User`s Column, November 1981, BYTE Magazine
Contents
1. CP M Sorcim POB 32505 San Jose CA 95152 Pascal M CP M November 1981 BYTE Publications Inc 4572. except that you can t take dragon successfully because he s an immovable object Once you ve killed the dragon however you can t get back to the room in which he s still alive Workman s implementation of Adventure includes a wizard routine that lets you move freely through the dungeon He doesn t tell you how to use the routine unless you buy the Build an Adventure Kit To build an adventure you use a standard editor such as Wordmaster to alter the game data base or create a new one after which you invoke a BUILDER program The program takes your logically ordered data base and makes a work file out of it while simultaneously patch ing other chunks into the ADVENT COM file that con trols the game You can construct very complex dungeons and when you re done you have a game that recognizes vocabulary You don t have to specify the permissible moves the way you must in BASIC adventure games I asked Workman how many of the people who buy the game intend to market adventures and he chuckled He isn t sure but he suspects that most copies are sold to people who bought Adventure and then couldn t solve the puzzles and mazes We give them the original Adventure data base with the Adventure Kit Workman said That contains the Adventure map We also tell them how to move through the dungeon by magic know that s why one guy bought the kit He kept writing letters begging for the map When
3. they re only fair but because PERT charting and critical path analysis are more arts than sciences and not easy jobs Milestone can make the jobs easier and if I ever again have to generate research proposals I ll certainly use Milestone One of my pet peeves is documentation without ex amples I can t imagine why people write instructions on how to use a program but fail to include specific illustra tions of what command to issue and the results Let me illustrate Suppose I am opening Milestone after not looking at it for a couple of weeks as indeed I am turn to page 36 and there I find B egin and E nd work These two values define when the normal working day begins and ends They must be even hours as defined on a 24 hour clock Follow the rules for entering in tegers rather than times Now ask you what does this mean Presumably I once knew but I confess I ve forgotten Indeed some of us go days on end without even thinking about computers I don t want to be too hard on Organic Milestone in fact comes with a set of example cases One is Dr Victor Frankenstein III s PERT for creating a monster Event One Fanatic Desire to Create Life is a milestone it has no duration but you don t start without it We proceed to Task Two Move to ancestral castle and continue searching for Grandfather s notes hiring a linguist etc As it happens Organic ran this example as part of a dem onstrati
4. add 6 tax Visa and MasterCard welcome CP M is a registered trademark of Digital Research Box 550 Goleta CA 93116 805 683 1585 Circle 435 on inquiry card November 1981 BYTE Publications Inc 451 User s Column cluded specific examples all over their manual and so should every other publisher Please Debate on Languages My last column on languages generated a lot of cor respondence Some was predictable I wasn t sufficiently respectful of LISP the LISt Processing language written in 1956 by my friend John McCarthy and since improved and expanded by McCarthy and my collaborator Marvin Minsky and used by my friends and associates who wrote ZORK and in other words please I don t dislike LISP users What I said was that LISP was fine for special pur poses but it wasn t among the candidates for replacing BASIC For those offended my apologies but I remain unrepentant LISP may indeed be a great language for professional programmers as it certainly is for those working in artificial intelligence Furthermore if you re someplace where you can learn LISP easily say MIT or Stanford then by all means grasp the opportunity Most of us though don t have that opportunity Even if you have access to MIT s LISP teaching programs it s going to take time lots of time to learn The ideal way to learn LISP is to use it it does have the great feature of being an interactive language which is BASIC s
5. are going to hum around here We ve been using Lobo drives both 8 inch and 5 inch on the boys TRS 80 for months now and we love them Meanwhile Spellguard runs fine under Speed a rather strange program available from the CP M User s Group Speed trades memory for rapid disk I O and if you have programs that don t use a lot of memory but have a lot of disk operations Speed can cut running time dramat ically For Spellguard the saving is about 50 the sav ing in posting my journals to ledgers is even more dramatic 70 Speed with auxiliary programs to get it running prop erly is available on Volume 38 of the CP M User s group CPMUG disks Those with access to a computer net may be able to find it in an on line file You need a bit of patching with DDT to install SPEED but the documenta tion also on CPMUG Disk 38 is clear enough One warning though Speed maintains the disk direc tories in RAM random access memory and if you change disks without rebooting in Speed that s control B rather than CP M s control C the result is an un mitigated disaster November 1981 BYTE Publications Inc 449 But back to Spellguard When you run Spellguard it first gives you a table telling you how many words it has read the number and percentage of unique words the number and percentage that it can t find in the dic tionary and finally a changing column that tells you the percentage of proofreading the program
6. description of each room where you can go from there and what com mands get you where the vocabulary five letter or shorter words that the program will recognize initial conditions for various rooms light water oil etc messages objects including their initial location and whether or not they can be moved treasures which are a kind of object and various other stuff It s amazing what you can do with it For example you can specify that to get from a room say BEDQUILT to another say SWISS CHEESE you will be successful 25 of the time if you go East but always if you go Up or that the travel will fail if you are not carrying the skull or that it will fail if you are carrying the skull You can automatically transfer from one room to an identical room identical to the player except all commands work backward in the second room or there are extra objects and doors In the actual Adventure game this is done a lot for ex ample there s a room with a live dragon standing on a carpet and another with a dead dragon lying near a carpet Most players think it s the same room since it s the same location but in fact it s not In the first room the carpet isn t real it s part of the room description If you tried to take it the program would say I see no carpet here if the program wasn t instructed to issue messages about the dragon only In the second room the carpet is real and so is the dead dragon
7. great ad Call Collect For Prices And Shipping Schedules 505 257 7865 HAPPY HANDS P O DRAWER I RUIDOSO NEW MEXICO oz aa DE 0z mas lt c 2 z 3 Q Q K3 opm ha amp O as amp 3 24 en x 3 ABLE TO ANY OTHERS L NO TAX ON OUT OF STATE We Have What You Are Looking For DISCOUNTED PRICES COMPAR SHIPMENTS C AVAILABLE SERVICE CONTRACTS L PROMPT SHIPPING 452 November 1981 BYTE Publications Inc Circle 182 on inquiry card vantage But the LISPs available for microcomputers are very limited Minsky himself wasn t able to do much with the one I have and it isn t likely that they ll get bet ter not with our present hardware Come the revolu tion when 32 bit machines with 256 K bytes of active memory and 50 megabytes of disk storage can be bought for 2000 LISP may then be the best thing available but not now unless you have very specialized needs In any case this remains the User s Column directed in large part toward nonprofessionals who are trying to make their small systems do useful things and for those readers I don t recommend LISP It can be fun to play with and I m glad Microsoft published it but I doubt that microcomputer users will ever do more than play with LISP But the problem of languages has yet to be solved In theory BASIC is an inadequate language Listen to the hackers they ll tell you that BASIC programs are a m
8. just barely I m a Star Warrior addict The boys like ASI s Hellfire Warrior which is an extension of their famous Temple of Aphsai They also like ASI s Rescue at Rigel which is Dungeons and Dragons in spacesuits I expect I d like them too if I had time to play them However I m not enough of a masochist to play Scott Adams s Adventure International games There are those who like Scott s games a lot Certainly they aren t easy Unfortunately for me at least they re just too tough For example he s got one called Balrog Sampler it also has the title Maces and Magic 1 on it a vastly complex game requiring two 5 inch disk drives Like Automated Simulation s Temple of Aphsai when you enter the game it generates a random character for you after which you buy weapons armor and the like before setting out Unlike ASI s games Adams s game gives you no choice You have to accept the characters randomly generated for you and a scruffy lot they are But don t worry if you re lucky enough to get one who s strong as Superman and rich as Croesus he s still going to get killed about the time you get interested in the game Everybody gets killed in Adams s dungeon and often un fairly In Zork and Adventure there s some logic to the puzzles but in Balrog various things pop up and kill you before you can run away There s one room in his dungeon where you find an attendant and a wheel of for tune If you don t
9. play the bouncer comes and kills you If you do play you lose There are other puzzles in Balrog but all of them are inexplicable at least to me and I always get killed So do the boys and one of them is an experienced and fanatical Dungeons and Dragons player so it isn t just my amateur status It wouldn t be so bad if you could just play get killed and start over but since the game is in BASIC with en crypted messages and all kinds of kludges to keep you from analyzing it it takes forever to initialize load create a character and go through the ritual of choosing weapons and armor just so you can get killed two minutes later The dungeon keeps score and the program alters itself after every expedition so that when next you play the dungeon proudly displays the number of players who have entered and the number killed Ours is up to about 25 for 25 now and nobody in the neighborhood wants to see the game again Meanwhile Workman amp Associates continues to sell the original Crowther and Woods Adventure for CP M systems see my review December 1980 BYTE page 230 only now they ve added a twist Only with our Build an Adventure Kit can you truly build an Adventure the Workman copy reads and guess that s nearly true The kit consists of an Adven EER ture data base and instructions for altering it or if you like starting over with everything new The data base contains a travel table
10. we put out the kit he bought the first copy Coming Up In the next column I will continue to dis cuss languages and I ve also collected a raft of data bases I want to talk about And I just finished letting Zeke do my taxes m References Grogono Peter Programming in Pascal revised edition Reading MA Addison Wesley 1980 13 95 Hughes Joan K PL Structured Programming second edition New York John Wiley amp Sons 1979 Additional Information Innovative Software Applications POB 2797 Menlo Park CA 94025 Spellguard CP M 295 Organic Software 1492 Windsor Way Livermore CA 94550 CP M Apple Pascal UCSD Pascal CP M 86 295 CP M Apple Pascal UCSD Pascal CP M 86 295 Milestone Datebook Workman amp Assoc 112 Marion Ave Pasadena CA 91106 Adventure CP M 29 95 Build an Adventure CP M 97 50 CP M Users Group 1651 Third Ave New York NY 10028 Speed Volume 38 Each volume CP M 8 inch disk 8 North Star 5 4 inch disk depending on the number of disks needed Catalog 6 Adventure International POB 3435 Longwood FL 32750 Balrog Sampler CP M 29 95 Automated Simulations Inc Dept SW7 Box 4247 1988 Leghorn St Mountain View CA 94040 Apple II TRS 80 Atari Star Warrior Digital Research POB 579 Pacific Grove CA 93950 PL I 80 MAC RMAC LINK 80 CP M 500 MT Microsystems 1562 Kings Cross Dr Cardiff by the Sea CA 92007 Pascal MT
11. New Software New Hardware Computer Languages and Games Jerry Pournelle c o BYTE Publications 70 Main St Peterborough NH 03458 Read any good books lately asked my mad friend Mac Lean Having just come back from an autograph party for King David s Spaceship and the day before sent off the copyedited manuscript for the new Niven Pournelle Oath of Fealty I knew what to say Haven t had time But I ve written some good books lately Yeah well I wasn t talking about science fiction said Mac Lean I meant good books on computers I ve got a dilly He held up PL I Structured Programming by Joan K Hughes Hey I know her I said Well you tell her for me she s written a really top book Good index Clear English Stand alone chapters so you don t have to thumb back and forth to find out what s going on TIl do better than that I said TIl tell my readers Yeah Sure When Uh real soon now gt We My apologies for taking so long in finishing this col umn and my thanks to all of you who ve written en couraging letters Things do get hectic here at Chaos Manor and the last few months have been something to see books to get done articles to write and I built a new wing on the office which meant moving everything around like Chinese Checkers which meant that I lost the documentation to half the software sent me for review which I am
12. also for my sins Chairman of the Citizens Ad visory Council on National Space Policy which involves chairing meetings and editing papers and writing sum maries and flying to Washington The result was that for a good while I had no time to play with Ezekial my Z80 but things are a bit caught up now and maybe we can get onto a schedule Just last week I had a surgeon remove the telephone from my ear One reason we got caught up was Spellguard Every now and then you find programs that do things right and have documentation that tells you what to do and how to do it programs that are a joy to use Spellguard is like that See the reviews of Spellguard Microspell the Word Microproof and Wordsearch on pages 434 448 Spellguard finds spelling errors That s all it does It doesn t wash dishes or set your clock or do your taxes but wow can it find spelling errors in standard ASCII text files And it doesn t care what editor you used to create the files Using Spellguard is simplicity itself All you do is tell it what file to look at It does the rest It does not do it as fast as the ads say at least it doesn t with Zeke but then he s only running at 2 MHz and my ancient iCom drives while utterly reliable are pretty slow Help is on the way I ve got a pair of Lobo s 8 inch drives and they ve promised an S 100 double density controller next month If the controller is as fast and reliable as their drives things
13. aze of GOTOs or that you can t do structured pro gramming in BASIC That isn t true A good modern BASIC say Microsoft s BASIC 80 or Software Systems CBASIC has do while if then else case and nearly all the features Pascal has plus string features that are a lot better than any Pascal I ve seen and decent I O which Pascal doesn t have at all True there are problems in BASIC that are easiest to solve with judicious use of GOTO statements but it s certainly possible to write good BASIC programs without a single GOTO and even easier to tame the GOTO so it never refers to anything outside a local modular block You can write top down structured programs in BASIC Best of all you can write interactively testing each step of the way then test the program logic until it s working after which you turn it over to Microsoft s BASCOM compiler and wham And for maybe 80 of the jobs you want a microcomputer to do that s the best approach It s almost certainly the fastest So what s wrong with it Plenty First BASIC still has a fatal flaw no truly local variables Passing parameters to a subroutine is hard and controlling side effects making sure you don t do something you didn t intend isn t easy You can reserve I J K L as indices and set up declarations in remarks up at the top of the program and with the new cross reference programs you can usually find the side ef fects Having don
14. but I ve mislaid the new manual Al though I ve said it before it s worth mentioning again the CBASIC documentation is excellent Gordon also tells me that by the time this is printed there ll be a new version of CBASIC that allows nested IF MEMOREX FLEXIBLE DISCS BUY THE BEST FOR LESS Lowest prices WE WILL NOT BE UNDERSOLD Buy any quantity Call free 800 235 4137 for prices and information Dealer inquiries invited C O D s accepted PACIFIC EXCHANGES 100 Foothill Blvd San Luis Obispo CA 93401 In Cal call 800 592 5935 or 805 543 1037 November 1981 BYTE Publications Inc 453 User s Column statements fixing one of Joan Hughes s pet complaints and before the end of the year they ll have parameter passing and local variables and they re working on speeding it up The language situation isn t our only dilemma Let s face it our microcomputers are becoming obsolete In one sense that s silly we have more computing power than the government did ten years ago The machines work reliably And there s no point in replacing our machines just when we re finally getting good software But that s the problem we re beginning to see hard ware limitations on the new software Take Spellguard for instance It s a good program I use it often But it can t touch real spelling programs like those that run on the big MIT computers MIT s Spell written incidentally in LISP not only find
15. e that you still have trouble passing parameters and if the program gets big so that you d like to compile it in chunks you re out of luck BASCOM doesn t permit decent chaining of programs nor does it allow true compilation in parts In fact the Microsoft BASCOM is not really the same language as its BASIC 80 In addition to the chaining prob lems you can t use computed array sizes or common statements But protests the BASIC enthusiast that can be a SS a EY fixed In fact I bet you somebody at Microsoft is work ing on it right now True And maybe one day they ll really fix the BASIC BASCOM system I hope so because I find BASIC programs fairly easy to read and write I expect you d be able to buy a lot of programs in compiled BASIC right now if it weren t for Microsoft s disastrous policy of demanding royalties for every program com piled with BASCOM Competition will take care of that meanwhile I use BASIC 80 with BASCOM for routine jobs and a lot of my most useful programs are written in CBASIC There s so much investment in BASIC software take Joan Hughes author of the PL I book that so impressed Mac Lean Joan runs Execudata one of the first of the small systems houses that have sprung up everywhere She sells turnkey systems for small businesses The hard ware she favors is the Vector Graphic S 100 bus Z80 with its mindless terminal which is really memory mapped video The software co
16. en you re all free It will also search through and find all the appoint ments you ve made with a particular person a task that is more difficult and certainly more tedious if you must rely on visual inspection of a book especially if there are a lot of entries And of course Datebook can make hard copy and update that often All in all if I worked ina business where I had lots of appointments and schedules I d probably use Datebook but then I m gadget oriented and I have a computer Organic s other interesting program is Milestone and people who need it will like it a lot Milestone is a PERT chart generator It performs critical path analysis for jobs with up to 300 tasks it computes milestones critical events monthly manpower levels monthly costs in short it handles most of the details we used to have to in clude in the management plan portion of a research pro posal Milestone isn t easy to use In fact it s almost impossi ble to use on my system because I don t have a 24 by 80 terminal I use a memory mapped 16 by 64 video display in part because I still use the old fashioned Electric Pencil as a text editor and Pencil requires it in part because I like the smooth scrolling and fast response and in part because I m lazy and have never gotten around to buying a terminal That s going to change one day Anyway Milestone isn t easy to use not because the directions for the program aren t clear
17. has done Many years ago when I was young and impres sionable I fell under the spell of a science fiction writer named A E Van Vogt later he became a friend neighbor and colleague Van Vogt was and still is interested in a rather hard to define field of study called general seman tics and through him I was led to Alfred Count Korzybski and a strange book called Science and Sanity That led me to Wendell Johnson at the University of Iowa Professor Johnson s interests spanned everything from classical linguistics and speech therapy to general semantics One of Johnson s research interests was identifying text how could you tell if an anonymous work had been written by a particular author Dr Johnson used a num ber of quantitative measures two of the most important being the type token ratio and the verb adjective ratio Type token means the ratio of unique words to total words verb adjective is self explanatory I remember going nearly blind counting total words and making tables of unique words in for example Marlowe s BDOS ERROR ON B BAD SECTOR Before disk errors ruin your work again order BADLIM a BADLIM assures the reliability of your CP M computer a You can use your disks 10 times longer without losing your data AND your time a BADLIM checks thoroughly your disk marking all the blocks which have defective sectors The Operating system will know that those sectors should be skipped a BADLIM is the only
18. mes from all over The editor is Vector s and I m tempted to buy a Vector machine just to get it it s a lot like Electric Pencil but with most of the bugs out Execudata writes other software or buys it commercially Like all first rate systems houses they support everything they sell and their customers seem downright enthusiastic The interesting angle is that the author of the best book we ve seen on PL I sells software largely written in CBASIC Why Execudata has been around several years When Joan first started the company there wasn t a PL I for microcomputers and CBASIC was the only BASIC that allowed long variable names remember the horrible days when variables were A and B1 and you hadn t the foggiest what they referred to and structured concepts She may change over now that we have PL I from Digital Research Digital s PL I documentation is if nothing to brag about at least readable PL I 80 is a fairly healthy subset of the ANSI General Purpose Subset G PL I and it runs Yeah and so what asked a friend Who d use it PL I is unwieldy and inefficient says a recent article in a magazine On the other hand Mac Lean has spent the last couple of weeks learning it and he loves it Meanwhile I have at last gotten not one but two Pascals that run and I ve been wading through Peter Grogono s Programming in Pascal see references and reading everything I can find on Pa
19. on for me at the San Francisco Computer Faire and I can testify that Milestone is both fast and accurate I thought up the need for a linguist to translate the notes That broke into subtasks advertise interview hire I watched Burns VanHorne of Organic enter the new tasks Milestone thought for a moment then rearranged itself because this information became part of the critical path Not long ago they sent a revision of Milestone and I notice that the tasks I suggested are now in the case study So they have examples in the sense of worked out problems for their program but they should have in Circle 443 on inquiry card EPISODE _THE VERSATILE COMPUTER PERIPHERALS EPISODE is a CP M comput er with 1 6 M byte of disk storage on dual 5 flop pies Its compact design provides a wide range of standalone or network appli cations including data base sharing EPISODE gives you total flexibility You can add your own CRT and Printer what ever brand and price range you choose All the logic in cluding the 64K RAM mem ory is contained on a single 6 x 8 circuit board ensur ing maximum reliability EPISODE includes a unique software system called SUPERVYZ a menu based software control sys tem that allows the user to integrate application pro grams Dealer inquiries invited foreign and domestic SDC EPIC jj SYSTEMS Epic Comp
20. only are you confined to 10 000 words or less with my system anyway but you encounter real problems if you want windows and multiple buffers or if you d like the machine to do some computing on values in the text Obviously I prefer Pencil s limits I have Wand and WordStar but I don t use them Star because it natters at me when was the last time you wanted to know line and column number every time you typed a letter and Wand because of the disk operations Word Master on the other hand is the best programming editor I know of None of the available editors not one can do what I d really like them to for instance let me put equations in my text solve them and have the answers available as I write What I usually do is leave the text on the screen and turn to my programmable TI 59 and that s silly COMPLETE HARDWARE AND SOFTWARE SUPPORT S100 CP M 2 2 TRS 80 Il TRS DOS APPLE Il APPLE DOS 714 559 0599 Circle 266 on inquiry card EES Yet what I want isn t impossible for big machines MIT s MACSYMA can solve intricate equations and its EMACS editor is inherently more powerful than anything we can implement on a microcomputer haven t seen them combined but it wouldn t be that dif ferent if the memory was available New Machines For a few years we ll exploit what we have but it isn t going to be long before Zeke becomes the world s smartest terminal two memory mapped
21. ook and Milestone Organic Software of Livermore California has also produced two excellent programs that I recommend al though I ll probably never use them The first Datebook can keep track of about six months worth of appointments for three people We had no trouble getting it to run and it seems to be easy to use The main drawback is that you have to want to run it Datebook requires both disk drives and all of your micro computer s memory What I want is Calendar a program that I may have to write myself it would come up when turn on my system insist that I give it the date the way Lobo s LDOS operating system does and then natter at me about what I have to get done But it s fairly obvious that I can t write that program until I have hard disks with multimegabyte storage Calendar would solve my problem I forget to look at my appointment book until it s too late And that raises a question is Datebook really better than an appointment book of the kind used by many physicians and lawyers I can t answer that but my guess is that I wouldn t buy a computer for that alone Datebook has various search patterns so you can look for appointment openings of stated lengths and the program offers up to nine candi dates but you can do that by glancing at a book too The value of Datebook is that it will keep three sched ules simultaneously so you can work appointments with your partners it searches for times wh
22. program that gives protection for soft and hard errors The first time BADLIM will list which files in your disk are on bad sectors so you can take action to correct it But thereafter the bad areas in your disk will be automatically by passed a For CP M 1 4 single density and for CP M 2 xx of any format and density It is a must for Winchester as the media cannot be replaced BADLIM cost only 73 Whatever the reason you have to use a computer you need BADLIM Contact your dealer or call us today BLAT R amp D Corp 8016 188th St SW Edmonds WA 98020 Phone 206 771 1408 BADLIM DEALER INQUIRIES INVITED 450 November 1981 BYTE Publications Inc Circle 50 on inquiry card Duchess of Malfi the idea was to find out if Marlowe had written any of the Shakespearean plays As best we could calculate he hadn t Now Spellguard gives you automatic type token ratios and if you really want to you can make up separate verb and adjective dictionaries thus finding the ratio merely by typing in the text which believe me is a great deal easier than doing it in teams of two with pencil and paper Spellguard with its efficient search algo rithms could be extremely useful in linguistic research projects Anyway if you work with text at all you ll love In novative Software s Spellguard It is an example of ex cellent software a program that does one thing does it very well and has documentation to match Dateb
23. rating system that looks a lot like CP M and allows you to bring over most of your CP M files The 8085 88 won t run Z80 code but then neither will the Z8000 It does execute 8080 code Bill Godbout sells an 8085 88 system and Tony Pietsch the engineer who built my system recommends it along with hard disks and dual sided double density floppies to back up the hard disk system Tony is building a Godbout S 100 system and there s a chance I ll get one for review The Lehmans use a Godbout S 100 8085 88 system for their Pascal MT and they re very happy with it while Sorcim s president Richard Frank says they ve got half a dozen running constantly and that you can pitch the Godbout box out a second story win dow without hurting it gee so fis a Circle 388 on inquiry card Terminals Printers Accessories Service Complete Business and Development Systems Specialized Business Systems 5306 S Bannock Littleton CO 80120 303 797 8709 Trademark of Ithaca Intersystems Inc CP M and MP M are Registered Trademarks of Digital Research November 1981 BYTE Publications Inc 455 In other words Z8000 with UNIX has respectable sup porters and so does 8085 88 Prices aren t quite com parable the Onyx system costs more largely because of the UNIX software which isn t cheap Performance isn t comparable either the Z8000 Onyx is much faster than the 8085 88 machines Fortunatel
24. s misspelled words it shows you the word along with context shows a menu of words it thinks might have been meant offers you a chance to enter the new word in your permanent dictionary if that s refused offers the opportunity to put it in a dictionary kept just for this job and finally lets you input the proper spelling which it inserts into the text It does all this at blinding speeds searching dic tionaries of 35 000 to 50 000 words No 8 bit machine running floppy disks can touch that job Editor s note Don t be so sure Jerry See the review of spelling pro MICRO MASSTOR COMPLETE WINCHESTER SUBSYSTEM FOR EVERY APPLICATION 3 5 to 68 MBYTE DRIVES 51 4 8 and 14 WINCHESTERS HIGH PERFORMANCE DISK and DISK TAPE CONTROLLERS HARDEDGE AUTHORIZED DISTRIBUTOR Micro Tech Industries P O Box 17383 Irvine CA 92715 454 November 1981 BYTE Publications Inc grams in this issue PL There are other limits One controversy over text editors hinges on a simple forced choice do you limit the amount of text you can work on to what can be held in memory as Pencil does or do you keep part of it on the disk as WordMaster WordStar and Magic Wand do If you keep part on disk you can t conveniently change disks that can be a serious limitation if you want to bring in a chunk of an old file or make a quick copy of some thing you can t afford to lose If you keep all the text in memory not
25. scal I recommend Grogono s book for that matter I rec ommend the Pascal MT implementation of Pascal It works and unless Mike and Nancy Lehman have become liars which I doubt Pascal MT is a full implementa tion of the Standard Pascal along with a few much needed extensions Their manual is improved too They sent me an early Circle 330 on inquiry card copy and apparently my anguished screams were too much for them They ve added a number of sections and according to Nancy That s all because of you I also have the Sorcim Pascal M up and running Pascal M compiles to an intermediate code It s slower than Pascal MT but it s also more compact and more portable It too has extensions to standard Pascal and I recommend it What I don t recommend is Pascal itself Not yet anyway When I first looked at Pascal several years ago I thought it was the nicest thing I d ever seen But the more I look at it the more misgivings I have I certainly could be wrong and I ll know more by next column time And by then Mac Lean will have done things with PL I sO we Can compare notes Meanwhile don t throw away your CBASIC they ve made some improvements also Compiler Systems President Gordon Eubanks says as a result of my reviews The needless limit on the line printer width has been fixed and the COMMON and CHAIN features improved I think the latest version has some other im provements too
26. screens a 20 K byte PROM monitor to control printing and I O etc while a new machine does the work Only what will the new machine be Two years ago everyone would have said the Z8000 Now we just don t know Next when we get the new machine what will we use for an operating system Again two years ago everyone would have said UNIX of course And if we had UNIX which is a fairly complex tree structured operating system developed by Bell Laboratories we d also have answered the language question since UNIX contains a C programming language compiler and is written in C Now again we just don t know What went wrong ead OL THE SYSTEM INTEGRATERS Ithaca Imter ystems THE MICRO FOR BIGGER IDEAS IS NOW MUCH BIGGER Multi user Z80 Systems Bs CP M MP M 1 to 4 User 64K to 256K Floppy and Hard Disk Systems First there weren t any reliable Z8000 chips Now that problem s fixed but there aren t many available Z8000 computers are there There is one Onyx has a working Z8000 with UNIX and C hard disks and 128 K bytes of memory They re being shipped as fast as they re being made and accord ing to their customers they work and work well There s a good chance I ll have an Onyx running here in a few weeks and I ll be able to tell you a lot more Meanwhile there s a serious rival to the Z8000 and UNIX the dual 8085 8088 working on an S 100 bus and running Digital Research s ope
27. uter Corporation 7542 Trade Street San Diego CA 92121 Tel 714 695 3560 See us at ComDEX Booth 1346 Supervyz is a trademark of Epic Computer Corporation CP M is a trademark of Digital Research C Compiler only 75 We have re written Small C as published by Ron Cain in the May 1980 issue of Dr Dobbs The Code Works C compiler CW C includes these additional features Structures and unions For switch case do while Multidimensional arrays Conditional compilation ifdef etc Assignment operators e g x 10 Can declare complex types e g int fp 5 User supplied I O buffers of any size Dynamic storage allocation alloc and free Command line arguments using argv and argc Improved error handling CW C is a proper subset of the full C language We donot have float double long unsigned or short data types static initial izers sizeof typedef casts bit fields goto undef if line CW C generates assembly language source code that is then assembled using ASM or MAC CW C supports inline assembly language with the asm endasm preprocessor commands Requires 56K 8080 or Z80 CP M system Distributed on single density 8 disk or Northstar double density CP M 5 disk Includes an excellent User Manual the executable CW C compiler runtime library and several useful example programs written in C tHECODE WORKS CW C is 75 including shipping in the US and Canada CA residents
28. y we don t have to make any decisions just yet It may be that the best policy is to skip all the 16 bit machines entirely and wait for a new generation of 32 bit monsters Certainly if you re contemplating buying your first system go ahead and get one I still recommend the S 100 bus and Z80 You can upgrade to dual density flop pies and hard disks without too much risk but if you want a system to use rather than play with be conser vative and leave systems development to the Tony Pietsches of this world Notice that if I get new systems in here they ll be in addition to Zeke him I don t touch And stand by Exciting things are happening in microland kK I like computer games I m fond of ZORK and the various Automated Simulation games and now they ve got a new one called Star Warrior that s guaranteed to use up more time than you thought you d give it especially if you re a fan of Heinlein s Starship Trooper The game has a lot of the same appeal as that book It s 1 800 556 7586 12 Meeting Street Cumberland RI 02864 4 401 722 1027 A 1 800 235 3581 3533 Old Conejo Rd 102 Newbury Park CA 91320 1 805 499 3678 CA TOLL FREE 1 800 322 1873 OMEGA SALES CO 456 November 1981 BYTE Publications Inc Circle 319 on inquiry card played in real time and you jump about in space armor trying to wreak havoc on the dastardly enemy while avoiding death And it s balanced you usually get out alive but
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