Letter from Pete Fischer

I received a pleasant surprise about Thursday of last week, Pete Fischer, co-author of the Telecommunications Guide for Timex Computers, sent me three disks and a letter. | was pleased with all three disks, and was very interested in what he had to say. Some of it you will now find out:

Hello David,

I would first like to say thank you for all these months you’ve been sending me copies of your newsletter. I sincerely appreciate it, and continue to be amazed at how you can manage to turn out SO MUCH new material every month.

I was especially pleased to see the Rebecca Wieser buffer utility in there. | thought it was a pretty unique piece of code, and I was happy to see it get some recognition. My intention was to send her a copy but my life has been pretty chaotic or the past few months.

I hope you noticed how Gary Lessenberry took the idea a bit further and made MTERM an 80 col Terminal to boot!

I’m enclosing some Aerco disks for you, now that you have a DD, you can see how easy it is to exchange files. Tape is so TIME CONSUMING! but the disk is so EASY!

I wish I could share your warm enthusiasm for Jerry and Til at Aerco, but I’m afraid they don’t care much for TIMEX users these days. They’re too busy selling to Atari ST users. They gave up on us before finishing the Spectrum Compatibility. This was, of course, a very key thing. It was promised 2 1/2 years ago. Never delivered.

I, personally, made the mistake of buying 2 disk drives from them, the infamous REMEX drives. They both failed, and in the process of my trying to get them to work, I screwed up MANY, MANY disks with hundreds of hours of work on them. Finally, I talked to Jerry on the phone. He insisted up and down there was nothing wrong with them and that he could fix them. So I sent them back to him. That was Sept. 87. I’ve heard NOTHING from them since. I called several times. Each time they said they’d have it out in the next week. Last time they said that was over 2 months ago. I since ordered a copy of the ROM disassembly. They said it would take 2 weeks. Again, nothing! Oh well, l guess another one bites the dust.

But onto more positive topics. Hold on to your hat, there’s a rumor that Sir Clive, himself, may make an appearance at the Florida Winter Fest. Only a rumor, but a nice one anyway. Sure wish I could go! But I think only a miracle could accomplish that….It is also rumored that John Oliger and Paul Holmgren are working on a Hard Disk interface for the 2068. This is a good source. Gary Lessenberry has been communicating with Paul a lot lately. I’m sure it’s true.

MAYBE A MONTH LATER…

I wonder if you have the Z-SI/0 card from Grey and Clifford? It has a pretty neat terminal program for it (besides Specterm-64) which I am using at the moment, It’s called IMP245. It works pretty well. I was able to buy a decent pair of drives. This has finally allowed me to use the RP/M part of my Aerco system. It was actually CP/M that I bought the system for in the first place. It was very frustrating not being able to use it due to the bad drives I bought from Aerco.

But with the combination of the Aerco I/F, 2 TEAC drives and the Grey and Clifford Z-SI/0 card using IMP245 I can upload and download all day long. So I am able to get a BUNCH of new files. I also approached the local FIG group and the local MORROW group. But I know you’ve probably too busy to do this sort of stuff. Well, I hope you enjoy the enclosed disks.

Take care, Adios,
Phoenix Pete!