Could Be Better

By James Treadwell

Originally published in EUG #10

Thanks for EUG #9. I agree with your statement about its shortcomings, although the graphics transferred from the Arc looked surprisingly good in Elk black and white.

By the way, I didn't select THE BIT AT THE BACK first (What happened to THE BIT AT THE FRONT?). Also, the second side of the disk has come in very useful though it could be used for increasing the contents of the disk in the future.

Finally, what happened to make those silly dots (Or CTRL-codes to be technical) appear instead of $s on the disk?

James Treadwell

As I hope you can see from this disk, the standard is on the climb (Nowhere else to go!) and things should improve still further in the future. There never was a 'First Bit' - I think you all get enough of my spiel when I include replies like this without me hogging extra space!

Talking of space, you must remember that not everyone has a double-sided disk drive so I am having to aim at the lowest common denominator (Single-sided DFS) so each issue will not contain more than 200K of coding. The silly dots came about because your silly editor used Slogger's silly (or perhaps superior) PEGASUS DFS system which doesn't seem to need the CTRL-code prefixes but will recognise them if they are included. The majority of EUG #9 disks had to be replaced because of this although a few readers were able to correct the problem themselves. I know Derek Walker used a disk editor for this purpose. We live and learn, eh?

Will Watts, EUG #10