Scor­pio News

Apart from effects on my attitude to the old machine, I find I keep reaching for a mouse when I want to do something. Machines without a row of pop-down menus seem slightly quaint. And the programs available are really something. A friend brought his Amiga round the other day, and we linked the two machines together with a simple 3 wire lead, and practised formation flying with the SubLogic Flight Simulator. You can see each other through the cockpit window when doing this. Far be it from me to criticise another Nascom programmer, but this sort of software is a considerable advance on “Revenge of the Drosophila”. (Actually, I may run that again soon, I still can’t believe it was possible at all.)

I’m sorry to go on for so long about the new machine, but it is what I have been using. It even has a Hisoft Devpac available, which is a relief to use, compared with the other Amiga assemblers and debuggers around. I had been thinking in terms of linking the Amiga and Nascom so that each could use the facilities of the other, but now I am not so sure. While it would be fairly simple (!) to get Marvin to pretend to be a MODEM for the Amiga, it would not result in any programs people might want to buy, and that is what I really want to do with the Amiga. Well, that and flying…

Dijkstra not all bad shock horror probe!

It is said that when Dijkstra is asked “Can a computer think?” he replies “Can a submarine swim?”. I suspect Noam Chomsky’s reply would be “It all depends what you mean by the word ‘a’.” And now a joke for programmers. A hardware engineer, an analyst and a programmer are in a car with brake failure, which is rushing down a mountain road. Somehow they manage to stop safely. The engineer wants to take the car to bits and fix it, while the analyst wants to interview the other two about what they actually want the car to do. “No,” says the programmer, “Let’s drive on, and see if the fault reappears.”

Downwardly mobile prices for antiques

The asking prices (and they are negotiable) for the gear mentioned in the last issue are now as follows. The Spectrum complete with MODEM and games is £100. Iotec Iona £100. S100 system which actually has four memory boards, rather than three, and so is a 64K system, is now £100. Ohio Challenger £50. Dolphin printer £25. Wrecked Nascom 1, silly offers invited.

I might be persuaded to part with my Pluto board, Belectra floating point board, Gemini MODEM board, Hisoft C and Compas Pascal for sensible sums. And a realistic offer for the whole system would be very tempting. The list of bits is in Volume 1 Issue 1 of this magazine, and the phone number is ____-______. ●