The Micro Enquirer
The Micro Enquirer: Commodore 64 is an A-to-Z guide to home computing by Christopher Bidmead and Benjamin Woolley, with Dr Peter Turcan as technical editor. It is built from updated and rewritten material first published in Computer Answers, a monthly micro magazine. This edition was published in 1984 under the Guild Publishing, London imprint by Book Club Associates, by arrangement with Century Communications Ltd; the back cover carries the book-club number CN9424. Copyright Christopher Bidmead and Benjamin Woolley, 1984. The printed book has roman-numbered front matter and 183 numbered pages: the text and index end on p. 182 and the publisher's list of other titles is on p. 183. The scan comes from the retro-commodore.eu archive and has an OCR text layer.
The opening pages describe Woolley as the first editor of Computer Answers, and Bidmead as a technical writer for Computer Answers and Practical Computing who had been a script editor on BBC TV's Doctor Who.
Contents
[edit | edit source]Each entry is a short essay on one topic, with Commodore 64 program listings as examples. The entries, from the contents page, are:
Introduction (p. 1); Analogue; Arrays; Artificial intelligence; ASCII; Assembler; Backing store; Backup; Baud rate; Bulletin boards; Buying your next micro; CAD; Cassettes; Communications: RS-232, IEEE and Centronics (p. 36); Computer crime; Computer graphics (p. 42); Copyright; CP/M; Data compaction; Data processing; Databases; Editors; Education; Floppy disks (p. 68); Game of Life; Games; Home control; Keyboards; Languages (BASIC, APL, BCPL, C, COBOL, Lisp, Logo, Pascal and Modula-2, pp. 83-104); Maintenance: after the sale (p. 105); Memory map; Memory; Modem; Monitors; MS-DOS; MSX; Music (p. 125); Numbers; Operating system; Printers; Processor; Programming; Random number; Software design; Sorting; Speech; Spreadsheets; UCSD; UNIX; User groups; Winchesters; Wordprocessors (p. 171); Index (p. 176).
The "Maintenance" entry is about dealer support, third-party maintenance companies and service contracts. The "Communications" entry describes RS-232, IEEE-488 and Centronics at concept level. There is no circuit diagram or service procedure for any machine.
Erratum
[edit | edit source]A leaf at the front of the book reads: "Due to an error at the printers, a few program listings in this book are rather faint." It reprints the affected listings, starting with the "Ellipse" effect from p. 45. If a listing in the body is hard to read, check that leaf first.
Related pages
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Download: GuildPublishing_The_Micro_Enquirer.pdf (139 MB)