Gonsalves@SU-SIERRA.ARPA (12/20/83)
From: Tim Gonsalves <Gonsalves@SU-SIERRA.ARPA> I have a problem with the Final Word on a H/Z-100 with Z-DOS: any characters typed whilst FW is being loaded from the floppy get lost. Likewise, there is some lossage during quitting. The Z-100 has an interrupt-driven keyboard handler with an 80-character buffer. I have not noticed any loss of typeahead with any other software (and, I use this feature a lot because of the speed of floppies). Has anyone else noticed this problem on this or other similar machines? Any fixes for it? I wrote to Mark of the Unicorn describing this behaviour. A support person there phoned me today to try to help (very decent of them). Unfortunately, she did not appear to understand what typeahead means. After I spent some time explaining, she informed me that no microcomputer software allows typeahead during program loading (except possibly some Zenith-specific utilities), and she could see no reason why anyone would want to typeahead anyway! Further, since noone else had complained to MoU about FW losing typeahead, it is apparently not likely that MoU will fix the problem. Being many years since I've used a machine that did not support typeahead, any help will be appreciated. Tim