SOUSY:
When disk drive units first came out for the Sorcerer (1979) they got a bad reputation for being expensive and unusable.One way round the problem was to connect a mechanised tape drive for digital cassette tapes to the parallel port. The drive is made by MECA and the Sorcerer version is called BETA-EX.Vic Tolomei wrote a rather simple operating system which has the enormous advantages of being short (3K) and of working - but which leaves plenty to be desired; also memory has got a lot cheaper meantime.
A highly competent French programmer has been working on the required improvements for over a year of spare time, and has produced a remarkable operating system: SOUSY version 6.At present, there are only four of us using it, but it seems positively mean to deprive any other potential users of the improved computing conditions that SOUSY has brought to us. How can this be done?We are not in the business of selling software, and we have little idea how many potential users there may be, though Don Gottwald thought he knew of maybe a couple of dozen.If the market really is that small, even translating the full documentation is out of the question: it would come to nearly $50 a head, and that's before copying and postal charges.I shall therefore outline what SOUSY does, and ask anyone interested in having a copy to let Don know.If the response is huge, or if enough people say they're willing to pay for a translation, then we'll get one done and charge accordingly (ie. using the formula: n-th part of (expenses + small safety factor against no shows)).Otherwise, we'll ask Don to appoint a volunteer, we'll send him one cassette together with one copy of the full documentation (in French) and leave it to the volunteer to get a chain letter copying job going.
So what takes that many pages to describe fully?I'll work my way to an explanation in chronological order.Imagine a systems programmer who is no longer working for IBM or one of its rivals, but is number 2 in a small firm which is nothing to do with computing and which is trying to keep its head above water in the east of France.To have something to compute with, he buys one of the first Sorcerers sold in France.Working, so far as I am aware, on his own, he produced various utility programs to turn the BASIC and DEV pacs into more comfortable environments to work in.Finding that various points keep cropping up in all of them, he wrote a program called SOUSY (French for SUB-SYstem) to be resident with all his extension programs.SOUSY deals mostly with I/O: asking the user questions and checking that the reply is of the expected type; and running a printer efficiently on the serial port.About this time he obtained a second-hand MECA tape drive and adapted SOUSY and its extensions to work with Tolomei's BETA operating system.The final stage was to ditch BETA and write a better operating system.The net result is a collection of programs as follows:

BASEX: Toolkit type extension for the BASIC PAC
DDTEX: Toolkit type extension for the DEV PAC
LECAM: Utility for reading or writing to any specified block on a MECA tape including the catalog.
LISBA: A BASIC Listing utility which converts all unprintable
characters into printable form, eg ^M for carriage return, and which produces a cross reference table of the line numbers in which each variable and reserved word is used.
MOCAM: Utility for modifying header information on a MECA tape.
SOUSY: Old sub-system with built-in new tape operating system.
TRAME: Utility for working in memory, a page of memory is dumped both in HEX and in ASCII, either part can be modified using a flashing cursor, the page can be scrolled between fixed headers. Also includes search and compare routines.