Bill Jones’s 1989 manual for Daisy, a large menu-driven software system for the TS 2068 with the LarKen disk system, published by Gulf Micro Electronics of Panama City, Florida. Daisy combines word processing, a text database, mail merge and disk management in about 80K of programming, mostly BASIC with machine-code routines where speed matters. Because the whole system is far too large for the 2068’s memory, Daisy keeps its roughly 30 menus and most of its functional blocks on disk and MERGEs them in, and DELETEs them again, as each function is needed.
The manual describes the three main parts of the ensemble: the Daisy Shell Manager, the Smart Text disk database manager and word processor, and the Mail Merge software. Daisy also manages two programs that aren’t supplied on its disks, Update Magazine’s D.Base-1 and Bob Mitchell’s View Calc Disk. A set of utilities prints files from Mscript, Tasword, modem downloads and other ASCII files saved to disk. After an overview, the manual covers getting started, first-run initialization of the printer and interface, general operation and hidden functions, then gives LLISTs of the main program modules, including inpt.B6, edt.B6, seqnt.B6, usrpgm.B6, wdpro.B6, pe.B6, fomat.B6 and stymn.B6. Many sections of Daisy were also printed in Update Magazine as stand-alone programs, starting with the Mail Merge software in October 1987.
Update announced Daisy.B6 in July 1989, and Jones wrote More About Daisy Smart Text for its January 1992 issue. David Lassov’s Daisy Be Good series in ZXir QLive Alive (1994–1997) walks through Daisy’s menus and describes his faster reworking of the suite, which he split into four programs: ManlAd, PO+MM, IN+ED and dbms. The TTSUC LarKen Disk Library lists Lassov’s version of the Daisy suite as disk 58.
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