Bits and pieces

Press, 22 April 1986, Page 27

Bits and pieces

New releases of the Wordstar 2000 and Wordstar 2000 Plus wordprocessing packages are now available in New Zealand.

Users of the earlier versions of these products are being offered an upgrade at a cost of $9O to $395, depending on the product and the date the purchase was made.

Release of the Wordstar 2000 and Wordstar 2000 Plus include such enhancements as the ability to print three columns side-by-side on a page, the ability to print footnotes, merging of Lotus 1-2-3 files into a document and on-screen justification of text.

Beechey and Underwood reports its having some difficulty meeting the demand for the new Sharp PC-7000 portable computer, which has only recently been available in New Zealand.

The 8.5 kg computer is an IBM-compatible personal computer with two floppy disc drives. It sells for less than $4OOO.

National Advances Systems (New Zealand), Ltd, has appointed Mr Dennis Nesbit as its sales and marketing manager for New Zealand. A New Zealander, Mr Nesbit was previously the European marketing manager for Storage Technology, based in London.

In spite of some exhibitors’ disappointment in the number of visitors to this month’s Southern Business Expo in Christchurch, one exhibitor at least is claiming its participation to be a success. Businessworld Com-

puters, Ltd, says it sold more than 20 computer systems at the show to customers ranging from self-employed businessmen through to substantial manufacturing, retail and professional users.

The library service which serves New Zealand’s largest city will install a major computer system from Datacom Systems, Ltd. Manakau City Libraries has chosen the Atlas package, supplied by Datacom, to keep track of its 350,000 books and more than two million issues a year.

Following the announcement that the Development Finance Corporation is to install a banking system based on Wang hardware. Wang has also announced a sale of a VS6S computer to AMP Financial Corporation (New Zealand), Ltd. The VS6S will run money market dealing, foreign exchange dealing and general ledger applications software supplied by the Australian company, Priority.

AWA New Zealand, Ltd, has installed in a new factory in Porirua an automatic component insertion robot that places electronic components such as capacitors and resistors into printed circuit boards.

The new factory, which will be officially opened next month, houses the main high-volume production equipment used to manufacture car radios, hi-fi and radiotelephone products.