If you find tapes take too long to load on your BBC Micro and you cannot afford discs, the Hobbit drive could save you both money and time.

For the domestic BBC Micro use there must come a point when the realisation dawns that cassettes are just not going to be of use any more. The commercial user has already moved on to discs either through the BBC's own drives or with the Torch disc pack, but the home user has been content to struggle with the 1200 baud cassette system.

The problem you must face is, how can you justify buying something that costs nearly as much as the computer again? The alternative approach to discs is to go it alone and add a proprietary drive which will be cheaper but requires a good knowledge of soldering and interfacing. Something that many people will rightly be nervous of doing.

So, is there another way of adding a mass storage system onto your computer that will be faster than tape, as easy to use as discs and yet still leave you with both arms and legs attached? The answer may well lie in a device called the Hobbit from Ikon Computer Products. It's not actually a new device, it has been available for the NASCOM computer for around a year and the Philips digital cassette mechanism is even older. But this is the first time that it has been implemented with a complete operating system. And, at £135 plus VAT it appears to be ideally placed between the existing tape system and the expensive disc.

The Hobbit is a small black box. It comprises a black metal and plastic cube 90mm by 95mm by 110mm with the tape loading door at the front, four rubber feet at the bottom and two sockets at the back. Also included in the package are a manual, two leads and a PROM containing the device's operating system. Both cables are fairly short; indeed the data cable was somewhat shorter than the power lead, which means that the unit has to stand fairly close to the BBC Micro but that's not too much of a problem.

The standard cable set will cater for two drives which means that expansion to a dual drive system only requires the purchase of a second Hobbit, the operating system will happily handle both. The cassette supplied with our review drive was, although of exactly the same size as a dictation machine tape, of digital quality rather than audio. Given the speed that the system operates at, I would highly recommend that these are used even though they do cost nearly £3 each.

Installing the Hobbit is no easy task. Mainly this is the fault of the manual, of which more later, rather than the basic ideas behind the system. If you have any worries about opening the box of your precious BBC Micro then you can send the whole lot to Ikon and they'll install it for a £5 note (plus VAT of course!). If you have no qualms about opening the box then the installation will take some five to ten minutes of your time, but don't rush it or you could damage your micro.

The first task is to make sure that the power is off and the plug is removed from the socket. Now remove the top cover of the BBC Micro and the keyboard assembly, a total of four screws and three nuts and bolts. You should now be able to see the ROM socket area at the front of your machine on the right-hand side. The ideal place to fit the operating system PROM is 1C100 but it can go in IC101 or 1C88 if required.

Plugging the PROM in is quite hard work, the sockets Acorn chose are not the nicest, so make very sure that all the pins are straight on the clip before you give it that final push home. Depending on where the PROM has been fitted you will now have to re-position one of two links and possibly cut the lead on one component. Now you can re-assemble the keyboard and case and proceed to plug the leads in.

First to go in is the data lead which fits into the user port socket underneath the micro, this should be poked into place with the clips provided on the socket. The other end of this lead goes to the socket at the back of the Hobbit. The power cable fits into the slightly precarious auxiliary power socket under the micro and care must be taken to ensure that the polarising lug on the plug is on the side nearest to the computer or spectacular damage may result. In theory it shouldn’t be possible to plug it in the wrong way round but... With the power cable attached to the Hobbit you can now turn everything back on.

Instead of the familiar, friendly greeting from the BBC Micro on the screen you should now have the following:

BBC COMPUTER
HOS V1.2 (C) L.J.WANT & A.WANT 1983
IKON..TEL 099 421 515
BASIC
>

This indicates that all is well. If you don't get this then turn off and check everything again very carefully!

What you now have is a very fast tape system which will obey (almost) all the commands that you have previously used on the cassette tape system. However, there is one major change to be made to the way you operate. Each blank tape must first be initialised and each side of the tape needs to be given a unique name. This is achieved by using the *FORMAT FFF command which initialises the tape and gives it a volume name which can be up to eight letters specified by FFF. As 2 confidence check type *CAT once you've formatted a blank tape and this will show you what's on it. Don't be perturbed by noises coming from the Hobbit drive, it's under complete control of the ROM and knows what it's doing!

The sheer speed of operation of the Hobbit should totally change the way you use your BBC Micro in that the handling of larger data files becomes a realistic operation time-wise and doesn't take all day. All the basic operating system commands you previously used on cassette are present and correct (with one exception that I'll cover in a moment) so you can SAVE and LOAD programs as normal.

However, to add to the facilities there are a number of extra functions available. The catalogue of programs stored on the tape can be accessed directly from the index display so it is possible to *CAT the tape and then simply type either the name or file number of the program you want and press f8 to LOAD or f9 to LOAD and RUN. If you want to return to the conventional cassette system then *TAPE will achieve this or you could simply type *BBC and the Hobbit Operating System (HOS for short) disappears completely. (Note: *HOBBIT will get it back after a *TAPE but only a Break will restore it from a *BBC command.) Later versions of the HOS use 0 and the Break key instead of *BBC to reset the system.

The LOAD, SAVE, RUN, SPOOL and *EXEC functions are all implemented as usual and should need no further comment from me. However, there are a number of totally new functions available which the cassette user will not have encountered. *COPY will either duplicate a file on the same drive or copv a file onto a second drive. This is the first command that incorporates the @ Inhibit Check symbol. If you are copying a file and the HOS finds that there is already a file with that name in the catalogue it checks with you first to make sure you wish to overwrite the existing file. You can also suppress this check so it does it automatically. You can *RENAME files on the tape, *DELETE a single file or *KILL the whole tape. Once a file is deleted it isn't removed from the tape, it is merely struck out of the index list, so Ikon have thoughtfully provided a *RECOUP command to recover the last file deleted. This only works if you do it immediately, a SAVE or *SAVE will overwrite the actual file area and all will be lost.

One of the apparent quirks of the Hobbit system is that, because it works on the directory or index system, it can appear to take longer to LOAD something than it took to SAVE it or, indeed, vice versa. This is because it has to look up the file in the directory and then spool through the tape until it reaches the correct point. This shouldn’t be much of an inconvenience as the transfer rate for information is 750 bytes per second. Compare that to the fastest BBC cassette speed of 120 bytes per second and you'll see why Ikon claim that it is halfway between tape and disc in operating speed. Each tape can hold around 100K of information with a maximum of 138 files.

It is in the area of files, specifically data files, that the small differences between the HOS and the BBC'’s Cassette Operating System or COS occur. The commands affected are the OPENIN and OPENOUT file operators. Under the HOS they have the same function and need to be qualified with one of the four control codes provided. The default values for OPENIN and OPENOUT are different in that the first gives access for both reading and writing and the latter only provides write access to the file. However, the OPENOUT command can be restricted to either read or write only by using the W or R control code.

The major problem is that while the Hobbit can handle up to five files simultaneously it only initialises sufficient buffer space for two. Yes, even the Hobbit eats more of your precious RAM and, as anyone who has read Tolkien's tale knows, they like regular feeding! Each buffer must be 750 bytes so the initial memory loss is some 1.5K, which is less than discs would take but still painfully expensive for the user. With all five file buffers initialised (the manual tells you how), you've lost nearly 4K of user memory so it is well worth making sure that you are doing things as efficiently as possible when dealing with data files.

That was the good news, now for the bad. The manual is a poor thing indeed. Currently standing at some 16 pages of poorly laid out and, even worse, badly thought out A5 sheets, it doesn’t do the Hobbit justice at all. The instructions for installation are not good, it doesn't even appear to warn you to turn the BBC Micro off before you start, and the diagram showing the location of the various components is a hand-drawn scrawl.

A re-write and re-packaging operation is called for here, decent examples should be included and it would be helpful if someone checked the spelling too. It would also be nice if Ikon could see their way to including some of the routines for data file handling on a tape and supplying this with the rest of the package because this area is the least well explained of the lot and yet will probably be the reason many home users buy the system.

The idea of using a very fast digital cassette for personal computers is not exactly new. Indeed, the Philips drive that the Hobbit uses has been around for three years now but has seldom been implemented. Ikon themselves produced a naked module for the NASCOM range of computers last year which seemed to gain some acceptance, but everyone else carried on with the domestic cassette. This year, however, we have seen the Epson HX-20 and the Sharp PC-1251 making use of the micro cassette and there are others to come too.

The advantages to be gained are enormous, in terms of speed of operation, physical size and the power of the operating system that can be provided - it has no match in tape based form. Hybrid devices such as Sinclair's long awaited Microdrive and the BATS/NCI 3" disc have yet to be proven in terms of reliability and don't exist in sufficient quantity.

The question that must be asked is whether Ikon have managed to link the micro cassette to the BBC Micro in the best possible way. There are two areas where they appear to have run in-to problems and, sadly, not actually told anyone about it. Because the tape needs a timing signal written onto it to enable it to find any program or data file Ikon 'borrow' the BBC's timer and corrupt its contents. It should have been possible to use the system clock and to generate a timing signal within the Hobbit rather than to mess up a system variable.

The other reported area of complaint is that the Control B copy facility fails to operate as nor- mal when the Hobbit is installed. I couldn't establish the truth of this claim as at the time of the review our printer was taking its annual holiday and Ikon reckon that it doesn't happen on their serial printer anyway. If it is correct that this facility is disabled then it would be kind of Ikon to warn us and explain how to get around it with the VDU2 and VDU3 commands, see pages 404-408 of the User Guide. Apart from these niggles they appear to have provided as good an implementation of the unit as possible.

Given that your usage of the BBC Micro is being limited by the amount you can store and access within a reasonable time and that you either cannot afford discs or simply don't think that you really need them, the Hobbit is probably your only real alternative. It really is halfway between the two in terms of price, speed and capabilities.

My only regrets are that the appearance and usability of the excellent Philips drive are let down by a shoddy casing, a poor manual and a generally unprofessional appearance to the whole thing. Given a nice case, a better manual and an overall uplift in quality it deserves to succeed as the price is right and the HOS flexible enough to satisfy the market for which it has been designed. Ikon could, given a little attention to detail, have a real winner on their hands provided, of course, someone else doesn't beat them to it with a 3.5" Sony-type drive! With technology progressing as quickly as it currently is, that's quite possible.