DECUS 12 BIT SPECIAL INTEREST GROUP NEWSLETTER

This document is the March 1980, Number 39 issue of the DECUS 12 Bit Special Interest Group Newsletter. It provides submission guidelines for contributions and lists contact information for various SIG committees and working groups.

A significant portion is dedicated to a "DEC Word Processing Update," detailing widespread customer dissatisfaction with the new 200 series due to its unresponsiveness and inadequate development. While lower-level management was uncommunicative, senior DEC management has reportedly begun addressing these issues and shows interest in the future of Word Processing/Office Automation, including PDP-8 based hardware.

Jim van Zee contributes a "Note" on his "V4G" software, introducing "relational expressions" for comparisons and an "UNTIL command" for conditional looping. The "Hints and Kinks for the TU58" section discusses the new TU58 ("DECtape II") tape system, noting its low cost and ease of interfacing but also an issue with generating a "Break" signal. It also highlights a potential undocumented feature that could allow more efficient 128-byte block addressing for OS/8 compatible storage, urging users to investigate.

The newsletter also reports a "PIP BUG" (V14A) causing system crashes and preventing PIP from running with SPOOLR. Finally, a letter from Data Systems, Inc. describes a persistent, unresolved hardware problem on a PDP-8 system where an LA120 hard copy terminal causes system reboots or halts during printing, a problem Digital Field Service has been unable to fix at multiple sites. The document also lists several new additions to the DECUS Program Library, including programs for Morse Code generation (KODER), WPS-8 to COS-310 file conversion, a Regular Expression Compiler/Arithmetic language (RECA), BASIC user-defined functions for the LQP78, and a combined editor and macro program (GEM), along with details on an enhanced PT: device handler.