INMC 80 News

There followed a reasonably short period of gradually increasing impatience, until one morning a large yellow van pulled up outside our front garden gate. That rather shook my wife who thought the Creed would be delivered by the Postman, but when the van driver came to the door and said, “You’d better give me a hand with this, Guv.”, and shortly afterwards she saw us staggering up the path carrying between us a box of almost unmanageable proportions and weight, her first reaction was, “I’m not having that thing in the lounge!”. Which is where my Nascom lives, nicely tucked away on a tea trolley.

I must admit that there was some reason for my wife’s ultimatum, not only in view of the size of the monster, but even more so in view of the noise it churned out. (I know someone who keeps a Creed in the bedroom, his wife’s remarks about it are unprintable. Ed.) For a little while it looked as though I was going to have a real quiet time, and be the owner of a non-operating printer. However, after a little discussion and much heated argument, I finally installed my printer in the spare room, with a lead from the Nascom going up through the ceiling and across the floor of the loft (we live in a bungalow), and again through the ceiling in to the spare room, and so to the printer. I am now able to take hard copy of my programs, whether in Basic or machine code, and it is only occasionally that I have to go outside to explain to a street audience that the noise is only an adjunct to my full enjoyment of my Nascom and not a machine-gun attack on my family. Almost my only worry now arises from the fact that we are hoping to leave this address soon, and I wonder if I shall be able to install the Creed in as convenient a location in another house or bungalow: I fear that the noise would prevent our taking a flat.

One would have thought that it would now be an easy matter to submit programs to the Club library, but that is not so for several reasons. The first and most important, is that I do not have anything really worth submitting, secondly, I have got Nasbug T4, and it seems that NAS-SYS is all the rage. Lastly, although the printer will hard copy Basic programs, I haven’t yet discovered how to run the printer with ZEAP, as entry to ZEAP immediately causes the teleprinter routine to crash. I am having a go at getting that one sorted out, and if anyone’s interested I’ll report on this later.

MY IBM’D Nascom

by C.B.Frater

I decided to go about getting a printer the expensive way. I ordered a second hand reconditioned IBM printer from Display Electronics in Haywards Heath. With this, I also ordered an Aculab 735p interface. This has two advantages. The first is that I do not have to embark on the tiresome task of fiddling around with transistors, resistors, et al, which I do not really understand. The second is that using a golfball, I am able to use a number of different type faces, Courier Metric, Courier, ASCII, Bookface, SCRIPT, etc, which, as I had already purchased NASPEN, may well come in useful.

The officionados at Henry’s Radio very kindly let me have a listing which enables a Nascom to drive a Centronics printer. As the Aculab makes the IBM look like a Centronics printer this was ideal.

The first problem I encountered was that I did not have the 26 way ribbon cable and a plug in my kit. This was apparently because I got an early kit, and I should have let Nascom know about this last December, but in my absent-mindedness I was not even aware that I should have recieved it. I couldn’t work out what to do, nobody seems to have these leads and plugs in stock. (Most Nascom dealers now keep them, also AP Products – Saffron Waldon, and RS Components, ED.) I did what the high priests at the INMC are always telling us to do, I read the manuals. One of these days I’m going to rewrite the Nascom manual so that non-computer-minded folk like myself