Chairman’s Bit

Well, here we are again, yet another action packed issue, and only a month late (as usual). The Editor said, “Final copy first week April please.” and as usual, we all ignored him until the last minute. Still we’ve got it all together, and it all goes off to the printers on Monday.

Now to the financial bit, members pay 5.00 per year for six issues, and what with rapidly rising postage and print costs, we are actually running at a loss. We aren’t broke yet, but we soon will be. Part of the expense is letter writers who expect replies and don’t send stamps for return postage. NUDGE. If you want a reply, 12p please, or you won’t get one. Now we have no intention of foisting a surcharge on members (so you can put your cheque books away), but to try and make a bit of extra loot, we are going to start accepting advertising. Not a bookful with a couple of pages of text lost somewhere in it, but we reckon that if we sell a maximum of 5 pages per issue, we can then afford to bring the newsletter up from 40 to 48 pages, and we’ll virtually cover our deficit. Maybe we’ll make a modest profit. Who knows, we might be able to reduce the subs next year.

To start with, we’ve twisted Nascoms’ arm, and another distributor. So if you sell goodies for Nascom, and you want to reach about 2,500 “Nasnuts”, then approach the INMC. We bet we reach more Nascom owners at once than all that expensive newstand advertising. Get a slice of the action!!! Our rates are very modest.

Commercial over.

As you read this issue, it won’t escape your attention that there are an awful lot of (perhaps that should be lot of awful) reviews. It didn’t start out that way, but like “Topsy”, it “Just growed”. Still, with this lot in print perhaps we can collect some loot from those people we didn’t slate too badly, as well as would be advertisers. So we decided to turn this into a bumper reviews issue, and get them all out of the way in one go. Hope you like it. A lot of the reviews and articles have been submitted by members, and this is very encouraging. Our thanks, keep them coming.

Back to the subject of readers letters. Paul has landed me with a fair number this month, and a large number of those display a very severe shortcoming of some Nascom owners and embryo programmers. They can’t read !!! Nascom manuals take a fair ammount of getting used to, but it is all there, and the vast majority of it is all correct. I have been tempted to write ‘read the ****** manual’ over some of these letters and send them back like that. My natural politeness and modesty forbade. But I promise, next month I will. Its a lot quicker than writing a letter.

We’ve still got a lot of material left over for issue 8, so we’d better get on with it, in the meantime, happy programming.

D. R. Hunt.