This is not really an educational package, more of a utility with possible educational uses. I occasionally see the odd report about business users basing their system upon the good old ZX81 and this, combined with the frequent advertisements for multiple expansion units, indicates that a lot of people still have a great amount of faith in a machine that many now consider almost redundant!

For those with such a system this package may be just ideal; in fact, even if your total memory is never likely to exceed 16K it may still be value for money. Fastword is the name of the twin cassette suite of programs and it is essentially a powerful word processor.

The cassettes contain five programs - a 16K Editor, Formatter 1 and 2, together with Word Processor 1 and 2. The tapes also contain fastload version of these programs for use in conjunction with the Fastload system developed, as was Fastword, by Dr. G. Pearson.

Given the limited space of reviews such as these, it is not really possible to do such a program justice and I intend therefore just to give an overview of the system, my comments relating mainly to the 16K elements of the package.

The system has machine-code routines which allow the saving and loading of text files to and from tape at high speed - virtually a disk system for the 81! The editor sections of the programs are fairly fast and would allow a moderate typing speed... provided of course that you have a decent keyboard!

Text editing is also impressive and as the extremely comprehensive manual points out '...menu-driven commands support some very fancy text editing techniques'. Printing capabilities of the program are very good and contain a character set that includes nearly everything that a normal typewriter can print, plus subscript numbers as well as several useful special symbols.

36 characters per line are produced with the ordinary print command but block of continuous lines up to 255 characters long can be printed with a wide variation of character sizes possible.

If you have only 16K of RAM then all you need to use is the 16K editor to create, load and edit text files. The maximum file size is 125 screen lines, roughly equivalent to two typed pages. You can then use Formatter-1 to load your text files from tape and print them.

The Editor section has 24 lines available for display and text is easily manipulated using single-key cursor commands. Blocks of print can be moved around or copied to new locations and the program has a fairly fast Find/Replace command. For the more complex functions, a simple menu is located bottom-screen to give help. Additional features include auto-repeat keys, fast data read, block movement, free-space available - in fact, almost everything you could desire in a word processing program.

The Formatter section performs with the aid of menus and commands available are Catalogue, Kill (this deletes one of the character sets to give enough memory for sideways printing), Load, Print and Ramtop (which allows ramtop to be changed in Formatter 2 only).

The basic Formatter-1 takes a text file, formats it to commands which you enter and sends the results to your printer. Normal video letters are here printed as Lower case, inverse video giving capitals. The formatting commands control such things as setting of left/right margins, spacing, underlining and height and width of the characters printed.

The commands can be given as direct commands or be incorporated within the text to be acted upon whilst printing, or both. Some of the facilities offered include line centering, line justification, banner-text variable-sized characters, indent, and paging (larger memories only).

As with most programs of this sort, the great temptation is to get right at it and start 'the fancy stuff' straight away. I suppose it is possible. But I couldn't turn many of the features off once I had started. A thorough read of the manual is strongly advised *before* you start!

A brief comment here about Fastload, the sister program. It claims to load any program from 4 to 6 times faster than normal. In use, it certainly loaded the sample program approximately four times faster, but it was difficult to load and I was therefore unable to test the Fastword sections which used this system.

However, the booklet accompanying Fastload gives detailed instructions on how to tailor your own programs to utilise the facility of drastically reduced loading times... this alone would make it worth purchasing for the 'serious' ZX81 user (Costs £8.50).

Individually (loading problems aside), both of these programs seem to represent real value for money. Fastword is extremely versatile and, although there are comprehensive word processing packages such as Tasword already in common use by those with 16K, for those using ZX81 as the heart of a business package who have 32, 48 or 64K then this suite of programs demands serious consideration.