The folding of the SINC-LINK, the end of the Best of the Best Sinclair newsletter era, leaves a large gap in the Sinclair community: For more than twelve years, SINC-LINK provided us with top-notch articles and programs on all of the Sinclair computers – very thorough with help available on what ails you.
George Chambers, Hugh Howie and Jeff Taylor were the nucleus of the Newsletter. George, the most prolific, Bob Mitchell, Larry Crawford. Hugh Howie and very many more.
As George puts it; “We have become long in the tooth and, at least for my part, I want to move onto other things. “- a state-of-the-art 486. He will still be available for advice on problems we may encounter; shall be maintaining my IS-2068 computer system for some time to come.”
I can appreciate how publishing a newsletter can become a chore after so many years especially when articles become scarce. Although I enjoy working on the Newsletter, I do spend some 40 hours, learning Desk Top Publishing: editing, spell-checking, formatting, printing and so on, and then some, for affixing labeis, stuffing envelopes, stamps etc.
“Any of you into MSDOS?”
George, you’ve probably discovered that MSDOS is still archaic by Sinclair standards although it seems that the end is near for it after Chicago (Windows 95) takes over in 95. It is clunky and not user friendly with limitations and intimidation; no true multitasking á la QL. Windows software, canned programs I don’t dare disturb, have improved greatly to being more intuitive and user friendly in the last 12 months; the learning curve became very short for the initiated but with a penalty of more memory requirements both for RAM (8 Megs.) and disk space. It is too early to go into Multimedia unless you know your DMA’s, IRQ’s and VO addresses. If you are finicky like myself, you would still like to write your own TS-2068 programs and have them run just the way you like, unless you are going into Visual BASIC or C++ programming. Good luck, bon chance to all.