Ask The Readers

Robert Lock Richard Mansfield, And Readers

Please address any questions or answers to: Ask The Readers, COMPUTE! Magazine, P.O. Box 5406, Greensboro, NC 27403.

Answers

"The Commodore PET has screen editing capabilities that are easy to use, due to the cursor and INST/DEL keys. The screen editor allows editing on the screen, with insert, delete, and type-over. The problem is BASIC, which doesn't like text without line numbers and PRINT" or REM preceeding the text. But there's an easy way around that. As long as RETURN is not pressed, BASIC doesn't know what you've done. There are, therefore, two solutions: at the end of a line, RIGHT CURSOR (CRSR = > ) to the beginning of the next line. Alternatively, shift-RETURN moves to the beginning of the next line without "entering" the line in BASIC.

Aha! We now have a 40 column by 24 line word processor, except there is no way to copy it. No? Yes! There's a program (published in COMPUTE!) [November/December, 1980, #7] called Keyprint. You press a certain key (backslash) and – zzap! – the contents of the screen are printed out. Great! Read your printout, HOME, go back, and re-edit. The last problem is – how can you save it for later use or editing? We need a clever program (Keysave) which will save screen memory to cassette, or transfer screen memory to the start of BASIC and then save it. The program can reside in memory, since we're only using screen memory.

Anyone out there want to try a Keysave? Such a capability would make possible an introduction to word processing, and use of the computer for writing, for many elementary schools where a very simple word processor could be used easily by students." Glenn Fisher