Thank you for the back issues which I found most interesting with some items of direct use to my programming needs. When I retired in 1983 I needed to become seriously interested in investment to bolster graphs of performance of selected unit trusts and shares and related matters by taking figures weekly from the Financial Times.
This manual effort got tedious and around 1985 I can across a brand new Electron being sold by ASDA for just under £60. I bought this, enrolled on a BASIC computer course at the local College of Further Education and so got started at my own program to meet my specific needs. I did not throw away the earlier issues of the F.T. so I now have a databank of the selected items above plus currency and world stockmarket trends going back to 1983.
I am always looking for ways of improving my programs hence my priority interest. I use a colour TV with a switchable splitter to go from my TV to computer and my graphs are in various colours so they print out in shades of grey according. By having Slogger's Stargraph ROM permanently plugged in, I only have to add *PRINT as the last line to dump the screen.
Of course I soon found that 32K was not enough capacity to hold the data so I upgraded to 64K. But the cassette system was time-consuming and not always reliable so I converted to disk drive, which also enabled me to separate the data from the program and which in turn enables me to update the data by rotating disks.
I have just ordered my second disk drive from Slogger which will enable me to do this last process without the need to take disks continually in and out of the drive.
I see from members' letters that some have trouble with "£" and "#". With my setup I find I have to type "#" to get "£" on the printout. Also, in NLQ I get "'" from the "|" sign. However, in standard program mode, I get proper inverted commas from the dash over the "7" and the "£" sign. Otherwise in both modes I get the printing as per the keys. I cannot raise the "#" sign from any key. One cannot change modes in one printout! There may be ways to overcome this by programming but I have not found out how.
Do you think it would be a good idea to number the pages of the magazine for easy reference?
Tony Boarer, Devon
It sounds as though you need to fiddle about with your DIP switches (if your printer has them). If the User Manual has a section on 'International Character Sets', you may find the answer there. I think numbering the mag pages is a very good idea and if all goes well, they should appear in this issue!
1st September 1992