I was glad you were able to give so much space (issue 80) to our Phloopy mass storage system for the BBC (and now also for the Electron, but your reviewer made our faces red. We agree products should be thoroughly tested and every bug eradicated before being passed to a reviewer for critical assessment. But sometimes even a painfully obvious bug which took us only a few hours to fix slips through the net. Sorry!
But there are other, more serious, criticisms. Again the fault is ours for obviously not providing sufficient information.
David Janda complained the Phloopy was "painfully slow", taking 13 seconds between repeated accesses. True, it is fairly slow compaed with a well organsied disk, but the Ultradrive and the Wafadrive take about 45 seconds when used in a similar way. Your Wafadriver reviewer, in the same issue, commented that in practice accesses were a fraction of that time, which of course is equally true of Phloopy except that it is an even smaller fraction of only 13 seconds.
The Phloopy review complained of a lack of a file compact instruction, remarking that it was "essential on tape systems". How disappointed we were that your reviewer had not appreciated that Phloopy does not need a compact command (or indeed the reorganise command needed for disk system). Phloopy automatically compacts data each time the loop is written.
Finally, we accept the comment about Phloopy plugging in through the disk port. We thought long and hard about that during the design phase, and our market research showed that the majority of customers would prefer for us to leave the user port free for other peripherals and accessories. We have a development version wihch operated perfectly well through the user port.
27th October 1984
