HIM

Chairman’s bit

Well here we are again, and you may notice, with a nice number of hardware articles, and diagrams. My thanks to those who answered my appeal for typists, even to the unsuspecting wife of one member, who may not know yet that her services have been volunteered. I have had a number of people contact me regarding the technical drawing bit, and the drawings in this issue have been done by Brian Hollins of Slough who committed the tactical mistake of wandering into the shop and volunteering, not knowing that I had all the articles which required illustration in my case at the time. Thanks Brian, I’ll bet you didn’t expect such prompt acceptance of your offer!! Still, my thanks to all of you, we now have a nice little pool of typists and artists we can call on, and we’ll be in touch when we need you. This way the load can be spread and the services offered can be distributed without any one person being landed with all the work.

Hopefully, this issue will be produced in record time, we’ve been indulging in a bit of “Digitus Extractus”, and as there was a lot of material in hand, much of it already submitted on tape or disk, we’ve had an easy time of it. (Speak for yourself! – ED.) BUT !!! We’ve got little material for the next issue. So if you’ve got something you’d like to see in print, and think that it may be of value to others, then let us have it. Only please read the little note buried somewhere in this newsletter about articles on, ‘How I built my Nascom’, and the like.

The clouds are still over Nascom (at the time of writing), and if anything look blacker as the days pass. Stock is still flowing from Nascom, but there are shortages of most product lines, with little apparent likelyhood of the supply situation easing in the near future. The receiver says that he has a number of possible purchasers looking into the company, but apart from purchasing the name of the company there can be little incentive on the part of any purchaser to carry on with expansion of the existing product lines as so much valuable development time and effort has been lost. It would take months to recruit engineering staff, and longer to weld them into a team capable of producing any worthwhile products. I doubt that any purchaser would be willing to put up the necessary capital for that unless the name and goodwill of Nascom were purchased at far below the receivers’ current asking price.

The ball seems to be firmly in the court of the independent suppliers who continue to have faith in the product (if not necessarily in the people who currently control the company). New Nascom compatible products are planned and some are already available, to the extent, that if you were thinking of buying a Nascom (if you don’t own one already, then how come you are reading this newsletter?), then I suggest you get one quick whilst there are still some around.

The six largest Nascom dealers have publicly announced their intention to support existing Nascom products and introduce new Nascom compatible products where ever possible. It doesn’t require much crystal ball gazing to see a situation developing, where Nascom will be producing so little that all the effective support will come from independent suppliers. So that if you already own a Nascom you’ll be sitting pretty. If you don’t own one, but want one, you’ll find it very hard to get.

In the meantime, the receiver is making life a little difficult for these very same dealers by having tried to raise a high court injunction against one of them (and sending strong warning letters to the rest), in part, regarding the use of the prefix ‘NAS’ being attached to both existing Nascom products, and to products compatible with Nascoms. A somewhat unproductive action I would have thought, and calculated to alienate the goodwill there is between Nascom and their dealers. I can see Nascoms’ point, they want to protect their good name against any old rubbish that anyone wants to market. But their action seems extremely heavy handed. Particularly as it is those very dealers who are keeping the name of Nascom alive in the light of the receivers’