December, 1974

Dear Radio-Electronics Readers,

It has been some time since I have had a chance to bring you up to date on the latest news here at Southwest Technical Products. This has been a busy and kind of frantic year for us. Until this fall, deliveries on many parts have been long and undependable. It seemed that we would just solve one shortage problem when another would crop up. Happily, we seem to be past the worst of it and most of our kits can again be delivered in a reasonable time.

Early in the summer we installed a "Datapoint 2200" computer system to help us keep track of orders and our inventory. Now I know some of you probably have "hang ups" about computers, but we are very happy with this one. Since about the middle of August all orders have been completely on the system. Not only has it speeded things up in handling your orders, it also makes it possible to confirm all orders and to notify you immediately and automatically if there is to be a delay. Without old Datapoint, doing this would have taken more hours of time than we had available.

We are also once more expanding our warehouse and workspace. Thanks to all our customer friends Southwest Technical Products is continuing to grow. The additional space will make it possible to produce our kits more efficiently and hopefully help us hold our prices. The majority of our board manufacturing, chassis punching and printing work is done right here at the plant to keep costs as low as possible. This combined with our - direct to you - sales method makes our kits a real bargain compared to other similar products.

During this year we have introduced several new kit projects of which we are quite proud. We have several new amplifiers, a keyboard kit, a new guitar preamp, an octave equalizer, a compressor expander and a multimeter plug in for our digital instrument. If you don't have our latest catalog listing all these goodies, circle our number on the reader service card and mail it in, or call us. We will get a new catalog to you as fast as possible. IT'S FREE.

During the coming year we will have several more new kits that I know will interest many of you. We will have a tachometer plug-in for the digital mainframe and possibly others. We will have the improved Digi-Viewer and Microlab kit too. The big one though will be our computer terminal kit. Your enthusiastic response to the "TV Typewriter" (Radio-Electronics Sept. 73) convinced us that many of you would appreciate a real honest to gosh professional quality terminal with all the features available on commercial units. Like the "TV Typewriter" this kit will use any television set for the display, which will consist of 16 lines with 32 characters on each line. The kit will offer two pages of memory as standard equipment-not an optional extra. It will operate from our KBD-2 or any other ASCII input source. For those that want the features; we will have special cursor controls, screen read (off line edit), and a UART system. We are making the kit available in as many forms and with as many options as practical so that you can build anything from a simple TV display to a full feature computer terminal for the least possible cost. Since you use a TV set for the display, you can choose the size that is best suited to your application and it will work with any old set you may have. Would you believe you can have the basic kit with the two pages of semiconductor type memory for $175.00.

See the January 1975 issue of Radio-Electronic for complete details.

Sincerely,
Daniel Meyer