This Column. But now that you have some inkling of my stubbornness (or staunchness), a word about this column. It mill be oriented mostly toward the H/Z19/89/90. (You H8 users will, I think, find my discussion of software interesting.) Topics mill, of course, vary all over the wiring schematic. But they will mostly (but not exclusively) be slanted toward enhancing the productivity of your system. You are interested in doing that, I presume?

I expect to discuss hardware, operating systems, software, books I've found useful, high-level languages, and so forth. In other words, I could cover almost anything between the soldering iron and the disk drive! But I also must emphasize that I need your feedback, positive or negative. Maybe you're running some program which makes what you do really move out; let me know and I'll pass it along to other readers. [Editor's note; A service for those mho don't care to write their own articles.] Perhaps you strongly disagree with something I've pontificated on or have a correction of a "fact" I declared to be true. If so, write! (Just go easy with the cattle prods!)

Simply send your remarks to the address, above. If you desire a reply, be sure to include a self-addressed, stamped envelope (SASE). (Without that, you can't even touch me with your stimm! I hope Gene Roddenberry forgives me that reference.) If I think your input is of interest to the greater audience, I'll mention you here. (So if you object to seeing your name in print, let me know!) But getting down to brass gargoyles (or is it microchips?), how do you, or I for that matter, improve the overall performance of that bucket of silicon wafers?

Hardware Enhancements. Actually, there are four ways of doing it. But I'm only going to discuss three. How come? Well, the price of Winchester drives (hard disks, to you cognoscenti) is still not in the range where they are affordable by the average home computer owner. (Namely me, but don't tell anyone!) But the other three are still (north taking a hard look at. In fact, I wouldn't be at all surprised if some of you really staunch 8-bit'ers have already picked one or more of them. But just what are they? To be brief, they are:

1) soft-sectored floppy disk drives,

2) RAM disk, and

3) doubled CPU clock speed.

All three are hardware additions to your system which significantly improve the speed at which the computer operates. But the first two are not particularly easy on the checkbook, either. If you were to put me on the rack to decide which of these to choose, exclusively, I'd pick the second. But the first, the one I'll discuss this time, also provides you with increased external storage if you're still running hard-sector, 100K drives.

What is Soft-sector? I've seen three different versions of Heath's original "standard" hard-sector controller board, one in my "Neanderthal," and two others when I was in St. Louis for Midwest HUGCON last May. This board is about as bare-bones as a

floppy disk controller can be. The reason; sector layout is "controlled" by the floppy disk, itself. All the board must do is read and write the sectors on each track where the disk tells it to.

But this arrangement has distinct limitations. There are only two methods for increasing the capacity on a disk, both hardware: double the number of sides and double the number of tracks per side. The former is pretty straightforward; just position read/write heads on both sides of the disk. But the latter isn't all that difficult, either, at least in theory. Standard drives have 40 tracks spread over a little less than an inch of radius on a disk. These are also called 48-tpi (tracks per inch) drives. In fact, dividing 1 by 48 will give you the distance between each track. Double-tracked drives sandwich twice the number of tracks into the same radial distance. These are also called 96-tpi, or 80-track, drives. Hence, the head positioning mechanism travels only half the distance of a 40-track drive when moving from track to track. And the width of the track is about one half that of the 48-tpi.

I suspect many of you out there did one, the other, or both of these. (I never did, just bought more drives!) Now there's nothing wrong with any of this, mind you. Anything is better than being cramped to one 100K drive, as I learned within the first month I ran my system. (Has anyone edited Zenith's BIOS.ASM on 100K drives? Can it be done? Let me know if you have!) But Heath never put its blessing on these improvements.

What it did, instead, was develop the Z89-37 soft-sector controller. Standard configuration on this board permitted double-sided, double-tracked drives, various densities, and the disks were the more-easily-found type used on other makers' equipment. Moreover, you could vary from standard configuration.

For example, when I converted to it three years ago, Heath was having considerable trouble with the Tandon "quad-density" (double-sided/double-tracked) drives it was selling. I had heard of their poor reliability, so negotiated a snap for single-tracked Tandons then being sold with the H/Z100. (These, by the may, have been very dependable.) And you can also vary the number of sides and density;

some of the soft-sectored distribution disks I've received have been single-sided, single-density, with capacity equivalent to "standard" hard-sector.

However, unlike hard-sector, format is controlled by the hardware and system software. The disk, itself, only tells the controller when it starts a new rotation. The increased capacity which soft-sector provides is because (to oversimplify a bit) the number of sectors per track can be varied for less or greater storage. Moreover, the board has its own, on-board clock which runs at 4 MHz. This higher clock speed means that reads and writes are faster than on hard-sector drives. For example, loading and saving an 1150-word document with 8-bit "PeachText" (an upgrade to "Magic Wand" under CP/M-80, and the word processor I'm writing this article with) yields the following table:

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