reece@nadc.arpa (02/12/83)
Doug Faunt's criticism of the micro-decision left a false impression I feel. The micro-decision has two serial ports, one being used for connecting the terminal, the other is a combination printer/modem port. The system can be purchased with one or two built-in drives, each holding 200K (the new model coming out in about a month will have 400K Qume drives). It has a nice feature of being able to read/write four 5" disk formats: morrow, IBM, XEROX, and OSBORNE. It comes with some very useable software included: Wordstar, Logicalc, Correct-It (spelling checker), Microsoft Basic, BaZic, and PILOT. It operates at 4MHz and has 64K memory plus diagnostics in ROM. Two additional 5" drives can be added inexpensively. Baud rates are selectable from 75 to 19.2 Kbaud. It only weighs 14 lb. and is 16.7"wide x 11.3"deep x 5.3"high. It is suited for novice users since all programs are set up to run under the Pilot menu. The bios has been written to trap and display errors in a readable manner and allows you to recover from the error by retrying, aborting the function, or skipping over the problem. It also has the neat "virtual drive" feature. The optional ADM20 terminal is very sophisticated for the money and has detachable keyboard. On the minus side, there is no expansion other than the extra drives (no bus is used).The machine is obviously not a hackers dream, but is very useable for many purposes and is a good value if you don't need more capability or expandability.