—- MEDIOCREWRITER —-

JOES GARAGE INC.
500 Bituminous Ave.
Sleazonia, Ont. 3N7 N5S

1/2-sided, sloppy-sectored, 5 3/8 inch droopy disk. 39 cents.

As you might expect from this programs name and price, its a
bare-bones, no-frills word processor package. What does bare bones
mean? For one thing, you dont get multiple screens – in fact, you get
no screens at all. Joe, the programs writer, claims that in about six
months an update (19 cents) will be available thatll give the program
video-display capabilities. In the meantime, youll simply have to
remember what you key in.

Another upgrade will enable you to type upper-case characters and
numbers greater than seven. But dont let these seemingly negative
comments dissuade you from buying the program. In reality, the 39 cent
price makes it good value for the money. You can for, example, use the
disk as a coaster for large beer mugs.

What are the programs good points? It contains a 3-word spelling
correction program called (predictably) MediocreSpeller. If you
misspell the words A, AND, or THE, it causes your computer to shut off
and locks the disk drive head on track 42.

MediocreWriters documentation is in keeping with the programs other
annoying features. It consists of a barely legible mimeographed sheet
with the following instructions on it:

* Turn computer on
* Insert disk
* Use program

The program is not copy protected.

Explains Joe: Who would want to copy it? And it takes little memory
space: 323 bytes. Its available for the Lemming/dos operating system
for use on Joes PC (available from Joe for $9.95).

ASST. SYSOPS COMMENTS:

In short, MediocreWriter is Joes latest attempt to write software that
works. It doesnt pretend to be anything other than what it is: the
sleeziest, most limited, bug-ridden word-processing program that exists.

Joe admits, it stinks. In addition to its lack of a video-display
capability, it has a tendency to set computers on fire and trigger
nearby automatic washing machines. It handles 21 lower-case alphabetic
characters and numbers from one to six; punctuation is limited to the
exclamation point.

The program is interactive with Joes other two packages: Lousycalc, a
1-column, 1-row spreadsheet; and RottenFiler, a database-management
program that accepts one entry. In short, I like it!

DETAILS: List price, 39 cents. Available only for Lemming/DOS on Joes
PC ($9.95); configured to drive Joes Smudge-Matrix Printer.
($14.95).

JOES GARAGE INC.
500 Bituminous Ave.
Sleazonia, Ont. 3N7 N5S
Phone 911