some of the Apple enthusiasts in Hong Kong three years ago theyd never have had to invent the damned thing in the first place. Wombat tries again Michael Suss of Computer Edge fang to tell us that his company had written and copyrighted a new language for his Wombat computer ich, he claimed, would “end Apple’s monopoly”. He told us that when he was in the “middle of the Apple court case (more On this later) he woke up very early ‘one morning and decided to read all the court papers again. And a fairly ong read it must have been. “I knew ‘that Apple had lost their source code 50 all we had to do to prove that we rad an original work was to have it "produced in source code.” In fairness we found that difficult ® believe. Who had informed Mr Suss that pple had “lost their source code”? € was not forthcoming on the point. He also told us that he had then missioned a team of program- ers to produce an improved BASIC. at would take advantage of the C02 (the CMOS version of the ormal Central Processing Unit). This ould enable Wombat to run all indard Apple programs and, at the same time, offer advanced facilities 2 programmers. _ He said he had copyrighted this ew source in Australia, Taiwan and e United States. There is certainly such a registra- in his name for the Wombat IC program - April 4, 1984 - and 2 further registration made on April 6. 1984 for a Disk Operating System and an Auto Boot program. Mr Suss offered to send us one of is Wombats to test. We suggested Rat he consult with his legal isors before he did this. Since he has not contacted us. is not cheap. Lawyers large more than programmers. 9 has to finance all this? At this lage of the game we are talking bout very serious money indeed _ As an appeal has been lodged in € High Court in the matter Apple v Somputer Edge and Michael Suss, = cannot comment on that because matter is sub judice. But we can comment on his new DOS and Auto Boot program. Mr Suss, by his own admission, is Businessman rather than a Ogrammer. We ialked to a programmer who truly knows which end is up. His view is that “no man born of woman is going to be able to put together an Apple compatible Disk Operating System and Auto Boot that doesn’t conflict with Apple’s patents”. Why then, we asked, did Mr Suss sound so confident? Our expert programmer said it was possible that Mr Suss had not understood how much of the Apple system his programmers had had to use to achieve their ends. No doubt this is not the last we will hear of this matter. Stay tuned for further reports. Apple pounces on Cat Meanwhile, over in Hong Kong, Apple Computer of the United States issued a writ against Video Tech- nology Limited claiming copyright infringements on the Autostart ROM and Applesoft programs. The latter programs were alleged to have been used on Video Tech- nology's Emulator cartridge for its 8- bit Laser 3000 microcomputer. Video Technology say they are filing a defence in Hong Kong and “we have instructed our lawyers in Chicago to file a counter-claim against Apple in the United States”. And what, you may ask in some puzzlement, has all this got to do with us? A lot Video Technology produce the Laser 3000, marketed by Dick Smith Electronics in Australia as “The Cat”, which has been both reviewed and advertised in this magazine. It would be wrong to make any predictions - judges can be very huffy about that sort of thing — but if Apple win the Laser case in Hong Kong, then as sure as Jobs and Wozniak made little Apples we'll be seeing a similar suit in Australia. Meanwhile, over in Taiwan the law suits continue on both the Apple and the IBM front, with the latest amazing news that four software pirates have been sent to jail. Heretofore, a fine of US$100 would have been consider- ed a condign punishment. Times they are indeed achangin’. Macintosh programs If the Macintosh is going to be a major force in personal computing and not just a university educational machine, it has to have a wedge, a bundle, a plethora of programs available. The issue before last we did a round-up of what had been promised. Now we are pleased to say that those promises are coming to fruition and the range of programs available for the Mac is not only wide but, in many cases, the state of the art. The following is a sample of what is now becoming available. (These are not yet available in Australia, but will be Real Soon Now, First of all Lotus 1-2-3 is now a definite starter. CRTplus is a program designed for banks to deliver information to their customers. Presumably the program comes with its own supply of red ink. Then there is a new database system called NPL Information Management Sys- tem which gets around most of the complicated problems of database programming. From Human Edge _ Software comes The Sales Edge, The Man- agement Edge and The Negotiation Edge. MicroSoft have added Word - their extremely powerful word pro- cessing program — to MultiPlan, thus underlining their dedication to the Macintosh which started when they supplied their immensely powerful MicroSoft Basic specially adapted to it. To go with it is Chart and File. They have a pretty way with imaginative titles at MicroSoft. Software Publishing Corporation has released their PFS series for the Macintosh, and it should be in Australia Real Soon Now. Infocom will let you play lots of games including the mind baffling Zork series and similar adventures of the imagination. Blue Chip has released Million- aire, Tycoon and Baron. We await with interest further games in this area such as Destitute, Impoverished and Bankrupt, when we will be able to play with a good chance of pulling off the Trifecta. In peripherals Davong have released a series of hard disk storages for the Macintosh, running from 5 megabytes right up to 32 megabytes. On the evidence in front of us this would appear to be an exercise in futility, because if you need hard disk storage with the Macintosh why don't you buy a Lisa LANGUAGES with it already built-in? It wonders us. Over in the UK a series of programs for the Macintosh is already being prepared, including the famous Wizardry imagination game which, in its Apple II lifetime, carried off a scad of awards. Apple joins pressure group In a move that comes as no surprise to anyone, Apple has joined the Ad Hoc Electronics Tax group, an American group dedicated to getting tax cuts for high technology firms. They say they are paying 10 percent more taxes than comparable American firms in other industries. They want their current concessions on Research and Development extended and they want to write the cost of technical equipment against expenses instead of having to amortize it over five years. Having read their last annual report and balance sheet with the keenest interest, our hearts go out to them in their travail. If things don’t improve Apple may stop having one of the biggest cash buffers and lowest borrowings of any company in corporate America. And then where would we be? Dealers get electrified Apple are now putting in an electronic mail system for their dealers with what their press hand out refers to as a “high speed communications facility’. 300 baud rate high speed? It is, it is true, faster than pigeon post and the postal service. But only marginally. The system will work off Apple Iles using boards provided by NetComm, a splendid outfit in New South Wales run by amiable eccentrics who produce some of the best communi- cation in the world. The idea is that dealers can keep up to date with the rapidly changing world of Apple and can also use the system to demonstrate the advan- tages of modems to_ potential purchasers. They'll be able to use Midas to access The Source, Dow Jones and they will be able to use Austpac to access the Australian Beginning. At rates faster than 300 baud, we trust. Otherwise the customers may be underwhelmed. o gs and Newman in Boston were what might be termed a commercial think tank.They developed Logo with the idea that it would be suitable for children and other computer novices and yet at the same time would be a language for learning and problem-solving. Logo was inextricably entangled with Lisp, a language which had been developed a number of years earlier for artificial intelligence research. This involvement was because the designers of Logo were in the main involved in the develop- ment of artificial intelligence. They saw Lisp as a suitable vehicle for an educational language. By the beginning of the seventies Logo was being fairly widely used in the educational market. It was in the early seventies that Seymour Papert, one of the original development group, brought to Logo the idea of Bx: in the sixties Bolt, Beranek ihakre Mm hel 2 beh U CLRID by Roger Braintree total graphics, which was first seen as a robot turtle and at a later stage as a figure on a television screen. This was a major breakthrough. It required a quantum leap in the imagination to see a child programm- ing a robot through a simple set of commands. By 1974 the philosophy of Logo had been stated at the university of Essex as: 1. a program that did not require students to have extensive formula knowledge from some other pro gramming system; 2. an obvious program trace which was the turtle trail to help debugging; 3. primitive commands which were simple to understand in terms of action within the problem. Its obvious that Logo was not a language that followed within the pattern of previous languages. It had a philosophy and a style of its own. At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Seymour Papert was developing a philosophy based on the idea that children could build their own intellectual — structure without being taught, and that Logo could be used as a tool to allow the child to explore, plan and program projects. There’s no doubt that it is an amazing educational tool, although there is some discussion as to how much help is needed from teachers. Now Logo is widely available on most personal computers and at the user level it is currently becoming an established part of the educational scene. More amazing is the fact that Logo is breaking into the business world. Obviously the turtle has ceased to be a turtle so that businesspeople can accept the package. It's now called a pointing ape. There's no suggestion that Logo is going to take over from either Cobol or Fortran but it does appear to open up a lot of areas. Digital Research, who are backing the introduction of Logo for business, see the possibility of it being a replacement for BASIC in the business environment. Qo There really is a difference in diskette brands. It’s in the way they are made. Because the computer industry cannot afford variation in the quality of diskettes, at Nashua we looked for, and founda way to ensure absolute consistency. Here’s how we do it. Quality Circles. At Nashua we've found the best way to attain this ‘consistency’ is to ensure that at each stage of production our diskettes _ When you can't afford mistakes. are statistically checked to make sure the quality is ‘built-in’ every step of the way. Rather than long production lines, we have Quality Circles’ — small groups of people whose job itis to make sure that each Nashua diskette is right in the first place. The result is a diskette with such consistency, that it is chosen by those people who can’t afford mistakes. Phone Sydney 958 2044, Melbourne 428 0501, Brisbane 3694244, Adelaide 42 0021, Perth 3281888, Darwin 816204. ashua There really is a difference. Ruwald & Skinner 401NA SOFTWARE REVIEW The Incredible Jack he Incredible Jack is three Uy [ V orograms in one. Its a filer, a word processor and a calcu- lator. Before we go any further, we must stress that each of the separate abilities of the Incredible Jack is limited. That in itself is not a bad thing, because it means the price is kept down to something approaching reality, and it means that The Incredible Jack will run very happily on the 48K on an Apple I+ or //e. In a sense we should call it “Son of Lotus 1-2-3” in that it is an integrated program, and integrated programs are the way in which software is heading. However it is also important to note The Incredible Jack does not contain a spreadsheet, although it does allow calculations. And it can enter those calculations in any part of the rest of the program. For example under the word processor you can create a form letter and within that form letter there can be a series of calculations. As a result you will be able to do a complete set of quotes to different prospective customers at different prices using the same form letter. Key card The Incredible Jack is packed in a little square box that houses the program disk, the instruction manual and the key card. This last item shows how all key strokes work on your computer to move the cursor around and access special functions. It is an extremely useful addition and it should be part of every program sold. It is almost impossible to keep in your memory all the instructions for the programs you use unless you have the memory bank of Harry Lorayne. When you boot the Jack, it first tells you that it is verifying the program disk and then it displays “Press any key to continue”. Here the peoplé who wrote The Incredible Jack have shown their intelligence. Work sheet If you press the key you'll go straight into a work sheet. If you don't press the key you get an interesting display of a title page. Programs are so often spoilt by the amount of time they take assembling and displaying a large amount of graphics to show. how clever the programmer is at making pretty pictures come up on your screen. With The Incredible Jack its possible to get around that by one swift press of the key. We recommend this feature to every other programmer. If you've got your 80-column card in slot three or if you have the //e’s 80- column card The Incredible Jack will recognise this and adapt all its output to those 80 columns. According to the documentation The Incredible Jack will not work if you put your 80-column card in any slot other than slot three or if you have a card in slot three which is not an 80- column card. This is not a great bother as we don’t know anybody who doesn’t stick their 80-column card in slot three. Tab setting When the work sheet appears on the screen it has lines on the top and bottom. You can set margins and tabs on the ruler lines by placing left and right brackets where you want the margins to be and by placing a + where you want the tab stop. Moving straight into a sub menu, you find format, tabs, colon and blanking as choices. You select tabs with CONTROL T and you can then enter your margin settings and your tab stops. When you want to confirm that what you have entered is what you want to happen, you press RETURN. But if you've got it all messed up - something we do with monotonous frequency with almost any program - then you press ESCAPE to get out of it and you can start again. The use of the escape key allows you to move between menus. If you incorrectly select a file menu instead of the disk menu, all you have to do is press ESCAPE and start again. Work disk Obviously you will want to save the information that you use. What. you need is a work disk. That's pretty easy to do. Go into the disk menu by pressing CONTROL D when you've got a blank disk in drive 2. The program will ask you if you want your disk formatted. If you say “Y” for yes the program asks you for a disk name and then formats the disk, calling it by the name you supply. (Here you should note that you need at least two disk drives to run The Incredible Jack as the program has to stay in drive 1 all the time. We think that is a drawback on a program which is so neat and so relatively cheap. And we believe that the programmer could find a way around it, But as it stands you need two disk drives.) With your data disk you can enter the calculations, templates, letters and forms. Full screen The Incredible Jack uses a full The big plus about this program is that it is extremely simple to use and the tutorial is one of the best we've ever seen. If you are someone without any computer experience whatsoever, you should be able to use The Incredible Jack within a few hours of switching on. If you're experienced with computers the time for the learning curve will be much less than that. With the program you have a relatively unsophisticated word pro- cessing system, a filing system and a mathematical facility all contained on the one disk. For many small businesses this would be almost everything that would be needed in order to write letters, prepare simple accounts, sort out quotations and maintain a mailing list. It is also the ideal way for the home user to build a part of the business functions of the computer into an Apple system. Seren for naming files in different If you're starting with a new disk —__ The Incredible Jack is not massive, =olumns, so that for example we can —-you're obviously going to have to _ itis not immensely flexible, it does not Gut letters in column one, forms in enter a new file name. Once you've contain a multitude of features. But it Solumn two and a calculation work done that you are back onto your {S_not intended to do any of these Sheet in column three. work sheet where you can enter data. things. . You automatically default back to Itis a unique package. i He disk menu which displays various When you've finished working on It allows you to write, to “use ns. your information, you hit CONTROL S mathematical calculations and to If you select the load option, a and the text will be saved under the —_refer to a simple address list without ‘prompt appears asking you to put the _file name you selected earlier. If you changing disks. And that, as they say Gursor over an existing file name or __ like you can print the file out or goon —_ on television, is incredible. Oo Be in a new file name. to a new one. Have you seen the other Gareth Powell Computer Magazines? Australian Business PC Report and The Australian Commodore Review Available from newsagents and computer stores, or by direct subscription ($18 for six issues, $36 for 12 issues of each magazine) from Gareth Powell Pty Ltd Top Rear, 4 Carrington Rd, Randwick, NSW 2031 10 SOFTWARE REVIEW Say it again, Sam by Gareth Powell Apple delivering the Gettysburg address. And after that it read out the soliloquy from “Hamlet”. OK, it didn't sound like Sir Laurence Olivier, nor yet Sir John Gielgud. It didn’t even sound like John Singleton. os But it was a voice. With pauses, stress, low notes, high notes, emotion. It did not sound like one of the Daleks from “Dr Who”. It sounded like someone speaking over a fairly old telephone. The worker of this miracle is a small board and program called SAM, which stands for the Software Automatic Mouth produced by Don't Ask Computer Software. (| am enraptured by the name of this company and can visualise all sorts of conversations. “Who do you work for?” “Don't ask’). Ls just been listening to my New generation This is one of a new generation of speech synthesisers. The originals all had flat, tinny monotone voices. Sometimes it was difficult to under stand what the devil they were saying, except whatever it was seemed horridly impolite. These early synthesisers used a “speech compression” of one sort or another. The way in which the system works is as follows. A phrase or word is recorded as a whole. Then using a piece of mathematical conjuring, the wave form produced by this phrase is transformed into a digital signal (all those Os and 1s that a computer understands) so that it can be saved on a silicon chip without taking up a lot of room. When a phrase is.needed it is simply called up from memory and transformed back into a waveform. Depending on the sophistication of the techniques and the quality of the loudspeaker, the sound ranges from barely adequate to quite acceptable. But you are, of course, restricted to those words or phrases you have recorded and then programmed into the chip. As there is only a finite amount of space the numbers of words or sentences available to you are limited. Unlimited vocabulary SAM is an unlimited vocabulary (and, indeed, an unlimited language) speech synthesiser. It achieves this by breaking speech down into phonemes - these are the atoms, the building bricks of spoken speech. And there are a lot fewer of these phonemes than you imagine. With English you can make a reasonable stab at reproducing the English language with just forty of them. But a phoneme is not the beginning and the end. Timing is everything Therefore you need a way to introduce a time for the phoneme to sound and a time for blending one phoneme into another. Using these controls you can specify timing, intonation and inflection. The end result can be quite excellent, providing you are willing to experiment and use a_ phonetic language which looks not at all like the English you are used to. For example “baby’ comes out as “BEY4BIY” while “transportation” comes out as “TRAESNZPOHRTEY4SHUN”. Not the simplest langage in the world to write, but the end results are eminently satisfactory. It is important to use a reasonable loudspeaker in a good case with this new generation of voice synthesisers, otherwise no matter what you do, the sound will come out tinny. To demonstrate how versatile a speech synthesiser like SAM can be, | wrote a small program for it to speak three short sentences in Cantonese, a language of immense subtlety and using seven tones to each word. The sentences were quite compre- hensible. Which means that the synthesiser is a lot smarter than | am. When | speak Cantonese (admittedly with a Welsh accent) | frequently misunderstood. am very Issue warnings This relatively inexpensive form of speech synthesiser (I paid under a hundred dollars for mine, but a half smart electronic technician could wire one up from the several kits available for less than that) means that my computers can now talk. And, better still, issue warnings to anyone who is using, say, a word processing program, and is about to do something horribly wrong like wipe twenty pages of copy. Then, the computer can speak up loud and clear and say “Save it first, you drongo”. Or some other suitable phrase. I've programmed mine to say far worse things than that but | am, after all, a journalist. Getting a computer to talk is relatively easy. But can we get them to listen? Voice recognition | think the answer at the moment is probably not. I've tested a multiplicity of boards attempting give this effect and the state of the art is probably the board produced by Texas Instruments for their fairly professional personal computer. It is true that it does react to certain commands. And it is true that it does achieve a very high level of voice recognition. But not nearly high enough. k There is very little point in having a computer that understands instruct ions like “save”, “stop” and “print”. These can all be far more easily catered for with a single key stroke. What is needed is a computer to which you can dictate letters. If a personal computer cannot format and type out a letter direct from voice dictation, then in my opinion, that computer does not have voice recognition. And as far as | know there is no computer in the world that fulfils that criteria. Yet. Airline answering device In Finland there have been some amazing breakthroughs in this area But, there is still a long way to go. | tested a fairly esoteric and immensely expensive set-up in the United States that was programmed to operate as an answering device for an airline. The conversation went something like this. “Good morning, where would you like to travel?” “Hong Kong.” “Hong Kong. We have flights leaving every day of the week. What day would you like to travel?” At this stage | inadvertently sneezed. “Thursday,” said the computer. Voice recognition still has a long way to go. But synthesised speech is already here and readily available. If you use it for nothing more than making a computerised game of strip poker a little more lively (1 have, it does) it seems to me worth the price. oO DIRECT SUBSCRIPTION The Australian Apple Review Please enrol me for ... issues subscription to the Australian Apple Review, commencing with the ... ... issue. | enclose postal order/cheque for$... ... NM r ios sec celts cece sesaves ese es inne, ce eas seeenes tate, Goa SS AOMOSS! 25% Gee aus wists Postcode... ....... (Please print in BLOCK letters) Rates within Australia Subscription rate for 6 issues $18.00 Subscription rate for 12 issues $36.00 The Australian Apple Review Top Rear, 4 Carrington Rd, Randwick, NSW 2031. A word on the care and maintenance of your micro computer... ES A regular maintenance program helps prevent data loss, errors and expensive service calls. And more — you can actually extend the life and improve the performance of your micro computer with Rexel Wilson Jones computer care products: @ Head cleaning kits for 514” mini disks and 8” flexible disk drives. ® Micro maintenance kit for computers, word processors, terminals and peripherals. @ V.D.U. cleaning kit for terminal screens and keyboards. @ Anti-static kit — for surrounding areas. © Type element cleaning kits for printwheel and golf balls. From office and computer supply specialists and wherever quality office equipment is sold. Getting the whole world organised New South Wales (02) 7361888. Victoria (03) 3298966. Queensland (07) 527866 1 12 HARDWARE REVIEW Further thoughts on the Apple IIc by Gareth Powell great length the new Apple llc, which we consider one of the major personal computers of our time. It is a machine which we believe will send Apple surging even further forward on the path to prosperity. But even at this early stage people are wondering about ways in which the machine is going to expand, ways in which the machine is going to be improved. The first obvious area is in the disk drive. At the moment Apple have made, in our opinion, the perfectly correct marketing decision to retain a standard five-and-a-quarter inch floppy disk drive built into the side of the machine. I n our last issue we reviewed at Twin drives? But there is no doubt that in the relatively near future (and how near that future is no one knows) the single drive will be replaced with either one, or even possibly two, 3.5 inch, double- sided, double-density drives from Sharp, with whom Apple have a working arrangement. * When that happens we will have effectively four disk drives with a total capacity of something approaching two megabytes. There will be four disk drives because on the newest systems each side of the disk is addressed as if it were a disk drive. What this will mean to the machine is that for word processing we will be looking at packages that access the disk as if it was virtual memory. Where else do we see changes? Go faster stripes The 65CO2 can probably be given some extra speed. At the moment this new microprocessor has a clock speed of 1.023 Megahertz and will perform up to 500,000 eightbit operations per second. It would not be a task of insuperable magnitude for that clock speed to be doubled. Apple’s Lisa, and to a lesser extent the Macintosh, have been criticised for not being quite as fast as one could wish. There are few applications for the llc where extra speed is needed, but there is no doubt that in those applications - _ specifically spread sheets — it would be extremely welcome. The 65CO2 is a CMOS (comple mentary metal oxide semi-conductor) the implementation of the 6502 microprocessor which has served Apple so well over the years. It is an extension of the 6502's instruction set with 27 new instructions, and offers faster graphics and _ arithmetic operations. It runs, as we have already said, virtually all existing Apple II software. But new software will be written to take advantage of the new instruction sets and this new software will not in itself be compatible with the lle and the II+. The lic extends the use of custom- designed integrated circuits beyond that of the original Ile design. Apple lic, monitor and stand Integrated circuits There's an input/output unit and a memory management unit, plus a custom timing generator chip that generates several time and control signals and a general logic unit that provides logic control required by the system. The disk controller unit is the same as the disk controller used on the Macintosh and is a one-chip, large- scale integrated LSI version of the disk controller originally designed by Steve Wozniak for the Apple Il. It is referred to as the IWM, and (if somebody isn’t seriously pulling our leg) we're assured that stands for the integrated Woz machine. The increased use of LSI (large- scale integrated) ICs has permitted Apple to reduce the number of chips in the llc. It has sixteen 64K bit Random Access Memory chips which gives the computer a standard 128K bytes of RAM. Besides these RAM ICs the IIc only has 21 chips. Fewer chips This is quite amazing when you consider that it is three chips fewer @n the number of non-RAM ICs in b= Ile. despite the fact that many of © functions performed by cards as the disk controller, the serial eriaces, the 80-column circuitry so on are included in the llc as dard. With the Ilc there are of eno slots readily accessible to user. Apple have clearly made the cision that portability and ease of = are of far greater importance than ansion possibility. __ The lic is marketed specifically for e who have no desire to mess d with the hardware. (For people 9 like to mess around, the Ile will @ continue) Nevertheless the IIc lends itself to = quite dramatic improvements, we may see implemented by or even outside suppliers — relatively near future. The Ilc comes with the Apple's ently-released ProDOS operating |. This offers a considerable crease in performance over the al 3.3 of the lle. ProDOS includes UNIX-like file "Stuctures compatible with the Apple / operating system. Not much point, We admit, in that the Apple /// appears @ long last to be going down the gurgie. Apart from the thousands of Software producers panting in the wings with their new offerings, Apple Memselves are introducing a new set @ software for the IIc including an Wiegrated database management, word processing and spread sheet @rogram; an Apple Logo which can ‘eke advantage of the vastly expanded memory, Apple Educational Classics and a communications program called Apple Access II. The last one is interesting because He lic does not currently have a built i modem. The IIc Read Only Memory @ppears on the surface to be very similar to the Ile ROM as far as programmers are concerned. In actual fact it was redone almost ‘completely. Most interestingly a series of 32 graphic characters were stalled in the character generator ROM. These characters, which Apple call Mouse Text, are a series of icons Gesigned to let programmers set up a users interface very similar to that found in the Lisa and the Macintosh. Enter the mouse This means that we will be seeing Mouse-controlled Ilcs and we will also be seeing icons on the llc screen before very long. These characters, incidentally, can be called directly and therefore it will be much faster to move them around the screen than the bitmapped characters which are a feature of the Macintosh. The fultscreen flat panel display Apple hope to introduce later this year comes from Sharp. It is a liquid crystal display which works off a series of individual pixels twice as high as they are wide. This makes the characters in the display appear somewhat flat. However, even in the 80-column display mode the characters appear very crisp and the display produces quite remarkable — high-resolution graphics. LCD display It is stated that the liquid crystal display panel will have three graphics modes: low resolution — 40 horizontal by 48 vertical; high resolution - 280 horizontal by 192 vertical; double-high resolution - 560 horizontal by 192 vertical. In truth we can't see how this is going to work but no doubt all will come clear when we see the finished machine working with its liquid crystal display units. What the Apple llc lacks as far as we're concerned is a modem. There is no doubt that at some time in the very near future we will see a modem included in the IIc. C/PM software Whether we will ever see a Z-80 card added - the other obvious omission -— is another question altogether. The use of C/PM software is a fairly major area with Apple. Z-80 cards are one of the most common additions to Side view of Apple llc showing disk drive the Apple ||. We cannot see why there should be any major problems including a Z80 circuitry in the design as it stands, and it may be that we will see this in the near future. Taking it from the top, we can say that as it stands the IIc is one of the most desirable computers we have ever tested We can also look forward to the possible implementation of some of the Macintosh/Lisa software in the near future. Future thoughts? A little further into the future it is quite possible that we will see one or even two micro disk drives built in instead of the current five-and-a- quarter inch floppy disk drive. It is also possible that we will see a modem installed which will be working at 300 baud at least and possibly 1, 200 baud. It is also quite likely that we will see an implementation of the Z-80 chip so that the machine can run C/PM software. If you want sky blue yonder stuff, we think that at some stage another version of the IIc will become available which will use the guts of the Macintosh as its base and will provide the user with half a Megabyte of Random Access Memory. There is no doubt that it can technically be done. It will be up to the marketing department of Apple - a group of people who appear to be collectively absolutely on the ball — to decide whether such machine would be a world-wide winner. We know that this is true of the llc. We suspect it would be true of such a hybrid machine. Apple in the lead The Apple llc firmly establishes Apple's position as one of the two major companies in the hardware computer market It will need a revolution of major dimensions to move it from that position. O 13 14 HARDWARE REVIEW The new Scribe colour printer by Duncan McCann described in our last issue is a plain-paper thermal printer with colour capability. That needs some explaining. We got it wrong. When we first read about it we were imagining all sorts of complex thermal-printing techniques. What in fact the Scribe does is print on almost any paper surface - we understand it can even print on projection transparencies. It has two resolution modes and can either operate at high speed at 80 characters per second or it can produce letter-quality printing at 50 characters per second. It is relatively quiet. Where we got misled was in thinking that the print head worked without a ribbon rather like the old Silentype. In fact, the print head consists of 24 resistance elements that are arrayed in a vertical column. When the machine is printing the head presses against a ribbon. This ribbon is made of polyester and uses a carbon-filled paraffin ink. The resistance elements in the head pulse briefly which heats them and melts the ink to deposit on the paper. We're now moving into the area of extremely high technology. The design of the print head permits a resistance element (and remember there are 24 of them) to rise to a temperature above 150 degrees Celsius and then to drop to below 35 degrees Celsius within the space of several hundred microseconds. The lower range is well below the melting point of the paraffin wax in the ribbon The result is that the letters do not smudge one into the other. The dot resolution of the Scribe can range as high as 63 horizontal by 52 vertical dots per square centimetre in letter mode. There are two ribbons which you can use with the Scribe. One is all black for standard printing and the other is a colour ribbon that has different colours laid out in consecutive bands. Although Te new Scribe printer which we transfer Apple Macintosh there are only three colours, the Scribe, by placing dots close together, gives the impression of providing a seven-colour spectrum. The Scribe, priced at around $500 odd retail, is not ideal for an office situation where there is going to be a vast throughput of printing. That is because of the cost of the ribbons. A black ribbon will provide about 80,000 characters and will cost something between seven and ten dollars. Working it out very quickly, that's about 12,000 words or over 20 cents for a medium-length letter. Colour ribbons are going to cost as much as $14. This means that the Scribe will be ideal for use where high throughput of printing is not required and a very quiet printer which can produce colour graphics is. If you are willing to put up with fairly low-quality printing, it is possible to rewind the black ribbon and run it through at least three times. We know because we've seen it done. But the end result is something less than satisfactory. There is no doubt that with this Scribe machine Apple have made a major breakthrough, which is going to create a fairly substantial stir in the electronic printing area. For example it is only a few weeks ago that we were testing the C Itoh 8510C, which we considered to be, for a colour printer, a good buy at around $1,400. This card was almost immediately trumped by Hewlett Packard announcing a colour printer in the $900 area. How they are going to compete with Apple, offering this colour printer at $500+, beggars the imagination. It may be that a case could be put forward for these other dot matrix printers in that they will not require their ribbons replaced so frequently and they will not cost as much to run. Possibly. But we believe that the design of the Scribe and the way in which it fits so well with not only the IIc, but also the Macintosh and the Lisa, means that once again Apple have stolen a march on all their competitors. Oo Apple Scribe colour printer by Gareth Powell 0 you have to be able to write Deezer: to use an Apple computer? Before we rush in with the obvious snap answer of no, of course not, ffs think about it for a while. It is Perfectly possibie to drive a car without having the faintest idea how the combustion engine works. But Here is no doubt that you will be a Better-equipped user and buyer if you do know some basic mechanics. You can eat at a first rate festaurant and not have the faintest ‘Gea of the ingredients of the various @shes and still enjoy yourself. But you will enjoy eating more if you Snow something about the food and %s preparation. You can take great pictures with a 35mm camera and not have the intest idea what is going on when you press the shutter release. But I'm willing to bet good money you will ‘eke better pictures if you have at ast a vague idea of how your ‘emera works. Similar logic The same logic applies to learning e simplest elements of programming # you are going to own an Apple. Sure, you can operate an Apple on Me basis that what is going on inside %S white man’s magic and you just ‘ont want to know about it, thank you wy much. Lots and lots of people do. Possibly the larger percentage of opie owners. But | think an “mderstanding of how programming works, why BASIC is such a popular ‘naquage, how a program is designed 26 constructed, will help you to get greater use and enjoyment from eur Apple. And learning the rudiments of grogramming is not difficult. Sure, all those bearded men with ‘erduroy trousers and boiled lollies in ér pockets would have you believe = is a difficult and arcane art ing understood only by members of the Australian Computer Society. It is, in my opinion, in the interests of most employees of data process- ing departments to see that the great unwashed (that's you and me) should be kept in.a state of blissful ignorance in case they suddenly realise that the ‘emperor has no clothes. And that a personal computer can, indeed, take over many of the tasks previously held sacred to a group who called themselves “computer professionals” who are huddled in a_ protective laager around their mainframes against the onslaught of the personal computer. Simplistic no So when we ask the question, do you need to know programming to use and enjoy an Apple, the first and simplistic answer is no, of course not Almost any problem that can arise in the world of personal computers has almost certainly been solved somehow, somewhere by a pro fessional programmer, and it is unlikely you will be able to do it better. There is little point in re-inventing the wheel when you could be doing something far more profitable and enjoyable with your time. Yet | am of the view that it is almost essential for you to know at least the rudiments of programming if you are ever going to get the full benefit of your Apple. In this magazine we are opposed to jargon and the obscure language so beloved of professional pro- grammers. And we have taken a very gentle line on programming, feeling too much on programming would frighten readers off. And we are probably right in that belief. But now the time has come to say that while we are really not into running courses for absolute begin- ners in BASIC, we think that anyone with an Apple should at least try to see whether they can grasp the rudiments. All goodies To check on this growing belief | have been using a series of programs that teach you to write in BASIC, your basic, as it were, personal computer programming language. And all of them, without exception, were well written, well conceived and well documented. | have not yet found a dud. Remarkable. They take the absolute beginner step by step (that is, in fact, the name of one of the programs) through the essential elementary details of programming. At the end of a short course of these programs you certainly couldn't write a full scale accountancy package. But you should be able to write at least a simple program that would set up, for example, a personal telephone directory. There are, of course, some people who find immense satisfaction in writing programs. They are much the same sort of people who enjoy solving crosswords, playing chess, or working out wiring diagrams. They become happy home hackers because they enjoy pro- gramming for its own sake. I'm not talking about them. rm talking of programming of a much lower order, where programs can be amended, adapted, adjusted, so your needs and requirements are precisely catered for. Getting to that level of expertise is extremely easy, and anyone should be able to do it in a week of spare time study. The lessons | have been looking at ranged over several titles. Don’t worry about whether your local computer shop stocks precisely 15 16 the program | mention. As | said earlier, | have tested dozens and they all seem remarkably good. Two | have had great fun with are “Micromedia Basic Tutor’ which appears to be a home publishing venture by “Stephen's Graphics Company” and “Hand Holding Basic” by Neil Bennett published by Apple Computer. Australian connection The last was by far and away the most interesting, It appears to have been originally published by Apple in America in 1980. The author, N.W. Bennett is, | am fairly certain, an Australian, as the book is dedicated to various Australian personal computer luminaries includ- ing two from the University of Wollongong and to Rudi Hoess who was then the founding _ father, presiding genius and owner of Electronic Concepts. “Hand Holding Basic” is not solely a tutorial on programming although there is no doubt it can be used as such. As a program it has two unique features. Firstly it will not allow you to write a single line of a program that is not absolutely perfectly acceptable to the computer. Secondly it lets you see what a program is doing while it is running. Once you have learned something about programming you will quickly find that “Hand Holding Basic” is also a useful debugging tool which can very quickly help you to sort out a problem program. There are, literally, hundreds’ of books and programs to let you learn the lingua franca of personal computers —- BASIC. Choose one at random and see if you can’t pick up just the BASIC basics. It is well worth the effort. Please understand that_| am not suggesting that you HAVE to learn BASIC to enjoy this magazine. You don't even have to know English very well, the way that it is written. But | do honestly believe that an idea of how programs are constructed will add to the pleasure of your Apple computer.) Tips and Techniques have had an APPLE for just over 1 five years now, and | usually find a new problem every time | write a program. My latest machine is the Apple //e, and | am programming with the Extended 80 Column Text Card. | have discovered that this card does not like the INVERSE and NORMAL commands. PRINT CHR$ (15) replaces INVERSE, and PRINT CHR$ (14) ‘replaces NORMAL PRINT CHR$ (21) deactivates the card. It is essential to deactivate the card before accessing another |/O port, such as a printer in slot #1. A summary of these commands can be found on pages 45 and 46 of the 80 Column Text Card Manual. Subroutines are the heart of any basic program. If there is a routine that you will use more than once, then you should go to it with a GOSUB. Here are some that | am sure you will find very useful. FOIE IIASA IIE | have always taken a dislike to the flashing cursor, sitting there waiting for me to press a key, so | always use this little routine. What- ever you do, don’t forget the semicolons, or the screen will scroll up one line. 18000 18010 REM PAUSE WITHOUT CURSOR VTAB 23: HTAB 10: INVERSE: PRINT “ANY KEY TO CONTINUE”: NORMAL WAIT -16384,128: POKE - 16368,0 VTAB 23: HTAB 10: PRINT“ “REM 20 SPACES RETURN 18020 18030 18040 THESIS OHI III I IES When | build, add to, or delete part of a string, | always call for confirmation, before the final con- struction or destruction takes place. by Graham P. Black At this stage; if | have made a mistake, | can abort and start again. For this | use the following sub- routine. 48100 REM CONFIRM (Y/N) 18110 VTAB 23: HTAB 13: PRINT CHR$(7); “CONFIRM (Y/N) “- GET AN$: PRINT AN$; IFAN$<) “Y” AND ANS < “N” THEN 18110 VTAB 23: HTAB 13: PRINT “ “ REM 18120 18130 14 SPACES 18140 RETURN The PRINT CHR§(7) simply draws my attention to the prompt in line 18110. Line 18120 is the error trap which will only let you type “Y” or “N”. Line 18130 erases the message before returning to the main body of the program where you decide what to do with your answer. SASS IASI EIEIO This next one is one method of rounding off the dollars and cents, and putting them: into a string with a length of 7 characters ready to print. ie. X=45:X$=" 4.50" 18200 REM RIGHT JUSTIFY DOLLARS AND CENTS 18210 X$=STR$(INT(X* 100 + 5) 18220 N=LEN(X$) 18230 IFN) 2 THEN X$ =LEFT$ (X$,N-2) +4.” + RIGHTS (x$,2) 18240 an THEN X$ = “0.0” + x 18250 eee THEN X$ = “0.” + x 18260 X$="“ “+ X$: X$ = RIGHTS (X$,7) 18270 RETURN TEI EOE SSIS IOI III III CONCATENATION:- STRING$ manipulation is a very portant part of basic programming. When you use GET ANS, as a Type it in and try it for yourself. “This is the method used in a data general rule, always follow it with a Also try it without the PRINT in line Base program for storing information PRINT statement, especially if you 100 and see what happens. The % disk. Let us say, that for our files, are using DOS commands from second method makes sure that the we require NAME & PHONE within the program. The example <CONTROL-D is on a new line by WUMBER. In our program, we above is the exception to this rule issuing a carriage return first. INPUT this data in three separate because the screen will scroll up ‘Operations. First we require the one line if you insert a PRINT 10 D$ = CHR$ (13) + CHR$ (4): ame, so we call our variable NAS. statement, and no DOS command REM CHR$ (13) = <RETURN ext we require the area code, and will be issued at that point. When you 110 PRINT “PRESS ANY KEY “;: e will call this AC$. Last but not issue a DOS command it must be GET ANS: PRINT t, we require the phone number preceded by a <CONTROL-D 120 PRINT D$;"CATALOG” and this we will call PHS. We which must be the first character on must decide how many letters anew line. i.e. eT ie bed eee é will allow for each string. Let us ‘2ssume that no name will exceed 25 10 D$ = CHR$ (4): REM CHRS (4) = Do you use the RENUMBER Characters in length, and that the <CONTROL-D program on your (Europlus) System phone number will contain no more 100 PRINT “PRESS ANY KEY “;: Master disk? Do you have trouble in 14 characters, including area GET ANS: PRINT with it changing some of your code and separators. When the data 110 PRINT D$;"CATALOG” formulas as well as the line | been entered, we must check to ke sure that it does not exceed limit, and that it is exactly the ght length, so that we will always 300 INPUT “PHONE NUMBER: “;PH$ ow exactly where to find the data 310 REM - IF THE LENGTH OF PH$ IS GREATER within the string. | always insert 320 REM- THAN 7 THEN GOTO LINE 300 AND space between each string as | 330 REM- ENTER IT AGAIN. emble the main string. By doing 340 IF LEN (PH$) 7 THEN 300 , looking at the string, | can see 350 REM - IF THE LENGTH OF PH$ IS LESS THAN ctly where each component part 360 REM-—7 THEN ADD ““ TO PHS. located. This method also sets 370 IF LEN (PH$) < 7 THEN PH$ = ““ + PHS ings up so that the string can be 380 REM - INSERT “-“ IN PHS. Printed “as is’. The string STS will 390 PH$ = LEFT$ (PH$,3) + ““ + RIGHTS (PH$,4): ow have a length of 40 characters. 400 REM - DISPLAY ALL 3 STRINGS SO THAT Our strings will look something like 410 REM - THEY CAN BE CHECKED. Tis: 420 HOME 430 VTAB 8: HTAB 1: PRINT NAS 440 VTAB 10: HTAB 15: PRINT AC$;” “;PH$ 450 REM-— CONFIRM THAT ALL ENTRIES ARE 460 REM- CORRECT BEFORE THE FINAL 470 REM - ASSEMBLY OF THE STRING. 480 GOSUB 18010: REM CONFIRM (Y/N) 490 REM - IF THE DATA IS NOT CORRECT THEN REM ENTER NAME AS NAS. 500 REM - GO BACK AND START AGAIN. BINPUT" NAME: “;NAS 510 IF AN$ = “N" THEN 10 D REM — IF THE LENGTH OF NAS IS GREATER 520 REM - IT IS NOWTIME TO ASSEMBLE REM - THAN 25 THEN GOTO LINE 100 AND 530 REM- THE 3 STRINGS WITH A SPACE D REM- ENTER IT AGAIN. 540 REM - BETWEEN EACH ONE AND CALL IF LEN (NAS) 25 THEN 100 550 REM- THEM ST$. REM - IF THE LENGTH OF NA$ IS LESS THAN 560 ST$ = NAS +““ +AC$ +“ “+ PHS J REM - 25 THEN ADD ““ TO NAS. 570 REM - DISPLAY ST$. DIF LEN (NA$) < 25 THEN NAS = NA$ +“: GOTO 120 580 VTAB 12: HTAB 1: PRINT ST$ INPUT“ AREA CODE: “;AC$ 590 END REM - IF THE LENGTH OF AC$ IS GREATER REM - THAN 3 THEN GOTO LINE 180 AND 18100 REM CONFIRM (Y/N) REM - ENTER IT AGAIN. 18110 VTAB 23: HTAB 13: PRINT CHR§$(7);"CONFIRM (Y/N) “;: GET DIF LEN(AC$))_ 3 THEN 180 ANS REM- IF THE LENGTH OF AC$ IS LESS THAN 18120 IFAN$ <__“Y" ANDAN$ <)“N” THEN 18110 REM-3 THEN ADD ““ TO ACS. 18130 VTAB 23: HTAB 13: PRINT “ “ REM 14 IF LEN (AC$) < 3 THEN AC$ = “ “ + AC$: GOTO 250 SPACES REM — AC$ IS NOW THE CORRECT LENGTH 18140 REM- THE SEMICOLON IS NECESSARY TO REM-SO NOW ADD THE BRACKETS. 18150 REM- STOP THE SCREEN FROM SCROLLING 18160 REM- UP ONE LINE. REM-"(..)" 18170 RETURN ACS ="(" + ACS +)" ‘ 18 APPLE APPLE APPLE APPLE APPLE APPLE APPLE APPLE. APPLE APPLE APPLE APPLE APPLE APPLE APPLE APPLE APPLE APPLE APPLE APPLE APPLE APPLE APPLE APPLE APPLE APPLE APPLE APPLE APPLE APPLE APPLE APPLE APPLE APPLE APPLE APPLE APPLE APPLE APPLE APPLE APPLE APPLE APPLE APPLE APPLE APPLE APPLE APPLE APPLE APPLE Please see your nearest computer retailer Orting the STAR hotine for details, TALKTOUS _ TAR instar worps Distributed by 1-3 Rodborough Rd; Frenchs Forest 2086. Phone (02) 452 5231 PROGRAMMING numbers? RENUMBER has a bug which has never been corrected (It may have been corrected for the //e — | have not checked). All you need to do is LOAD RENUMBER, and type the two following pokes:- JPOKE 4789,172 JPOKE 4790,171 Now put a formatted disk in the drive and type SAVE RENUMBER. | have not tried the RENUMBER program on the //e System Master, but it appears to be different, and may well have been corrected. (Don't quote me. Try it for yourself and see what happens. These pokes certainly fix the older versions.) SORIA IOI IEE Would you like to have some fun with some POKEs? Here are the addresses for the first and last character of each line — lines are 40 characters long. You must obtain the ASCII value for each letter and add 152. ie. the ASCII code for ‘A’ is 65. Now add 152 and you get 193 (for NORMAL mode. Don't add anything if you want it INVERSE, If you want to print the word APPLE ][ on the 10th line at column 13, then you would type the following (with or without the line number): 100 POKE 1333,193: POKE 1334,208: POKE 1335,208: POKE 1336,204: POKE 1337,197: POKE 1339,221: POKE 1340,219 You can also do it ina FOR NEXT loop, with the aid of DATA state ments, like this 10REM A,P,P,L,E,,],[ 20 DATA 193,208,208,204,197,32, 221,219 100 HOME 110 FOR1= 1333 TO 1340 120 READ X 130 IF X= 32 THEN NEXT: REM SPACE 140 POKE |X 150 NEXT! Line # POKE address 00 ... 1024 - 1063 01... 1152-1191 02 ... 1280-1319 03 ... 1408 - 1447 04... 1536-1575 05 ... 1664-1703 06 ... 1792 - 1831 07 ... 1920-1959 08 ... 1064 - 1103 09 ... 1192-1231 10... 1320-1359 11... 1448-1487 12... 1576-1615 13...1704-1743 14... 1832-1871 15... 1960 - 1999 16...1104-1143 17 ..1232-1271 18... 1360 - 1399 19... 1488-1527 20 ... 1616-1655 21... 1744-1783 22 ... 1872-1911 23 ... 2000 - 2039 To find out what the ASCII codes are, type in this little program. 5 HOME 10 FOR |=190 TO 255 20 PRINT “CHR$ (“s1;”) = “1, 30 NEXT HAVE FUN!!! eereeeenerteeterererrc roses’ Here is something for the BUG- HUNTER to ponder over. Enter this little beauty exactly as shown. To get it up and running, DO NOT type RUN. Type GOSUB5 from the keyboard and enter “ERR” at the INPUT prompt. 5 _INPUT A$: RETURN 100 TEXT: HOME: VTAB 10: PRINT “APPLESOFT ERROR” Now delete line 100 by typing 100 <RETURN and try again. eereceerccceecrece Ccmtcercn HELP!!! Can sore kind person please tell me how to activate the underscore cursor when using the 80 column card? | cannot find it in any of the manuals that came with my //e. THEI SHE EE SHSIIIIIIE outdated e are all going to have to be very careful that we do not let the personal computer be- le a plaything of fashion. ause computers are so fascinat ng, there is a terrible temptation to int the latest development as soon it appears on the market. That inges the computer from being a king machine into a trendy status symbol. | have just looked at two situations where people have perfectly compet- Apple computers, working exactly the way they want, producing the result they want in the way that They want. In both cases, the Apples have an immense amount of as yet untapped power. And in both cases the owners @re wondering whether they should upgrade to a newer, bigger, better, more powerful computer with bells and whistles. Need they, too, dress like Charlie Chaplin and boast they have a PC? Do they need to spend all that extra money? E The answer is almost certainly no. Positive inertia The fictional detective Nero Wolfe advocated a policy of “positive inertia” in solving problems. It is a policy that we would recommend to many owners of personal computers. lf your Apple is doing what you want without any major problems, then before you go charging down to your local computer store to get the latest whizz-bang special, just ask yourself what you are lacking and whether in fact your Apple cannot provide the extra for you with some small modifications. Many users are unaware of the number of possible ways to use, extend and expand an Apple ‘computer. How can you find out if you are getting the maximum out of your Apple? You can find out if you are getting enough value out of your investment in your machine by keeping a weekly log. If your Apple is being used for less than 10 hours of the week then you are not getting value for your money. The last thing you need is a newer, bigger computer. Putting it to work What you need is to put your Apple to work. Remember the Apple is not in the union. It does not know about restrictions on working hours. And it doesn't get bored. There is no point in letting sleeping Apples lie. It is well worth waking them up and using them to the full limit of their potential. The bottlenecks The best way of looking at enhancing and using your Apple is to look for the bottlenecks. Many of these bottlenecks have a very simple solution. Let us take a good example. If you have a printer hanging off your Apple, it can stop the computer working for many hours of the day. Simply because the Apple is able to feed out the information at a very high rate but the printer can only accept it at a slow rate. The answer here is of course not to buy a new computer nor yet to slow down the printer (amazing to believe that one computer manu- facturer recommends that very course of action). The answer is to buy a “buffer’. This is a very simple and relatively cheap mechanism which can accept all information from the Apple at its highest possible speed. It will then ration it out to the printer at the Why your Apple is far from speed at which accept it. As soon as you have finished a document and dumped it into the buffer, the Apple is again free for more work. Now this may not appear to speed up the Apple. And in a theoretical sense of course it does not. But in a real sense it does exactly that, because it frees the computer for other tasks. The cost of buying such a buffer is approximately one-twentieth the cost of buying a computer. the printer can Disbelieve myths Do not believe the widely held myth that a 16-bit computer is necessarily faster than an 8-bit Apple. It just is not so. In some cases an 8-bit Apple can operate faster than a 16-bit computer in certain types of programs. But if you feel that your Apple is not working fast enough for you, then you can use a “go-faster’ board. CompuMusic in Sydney have the Accelerator, which can triple the speed of your Apple. Whisper it not in Gath and tell it not in the streets of Askelon, but we have used an American “go faster’ board that took the Apple from a standard clock speed of one megahertz to just over eleven. Bearing in mind that the IBM PC ig set at 4.77, you can see that is very quick indeed. However, so cleverly designed is this board that the United States government has decided it is a strategic weapon and may not be exported to Australia in case those damn Russians get hold of it. True. Miserly memory? It is indeed true that 64K of Random Access. Memory seems miserly nowadays. (Although when 19 ARTICLE would you use more except in a large spreadsheet? You are going to write “War and Peace” with chap- ters?) There was always a theoretical limitation on an 8-bit computer but this has now been overcome by the elegant system of bank switching. There are lots of boards that will give you more memory than you know what to do with. The semi-rotund Harry Harper at Zofarry will fit you up with an extra 256K in double smart time. Do you have any concept how large a spreadsheet you can make with that much memory? Enough to keep the board of BHP happy. Where such memory comes in very handy is when you can pretend that it is a disk drive and load a program on to it. Then instead of the computer having to repeatedly access the real disk drive - which can be a time-consuming business — it can obtain the information from the pseudo disk which is the extra RAM card. This makes some accountancy programs operate at three times the speed User-definable keys Another area where you may feel your Apple is lacking is that of user definable keys. These are keys which can be defined to enter in a series of pieces of information that otherwise you would have to laboriously type in before you started using, say, a word processing program. But there are several software programs that allow you to do just that. And you can always add-on a numeric keypad. Indeed, you can buy totally new keyboards to fit on to your Apple which have more than enough user-definable keys. And they are a lot cheaper than buying a new computer. There is always a temptation to have the newest, fastest, biggest. But think about this. ~ If you get rid of your trusty Apple to buy a new, flash, whizz-bang marvel it is you that will be the guinea pig. It is you that will be discovering the bugs. And bugs there will be, we can assure you Sometimes it is better to be on the blunt edge of technology. Let some other sucker do the pioneering. oO 20 ended last month in Chicago. There was an immense amount to see and an immense amount to learn. Much of it has nothing to do directly with Apple users, but a lot of the products could be regarded as straws in the wind indicating the way in which Apple computers might be moving in the near future. Its difficult to put it into a coherent pattern and perhaps the best way that we can report it is to take snippets. It's not just the computer industry that has got great problems with pricing and compatibility. The video cassette market is in a similar state of shambles. One of the greatest complaints that was being made at the show came from the advertising manager of TDK who said “The Koreans claim they can pay $5 a day to their workers — that's great but what about the quality you get when you pay that kind of money?”. Well, in our experience, the quality of the stuff that comes out of Korea is absolutely firstrate, including the monitor for the Apple Ile. Another marketer from SKC charged that the major manufact- urers were creating the problem “They're not controlling the market. They promiscuously sell to anybody without controlling prices.” A song we have all heard before. Obviously there’s going to be a shake-out in the video cassette market in exactly the same way as we're going to see a shake-out in the computer market. The Consumer Electronics Show awarded prizes for the best design and engineering shown in various products. The computer award was won by the Apple llc, which will come as no surprise to anyone who reads this magazine. Te Consumer Electronics Show Computer-compatible typewriters Smith-Corona produced three new computer-compatible typewriters for the show, featuring the company’s work erase correction system. This can delete entire words at the touch of a single button, by utilizing a built in| memory which counts blank spaces between words. Prices were all around the $500 mark. Interactive video disk RDI Video Systems were showing an interactive video disk system This system incorporates speech- recognition and artificial intelligence with a vocabulary of over two hundred words and operates off a modified Pioneer laser disk player. Its basically for the arcade game market and will be selling for somewhere around $2,000. It should only be a matter of time before this sort of technology becomes available in personal computers. New keyboard A new keyboard which will bypass the standard keyboard on_ the computer was announced by Koala Technologies. This was called “Muppet Learning Keys’, a computer peripheral that simulated the contents of @ child's school desk. The Mylar surface of the board depicts various children’s learning @ oing Apple Ile CPU/keyboard and monitor B tools - compass, ruler, eraser — and it seems ideal for the pre-school ankle biters. This unit will be available for the Apple //e and llc and the Commodore 64. Probably it will be on sale here next year at a price somewhere under $100 Female market The Executive Vice-President of the Neon Software Company said that “The audio business made the mistake of ignoring the female market and the computer industry is making the same mistake.” Understandably, he was promoting a Women’s Wear fine of computer software. “Not only has the computer business become an office-oriented, male-dominated field, but the retail settings are becoming very stand offish. It can be difficult for a woman who is looking to get into computers.” This software is totally designed for the female market and is packaged ike women's clothing complete with a hanger and price tag. Wico mice A board which would provide a Mouse capability to standard Apple I! Apple IIc, mouse, flat LCD screen and modem. machines was announced by Wico Company, which produces a superior line of joysticks. The package is designed to give cursor capabilities to earlier machines. Quotes A good quote from this show came from a dealer working out of Colorado. He said: “| think the software people are finally figuring out just how the computers work.” On the other hand a dealer from Avon, Massachusetts, said: “From what I've seen so far | would say there is a lack of really innovative software.” A Dutch distributor disagreed. “| think the quality of software is getting better.” Epson Elf and Fuji floppies Epson, the Japanese company with a firm base in the United States, introduced the Elf, is a hand-size colour television with a minute liquid crystal screen. Look to see this sort of technology extended to computers in the near-future. Fuji announced some of the new 3.5 inch (9 cm) disks with a capacity of one megabyte, which looks like being the standard for next year. In the show report it was announced that these disks would have a capacity of “1,000K megabytes” which would make them the biggest memory disks in the history of the civilized world as we know it today. These errors happen to us all. Educational programs BroderBund, perhaps one of the best software publishers in the world, are now branching out in new directions. They are going heavily into the children’s educational field as well as adding to their Personal Productivity series. They will be producing a program which features the Muppets and they are also looking to introduce a Bank Street Filer and a Bank Street Mailer to join the Bank Street Writer and the Bank Street Speller in the firm’s line of high-selling simple word processing systems. Cheap printer Okidata rocked everyone by producing a fullcolour printer at $239. The printer uses thermal transfer printing technology - not unlike the Scribe - and at the moment will interface with Apple, Commodore and Atari computers and popular software programs. It is claimed that the printer works with letter-quality printing at 60 characters per second. Atari top-of-the-line Atari started to show a new top-of the-line computer which they say they will launch this year. Their vice- president of marketing said: “We will produce enough units of the new computer to satisfy demand this Christmas’, The new computer will have a double-sided double density disk drive, a modem, speech synthesiser and a database. It doesn’t sound too exciting but we'll have to wait and see. The Atari machines are going to be capable of running MS-DOS and Atari have announced that theyre going to introduce an expansion box which will enable owners of the 800XL also to be able to make use of that disk- operating system. 21 ARTICLE HARDWARE REVIEW Graph typewriter Brother, producers of the typewriters which so easily tie onto computers, have introduced a “type-A-graph” electronic typewriter which is capable of producing fourcolour graphs and is undoubtedly the world’s first. Dual disks An amazing forecast was made by Thomas R. Dusenberry, manager of sales promotion for Parker Brothers — one of the biggest games manufact- urers in the world. He said “The dual disk concept in video games, one side IBM and one side Apple, is the way most video games will be offered by January.” Parker Brothers will be introducing a series of programs to work on the IBM PC Junior and the Apple I! in this format which will reduce the number of display units that a dealer will need to carry. Dusenberry went on to say “We. solidly support the game business as long as its viable, and our sales and profits are up to this year in games. People still use their game equipment and are buying premium games.” In all truth we can’t see how this is going to work, but Parker Brothers have got a reputation for getting it right. Time alone will tell. Seiko screens Seiko introduced a screen which worked with 52,800 pixels each driven by a = matching _ thin-film transistor. The set was an amazing 5.08 centimetres across. Obviously if they can produce in colour working off pixels at that size the time of the ultra-portable colour computer cannot be far away. Seiko also showed their wrist information system, incorporating a wristworn computer with an LCD screen and a pocket keyboard and controller. Thats been on sale in America now for some months at $300-$400 and is very much the machine for the up-market executive. What it actually does is open to some debate. It replaces in a sense a diary but it takes up much more room and is difficult to use. However it makes the owner look on the cutting edge of technology. Oo 22 A silent printer for the Apple by Gareth Powell hy am | writing about a W Hewlett Packard product in an Apple users’ magazine? Simple. Hewlett Packard have produced a printer which is, in our opinion, going to change the face of personal computer printing permanently and irrevocably. They have come up with such an excellent product they didn’t even have one spare in Australia for us to test. So we had to borrow one in Hong Kong to write this review. The lengths we go to keep our readers happy. In our office one of the biggest problems has always been the noise of the printing machines attached to the computers. If you have ever heard two Qumes and two C.ltoh 8510s plus an Olympia typewriter all going at full chat you will realise that Dante's inspiration for his Inferno came a little too early in the piece for him to add the correct sound effects. There is a great line in “My Fair Lady” where Henry Higgins sings, “I rather would be willing, for a dentist to be drilling’. And that's exactly what our printers sound like when they are operating under full load- which is sadly most of the time. Solutions There are ways, of course, around this. There are ways around everything. The first is to build a large acoustic hood over your printer. The drawback is that these hoods take up a lot of space and cut down the speed and efficiency of your printer. The second way is to position your printer in a remote room of its own. We've tried this but it gets fairly difficult when the printer starts to jam with paper — it happens, you can believe it happens — and there is no one there to stop all that paper being wasted. In the end we decided to put up with the noise in order to have the printers within easy access. But there is no doubt that this sort of noise is a_ serious industrial problem in any sort of company and the noise from printers — dot matrix or daisy wheel — sometimes approaches the threshold of pain. Almost silent The new Hewlett Packard printer is almost totally silent. The technical figure claimed is less than 50 decibels, which is mouse quiet The makers happily claim you can make a telephone call while the machine is operating next to you. And they are correct. It is truly that quiet, and for this reason is the most revolutionary printer we have seen in recent years, apart from the laser of which more in a future issue. The price is eminently reasonable, well under $1,000, and despite the daft name that Hewlett Packard have used - Thinkjet - the machine is selling as fast as it can be made available. Which is why we were not able to test one in Australia. Are there any problems with this printer? There is one, but it is not serious, it can be avoided and hardly detracts from the printer at all. We'll come to thatin a minute. Previous experience There have, of course, been ink jet printers before. IBM had one that worked extremely well. But it was not cheap and there was a small problem in that the ink tended to clog in the jets. Hewlett Packard —- a company renowned for its intelligent engineer ing solutions — has come up with a new concept This is a disposable print head/ink reservoir, which resolves EE EOeEeEeEeEeErTrTSS,,t( et (‘aw S OOS ewlett Packard inkject printer 2225A for ever the problem of potential wear ® the jet itself. Nor does the problem of ink Getting loose and spraying around anise. (Previously ink jet printers have Geen known to suffer their moments o@ madness, which ended with tears and tantrums all round and people covered in ink). With the Thinkjet the print head Ssues ink droplets on demand by heating the ink and making a bubble mse to the surface. This is the same principle on which your coffee percolator works, but on an infinitely smaller .and more precisely controlled scale. As a result there is no recirculating ink, nothing to clog except for the little et itself. Now this jet can, of course, Become clogged if the printer is left unused for a while in dirty and desperate surroundings such as our Office. Built-in absorber With fiendish cunning Hewlett Packard have built in an absorber that works to keep the ink spraying orifice Clear. The absorbent pad to the left of the paper margin gets a fast blast from all jets before startup just to see they are clear. And if you do get dust on the print head and some of the characters become a little misty, a quick wipe with a tissue solves the problem immediately. The disposable ink container/jet is translucent plastic and you can easily see when you are out of ink. You can get about 500 pages of A4 typing from each of these disposable ink containers, which remind us very much of those nasty plastic things they use for giving you milk on airlines and in motels. The container is “assembled as a negative-pressure environment’, a new piece of computer-speak which means that if it is punctured ink doesn't spray all over the place. The machine produces dot ad dressable graphics in two densities. In the lighter of the two, which works on a superior 11 dots by 12 - let us call it draft mode — the copy is coming through at 150 characters per second, which is fast enough for most medium sized office jobs. This speed is possible because the machine prints bi-directionally. There are several fonts available in normal, condensed and compressed types. But because this is a dot addressable graphics printer the number of typefaces available is, in effect, limitless. You just need a graphics program that produces the typefaces that you want. The snag The minor snag referred to earlier is that ordinary computer paper is made with a long fibre paper. When the ink droplets strike the paper, instead of standing still and drying instantaneously they can spread. This spreading is minute but it can, on certain types of paper, give the appearance of blurred type. The answer is improved paper. Hewlett Packard have already spoken at great length to the computer paper manufacturers. Indeed, in the United States they are packaging their own. In the near future we will certainly see a paper which can use to the full the magificent resolution of which this machine is capable. In a sense, we are now waiting for paper technology to catch up to computer technology. At the moment the probable answer is to roll the paper through heavy rollers during manufacturing (called super cal endering) and possibly add a kaolin based machine coating. In fact, in Hong Kong we were able to get hold of some short fibre paper from Toppan Moore who specialise in dealing with these sorts of problems and this paper printed beautifully. We also know that ICI in England have produced an all plastic paper which has an almost totally non absorbent surface. When they first produced it some eight years ago it was an invention looking for a use. Now that there is a massive over supply of plastics all over the world, the introduction of machines like the Thinkjet will use up some of this spare capacity, and save a few thousand hectares of forest every year at the same time. Hewlett Packard have always had a reputation for producing magnificent computers for the top end of the market. With the Thinkjet they have produced a printer that will work with almost any computer, is reasonably priced and they have not sacrificed any of their engineering standards to do it. A small miracle indeed, that will revolutionise the market for computer printers. ARTICLE The age of the microfloppy has arrived... and we’ve nearly all agreed ona standard ow that Apple have intro- N duced the concept of micro- floppies into the Lisa and Macintosh, but not, as yet, into the Ile and Ilc (more on that later) are we going to see more rationalisation and standards in the personal com- puter industry for micro-floppies? Amazingly the answer appears to be yes. Micro-floppy disk drives are one- quarter the size and half the weight of a conventional 5.25 inch Shugart disk drive, consume 50 percent less power, and typically can be pro- duced for about half the price. There are other advantages. They can contain an immense amount of information. Micro-floppies currently store between 358K bytes and i megabyte per disk, with 500K bytes being about average. But will micro-floppies dominate the market? And will the 9 centimetre (3.5 inch to the unconverted) disk be the selected size? First of all we have to explain that the word micro-floppy is a_ total misnomer. The title should, in fact, be micro-hard case. (The fact that this sounds like an undersized recidivist from Pentridge is hardly our fault). The disks are packed in a hard- shelled cartridge which protects them from damage. This makes them easily transportable and difficult to damage. And for their size, they can hold truly amazing amounts of information. Why the standard? But why 9 cm as a standard instead of all the other sizes that have been suggested and in some cases marketed? 24 by Gareth Powell The story goes back to May 1982 in the United States when the Micro Floppy Industry Committee (a name guaranteed to instil confidence) was established to try and create order out of chaos. By 1983, in an unprecedented show of intelligent solidarity, 22 leading disk drive media and personal computer manufacturers had joined the com- mittee. In September of 1982 the committee proposed the adoption of a9cm (3.5 inch) hard cartridge disk standard to the American National Standard Institute's Committee. However, by that time Sony had already begun to sell its own version of a 9 cm micro-floppy drive. And although there were tremendous points of similarity between what the committtee wanted and what Sony had produced, there were points of difference. These concerned the number of tracks on the disk, the thickness of the iron oxide coating, the type of shutter used to protect the head access window (where your disk drive reads and writes the infor mation onto the disk) and the coercivity of the disks. Slight differences The Sony drive had 70 tracks while the floppy committee proposed 80. Both disks used metal hubs to cut down on wear. The unit of magnetic resistance, the coercivity of Sony, was 580 oersteds whilst the suggested standard was 650 oersteds. Sony had an oxide layer on their disk 100 microinches thick while the MIC proposal was more like 40 to 50. The idea behind the thinner oxide layer and the higher coercivity that Sony was already manufacturing was to allow much higher recording densities to be used. This Sony disk had a simple metal slide which the user had to manually open before putting the disk into the drive and also had to close as the disk was removed. Something less than ideal, as the shutter could remain open accidentally, or a greasy finger could touch the disk surface. The floppy committee recom- mended a spring-loaded auto shutter which would automatically open upon insertion of the disk into the drive and equally automatically close once the disk was removed. To the amazement of everybody in the industry, a compromise was reached between Sony and MIC, the floppy committee, in January 1983. Agreed standard The agreed standard was 80 tracks per side of the disk, a coercivity of 625 oersteds and an oxide thickness of approximately 60 microinches. Sony, God bless their little cotton socks, in a move of stunning corporate perception and_ intelli- gence, immediately switched over to producing this second-generation type of mini-floppy, and there is very little doubt in our minds that it is going to be the standard of the industry in the very near future. It has already been accepted as the standard by Apple, Atari, BASF, Matsushita, Memorex, Mitsubishi, Nashua, Olivetti, Philips, Shugart, TDK, Verbatim, Wabash and several others. Against such strength it is unlikely to see the other types of drives survive. The opposition Let's look at some of others. The 7.5 cm (3 inch) floppy-disk drive was initially launched by Hitachi. We actually fitted one to an Apple to see how well it worked. It ARTICLE worked fine but the recording area on the 9 cm disk is 50% greater (we had to use our calculators twice before we could believe that) What makes its future extremely doubtful is that Hitachi has not announced any volume agreements with American computer makers yet, although several Japanese manu- facturers have announced that they will go with this standard. It is doubtful that they will go through with this decision. There are already some defectors and there will be more as the manufacturers face the inevitable. The 7.5 cm (3 inch) drive’s early supporter was Matsushita, and they have already announced that they will go with a 9 cm (3.5 inch) drive size. The smaller size micro-floppy has trouble getting one megabyte of information on to one disk (and that is the target to aim for). Both sides have to be used to get 500K bytes of information on each side in comfort To get one megabyte capacity you have to move to a track density of 200 per inch which dramatically lowers reliability at the current state of the art. IBM's micro-floppy The proposed IBM 10 cm (4 inch) disk drive obviously has consider- ably more recording area than the 9 em (3.5 inch) disk drive. But as the design stands it will only store 358K bytes, less storage capacity in a larger package than a9 em drive. It is - as far as can be judged by the specifications - also fairly slow on access time and most of its features are totally non standard. If IBM decide to use this drive they will be doing the personal computer industry an immense disservice, and they will have flown in the face of most of the informed opinion in the industry. We feel sure that they will not do that. We think they will drop the 10 cm (4 inch) drive and move to the industry standard of 9 centimetre (3.5 inch) floppies. Sanity will indeed prevail. And so out of chaos we're getting reason. LPs to cassettes The analogy has been made that the new micro floppies compare with 5.25 floppy disks as cassette tapes compare with LP records. Its not a bad parallel. Its nice to see that for once the industry has got its act together. How does this affect Apple? Considerably. There will surely come a time - probably next year or early the year after - when Apple will standardise on a double sided double density 9 cm micro-floppy as the recording media for all of its machines. They may not cram one megabyte of memory on to it, preferring to go with with a slightly smaller rmemory but greater dependability. Standardising on the 9 centimetre micro floppy seems the logical way for them to go. It will make the llc into a far rnore portable machine and it will reduce the bulk of a Ile. It may even reduce the price. o The Visible Computer : va 6502 = ss ss CompuMusic P.O. Box 57, 103 St Johns Road, Phone 692 9