Write Hand Man is a marvellous, If somewhat dubiously titled, utility imported from the US by Hisott. It has been modelled on a famous program on the IBM PC called Sidekick, to see it on CP/M is an eye-opener The idea is that the program is loaded into the part of memory that holds CP/M itself, taking between 3 and 5K in the process depending on which option you choose. When running CP/M programs you will never see that this memory is missing (eg. Newword) but with others the loss may be more critical. This is particularly true when using CP/M 2.2 where the programs may have had to be squeezed in. Write Hand Man sits there completely invisible until a special key combination is pressed. The program you are running is frozen (without harm) and a pop-up menu appears giving you several options. The options are to look at. or enter, notes in a notepad file, study your diary for the next two weeks, look up a phone numbers file, get a disc directory, use a calculator or view a text file on disc (potentially very useful when using a word processor). Wordstar-sye editing keys are used for entering data There is also a communications program supplied that needs to be installed for your particular hardware Your own purpose written programs can also be called up if they fit within 1.5K. When finished you are then restored back to your main program exactly where you were before you started The drawback Is that you need to have the appropriate program files and data files on a disc at hand at all times or the whole thing becomes pointless. This is really not a great hardship, as unless you have lots of data very little room is lost on a disc. You also have to be committed to keeping things like the diary up to date On the whole, it is perfect for those who spend a lot of time at the keyboard and who often have two things to do at once. It also suits those who. like me, write everything down on scraps of paper and then lose them. It makes a perfect complement to CP/M programs such as New word Tony Kendle , PopularComputingWeekly
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