Bryan Skinner compares the Sord IS-11 with the competition

The current spate of lap-held portable micros begs the question of who will use them. There will always be the small market among enthusiasts who want a programmable machine wherever they go, and an equally small number who will buy them as expensive toys. Their true value will probably be found among those who travel about and need to work on the move - business executives, sales reps, site engineers, architects and so on.

In any case a portable should ideally offer some kind of database, a text editor and a finance program.

The Sord IS-11 is the latest entry in the lap-held stakes and takes on the now established micros like the Tandy 100, NEC 8201A and the Olivetti M10. Unlike these it does not come from the Japanese manufacturer Kyocera and it's also much more expensive. At about £1,000, it's almost twice the price.

However, the Sord has rather more built-in software including a dedicated calculator, text editor and communications package. But the star is the database/spreadsheet with full editing and graphics capability. This is Sord's PIPS system which allows you to print pie or bar charts on screen or to a printer and also features full formulae handling.

The Sord comes with a detachable microcassette recorder and a ROM-based cassette operating system. There's also a built-in spreadsheet/database program and a calculator. You get a simple text-editor, but a programming language is an optional extra.

Initial impressions were favourable, but disappointment set in surprisingly quickly. For all my writing I use an NEC whose main problem is a lack of memory. A 2,000 word document only just sits in an empty NEC (12K), so I was looking forward to 32K and a built-in storage device to work with. Writing this review on the Sord proved impractical. The Sord's basic text-editor, I-EDIT, is of little use for serious long-haul writing.

The machine will have a detachable ROM cartridge with a "proper" word processor on it, but that was absent on the machine supplied.

The Sord is heavier than the NEC, but not much. It has rechargeable batteries which are automatically on charge when it's run off the mains adaptor. This is a nice touch - one of the NEC's problem is that you must keep recharging batteries - nickel cadmiums last only four or five hours (Duracells last for 18 hours). However, you can't remove the Sord's batteries, so if they run flat in transit you can't swap them for a spare set, as you can with the NEC. With the machine plugged into the charger, the batteries take only a couple of hours or so to recharge, as against up to 16 for 'normal' rechargeables.

The keyboard is not as nice as that of the NEC or Tandy, being rather springy and a bit rattly. A group of keys can be toggled to act as a numeric keypad with the NUM key - if you've a lot of data entry they can speed things up. Since there's the spreadsheet this might prove useful and Sord is to release a detachable numeric keypad to fit on the right hand side.

The keys are laid out neatly and the markings are clear, but I found the tops a bit loose.

The manual supplied was preliminary, but is quite adequate. Most of the pages cover how to use the I-PIPS database system. The manual is part tutorial with illustrations of screens to go with the text, so if you follow the instructions you can get fairly familiar with the system very quickly. There was no index or detailed specifications, such as the pin-outs on the RS232 port and it's to be hoped that suck important information will be included in the final version.

The screen is the now almost standard 40 characters by eight lines, but the physical dimensions are considerably less than the Tandy, NEC or Olivetti. These are about 195 x 55mm, while the Sord's is 145 x 40mm. I found it rather a strain.

You can even define up to eight windows on the LCD for display of your calculations etc. However, this is of limited value as you can scroll information only in the last window defined, and the screen's so small.

What really lets the Sord down is the speed of the screen update. It's incredibly slow, as if each character were drawn rather than dumped from a ROM-based set onto the screen. You can almost see each of the 64 lines run across the screen when it scrolls. For word processing it's intolerably slow.

Below the screen are the six function keys around which so much of the software revolves. Above these you usually get a single line window in which the current functions are displayed. Sometimes the design of this window left much to be desired; information would scroll out of the window before you could assimilate it.

All the software has the prefix I-. There's I-PIPS, I-EDIT, I-CALC and I-COMM. From the main menu there's also SYSTEM and HELP. A Help function (function key 6) is available under most menus and tells you very briefly what the various options do. SYSTEM lets you set such things as the date and time, initialise a tape, toggle the printer on and so on.

Of the software supplied, I-PIPS is both the most interesting and the most powerful. Standing for Pan Information Processing, I-PIPS is a very cut-down version of Sord's data management/file handling system usd on its larger systems. On the IS-11 it's function key oriented and you're faced with up to six choices at each point, so it's menu-driven in a sense. As with all the Sord's menu systems you can usually always escape to previous levels via the ESCape key.

If you want to set up a table for database use, the first thing is to select Create, to set up a data file. This is little more than configuring a data table: rows, how many columns, defining data types as numeric or character, number of characters per field and so on. The number of rows is determined by existing memory usage. Of course, for a largish model, you could PUT all the files in memory onto tape, then erase them from RAM to make room, but that requires a lot of messing about. Even when you're working with an empty memory, a table of four columns taking a total of 24 characters per row can only hold 547 rows in the standard 32K model, so we're not really talking about any serious applications.

Once the Sord has set up space for the model you can perform various operations on it such as data entry, sorting, selecting (using mathematical operators), sub-total and other calculations.

For data entry you can choose to have automatic updating by row or column, i.e. specify the next item to be updated. This is handy and saves a lot of time when you've a lot to enter at one go.

One feature that most business-orientated users will find of great value is the graphing function. You can have the data in a column or row of a table displayed on the LCD in pie or bar chart form, six rows or columns from the table at a time, and have the chart sent to a printer.

The implementation of PIPS is possibly not as good as it might be. Just as a simple test I set up a simple file with name, age, sex and phone number and made five entries before asking for a sort by name in ascending order. Incredibly, it took 90 seconds, so I asked for a re-sort by age. Same time. It seems as if PIPS sorted all the array, even null entries, because the row entries disappeared from rows one to five and were now to be found between 95 and 100. Presumably a sort on a full 100 entries wouldn't take much longer, but even so it's an unrealistic length of time. Even with only 24 per cent of memory used, a similar table with ten entries took 60 seconds.

On the other hand, I-PIPS allows you to insert or add rows or columns into a table, delete rows or columns of a table, delete whole files, have the result of a selective search sent to a separate file, etc.

I-PIPS lets you define macros of a sort. You can set up command files under I-EDIT to be automatically executed when called up with the command AUTO. You can use the whole range of functions available here including SQR, INT, RND etc and even have the file fill in a table set up with I-PIPS for database operations.

Many other very useful and impressive facilities are available, making I-PIPS the main focus of the micro.

A curious aspect of the spreadsheet is that formulae are entered in RPN (Reverse Polish Notation). If you want to set up a table to calculate the areas of circles, the formula might be PI*(C1*C1) = C2, meaning "entries in column two or all rows will be the squares of column one (the radius) time PI".

I-EDIT is a rather primitive text editor. All you can do is enter text, move the cursor around a character or line at a time, delete and so on.

I-CALC, accessed by pressing function key 3 from the "main menu", puts up a calculator window on the right of the screen with a menu window at the foot. A single line for data entry also appears at the top. You can do some pretty fancy stuff with I-CALC, as well as being able to call it up from I-EDIT or I-PIPS.

I-COMM lets you set the number of bits/word, parity status, number of stop bits, baud rate and everything else you might need to transmit information down a modem or to another micro. You also get a terminal emulation program which allows you to set up communications with Sord information network systems.

An aspect I didn't like is that if you turn the machine off you restart on reboot at the main menu. Another gripe is that the keyboard buffer isn't cleared after most functions have been executed. This means if you press a key for too long, the characters or commands are acted on when the Sord returns to them.

Most of the I/O is handled round the back, while the numeric keypad port and that of the printer are strangely underneath. There are sockets for a bar code reader, the mains power adaptor, a serial port, an RS232C and an expansion port which will probably be used for a disk interface. The RS232 port needs an eight pin DIN socket, so I didn't get a chance to try out the comms package at all. Indeed, the printer socket takes a tiny 16 pin plug which was unobtainable.

The microcassette player slips out from a socket at the rear right of the machine and just beneath this is the ROM cartridge socket. A C30 microcassette can take up to 128K of data, and this is very useful. Should you run short of RAM space, or just as a precaution against terminal battery drainage, it's a fairly simple matter to PUT a file onto tape, then delete it from memory. This is preferable to using an external cassette as it's quicker and you can get a directory of files on tape, but some of the operations are slow. On the positive side you can get a selective directory, with wildcards, just as you can with files in RAM.

An odd feature of the cassette operating system is that it doesn't keep a directory in a working ROM file to be updated when the cassette is written to, or files are deleted from it. Each time you ask for a directory of the tape, the system has to re-read the tape directory which is held in the first few seconds of the tape. If you ask for a directory of an uninitialised tape, the system will look for a directory the whole length of the tape.

The review machine had some serious faults. Somehow I managed to put the Sord in a loop it wouldn't quit. The bottom window kept displaying 'DELETE WHAT:', with the function key commands FILE, ROW, COLUMN below, then reasing that display and repeating it, together with a ticking noise. The only way out was to switch off the machine and reboot it.

I also messed up the Sord's RAM file pointers at one stage. I'd just graphed a table, then pressed the function key for END before the system froze. I tried reset, escape and a few other tricks. Eventually I turned off the backup power switch, which should give a cold boot when it's turned on again (with no files in RAM) only to be greeted by one garbage file name in the directory and the information that 148 per cent of memory was being used! The only cure was to INIT the memory from the SYSTEM menu.

In my opinion; the faults I encountered on the Sord point to major problems in the software, so I'd be very cautious about any operations on data I'd not stored on tape. Users really should never be faced with major disasters like this and I can only hope that they were due to the machine being a pre-production version.

It's a nice enough machine, but it's overpriced. I didn't like the keyboard and the screen is too small. The overall feeling I had was that too much effort had been put into porting I-PIPS across, while not enough attention had been paid to the hardware.

Problems aside, there's little doubt that with the optional 32K RAM extension, the word processing package I-WP, the optional Basic, the forthcoming microfloppy disk system and whatever else Sord comes up with, the Sord IS-11 could find a welcome among a large group of users. For the busy, nomadic business micro-user, the Sord could offer a very neat, albeit rather expensive package.