With reference to J. P. Hibbin's letter in issue 103, I too have been thoroughly pleased with the performance of the Byte Drive 500. It does everything and more than your review said it would (including some undocumented facilities):
440K of formatted storage in a nifty double-sided 3.5in child-proof plastic diskette
ability to chain four drives in one system, giving 1Mb in use at once
extended Basic with window management, programmable function keys, Random-access files, printer echo, error-trapping, plus the amazing TYPE and DO commands, all documented
I have found several undocumented facilities:
when requesting a file, wildcards in the form of question marks, e.g. 'MYFILEno.????', are allowed in the filename
if in word processor mode you enter a single '?' as the filename the Directory is helpfully presented
the system can be reset by the on-off switch or - would you believe? - the Basic command RESET, both of which will auto-boot the disk system. The Reset button tucked underneath just gives a hard Break.
Do I have a vested interest? You bet. I bought mine last year and I love it. I won't be happy if support fails because of a bad press.
6th April 1985
