Nascom News­let­ter

existing software. I would particularly like to mention Business, and Leisure’s PASCLDOS, which in conjunction with our existing Pascal provides many useful toolkit and disc access operations. Having used this recently I can vouch for its performance – a really well produced item. Documentation conforms to the present (but not necessarily future) A5 format of the Pascal manual – but I don’t think much of the cartoon on the front cover! As that is the only criticism I can level at present I think it speaks for itself.

Incidentally it is definitely a more polished DOS extension than the one which we offer ourselves.

B and L have also produced some NAS-PEN extensions (by a different author). While these are quite effective and are well implemented I personally much prefer the entirely new SPEX package – B & L prefer their extensions, so perhaps you should wait for an unbiased review of both elsewhere in this magazine in the future!

As well as NAS-DOS we fully support the standard CP/M version 2.2, and we have available a number of extremely powerful software packages. More information on these another time.

Look out for more news on applications software in the future – remember that we will be producing more software for NAS–DOS and CP/M for use on our computers and disc drives.

3. MANOR

There is little to report on this occassion. I have received two reports of a problem with the CReate option of HINTON, although I have not yet been able to produce the reported fault (an NF error) myself. When this is located a revised copy of the MANOR disc will be issued to all registered owners. This will include a number of minor changes witch increase the speed of operation. In particular a version for those of you using a short key field (typically 10 characters or less) will be provided, which can dramatically improve the time required to load the index file initially. A revised version of Rebuild is also planned which should be of considerable help to those with very large files who have the misfortune to corrupt their index file.

If you wish to use the suggested method of creating an empty file which forms the structure for a standard application (eg parts list), and then copy this whenever you need to start a new file I would make one useful suggestion. It is much easier and quicker to copy an empty file structure using the NAS-DOS utility FILCPY than to use the CReate option of HINTON. The CReate facility 1s really intended for those cases where you wish to change the structure of the file.

A few users do not seem to have appreciated the use of the second disc – as specified when you answer the ‘Data file disc umber?’ prompt. To enable you to create data files occupying