Nascom News­let­ter

Volume 7

Applications Software for NAS-SYS and NAS-DOS – NAS-PEN, SPEX, NAS-CALC, MANOR etc

Volume 8

Applications software for CP/M – FINAS, FMS 80, Calcstar, Wordstar etc

Of these manuals the whole of volume 1 is completely new except for the NAS-SYS 3 manual, which is merely a reprint using daisy wheel printer. In almost all cases the manuals will be typed using a daisy wheel printer with a standard type face (prestige elite at 12 characters per inch, 70 characters per line). So far the MANOR and NAS-CALC manuals have also been reprinted in the standard format, and others will follow in due course. NAS-DOS will probably be the next to be tackled, and will involve re-writing some sections. Incidentally most of the manuals are now being prepared using the SPEX word processor. NAS-PEN will continue to be available and is a super word processor for its size, but for the NAS-DOS owner SPEX does have a number of advantages (see the next section!).

2. NAS-DOS – Pascal and SPEX

NAS-DOS is our own low cost disc operating system, and is compatible with all our NAS-SYS software – ROM BASIC, NAS-PEN, ZEAP, NAS-DIS and Pascal. In addition we are adding new applications software to increase the versatility of the machine. All this software is priced very modestly, and therefore we think that for many users with a limited budget NAS-DOS is an attractive proposition compared with CP/M. At the moment we have already released NAS-CALC (a spread sheet program) and MANOR (a data base manager).

SPEX is a powerful word processor package intended for the disc user. It is loaded into RAM, and occupies about 12K. It is not intended as a replacement for NAS-PEN, which with its compact size and availability on EPROM is particularly suited to the cassette user (although as we have said already it can be used perfectly successfully with NAS-D0S). The particular advantages of SPEX are:

Greatly extended editing functions, and NAS-SYS compatible use of the cursor

Improved (and variable within the text) width and margin inset facilities

Scrolling via the cursor (it never goes off-screen!)

Automatic paging

Elimination of the need to perform a formatting operation

Generally no need to hyphenate – and then have to change hyphenation if the text is changed

Unfortunately the editor asked for this contribution to be produced using NAS-PEN, so on this occassion I have had to go back to that package. However for ease of use most of the new manuals are prepared using SPEX.

Other people are now developing NAS-DOS extensions for