CFOG's PIP, April 1986, Volume 4 No. 6, Whole No. 42, page 7
Presto! Change-O!
by Benjamin H. Cohen
Presto! was reviewed in PIP's July-August-September-October 1985 issue (#36). In early 1986 a new version of Presto! was released by Spectre Technologies. A number of the objections of early users have been dealt with, but owners of Osborne Executives may be unimpressed.
The biggest problem faced by Spectre in selling Presto! was that it was a memory hog when used with the Osborne 1, Vixen, and Kaypro machines. Too many users found that the TPA penalty was so drastic that they couldn't use their favorite software with Presto!. The fix was to break Presto! up into parts and leave most of them on the disk.
Presto! now comes with a bunch of overlay files. Only Presto! itself and one overlay are in memory at one time. If you move to the Notepad the Notepad overlay is brought from the disk into memory. Read "delay". When you return to the Notepad again, there is no delay, of course, since the overlay is already or still in memory.
When you move from the Notepad to the Timepad, however, you'll have to wait while the Timepad overlay is loaded into memory. If you want to put the time and date into the Notepad, wait while the Notepad is loaded back into memory.
The combined Presto! version 2.0 and overlays take up more space, too. You can put Presto.com on Drive A: and the overlays on Drive B:, or any or all in a RAM disk, to alleviate the problem, but with the Osborne 183K DD disks, I've never looked for programs that take up more space!
With the changes, Presto! looks a lot better for Osborne 1, Vixen, and Kaypro users, since they can now get the features without losing so much TPA as to be totally crippled -- but Presto! is a little more largo and less presto than it used to be. Executive owners may want to ask for Version 1.0 since there don't seem to be any significant advantages for them with Version 2.0.