Ralph Bancroft on a sub-£1,000 luggable

The £1,000 mark is an important psychological barrier. Arguably, the transportable Wren is the first business micro to break that barrier. For your £1,000 you get all the hardware including screen and twin disk drives, CP/M, BBC Basic, bundled software and a built-in modem. You only need add a printer for a system that's ready to go.

Of course, you only get what you pay for. In the case of the Wren there are some limitations that have to be taken into account. The disk drives have a capacity of only 200K, puny by today's standards. The built-in screen is monochrome, so you miss out on the glorious technicolour of Prestel that the machine was purpose-built to work with.

The bundled software is, inevitably, from Perfect with all its non-anglicised imperfections. And, while you do get a Prestel program, there is no software enabling the user to exploit the micro-to-micro communications capability.

Still, at £1,000 the Wren is well worth a detailed look if price is the important consideration.

The Wren sent for review did not come in any kind of box. It was one of three pre-production machines so some of the criticisms listed here may have been dealt with in the production versions by the time you read this.

With the machine you should get a large shoulder/hand bag that holds the Wren, disks and cables, and documentation. Certainly, these would be essential if you wanted to exploit the machine's transportability. The micro is advertised as a portable, but weighing in arm-wrenchingly at around 20lbs, it is more in the category of Osborne-like transportability than the compact lightweights now available.

The documentation was a loose-bound folder of photocopied typescript that was definitely pre-production. It is, compared to some manuals, well-written. But to the inexperienced user with no knowledge of CP/M some of the sections might be as readably as Dostoyevsky. Much will depend on how well it is laid out and illustrated.

For the Perfect Software you get the usual Perfect manuals complete with the misleading pages that suggest the software has been customisd to deal with English, as opposed to American, ways of handling dates and addresses.

At first sight the Wren is robust if ugly-looking. Hardly the small, light, stream-lined picture conjured up by its name. The case is a combination of sheet metal and the more familiar injection-moulded plastic.

The unusual constructional feature is the sliding monitor/disk drive unit. When not in use, it slides forward to cover the keyboard and reveal the sturdy carrying handle at the rear.

At first sight this appears to be an absurd arrangement. When you carry the Wren around, its monitor screen is facing the floor and you might put it down on an unever surface or sharp object that could damage or scratch the screen. Wren Computers said it was redesigning a screen cover that would be firmly secured to the case when the Wren is in transit. Unfortunately, one was not provided with the review machine.

A plus point for this arrangement is that the Wren can be easily up-ended on a desk when it is not being used thereby releasing the space otherwise taken up by the Wren's large footprint (or should that be clawprint?).

In practice, the monitor unit was very loose with a tendency to wobble when moved and the sliding action was far from smooth. The only way to get it to slide fully forward was to upend it and let gravity do the work.

This wasn't the only tacky feature as the keyboard left much to be desired. There was a distinct lack of travel in the keys and the whole keyboard bent if a key was pressed too hard, as the board carrying the keyboard was screwed to the outer casing rather than supported from behind in the usual arrangement.

The layout of the keyboard is standard qwerty with the addition of a vertical line five function keys on the left and five cursor control keys on the right. Two nice features are the LED in the caps lock key and the special * and # keys for use with Prestel. These latter keys should only be used with Prestel as they generate different keyboard codes than the usual * and # keys.

The Wren is not the most ergonomically designed machine and I found it a pain to have to crouch to see the whole screen properly. The monitor needs to be moved forward and/or the casing redesigned to allow you to see the screen at a normal viewing angle.

To get the Wren up and running you first plug the power lead into a socket hidden in a compartment on the top of the monitor unit. Also beneath the grill are the on/off switch and controls for brightness and contrast for the screen display. An additional bonus is that the compartment is big enough, just, to stow the power lead with its bulky mains plug when the Wren is in transit.

On powering up the Wren it is immediately obvious that someone has given careful thought to what is described nowadays as the man-machine interface. Instead of the usual few lines of copyright notice and version number appearing at the top of an otherwise empty and far from user-friendly screen a large Wren logo appears with a message prompting you to insert the systems disk into drive A. After you insert the disk and wrestle with disk drive door (it's the worst design I've come across) the screen clears and a copyright message flashes by as a menu is loaded.

This is undoubtedly the feature of the Wren I liked most. The menu software and executive desktop software was written by Quantec Software, a small CP/M software house better known, perhaps, for its high quality Micromega Spectrum games software and early learning software published under the Longmans label.

The menu appears on screen as a series of overlapping file folders, each file covering a different function. To select a file you simply move a large cursor from file to file using either the space bar or cursor keys and then hit Return when you have found the one you want. A message appears at the bottom of the screen telling you which disk to insert in which drive and what to do next.

The Executive Desktop suite of programs are nice, neat and not worth having unless they come free. Frankly, if you want to use their features you would probably find good, old manual technology more efficient than the swapping around and loading of disks involved with the Wren.

Executive Desktoy might be a more apt description for this software. It has a number of features that you could always find an excuse for using. It has 'Time Management' (a diary), 'Addresses' (a card index), 'Deskfile' (a notebook and simple forms like expenses), 'Filing system' (an index), 'Calculator' (a pocket calculator) and 'Typewriter' (a typewriter).

The software gives a full Prestel terminal emulation and generates the Prestel graphics and codes within the software rather than using a proprietory chip set. Apart from the ability to look at Prestel pages, save them on disk and/or print out you also get a software downloader (very useful when Micronet gets round to launching the much delayed Business Micronet and starts providing downloadable CP/M software) and an off-line message editor. If you have tried to send messages via Prestel you will know why this facility is such a godsend.

However, Prestel looks none too impressive on the Wren's tiny amber screen as some of the colours almost disappear. Regular Prestel users will therefore need to invest in a colour monitor to plug into the Wren. Alternatively, Prism says it will be offering an add-on modulator so you can plug the Wren into your TV.

Although Perfect Writer is a powerful and complex word processing package that is great if you want split screen editing of two documents and automatic placing of footnotes it is user-violent when it comes to learning to use it.

Perfect Calc is a competent spreadsheet. I don't use spreadsheets, but those who do assure me that Perfect Calc is fine.

Perfect Filer is the program I take great exception to. Apart from being a somewhat pretentious database system it has the fundamental disadvantage of being written for the American market. Perfect has told all and sundry that it will be anglicised for the UK market. Unfortunately, they only got as far as rewriting the manuals. Thus, the date fields use the American (month/date/year) format and the address template (essential for generating address labels) has two digit fields for 'state' and a 'zip code' field not large enough to handle UK post codes.

A Wren spokesman assured me the programs will be anglicised 'after the first 200' but I remain a hardened sceptic.

The irritating faults of the Wren are not isolated to the software. Mention has already been made of the bouncing keyboard and disk drive doors but the drives themselves give rise to concern. On the review machine, the top drive had a nasty habit of corrupting disks or simply refusing to read them. This last fault could be cured, but only by asking the Wren to attempt to re-read the disk several times until it eventually found the data that was undoubtedly there.

Apart from this curable fault, the drives ran hot and any disk left in a machine for more than an hour was liable to come out with a warped jacket. Over a period of time this could also lead to unreadable disks. Regular backing up of disks is to be firmly advised. Investment in a large fan may not come amiss either.

The Wren has an impressive pedigree. Designed by Transam (designers of the Tuscan - remember that?), manufactured by Thorn-EMI and distributed by Prism Microproducts via its Prism Business Systems subsidiary, it has all the hallmarks of a machine that should sell.

The limitations and foibles of the hardware and software are not insurmountable if Prism/Wren puts its mind to it.

The only class of machines that Wren could claim to belong to is the far from crowded communicating micro market. The Tiger is in suspended animation following the collapse of Harrison Industrial Developments and the Torch (like the Tiger) is a desktop machine that nobody except a would-be hernia victim would claim to be a portable (it is also more expensive).

The real test is whether I would be prepared to buy one myself. I must admit, in the end, I'm tempted. Given correction of the design faults and larger capacity disk drives I would be tempted even more. After that the only drawback is the lack of an electronic mail package to allow full micro to micro communication. Then all it would require would be a ray of inspiration at Torch to convert its excellent Mail Plus program to run on the Wren and I would be reaching for a chequebook.