Bill Miller Reports

Peninsula Timex/Sinclair User Group (PUG) Meeting, attendance: 11

The videotape of the Tech-Draw program from Zebra Systems was shown.

EBZUG Meeting, attendance: 10

The video tape of the Tech-Draw program was shown. Wayne Seibel reports Pacific Bell’s Call America service is great for you heavy modem users. If you do most of your calling between 11:00pm and 6:00am, it might pay to check into it.

Bill Miller demonstrated his ZX Microdrive and ZX Interface 1 (available from The English Micro Connection), attached to a ZX Spectrum on loan from A&J Microdrive. The RS-232 port on the ZX Interface 1 seems to work fine with the Radio Shack CGP-115 Printer/Plotter’s RS-232 port.

SVSTUG Meeting, attendance: 20

The video tape of the Tech-Draw program was shown.

Terry Greenlee demonstrated his program (for the TS1000) to POKE characters from a string array into a REM statement. Terry created a 10240 character (320 line) REM statement and then used his program to poke the contents of an 8000 byte character array into it. The program deletes the unused part of the REM statement when it is done.

This program allows us to create long BASIC program lines (such as this article) with a text editor. Jack Dohany’s TYPEWRITER 32 was used for this article. TYPEWRITER 32 is available from the TIMELINEZ library for $4 on cassette.

We hope to incorporate these concepts into an information management system which will allow us to create, store, and transmit information “records” of variable length as long BASIC program lines.

These lines will probably be be DATA statements on the TS2068 and ZX Spectrum, but could be converted to PRINT statements for the ZX81/TS1000.

This system should be especially useful with a QL with 640K RAM.

Searching for this information should be very easy with any of the ‘TOOLKIT’ programs which search a BASIC program for a specified string.

Jack Dohany reports he is converting several of the ZX Spectrum ‘TOOLKIT’ programs to work with the TS2068.