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EDITORIAL by Dave Tonks
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Well hasn't the weather got nice over the last few days? It got
to the stage where I even opened the window of my little room,
which is quite difficult, as the bars tend to get in the way.
It's only a small window but I get the sun streaming through it
from 10am to 10.05 am in a morning, and this sort of makes my
day complete.
Now for the good news... The Supplement price has been dropped
back to £2.00 as from this issue. It seems that discs have gone
through the silly price stage that happened at the begining of
the year, and so we are able to revert back to the £2.00 price
tag.
For anyone who has a subscription, we will balance things up
with an extra issue added to your sub. If you send your own
disc, then the postage will now be 50p and subscriptions will be
£10.00 for 6 issues.
I'm sorry that the price had to go up for a short while, but the
club can only stand a short time of high disc prices before it
has to up the price or stop publishing.
Hopefully, the price will now stabilise, and we shall be able to
hold the £2.00 price for some time.
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OOPS Dept...
There seemed to be 2 "File not found" messages on issue 20.
The first one was my fault, but the second one wasn't. First
file not on the disc was "FOURIERSET" which went with WRITER. I
have included this on this disc for you to add to issue 20.
The second one is in Duncan Monro's dictionary project on the
ODDS & ENDS menu. This file is in fact your own dictionary data
file which, for those of you participating, you should already
have.
------------------------------------------
Jason Highfield
17 April 1992 4 Pirbright Close
Bradley
Membership No. 135 BILSTON
West Midlands
Telephone No. (0902) 493704 WV14 8PZ
Dear Dave
I am writting to you (although a little late), to thank you, and
the rest of your team for helping me out at the Birmingham All
Formats Fair, in December '91.
I went to the show to purchase the 1Mb of external memory from
SamCo. Unfortunately they did not turn up! So the Sam Supplement
came to my rescue by ordering the product for me. I received the
piece of hardware in just over a week! My complete thanks go to
you all.
Included on this disk is an updated version of the text viewer
used in the Supplement. I have added an option to Jump to a
specific page which is very useful for when you need to see the
end of a file! (Have you tried holding down the N key for 20+
times)!!?
The lines I have added/changed are:
1175, 8910, 9500 to 9550
I hope you find this addition to the text viewer useful.
Please keep up the good work.
Yours faithfully Jason 'VENGER' Highfield.
Ed's Note..
As you can see if you glance down to the bottom of
this page, I have implemented Jason's "JUMP TO PAGE" routine in
this issue, and very good it is too.
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Kevin Cooper,
Member No. 356. 157 Newtown Road,
Carlisle,
Tuesday 12th May 1992. Cumbria,
CA2 7LL.
Dear Dave/Brian etc, Tel:(0228) 47058.
Thanks for Supplements 19 and 20, thanks for sorting out
the little problem Brian.
There isn't any real reason why I am writing, I just
thought I would. I have got a few comments though.....
I've managed to get hold of a printer. Somebody has lent me
one, John Heinrichsons, it was an old printer he wasn't using,
its an Olivetti PR 15. I'm just waiting Interface and Cable to
come now. Samco said they have just got some in, so it will be
getting sent out tomorrow. 'cos I've never had a printer before,
can you please tell me what Off-Line means? Also, if anybody has
ever used a PR 15, or knows anything about them, I could do with
some help!
You asked for people's opinions on the matter of raising
the price of the Supplement to pay people for contributions,
after a letter from somebody in issue 19 (can't remember the
name). I would prefer the price to stay the same. One of the
main reasons I get the Supplement is the low price, I haven't
really got much money (remembering I'm 14) and so the low price
(or as I do, sending disks) and the good quality makes it a very
good magazine.
Reversi, last issue.....You said in the program notes that
full instructions were included in the program, but they aren't.
I might have someday sent a photo for the
digitise-the-members bit, but you might as well call it a second
horror show if my picture gets on!
Bye for now,
Kev.
P.S. I don't know why but I always seem to cringe when I read
one of my letters in a magazine, I remember one time I read a
letter in a magazine, and I was thinking "whos that wally?" it
turned out to be one of my letters I'd sent in months before it
was printed!
PPS. Just to add my bit to the sending disks back debate, I'm
not really bothered about you sending the disk back, the price
of an envelope and stamp just about covers another disk. What
about members sending an S.A.E. if they want it back?
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From Malcolm Goodman,
Leeds.
In early February of this year I ordered a printer+disc
interface for my coupe via Lerm at Whitley Bay, on the basis
that they could get the goods delivered to me more quickly than
if I sent my order directly to Samco, since Lerm accept credit
cards.
Sure enough, within 2-3 days a package arrived, but was found to
contain a serial-parallel printer interface. A quick phone call
to Lerm resulted in my returning the package directly to Samco
for a replacement. Mr. Evans at Lerm said he would ring Samco so
as to clarify matters. After some further phone calls and
letters to Samco from yours truly, the correct item finally
arrived, some four weeks later.
On connecting it up, it failed to work, and I was obliged to
contact Samco by phone to see what needed doing. It transpired
that an internal link was in the wrong position, which once
corrected, put me into a 'go state'.
How much easier and cheaper it would have been, Samco, if only
you had included a note to the effect that this is what needed
doing if the unit did not perform as expected. Shortly
afterwards, on March 23rd, I was pleasantly surprised to receive
a letter by Alan Miles expressing apologies for the delay and
explaining that he was trying to improve the service. I quote
:-'It is my firm ambition to be able to supply customers on a
next day basis. The day after the order is received the goods
should be dispatched' (production delays excepted). He then goes
on:- 'We're not going to send out acknowledgements. To do so
would be to admit defeat, to say that we are not likely to
perform to our declared objective of shipping the day after
order.' He continues 'Instead we've developed a system which
will mean that customers will be notified that an order has been
received and will be given a reason for delay if any order is
unfulfilled two weeks from receipt.
It was with this assurance in mind that, following receipt of
Newsdisk 3, I sent an order for a 'Kaleidoscope' kit but after 3
weeks and no kit or that notification of delay, I felt it was
time to remind Alan Miles of his letter to me. I simply
requested that if the kit could not be supplied by return then a
refund of my money was what I wanted. At the time of typing this
(14.5.92) no reply to that letter has been received, but on
2.5.92 the kit arrived. I have now reached the conclusion that I
cannot rely on Samco since their deeds do not match their words,
as far as I'm concerned.
I work at a school which has a fairly active computer club which
embraces a variety of machine users - but not a single Sam
amongst them. I would like to promote the Sam (because I think
it is a good computer,) to people thinking of a change, but on
the basis of my experiences, it is not likely to happen.
To quote Alan Miles once more:-'As a small company competing
against the giants of the business, I recognise that
it's crucial for us to maintain strong customer relations - and
we won't do that if we carry on conducting ourselves as we have
done in your case.' Well Mr Miles, your company's (in)actions
have now upset me on three counts, and if you treat other
customers in the same way as I've been treated, then it will
only be a matter of time before what I regard as a 'cult'
computer, goes down the same road as the Oric, Dragon and the
ZX80.
--------------------------------
I'M TIRED
Yes I'm tired. For several years I've been blaming it on my age,
poor blood, lack of vitamins, air pollutin, saccharin, obesity,
dieting, under arm odour, yellow wax build up and another dozen
maladies that make you wonder if life is really worth living.
But I've found out it ain't that.
I'm tired because I'm overworked!
The population of this country is 51 million.
21 million are retired. That leaves 30 million to do the work.
19 million are in school. That leaves 11 million to do the work.
2 million are unemployed and 4 million are employed by the
government. That leaves 5 million to do the work. 1 million are
in the armed forces. that leaves 4 million to do the work. 3
million are employed by the county and borough councils leaving
1 million to do the work.
There are 620,000 people in hospital and 379,998 in prisons.
That leaves 2 people
you and me:
and you are sitting on your behinds reading this:
NO WONDER I'M BLOODY TIRED!!!
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W E Thomson
Woodhaven, Leiston Road
ALDEBURGH Suffolk
IP15 5PX
The program "Random Number Selection", by D A Lorner
(Supplement 20) has a theoretical flaw in that the permutations
it produces are not equally probable - which is usually the aim
in producing random permutations.
This is caused by the sequence of two commands
LET s=RND(k):IF s=0 THEN LET s=s+1
that are used in all three sub-programs, for the value s=1 is
twice as probable as each of the values 2,3,..,k. Equally
probable permutations can be got by replacing these two commands
by the single command
LET s=1+RND(k-1)
for which the values of s, 1,2,3,..,k are equally probable.
Yours sincerely Ettrick Thomson
DICTIONARY - Final Progress Report
------------------------------------
As at 21st. May, the dictionary is well on it's way to
completion. All the sections have been taken up by club
volunteers and so far, 12 sections have been completed and
returned. After sorting and checking, these sections have been
combined into one file of 24600 words with an end-of-file at
address 295000. So it looks as if compression will not be needed
for 512 k machines.
My thanks to all those who have put in several hours typing and
especial thanks to those who have gone on to complete a second
section. Special mention must go to Jack Laing who has completed
and returned no less than four sections of the dictionary in
record time and with virtually no typing errors. My only regret
is that out of 500 club members, only 4 percent seem to be
interested.
As soon as all the remaining sections have been sent to me, I
will complete the dictionary and return the discs with the full
dictionary file plus a few extra programs to help in solving
anagrams, crossword clues and a hangman program, all of which
need the completed dictionary file as a database.
Finally, I see no difficulty in principle in using the file as a
Spell-checker as part of a WP program but as interest in the
project as a whole has been so limited, there seems little point
in developing such a program for either TASWORD or SAM SCRATCH
except as programming exercise. Duncan Munro.
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