INMC News

Eddie Pounce joined the committee in October, is 27, is married with two children and lives in Watford. He has been playing with computers since leaving school, and throughout his university training, where he gained a B.Sc Hons. in computing. He is a data administrator for a large multi-national company working in London. He owns a Nascom 2 with Naspen, and fitted with an automatic double cassette I/O with auto. stop/​start. He is equally at home with machine level code, Basic, and the hardware side of things, and has a general background in both mainframe, mini and micro computing. On the INMC he acts as sub-editor, and deals with technical corespondence.

So now you know who we are; as to the INMC itself, we meet about once every two months to chew over recent developments, and get feedback from each other. Corespondence is usually farmed out between members by post, and the letters are dealt with by the individuals, poor Paul seems to ‘cop’ most of them. Newsletter bits are usually rewritten (we call it editing) by Richard, Paul, Eddie and Dave, in most cases on Naspen tapes. Drafts are printed usually on the TI printer, and Paul and Dave have a late night session putting it all together to find out how much we’ve got. We usually aim for about 30 pages. If we are short of copy, some programs are rooted out and printed to make up the space.

Final editing is carried out on the Naspen tapes and printed on an IBM printer on A4 sheets, Paul then takes the lot, pastes it all up, filling spare bits as he goes. At this late stage Chas. is chivvied up to come up with another ‘Lawrence’ and any other line drawings required, and the whole lot sent to the printers. When it is all printed, the girls at Nascom get landed with seeing that they all get posted.

So thats who we are and what it is all about. The whole process usually takes about two months, and a lot of copy for the next newsletter is on file even before the previous one is ‘put to bed’. So when you send us letters or copy, don’t despair if it doesn’t turn up in the next newletter, we’re horrors for holding things over to the next issue. But the final message is we still need copy, keep it coming. We want reviews on MAPP1-3Z and the cheap colour graphics which is knocking around. We also want a review on any EPROM programmers. Please.

Nascom 1 VDU Problem – IC 18 Modification

Mr. L. E. Gilham of Bedfont asked us to clarify the position with regard to the modification to IC 18 to cure the problem with the VDU when a space is displayed where a letter should be.

The problem is around the timing of the character decoding in IC 16 and is corrected by:

1. Bending Pin 5 of IC 18 straight so that it is not connected when IC 18 is in the socket.
2. Connecting Pin 5 to Pin 12 of IC 18 on the underside of the board.