By the way, I sent a long e-mail to Zozo, answering some questions about myself. Perhaps he would like to publish it in the forum, to save me having to type it all again.
Ok, there is your e-mail:
The Enterprise was my second computer. I previously had a Compucolor, which I think I bought in about 1980. This was an American computer with the motherboard and a floppy drive built into the same cabinet as the colour monitor. It was one of the first colour computers - the other was the Apple. In my opinion the Compucolor was technically better than the Apple (it certainly produced a much better picture) but it was not marketed so well. One of the problems was that you had to buy everything (including floppy drive and monitor) at the same time, and I remember that I had to pay about £1400. That is still a lot of money to pay for a computer today, but in those days it was an enormous amount, so of course the market was rather limited. Eventually the company producing Compucolor went bankrupt and we had to rely on User Groups for support. There were very active groups in USA, Canada, Australia and Great Britain. Actually it is not such a bad thing when the company supplying your computer becomes bankrupt, as it causes the User Groups to become very strong.
I wrote my first Basic Compiler for the Compucolor and I sold copies of my program in all the countries where there were User Groups. In fact I wrote two compilers. The first one used floating point arithmetic to produce exactly the same results as a Basic program, but it only ran about 3 to 5 times as fast as Basic. Then I realised that there was not much sense in using floating point for a compiler and I produced an Integer Compiler, which ran much faster.
I think I got my first Enterprise in 1984. It was the 64K version and I got it at a special price through a friend who had contacts with the Enterprise company. He had told them about the Basic compiler I had written for the Compucolor, and he suggested that, if they encouraged me, I would write a compiler for the Enterprise. They already had a company under contract to produce a compiler but when I showed them an early version of mine, they cancelled the other one. That's when they gave me my second Enterprise (128K version) as a free gift to help me with the design of my compiler. They planned to include my compiler as part of the package that you got when you first bought an Enterprise computer, and I was just about to sign a contract with them when they went bankrupt. Once again I found myself relying on User Groups, although in this case for quite a long time there was only one User Group - the UK group - but it was a good group and we had a great time.
I kept on with the Enterprise for several years after the PC had been launched and therefore I had a lot of surprises when eventually I got my first PC. By that time the PC had advanced quite a lot - it ran much faster than the Enterprise and the software packages were much bigger and more complex. I also found that all the utility programs, that I might have produced for the PC, had already been done by somebody else - in fact in most cases there were already a lot of different programs available. So I did not write any serious software for the PC - just a few bits in Assembly Language to prove to myself that I could do it. Now I just use the PC as a tool. I got interested in making and editing video films, and that is one of the major things that I do on the PC.
A long e-mail from you with lots of questions, which I will try to answer.
No, I never tried writing a floating point version of Zzzip, as it would have been too slow. I'm fairly sure that was the problem with the Aztec compiler (which got cancelled). To include floating point arithmetic you really have to use the subroutines in the Basic ROM (otherwise you have to add an enormous package of run-time routines to every compiled program). In the case of the Enterprise the maths routines in the Basic ROM were extremely slow. As far as I can remember, they were actually based on BCD (Binary Coded Decimal) rather than the more usual floating point operations - not a good idea.
I'm delighted that Zzzip was included with the Enterprise in Hungary (although I never got any money for it). At least plenty of people had the opportunity to use it.
The main user group in the UK (IEUG) was the only one as far as I know. You have already got all the magazines (8 issues of Private Enterprse and 1 issue of Enterprise Computing Intenational). After 1989 the UK user group quietly died. I think this was because the leader of the group (Tim Box who ran BoxSoft) disappeared wthout leaving information on how to contact him - I expect he changed jobs and moved to another town. Anyway the group just fell apart.
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