News From Nascom

This month’s news is being written in the middle of the first really good weather of the year – so it’s a bit shorter than it would have been otherwise!

On the new product front we have news of the LX80 printer – a low cost 80 character per line, 80 characters per second printer for use with the parallel interface.

The specification of the NAS-CAD computer aided drawing package has grown considerably since our last report, so although a brief outline of the features is given this month you will need to wait for next month’s newsletter for full details.

We have more information on using disc files under NAS-DOS who find the manual rather terse (it is!). This will be continued in the next Nascom News when we will also give more information on the operation of the MANOR database manager, which makes extensive use of data files.

The addition of soft function keys at zero cost has been held over to next month – no problems in that we already use it ourselves, but there has not been time to prepare an article for this newsletter.

Mike Hessey

1. Appeal For Information And Soft­ware

Nascom users are exceptionally ingenious, but unfortunately they are also very reticent about what they use their machines for. We are often asked by potential customers ‘Has anyone else used a Nascom to.........’. Although we often believe that it has been done we don’t have a specific contact. It would help us a lot to be able to compile a directory of users/ applications/ software, and by publishing this we could put you in touch with other users with similar interests, and perhaps save people re-inventing the wheel by writing software which already exists. It could help you make money too – as we may be interested in buying some software ourselves, or contacts you make may be willing to pay, or swap other software.

If you want to take part in this scheme send us a note of your application, hardware configuration and software and how you can be contacted. We would be particularly interested to hear about educational software and NAS-DOS utility programs. The latter could be put into a library, or added to the existing utilities disc.

If you have a particularly interesting application you might