Date: Fri, 14 Nov 1997 20:08:47

From: Frances &/or Richard Clee <cleechez@tamcotec.com>

Subject: postal strike

Well - after much in the way of diversions, the trailer has been
cleaned out, winterized, repaired and put away, the new cabinet 
has been delivered and the rest of the room reorganized into it,
the DOSbox has changed its assortment of bugs but is gradually 
contorting into some semblance of reliability, our ISP has man-
aged to get his suppliers into line enough that he can actually 
keep up with the demand, and things are calming down here.
As this is written there are about 18 cm. (7 inches in English)
of snow on the ground in Toronto, harbinger of a steady supply 
till next May or something. So we in the Great White North 
(which includes everything Stateside north of Detroit) won't be 
going much of anywhere or doing much of anything for the next 
several months.

And now we're also threatened with a postal strike, which will
cut off the inflow of magazines - about an issue a day here. 
The Formula 1 season is over (how about that Jacques Villeneuve
 - a Canadian World Champion, a dream towards which I watched 
and often worked and paid for forty years) and the Grey Cup 
(the culmination of real football) is this weekend, so no
more TV to watch. 

We're even into the third week of October's backlog of e-mail.
Which is to say that the particular Adamites at this e-mail
address have at least caught up to the point where we should be 
able to respond to communication in some reasonable period of 
time, and hope to resume a more active level of participation 
in the Adam community. And if the posties do go out, and stay 
out, we may even get fairly close to fully caught up -
except for the stuff that has to go by snail mail, of course.

Notes inspired by finally getting around to looking at Dr. D's
TWWMCA: 
one of the Walters brothers, I think Jim, has at least two Smart
writer ROMs and/or ROM images for revisions beyond R80. Don't 
know if he's on the echo, what his present activity status is, 
or anything, but maybe someone can follow up. Also if anything 
comes of this, are the SmartWriter ROMs actually (as I suspect) 
EPROMs? I don't know (but have my suspicions) about the rest of 
the Adam crowd, but I certainly have a number of Adams in my
basement, especially Module 3s, that do not work, but I would bet
that in most cases the faults are in the memory chips or circuits
 - solder breaks or bridges, or whatever. Could these be a source
of reprogrammable EOS, Smartwriter, TI9918 or even the non-dupli-
catable custom chip for Adams? If so, reprogramming chips to a 
higher standard should be easy and might even be do-able on an 
exchange basis.

As for the Smartwriter bugs, the most notorious is the line and a
half line feed inserted when a blank line is added after a hard 
return, as between paragraphs. There is a defeat for this using 
a control-6 or one of the super-or-subscript keys (forget which) 
but under certain circumstances this can throw off the print-
head's sense of where it is and produce badly pyed type; not 
using the defeat means that the left margin line counter becomes
progressively more inaccurate as it doesn't allow for the extra
half line.

The result is that in a multi-paragraphed letter one may find
what the counter shows as 3-1/2 pages barely squeezes on to four.
Also, for some reason every once in a while when the clear
workspace key is used in Smartwriter (as when reading the ANN 
discs) the sound cues are lost; sometimes they come back again, 
sometimes they don't; it's basically merely a nuisance but is 
it a signal of a more serious fault?   Not bugs, but it would 
be pretty neat if Smartwriter would recognize a second disc 
drive  without disabling the second tape drive. Is there any 
promise in the ability to access the modem slot?    Would its 
use allow faster communication under Adamserve?   Might there 
be a patch that could be written to allow more generalized 
access to the slot?   Seems Rich is unearthing all sorts of
promising leads here. Maybe we should all also try to get Z80B
CPUs to speed up the machine?

Anyway for those who have been neglected we are working our way
through the accumulated e-mail and hope to get responses out 
to you soon. Our downtime isn't over, but we are poised to 
start imitating social human beings again
soon. 

- Rich Clee


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