CHAIRMAN’S PAGE

It is now almost a year since I took on the task of Chairman of the IMNC and during that time I have watched the INMC grow. The membership is impressive by almost any standards and stands now at about 2000. The members are from all walks of life, from accountants to hospital porters, from bus drivers to professional computer engineers. It is encouraging to see the spirit that exists between the members of the INMC.

There is almost a latent sense of conspiracy to try to catch Nascom out, be it with bits of hardware design, software, or whatever; none the less, this spirit also expresses an intense loyalty to what is after all a very good product. (No Nascom don’t pay me).

I was playing with a shortwave set recently, and overheard a conversation between two CB’ers on 27 MHz. One, calling himself the ‘Prowler’ was vigorously defending his Nascom 1 against the various merits of a product that hails from the nether depths of Barnet. Nascoms are now on the legitimate SW bands churning out and decoding morse code (one program is going into the library), and there is a distinct group of licensed radio amateurs who use Nascoms for RTTY and God Knows what!

I have seen a Nascom being used as a ‘patient monitor’ in a hospital intensive care unit where the patient’s heart beat and respiration is continuously checked, and it also keeps a log of drugs dispensed. In all, Nascoms are turning up in the most unlikely places.

Another sign that Nascom is here to stay, is that external manufacturers are now making a range of Nascom products available, both software and hardware; ranging from word processors, and maths packages to relay switched output boards and EPROM programmers etc. Nascom continue to support their own product of course, although personally, I wish they wouldn’t shout about new products until they are available. As a dealer, I get a lot of aggro on that score,

To the newsletter, I hope you think that the quality has improved over the past year, and now that subs are becoming due, that you feel you have had good value for money. At first we virtually had to write every word, and in the process almost exhausted everything we had to say; but our appeals for material from members is beginning to bear fruit, and more and more ‘external products’ are appearing in the mag. Speaking on behalf of the committee, we would like to make the mags more frequent, but pressure of work (yes we do put in the odd day’s work occasionally) doesn’t really allow this. Splinter groups of the INMC are now getting organised, and local newsletters may be a thing of the future. The Merseyside group have published a superb Nascom program book, and we look forward to the next.

Now for a moan: we occasionally get letters demanding (and I do mean demanding) solutions to technical problems, now I must emphasize that INMC does not exist to solve all technical problems. If we know