These programs are described as a cheap entry into computer aided design. This is quite a task and how well did they fare?

First, an outline of the series. Grafkey is a keyboard-driven graphic generator program. It allows to draw lines, rectangles, triangles and circles on screen. These can be lined or filled in up to eight colours plus eight flashing colours.

The resultant pictures can be saved to tape quite quickly, in about 20 seconds.

One nice facility is the Rubber Banding mode, in which up to four points can be stretched about the screen.

Grafstick is similar in function to Grafkey, but is driven by a joystick.

Grafdisk combines both programs, and has the advantage of faster save and load facilities - about two seconds faster!

The instructions supplied were quite detailed and easy to follow. The programs all failed however to exploit the full capability of the BBC graphic commands, though with the disc program, Clares promise an upgradable on-going development.

My main criticism is that you can't dump a screen to a printer; this sort of program is of little use without that ability.

Secondly, hitting the Break key by accident was always fatal, as "olding" resulting in "Bad program" and a loss of hours of work!

J.H.