There's one big question that gets asked wherever two or three PCW owners are gathered together: `Where were you when you heard that PCW Plus had been axed?'
The answer for me is, well, the same place where I learn most news: sitting at a keyboard watching e-mail and Usenet messages come chugging down the line. The date was 2 November 1996, the place was the comp.sys.amstrad.8bit newsgroup, and I still remember reading with slack-jawed horror how Future Publishing had deployed fear, surprise and ruthless efficiency by rushing the bad news to the PCW Plus editorial staff just a week before the final issue 124 went to press.
At that time I felt a bit like the oldest inhabitant, wearing a long white beard and mumbling: `Ar, what do these new users with their pansy 3.5" drives know? In my day we had to mortgage our wives just for the down payment on a pack of CF2s, and still hunt all over the floor for the missing address marks. And when you told LocoScript 0.5 to move to the end of a 4k document, you had time to make a pot of tea, drive to the airport, go on holiday to Majorca, and come home before it finished scrolling. Tell that to today's youngsters and they won't believe you. Harrumph!'
Well, something quite a lot like that. There were certainly deep, poignant emotions associated with having had columns in the very first 8000 Plus dated October 1986, and (despite gaps when Future decided they couldn't afford luxuries like columnists) the very last PCW Plus in December 1996. Perhaps it's best summed up in the simple, tragic words that later came spontaneously to my lips: `They're never going to send me a complimentary copy of #124 now, the rotten sods.'
Really, it was a strange time for the magazine to fold, since LocoScript Software (`Ar, today's youngsters don't know the thrill of the glory days when they were Locomotive.') had just caused a splash of excitement in the PCW world by releasing LocoScript Version 4. That should have been worth a few more issues of hot debate on exciting new word processing techniques, and indeed new bugs. Experienced LocoScript-watchers got the impression of wall-to-wall panic in Dorking until the original Loco 4 could be replaced a little later with the very much more wonderful Loco 4 Release 2.
Meanwhile, with PCW Plus gone I couldn't whinge in public about the problems caused to my own Ansible Information by the unexpected -- by me, anyway -- appearance of Loco 4. The trouble was that our internationally unknown AnsibleIndex software reads Loco files, but was unable to recognize or understand Loco 4 documents thanks to slight but significant changes of structure. So Ansible customers who upgraded to Loco 4 were soon sending ominous letters and making doom-laden phone calls to say how we could shortly expect a visit from the Men With Big Sticks....
It was a tense time. Fearlessly I shouldered the responsibility by answering these anguished complaints and queries in suitably shifty, unconvincing tones: `Er um, it's all LocoScript's fault!' Far away in Hastings, my business partner Chris Priest backed me up nobly by answering enquiries with: `Don't blame me, guv, blame Langford.'
Meanwhile, the old PCW was glowing red-hot as Borland Turbo Pascal 3.0 -- my favourite CP/M programming language -- stalked the M: drive once again after years of slumber. Good old Howard Fisher of LocoScript had sent along a buckshee copy of Loco 4, so I could work out some of the obvious changes by analysing the documents which this produced. Unfortunately, one of the not-so-obvious changes was subtle enough to be very, very hard to identify by peering suspiciously into document files with CP/M's SID.COM and my own home-made software toolkit.
Finally, at the eleventh hour, just as the entire Ansible Customer Support group had surrounded my house wearing pointy white hoods with sinister eyeholes, and were igniting a huge blazing replica of a 3" disk on the front lawn ... the hero programming team at Loco completed their magic software developer's bible, The Structure of LocoScript 4 Documents. Howard instantly had a copy rushed by helicopter to Reading and parachute-dropped to me, and thus the world was saved. That's what it was like in the grand old days of February 1997. Tell that to today's youngsters and they won't believe you.
What a great man Howard Fisher is. What a pity I never had the chance to write up this episode in the hallowed pages of PCW Plus.
According to my own files for this magazine's fateful ten years, I did somehow manage to publish 88 columns there. Only one passage was censored by steely-eyed editors: a mini-rant about the bloody awful index in the manual for the Amstrad PPC portable, vetoed because the PPC wasn't a PCW. Early on, under a different editor, I'd got away with an entire column on the PPC. So it goes.
Which brings me to this issue's amazing free offer. Since these days I have some spare web space, I've whimsically made all my old PCW Plus columns -- including that censored chunk of text -- available for perusal at ...
http://www.ansible.co.uk/ai/pcwplus/
Have fun!