SIR CLIVE – TODAY A KNIGHT
No longer can we call him Uncle! Clive Sinclair, recognized for his many accomplishments in his homeland, has had bestowed upon himself the Royal Order of Knighthood by the Queen of England.
Sir Clive, at the age of 42, is one of Britian’s best known and wealthiest entrepreneurs. His accomplishments include breakthroughs in the fields of digital watchs, calculators and microcomputers which have consistently sold for less than even the Japanese.
The pocket TV set we have mentioned before with the two inch screen is due to be sold in the Britisn market before the year is out.
The electric car is an important item on Sir Clive’s agenda and he has apparently taken a serious step toward entering that market. He has purchased an option to acquire a major portion of the defunct De Lorean Motor Company’s automobile assembly plant in West Belfast, Northern Ireland.
Sinclair has been working on the electric car concept for a decade and according to a company spokesman, a prototype may be ready in less than two years. A new type of lead-acid battery that will be light, low-cost and quickly recharged is under development.
Sir Clive has also shown an interest in the Lotus sports car company and is considering making a personal investment in that concern.
FIREFOX IN ANTIGONE
A U.S. Air Force pilot flying alone on a reconnaissance mission spots what appears to be a group of missile silos being built on the border of an enemy and neutral country.
The plane swoops lower to take photographs when out of nowhere, an enemy Russian-built MIG appears dead in the rear of the U.S. aircraft. The pilot wills the plane into a defensive maneuver and pictures in his mind a missle being launched from the rear of his aircraft and destroying the MIG.
Within a split second, the projectile is fired and the enemy aircraft goes down in flames!
A scene from a movie or a science fiction novel?
Not quite! Scentists at the University of Utah believe they have found a way to accomplish this with today’s technology.
These bio-engineers have found that thought patterns can stimulate electrical activity in certain body muscles. These electrical impulses could be monitored to control computers that would perform aircraft maneuvers and manipulations much faster than by doing them manually, according to Professor John Wood.
Wood and Dr. Stephan Jacobsen have developed a mechanical arm costing $20,000 utilizing these techniques. The Air Force has provided a grant to fund future research which will cost between $30,000 to $50,000.
The university is the same one that developed and implanted the artificial heart in Seattle dentist Barney Clark.
149.95, 99.95, 49.95, 39.95, ?
What is the cheapest price a computer can be purchased for? The above prices reflect the suggested retail prices for the ZX-81 or TS-1000 computers since conception to present date.
Sears and K Mart have dropped the selling price even lower to 29.97. K Mart was selling the 16K RAMpack for 34.97 and is now selling it for 39.97. These RAMpacks, by the way, can be attatched to the new TS-1500 for a total of 32K of memory.
In other facets of the computer price-discount war, K Mart is selling the Commodore 64 for 199.95. This computer sold for $599.95 when new and was, in my opinion, an excellent buy at that price at that time.
The TI-99/4A, which originally sold for 1150.00 when introduced, can now be purchased almost anywhere for under $100 after rebate.
Computers from Radio Shack, Atari and other companies have been discounted tremendously. The Apple 2, which a year or so ago sold for around $1400, was phased out and sold for under $600.00.
This type of price-axing never existed until the TS/ZX computers showed up on the scene. The profit margins for the manufacturers must have suffered substantially in the process.
But this is only the beginning. Radio Shack has a low-end color computer in the works that is to sell for around $125.00. It comes with 4K of RAM. Compare that with the features and cost of the 2000, the cost of the add-on peripherals and the massive marketing campaign of Timex and that computer will probably be lost in the shuffle.
A lot of manufacturers have re-structured their thinking and will have to continue to do so.
SYNCHRO-SETTE DOUBLE ISSUE?
If you look at the cover of this month’s issue, you will see that it says JUNE/JULY 1983. This might be interpreted as being a loss of one magazine or cassette tape to our subscribers.
Let me assure you that this will not be the case.
All subscriptions will be extended one month so that everyone will receive exactly 12 magazines and 6 cassette tapes for their investment. The same goes for any advertising contracts in effect. The ads will appear in as many issues as contracted for.
The reason for this move is two-fold:
1. Ever since the conception of Synchro-Sette, the magazine has been shipped at the end of the month with that month’s name appearing on the issue. To many subscribers, this was envisioned as being a product that came out late with old news. This was and is not the case. Many of the news items were inserted into the copy at press time making the magazine as up to date as possible.
2. The cassette tapes coming out on even-numbered months posed some book keeping problems we didn’t anticipate when the magazine was first conceived. A system with the cassettes coming out with the first month of the year is an easier and more logical structure to work with.
The cassettes will now come out on odd-numbered months with a new subscriber who begins on an even-numbered month, having the subscription pre-dated one month so as to include the last available cassette and issue.
The next magazine you will receive will be the August 1983 issue with the following month being September and so on.
The cassettes will be shipped with the odd-numbered month’s issues.
We hope this doen’t create too much confusion. The product should be shipped with the same regularity as in the past.
2K OR NOT 2K, | THAT IS THE QUESTION!
What do you think of the idea of phasing out the 2K programs on the bi-monthly cassettes?
Instead of getting an average of 4-2K programs and 3-16K programs with the 16K BULLETIN Board, you would receive an average of 6-16K programs with the 16K BULLETIN Board.
Last year we phased out the 1K programs and replaced them with 2K programs. Before this, we asked our subscribers if they had any objections. The only negative responses we felt would be from persons who had a 1K ZX-81 and did not anticipate purchasing a 16K RAMpack.
Not one person responded this way. However, many wrote to tell us they were for the idea. We felt the subscriber has benefitted with programs of better quality on the average since more could be done in 2K than 1.
Now we are wondering if anyone out there has a 2K machine that they do not intend to upgrade to 16K!
Besides this possibility, the only other drawback might be the short routines that are 2K in size which many people find useful. These routines, of course, can still be loaded into a 16K machine but the subscriber may feel cheated if we counted them as one of the programs because they are not getting the same amount of programs as before.
If this happens, we intend to include enough of these shorter programs to compensate.
Let us know your feelings on this subject as soon as possible.
WINKY PRICE DROP
Bill Russell of G. Russell Electronics has announced a price reduction for the Winky 2. The new prices will be 14.95 for the kit and 19.95 assembled. Include 1.00 for shipping.
For those of you who are not familiar with what the Winky can do, you can make duplicates of a cassette tape from one recorder to another with this device in between the two recorders, no matter how many programs are on the tape.
There is another important use. Do you have a noisy RAMpack that introduces noise onto a tape when you are trying to save a program? When you don’t use the RAMpack, the noise disappears, so you know it is the RAMpack.
We have one such RAMpack that is so bad, saved programs cannot be reloaded no matter what the volume adjustment is at. When listening to the tape with the cords disconnected from the recorder, it sounds like the sound a train makes but played back at a high speed with the program pulses being all but drowned out.
When the Winky 2 board was installed (just plugs in between the computer and the recorder) the program loaded with no problem. Listening to the tape through earphones showed all the noise to have disappeared.
The Winky 2 has the potential to hook up from computer to recorder, recorder to computer, recorder to recorder, computer to computer, computer to recorder and computer, etc. See the ad in this issue for further information or the review in the February 1983 issue.
THE TS-2000 AS A BUSINESS MACHINE
Which computer represents the best buy for business purposes? If mass data entry is required, such as an inventory program for an Auto Parts Store or other such business situations is a prerequisite, the Commodore 64 has the capability to address 64K of RAM. The Radio Shack has 128K capability. The IBM PC and other computers can hold as much as 256K.
Why is RAM memory important? Let us say you had a customer invoice program and you had to enter a few hundred or thousands of customer sets of information per month or year. Almost any computer can do this if you don’t mind making a new file everytime your program file runs out of memory.
But what if you wanted all of those customers or inventory items in the same file and held in memory at the same time such as in a situation where a data-sort would be performed? Even 256K could be bulked out with a small Auto-Parts Store.
Of course, the user could purchase a RANDOM ACCESS DATA SORT PROGRAM that sorts data on disk rather than in memory.
Now the user has to consider the price of not only the computer but the disk drives, the disk drive controller, the disk drive interface and the necessary program itself. It doesn’t take long to surpass $5000 or more to reach the end result.
The TS-2000 can address up to 256 64K blocks. This comes out to be 16 megabytes (over 16 million bytes). Compare this with the 2K and 16K Timex machines that many people are already using in business today.
At this time, we are not knowlegeable as to how much of this power will be able to be directly available to the user with add-on peripherals. Memotech has stackable RAMpacks that allow existing ZX/TS machines to hold a megabyte of data in RAM.
It is not too difficult to envision a small business person sitting before the 2000 and having it print out a mailing list of 20,000 customers, all sorted by zip code.
The “People’s Computer”! Here it comes!
MATH PROGRAMS FOR SCHOOL
Computech is offering THE MATH TEACHER, an educational software program for levels between first grade elementary to junior high.
The program is a serious and professional educational math tutorial designed to drill students on the basics of addition, subtraction, multiplication and division by presenting to the student 25 working math problems per session.
Math operations and skill level are teacher or student selectable and can be changed at any time. Student’s scores are, of course, displayed along with graphics. 16K is required.
MATH TEACHER is available for the TS/ZX machines for 29.95. It is also available for the IBM-PC, VIC-20/COM-64, OSBORNE-1 and the NEC PC8001A.
THE SPELLING TEACHER will soon be available, also.
For further information, contact:
CompuTech, Dept. TS-MT-SS | P.O.BOX 7000 | Redondo Beach, CA, 90277
2 NEW 64K RAMPACKS
From Barlog Software – low profile – metal case – 109.95
From Gladstone Electronics – 6 month limited warranty – plastic case – under 100.00
These are both assembled units, not kits. Without too much shopping around, a person can now own a 64K computer for under $150.00. For more information contact:
BARLOG SOFTWARE | 401 N. GEYER RD. | KIRKWOOD, MO, 63122
GLADSTONE ELECTRONICS | 1585 KENMORE AVE | BUFFALO, NY, 14217 | (716) 874-5510
MACHINE CODE STARTER
We have experienced excellent response to last month’s machine language tutorial. Bob Lucas of BARLOG SOFTWARE sent us a few programs he wrote. He is offering a program tape for beginners interested in machine code.
It’s called the MACHINE CODE STARTER and comes with three subroutines and documentation explanation formatted in language for the beginner. It sells for 6.95 and requires 16K.
For more info about this and other products, contact Bob at the Barlog address listed above.