RESULTS OF QUESTIONNAIRE
So far sixteen completed questionnaires have been collected, including my
own; this article contains an analysis of the results. This is interesting
not just out of curiosity, but also because the information about what
hardware the majority of members have, and what software they would most
like to see written, will no doubt be of great interest to all
programmers. Additionally, the various results will affect the way in
which 8-Bit Software is run.
The second half of this article consists of the details of members'
interests, both computer-related and general. I hope members will have a
look through these in order to find and contact other members who share
their interests; I have found at least one piece of information worthy of
further enquiry myself.
Finally, please note that the collection of information is by no means
complete; I hope to receive three times as many questionnaires as this or
more. The averages and scores etc. will be updated for my own reference in
running 8BS, and I will include a brief summary of the developments at
some stage, though not in as much detail as this article. Details of new
members' interests etc. will be featured as they arrive, but the ones in
this article will not be repeated.
HARDWARE OWNED
Ten members owned a BBC "B" or similar, and six owned a Master 128. None
of the members who have returned a questionnaire so far have Master 512 or
Master Compact computers, although I think Duncan Webster has a Compact in
addition to his model B.
One of the BBC B's mentioned above is a B+ (or B+128 or whatever), and so
there are seven members with shadow RAM (i.e. six Master-owners plus the
B+ owner), leaving nine without. All the Master-owners, not surprisingly,
have four banks of sideways RAM. Three BBC B owners have one bank of SRAM,
one has two, and the B+ owner has four. Hence the total score for sideways
RAM is as follows:
4 banks : seven users
2 banks : one user
1 bank : three users
no banks : five users
I would very much recommend that BBC B users without any SRAM get at least
one bank; it certainly makes life a lot easier because many programs and
utilities come as ROM images these days (HADFS, Fanfare Teletext editor
etc.), and many pieces of software (e.g. most TYB software) require at
least one SRAM bank to store data in.
In addition to the Master owners (ADFS is built into the Master as
standard), two of the BBC B owners have ADFS. One of these cannot *TYPE
files in his ADFS. This makes a total of seven of the sixteen members
having serviceable ADFS; clearly moving to ADFS is out of the question. I
would recommend, however, that those without ADFS get an upgrade; as well
as giving you an extra 240K per disk, ADFS removes the 62-files-per-disk
restriction, and greatly improves disk organisation, with ten-letter
filenames and a hierarchial directory structure - DDFS just can't compete.
For programmers, ADFS is indispensable; one ADFS 'L' floppy disk can be
for 8-bit machines what a 20Mb hard disk is for an Archimedes. When all
members have ADFS, the days of archiving will be over, and I can fit as
much as I want on each issue!
To move onto the related topic of disk formats, twelve people have 5.25"
drives only, three people (including myself) have both 5.25" and 3.5", and
one person (spot the obvious Archimedes-owner) has only 3.5". Since I can
handle both formats, this is of little importance, though it is
interesting that very few 8-bit users have been tempted to upgrade to
3.5"; if you don't regularly need to exchange information with Archimedes
or Compact owners, then a 3.5" disk provides no advantage other than that
it is 1.75" smaller (pretty obvious from the name) and slightly tougher -
which hardly justifies the expense of upgrading.
Eight members use televisions, five good colour monitors, two poor colour
monitors, and one a good monchrome monitor. Despite the predominance of
televisions, only one member said that moving to a Teletext-format disk
magazine should be a priority, with fifteen saying that it shouldn't be;
one member even complained about Teletext-format articles. Moving back to
Teletext is still on the agenda, especially since Chris Richardson is
developing a whole range of programs to allow Teletext articles to be
created easily, printed out in 80 columns, and even viewed in MODE 3 in
several different formats. However, issue 22 will probably be in the
traditional 80-column format; issue 23 may well be produced by Chris
himself, so we will have to see!
Now for additional hardware; this was fairly limited. I myself have an
internal 65C102 Master "turbo board" co-processor, and M.T. Farnworth has
a 6502 second processor for his BBC B; apart from these, no-one owns any
extra processors. Two members own modems, and three members (including
myself and M.T.F.) use Econet or know someone who does. Four members have
a mouse, and two have either a Music 500 or a Music 5000. Obviously,
software requiring any of these add-ons will be usable by very few people!
However, everyone owns a printer of some sort.
MISCELLANEOUS
The average number of Electron owners that members knew was 1.4, which is
a fairly meaningless statistic really. To put it another way, if all of
the Electron-owers that members knew were different people, there are a
total of twelve Electron users known to the sixteen 8BS members who
returned a questionnaire. This is a surprisingly high number, probably
making it worthwhile producing an Electron-compatible version of issues,
depending on how many of these people have disk drives (entirely my fault
for forgetting to ask). However I am not planning to take any steps in
this direction immediately, as I haven't the time (and it would mean the
end of the pretty MODE 7 menus). Presumably members can hand over
compatible software from 8BS issues to the Electron-owners they know
anyway.
Twelve members thought that the 50p charge was reasonable, and four
didn't. However, one of these four later changed his mind and said he
thought it was reasonable too, which makes it thirteen in favour and three
against. So much for that. All members but one thought a two-disk issue
should be produced if necessary - I intend to do so once enough
submissions arrive!
The average age of members was 27.5, but this does not at all mean that
most members are in their twenties; ages vary between 15 and 69, the only
age-group in-between unrepresented so far being those in their fifties,
and the most common being mid- to late teens. It is still a bit
intimidating, though, that the average member is nearly ten years older
than me!
The average length of time members have owned their machines for is 6.6
years (according to my questionnaire analysis program, anyway), which
means that the average member first used a BBC at the age of about twenty.
On closer inspection of the results (to check that my program isn't just
making things up), quite a few people seem to have got their computers at
the age of eight, presumably for educational reasons. The vast majority of
you seem to have much more experience of Acorn machines than me, though; I
have owned my Master for less than two years!
No-one admitted to having no programming ability at all; five people say
they can write simple BASIC, five more complex BASIC, three members can
write complex BASIC and simple assembler, and three people have put
themselves in the exalted category of "experienced coder". Now, if
everyone can write at least a little BASIC - where are all the
submissions?
PREFERRED ARTICLES
The most popular subject for articles was advanced programming, which
scored an average of 8.1, while simple programming - somewhat surprisingly
considering the number of members at this level of expertise - scored only
6.1, beaten by hardware information (7.4) and reviews and cheats for
commercial software (6.7). General topics and comms both scored badly, 5.6
and 4.0 respectively, though the latter is hardly suprising considering
only two members out of the sixteen own a modem.
I will do my best to select articles accordingly (starting this issue with
a hardware review and three programming articles), but it would help
considerably if people would let me know what specific topics within the
more popular areas they would like covered. However, as well as covering
advanced programming from every possible angle (another very lengthy
article from Hugh Williams, with advanced encryption (I think) techniques
and supporting examples, is on the way) I will still include as much as I
can on simple programming; if you are not planning to learn to program on
your BBC, you have got the wrong machine!
Unless I receive more text on computing topics, I will have to include
general articles just to fill up the disk magazine - I am sure some of
them will be interesting to some people at least! Finally, support for
modem-users will be continued (see Hugh Williams' suggestion elsewhere),
since they provide a vital link to the world of bulletin boards - see the
wide range of software from Resolve Communications on this issue, which is
generally unavailable through PD libraries.
PREFERRED SOFTWARE
Utilities scored the highest by far with 8.9, followed closely by
graphics/demos with 7.8 - I have heard that graphics and demos are
generally the most popular software around, but presumably the more
practical and technical-minded nature of 8BS members gives utilities the
edge. Applications and games both scored the respectable figure of 7.3
(though Acorn consider games to be applications anyway). This left music
with 6.4, and the surprisingly low (considering what the BBC was designed
for) score of 5.0 for educational software.
I have started adjusting the software content of issues to meet peoples'
wishes already, beginning this issue by leaving out some rather good sound
samples (which presumably count as "music", and so score only 6.4), and
replacing them with a variety of archived utilities, applications and
games from Resolve. However, even the lowest-scoring categories of
software will continue to be featured; education was rated very highly by
some people, so I will continue to include it whenever I can find it.
New applications software and music are also hard to find, although
utilities, digitised graphics and sampled sound are plentiful. This issue
has quite a few games on it, but, from the current membership, only Sattar
Shakoor writes good action games in any quantity. Finally, if you are
planning to write a piece of software (or an article) in a category that
has scored badly, don't be discouraged; I simply don't receive enough
submissions to be able to exclude anything just on the grounds of this
limited survey!
MEMBERS' INTERESTS
Interests are included under two headings (where available),
computer-related and general. Phone numbers are included where members
have requested it. Addresses are only included where members have either
published their address in the past, or where members have asked me to
publish their phone numbers (in which case I have assumed they don't mind
their address being published as well).
If neither address nor phone number are given, a textfile message can be
sent to the member via the 8BS messaging system (see issue 20 for
details). Alternatively, send the message you want the member to have on
paper (no more than one sheet of A4) to me, and I will enclose it with the
next issue. However, if you wish to use either of these last two methods,
you will have to hurry up - message to reach me not later than 24th
September.
If any of the details below are wrong, please let me know ASAP and I will
correct them in issue 22. Also let me know if I have not published your
address and you would like me to.
15A Steven Flintham
6 LAYTHORPE AVENUE, SKEGNESS, LINCOLNSHIRE, PE25 3BX
Computing interests:
BASIC & C Programming Utility Writing Fractals
Artificial Intelligence
General interests:
Astronomy Science Science fiction
16C Michael T Farnworth
27 Hunt St, Atherton, Manchester, M29 9JF
Computing interests:
Programming
General interests:
St John Ambulance Piano
176 Eric J Shuker 0271 864500
89 CHANNEL VIEW, ILFRACOMBE, DEVON EX34 9PU
Computing interests:
BASIC Programming Applications Word Processing
1K1 Abdus Sattar Shakoor
Computing interests:
PASCAL programming 6502 Programming Kick Off 2
General interests:
Football Squash Badminton
204 Carl Wheat
Computing interests:
BASIC Programming Games Educational
20G Roy Dickens 0933 55556
40 SHORTSTOCKS, RUSHDEN, NORTHANTS, NN10 0EB
Computing interests:
Programming Board Games
275 David Roy Steadman 0777 706995
7 WOODSIDE, RETFORD, NOTTS, ND22 7YA
Computing interests:
Education Puzzles Chess
General interests:
Gardening DIY Electronics
2J3 Chris Richardson
Computing interests:
Word Processing Programming Cheats
General interests:
Cycling Model Building Electronics
483 Daniel G. Shimmin 0204 492613
1 OAKWOOD DRIVE, HEATON, BOLTON, BL1 5EE
Computing Interests:
BASIC/C/LISP Programming Hardware Expansion Word Processing
General Interests:
PBM Gaming Hockey
6EE Michael G Needham 0742 424474
153 FIRTH PARK ROAD, SHEFFIELD, S5 6WU
Computing interests:
Desktop Publishing Graphics Music
709 Hugh Stuart Williams 0873 810162
17 EVEREST DR, CRICKHOWELL, POWYS, SOUTH WALES, NP8 1DH
Computing interests:
Programming Graphics Comms
General interests:
PBM Gaming Food Films
Bridge Chess
7GE Matthew R Price
Computing interests:
Word Processing Desktop Publishing Games
General interests:
PBM Gaming War/Board Games Music
C83 David R Stillman
Computing interests:
DIY Hardware Graphics Games
General interests:
Martial Arts TV Reading Stephen King
YJ2 Andrew P Snodgrass
Computing interests:
BASIC Programming AMX DTP Digi I.
Sound Sampling
General interests:
PBM Gaming Amateur Video Hill Walking