News From Lucas Nascom

This months excuse for a short contribution is pressure of work! Once again I have had to postpone the article on function keys – anyone who is really impatient can obtain a listing of part of some software which uses this technique by sending me an SAE. Due to our planned expansion of te business we will shortly be appointing extra staff. We need experienced hardware engineers, system and applications software engineers, technical support engineers and a documentation engineer. If there is anyone out there who feels that he or she might meet the bill, please write to our Personnel Department.

This month sees the release of information on the Winchester disc system, described below. In fact a number of these have already been delivered to customers at the time of writing. Other developments are mainly by way of enhancements to existing software products. We are continuing to try to improve the standard of our documentation, both on new products and existing ones. In particular the release of NAS-DOS 2.1 also sees a new manual, which we hope will be found to be more ‘user friendly’ than its predecessor. All manual updates are now generally be accompanied by a pocket-sized summary card.

In mentioning new releases of existing software can I yet again make a plea for you to register your software purchases using the cards supplied with the products. This is in your own interests – special software upgrade offers and technical support will ONLY be provided to owners of registered products. From our knowledge of sales and registrations it is obvious that not everyone registers. There are no conditions attached or loss of any rights if you do register.

Returning to the question of documentation and general product presentation (particularly software) it is interesting to see how the microcomputer industry in general is now placing much more emphasis in this area. As more new computer users appear, particularly in business, software needs to become more polished and easy to use, with corresponding improvements in documentation. However, while not wishing to discourage a long needed move in that direction, I do have some reservations. There seems to be a danger that presentation of a product and documentation are becoming excessive – enormous manuals and ever more fancy binders supporting increasingly complex programs. Are there still at least some new users who really only require straightforward basic software which is easy to understand and can be explained fully in a manual of less than 100 pages? Any comments would be received with interest.

As the time of writing there is a special offer on the Lucas LX80 printer – 80 characters per second, 80 columns and while the offer lasts only £225. There are many special printing features, including expanded and compressed text, italics, overprinting, undrlining and graphics. Thiz offer will be for a limited period.

Mike Hessey
Technical Manager