Drobe Launchpad | The best of the Microdigital Mico manual

The best of the Microdigital Mico manual

Published on 6th Jan 2007, 15:35:53, source is drobe.co.uk
By Martin Bazley

Some good old fashioned sarcasm

An MD Mico Microdigital are now all but a distant memory, although in its prime the company manged to get a few computers out of the door. One was the infamous Omega, and another was the Mico: A little 56MHz ARM7500-powered desktop machine that was fairly unremarkable apart from its manual. Here in this historical piece, Martin Bazley gives us a guided giggle tour of his favourite mistakes and clangers in the Mico user manual.

"The best of the Mico manual"
(Returrn of the Typoes)
Filmed in Glorious Technicolour. Well, HTML.

DISCLAIMER: All speeling mistakes and grammatical error are entirely authentic and intentional and part of the original text. The text in square brackets [] are our own comments.

Connect the mouse

Locate the keyboard port on the rear of the computer.

Display or monitor manager

Allows you to alter the screen mode sometimes called screen resolution to suit your own requirements, for further details see page xxx.

[Is that like trying to catch tomorrow? Or some kind of pornographic bonus chapter?]

Holding the mouse

Place the mouse on a flat surface, left handed users will find the mouse easier to control if they place the mouse to the left of the computer and right handed to the right of the computer that is when sitting in the normal working position. Other users will receive instructions from the suppliers of their particular mouse type device.

[Who, amputees?]

These are Radio Icon one of which can be selected at any one time. If you click select on the Off then the On button change state to On.

[Yes, how very clear. They could definitely have used a better set of radio buttons, there]

[From the instructions on the 'new directory' Filer option]

Having created the Apps directory you have to consider the type of applications you are going to purchase we will use general types Word processors, Imaging, Office, Music, Graphics, and DTP.

So in exactly the same way as we created the Apps Directory place pointer on the hard disc icon click select to display the $ Directory.

Remove default name directory by either Control U or the Delete key. Type Wordproc "word processing abbreviated".

[Because the revolutionary long filename support is for losers]

Place pointer onto the document and click menu. Move the pointer to Save wipe across in the direction of the arrow till the Save as window appears.

Head phones socket

Plug-in head phones are useful if you need to work in private. For sound mixed with computer generated sounds you should use the audio out socket at the rear of the computer.

[It's a new and exciting technology which allows you to hear babies screaming, telephones ringing, people typing, and dogs barking with perfect ease]

Using a CD ROM Drive

Place CD disc into the drive, place pointer on the CD ROM icon on the desktop. Double click select to open the directory viewer window in exactly the same way as you would a hard or floppy disc drive.

Your Mico computer is fitted with 16MB main memory so place pointer on 8MB directory.

[Later in the same chapter]

Volume

Setting volume from the desktop was dealt with in the chapter using a CD ROM drive.

Desktop boot

Have not got a clue

[?! That's just superb]

Shutdown

Place pointer on task manager, click menu, move pointer on to shutdown and click select.

Window opens to ask Are you sure you want to shut the computer down. Select cancel to return to desktop or shutdown to exist.

[Finally, Microdigital reveals the grisly effects of computer addiction]

Adapting Mico for your own use.

If you have purchased a complete system from Microdigital the computer has been set up to give you the optimum performance, so you can ignore this section for the time being.

[Bonus points for being smug]

Rotate and Mirror options perform rotations and mirror operations on the source image.

[Such a very helpful manual]

[Also not featured here was a graphical mistake in the ChangeFSI chapter. All the screenshots were taken on what appeared to be RISC OS 3.1. Definitely not the best way to show off RISC OS 4's graphics capabilities]

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Microdigital's unofficial withdrawal from the market
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