No part of this issue may be reproduced in any form without the prior written consent of the publisher except short excerpts quoted for the purpose of review and duly credited. The publishers do not necessarily agree with the views expressed by contributors and assume no responsibility for errors in reproduction or interpretation in the subject matter of this publication or from any results arising therefrom. The Editor welcomes articles and listings submitted for publication. Editor: P.A. Greenhalgh. Published by Scorpio Systems of Aylesbury. Copyright © Scorpio Systems 1987.

Editorial

First of all, thank you for the positive response to the first issue. You will find a representative sample of letters received later on in this issue (i.e. ‘representative’ in that it is virtually all of them!).

The bad news, I’m afraid, is that we have ‘lost’ a fair number of ex. 80-BUS News subscribers. This is probably for a number of reasons – Scorpio News may be considered inappropriate for those still using unexpended Nascom 1s or 2s; apathy; cost of changes of computing interest. The good news is that we have ‘gained’ quit a few subscribers, including at least one NON 80-BUS/​Nasbus user, and to all of them, welcome.

The direction that Scorpio News takes over the next issues will be guided by two main things. The first is what YOU the reader wants. Write a letter to us for publication expounding your views; write a brief (or long) article on your favourite computing topic. You can steer the direction probably more than you realise, IF you do something about it

The second guiding force is consideration for expanding the number of subscribers. At the current level I’m sad to say that we are unlikely to continue into a second volume, but if we can double or treble (or more!) the numbers then that’s a different story. So there are at least two possibilities here. One is don’t lend friends or colleagues your News, but each of you work on two or three of them to also subscribe. The other is to broaden the areas of coverage of Scorpio News. I’ll say little more on this now. Read Dave Hunt’s article and the letters carefully. A nunber of people are STILL using 80-BUS but now ALSO PCs/​Clones. What do YOU conclude? What’s YOUR own interest?

Finally, to any that fear that expanding the areas of coverage may dissipate the content too much, a few figures. Printing has high plate/​setup/​finishing charges, but lowish unit costs. I would estimate that with FOUR times the subscribers we could have TWICE as many pages for the SAME subscription. Hmmm!