Back to the VZ-200
From a reader in Oak Flats on the NSW South Coast comes a letter which is set out in the accompanying panel. I suggest you read it at this point.
In responding to W.T's letter, I have a strong urge to do so in similar terms: "Whoa! Slow down there."
For sure, I made a case, in the August '84 issue, for investing $99 on a VZ200 computer - a product that had been dubbed by some buffs as "useless". I did so on the basis that, for $99, it could offer members of a family a unique opportunity to gain hands-on experience and, with it, a degree of confidence, when faced with a larger computer at work or at school. I quoted examples of how this had already occurred in typical family situations.
Out of all this came the further notion of using the VZ200 as the basis of an inexpensive word processor something for which there was an obvious opening. It worked out better than ever expected, helped along by a $90 "Princess" B&W TV set as a monitor, a 16K memory module, a mini-printer and interface, a cassette recorder, and a word processor program that had fortuitously become available on tape from DSE. The exercise culminated in "Forum" for November '84 entitled: "This was written on a 'useless' small computer".
I might add that, since then, many more such articles have been written on that same small word processor and on other systems like it. The pity of it is that, as I write, supplies of the VZ200 are in danger of drying up, just when their bargain price utility has become most apparent.
Far from disproving anything that I have said, W.T's letter carries the idea of $99 self-tuitional exercise well beyond anything that I had really considered. He gives no information as to his educational background but, if to begin with, he was as much a computer novice as he makes out, he has had his $99 worth several times over!
I'm not about to debate his remarks about the ultimate accuracy of the VZ200, because I certainly haven't devoted to it that kind of attention. Nor do I propose to. I'll happily leave that to other readers who may share W.T's enthusiasm for such exercises. In the meantime, someone who should know was not the least surprised by his observations.
Computers, he said, work to certain limits of accuracy, determined by their logic resources and speed of processing. Like most other products, they are designed with a market role and price in view. If user needs dictate a higher order of accuracy than a certain computer will give, the buyer's only option is to purchase a better one. As it is, the ultimate accuracy of the VZ200 is quite typical for budget priced PCs.
But while W.T. pursues further enlightenment on that score, I'm more impressed by the apparent build-up in the skills and potential of this hitherto unemployed reader. He should, by all means, keep probing and asking questions but, in the meantime:
Good on yer, mate!
Forty years ago it cost a fortune. Can we do it now for $99?
Dear Sir,
Whoa! Slow down there with the eulogies to the VZ200 $99 computer. The monitor in ROM has a bug in it. I followed with interest your praise of the VZ200 in "Forum". Even on the dole, $99 isn't too hard to scrape together so, when I saw the DSE advert in July, a trip to DSE in Wollongong became mandatory.
After acquiring rudimentary programming skills, I hit upon the idea of making my self education more interesting by repeating Mauchly and Eckert with ENIAC, in calculating e (or pi) to a large number of decimal places (pi to 2040 places, "Scientific American", Dec '49, p. 30).
To begin, I wrote a program to print the product of any two integers, however large, exactly and was rewarded with intermittently correct results. Mostly it was correct but occasionally (the frequency increased as the computer warmed up) incorrect answers were outputted.(!)
After running the same thing on the demonstration CAT at Wollongong, to make sure it wasn't a bug in my program, I remembered an early exercise that had caused the VZ200 to crash:
10 N = 1:INPUT S: FOR P=1 TO S:N = N*P/(P + 1):PRINT N; : NEXT: RUN
If one RUNS and then INPUTS 23 two times, the second time the computer goes crazy.
I had been informed that it was only POKEing into a memory location it didn't like and didn't think was important!
As a consequence, the VZ200 pays for itself many times over in the self-education required to debug the machine language monitor. In the meantime, it is not possible to use the computer for any calculations requiring great accuracy. Even the double precision feature available by using the STR$ and VAL functions is inconsistent in its output.
Is any other VZ200 user out there able to help me?
I don't hold anything against DSE but it would be nice to say that any Tom. Dick or Harry can do in 1985 with a $99 what the computer buffs did in the '40,s and '50,s with computers costing a fortune.
By the way, the Tandy "Understanding" series books are okay and they're cheap!
