1st April 1995Apologies to Richard Dimond. He has sent in an excellent new menu with a completely new code for displaying text files such as this. Unfortunately, I've had a few problems with it though so as yet it remains in EUG HQ. Still, it's no bad thing. In fact, when I first saw it, I said to my wife, "It's people like Richard that make me realise I'm not as smart as I used to think I was."
There is another User Group which I think many members may be interested in hearing about. It is called Solinet and has been mentioned before in EUG #6. Their disk is, quite by accident, published on the opposing months to EUG (i.e. every two months from January). I've been in contact with Ron Marshall, the parallel editor. He will mention EUG in Solinet and I will reciprocate here.
Solinet is a bit of a different beast from EUG. It relies more heavily on text, although it does have some useful and interesting software. There tends to be a lot on things like 512K addons for the BBC, using some BBC-specific software plus, of course, there are things which need Mode 7 to work. However for all that, it's an interesting read. I have every issue of Solinet from #1 and can vouch for that.
It's available on DFS, and not ADFS. However you can use 3.5" or 5.25" disks. You need to send a formatted disk with a stamped return address label and £0.50 to Ron for an issue.
In addition to their bi-monthly disk, Solinet also have a BBC PD library and back issues of the Beebug disks. Some of the Beebug disks are also available on ADFS, but make sure that if these are the double-sided variety that your drive can handle double-sided disks. For that matter, if you only have a single-sided drive, you may be able to get disks on two single-sided disks.If you have DFS, I urge you to try Solinet. There really is no competition between it and EUG, and it will give you something to read in that month gap between EUG being published. One point though. EUG and Solinet will not be publishing each other's software. I have no objection to any references being made to something that appeared in Solinet but please don't start ripping utilities off the new disks and then submitting them to EUG!
I was listening to the radio the other day, that program on Radio 4 that replaced Anderson Country because some small minded people didn't like the broadcaster's accent. It was just after that man was released from prison after he spent three years studying brain anatomy and ended up knowing enough to prove that he couldn't have done the crime he'd been convicted of. Anyway, the presenter, now with a wonderful BBC accent, put forward the proposition that people who teach themselves can achieve really quite amazing things.
Two 'experts' in education were there too to argue the point and immediately began to put down the whole concept of self-learning. The main crux of their argument was that people who go in for self-learning tend to concentrate on single topics and two examples were one who had become an expert on spaceships and another who had become a world authority on a particular fish which had been released into Lake Victoria and damaged by that environment.
Where do they find these 'experts'? By their standards, most of the EUG membership, together with Albert Einstein, Abraham Lincoln and Thomas Edison haven't achieved anything.
I've been running EUG for a year now and I laid out how I thought EUG should go in EUG #14. Most members seemed to agree with most of what I said, and a few of those who didn't have since changed their minds (at least partly).
Now one policy concerned the use of previously published software. EUG is, of course, still bound by copyright laws and quite rightly so. Some submissions have been of software which is now said to be Public Domain. I have refused, and really would prefer to continue to, to publish this - with the exception of where improvements or adaptations have been made. These should ideally be, in the opinion of members, where significant improvements have been made; not just renumbering the program or changing a REM statement.
You should also give some information on the improvements you've made and how these differ from the original. Most importantly, give full credit to the original source of the software. A program sent in recently, and which appears in this EUG, came from Matthew Ford. He found the original program in The Micro User. He liked it but it wouldn't work on the Elk. He has rewritten some of it so that it now does and given full credit to The Micro User. This is acceptable and I have published his new version to demonstrate some of what appears in the computing magazines might be adaptable to the Elk. If any readers of this now buy a copy of one of these magazines as a result, then surely the magazines can't complain.
Finally, a new member is a school teacher who is thinking of using the Elk to teach her young class about computing. If you fancy writing a game or something which would appeal to young children, then there is now a willing audience for it.
Anyway contributions from all please. As I've said before, that's what makes EUG. I'm pleased to say membership is growing again and that can only be good for all of us.
Gus Donnachaidh, EUG #19
