Scor­pio News

Volume 1, Issue 4 at the end of September. This produced a minimal response, and so valuable subscription funds were used to send out a further reminder in mid-December. As I write this re-subscriptions are still coming in every couple of days. The difficulty that this causes is in not knowing how many newsletters to have printed, and if we had gone to the printers in December, as we did with Vol.1 Issue 1, then we would have definitely had too few printed. Even now it is difficult to tell. Isn’t life fun!

Now, I also have to confess that this issue is probably a bit on the skinny side. “Why is that?”, you ask. Well, for one, Scorpio News, like its predecessors, largely depends upon the FREE supply of suitable material from you, our readers. We’ve no idea what has happened, but we have received virtually nothing this time round. (Probably because we hadn’t published the issue dates??!!) Secondly, producing Scorpio News, fun that it is, does absolutely nothing to help our poor depleted bank balance, and so we have been exceedingly busy on other projects. Next, we have to get this out in a hurry before you all ‘phone up and say “where is it”, and we haven’t time to write 30 pages ourselves. And finally, because we have used the amazing Xerox Ventura Publisher to produce this issue, the same amount of material fits onto far less pages. So here it is, rather thin, but with the promise that the next one will be somewhat thicker if YOU’ll send in a letter or article.

Disks and articles

We still have a couple of disks that people sent us articles in on. Sorry that we haven’t returned them to you yet, but we’ll endeavour to do so once we’ve got this issue out. Despite the paragraph above we DO still have one or two articles in hand that we could publish, but they require various drawings/​diagrams etc. associated with them, and we haven’t had the opportunity to produce those yet.

COMPEC

Did anyone make it to Compec? What a waste of time! It seems to have totally lost direction, and it was very difficult to work out who on earth it was aimed at. Once upon a time it was THE computer show, and anybody and everybody who was anybody or hoped to be somebody used to be there. For some time it has been the ONLY show that Gemini has attended.

Well, Compec ’87 was, in my opinion, a wash-out. As I wandered round trying to find certain companies’ stands, I realised that they weren’t there. And as I started to think about it I realised that virtually none of the major hardware or software companies were there. So there is little to report about Compec ’87. What will happen at Compec ’88? I, for one, doubt that I will be going there to find out.