Nascom News­let­ter

It will be simple enough to define certain SCAL numbers for specific tasks, and to define the way they pass their parameters/​results. For example, the RTC might be called using whatever SCAL is defined for it with HL pointing to the area where the time/​date is to be stored. The colour boards such as the Pluto or Climax might also avail to the ’Sys facilities in that predefined graphics routines (Draw line, Circle,​etc) might be assigned ’Sys numbers.

Implementation of each of these elementary functions (primitives?) will be system depentant of course. It will be necessary for each Nascom owner to do a little bit of work building up the library of routines to suit his own system, but then that is done, programs can be interchanged between owners in the knowledge that they will run on one machine or another provided that the host machine has all the facilities required. Obviously, one can not expect a program to read Day, Date and Time on a machine that has not got a clock fitted, but one could expect an error message and a safe return. Consider a Pluto owner who sends a program to a Climax owner. Under the old machine code system, the Pluto program hasn’t a ghost of a chance of running on the Climax. Using the suggested Extended ’Sys, the program will be able ta rely on certain standard primitives being available. It will not have to concern itself with the precise byte by byte structure of those primitives. Instead, it will know (and use the word usefully) that Circles are drawn by a particular SCAL number and lines by another.

I hope that this letter will serve to provoke other Nascom Users into considering this proposal.

This is something that has been in the back of my mind for quite awhile now and as Mr. O’Farrell has put something in writing, I would like to take the proposal further. Being the editor of this magazine, I get to see a vast amount of ingenious software and hardware ideas. Some of it is from professional sources but the vast majority of the ideas come from private individuals who have applied some ingenuity and imagination to a problem. I would life to propose that we set about creating a specification for a new standard of operating system for the Nascom computer. This would take into account most, if not all, of the current hardware available but also leave the doors open for further expansion (speech and speech recognition, picture recognition, etc). It would need to support page mode Gemini boards, MAP-80 256K boards, etc) and it would also be nice to see the facility to communicate with other machines and possibly additional processors.

Well, these are my thoughts on the subsect, what are yours? Get your pens out and start writing.
IJC