The ten plus year QZX index is completed and copies mailed off to all those who sent in advanced orders. It looks quite good, if I do say so myself. It is a 59 page book with heavy red covers and plastic comb binding so that the pages easily lie flat.
The main part consists of four separate indices, a Subject Index, an Author Index, a Computer Index, and a Title Index, The last eight pages contain articles on the index organization, a list of issue corrections, a description of Sinclair computers in general, some author addresses, back issue availability, and QZX history. A sample page from the Title Index is on the last page in this issue.
The organization of the index was more complicated than I had anticipated. Part of the difficulty was that I was learning two new programs, the database program and a desktop publishing program. The database holds the basic information on each article and is instructed to print it out in four different formats to create the four indices. The database program also combines the article authors with the appropriate address from the QZX subscriber database to create the author address printout.
I experimented a bit with type size to get an index which was readable yet did not take too many pages to print. The. same font styles as QZX were used. It was not until just before the final print out that I discovered how to remove excess space between each line in the index. Some little touches like the print date and index title were added to the top of the page. The page numbers were made to come out correctly by making use of an undocumented feature of the page numbering system. (See the sample page.)
Most people know the general subject of the article for which they are looking, hence the first index is the subject index. Each article was assigned to one of 16 subjects. Some articles deal with more than one subject, but it would have required considerably more programing to have listed some articles under more than one subject (to say nothing of increasing the length of the index). In a few cases a secondary subject follows the main subject in the listing.
Fortunately most articles dealt with only one subject and the title is informative enough to convey some subject information too. The 16 subjects are listed later in this article.
Everybody has a favorite author or at least knows what many authors prefer to write about, so the second index is an Author Index. For amateurs, the most distinguishing feature is one’s call, hence authors are listed by their calls. Some authors are not licensed, so they are listed by their last names. Occasionally articles were taken from other magazines. If an author was not given, the name of the magazines is used as the author. If the information in the article is just a compilation of widely known information sometimes no author is listed. Authors have their calls listed in strict alphabetical order, starting at the beginning. This means that calls are not segregated by call area as is quite common in amateur literature. The table below lists the top 11 authors not directly connected with QZX and the number of articles each has written.
If you are interested in a particular Sinclair computer the third index will be most useful. There the articles are listed under the specific computer most closely associated with the article. Occasionally a second computer is listed if the article applies to it too.
The last index is based on the title of the article. It is the most complete listing as there is a column which tells the reader whether or not the article contains a schematic. The other columns are the same as the previous indices but are a little narrower (hence contain less information) to allow space for the schematic column.
Selecting the subjects to index was the most difficult decision to make when designing the index, and assigning one of these to each article was the most time consuming task when building the data base upon which this index is built.
Not all articles were suitable for indexing. There is no need to index the Editor’s Notes because they appear in each issue. Furthermore, they and a number of other articles such as Friends, Ads, Net reports, and vendor lists contain information which becomes dated rapidly, so that there is little utility in looking them up; hence they are not included. °
Most of the other articles are divided up into 16 different subject areas. The following table lists all these subjects and shows the number of articles assigned to each area as of the April 1993 issue. Figure 1 shows the assignments in a graphical form.
There are really quite a few computers which can be classified as Sinclair computers. A short article with more details of their differences appears in the index. But it is easy to classify all of them into one of six groups listed in the following table. The table also shows the number of articles in each group and is followed by Fig. 2, which displays the same information in graphical form.
The ZX81 group is the biggest. It also contains articles written for the very closely related TS1000 and TS1500. Also appearing in this group are articles discussing the predecessor ZX80 and Microace. The TS2068 group includes those very few articles which deal with the Spectrum series of computers. The Spectrum computers come in a number of models and were quite popular (especially as a game machine) in Europe, but were rarely sold here. Hence almost no QZX articles involve only these computers. The QL is a very capable computer. The Z88 is a really small lap top but is not used much by the amateur community. The Other category includes MSDOS computers and such unusual models as the PC8300, a Chinese distant relative of the ZX81 that will run some of the same programs. Some articles covering topics applicable to all of the Sinclair computes are indexed under All.
Schematics are always useful especially if one is repairing or extending a computer system. The last index (the Title Index) contains a special column with a Y in it if the article contains a schematic.
A sample page from the Title Index appears on the next page.