I really must start by congratulating you, your contributors and helpers, if any, on the magazine. Its quality and content must fill all Elk owners with enthusiasm and the desire to take on the world. I will not belittle the attempts of the other two User Groups I have know, for I was only a member in both cases for less than three months before they folded but they did try and I did not, but your efforts come across by far as the best!
I was surprised too by how far the Electron has gone. It is three years now since I moved on to my PC and, reading of the addons, etc, nearly every page of the magazine contained something that would have made my mouth water three or four years ago.
As an aside, I would say that if a student of computers only wants to work in BASIC and 64K is enough, it is a waste of time buying a PC. Though my IBM has 640K to run applications, I have only 64K for BASIC and, on getting this PS2, I thought the BASIC would run at 8MHz compared to the Electron's 2MHz. I wrote a Loop program, timed it with a stopwatch on both machines and the Electron won easily. At that time I was a member of the IBMPCUG and I wrote to them detailing the experiment and asked for an explanation - none came.
In fact, I am not very lucky in getting replies to computer problems. Of the ten queries I sent to Electron User, I only got one answer!
I am an occasional reader of Micro Computer's Mart (Never manage to read a whole issue before the next one is out since it became weekly though!) and I was optimistic enough to buy the next edition hoping to read all the wonderful points about the Acorn Electron [I'll explain this bit in a minute, folks! - Will] and wondered what on earth was going on when I failed to find part two. Thanks for your explanation of what happened... There must be quite a few puzzled people about.
Frank Jones
Thirsk, North Yorkshire
Frank heard about our Group from an article in Micro's Computer Mart which was part of a series on computers which are "no longer in production". The writer's jottings on the Elk were split into two parts, but thanks to an EUGesque bit of editing, part two was published before part one!
On the whole, the articles were pretty far (I provided most of the author's source material!) and EUG got two favourable mentions (One per article and it only cost me £50 a throw!). For those who have never read Micro Computer's Mart, I recommend that you do - if only to count the number of typographical/spelling/factual errors which appear each issue. It does my ego a power of good to see that even the "professionals" can make mistakes on a par with my own! A lot (but not all) of the articles are obvious space-fillers and are just so much waffle (rather like this!!) and would never be allowed to appear in some other publications.
But for 60p a week, who's complaining? Oh, nearly forgot. The odd item of Elk hard/software gets advertised from time to time too!
Will Watts, EUG #9