Meeting to commemorate Evans

The London Regional Management Centre feel it would be said if Christopher Evans, who was a good communicator and realistic futurologist, should go without commemoration. They are therefore holding a seminar on 29 May 1980 at which Tom Stonier, speaking on 'Microprocessors and the future', will be supported by a member of the National Physical Laboratory staff (Dr Evans held a senior post at the NPL until he died).

The seminar will be held at the Polytechnic of Central London start- ing at 2.00 pm. Applications for free tickets should be made to the London Regional Management Centre (01- 637 7583).

Comart move into applications software Comart, distributors of Cromemco systems and new owners of the Byte Shop chain, now have an exclu- sive UK agency contract with CAP MicroProducts to market MicroCOBOL applications packages on the Z80-based Cromemco System 3.

This agreement, which covers Auto- Clerk, Autolndex, Purchase and Nominal Ledger, Sales Ledger and Pay- roll, marks a move towards the data processing market, in which micro- systems from retail chains have not, up to now, made much impact. Comart feels that the time is now right for software which is easy to operate since microsystem users are

becoming less and less computer people, and that the MicroCOBOL agency will allow it to supply such applications packages. Sales of more than 100 systems with the CAP software are looked for by Comart over the next year.

CAP MicroProducts also anticipate that the agreement will generate sub- stantial revenue in the near future. As Alistair Jacks, MicroProducts Manager, said, it forms a relationship between a well established business systems supplier with a wide range of outlets and CAP, who have a proven range of applications packages.

P

Ferranti packs it in Ferranti's F100 general purpose micro- computer/development system is now available in a single box. It will be available in this form from June on- wards and will cost £5800 (£4182 in quantity) for an assembly level system with two floppy disc drives.

Morse decoder wins prize One of the five £250 cash prizes in the 1980 Design Council Molins Design Prize competition was won by David Deaville of the University of Durham with a microprocessor-based Morse decoder. The decoder for manually sent Morse can be used by unskilled personnel operating in mil itary or marine environments and, being micro- processor-based, offers scope for more sophisticated real-time analysis of the incoming signal.

David Deaville built a unit which successfully decodes Morse sent at

varying rates and prints the message automatically on a Teletype. The model he produced while in his final year at the university demonstrated to the judges its ability to detect and decode Morse actually received by radio while coping well with imper- fections and variables.

Quantity discount Purchasers of three or more Tektronix Microprocessor Design Laboratories can now obtain a 10% discount. The scheme applies to the Tektronix 8002A system when ordered with the Tektronix 4024 terminal and includes all optional configurations of the system and any software packages, emulators, control probes and memory modules ordered at the same time.

Karlin to manufacture in UK Karlin Computer Systems, suppliers of a range of microsystems based on the LSI-11, has established a manu- facturing and development centre in Hayes, Middlesex, UK. At the same time the company has moved its head offices to the same location the Pasadena Trading Estate.

Karlin has decided to put more emphasis on manufacturing and sub- assembly of its systems and plans to handle more and more of its systems product manufacture in the UK.

As well as hardware manufacture, there are software teams working at Hayes on new offerings for the Olympic family to complement and enhance products like its NET-11 multitasking operating system.

120 microprocessors and micros.vstems