Afterword
It’s November 1984 now, and I’ve sold my Kaypro.
Business computers are production tools, not family heirlooms; when I found that the Kaypro’s screen and storage capacity were becoming inadequate for my needs, I unsentimentally ran want ads. The new owner—a church magazine using the Kaypro for lighter-duty work such as letter writing—couldn’t be happier.
The Kaypro’s replacement was a sleek Victor 9000. I was growing accustomed to it when a writer friend, Stephen Banker, called with news of an auction at a shut-down computer store a few miles from my apartment. A year and one-half ago the store’s managers and I had argued about the Kaypro’s merits versus the Osborne’s. They’d gambled on the wrong machine, the Osborne. Micro sales in general were growing, but this business had perished in the Silicon Jungle.
Now I returned to the store and saw the debris of the micro revolution. Spread out haphazardly on long tables, treated like dead fish, were the computers that I’d seen glamorized on the covers of the micro magazines just months before.
The auction had begun on a Thursday and would last over the Labor Day weekend through Monday. The first day the prices were reduced 30 percent, and they would keep declining, until on Monday you could buy most of the machines for 80 percent off. It was now Friday.
The machine I wanted, a hard-disk version of my Victor 9000, would be $2,400 Sunday—40 percent of the original list price of $6,000.
“Don’t buy it Sunday,” said Steve. “If God intends you to have a hard disk, He’ll let you get it for $1,200 Monday.”
There were two hard-disk Victors, one new, one used, both selling for the same. So far only one other person seemed to be showing the amount of interest that I did, a husky, gray-haired man in a T-shirt. He was trying the used machine. I wondered if he’d seen the new one and was trying to distract me from it. This could be the stuff of nightmares:
A whistle blows that Monday. T-shirt pushes a frail young auction staffer aside and races toward the new Victor. I overtake him, however. Just as I’m about to lay hands on the machine, T-shirt throws a punch toward me. I duck. T-shirt grabs the Victor monitor.
“Listen,” I say, “that computer isn’t yours unless you get the main part. The monitor won’t do.”
An auction staffer nods.
I unplug the main machine from an AC extension[extension] cord. T-shirt, however, sets the monitor down and moves closer, as if to grab the part with the disk drives and the central processing unit.
“Look,” I tell the auction staffer, “it’s my machine.”
“First come, first serve,” he says. “First to the counter gets the computer.”
T-shirt flexes his biceps. “You and me got some fighting to do.”
“Hell, no,” I say. “I already have my computer.”
“My computer,” T-shirt growls. I hug the Victor more tightly. My back is aching. T-shirt laughs at my discomfort. “My computer,” he repeats. “Gimme!” The auction staffer watches calmly. I don’t. That’s $6,000 worth of machinery we’re fighting over. Suppose I drop—
T-shirt rushes in. The computer’s plastic case smacks against the floor and shatters. Simultaneously, one of us brushes against the monitor. It, too, falls; and the CRT makes a horrible sound as the air rushes into the vacuum. The Victor, however well built, isn’t a machine to be fought over, barroom-brawl fashion. On the floor I see tiny computer chips and spaghettilike clumps of wire. God knows how, but the hard disk has spilled out of the Victor and is rolling down the aisle of the store.
The auction staffer makes clucking noises. I glare at T-shirt. “You saw it all,” I tell the staffer. “He’s the one who’s going to have to make good.”
“Hey, boss,” the staffer yells toward the counter, “we got ourselves a little accident here.”
The chief auctioneer rushes over and looks over the Victor’s remains.
“He smashed it,” I say, frowning again at T-shirt.
“But you let it drop,” T-shirt snaps.
“The price was only $1,200 on the last day,” I remind everyone. A lump is forming in my throat. Inflation notwithstanding, I’ll never feel right putting “only” in front of “$1,200.”
“Well, it was still worth six thou,” says the head auctioneer. “See you both in court.”
“Both?” T-shirt and I ask at the same time.
“Both,” says the auctioneer, “unless you want to pay now. That’ll be $3,000 each. Cash or certified check?”
Hoping that T-shirt wouldn’t notice me, I put the new Victor through its paces as much as I could. It wasn’t set up to run WordStar, the program I wanted to test it with. I’d be taking a chance. Still, if I bought the Victor for $1,200, I’d have enough money left over for even massive repairs—assuming someone didn’t beat me to the machine.
“Maybe I’ll buy it myself,” said a sales rep, out of either cruelty or a desire to increase my interest still more, assuming that was possible. “Maybe I’ll sell it for scrap.”
He himself was a good six foot four inches, perhaps three hundred pounds, but some Victor enthusiasts might have thrown a few punches, anyway, at the source of such sacrilege.
The Victor, unlike most of the other micros there, wasn’t the computer equivalent of a dead fish.
With the built-in hard disk I could keep every syllable of The Silicon Jungle ready for editing without jockeying around the floppies. I silently thanked “Big Blue” IBM for the bargain that might await me. Through its normal marketing muscle, including a massive ad campaign featuring a Charlie Chaplin look-alike, IBM had overwhelmed the competition. People shunned “obscure” brands, especially if they couldn’t use IBM PC-DOS IBM software. The Victor didn’t have Charlie on its side. Some bozos at the company even charged dealers for promotional literature.[[97]] But what a micro! The Victor was a 16-bit, MS-DOS machine and ran WordStar 3.3 and the CrossTalk communications program, the software I used in my work. The screen was noticeably sharper than the IBM’s; the keyboard was closer to a Selectric’s; the light brown plastic cabinet was sleeker, and it didn’t take up as much desk space as an IBM PC would. And the floppies could store an amazing 1.2 megabytes of information or three times as much space as the usual IBM disk. How lamentable that IBM rather than Victor had set the standard for the personal computer industry. Victor had gone into chapter 11, but subject to court approval, would be bought by a Swedish company—and even if the sale doesn’t go through, there would be 100,000 Victor owners, enough to guarantee a market for replacement-part manufacturers. IBM might have the brand name. But the Victor right now was best for my needs.
“When’s a safe time to get here before anyone else gets the Victor?” I asked the sales rep.
“We open at nine o’clock,” he said.
“Won’t do me any good to come several hours earlier?” I asked out of curiosity—I’d show up regardless of the answer.
He shook his head.
That night I called Steve, just to overcome last-minute doubts. The better the bargain, the more suspicious I should be. “You think I should go ahead?”
“Why not? The biggest problem you’ll have is selling your present Victor.”
I’d paid $1,750 for it new, through the mail. It, too, had been a risk. I’d taken out a maintenance agreement with a local company in case the new arrival turned out to be a lemon. It hadn’t been. But could I recover the money selling a supposedly “has-been” machine?
Monday, I arose at five in the morning. If the Victor was still there and if I got to it before anyone else did, I’d save more than $4,000 off the normal price. For four hours of waiting? I’d have to be a regular on all the best-seller lists for my time to be worth $1,000 an hour.
When I pulled into the shopping center, I saw no one else there except for a police car passing through. An old van wheezed into the parking lot a few minutes later. A bearded man and a boy of perhaps ten got out and set up a canvas chair; veteran auction goers? They’d have advice on the best way to fight the crowd and claim my prize.
The man, however, just gestured and grunted. The boy couldn’t speak, either. They were apparently deaf mutes. I pulled out pen and paper and learned they were after Atari-games software.
Maybe an hour later a few others straggled in, one of them a psychologist, with whom I began discussing the great issues of the day.
“You’re not interested in the Victor, are you?” I asked.
“I’m looking for Osborne software,” said the psychologist.
“What about detachable keyboards and monitors?” I asked, remembering my nightmare over the criteria for laying claim to a machine.
We decided that proper auction etiquette required you to defer to the person who carried away the main part of the computer to the counter; an auctioneer later agreed.
Miraculously, a small, orderly line was forming even now, with fifty people in front of the store by eight. Over the next hour a mob came, some in old jalopies like the van, others in Cadillacs and BMWs. There was both excitement and desperation. Many people, like me, simply would forego buying a new computer if someone else beat them to a suitably priced machine. Should I lose out on the Victor, I’d just spend another year or so juggling floppy disks around. Others, however, might have been hoping to be able to afford a serious business computer, period. No, it wasn’t like the Depression, but I couldn’t help thinking of the dance marathons of the 1930s where the hardiest carried off the prizes. I was the first in line—of all the hundreds of people—but I certainly didn’t boast the strongest back. Just a few feet down the line I saw ... T-shirt.
An auction staffer picked up a bullhorn. He said only fifty people could come into the store at once. I heard sighs. Relatively few people, however, left that line. Maybe, just maybe, the others wouldn’t appreciate the merits of the bargain machines that they themselves wanted. I hoped that to most in the crowd the new Victor would be just another dead fish of a micro.
Finally, it was nine. The salespeople—as if at a fire—urged the crowd to stay calm. If the mob lost discipline, the other early comers and I might be crushed against the glass.
As the doors opened, I glanced back at T-shirt. If he was worried about me, he wasn’t letting on. At a pace between a jog and a sprint I entered the store; I tried momentarily to excise the image of T-shirt from my mind.
Oh, look! A friendly sales assistant. I’d offered him advice on electronic mail and—
“Do you think you could help me with the Victor?” I asked.
Suppose he couldn’t. His job might be at stake if he did even a small favor in this every-man-for-himself struggle.
“Sure,” he said. And I’d like to think this was another demonstration of the value of befriending others in The Jungle and sharing knowledge, user to user. With the sales assistant watching guard over the main machine, I picked up the monitor and pushed through the crowd to the counter. I still couldn’t believe the Victor would soon be mine. What if the sales assistant had suddenly developed a fondness for Victors and had himself decided to claim the main machine? T-shirt all this time may have been in the other part of the room; perhaps he was a gracious, mannerly fellow who, having seen me first in line, was decent enough to relinquish the new Victor to me. I don’t know how T-shirt fared at the auction but hope that his own patience was rewarded through the acquisition of the used Victor.
Within half an hour after taking the new Victor home, I had WordStar running on it. There was some tinkering to do with the software so the computer would start up without my having to stick a floppy disk in it, but otherwise it was a perfect machine, save for a little crack in the front of the case, which I discovered after I peeled away the price tape. For $40 or so I could buy a replacement front. The hard disk, at any rate, has been just as handy as I expected for editing this book.
My old Victor is in the hands of Gabriel Heilig, an aspiring screenwriter, who saw my want ad and bought the machine for $1,750, exactly what I’d paid. Gabe is no dummy; indeed, he used to sell cars—Mercedes—and he insisted that his purchase price include plenty of advice and several hours of instruction in WordStar, my favorite word processor. And then what does Gabe do? He goes out and buys a copy of Word Perfect, a new program that he swears is easier to use. I say, “Great if it helps you do your work.” It must. Gabe tells me that the Victor helps him revise five times as fast as he can on his electronic typewriter. “You constantly have a fresh copy in front of you,” he says, “whereas if you’re using a typewriter, you must retype the whole page even if you change just once sentence.” A producer is interested in a proposal for a TV series, and Gabe says: “I did it in three days—it would have taken two weeks with a typewriter.”
Having sold the old Victor to Gabe for $550 more than the price tag on the hard-disk one, I invested $230 in a 1,200-baud modem. I remain a computer communications junky. A draft of this afterword, in fact, reached my technical editor up in New York via the phone lines.
■ ■ ■
My afterword could cover a number of topics, but I’ll resist. Still, you might be interested to learn that the Great Modeming continues between the United States and Sri Lanka.
Because of problems with the Sri Lankan phone service, the link over the past year hasn’t been 100 percent reliable—monsoons can wreak havoc on cables between Arthur Clarke and the satellite station. But Steve Jongeward, who is now an assistant both to Clarke and Peter Hyams, the 2010 director-writer, reports that the struggles have been worthwhile. The movie will be out in December 1984 (remember: I’m writing this in November 1984), and if a reporter has questions for Clarke in Sri Lanka, Steve will just type them out on the Kaypro in California, and the novelist will typically respond within a day or so. Sometimes the reporters even visit the office with the Kaypro and interview Clarke via modem and get instant replies.
■ ■ ■
The Great Modeming has produced a wonderful outgrowth: an attempt to start an Electronic Peace Corps (EPC) to pipe U.S. technical savvy into the Third World via computers links. (See Backup [XIII], “Why Not An Electronic Peace Corps?”)
The idea—in the form of an agency working within or alongside the existing Peace Corps—has won support from people ranging from Clarke to William F. Buckley, Jr., and Chicago Sun-Times editorial writers.
Two established foreign-aid groups, Partnership for Productivity and Volunteers in Technical Assistance (VITA), hope to develop an informal EPC-style project with the Sri Lankans.[[98]] If successful, it could complement an existing VITA plan for an earth satellite to relay electronic mail to and from the Third World. Ideally, a permanent EPC would develop. Then it could recruit volunteers, help fund projects like the satellite and the Clarke Centre, and otherwise encourage computer communications in vital fields such as public health and agriculture.
—Alexandria, Va.
Nov. 15, 1984
BACKUP:
More Tips and
Tales from the
Jungle
BACKUP I
Twenty-Six Questions to Ask at (and About) the Computer Store
The very worst computer stores are like amusement-park arcades. Expect to be clipped. Just aim for the bull’s-eye and keep your losses low. Better still, go to the good stores.
Reading my list of twenty-six before-you-buy questions, please remember that the quality of computer stores can vary tremendously. The proportion of lemons to good ones is higher than in the case of ordinary retailers. That’s because of the complexity of the product. In fact, there’s an old joke about the difference between a car salesman and a computer one: the former knows when he’s lying.[[99]]
One of the main tricks of the crooked computer hustlers is nothing more than the retail-store version of leaving town ahead of the sheriff.
“The average computer salesman has a half-life of two months,” said my friend the systems analyst. “Then he loses his credibility with his supposed ‘clients’ and goes back to selling shoes or automobiles. If you’re relying on any salesman for expert knowledge, you might be in for a rude awakening. That’s why users groups formed. People got ticked off with this world of hucksterism and created their own little world.”
One of the problems is that many good, honest sales reps will soon leave for more lucrative work as consultants or for manufacturers or others.
Of course, the customer himself may be as impossible as some of the sales reps. He might expect a quick, accurate, lucid answer to his question from a rep working for little more than a department-store clerk’s earnings. Computer stores can be full of ignorance on both sides of the counter. Moreover, even if the sales rep knows his subject forward and backward, many computer problems just defy easy answers. Imagine the frustration of a sales rep working on commission. He can ill afford time to educate complete novices. So do your homework or at least make an appointment when the sales rep isn’t going to be jammed up with lunchtime traffic. That’s the nature of the Silicon Jungle, not simply a series of ripoffs. Cherish the good sales reps.
Perhaps the ultimate bad customer is a middle-aged Missouri man accused of the first-degree murder of a computer-store owner with whom he disputed a $180 bill.
Neither men nor machines “interfaced” well here. Although the customer had bought a printer elsewhere, he was under the impression that no one would charge him for making it compatible with a computer purchased from the store. The owner wouldn’t yield. Allegedly—I didn’t know the verdict at the time of this writing—the man then fired two .38-caliber slugs.[[100]]
Short of killing the store owner, how do you protect yourself?
Start by realizing that even at honest stores, your interests and the firms’ won’t be the same. I know of a Washington store that planned to drop the Kaypro. Despite the computer’s generally good technical reputation, the store seems to have been stuck with more than its share of lemons with disk-drive problems. But that wasn’t the real reason, apparently.
“We’re moving out of the lower-priced equipment into systems where we can make a bigger profit,” explained a store employee. “We’re not in this for charity. We’ve got to make a living.”
Understandable. But don’t count on a store like that to sell you the least expensive machine for your needs.
You can also protect yourself by considering the right questions—some of which appear below:
ONE
Do you need a computer? Are you prepared to fire the humans the machine might replace? Remember, a computer can’t make coffee or lie about your whereabouts when you may face an angry customer. Of course, your business may be expanding so that this isn’t an issue.
TWO
Do you have the temperament for the device? A willingness to struggle with mechanical and human frailty—including your own?
THREE
Are you prepared[prepared] to do your homework? You can’t avoid some preparation. It’s dangerous to dump the whole chore in the lap of a consultant who, however good, doesn’t know your business as well as you do.
Use a consultant if need be. But help him and yourself by knowing what’s going on. If you don’t have time, at least be certain that a trusted employee does—ideally, someone on whom you can bestow a fat raise if computerization goes smoothly.
FOUR
What magazines and reading material should you buy at the computer store and elsewhere?
The Silicon Jungle is just a start. Neither it nor other books can keep you informed about new products as quickly as a weekly magazine like InfoWorld can. I’ve written for InfoWorld and may be prejudiced, but I think it covers the industry well. Some micro magazines, especially those oriented toward specific brands, are namby-pamby in their coverage of the industry or their pet machines.
A good general book is fine for acquiring broad perspective; but now move on to a guide focused on computers for your kind of business. Shop for magazines and books as carefully as you would for the machines. See if the magazines’ articles are as up to date as their ads; I know of one that reviewed the Osborne more than a year after its introduction.
Timeliness isn’t as important with books if they discuss principles as well as specific products. Whatever you read, make sure it’s in English, not gibberish.
FIVE
How do you want to buy your computer and the trimmings? At a store or through the mail?
Unless you have a consultant or otherwise enjoy plenty of technical backup, you should buy your entire system locally, at one store.
Many manufacturers discourage mail-order sales. That’s partly because of price cutting but also because they need local stores to guide customers who are new to computers.
But if advice is available to you from a consultant or friend? Then mail-order software might be a terrific buy, especially since most computer stores can’t supply much software expertise, anyway.
SIX
Do you want an independent store or a chain store?
My own preference is an independent that has been in business several years. Computer sales reps may come and go. The owner, however, should still be in the store and in town when your warranty expires!
If you insist on buying from a chain, well, fine. But learn how long the manager has been around—and how long he intends to stay. He may lie through his teeth. But at least you’re trying.
Also, ask the manager how long his predecessors lasted? How fast does the revolving door spin?
SEVEN
Are the sales reps knowledgeable and understandable?
One of the best ways to find out is for them to demonstrate a program of the kind that you want. Ideally, sales reps or consultants won’t just know a lot about computers. They’ll also know—or learn—something about your business.
Above all, the sales rep should give you accurate information in language you understand. If you’re a businessman shopping for a word-processing computer, a good salesman can tell you how many double-spaced pages each of your floppy disks will be able to hold. Of course, ideally, you’ll walk into the store knowing the basics of computers. But there are bound to be gaps in your knowledge somewhere along the line; even writers for computer magazines argue with each other over some supposedly clear-cut technical matters.
EIGHT
Can anyone go with you to the store, especially on the day when you want to firm up the purchase?
You may at least enjoy a psychological advantage over the sales rep if there are two of you asking well-coordinated questions.
Who should accompany you? Perhaps the person in your office who would use the machine the most; what better source of questions for the sales rep? Obviously, too, it’s good labor relations. Employees who helped choose a machine will be less likely to complain about screens or keyboards.
NINE
What programs will do the jobs you need done?
Don’t just consider costs of the programs; consider their costs versus the cost of not owning particular ones.
I don’t regret spending $250 for a word-processing program to replace the cumbersome software with which my machine came. With the “free” program it would have taken perhaps 40 percent longer to write this book.
TEN
How easy are the programs to learn? How easy are they to use? Some of the easiest to learn are the hardest to use.
ELEVEN
Do the programs include good instruction manuals? You still may want them if they don’t—as long as you can buy readable books about them.
TWELVE
What machines will run those programs? And how well will they run them?
Take WordStar. Many machines can run this popular word-processing program; but not all will let you use the cursor keys—the arrowlike ones—to move from place to place on your screen. With some computers you must simultaneously tap on two keys, not just one, to move the arrow. You could have WordStar customized for your machine; but why not instead buy a computer that works well with it from the start?
You also want to consider the operating system that a machine uses. By now, the most widely used operating system is MS-DOS, which has become a de facto standard because of IBM’s endorsement of it. It has supplanted CP/M. Rival machines may not run every program that the IBM computers can. Some, like the Compaq portable, come close. But if a computer exactly duplicated all the IBM’s functions, Big Blue’s legal staff would crush the maker.
The widely used Apples have their own operating systems—one for the Apple II series and another for the Macintosh.
There’s also UNIX. Ma Bell developed it originally, AT&T Information Systems now supports it, and Microsoft sells a microcomputer version called XENIX. The gurus say UNIX could be the operation system of the future. With it programmers can more easily write software for machines of different brands and sizes and “port” their programs from one computer to another. UNIX may also be good for micros with many people using them at once. The negative is that the nonexperts sometimes have more trouble using UNIX than they do good ole CP/M and MS-DOS.
So much for the mainstream and soon-to-be-mainstream formats. What, however, if the program you need comes only in an oddball one? Think hard. Do you need this software—hence, this computer—immediately? Or can you wait until the wonderful program or an equivalent is available for other machines?
By the way, the word “format” doesn’t refer just to the general style like CP/M or MS-DOS. It can also mean specific machines within CP/M and so on. Different makes of CP/M-style computers, for instance, may not read each other’s disks because their exact formats are different.
THIRTEEN
Is the machine 8 bits or 16 bits; and how big is the random-access memory? Remember, 8 bits may be fine for word processing and light-duty accounting, but 16 bits might be better for complicated spreadsheets and is a definite advantage in data-base applications.
At the very least in the business world, you want 64K of RAM for word processing and 256K or even more for intimidating calculations.
You may find that a micro just isn’t powerful enough to handle a mailing list in the tens of thousands or process the payroll of Exxon. They’d be uses fit for a mainframe or at least a mini.
FOURTEEN
What about mass storage—in other words, devices like disk drives? Can they hold enough information for your business?
If you need to juggle around great masses of material in a hurry, you may want a hard disk, which is more expensive than the floppies.
Remember—one character equals one byte and you can squeeze most numbers into one or two bytes. Estimate your needs by calculating how many pages by how many bytes per page, etc., then double your result to allow for growth and the unforeseen.
Don’t just consider storage capacity. Think about the ease of making electronic copies of information you squeeze into your computer. A hard disk capable of holding the equivalent of five thousand typewriter pages is nice. But you still must contend with floppies for backup if the hard disk fails. You must either make backup copies as you go along or else, every so often, hold a long, tedious copying session.
Fortunately, the price of hard disks is dropping quickly enough that in the future you might be able to afford a second hard disk to back up the one in the machine. Some micros can back up on a standard videocassette recorder—a good four-hour tape will hold 100 megabytes. Besides, there’ll eventually be cheap, reliable, roomy memories without any moving parts.
Even then, however, you’ll still want copies of some kind, especially if failures would zap thousands of pages of hard-won information.
FIFTEEN
Must your computer system accommodate more than one user? Will it work well with people tapping into it from different terminals—those machines with the keyboard and screens but little or no computing power of their own?
Computer makers ballyhoo many micro systems as being “multiuser,” but often there are hitches.
These machines may let one person do accounting and the other do word processing at once but might not allow two people to run the accounting program simultaneously. And what about data bases and electronic file cabinets? Can more than one person simultaneously update inventory records, for instance? And will the computer slow down much if too many people use it at once?
Still, properly chosen, a multiuser system is a great way to share information with many people and not have to jockey floppy disks around all the time. Then there’s the cost. A multiuser system for twenty or thirty persons may cost less than half of what individual desktop computers might.
Instead of a multiuser system, however, you might still go with full-blown computers—but network them.
Networking is basically what it sounds: tying together machines to help them share letters, reports, data bases, and other electronic files. (See Chapter [13], “Net Gain$,” for a fuller explanation.)
SIXTEEN
Can you expand your computer system without difficulty, adding more storage, for instance, or devices like a modem to help you communicate over the phone lines?
SEVENTEEN
Will the sales rep show you that the computer will work well with the printer or other accessories you have in mind?
He or she might not be able to demonstrate this compatibility, simply because he doesn’t have the peripherals in stock; but you should at least obtain a clear written promise saying that everything will work well together. Be sure that his obligation to make it work is clear before you sign the check.
The same idea naturally applies to software.
EIGHTEEN
How clear is the computer’s instruction manual?
In computerese, you want “good documentation”—something that’s “user friendly.” If the manual doesn’t include it, then does a book from an outside publisher? Ideally, the book won’t focus just on the machine but also on the software that comes with it.
NINETEEN
How long has the manufacturer been in business? How prosperous is the company?
Buy from a new company if the technology looks far enough ahead of the pack. But be careful. You don’t want to buy from a computer maker likely to perish soon in the silicon jungle—not when you’ll need spare parts and technical assistance.
TWENTY
Are any users groups around—organizations of people owning the machine?
Ask your dealer or call the manufacturer for the name of the group near you. If there isn’t such a group, that’s a blow against the machine then and there. You still might buy it, but you’ll have less technical advice than you might otherwise get.
Another beauty of good user groups is that they work closely with dealers and manufacturers without compromising their own independence.
With fellow owners just a quick phone call away, you’ll be less at the mercy of know-nothing hucksters.
Obviously, too, before buying the machine, you’ll find that the user groups can be just the ticket for learning the quirks of the dealers and the machines. Ask discreet questions after the meetings. Which machines and dealers are winners? Which are gobblers?
Don’t forget, of course, that the owners would like to think of themselves as having spent their thousands of dollars the right way.
I try to remember that when a computer shopper at a Kaypro meeting asks me about my machine,I say I like it. Then I go out of my way to tick off the Kaypro’s flaws so I won’t have it on my conscience that I offered a bum steer.
TWENTY-ONE
What about maintenance?
You can solve many of your repair problems ahead of time by buying a computer easy to service.
That’s one reason I got the Kaypro rather than the Osborne.
You also want to find out how often the machines break down. Try—whether it’s a computer or a printer—to get an MTBF figure. That stands for “mean time between failures.”
Failures? That sounds fatalistic. But face it. Neither people nor machines go on forever.
MTBF figures are like political polls and deodorant-commercial statistics—subject to gross manipulation. But they’re a start.
Also, consider if you want to pay for regular maintenance, which, in one year, might cost more than a tenth the price of the computer?
Or should you gamble without a maintenance contract?
Here’s a rule of thumb. Don’t gamble if (a) your system is large and complicated or (b) you’ll be up the creek without a paddle if the computer is out of service too long. The second condition is particularly true if one or more of these conditions prevail:
a. If you own just one machine.
b. If it’s an oddball machine—not a commodity like an IBM or Kaypro.
c. If your business grinds to a halt without it.
I gambled for a while and seemed to be losing. During the first year I spent perhaps $150 on replacing a printed circuit board in the Kaypro and $300 on printer repairs. Considering the Kaypro’s dramatic effect on my output, I won’t gripe too loudly. Nevertheless, I appreciated the need for a service contract for even a well-made computer in constant use. And within a few weeks it paid off. A disk drive failed, and the computer shop didn’t charge me a cent for several hundred dollars in repairs. The man worked while I waited at the public library down the street. The shop had promised, before I forked over my $250 yearly payment, that it would at least try to fix up my machine within twenty-four hours.
If possible, negotiate for financial penalties if repairmen don’t do their job—at your location or theirs—within a certain amount of time.
The contract might be with anyone from a national service organization to a good, honest man operating out of a garage who’s been in business a while and has convincing references—and substitutes for the times he’s on vacation. (See Chapter [8], “People,” for rules to consider in avoiding turkeys.) Count on spending 1–1½ percent per month of the hardware costs if you’re dealing with a national service organization.
Of course you might be better off without a service contract. Just make sure you can limp along briefly without a computer, which, alas, I can’t.
If you do try to wing it without a maintenance contract, you’d better be prepared to know as soon as possible if you’ve bought a lemon. That’s not such a bad idea even with a contract.
Theoretically, you should smell the juice within the first few months before the warranty expires. But that’s not how it always works—or doesn’t work. As a novice, you may not be putting the machine through all its paces. So why not invite a more advanced computer owner or a consultant—someone you trust—to tinker around with the computer in ways that you’ll eventually be doing? The sooner the “test drive,” the better. Your tester should do basics like copying disks, transferring electronic files from one disk to another, erasing files, and renaming files. See if there’s a program available to test the disk drives and related circuitry. Often those parts are the ones that fail first, since (a) the drives are mechanical as well as electronic and (b) they get some of the heaviest workouts during the computer’s operation. As soon as you get your machine, you might leave it running twenty-four hours a day for a week or two. Any component that will fail from heat buildup, for instance, will probably[probably] quit then—while your warranty is still fresh. Power consumption is typically no more than a light bulb’s.
Whether you have a maintenance contract or not, remember a basic rule:
It isn’t the shop’s diagnostic tests that count. It’s how your newly repaired machine will run your programs.
After I took my computer into a shop for disk-drive work, the repairman said the drives just needed a little cleaning and were now testing fine. The computer, however, flubbed when I tried one of my regular programs.
Result: I forced the repairman to install the new disk drive that my machine needed.
Moral: always keep on hand some good backup copies of important programs that you can take with you to the repair shop to make certain that the people there have done the job right.
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Rothman’s Law of Computer Trouble-Shooting (Cribbed From an Old Rule for Fliers)
1. If your computer messes up, remember the very last thing you did, whether in hardware or software.
2. See if that isn’t the answer to your problem.
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TWENTY-TWO
When will the new machine be available?
Be especially wary in buying recently introduced computers—even from giants like Xerox.
Maybe you should go ahead because they deliver more value; but don’t commit yourself even to a partial payment if you can’t pin the store down to a delivery date. Why not negotiate the right to withdraw your money any time you want before you formally accept the computer?
TWENTY-THREE
Will the store deliver your computer system and install it?
For a small portable, obviously, that matters less than it would with a major office system.
Remember, too, that you probably want your software all set to go. Even popular programs like WordStar may be too scary for you to install yourself. The word “install” in this case refers to tinkering with software so it runs right on your machine for your use.
TWENTY-FOUR
If the store or other supplier is supplying the equipment over a period of time, can you break the contract into segments?
That way, if the store or systems house doesn’t perform in the early stages, you’ve retained some leverage.
TWENTY-FIVE
What references can the store provide before you purchase a major system?
Buying a computer isn’t that different from hiring a consultant or any other professional.
Since you probably can’t fully understand the product, you at least have a right to know the reputation of the people offering it.
In at least one case, in fact, a court ruled that the computer dealer in effect was functioning as a consultant and had more responsibilities to the buyer than he would have had if he had been selling a less complicated product. It’s an interesting ruling. And that’s it. Don’t count on it to protect you.
TWENTY-SIX
Will the store owner himself sign the contract? Remember, your trusty sales rep may be on his way out of town.
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Rules for Buying a Used Computer
1. Know your prices. Study the want ads of the local papers. There’s even a Computer Classified Bluebook that rates micros for value in various areas (such as dependability) and offers possible prices. It’s available from Computer Classified, P.O. Box 3395, Reno, Nevada 89505 ($30 a single copy). Micro prices can change faster than a guide can keep up with them, but the Computer Classified Bluebook might be a good start if the local newspaper doesn’t carry many want ads for your particular machine. Obviously, too, you’ll want to ask around user groups and read the classified sections of their newsletters.
2. Pay attention to the machine’s physical condition. A banged-up case—or a chipped one—might suggest that the innards have been roughed around, too.
3. Find out how your pet programs run. If you don’t have any available that work on the machine you’re considering, see if you can borrow some from a friend and have him or her accompany you. Make sure your friend has backup copies in case the programs are damaged by a sloppy drive in machine[a sloppy drive in machine] you’re considering.
Remember that in the secondhand market the buyer normally doesn’t have much recourse if later he finds that the merchandise is defective.
4. As with a car, ask why the seller is selling.
5. Find out what generation of equipment it is. Does it include all the wrinkles of new models advertised.
6. Learn where you stand legally if you’re buying software with the used machine. Some companies may require you to register yourself as the new owner; software manuals or accompanying literature may have this information. If you’re on good terms with the software company, there’s more of a chance its people will answer questions. The company may require you to give the serial number of your disk before it will respond.
7. Call up commercial auctioneers and find out if they’re holding any auctions offering the equipment you’re interested in.
Don’t buy equipment at an auction unless you’ve been around the computer for a while or have a friend who can watch out for you. Very possibly you won’t get a chance to give a machine a good test. Don’t buy unless the price is low enough so you’ll still be okay even if you must spend 25 percent of the auction price on repairs.
8. Obviously you’ll want to consider a maintenance agreement with a local dealer or repair shop if you need the machine for your work. You may, of course, have to pay for an inspection.
BACKUP II
A Few Grouchy Words on Printers
I sold my daisy wheel—a printer that prints like a high-priced electric typewriter—and replaced it with a plebeian dot matrix machine.
Why? Because all printers, especially my 1975-vintage daisy, are a series of lousy trade-offs.
And one of the trade-offs was about to be my solvency.
The old daisy wheel cost a mere $650 used—quite a bargain for a machine whose latest models go for several thousand dollars—and Anderson Jacobson didn’t charge for minor adjustments if I lugged in the bulky printer myself. AJ, however, kept after me to get a $450-a-year service contract.
Then, one day, a printed circuit board conked out, and the replacement board and some other work came to $300.
“You’ve got to be kidding,” I told the crew at Anderson Jacobson. “Three hundred dollars for a printer that cost me $675 originally?”
No, Anderson Jacobson wasn’t out to gyp me. Quite honestly, the people there had intended to make their money off me through the service contract; and that would have been fine for a company that needed a heavy-duty, industrial-quality printer to pound away, day after day, around the clock, without stopping. But for a lone free-lance writer? However fast I typed, I could never give them the amount of business for which its makers had designed it.
So like destitute parents searching for the right foster home for their children, I looked for better, more affluent surroundings for my printer.
I asked for, and got, $650 for the printer with a tractor feed thrown in for free—it lets you use big stacks of perforated computer paper without stuffing in new sheets when you reach the end of the page. The new owner, a Washington consultant, understood. He wasn’t just buying a printer; he was buying his right to an Anderson Jacobson service contract.
My AJ’s successor was the Microprism Model 480, a sleek, plastic-covered machine that took up less space on my tabletop than some typewriters.
In a dot-matrix printer like the 480, little pins hit the ribbon, making impressions on the paper. An “A” is one series of pins, a “B” another, and so on. The quality normally isn’t any match for the daisy wheel’s, even though the price may be much lower than a daisy going the same speed. “Prints like a daisy, costs like a matrix!” Integral Data Systems touted the Model 480. That was stretching matters.
The letters from my next printer, a Panasonic KX-P1092, could almost pass for a typewriter’s. It sold discounted at a local store for $489, just a few dollars more than Anderson Jacobson wanted for its one-year maintenance contract.
Here’s what else I could have chosen—rightly or not:
1. Another daisy wheel machine. The daisy wheel is plastic or metal and looks vaguely like some flowers, with many strokes radiating from the center. The spokes contain letters and numbers, and your computer tells what spoke the printer should strike—which it does with a little hammer. Run a noisy daisy wheel at one in the morning in a thin-walled apartment with an early-rising neighbor on the other side and you may get a not-so-friendly visit from the police or zoning department.
2. A laser printer. Typically, it works a bit like some copying machines, with your computer controlling the printed image rather than a document you put in front of a mirror. This wasn’t the choice for me; laser printers at the time went for several thousand dollars up. By now, however, the price may be much lower. Political fund-raisers love the nice quality that lasers can add to slick letters saying how badly they need your money.
3. A thermal-transfer printer. This uses patterns of heat to arrange the images on special paper; it’s quiet. Normally, the paper can be expensive, and the printing quality is poor; so thermal printers were also out of the running[running] for me. Later, however, IBM introduced its Quietwriter printer, which prints beautifully on ordinary paper.
4. An ink-jet printer. This kind literally squirts ink against the paper in patterns forming letters and numbers; and the noise level is low, maybe 50 decibels, compared to 65 or more that a daisy wheel might inflict. What a boon to apartment dwellers and people in already-noisy offices.
While I was shopping for the Anderson Jacobson’s replacement, I didn’t take ink jets very seriously because of the broken-up letters that came from them. A year later, however, I talked to Richard Sugden, a Wyoming M.D., the owner of a PT-88 ink-jet from Siemens, selling in the $900 range, who may have had a limited solution.
He used the 88 with a special printing program called Fancy Font and high-quality paper that soaked up the ink neatly.
The program slowed his printer down to a fraction of the usual 160 characters per second but greatly improved his print even if it still couldn’t pass for a daisy wheel’s. You can also team up Fancy Font with some dot-matrix machines, especially those from Epson. Then you can print in a number of sizes and styles, including “olde English.” Don’t overdo. “Fancy,” as its makers joke in a printing sample, “may either kill or cure.”
In printer shopping for myself, I used these criteria:
SPEED
Yes, actually I could have afforded a new daisy—one of those $450-$1,000 models.
The problem was that most crept along at less than 20 characters per second. That sounds fast, maybe 200 words a minute; it isn’t. You must redo an entire page if you want perfect typing but wish to make one change in material already printed; you can’t just white out the wrong word and stick in the correct one as you can with a typewriter. Often, after completing a supposedly final version, I see many changes I should have made on-screen. Somehow my editing eyes are sharper with paper.
People less fallible than I can make do with 20 characters per second. They get everything printed right the first time.
Then again, if their printing volume is too high, a snaillike printer still will bog them down.
And if they’re using their computer system to store and print notes or records, a faster machine is a must. That’s especially true if you’re churning out nothing but long rows of numbers. If best impressions don’t count, you might consider a high-speed dot matrix capable of more than 150 characters per second—or even 200 or greater.
My Panasonic dot matrix was somewhat of a compromise, with a draft speed advertised at 180 characters per second and a near-letter-quality one of around 33 cps.
WARNING: Please note that advertised speeds may be one-third or more higher than the actual speeds. The advertised speeds may not consider factors such as the time it takes the printer to go from one line to another. This is particularly true the case of unidirectional printers, which print only from left to right rather than in both directions, as do bidirectional printers.
The only real way to judge a printer speed in your application is to try it with your own sample material.
PRINT QUALITY
Here’s the hierarchy of printer quality:
1. Draft quality. The letters are too dotty for anything but drafts and correspondence with enemies whose eyes you want to torture.
2. Correspondence quality. It’ll do for a letter to a forgiving friend or business associate.
3. Near-letter quality. You can get away with it for book manuscripts, especially if you already have a contract.
4. Letter quality. That’s typewriter quality.
A friend described my Microprism’s supposed “near-letter quality” as looking like “an upscale grocery store receipt.” It was a long way from a daisy wheel.
Still, Judith Axler Turner, a nationally syndicated computer columnist, says dot matrix might actually help her at times; she can print the letters larger than regular typewritten characters. Her manuscripts command more attention.
A Washington lawyer fared worse using a dot-matrix machine without near-letter quality. A judge threw out his brief.
We dot-matrix plebeians, before buying, should test the print quality on a number of people, especially colleagues or clients. Are they happy with the shapes, sizes, and quality of the characters? Do they feel that our dots blend smoothly into each other? Usually, the more pins a dot-matrix printer has, the better will be the printing. Many dot-matrix printers in late 1984 had a matrix of seven-by-nine wires. In 1984 Epson was selling the $1,500 LQ-1500 with twice that density and “letter-quality characters to rival fine office typewriters.” I looked one over. The typewriters were still winning.
Sales reps will bill the LQ-1500 and many other dot matrixes as being capable of both (a) lightning speeds with draft-print quality and (b) slower speeds with good quality. Is it “good” enough for you? If not, consider buying a speedy dot matrix or ink jet for routine work and a daisy wheel for the times you want the best impression. The combined cost may be lower than that of a super-duper dot matrix.
If you’re doing serious work with graphics, look for a printer capable of reproducing details as well as a good computer monitor does. Daisy wheels won’t suffice because of the tremendous number of strikes; doing one dot at a time is incredibly slow, and their preformed characters don’t include the variety of patterns that good graphics require. You really need an ink jet, dot matrix, or other alternative.
COST
With printer technology advancing so rapidly, I didn’t want to sink much into a machine—hence, the $489 Panasonic. Sometime in the 1980s I’ll forsake my cheapie dot matrix for a good ink-jet, thermal-transfer, or laser printer when the price is down.
When pondering costs, don’t just look at a printer’s price tag. What about ribbons? How many pages will they print? And how much do they sell for? My IDS ribbons listed for around $12 apiece, but luckily I could get around that by (1) buying at a discount place and (2) eventually purchasing a little machine called a MacInker, which, for less than a dime, let me reink a ribbon. It’s messy. Don’t inflict a MacInker on a Fortune 500 secretary, or any secretary, but think about one, maybe, as a way of being frugal at home. The MacInker is available from Computer Friends, 6415 SW Canyon Court, Suite #10, Portland, Oregon 97221. The telephone number is 1-800/547-3303, or 503/297-2321. The gadget as of mid-1984 was selling for around $60 if you included ink and shipping charges.
PRINTING VOLUME
I wanted to be able to churn out a book manuscript in one weekend without overwhelming the printer.
Before you buy a printer, ask the manufacturer if it can handle not only your typical workload but also your peak one.
Cheaper printers may overheat—just when you most need them.
A DECENT REPAIR RECORD
A printer is an electromechanical device. That’s a fancy way of saying it may break down a lot.
An electromechanical device, after all, is partly mechanical—which makes it less reliable than the gizmos in your computer system that are purely electronic.
If you can afford backup machines, naturally the repair record won’t be as crucial, but no matter what, do compare statistics on the mean time between failures. Remember, they’re like EPA ratings for automobiles. They’re wrong, frequently, and may not apply to the printer you end up with. But don’t shrug them off entirely.
QUIET (OR RELATIVE QUIET)
My daisy—with the little hammer pounding away—was too noisy for the late hours. Older dot matrixes also can be offenders; they can almost shriek with high-pitched sounds. Some of the newer ones may be better behaved. Sharing an office-apartment or working from an ordinary office, however, you might buy a sound-muffling box and wrestle with pulling paper in and out of it.
When good, cheap ink jets and laser printers hit the market, these noise hassles will end.
SPECIAL FEATURES
“Will it underline?” I asked. And would it offer boldface, the dark, heavy print that books often use for emphasis.
And what about other special features? How about proportional spacing, for instance, which prints the “M” wider than a “j”—making the type look more like a book’s. That could make the print more readable.
Another question is, “Does the printer offer justification?” It’s really a software issue. But we’ll group it here with the other special features.
Justification evens out the spacing of both the right and left margins, though that’s a mixed blessing. Justified margins look more impressive. But ragged right margins, the normal typewriter kind, guide the eye more easily and may be better for long reports as opposed to short letters. I did not justify this manuscript. But justification is just the ticket for correspondence with the status conscious.
In the case of all these special features, keep remembering to ask:
1. Does the printer offer them no matter what computer or program you use?
2. If not, will your hardware and software let you use the features?
3. For free, will the store modify your computer system to make the features available to you?
4. Will your desired combinations of features work simultaneously? Unfortunately, with my software, anyway, the Microprism 480 couldn’t use boldface and proportional spacing at once.
OVERALL COMPATIBILITY WITH YOUR COMPUTER
1. Can you use a standard cable to connect the printer and the computer?
2. If not, can the store make one up for you? At what cost?
Remember, it isn’t enough for the cables to plug in. You also want the right wires going to the right pins and for the computer and printer to be on speaking terms electronically.
To connect up with a printer physically and electronically, a computer uses a port—nothing more than (a) a plug or socket and (b) the gizmos that let your machine exchange bits and bytes with the outside world.
“The outside world” may be a modem, which connects up with a phone, or it may be simply your printer.
Two common styles of ports are serial and parallel. Data passes through serial ports a bit at a time; through parallel ports, it passes eight bits or more at once.
Serial ports commonly use an industry standard, the RS-232, which is a kind of socket together with the related electronics. As with “IBM compatibility,” this “industry standard” often can be elusive. One brand’s RS-232 may differ from another’s.
The Kaypro has both a serial and parallel port, and with the Anderson Jacobson, I had to wrestle with plugs whenever I used the modem, since it and the Anderson Jacobson both required the serial port.
In between printing one of the last drafts of this manuscript today, I’m adding another criterion—whether a printer has a buffer.
A buffer in this case is just some memory, in the printer, that lets your computer pump a letter or report into the machine in a fairly short time. Then you can return to other computer work while the printer runs. You can of course buy a buffer if your machine lacks one and you’re sadistic enough to deprive your secretary of a good excuse for a coffee break. Wait. Come to think of it, your secretary herself might appreciate a buffer if she’s trying to keep a nine to five job nine to five.
You needn’t have buffering by way of your printer. Some programs, such as Word Perfect, even let you “schedule” several printing jobs from different documents on your disk while you’re still writing.
Big Blue’s Quiet One
Do you need a quiet printer that will turn out typewriter-like work but won’t cost as much as a laser-style machine?
Then you might consider the IBM Quietwriter printer or the inevitable clones that will follow. It uses a new kind of thermal-transfer process—heating the ink so it goes on the paper without the ribbon actually touching. The Quietwriter doesn’t need special paper. Its sound is a polite swish. And its print looks typewriter-sharp.
IBM introduced the Quietwriter at around $1,400—less than half of what the cheapest laser printers were selling for in late 1984 (not that they aren’t coming down in price too).
Granted, drawbacks exist The Quietwriter’s speed isn’t as fast as a laser printer’s—effectively a mere 25 characters per second if you use Pica-sized type.
Also, the Quietwriter’s ink doesn’t sink into the paper as with some typewriters or daisywheels; your work might lack the feel of a traditionally typed document. And because the ink is erasable, you shouldn’t use a Quietwriter for legal papers. It won’t make carbons. Moreover, the technology is unproven—at least to me as I write this. Ask me again when the machine’s been out long enough for the lemon-owners to fire off blurred letters of complaint to InfoWorld.
Just the same, Quietwriter-style machines are well worth investigating. Hats off to Big Blue on this one.
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BACKUP III
The Lucky 13: What to Look for in Choosing Software
A friend warned me: Don’t water down your software advice with “In my opinion”-type phrases and other hedges.
“That’s how it seems to me, anyway,” he joked.
Well, Rick, I’m sorry. Just as a critic once called Citizen Kane “a shallow masterpiece,” I’ll qualify my enthusiasm for WordStar. I’ll be a responsible zealot.
Anyway, I like WordStar enough to use it to help explain the Lucky 13—my general criteria for judging software.
ABSENCE OF BUGS
Programs are like people. “Mature” software is more reliable. It’s more like a tried-and-tested salesman or secretary, less risky, say, than a green employee hired off the street.
A complex creation like WordStar, with its thousands of lines of instructions for your computer, won’t ever be 100-percent glitchless. But it’s close. MicroPro, the company selling it, normally tests its programs well before unleashing them on the market, and WordStar has been around since the late 1970s, giving others the pleasure of suffering bugs before you have a chance. Why should you pay for a software maker’s education? Not that you should always buy “mature” programs. Sometimes a newer one looks so promising that you might want to gamble.
GENERAL EASE OF USE
WordStar’s easy for many people—not all but many—to learn and use. Arthur Clarke picked up the ABCs of WordStar in days. A public relations woman at MicroPro International says she was doing serious work with WordStar the first day she used it. I believe her. My friend Michael Canyes explained the basics to me on the phone; but my main training was just hanging around computer stores and trying out Osbornes, which included WordStar as part of the standard package.
WordStar exercise books exist, the computer version of typing ones, but for me they would have been a waste of time. I was too eager to get to work with my new software.
A millionaire swears by WordStar; he has four secretaries deftly running it on Kaypros. A fifteen-year-old I know—smart, though not a prodigy—does his homework on WordStar, and the son of MicroPro’s founder learned it at age ten.
Yes, I’ve heard WordStar horror stories. You’re not dim-witted if WordStar doesn’t come as easily to you as to me. Oddly, I found Select—ballyhooed as a beginner’s word processor—to be more of a puzzle. Oh, well. One person’s dream software may be another’s kludge.
Keep in mind, however, that you must often suffer trade-offs between easiness, speed, power, and versatility. Although WordStar might not give you instant gratification, its speed and power may justify the struggle. Ditto for some of the best spreadsheets and other software categories. The big question is, How much word processing or spreadsheeting, or whatever, do you do? Not much? Then place ease of learning ahead of speed. Ideally, though, a program will give you both. MicroPro has tried especially hard to do this with WordStar 2000, an improvement over WordStar in learnability. Like nearly any powerful program, however, 2000 still takes practice to get up to full speed on.
Whether you’re buying a word-processing program or an accounting one, look for software with logical commands.
WordStar, in this way, triumphs. Consider the famous SEXD diamond that you use with the Control key. S is the diamond’s leftmost key; it will move your cursor over one space in that direction. E is the uppermost key and indeed moves you up. X, the diamond’s lower point, takes you a space down. Rob Barnaby, in short, has done a superb job of letting me get from place to place on the screen.
You may disagree violently. Fine. Software is personal. You’re letting a stranger—the writer of the program you use—influence your working habits.
Ideally, however, the writer’s logic and yours will be the same, so that, in the end, the stranger becomes a friend. He might be thousands of miles away. He might even be dead. Or you might loathe him if you meet him in person rather than on your disk. But in running his program, you still get the feeling Holden Caulfield got in Catcher in the Rye: you want to call up the author after he’s done such a fine job. Holden was talking about novelists. I’m talking about programmers. Ideally, they’ll touch your brain the way Holden’s literary heroes touched his heart.
GOOD DOCUMENTATION
People say WordStar’s manual nowadays is better than the past ones, which Personal Software likened to “the Russian-language version of War and Peace.” Don’t memorize even the improved manual, however. Home in on MicroPro’s simple list of WordStar commands, a sheet smaller than a restaurant menu with which I learned the basics.
My WordStar version also included a spiral-bound book with exercises similar to a typing guide, but I didn’t get lost in them. I was too eager to get on with my real work with WordStar.
There’s one other resource nowadays—a tutorial disk, which, because it came only in an IBM-style version, I hadn’t tried as of this writing. Normally, however, I absorb new wisdom better the old-fashioned way: via bound paper.
More than twenty books on WordStar exist—maybe because of the old manuals’ failings—and one of the better guides is Arthur Naiman’s Introduction to WordStar. Published by Sybex Computer Books, Berkeley, California, it’s generally as intelligent and helpful as the program itself.[[101]]
Remember the basic criteria for evaluating manuals of any kind, factory supplied or not:
1. The general logic of the manual. The author should have written it from your viewpoint, not his—from the viewpoint of what you do with the program, not how the programmer coded it. Ideally, you’ll find descriptions of related commands in the same chapter.
2. The quality of the index. I’ll charitably assume it’s there to begin with. It should list even the most obscure commands—telling on what pages you’ll find them.
3. Simplicity of vocabulary and sentence structure. A manual shouldn’t impress; it should teach.
USEFULNESS TO OLD PROS AND BEGINNERS ALIKE
WordStar adjusts to different levels of skill. You have some menus to guide you, to help you decide, say, whether you want to print or see material you’ve already written. But most of the time you won’t need menus during composition. Not after you’re experienced, anyway. Some rival word-processing programs have menus that bog everyone down, beginners and old pros. But not WordStar. It has four “Help” levels, including one that keeps messages constantly on the screen to guide you. But you can zap all this once you’re a WordStar pro.
WordStar is only as “friendly” to you as you want it to be. It isn’t like a puppy leaping up on you and licking your face at the wrong time.
SPEED
WordStar lets you do your job in a hurry. Well, basically. If you’re just turning out short business letters, for instance, and don’t want to store them on your disk, try something else. WordStar makes you electronically save your words there before you can print anything. And that takes time. For swapping words around, however, for additions or deletions, few programs could surpass this one. Were I writing long sales pamphlets or annual reports, WordStar would be my choice.
Now, I’ll qualify my “speedy” verdict. WordStar will slow you down when your computer has to reach instructions that the program hasn’t already sent on to the RAM—the temporary memory. That means a time-consuming electronic trip to your floppy disk. Also, if you type in a certain amount of material, WordStar will automatically lock some of it on a disk if the RAM is running out of room. WordStar is a disk-based rather than a RAM-based word processor.
That has its virtues, however, since, by farming out the runover to a floppy, WordStar lets you work with longer files. Some RAM-based programs may limit each document to only 15 or 20 pages in many computers unless you electronically splice them together.
Altogether, I’d say that WordStar, evaluated as a disk-based, fully featured word processor, is fast. And new wrinkles like hard disks will make it run still faster, even without the speed improvements that very likely will come. MicroPro, in fact, recommends hard disks for users of WordStar 2000, even if it will run with two floppies. Very soon most office micros will contain hard disks.
POWER
WordStar is powerful. You can, for instance, type “@” instead of a long name used commonly in your work. Then, when you’re ready, you can plug the name in where the “@” appears. This search-and-replace feature is common to every advanced word-processing program; but WordStar implements it better than many rivals.
You can also use it with an accessory program, MailMerge, so you can type a list of names and addresses just once, then automatically plug them into the right spaces in a form letter. Only, it’s individually typed, so people needn’t know they’re getting a form letter.
Of course, “power” isn’t a virtue just in word processing. The best electronic filing cabinets, for instance, boast clever wrinkles to make it easier for you to enter new categories of information or to change individual records. Consider this story, which is true, about a reporter whom an editor was on the verge of firing. The severance pay was ready. The editor changed his mind at the last minute, however, and the final check stayed in his desk. Then, not long after, the paper’s auditor stormed into the city room. “Why didn’t you fire the son of a bitch?” he asked. “Now we’ll have to spend all this time straightening out the records.” Had the paper had a good, powerful electronic filing system, the nonfiring would have been a little less traumatic to the auditor.
FEWER CHANCES FOR BOTCH-UPS
WordStar limits the chances for careless errors in the first place.
While you’re working on a file, for instance, you can use the Control-KJ command to delete everything but the document you’re in the middle of.
Granted, WordStar isn’t perfect. Arthur Clarke, for instance, complains mildly of the underlining procedure. If he turns on the underlining, he’ll occasionally forget to turn it off, meaning that, unwittingly, he’ll underline everything that follows. WordStar 2000 corrects this problem by showing you true underlines on the screen, not just symbols at the beginning and ends of the underlining.
In record-keeping programs, especially, the anti-botch-up features can be real lifesavers. One technique is to limit the range of numbers entered. An elementary school, for example, might guard against typing errors in new files showing pupils’ birth dates. The computer might then flash its skepticism if a clerk said a first grader was born more than six years ago.
THE JEWISH-UNCLE EFFECT
Without bogging you down, WordStar lets you reconsider some drastic actions. Suppose you’re about to erase an entire file; that is, a whole document that you’ve worked on: say, a letter or a sales report. If you press the control key and the letters “K” and “J,” WordStar won’t act immediately. Instead, it will ask, “Name of File to Delete?” You can even get out of most commands before they’re executed. It’s simple. Just hit the “Control” and “U” buttons, then the “Escape” one. WordStar, in short, is good for the hotheaded. You feel as if Seymour Rubinstein—the MicroPro founder—is watching over you like some kindly, protective Jewish uncle.
A good record-keeping program would react similarly if you were about to erase 8 million names. A payroll program might inquire more than once if you wanted to register the firing of five hundred people. A spreadsheet program could ask if you really wanted to wipe out dozens of numbers that you’d entered. A graphics package, ideally, would do likewise if you were about to erase an electronic equivalent of the Mona Lisa.
Some programs, in addition to saying you’re messing up, will offer you alternative courses of action. The older WordStar isn’t as advanced as some other programs in this respect. But normally the error messages are self-explanatory and the corrections obvious.
DAMAGE LIMITATION
WordStar limits the damage if you or your machine goofs in a big way.
It rarely sends you back to the operating system of your computer. What’s more frustrating than getting, say, an A> prompt—the computer equivalent of, “Buddy, you’re back at square one”? Then you’ll have to reenter your work.
WordStar 2000 corrects one feature missing from the original program. Plain old WordStar doesn’t let you delete a paragraph, then restore it without zapping other changes you made since you last saved your work on your disk. That is, there’s no yank-back feature to undo erasures or other recent modifications.
But even the older WordStar makes an electronic equivalent of a carbon copy, a backup file—meaning that you’re probably still in business if a glitch destroys the original. Uncle Seymour makes you think twice, literally, before you erase whole files.
The old saw of the computer trade, however, will always apply, no matter what the program:
“Garbage in, garbage out”—“GIGO.”
Berenice Hoffman, my literary agent, really rubbed that in. I’m the type whose letters and checks take a little time to adjust to a new year. “For your records, if you keep carbons,” Berenice replied to one note, “you might want to change the date to 1983—didn’t the computer tell you?” The best programs in the world can’t detect such mistakes.
But wait; I just remembered. The fancier computers have electronic clocks that potentially could warn you if the wrong date appeared when you were working with a correspondence format.
AFTER-THE-GOOF FEEDBACK
WordStar also provides another service—offering error messages telling you what went wrong. It isn’t perfect. Sometimes you may see combinations of letters and numbers, meaningless to someone without a manual. But normally WordStar is helpful. Say you want to use two markers—one at the start and one at the end—to designate material to be moved to another part of the document. WordStar will tell you if you forget to type out either one.
Ideally, programs not only will offer you a diagnosis after the goof but also a solution. Although WordStar isn’t as advanced as some programs in this respect, it’s very adequate for the experienced user.
ABILITY TO CUSTOMIZE
I adapted my WordStar to the requirements of a writer. Editors normally don’t like hyphenated copy, so now WordStar’s “hyphen help,” which suggests possible hyphen breaks, is an optional feature instead of a normal one. No longer need I turn it off with special commands. WordStar provides a menu in the installation program that makes it easy for you to change normal defaults—the settings that your software will have before you tinker with it. The menu doesn’t cover every possibility. But you can vary margins and many other important details, and once you’re experienced, you can do a patch—a modification in the program—to change other things.
If you’re a novice buying from a full-service computer store, ask it to set up your WordStar. Better still, try to dope it out yourself so you make your own changes in the future. You might get guidance from a users’ group.
Likewise, you might tinker with a communications program to make it work better with the computers you plan to use and talk to. Or you might set up a record-keeping program to check automatically the accuracy of information fed into it.
ACCESSORY PROGRAMS
WordStar will work with a variety of accessory programs intended especially for it—everything ranging from electronic thesauruses to spelling checkers, word counters, footnoters, and a communications program.
Some word processors, accounting packages, other software, include all the functions you’d need. Others require you to buy the accessory programs. That’s not always bad. Why bother to pay for a dictionary if you’re a perfect speller? Just make sure—before you buy—that the original software either includes good accessory programs or will work with them.
Some outside companies’ accessory programs, by the way, may be superior to those from the main software’s manufacturer.
SUPPORT FROM THE MANUFACTURER
There is one plus that I wish I could have included in my praise of WordStar—good support from the manufacturer. Don’t count on it. In the area of guidance and troubleshooting from the manufacturer, WordStar on occasion hasn’t even been adequate.
Calling as a prospective customer, I couldn’t find out if WordStar in a Xerox 820 format would run smoothly on my Kaypro. The company took down my message, then mailed me literature that didn’t answer my question.
A California man phoned MicroPro with a problem involving DataStar, a sister program of WordStar that eases record keeping. “We do not have time to correct the programming that results in this quirk,” he heard. He complained to InfoWorld that MicroPro “has some really elegant program tools but no inkling as to the meaning of customer support.” Likewise, the head of a MicroPro users group in New York told the magazine that “fully half of the people who called me to join immediately presented me with a problem they were having.”
For a while—I don’t know what it’ll be like when you’re reading this book—MicroPro wasn’t even replying to most customers’ questions on the phone; this supposedly was the dealers’ job. And while Rubinstein’s company indeed sells a Mercedes of a program, some computer stores aren’t up to fixing the windshield wipers.
Ideally, software manufacturers like MicroPro will not only offer technical support but also 800 numbers so you won’t be on hold for twenty minutes, racking up a formidable long-distance bill.
BACKUP IV
On the Evolution of Software (And a “Perfecter and Perfecter” Program)
Mary Matthews, a gifted writer-editor in Chevy Chase, Maryland, favors a WordStar rival called Perfect Writer.
“What a conceited program,” I say.
“WordStar’s a dinosaur,” she shoots back.
In late 1984 we both tried new versions of our pet software (actually WordStar 2000 is more of a successor), and while defending them, we harbor reservations.
First the basics. I myself prefer a program like WordStar Version 3.3, which is in the “get-what-you-see” tradition and shows your copy on screen almost exactly as it will be printed. But Mary makes a good argument for a rival with a different philosophy. WordStar 2000 in fact helps her case. It now has many of the features that her dear Perfect Writer came out with first, including split screens. Interestingly, however, the new Perfect is more useful to the “get-what-you-see” crowd than is the older version, while WordStar 2000 is less get what you see in an important way than 3.3 is. At least that’s true of the WordStar 2000 previewed to dealers. During a demo, anyhow, a MicroPro employee couldn’t coax 2000 into displaying double-spacing conveniently on screen even though we could have double-spaced on paper.
Where does the increasing resemblance between Perfect Writer and the WordStar family fit in the cosmic scheme? I’ll recklessly generalize:
The word processors of the world are becoming like refrigerators; all the deluxe models will have the equivalents of automatic defrosters and ice makers and butter warmers and lettuce crispers. More of the new wrinkles will be marginal. And the surviving companies will be the ones that can explain and exploit the differences and support their customers the best.
Not everyone likes butter warmers. As noted before, WordStar 2000 isn’t an unalloyed improvement for me, and the “perfecter” Perfect in some ways disappoints Mary.
The older WordStar lets you move to the left of a line with the combination of the Control key and the letters Q and S or Control-QS. A touch typist could do this almost instantly. WordStar 2000, on the other hand, uses Control-CL. CL stands for “cursor left,” CR for “cursor right,” and mnemonic commands like those are indeed easier to keep in your head, especially if you use a program only occasionally. On the other hand, the new strokes are harder for a touch typist—this one, anyway. Likewise, Mary wishes that Perfect Writer’s new commands were a bit more logical, especially to old Perfect Writer hands.
Concluding, Mary says Perfect Writer users with 64K machines shouldn’t junk them to buy more powerful computers just to run the new version. My thinking is basically the same about WordStar 2000 versus WordStar 3.3. The older program isn’t as good as 2000 in some cases; for instance, when you could use built-in memo format to make temporary employees more productive. But 3.3 is still terrific for people without such needs, and I’ll think long and hard before I myself change.
Mary’s impressions and mine are typical of many veteran users of software who can’t stomach features added for novices. She’s 100 percent right except when we disagree. As “host,” I won’t rebut her in the places below where we do.
Here’s what she sent over the phone via her Kaypro II:
Somehow, I’m not sure how, I’ve gotten to be enough of an authority on Perfect Writer—the “old” Perfect Writer, that is, the one released in June 1983—that strangers call me up and say that a computer salesman somewhere told them I was the Sibyl who could answer their questions with a local instead of a long-distance phone call. Luckily, the questions usually run in the “How the heck do you do X?” vein, or I might have to reveal that I’m only a good-hearted writer.
Now the Perfect Writer people have released a brand-new version of their already powerful program, and I think I’m in trouble. The new, revised version of Perfect incorporates some radical changes—sweeping enough to demand 128K of RAM (and IBM PC DOS) to operate. (Actually, after claiming that the new Perfect can edit documents of up to 100 pages, the manual states that “with 64K of RAM you will be able to edit documents about 5 pages long,” so I assume that the new Perfect takes up about 56K of RAM—not being familiar with the PC’s way of juggling numbers, I can’t tell exactly.) I’m in trouble because I won’t be the reigning Sibyl anymore unless I can figure out how to buy a PC-compatible computer with a decent keyboard (most PC keyboards are horrid) and still do things like pay bills and buy the occasional loaf of bread and jug of wine.
The most radical of the changes is that the new Perfect Writer now uses what it calls “pop-up command menus” during editing. When you hit the Escape key, a small (about one-twelfth of the screen) “top menu” will superimpose itself over your text, as close to your cursor as possible, three characters away to the left or right. It lists your choices for subsidiary menus, which eventually lead you to the command you want.
Nearly every command has been changed, so that those of us who are used to the old Perfect Writer must learn the editing commands all over again. The new manual (haters of the old one will be glad to learn that the index is now at the back where it belongs and those frustrating Roman numerals are gone) explains with a straight face that the pop-up menus exist so that you “don’t have to memorize command sequences.” Of course, if you plan to use Perfect Writer more than once a year or so, you’re going to memorize the commands, anyway; and so, as the manual airily says, the Control key does everything the Escape key does, identically; the only difference is that you “bypass” the top menu—because, it says, you aren’t always going to want to see it. Mind you, if you use the Control key, you’ll see every menu but the top menu, anyway.
Is this enough reason to change all the commands but one—to bypass one menu?
To me, this is not an improvement over the old Perfect Writer—not unless you actually like added keystrokes. All the old two- and three-keystroke commands are now three-keystroke commands at least, and often four or five. This is progress? The new Perfect Writer has indeed taken pity on us and assigned to the PC’s function keys twenty frequently used commands, so that if, for example, you don’t feel like keystroking Escape-DS-Carriage-Return to save your document and continue working on it (Control-X-Control-S in the old PW), you can keystroke SHIFT-Function Key 9-Carriage Return. Whoopee.
Let us not carp too much about what strikes me as suspiciously similar to kludge, since the new Perfect Writer is as fast or faster than the old Perfect Writer. We’re probably only talking about a few microseconds, mind you, but it still seems to me that the execution of Perfect’s new commands is usually close to instantaneous. This is a thing to marvel at when you compare Perfect Writer to WordStar 3.3, where unless you have a specially speeded-up version with specially reassigned command keys and fingers with a lightning-fast touch, it takes forever to execute certain commands (well, ten or twenty seconds) and perceptible time (say, one or two seconds) even if you do have the speed. But I still say the 50, 100, or 200 percent additional keystrokes are a pain in the you know where. The program may be faster, but the human being is now 50, 100, or 200 percent slower.
One improvement in particular is one to run through the streets singing about: Perfect Formatter has been incorporated into Perfect Printer in the main menu (inexplicably renamed “PSI”), and the two of them together are approximately a million times faster than they used to be. Thank you, Perfect Writer!
For a couple of years now, I have been using Perfect for the long, complicated projects, like books, that demand powerful editing capabilities and Perfect’s special strengths—such as split-screen editing, automatic footnoting, automatic construction of a table of contents, etc. For shorter things, like personal letters, I’ve been using WordStar, for its what-you-see-is-what-you-get screen. The main failing of the old Perfect was whether or not you were using the document design capabilities, you had very little idea of what the final product was going to look like. (The main failing of WordStar, which as far as I’m concerned has been a dinosaur for several years now, is that it can’t do half of what Perfect can—and it does it slowly, too.)
Shout “hallelujah,” brothers and sisters! The new MS-DOS PW allows you to choose between using its old “@@ commands” and having what-you-see-is-what-you-get. Or you can mix the two of them (not that I know why anyone would want to, since with the PC I’m using, you can’t tell when a word’s been underlined).
You can now get on-screen justification if you want it; and if you want to underline a sentence, you don’t have to worry about your on-screen justification being thrown off 4 or 5 characters—you just position the cursor in front of the material you want to underline, go to the end of it, and tell the machine to underline it. The exact command sequence for underlining a sentence is Escape-T-B (begin marking), Escape-F-S (go to the end of the sentence), Escape-A-M-U (underline the marked area). This looks like a lot of work, especially compared with the old PW’s @@ux{}, until you stop and consider what the same thing would be in WordStar. Suppose it’s a ten-word sentence you want to underline: you’d go to the start of the sentence and keystroke something like this: Control-P-S, Control-F, Control-F, Control-F, Control-F, Control-F, Control-F, Backspace, Backspace, Control-P-S.
I’ll break discipline and object to Mary’s description of the WordStar underlining procedure. You could underline a sentence just by starting with one Control-P-S and ending it with another. What’s the big deal, Mary? Your described procedure would apply only to material that you underlined after you wrote it. All those Control-Fs do is make the cursor jump a word ahead. Grrr! Then again, maybe I’m simply a more decisive underliner. I know what I want! If nothing else, this little disagreement shows how work habits influence choices in word processors.
Not only does the new Perfect Writer have the old Perfect’s strengths—split-screen editing of up to seven documents at a time, a zillion powerful editing commands, still another zillion powerful document structuring options—but it’s added a few more just for fun. For example:
◾ The old Perfect allowed you to delete from wherever the cursor is to the end of whatever sentence you’re in; the new one lets you do that, of course, and also lets you cut to the end of whatever paragraph you’re in—or an entire paragraph, if you’re at its beginning.
◾ Now you can delete not only the next word ahead of your cursor but also the word behind it—a small thing but amazingly handy.
◾ You don’t have to delete text before you copy it. (However, the process is more complicated than it used to be.)
◾ You can flush right material on screen—useful for the what-you-see-is-what-you-get feature.
◾ You can more or less paginate on screen—although this instruction is only good for the what-you-see-etc. editing; it’s useless for the document-design mode (@@ commands).
◾ You can use the “Search” function to search not only the document you’re working in now but any and all other document files on your diskette. This strikes me as amazingly handy for editing multiple documents when you can’t remember what the name of the other document is or where the reference is you’re thinking of. For example, suppose you’re writing to Joyce Davenport and you want to add a paragraph from a letter you wrote to James T. Kirk but you can’t remember more than that it was about artichokes. You would invoke “search document”; the prompter then asks you what you’re searching for, and you say, “Artichokes.” Pretty soon you have a list of the documents the word “artichokes” appears in, and you can then call up the one you want for multiple-document editing.
◾ Similar to this is something new the main menu offers: you can compare two files, and Perfect Writer will show you their differences—useful for comparing edited and unedited versions of a report.
◾ If you have a color monitor, you can “paint” the letters and backgrounds of the up-to-seven files you’re working on different colors (eight background and sixteen letter colors), so as to tell them apart. For me, this falls into the “who cares?” category, but some may like it; and I have to admit, you can get some very pretty (though not always easy on the eye) combinations.
◾ Perfect Writer now has the printing option “End at page X.” Shout hallelujah, brothers and sisters!—the new Perfect at long last has caught up with the dinosaurs like WordStar.
◾ Some of our old favorite document-design commands have been renamed, usually for the better. And we have one absolutely dandy new command: @@need. @@need makes sure that there’s enough room left on the page for a chart or similar material. If you’ve just written a 15-line poem that can’t be broken between pages, immediately after the last line of your poem, type in @@need{15 lines}; if there isn’t going to be enough room on the page, your poem will automatically be “forced” to the following page. Hot diggety!
All is not completely rosy in Perfect land. The new Perfect has lost some of the old Perfect’s advantages. For example, the old Perfect had an automatic feature that told you where in your document you were—35 percent of the way through, or whatever. Moreover, the old Perfect had a command that let you know how long the document was in terms of both number of lines and number of characters, and where your cursor was in all this. I’ve searched the new Perfect manual and haven’t been able to find any equivalent new command. The closest I’ve been able to come is a command that lets you know only how many characters there are in the file, not where you are, or anything else; and the command isn’t listed in the index, nor is there any equivalent command that I can find. Great work, guys. This is what I call a major frustration. It’s maybe bad programming, and it’s certainly bad documentation.
The new manual is slightly better organized than the old one, but that’s not saying a lot. I’ve rarely been able to divine the new name for the old command in the new manual, and when I’ve found it, it’s usually been by accident. It would have been an enormous service if the Perfect people had put in some sort of comparison chart for us old-Perfect old pros.
Like the old Perfect, the new Perfect is very cavalier about the number of spaces it leaves after a period or colon; sometimes it’s the two you typed in, and sometimes it magically gets transformed into one. The new Perfect goes the old Perfect three better and is randomly cavalier about the number of spaces it leaves behind a period, colon, quotation mark, question mark, and parenthesis—not only deleting spaces where you do want them but also inserting them where you don’t want them. Instead of mildly annoying, this quirk is now big-league annoying. May whoever thought it up and liked it so much he/she expanded it spend eternity brushing gnats out of his/her face!
You still can’t tell the Search feature to search for something X number of times. For example, if three times you use the word “pishtosh” and want to change it to “nuts,” you can’t tell the search-and-replace feature to “do this three times”—as with the old Perfect, you have to do it twice with the “Ask me” and then “Cancel” the third time and do it by hand, or do it three times and then have Perfect search wastefully through the rest of the document for something you know is not there.
The new Perfect’s printing menu is better than the one the old Perfect came with but not nearly as good as the menu that David Hite developed in 1983 for the old Perfect Writer. The only improvements are the “compare” feature mentioned earlier and the ability to step outside Perfect for a while into Perfect Calc, Perfect Filer, or a telecommunications program—nothing I’d write home about.
We’ve lost the “one word” command—a serious blow for those of us who used it to get around Perfect Writer’s cavalier treatment of periods and colons. This command caused the characters placed within it to be considered one word, so that Perfect Filer wouldn’t split certain words between lines.
Perfect Speller, which is now on the same diskette with Perfect Writer, Perfect Formatter, and Perfect Printer, is much faster than it used to be. Alas, it is just as stupid. Unlike better spelling checkers, Perfect Speller works on the system of prefixes, suffixes, and roots. In other words, if the word “check” is an acceptable root, then “checker” and “recheck” are acceptable. So are “checkment” and “checkation.” And like the old Perfect Speller, the new Perfect Speller doesn’t recognize its own vocabulary—it queried words like “blankline” and “ux,” which are Perfect Writer commands and ought rightly to be ignored. My recommendation is to get The WORD Plus, which can be renamed to be accessed as if it were Perfect Speller and which is far superior.
An interesting—I don’t say terrific—addition to the Perfect family is Perfect Thesaurus. You substitute the Perfect Thesaurus diskette for your document diskette in drive B, position the cursor on the word you want to look up, type Escape-S-T, and Perfect Thesaurus checks its dictionary. If the word is there, you may substitute any of the synonyms for your original word, type in your own replacement, or say “forget it” and go on to look for another synonym. The hype says that Perfect Thesaurus “holds nearly 50,000 words (entries plus synonyms).”
The parenthetical remark is the key one to home in on. I asked Perfect Thesaurus to look up “transform,” and it did; one of the synonyms it offered was “metamorphose.” When I asked it to look up “metamorphose,” it told me, “Word not found.” (Perfect Thesaurus has also never heard of “fanatic,” “asinine,” “pop,” “airy,” “bypass,” “instantaneous,” or “shrug,” among about fifteen others of the forty-five words I tried.) I’d estimate that the average number of synonyms offered for each word is between five and ten—if we compromise and say seven, that’s only 6,000 or so words that Perfect Thesaurus can recognize. Moreover, Perfect Thesaurus can only look up fifteen words before it starts yelling, “No more marks,” and refuses to cooperate any further.
In other words, Perfect Thesaurus is a nice toy, but I question its usefulness for serious writers. Having a copy of The Synonym Finder by your desk offers you about a million words that you can recognize, and is about as fast to use.
The new Perfect Writer itself still has many of the annoyances of the old Perfect Writer:
◾ The automatic swapping feature still cuts in at inopportune moments and makes you wait before you can continue typing or execute a command. It’s now only one second or so instead of five seconds or so, but it’s still annoying.
◾ There is still no automatic indicator showing where you are in your document or how long it is, a feature of every other word-processing program known to humankind.
◾ You still can’t customize the document-design commands (although it’s usually possible to get the look you want if you’ve used Perfect Writer for many years and know some tricks they don’t mention in either the old or the new manuals)—if you want some real customization, tough noogies.
◾ You can still start printing by referencing page and section numbers, but if you want to start with footnote 125, you’re in for a major pain.
The new Perfect is more powerful than the old one, but not by as much as its creators fondly think. After spending two days evaluating the new Perfect for this article, I went home and spent several happy hours with the old Perfect. Oh, I admit I thought now and then, I wish I could cut to the end of the paragraph, or, I wish I could delete the word behind the cursor instead of only the word in front of it—and the old Perfect Writer is indeed slower than the new one (by maybe 5 percent?)—but on the whole I found I preferred two keystrokes to five and three keystrokes to six.
Many of the improvements of the new Perfect Writer fall into the category of kludge: lots of flashing lights and ringing bells and chrome and racing stripes and wow, look at that dashboard! Perfect Writer is still the best word-processing program I’ve ever run across, but for those of you who don’t want to give up your 64K non-IBM PCs, don’t worry: you’re not missing enough to make spending all that money worthwhile.
BACKUP V
“3-D” Versus Mail-Order Software—and How to Shop
How to pick the right disk?
People like Dusty Park know how to improve the odds. Park was at the top of his class at a computer school, worked as a customer support man at MicroPro, then joined a mail-order house called 800 Software in a similar job.[[102]] I phoned him there when my mail-order copy of WordStar didn’t work on my machine. It was a common industry problem, this incompatibility. Theoretically—which doesn’t mean that much—my Kaypro could read disks in the electronic format of the Xerox 820. Yet my machine in this respect seemed functionally illiterate.
Park told me on the phone that many other Kaypro owners were suffering similar difficulties, that if need be he’d send me another disk set up for my computer. Step by step he went over the WordStar installation procedure with me.
As it happened, I succeeded without him—by having WordStar electronically piped over to the Kaypro from another machine when my micro wouldn’t reach the disk. Park had been ready with patience and empathy. I took it for granted that he would suggest buying by mail in many instances; but what advice, based on his MicroPro days and other experiences, did he offer about buying “3-D,” as he called it—buying in the flesh from a store, in other words?
“The best place to go if you’re buying software retail,” he said, “is to someone who’s doing a training seminar in the same program you’re buying. That way you’ve got it aced, because the person who’s doing the class is going to know the program well.
“You don’t have to take the class, but at least you know that there’s somebody there who could be asked a question.”
Not that a dealer has to know every wrinkle of a program to teach it. But you’ve still got a head start if you do choose a store with classes.
Just be sure that the instructor isn’t a circuit rider, so to speak—that he isn’t flying out of town to another store as soon as he completes a series of classes. You want him around to answer your questions later on.
This principle would especially hold true when buying software from franchised stores. Some stores may be excellent. Others, however, as Park pointed out, “may be a bunch of small businessmen who used to sell shoes and bought into a franchise at an exorbitant price.”
Offering, obviously, a mail-order perspective, Park said that the computer-store managers he knew didn’t always know their software lines because there were so many products to keep track of. “It takes too much time,” he said. “There’s too many things to do in a 3-D store to handle that. Mostly you’re showing people hardware.”
His opinions rang true. Trying out WordStar with Osbornes, I’d run across sales reps who couldn’t show me how to make printouts of the letters on the tiny black-and-white screen. Some sales reps were “terminally” dumb. Others were bright and helpful but too busy selling too many machines to pick up the basics of WordStar and other heavy-duty programs. WordStar wasn’t that hard to master, however. I wondered how stores could counsel customers if they couldn’t even train sales reps.
I asked Park about mail-order software.
croPro,” he said, “I told people, ‘Don’t buy by mail. The dealers are the ones who can answer your questions. You have a real, live, 3-D person.’” MicroPro had instructed Park and five colleagues to try to duck the time-consuming questions from businessmen and others using computers and to refer them back to their dealers. And yet Park and the others had actually ended up spending half their time responding to the pleas of “end users.” And many were the customers of mail-order houses.
But now, Park said, some mail-order people were competing not only with low prices but also with technical support; 800 Software had even hired a software guru from the University of California at Davis to evaluate programs it was going to sell and support. I myself had paid $250 for WordStar, or about half the $495 list price; however, after talking to Park, I felt I was in better hands than I would have been at the typical computer stores I’d visited.
I got everything I paid for; 800 didn’t pull any cheap tricks like sending the software without a manual, which, in fact, some mail-order houses may do. This isn’t an endorsement of 800 Software. It shows, though, that at times you can successfully bypass the wretched support and high prices that many stores inflict on software shoppers.
“Save by ordering some software by mail,” advises CPA Micro Report, “but only if the package is easy to install and easy to use. If you’ll need training before you can use it or if the package must be configured for a hard disk, buy through your local dealer. Word processors and spreadsheets are examples of software you can safely buy through the mail. General accounting, client write-up systems and communications software should be purchased through a dealer.”
It’s good advice, basically. Park says few people call him about spreadsheets, that they’re easier to unravel than many programs. So what’s the most trouble? Data bases, sometimes. “But word processors definitely take the cake.
“You’ve got to deal a lot with special features on printers, like boldfacing and underlining and whether the software will let them work right,” Park says. He suggests the obvious—that before buying new software, you find out how it will run with your printer and computer. Of course, as stated earlier, you’ll ideally select your hardware after you’ve chosen your general range of software. Park says most people don’t fully “realize the implications” of the software they’re ordering “because they haven’t thought of it yet.” There’s the old problem, of course. How do you know you’ll like the software until you’ve tried it at leisure? And then you normally can’t get your money back. Before you order by mail, give serious thought to asking someone locally for a “3-D” demonstration.
A very leisurely tryout, in fact, is a good idea no matter how you’re buying, mail or “3-D,” and ideally you’ll have someone with you—a clerk, a secretary, anyone who’ll actually be using the system.
You might even want to bring along your accountant or somebody else working with the information that comes out of your computer system. At the very least, show him the software manual before you buy the program. Don’t take the software seller’s word that the software will keep the IRS or the SEC happy. Instead, trust the accountant or lawyer you use in your business. If he’s uncomfortable with computers, ask him to recommend someone in his profession whom he could work with. You don’t have to fire him. Just get him the backup he’ll need.
A computerwise accountant, for instance, can tell you if a general ledger package has a good audit trail—a way to keep track of what was done on the computer system to make the records come out the way they did. A computer-literate lawyer or accountant can also make certain that the software is reasonably crook-proof.
Follow the same rule as with hardware. Find someone already using the program you want to buy. Is he happy with it?
The nearer his work is to yours, the better. The best authority on accounting software, for instance, isn’t a computer guru: it’s an accountant. But beware. Some people may have chosen their programs without considering the alternatives, and they might have done better using a different system. Ideally, your fellow accountant, lawyer, doctor, whatever, did plenty of shopping before making up his mind.
Also, remember how subjective software is. Even if someone is in your field, he may think differently and do his job differently.
Of course you might read reviews in computer magazines, but be careful. I recall how glowingly some of them described early versions of Select; how they said it was superb for heavy-duty writing, even though, quite clearly, it was a bona fide kludge.
“How could the reviewers be so wrong?” I asked a computer salesman, a good one, who had sold a number of copies of the Spellbinder program to Kaypro buyers unhappy with the early Select.
He replied, “Advertising. They did a lot of advertising in the magazines. That’s probably why.”
Well, maybe. More likely, however, the reviewers simply were writers unfamiliar with alternatives like WordStar or computer experts unfamiliar with the needs of most writers. Your best bet is to read the magazine reviews, and this book, knowing that the ultimate authority on your software needs is you.
BACKUP VI
“Easy” Data Bases:
Another View (Mensa
Member Versus
InfoStar)
Charlie Bowie, one of the stars in Chapter 6, “Three Software Stories,” breezed through the dBASE II program. But not everyone will find all data bases so easy. Mary Matthews didn’t. And you can’t call her stupid. She is, after all, a Perfect Writer guru/Sibyl. Also—I’m sneaking this in behind her back—her IQ is high enough for her to belong to the Mensa group for bright people. She’s a Smith College alumna, a human dictionary, now working as publications director at a prestigious prep school. I thought that InfoStar—well reviewed in a major micro magazine—would be a cinch for her to learn and use in listing the traits of a good data base.
Well, back comes this essay telling me that she banged her head against InfoStar for a week and almost committed hara-kiri. You can interpret that as a failing either of Mary or of the program. I’ll blame the software and documentation.
(Of course she’s full of bilge in her Perfect Writer review when she knocks my beloved WordStar.)
Mary, please note, has nice things to say about InfoStar’s power; she says it might even be worth the torture. And a consultant can simplify the program for you. Still, if Mary is having trouble befriending InfoStar, what about average people who must master powerful data-base software?
They’ll succeed only if they have time and buckle down. They mustn’t swallow the manufacturers’ cant that the programs are “simple”—at least not if the software’s like InfoStar. Oh, well, at least they can console themselves that their business competitors may also be suffering.
And once learned, programs like InfoStar (as Mary’s essay shows) can indeed make life easier.
Her observations:
There are a number of data-base programs on the market for personal computers, with new entries coming in daily. The MicroPro people—parents of the famous (or infamous) WordStar—have come out with a dandy of their own: InfoStar, which can sit up, roll over, and whistle Dixie.
What does one look for in a data-base program? To a certain extent, of course, it depends on what one wants. Someone who wants to put a Rolodex file on to the computer is going to need a lot less by way of power and versatility than is the owner of a small business who wants to use the data base to keep track of clients, orders, and inventory.
The first thing to think about is how much data the program can handle without going off its nut or slowing down so much that you could walk to Waukeegan and back while your program is processing any entry. Here are some terms and ideas to keep in mind:
◻ The data base, or data file, contains all your entries. InfoStar allows any number of data files per diskette; others allow only one. Score one for InfoStar.
◻ The data record covers all the information you store for each entry into your data base. How big will your program allow each data record to be? How many data records will your program allow before it seizes up and refuses to accept any more? Will the program warn you that as of X moment its files are full and it won’t accept any more records? (I once spent two days trying to figure out why Perfect Filer was giving me back nothing but garbage before I thought to check and see whether my diskette was full.)
InfoStar will allow you a maximum of 65,535 data records per file. By way of comparison, Perfect Filer will accept as many data records as the diskette will hold—about a thousand if your diskettes will hold 200K of memory and you’ve filled up your data entry screen with lots and lots of data fields; probably a skillion if you only have one one-character data field and a lot of disk capacity. The new program dBASE III will allow over a billion records or two billion characters in a file—again, up to the limit of your disk space.
◻ The data fields are the building blocks to your data record. Some obvious attributes a data field may have are that it is alphabetic (letters only); numeric (numbers only); or alphanumeric
(okay, you guessed it). That’s about all the simplest data base programs allow—but here’s where InfoStar is an absolute champ. Some of the attributes InfoStar will allow:
1. The field may only contain certain numbers and/or letters—for example, if you’re typing in a state abbreviation and type “IT” when you mean “IN,” InfoStar will stop you and tell you that’s not acceptable. (It does this by checking what is called an authority file and comparing the authority’s contents with your input. Handy-dandy!)
2. The field will enter itself based on your previous entries. For example, you can enter that your customer wants 47 of your code number W889AA (widgets), two entries; and InfoStar can look up the price of widgets, multiply that by 47, look up the sales tax for the state you inputted earlier, multiply your subtotal by the amount of sales tax, and all by itself enter the name of the product, the subtotal, the amount of the sales tax, and the total—zip-zip-zip-zip, four entries, all done by the computer rather than by you and all done in a flash. The first time I tried it, I was startled into yelling, “Wa-hoo!”
3. The field can be a constant. For example, if your data record contains years, you can tell InfoStar to enter “198” automatically, and you only have to enter “4,” “5,” or whatever.
4. The field can automatically shift cases for you. For example, you can type in “new york, ny,” and InfoStar will insert into the data record “New York, NY.”
5. The field can insist that whatever you type in is identical two times in a row or it won’t save the data record—useful if you deal with complex numbers that have to be right.
6. The field can be required—something that you have to enter, or InfoStar won’t let you go on.
Oh, and these are only examples! I guess I’m just a simple country girl, but I was amazed and thrilled by all that InfoStar could do with its data fields.
◻ How big are your data fields allowed to be? How many fields are you allowed to have? InfoStar allows you a maximum of 245 fields per record, and a maximum of 255 characters per field—it comes out to a maximum of 62,475 characters per data record. (Perfect Filer, again by way of comparison, theoretically allows 70 fields with a combined total of 1,024 characters. On the other hand, the one time I tried to test this limit with Perfect Filer, the program went comatose on me.) I do wonder whether an InfoStar data record that was 61K in size might mean you would get fewer than 64K data records into your data base. On the other hand, who could imagine a 61K data record on a personal computer? It is, after all, about the same size as a 60-page letter to your Aunt Millie, and how often do you write 60-page letters to your Aunt Millie?
◻ Once you have data in your data base, the sort keys determine how you can get the data out again. Do you want to get the information out in alphabetical order by name? Numerical order by ZIP code or phone number? Some combination of the two? (For example, you might, if the information is in your data records, want to sort your friends by who is left-handed, who gave you a Christmas card last year, when their birthdays are, or all of the above.) How many sort keys will the data base allow? What kinds? How long does it take the program to do a sort?
To take a primitive example, Perfect Filer allows you up to five sort keys (alphabetical order by sister’s name, for example; numerical order by ZIP code; both; numeric order by phone number; all three; and so on). Perfect Filer will also generate up to twenty subsets from which to sort. (Left-handed Republicans, female plumbers, all those who owe you more than three dollars—you name it.) And it will also let you have up to 40 list format fields—that is, it will allow you to generate up to 40 different kinds of list (all left-handed female plumbers who live on the West Coast). InfoStar, on the other hand, will allow you 32 sort fields, which is a few more than 5; but it doesn’t have any subsets per se and doesn’t seem to allow you more than one list format. On the other hand, the range of “logical expressions” it allows is amazing, and provided you understand BASIC (InfoStar’s data are written in CBASIC) fairly well, you can attain heights of efficiency Perfect Filer couldn’t even dream of (more on this immediately).
◻ What kinds of calculations will your program do, and when does it do them? Some programs will allow you to add, subtract, multiply, divide, and other even more abstruse calculations, and all at the data entry stage. The best of these allow serial calculations. For example, take A and multiply it by B; then divide the result by C; then add it to D. A program known as DB Master allows calculations for only two fields at a time: A plus B equals C. D plus E equals F. C plus F equals G. Other programs will only allow you to specify that certain relations between data exist, and then only at the report-generating stage. Perfect Filer, for example, will allow you to specify that you only want your report to contain the people whose ZIP codes are between 20815 and 21903—but it won’t do any arithmetic at all. InfoStar, on the other hand, can do algebraic and numeric calculations and impose such logical conditions as “include this record if it meets X criterion”; “do this calculation unless the data field is Y”; “do this if conditions X and Y OR conditions P or Q exist.” Zowie!
◻ What sort of “overhead” does the program demand? That is, what do you need to be stored on your diskette in addition to your data records? One trade-off might be that the more sort keys, subsets, list formats, and/or logical expressions you have, the less space you have for your data records. Unlike Perfect Filer, InfoStar creates an index file for every data file that you create. An InfoStar index file contains only the field values of your sort key(s) and addresses for each of your data records, but even so, with a lot of sort keys and with a nice, big data base, the index file is not going to be tiny.
Playing with InfoStar—after a week hunched over the keyboard, I still can’t say I’ve learned it—was, in order, daunting, boring, thrilling, mystifying, frustrating, and annoying. The program comes with four (count em, four) diskettes and three instructional tomes of a size and heaviness guaranteed to strike fear into the heart of a neophyte. We’re talking half again as big as the compact edition of the Oxford English Dictionary. We’re talking three three-ring binders crammed to capacity with information. Daunting.
The program comes complete with three on-line tutorials—one introductory tutorial that assumes that the person using it has never been near a computer before, one tutorial for data entry, and one tutorial for generating “quick reports.” All three are pretty to look at, slow as molasses to try to go through, and simpleminded in the extreme. The first one, for example, draws you a picture of a computer terminal on its screen just in case you’re suffering from selective blindness and can’t see the terminal you’re running the program on. My advice to those who buy InfoStar and who’ve ever even seen a computer before is not to bother with the tutorials—certainly not with the first one!—but to go straight to the training manual and start plowing your way through. It shouldn’t take more than a hundred years.
When I started playing with some of the data bases that InfoStar provides for its customers, I was excited. No, I was thrilled. I’ve never seen anything like some of the things InfoStar can do, and watching six fields fill up all by themselves after Id inputted one number made me chortle with glee.
InfoStar uses most of the same commands that WordStar does, which is convenient if you happen to like control commands. I first began to get annoyed when I discovered that InfoStar does not use arrow keys. If you want to move your cursor, it’s CTRL-D, CTRL-S, CTRL-E, CTRL-X—the same commands WordStar uses and a major-league annoyance. Nor have any Function keys been assigned any values. And every single, solitary time you use InfoStar you have to go through at least four help screens—like it or not. Grrr!
I first ran into trouble when I began trying to define my own data record. Drawing the screen is easy; but what does one do when one is trying to assign attributes and runs up against prompts like, “Field derived? Processing order? Copy attributes of field? Pad field? Batch verify? Range check? Edit mask? Entry/content control character codes?” I’ll tell you what I did: I read the training manual. I read the reference manual. I tried native cunning. I tried pounding my fist through the keyboard. I tried crying. InfoStar’s hype says, “On-screen menus give you options in plain English ... while a series of help screens guides you through each procedure.” Yeah; and I am Marie of Romania.
The same sort of thing happened when I started fiddling with the generation of reports. As promised, InfoStar “enables you to create and print a report in sixty seconds.” The report prints all the data in the given file. Here’s what the report for the file I’d tried to construct looked like:
B:MMPLAY REPORT
B:MMPLAY REPORT
B:MMPLAY REPORT
10/21/84
10/21/84
10/21/84
FIELD #001 FIELD #002 FIELD #003 FIELD #004
FIELD #005 FIELD #006
FIELD #007 FIELD #008
____ ____ ____ ____ _____ _____ _____ _____
____ ____ ____ _____
____ ____ _______ ____
mwm Mary W. Matthews
4823 Willett Parkway Chevy Chase
MD 20815
ec Ed Corrigan
Pirmasens American School New York
NY 09189
I hope you get the idea. I’m too depressed to go on. So much for the “quick report” that you can create in only sixty seconds.
Next I tried to design a “custom report.” The prompts didn’t start out to be quite so confusing—“Is the file going to be used for Input or Output?” and “How large should the disk buffer be?” But by the time I got to “Edit mask,” “Copy attributes to field,” and “Enter algebraic expression,” I was thinking seriously about hara-kiri. We are not talking quick and easy here. We are talking call in the professionals or resign yourself to a lot of long, hard work. Considering that I don’t even get to keep the copy of InfoStar—I only own a 64K CP/M machine, and InfoStar requires a PC DOS and at least 96K of RAM and recommends that you use a hard disk (but will put up with two floppy drives provided that you can get 320K of memory on each disk)—I eventually just threw my hands into the air and gave up. There is no doubt in my mind that InfoStar is a terrifically powerful program that will allow you to do just about anything you want in the world of data bases. The doubt in my mind is whether I’m an ordinarily intelligent person who was thrown by some big-league complexity or whether I’m an absolute moron because I didn’t find the program “simple” and “easy to use.” (Variations of the words “simple” and “easy” appear seventeen times in the InfoStar hype booklet; for example, “InfoStar is ... easy-to-use ... goes well beyond the capabilities of a simple data base system. InfoStar eases the job of managers.... It’s really quite simple. The whole process is really quite simple.... And it’s easy....” All this on one page, mind you.)
To sum it all up in a nutshell, InfoStar offers some wonderful features, particularly in the area of making things easy for the clerk typist/secretary who’s doing data entry. And it is, as advertised, lightning fast at calculations and sorting. Its use of WordStar commands is a drawback, and its refusal to allow the arrow keys to function, along with its insistence on making you plod through help screen after help screen that you’re really not interested in, can be infuriating; but I suppose the clerk typist who is forced to use WordStar—at only five years old the dinosaur of word-processing programs—might find it convenient.
But if you, the doctor or lawyer or small business owner, want a custom-designed form or a custom-designed report, you’re not going to be able to delegate the job to a clerk typist/secretary/assistant. You’ll have to either hire a consultant to do it for you or resign yourself to spending days or even weeks mastering ideas and language that, to me, range from the arcane to the dumbfounding.
It’s really quite simple?
BACKUP VII ❑
Graphics Tips
No matter how you’re using a graphics program, remember the RDHP—the Rough-Draft Hierarchical Principle. It also may help at times when you word-process memos.
The principle: create the basic pictures or prose yourself. But if pressed for time? Then farm out the details. Just as a secretary might put your memos in the right format on paper, he or she might also smooth your drawings. Or your art department might.
Here are other tips for graphics users:
KNOW YOUR CHARTS AND OTHER BASIC TOOLS
A line chart—a graph with the outlines of hills and valleys—is great when broad trends count more than the numbers themselves.
One glance at a good line chart can tell you if wok sales are up or down.
And for even better effect, you might try a curve chart, or area chart, filling in the area below the curves that the lines make.
“Instead of looking like a wriggly line,” explains Carl Herrman,[[103]] an award-winning graphics expert, “it looks like a mountain. It’s much easier to follow.”
And if you want to show sales trends in three wok categories? Well, you can still use a filled-in chart.
“You might fill in the bottom one solid black,” says Herrman. “You might do a cross-hatch—parallel intersecting lines—on the middle one. And on the top one, you might have a straight-line effect or a lot of lines running close to each other.
“That way, you can readily see the difference between the three It’s more effective than three graph lines on top of each other.”
Another tool is a bar chart, with bars of different sizes—horizontal or vertical.
NAME THAT CHART With Apple’s Macintosh and the Microsoft chart graphics package from Microsoft, you can whip up charts like the ones below. Chart will even pick up numbers from a sister spreadsheet program, Multiplan. My thanks to artist Jo Steele, who works for the Dartmouth College Computer Center and is a partner in Northtronics Associates. Oh, and don’t blame Jo for the use of those over-mentioned woks. My mistake. Next time I’ll use dishwashers or watermelons.
Do broad trends count more than the numbers themselves? Then use a line chart, a graph with the outlines of hills and valleys. Amalgamated Wok might decorate each sales rep’s office with such a chart, at which a myopic CEO could smile or frown as he walked in.
Use a bar chart to compare sizes or emphasize differences, including those over time. With the bar chart, you might contrast 1979 wok sales with 1984’s.
Don’t normally use the bar chart, however, to illustrate trends. For that, it’s usually back to the old line or curve chart.
Just the same, Mike Slade, a product manager at Microsoft, says: “There are times when you can illustrate trends successfully using overlapping bar charts—with bars of different colors or patterns.
A curve chart or area chart is just a line chart with the area below the lines filled in. This is a deluxe version with different shadings indicating different years. A no-frills area chart might actually be easier on the CEO’s eyes than would a line chart without shading.
Yes, wok sales are increasing and our canny artist used a vertical bar chart to emphasize this. Just the ticket for a presentation to a stock analyst studying the prospects of the Amalgamated Wok Corporation. Notice that numbers are easier to take in than those on a line chart.
“You might have a vertical bar for 1979 wok sales slightly overlapping with one for 1979 widget sales and continue these twin bars for the next five years.
“Use overlapping bar charts when you’re showing trends for a number of different products or categories.”
Wow! Look at the hefty wok sales in November and December. Someone offer rebates? Actually you’d be better off using a pie chart instead to show the percentages of semi-annual sales from different regions. Regions, not the 50 states. You can only slice a pie so thin.
Yet another tool, the pie chart, just like a pie, with slices, nicely shows relations of complete parts.
Use the pie chart to show the percentage of sales that came from four or five regions.
On the other hand, suppose you have many, many small components in your pie—say, you’re interested in the percentages of domestic sales in each of the fifty states. Then a map with percentages on it might be better.
I’ll stop here—this is a computer book, not a graphics guide. For more detailed information, Herrman recommends Designer’s Guide to Creating Charts and Diagrams by Nigel Holmes (from Watson-Guptill, New York).
KEEP IT SIMPLE—WHETHER ITS A CHART OR MEMO
Don’t make your charts look like puzzles. “If you clutter up your chart with too many facts, you’ll lose the very simplicity that graphics can offer,” says Herrman. Home in on your main point. “If need be,” he says, “use a short narrative under the chart to back it up.
“In fact, you might be able to say something in words more simply than with a chart. If you’re trying to compare the cost of widget imports in the last fifty years and it’s doubled each year, then why not just say so in prose?”
Also, avoid other forms of visual clutter. Don’t make people’s eyes spin with special effects and too many colors.
Grid lines—a series of little squares like those on engineering graph paper—often confuse chart readers. “Don’t put them in if you can help it,” says Herrman.
“Definitely not,” agrees my friend Hard-core bureaucrat.
In memos, don’t confuse your readers with a barrage of different typefaces. A little variety is good. But make sure you have a decent excuse, such as special points to stress or different categories of information.
“If you show off your fancy typefaces,” says my friend the Hard-Core-Bureaucrat, “it’s just a plague that’ll make your eyes ache. That’s one reason I’m down on fancy graphics for routine stuff. Some Macintosh users are going to produce memos that look like samplers from printing salesmen.”
Even on a thousand-word memo, use three of four typefaces at the most. Also, don’t stint on white space. Apple’s manuals for the Macintosh and its more expensive sister, the Lisa, are models of wise use of white space.
AT THE SAME TIME, KEEP IT LIVELY!
If you can get away with it, why not try a little flair in your graphics and your points will be more memorable.
A good model in many cases is the newspaper USA Today, which sports some of the liveliest graphics in the country.
It regularly publishes charts with such sexy facts as amount expected to go for health care in 1990 or the percentage of women who received haircuts and other beauty-shop treatments in 1983.
To jazz up the chart titled “Only Their Hairdressers Know,” an artist drew the face of a woman with her hair blowing out. The lengths of the bunched-up strands varied according to the percentages of women receiving different kinds of treatments. “Haircut” (76 percent) was three times longer than “Coloring” (a mere 24 percent). Today the average micro user may not be able to produce such “hairy” graphics, but the future may be different.
Snazzy graphics is like colorful writing. Humanize your work. The “Only Their Hairdressers Know” chart wasn’t in the fanciest of color—just black and white and blue—but it was more eye-catching than most eight-color ones might have been.
And if you yourself can’t draw too well even with a computer? Well, what a chance to liven up the workday of a young, talented aide who’d like a break from the typewriter, er, word processor!
Besides, on occasion, you can at least do what an editor may have done with the hairdresser chart—think up the basic idea.
KEEP THOSE CAPTIONS LIVELY, TOO
Imagine you’re writing captions for a hybrid of the New York Times and The National Enquirer.
Try to be accurate, clear, and interesting.
Snare the skimmers! Give them no choice but to read your report.
I’ll qualify that. Alas, many report writers, especially the government species, don’t want to be clear with words or charts.
Maybe they can scrutinize this section to know what to do in reverse.
KNOW YOUR COLORS—WHEN AND HOW TO USE THEM
There is life without color.
Just look at the nifty things you can do with high-resolution black and white, with its many different shades.
If your picture offers widely varied shapes and sizes, color just might not help that much.
Think, too, about costs. If Mac had had color, the $2,500 introductory price would have been several times higher. So Apple concentrated instead on resolution. And very likely, some makers of similar machines will do the same. There’s a technical trade-off: color capability often comes at the cost of sharpness. Even black-and-white graphics today—at least the affordable kinds—normally are a far cry from the sharpness required in an annual report or the slickest sales brochure.
Still, to a generation weaned on color tv and movies, a 100 percent monochromatic life would be like a monastic life.
And color could be just the ticket for enlivening graphs that visually drone on and on with statistics.
What’s more, it can help separate elements of charts. Just don’t overuse or abuse the technique. Don’t use color to slice a pie chart too thin.
In working with color, you should know the best combinations. Often you’ll want to alternate weak, cool colors with strong, warm, “advancing” ones that leap out from the screen. The strongest colors usually are bright red first, then orange, then perhaps yellow—it depends on your machine and other variables.
“Your weakest colors,” says Herrman, “could be blue, green and brown. If you try blue and bright red, your chart will be much more readable than if it has green with blue. You might also use green and orange.”
Try, too, to avoid adjacent colors that “vibrate” together in an irksome way. “Red and green is worst,” Herrman says. Another loser: red and blue.
Other advice? Match colors to what they stand for. If you’re comparing oil and gas production, the oil might be black and the gas a light blue. Oil sometimes is black. And gas often bums blue.
Remember, also, that dark colors often can better represent large numbers. Say your company has its biggest, best year ever in sales. And now you’re bragging with a multiyear bar chart? Well, you use a dark blue or black bar to represent your recent, gigantic revenues. The leaner years, by comparison, might be a very light color or maybe faint grays or perhaps just white inside gray lines.
Yet another tip is to be consistent if possible. “If you’re comparing oil and gas through twenty charts,” says Herrman, “stick with oil in black and gas in blue in all the charts.”
“But,” you say, “how do I choose my graphics programs in the first place?”
Here are the questions you should ask, among others:
1. Does the program help you come up with pies, bars, or whatever kind of chart or drawing will be most useful to you?
2. Can it do so as quickly as possible?
Here programs using a mouse—the pointer on your desk—have a real advantage.
3. Does the program fit in well with your other software?
That’s one advantage of Lisa- and Mac-type systems. You can more easily stick a chart inside a page of text—perhaps sparing your readers a distracting flip to the back.
Another advantage of a “good fit” is that it may save you hours of typing and drawing. Look for programs that will let you select trends from spreadsheets, then more or less automatically whip up charts based on the numbers. This way, too, you don’t have to waste time typing in the numbers from the spreadsheets. Microsoft Chart can do that with the right software for the Mac, Lisa II, and IBM computers. Are you shopping for a program that changes charts automatically along with the numbers? Then see if you can do this without having to clear the chart from your screen and replace it with a special menu.
4. How much memory space does the program—and the electronic files of the resultant drawings—take up?
You want enough space on your disk for spreadsheets, word processing, and other programs if you change your tasks often. But you don’t change often? Then don’t worry as much about this.
Frugal use of space, of course, is one advantage of integrated programs combining graphics with word processing and spreadsheets or communications.
You might also worry about the lengths of the files. One chart can take up the equivalent of page after page in disk space if you’re storing the image of the chart rather than the instructions for creating it.
5. What about the program’s color capabilities—both on screen and on paper? How many colors offered? And if the program has preset color combinations, do they work well together?
6. Does the program coexist okay with the printer or plotter you own or are about to buy?
7. How easy is the program to learn? What about the other general traits of good software mentioned in Backup III, The Lucky 13?
Whatever your graphics program, don’t stint on the hardware. A good, sharp, high-resolution screen is just as important—more so, in fact—as it is in word processing.
BACKUP VIII
Consultant Contracts:
Some Who-How
Questions
Charles Harris, a lawyer who is expert in computer negotiations, ticks off a list of contract questions very similar to the Who-How from the newspaper world.
His list:
1. “Who?” Who from the contracting firm is doing the work? A junior member? If so, you might ask, “Can he perform? Will the consulting firm still bill me the full rate?” Find out the track record not only of the firm but also of the people actually doing the work. Write their names into the contract if you can. Spell out the qualifications of substitutes you’ll use if the original people leave the consulting firm before finishing the assignment.
2. “What?” Describe the task as clearly and precisely as possible. And in my opinion you might consolidate the “What?” and the “How?” here. Is there a right way and a wrong way of accomplishing the “What?”? Find out the right way before signing the contract.
3. “When?” Can you negotiate a penalty if the firm misses a deadline? And how about a bonus if it comes in early?
4. “Where?” Will the consultants do the work in your office? Theirs? On your computer? On someone else’s?
5. “How much?” Obvious.
In my opinion, you’d also do well to keep asking the “Why?”—to make the consultants justify whatever they have in mind for you. Why not? You’re the one spending the money.
Also, at least consider the following:
1. Thinking small. Don’t bargain over the Who-How simply for the whole project; break it up into parts. “You say, ‘For this much money we expect to at least get a machine in the door,’” Harris suggests. “‘For this much money we expect to get the following diskettes for the following programs.’ ‘For this much money perhaps we’ll talk about customizing software.‘” If a consultant flubs an early part of the work or specifies the wrong programs or equipment, then you can more easily send him packing. “But,” you worry, “can a rival consultant pick up the pieces?” Well, you simply insist that the original consultant do his work in as standardized a way as possible. See if he can use a program like dBASE II or III—software with which thousands of other consultants are familiar.
2. Making the consultant give you the source code of the new software. That’s another pick-up-the-pieces kind of protection.
3. Insisting that any manuals for his software be complete and in plain English. If your consultant can write only computerese, in fact, you might not even want to bother with negotiations.
4. Bargaining if possible for a software warranty. Then, if you discover glitches in the software after it’s in use, the consultant won’t charge you to correct his own mistakes. You might not succeed here. But try.
5. Possibly requiring the consultant to give you a discount on modifications or expansion of your system.
6. Negotiating for full or part ownership of the software he may develop for you. But don’t count on getting rich from the sale of the programs. Adam Green, a software training expert, tells of a computer-store salesmen who, in that way, would appeal to customers’ greed. A taxidermist, for instance, might hear this pitch: buy from me, use the right consultant, and you’ll make a killing in specialty software for taxidermists. “The consultants would usually intend to finish a job writing this specialty software,” Green said, “but it would drag on, and the customers would run out of money, and the things usually didn’t get finished.” Very likely you won‘t want full ownership, because it would reduce the consultant’s interest in perfecting his brainchild.
7. Forbidding the consultant from selling the new software to your competitors. Antitrust complications might arise if you don’t bear the financial risks of software development. If you do, however, you’re within your rights to demand exclusivity, just as the consultant is within his rights to charge you more for it. “Trade secret” is a key phrase both here and on the issue of ownership. “I recommend to clients that they go for trade-secret protection because copyright law protects the information only in the way it’s presented,” says William Wewer, a Washington lawyer who specializes, among other things, in intellectual-property law. In other words, an unscrupulous consultant might bypass the copyright law by using a different programming code to duplicate your new software’s functions.
8. Making the consultant pledge that he won’t violate any trade-secret laws or copyrights. You don’t want to suffer because someone else has plagiarized or pirated software. Be certain you’ll own the master copies and instruction manuals that the consultant buys. Try to register immediately with the software company as the buyer or user of the disk. You want to know about updates of the product and about debuggings, which you won’t find out about with a pirated copy. A shady Massachusetts consultant has resold the same dBASE II program ten or fifteen times. The buyers think he is purchasing it for them and that he’s going to supply a version modified for their needs. “But halfway through the work,” Green says, “he just walks off.”
9. Hammering out a confidentiality agreement, if necessary, to protect company secrets. You don’t want an outsider blabbing to competitors.
10. Making the consultant agree in writing that he is working as your independent contractor, not your employee. Protect yourself against unfair Workmen’s Compensation claims and in similar ways.
11. Trying to write into the contract your right to a full explanation whenever you want one. Make the consultant justify his recommendation for a certain computer or a certain program; he owes you at least oral explanation and perhaps a written one. How much experience has he himself had with the product? Is he going by someone else’s word? Whose? How certain is he that the software-hardware combo that worked for the other person will work for you? Can he arrange a demonstration of the combo so you can see for yourself how the software runs?
12. Remembering that there’s only so much protection the law can give, especially at the micro level. Trade-secret and copyright laws can be vague and expensive to enforce—a major stumbling block to a small business. Your best protection is simply to deal with a reputable consultant whose credentials you have checked.
13. Choosing the right lawyer, if you can afford one, for the contract. He needn’t call himself a “computer lawyer.” A good contracts lawyer or intellectual-property expert, if conversant with computers, might also work out.
If the job is simple enough, don’t negotiate in the same detail that GM does when installing a $10-million mainframe. Again, even with small tasks, do sign a contract or write a letter similar to the sample one on page 114. And if you can afford it and the job’s important enough, think about still-another contract—for a second consultant to check up on the first.
BACKUP IX
Window Shopping
The ad men and writers have had fun with the inevitable: “Microsoft Does Windows.”
You read the headline and envision some programmers with buckets and rags, bravely scaling Manhattan skyscrapers to help executives get a clear view when they’re looking up from their computer screens.
Windows, however, actually are within computer screens.
You can split your screen into parts: one window showing a chart, for instance, while the other displays the report into which you’re inserting it.
Of course you need a screen big and sharp enough to get good views of many windows.
And the software problems could be hairy. Microsoft as of late 1984 was months and months behind in releasing its windows-type product. Other companies were behind on theirs, too. Someone once coined a term for much-talked-about-but-late software—“vaporware”—and it is sure described windows.[[104]]
Well, now that the miracle windows are theoretically here, are they worth gazing at?
Depends.
Don‘t buy windows if you’re just writing short letters and you needn’t blend anything else into them or regularly don’t consult other material.
But consider them if, say, you want to look at many spreadsheets quickly while writing reports.
Think what this means to executives with cluttered disks, er, desks. They can stash their material away electronically and not have to print hard copies as often in the future.
“I can imagine people having as many as twenty or thirty windows ready to call up with notes or working papers,” says John Butler, a product manager with Microsoft.
Also, windows software may let you switch noticeably faster from one program to another. And with a RAM (temporary computer memory) above 500K, you may even be able to do so instantly.
The plus of this? You won’t need to return as often to your computer’s operating system and feed the programs one by one into the RAM.
So the machine may seem to impose itself less between you and your work.
When “windows shopping,” however, you should ask these questions and more:[[105]]
1. Is the convenience worth the extra several hundred dollars you’ll be paying for the window software alone if it doesn’t come with your computer?
2. Up to how many windows can you see on your screen at once?
3. How do the windows look alongside each other? Do they overlap, just like papers atop each other? Or do they tile? That is, if you select more windows, the existing ones shrink, and you view less from them.
4. How about data transfer? If you move information from one electronic file to another, will important details remain? For instance, the way rows and columns coexist with each other on a spreadsheet? Can you cut a graph out of a chart and insert it in the text of a report without it shrinking or ending up distorted? Will it reproduce in as much detail as it would without your reaching it through a window?
5. What kind of graphics—bit mapped or character based? The bit mapping means sharper images. Your computer keeps track of each little dot, each pixel, on the screen. That hogs memory and may rule out color. Character-based systems, though, don’t let you make your lines and curves as smooth as bit mapping does. They must work with already-shaped letters, numbers, and other visual forms.
6. Will the window program work with ordinary software or just products written for it? And how many of the windows’ special features will do work when you use regular programs?
7. Will the windows at least slightly slow down some programs? A word processor may take longer for you to get from one part of your report to another.
8. Is the program picky about the computers it’ll work with? A window system may need over half a million bytes of RAM and a hard-disk drive storing 5 megabytes. Also, as of this writing, windows seemed geared more to the IBM-style MS-DOS computers than to the older but cheaper CP/M ones. Besides, some companies may not sell windows programs directly to ordinary buyers. Microsoft got various micro manufacturers to bundle the program with their products.
9. Does the program require a mouse—the gadget you roll on your disk to move the cursor? How easily can you control the program without a mouse?
BACKUP X
Of Mice and Men—and Touch Pads, Touch Screens, Etc.[[106]]
“If you’re a trained, high-volume production typist,” asked Seymour Rubinstein, the WordStar developer, “what are you going to do with a mouse except feed it cheese?”[[107]]
Score one for Rubinstein. He says mice are great—if you have three hands.
Doing graphics? A mouse, maybe. But damned if I’m going to take my hands off the keyboard to push the cursor from one spot on the screen to the next.
It’s simply too much wasted motion. I instead just press the cursor keys right above the main keyboard. Or I use WordStar’s cursor-moving commands. And even if I hadn’t learned touch typing a quarter century ago, I’d still wonder if a mouse for word processing wasn’t the Silicon Valley version of The Emperor’s New Clothes. Next time you’re in California, maybe you’ll see Apple execs naked in the streets as well as their hot tubs. Well, maybe not. The mouse could be a great marketing tool for sales reps peddling Macs or Apple IIc’s to people hoping to do word processing. But experienced typists? Many would probably groan over all the excursions that the mouse forced them to take from the main keyboard.
Some enemies of mice—cats?—also wonder if jockeying the cursor this way couldn’t be a little tiring for people writing or typing. Think of the hand-eye coordination required. You’re rolling a palm-sized gizmo on your desk to position the cursor on a single letter at times, and that might not wear too well if you‘re working for hours on end.
Mind you, the rodents have their friends, especially at Apple, where, inconsiderately, the hardware wizards didn’t even favor the Macintosh with cursor keys.
Joe Shelton, the Apple products manager mentioned in Chapter 7, says he does most of his writing with a mouse. He suggests the mouse-equipped Macintosh for “naïve[naïve] users.” Your term, Joe. Now I’ll slightly water down my jeremiads. Macintosh-style computers offer nifty graphics and nice offbeat typefaces. So some trendy writers may want one—rodent or not.
And if you’re an executive or someone else not doing heavy word processing? Then maybe, just maybe, a mouse is for you. Perhaps you’re working with spreadsheets, a number of programs in fact, and you write only a small fraction of the time.
Richard Webb—a partner at Peat, Marwick and Mitchell, the big accounting firm that advised Apple during development of the Macintosh and ordered thousands of them—swears by the mouse for spreadsheets. He says that alone would justify the mouse.
I’m not a spreadsheet artist and will take a pro’s word. But at least for heavy-duty writing and typing, the old cursor keys are my best bet.
Graphics is different. There, the cursor keys are more cumbersome.
One artist, however, wanted not a mouse but an electronic “pad and a stylus”; he might be happy with a digitizing tablet—also known as a graphics tablet—like the well-known KoalaPad. You can write on this surface with a stylus or your finger and the computer will display the lines on its screen.
A touch-sensitive screen is still another possibility—for some people—both in word processing and graphics. You point your finger at a spot on the screen. Bingo! You can start moving a paragraph or perform graphics magic. But touch typists may face the same problem as with the mouse—wasted motion—and some people may tire of reaching up to the screen again and again. Also, touch-sensitive screens may not be precise enough for you to pick out just one number or letter.
Hugh Hunt raised an interesting issue.
“What happens if a fly lands on the Hewlett-Packard screen?” he asked someone about a computer with a touch screen.
Well, I hear, the HP 150’s screen uses infrared touch sensors that are more than fly length from the glass. “Debugging” the 150, Hewlett-Packard must have thought of everything.
Yet other pointing devices are:
● The joystick. Moving the stick around, you move the cursor. A neat idea. But it’s more fit for video games than word processing and many other business programs—you just can’t point exactly.
● The trackball. You move the cursor by rotating a ball inside an enclosure. Want the cursor to go faster? Then rotate the ball more energetically. The trackball is found most often in arcade-style systems[systems]. It’s great for chasing aliens and may have uses in spreadsheets and data-base management, but some people say it’s an abomination for word processing.
● The light pen, with which you could electronically “draw” on the screen. Draw? Okay. Write? Well, it’s “wasted motion” time again here, as with the other items on this list.
As computers climb the executive ladders—as more nontypists use them—these alternatives may grow in importance. And what about people on the factory floor? They may use such gizmos to make new inventory entries or machine adjustments. Partly the world is learning to type, and partly the computer is learning to understand devices other than the keyboard.
What cursor-control gizmos are ahead? I’ll keep reading the National Enquirer articles about people moving objects with their minds. Maybe, the hard-core hackers are thinking, the next gimmick will feature some user-friendly ESP.
BACKUP XI
The Micro Connection: Some Critical Explanations
When John Fuller hooked up his Heath micro over the phone lines to the Wang at his office, he had a head start on many other do-it-yourself telecommuters.
He wasn’t a computer or electronics rookie. For years he had worked around big IBM’s and Honeywells, and while telecommuting, he was a computer and management consultant with the navy. He even soldered together his H-89—a kit. And, anyway, he was communicating with another smaller computer, a Wang word processor.
Does that mean you should give up on do-it-yourself telecommuting because of the technical complexities?
No. Not at all. Before hiring a consultant, you might consider two possible sources of free advice: (1) your corporate data-processing department, if you have one, and (2) users groups, whose phone numbers you can get through dealers.
Before approaching anyone, though, learn the basics of the technology. A modem converts the 0s from your computer into one pitch and the 1s into another, and that whine, you’ll recall, goes out over the phone lines. The “mo” in “modem” stands for “modulator”; the “dem,” for “demodulator.” And a “dem” springs into action at the other end—demodulating the whine back into the 1s and 0s.
Modems come in two varieties, direct connect and acoustically coupled.
The direct-connect modem hooks between the phone line and your phone, or between your phone and the handset. Its whine transmits better over static-ridden lines than do acoustic couplers, but it’s normally a little more expensive, and hard to install if your phone lacks modular plugs, the tiny plastic ones that unsnap.
Using an acoustic coupler, you cradle your handset in rubber “earmuffs.” A small speaker whines into the phone transmitter; a little microphone picks up the sound from the handset’s receiver. Acoustic couplers don’t need phones with modular plugs, obviously—a boon to traveling executives—but they might not work if the handset is oddly shaped, as it is with some of the new-style phones. Also, loud noises in the room can confuse them.
A direct-connect modem, for that reason and others, would probably be better for your regular office. Also, consider a full-duplex modem in most cases.
No, it isn’t a modem for two-family houses. “Full duplex” is just jargon for computers jabbering back and forth, both ways, at once. Like two people on the phone. A half-duplex modem would allow just one-way communications without switching; it’s somewhat comparable to a radio with an unwieldy send-receive control. There are times, however, when half duplex would be best. Normal phone lines, voice grade ones in telephone company language, can’t handle computers jabbering at too high a speed, and half duplex may work better than full.
Like most modems for personal computers in the early 1980s, Fuller’s gizmo transmitted information at 300 baud[baud]—equivalent to 300 bits a second, 30 characters per second, or 360 words per minute at 5 letters a word. When telecommuting, however, you may be better off with a modem going 1,200 baud. After all, it can zip material over the phone lines at four times the speed, and that means you’re tying up your modem less on long documents. You might not be tying up yourself if you run an operating system like Concurrent CP/M, which lets your computer handle electronic mail while you’re using it for other purposes; but a 1,200-baud modem is still a good investment if you can afford it. You may well be able to. Soon 1,200-baud modems with auto-answer features will commonly sell for well under $300.
Sent through a modem, the data bits are those conveying the information itself. And the start bits and stop bits keep track of the beginnings and ends of your micros’ characters. The most common setting is a word length of 8 data bits and 1 stop bit.
Parity bits may help the computers check for errors caused by static and other electronic noise. Parity is said to be “even,” “odd,” or “none.” This error-checking method has its drawbacks. It may fail if the mistakes cancel each other out—and it’s slow since it checks every character. Some communications programs (the ones allowing computers to talk) lack this feature. The most common parity setting is “none”—when you tell your software not to do parity checks.
A few other wrinkles in such programs are:
FILE TRANSFER
That’s the ability to send whole files of text or data—including programs, too.
CAPTURE ABILITY
With capture ability you can keep a record of each end of a keyboard conversation with both people typing away. You tell your computer to open up a buffer in its RAM—the temporary memory. The buffer captures the conversation. And if it fills up, some software will automatically “write” to your floppy disk, then reopen the buffer. Some programs won’t write to the disk at the ends of your conversations unless you command them to, meaning that the absentminded will see their bits and bytes vanish.
PROTOCOL FLEXIBILITY
Beyond changing bit numbers, etc., you may want software that can handle different kinds of protocols—sets of rules telling how computers transmit different sets of information.
One possible protocol for you to use—at least in conversations with other micros—would be the XMODEM Protocol or Ward Christensen Protocol. The receiving computer tallies up the number of bits and bytes transmitted from blocks—tiny parts of material—and compares this check sum to the number that the originating machine says it sent. And if there’s a mismatch? The receiving computer asks for the block again.
You might also use no protocol at all. It’s as if you’re sending material simply by tapping away on the keyboard without any elaborate rules for the other person’s machine. You two should still, however, agree on basics like baud rate, data bits, stop bits, and parity.
Protocols use handshaking as part of their bags of tricks. Handshaking, computers swap bits and bytes to verify that they’re on speaking terms. A common form is XON/XOFF.
Some mainframes use XON/XOFF to talk to micros and vice versa. The receiving computer gives an XOFF signal, telling the transmitting one to pause while the receiving machine “writes” to its disk. XON means, “Okay, my buffer’s almost empty. Send more!” Without this flow control, you might overwhelm the buffer and lose information.
AUTOMATIC DIALING AND OTHER TRIMMINGS
Some modems will let the communications software dial for you or at least let you feed the number in from your keyboard. Some also have automatic log-on. That lets you check onto a network or bulletin-board system without typing out your ID or password. Many intelligent modems, by the way, even without special software, can remember and dial phone numbers automatically and spit out log-on sequences and passwords.
VERSATILITY
Want to speak to a number of computers? Then buy software allowing you to set:
◼ Baud rate (speed of transmission).
◼ Data bits.
◼ Stop bits.
◼ Parity.
◼ Terminal emulation. It means making the micro imitate popular brands of terminals.
◼ Half or full duplex. Full is most common in micro communications.
◼ The type of handshaking protocol.
Ideally, the software will also:
◼ Accommodate a variety of modem types.
◼ Designate the host—which computer will manage the echo back (which makes the typed conversation appear on both screens).
◼ Let you choose different protocols.
All those features, of course, might still not let you communicate easily with your corporate computer. It may not use the ASCII code, for instance, which most micros do.
“Since you ASCII’d, anyway,” as PC Magazine once punned, “those five letters are an acronym for the American Standard Code for Information Interchange.” With ASCII, an “A” is one combination of 1s and 0s, “B” is another, “,” is another, and so on.
When communicating with a mainframe capable of ASCII, it may not matter what brand of micro you’re running. So don’t reflexively think Big Blue for telecommuting.
The proud IBM mainframes, however, like aloof mandarins of old China, jabber away in a dialect of their own, EBCDIC—it’s similar to ASCII but different enough to cause serious problems. Now that doesn’t mean your home computer won’t work with an IBM mainframe. But it may require special programming that will translate from one set of codes to another.
Of course your corporate mainframe may also need a string of control characters to open or close an electronic file, and here your word-processing software may matter more than your communications program.
The control characters normally are just letters tapped out in combination with the control key to give commands to your computer. They generally don’t print out on paper; they may or may not show on the screen. In this case, controls characters pass the commands on to another machine over the wires. And so you may have to embed the control characters in your electronic files. If your word processor won’t let you embed control characters, you may not be able to communicate with some kinds of mainframes. WordStar lets you do this.
An issue more basic than control characters is[is] whether you’re using synchronous or asynchronous communications. The former is a staple among the big mainframes; the latter, among micros.
In synchronous communications, the two computers or modems employ timing signals to separate characters sent in one stream.
Synchronous has a big advantage. You can send at 4,800 baud[baud] over regular phone lines; you can’t with the asynchronous method, or at least not with late 1984 technology.
But “synch” is more expensive—the needed modems typically cost well over $1,000. Asynchronous, moreover, doesn’t require timing signals. It’s the simplest form of communications between computers; and more and more data-processing departments have added asynchronous ports for micros to dial up.
John Fuller himself was communicating not with a giant computer but a dedicated word processor in his office, which, like most, talked ASCII asynchronously. He solved other problems on his own. You may need a consultant to do what Fuller did. But take heart. It could well be worth it, what with the time and money your telecommuting may spare you and your employer.
“I’m saving gas, dressing in comfortable grubbies when I write,” Fuller said in an article about his experiences, “and with the direct connection I can prove that I’m working. I turn out my reports faster. My computer is really paying off. Now,” said the self-deprecating Fuller, “if you’ll excuse me, I have to repel invaders from space.”
BACKUP XII
MODEM7: An Almost-Free and Fairly Easy Way to Talk to Other Computers
MODEM7 may be free, but it works. With it you can talk to computers thousands of miles away if they’re running MODEM7 or compatible software. Normally, your only real expense is for the modem and maybe cables; you might spend as little as $100.
Using MODEM7, you can send letters, reports, or programs already on your computer disk. Or you can receive them.
You can also:
1. Communicate teletype-fashion with the other person. You can keep electronic records of what you both type and later print them out using WordStar or another word processor.
2. Call up electronic bulletin-board systems (BBSs) or plug into The Source and many other information utilities. In this case, too, you can store material on your disk and later print it out.
3. Get copies of other programs that altruistic computer buffs have placed in the public domain; you do this after you log on the BBS.
MODEM7 is a good example of free software that fills a niche; experts say it’s better than some $150 products. Most free programs are losers for the typical business. They’re either (1) games, useless except for training, (2) unreliable lemons with bugs in them, the software kind, (3) programs that might work but don’t do anything useful, or (4) fiendishly difficult challenges because the instructions are confusing and no one handy knows how to use them. But wonderful exceptions exist. Never thumb your nose at something just because it’s free. In MODEM7’s case you’ll find more happy, knowledgeable users than you will in the cases of many commercial programs.
MODEM7-style protocols have become an industry standard. Even big businesses and government agencies, including the IRS, have used MODEM7 for some purposes. It’s influenced the designs of commercial micro programs, which employ similar techniques to facilitate linkups between different brands of communications software. MODEM7 will also get along beautifully with the popular PC-TALK III “freeware” program for IBM micros and some clones. Freeware is low-cost software distributed in many cases by the users themselves; the author may request a “donation”.
Granted, MODEM7 isn’t the ultimate. The instructions included on the disk are confusing to the novice—a problem I’ll try to overcome here—and ready-to-run versions aren’t available for every computer system.
Some commercial communications software, moreover, is easier to run and can help you talk to more machines. And it may also make better use of the “smart” modems and their software so that your computer can dial up others automatically at 11:00 p.m., when the phone rates go down. You can’t do this with your cheapie modem and the plain vanilla MODEM7 described here.
But for the average computer user, MODEM7 is a good communications program to start out with. After reading the instructions that follow, you needn’t be a micro whiz to use it.
Also, you may find that MODEM7 is as convenient as some commercial software for simple tasks, such as quickly checking your electronic mailboxes on The Source or CompuServe.
Don’t forget: you shouldn’t pay a cent for the basic MODEM7 program itself except for the cost of a copied disk or another token fee. It’s public-domain software. So you can legally make copies for all your friends and business contacts who have modems and the same machine that you do.
But how to track down your own copy? Through CP/M user groups, you can locate versions of MODEM7 set up for different computers and disk drives, or you might find an organization of IBM owners, Kaypro fanatics, or others. The better computer stores can steer you to the right people. Incidentally, if you distrust your store, you might not want to say exactly why you’re trying to catch up with a user group. Bear in mind that the computer store isn’t going to make a profit off a free program. Some organizations, however, are selling MODEM7 at next to nothing through the mail. For instance, the Public Domain Software Copying Company says it has versions for the IBM PC and clones, all the Kaypro machines, the Morrow micros and Osborne, among others. The cost as of late 1984 was $10. The address is 33 Gold St. cl3, New York, N.Y. 10038; the telephone number, (212) 732-2565. The company also offers separate programs that will adjust stop bits and other settings, eliminating the need for programming. These programs aren’t universal. Like MODEM7 itself, they might not work for your particular machine. The Public Domain Software Copying Company also says it offers a low-cost program for the Apple II that lets it communicate with computers using MODEM7.
In addition, you might also investigate PC-TALK III, commonly available through IBM user groups. If they’re ethical, they’ll encourage you to send a small “donation” to PC-Talk’s originator, Andrew Fluegelman, who wanted to save distribution expenses through this “freeware” approach. You needn’t feel obligated to pay until you’ve tried the program. Probably, however, you’ll find PC-TALK to be worth the $35 or $45 it may cost; this software is more sophisticated than MODEM7, which I’m focusing on because of its simplicity.
Another excellent MODEM7 alternative—for experienced computer-users—is MEX. CP/M versions are available free through users groups and work on many machines, including Kaypros; and NightOwl Software (telephone 800/648-3695 or NITEOWL) expects to sell it for $59.95 in an IBM version. Most of MEX’s send-and-receive commands overlap with MODEM7’s.
MODEM7 as of 12/18/80
Originally Written by Ward Christensen
Revisions by Mark M. Zeiger, Jim Mills
WRT —Write file to disk (from terminal mode)
DEL —Erase present file (from terminal mode)
RET —Return to terminal mode with no loss of data
XPR —Toggle expert mode (Menu on/off)
DIR —List directory (may specify drive)
CPM —Exit to CP/M
S —Send CP/M file
R —Receive CP/M file
T —Terminal mode (optional file name)
E —Terminal mode with echo
DEFAULT DRIVE:
Command:
IBM PC owners, fear not! This Kaypro version of MODEM7 shows the same menu that the IBM version, dated Oct. 15, 1982, does. The only real difference is the IBM adaptation’s use of the DOS command instead of the CPM one to return to the computer’s operating system.
Here now is a plain-English guide to MODEM7’s version of December 18, 1980, as adapted in 1982 for the Kaypro, IBM, and many other machines.
TO GET READY
MODEM7 has two basic modes for Teletype-like communications, “Terminal” and “Echo.” For both parties to see both ends of the conversation, one must be in “terminal” and the other in “echo” if they are communicating directly. Just the “terminal” person will be able to record on his or her disk. The one in echo mode can’t save the material electronically.
Beginning, you should read your computer’s instructions for information on how many stop bits and data bits your machine normally runs with. And does it use odd, even, or no parity? You might also get this information from your dealer or users group.
Don’t worry right now about knowing about the full meanings of the terms. Just find out what the settings are.
MODEM7 doesn’t provide for changing the settings. If the person at the other end can’t adjust them, either, and if those for his machine are different from yours, you’re out of luck if you don’t know how to fix the program code. You two may have to reach each other through an electronic mail service that mediates between machines. Often, however, micros are set for 1 stop bit, 8 data bits, and no parity, an informal standard. And just about all decent commercial programs for communications let you alter these settings. So does PC-TALK III.
In addition, even though MODEM7 itself won’t change its bit settings, your user group may have some free or low-cost programs that you can load up to do the trick—and then use MODEM7.
There’s one other little worry. Are you and the other person sending at the same speed over the phone lines? The normal speed for cheap micro modems is 300 baud or about 30 characters per second; for the deluxe ones, 1,200 baud. Don’t worry right now about what a baud is. Just make sure you and the other person are both at the same speed. MODEM7 often is set at 300. Some versions may allow for changing the software to accommodate different baud rates, but the command may not work on your particular brand of machine. By the way, remember that you must consider the baud rate not only of the software but of the hardware. Simply adjusting your software to send at 1,200 baud won’t do the trick if your modem can reach only 300 baud. Remember, too, that MODEM7’s speed command won’t necessarily govern your modem’s transmission speed, just your software’s.
You also want to find out how to operate your modem. Some use a physical switch to change from voice to data. Others—smart modems—use commands that you type out while your modem program is in the terminal mode. You can tell a smart modem to dial a number or answer the phone automatically.
TO TRANSMIT AND RECEIVE WITHOUT SAVING ANYTHING ON YOUR DISK
Just think of your computer and the other person’s as two Teletype machines connected. When hitting a key on either Teletype, you or the other person can make the two both print, right? Well, it’s the same with the computers. Here, however, the “print” is characters on your two screens.
Ready?
1. Start out with the other person’s modem set on ORIGINATE and yours on ANSWER (or vice versa) if the modems lack automatic switching.
2. Type MODEM7 after the A> prompt of CP/M (or PC-DOS).
3. Hit your carriage-return key.
The menu listing your choices will flash onto your screen.
4. Hit the letter T.
5. Tap the return.
6. Assuming you’re using a manual modem, flick the switch to “data.” With a smart modem, you use the right keystrokes to awaken the gizmo or get it to answer the other computer.
Most smart modems nowadays employ commands similar to those of the Hayes models. With Hayes-style modems, if two people are switching from voice to data, one will type ATD and a carriage return (to start getting the modems talking), and the other will type ATA (to answer electronically).
If you’re talking to another micro or a little terminal hooked up to the phone at the other end, you may need to type E (and the return) instead of T (and the return).
That’s the echo mode, which you’ll recall differs from the “terminal” one. E lets you see your own typing. Again, normally, one micro user will be in echo, and one will use the straight terminal mode. When communicating with a bulletin board, even on a micro, use the T command rather than E.
How to switch from the regular terminal mode to the echo mode or the reverse?
You use MODEM7’s electronic gear shift. That’s Control-E; don’t confuse it with the E used in the echo mode. You tap out this command in other situations, too, whenever you want to return to MODEM7’s main menu. A Control-E, of course, consists of holding one finger on the CNTRL or control button and then hitting the letter E.
Here’s a warning: you may need to hit the line feed and/or the carriage return at the end of each line for your words to come out in the right places on the other person’s screen.
The terminal mode is worth using even when you and the other person only plan to exchange electronic files. If the terminal mode doesn’t work, then the others probably won’t, so use the terminal mode first to pave the way for file exchanges. By the way, the terminal mode is just the ticket to communicate with information utilities like The Source or with bulletin boards.
TO RETURN TO THE OPERATING SYSTEM OF YOUR COMPUTER
To return to CP/M—to crank up WordStar or Perfect Writer, for instance—you:
1. Type Control-E.
2. Tap out CPM from the main menu.
3. Hit your return.
Bingo! You’re back with the A>! And from there you go on to WordStar, etc.
If you’re using the IBM version of MODEM7, you use the command DOS instead of CPM (unless your menu says otherwise).
TO TRANSMIT MATERIAL ON YOUR DISK WITHOUT ERROR CHECKING—WITHOUT A MODEM7-STYLE PROGRAM AT THE OTHER END
MODEM7 uses the Ward Christensen Protocol—sometimes called the XMODEM Protocol—to help make sure the material is going from computer to computer okay.
If you don’t use error checking in transmitting files, the static on the phone lines may garble some words. Your computer, after all, is just squirting your file over the phone without bothering to find out if the other machine is receiving it right. You want error checking if you’re transmitting or receiving software; just one electronic goof, just a single messed-up “one” or “zero,” can throw the whole program out of whack.
But sometimes, when you aren’t dealing with programs, you’ll want to skip error checking. That way, the transmission will go faster. And it’ll be easier for computers with different communications programs to talk to one another.
There’s still no guarantee you’ll communicate, but with an industry standard like MODEM7 you have a good shot at it.
Here, then, is what you do to send a file to someone without a MODEM7-style program:
1. From MODEM7’s main menu, you select T and again hit the return a few times.
2. Find out if the other person can read words you type. (Don’t worry if you yourself can’t read your own words.)
3. Tell him (or her) to set up his computer so that, on paper or on a disk, it’ll record what it receives.
4. Once the other person is ready—while you’re still in the T mode—hit T again, but this second time your finger is on the Control key while you’re doing so.
The screen will ask you the name of the file you want sent. Normally, that file will be on your data disk, the one on drive B. B in that case contains the articles, reports, etc., for which you may lack room on the A disk containing your programs. (But if the document to be sent is on A, substitute that letter for B in the rest of the steps.)
5. Now you type B:[name of file]. Here and elsewhere don’t type the brackets surrounding the file name—and please put the file name directly after B: without a space in between.
6. Next hit your return. The disk should start spinning, and both you and the person at the other end should see your file flashing across the screens. Following transmission, your computer will say FILE TRANSFER COMPLETED. The other person should now have an electronic copy on his own disk.
TO RECEIVE COPY WITHOUT A MODEM7-STYLE ERROR CHECKING
1. Get the two modems talking, then return to the main menu.
2. Again, select your trusty T from the main menu. But don’t hit your return immediately.
3. Type a space.
4. Type B:[the name of the file you’re creating on the data disk to receive the other person’s file]. The name on B can be anything you want except a file that’s already on the disk.
In other words, if you want to save the other person’s file under the name MAGIC, you type: T B:MAGIC.
5. Hit your return once or twice.
6. Then hit the letter Y with your finger on the control key (Control-Y).
You’ll see some colons on the screen when material starts flashing across it. They won’t show up, though, in the file you’re creating. They’re merely an indication that the computer is saving material—whether it’s a file, an item from a computer network, or someone just typing away.
7. Type Control-E to return to MODEM7’s main menu.
8. Then, to preserve the file, “writing” to your disk, you must type out WRT, then hit your return.
And that’s it. You’re done!
By the way, if, while receiving material, you decide there’s a part you don’t need saved, you can leave that out of the file you’re creating. Just hit Control-Y again. Hit it still another time if you want to return to the “save” mode. On some successors to MODEM7 such as MDM711, a Control-R rather than a second Control-Y will tell the computer to shut off the save feature.
This save feature, alas, won’t work on a computer using the older MODEM7’s echo mode (though it will with newer versions of the program). But you can get around the shortcoming. Ask the other person in advance to make a two-way record of your conversation and send it to you! How to receive it? Well, after you’ve transmitted in the E or echo mode, you can shift to T with a file name added to save material.
Please also remember that MODEM7’s capture buffer—the feature letting it save incoming material to your disk—is small. Often the buffer can’t work safely with files bigger than 16K. That’s about eight double-spaced pages. If you’re using a Ward Christensen Protocol, however, files can normally be as long as disk space allows.
Printing the saved material, you may experience some problems because different word processors aren’t absolutely compatible with each other. You may see odd format commands, for instance, like “@”s (noticeable to WordStar buffs reading the files of their not-so-Perfect Writer friends) or “.HE” (a WordStar command that may baffle the Perfect crowd). But once you get the hang of it, you can usually “clean up” such “garbage.”
TO TRANSMIT COPY TO SOMEONE WITH A MODEM7-STYLE PROGRAM
1. Get the modems to start jabbering to each other.
2. From MODEM7’s main menu, type S B:[name of the data disk file you want to transmit—either a program or a letter or other document]. The B: shows the file is on the B disk. If it isn’t, just type S and the name of the file—for instance, S MAGIC. If MAGIC is on B, type S B:MAGIC.
3. Hit the return.
Soon your computer should start constantly asking the other machine if it’s getting your file okay.
If it isn’t?
Then your computer will conscientiously try again. But its patience is limited. It’ll give up eventually if the two machines and their software aren’t on speaking terms.
And if everything does work? Your computer will beep when it’s through or at least flash a message letting you know that it’s done.
Note: If the other person is using some versions of MODEM7, you may have to ask him to switch on the “check sum” form of error checking. This guide is for the simple old MODEM7, not newer versions. Most of the commands, however, will also work with the updated varieties, and of course all versions of MODEM7 can communicate with each other, subject to minor adjustments. Some versions use the TCC command to turn on the check-sum mode.
TO RECEIVE FROM SOMEONE WITH A MODEM7-STYLE PROGRAM
1. Fire up your modem.
2. Type R B:[new file name].
3. Hit your return.
Your computer will tell you when it’s through receiving. Remember, the material will show up on your data disk. If you want the material on the other disk, just type R A:[file name] instead.
TO FIND OUT IN A HURRY IF YOUR COMPUTER SAVED A FILE SENT BY MODEM (ASSUMING YOU’RE USING AN OPERATING SYSTEM LIKE CP/M OR PC-DOS)
1. Go to the A> prompt.
2. Type the word TYPE, then a space, then the name of the file—preceded by a B:, of course, if it’s on the data disk.
Immediately after the A> you should have the equivalent of TYPE B:MAGIC.
3. Then hit your return.
This is a CP/M and PC-DOS procedure.
TO ERASE A FILE (FROM CP/M)
Do the above, except substitute ERA for TYPE. Say you want to erase MAGIC. Just type ERA B:MAGIC.
TO ERASE A FILE (IF YOU’RE USING PC-DOS)
Use DEL instead of ERA. Type DEL B:MAGIC.
TO ERASE A FILE FROM WITHIN THE MODEM7 PROGRAM
Type DEL B:MAGIC or whatever the file name is.
TO FIND OUT WHAT’S ON YOUR DISKS WHILE YOU’RE USING MODEM7
1. Type DIR from the main MODEM7 menu.
2. Type a space.
3. Type B:.
4. Hit your return.
This will show the contents of the B drive, normally used for storing data.
To see A drive’s contents, you merely type DIR and hit the return.
TO USE THE DIRECTORY FEATURE WHILE YOU’RE IN THE MIDDLE OF A FILE YOU USE TO SAVE
What if you want to save the other person’s message using the T B:MAGIC method—but in the middle of the conversation you also want to check the contents of your disk via the DIR command?
How do you prevent the MAGIC from disappearing except for the name on your file list?
After all, an electronic file is like gas inside a bottle. You must “cap” it with a WRT command, or the gas will leak out the top. And you can’t reenter your file by typing another T B:MAGIC.
But you can get back to T B:MAGIC by typing RET after the DIR command.
TO GET THE MENU OFF THE SCREEN ONCE YOU KNOW THE ROPES
From the main menu, type XPR. Hit the return.
TO CHANGE THE BAUD RATE
If you’re using MODEM7 with a 300-baud modem, you don’t worry; the software normally comes set for that speed.
With a 1,200-baud modem, you may be able to accommodate the higher speed this way:
1. Enter the T mode of MODEM7 from the main menu.
2. Hit the return several times.
3. Tap Control-B.
You’ll then see a request for a new baud rate.
4. Type the right number (300 for 300 baud, 1200 for 1,200; do not use commas—MODEM7 doesn’t like them here).
5. Hit your return.
Please note that at least on my Kaypro II the Control-B command doesn’t work. This may have been due simply to my machine’s quirks.
Again, don’t forget that MODEM7’s successors operate somewhat differently and may use a command such as SET or TIM to set up the baud selection.
And remember, too, that the old MODEM7’s baud command won’t control the speed of your modem (although some modems will automatically pick up the baud rate of the one at the other end).
Thanks to Jon Albers, Eric Meyer, Rick Nelson, and Pat Ehresmann for checking the accuracy and clarity of the above instructions. Blame me, however, if anything’s wrong.
My instructions are a simplification of:
CP/M MODEM PROGRAM DOCUMENTATION by Mark M. Zeiger
and James K. Mills 11/04/80
The MODEM7-styles programs have their origins in the work of Ward Christensen, an IBM employee and public-spirited computer hobbyist.
■ ■ ■
A MODEM7 Cheat Sheet
Snip this out! It’s a handy summary of commands for the free MODEM7 program.
◾ TO MAKE MODEM7 APPEAR ON YOUR COMPUTER SCREEN: Type MODEM7 from the A> prompt and hit your carriage return. You’ll end up in the program’s main menu. Or if you’re using a new program, you might instead see a screen telling how to reach the menu.
◾ TO USE THE TELETYPE-LIKE TERMINAL MODE: Tap the letter T and a carriage return after the main menu appears. You can use this mode with The Source, MCI Mail, and other on-line services.
◾ TO USE THE ECHO MODE: Type E and the return. For Teletype-like use when the other machine is in “Terminal.”
◾ TO GO FROM ONE MODE TO ANOTHER: Use Control-E. This gearshift mode returns you to the main menu.
◾ TO SEND MATERIAL ON YOUR DISK WITHOUT THE WARD CHRISTENSEN ERROR-CHECKING PROTOCOL: Type Control-T after you’re in the terminal mode. Give the name of the file to transmit. Here, as in other cases, precede the name by B: (no space after the :) if the file is on Drive B. Hit your carriage return.
◾ TO RECEIVE MATERIAL WITHOUT A PROTOCOL: After typing the usual T in the terminal mode, you skip a space. Then specify the name of the file where you’ll collect the received data. Now hit your return several times. Use Control-Y to tell your computer to start saving material; also use it to turn off the save feature. (On newer versions of MODEM7, Control-R might be the off switch.) IMPORTANT: After you’ve finished talking to the other machine, you must return to the main menu and type WRT and return. Otherwise your computer won’t save the material on the disk.
◾ TO SEND TO SOMEONE WITH A MODEM7-STYLE PROTOCOL: Type S, skip a space, then type the name of the file that you’ll send—with the B: before it if necessary. Hit the carriage return.
◾ TO RECEIVE FROM SOMEONE WITH A MODEM7-STYLE PROTOCOL: Type R. Skip a space. Then type the name of the file where the material will show up, using B: if needed. Hit the return.
◾ TO RETURN TO THE A> PROMPT: From MODEM7’s main menu, type CPM if you’re using a CP/M version like the Kaypro one. (The IBM version substitutes DOS for CPM.) Hit your return.
■ ■ ■
BACKUP XIII
Why Not an Electronic Peace Corps?
In a Chicago suburb a $50,000-a-year engineer spends countless hours twiddling with his new IBM PC. The technology engrosses him, but he lacks a sense of purpose. In Southeast Asia, meanwhile, a young man wrestles with calculations needed to build an irrigation dam. He thinks his figures are correct but isn’t certain, and thousands of people will die if the dam collapses.
Can the Chicago engineer somehow help his counterpart abroad?
There is a way if politicians for once will appeal to the better instincts of technicians. An Electronic Peace Corps (EPC) could bring these two together and offer the Third World some of the best international technical expertise via computer networks.
Useful computers sell for around a thousand dollars, and much better, cheaper, smaller computers are on the way. What’s more, thanks to satellites, international communications prices are falling; and 1,000-word messages anywhere in the world, via special packet-switching networks, could cost just $1 each.
So the EPC needn’t threaten the taxpayers with a major burden. By essentially exporting knowledge instead of people, it in fact would increase the impact of economic-aid dollars. The EPC could emphasize basics like public health, agriculture, transportation, construction, manufacturing, and communications.
In carrying out the idea, a government or international agency might keep computer files listing:
● The skills and information required in specific underdeveloped countries.
● People abroad who needed help.
● Those who might be able to offer it.
Most of the corpsmen wouldn’t even be computer experts—just people with the right technical knowhow. Some might be ex-Peace Corpsmen. Others might receive special cultural indoctrination similar to traditional Peace Corps training.
Once in the EPC, the corpsmen might regularly correspond via E-Mail at nights and on weekends or on occasion “talk” instantly to Third World counterparts. Of course, not every Third World beneficiary might use a micro. Some might submit written questions that local Peace Corps offices could pass on electronically (one way to mitigate the language problem).
E-Mail, incidentally, needn’t be the only form of computer communications available through the EPC. The organization could offer electronic bulletin boards with the names of people either needing or offering information on subjects like biological pest control or solar power. That way, the EPC’s beneficiaries would feel as if they had more of a choice.
In addition, there might be ongoing computer conferences on topics of common concern.
Obviously, the EPC wouldn’t replace foreign-aid experts in the field, and it wouldn’t aid people directly at the village level. It wouldn’t hand out lap-sized portables to barefoot farmers. Rather, the EPC would help engineers, doctors, scientists, and other people engaged in development in their own countries. Corpsmen in the field would work with local governments to make certain, for instance, that a New Delhi slumlord didn’t use the EPC to automate his dunning operation.
Typical EPC beneficiaries might be Indians trying to set up a more efficient grain-storage network, millions of Third World people are starving because the food goes to the wrong places. Sometimes, incidentally, the “wrong places” include the warehouses of thieves, and computerized records could reduce the opportunities for corruption. Many problems are political or economic, of course. The EPC would limit itself to technical issues and try to be as apolitical as possible, just as the international Red Cross focuses on relief rather than ideology.
Another EPC beneficiary might be a communications specialist hoping to install a satellite link; for obvious reasons, better communications might be one of the EPC’s first priorities. The EPC might help domestic and foreign groups working toward this goal. Even countries with poor phone lines, of course, can receive some computer messages in the large cities.
Yet other beneficiaries could include:
● Colombian doctors who wanted to fight an epidemic with the latest information sped over the computer lines.
● A civil engineer in Peru working on a road or bridge for isolated villagers who hoped to sell food to cities.
● A rural-assistance administrator in Kenya. Micros could help his staffers keep abreast of the newest, best way to dig a well or treat a dysentery-stricken baby.
The EPC wouldn’t just promote the flow of information from countries like the United States to the so-called lesser-developed countries. Among them, too, it would speed up the spread of practical solutions to common problems.
Learning of an efficacious home remedy, for example, a rural-assistance group in Ecuador might pass the information on for possible global dissemination. It just might save the life of a child in Peru. By keeping track of the better home remedies in the Third World, in fact, an American drug researcher might discover something that checked out scientifically—as has happened in the past.
Some Third World countries or groups of them might want to start their own EPCs. Rather than preempting these efforts, an American or international EPC could aid them, thereby multiplying the benefits of the original organization and forestalling fears of electronic imperialism.
The EPC could have a domestic version, too. Because of lower communications cost, the Home Corps (a friend’s phrase) might take more chances helping nonexperts without credentials. A gifted high school writer on Chicago’s South Side might tap out short stories on a school computer, for example, and a famous author across town might zip the files back, with comments easily inserted electronically. The two might meet a few times in person, then carry on via computer without the hassles and menace of urban travel. Likewise, an Evanston business executive might volunteer help to a businesswoman in a small town many miles away.
The most urgent need for EPC-style assistance, however, is in the Third World, where, because of technical backwardness, so many are starving. The idea isn’t so farfetched. In fact the Third World is already enjoying some similar help in a small way.
The CARINET computer network links the United States, the Caribbean, Southeast Asia, and Africa. Long before harvest time a Jamaican farmer can learn how promising a market there’ll be for his crop in the United States—or an African potter can find out how to make a ceramic insulator for his local phone company. Jerome Glenn, an official with Partnership for Productivity International, the Washington-based group behind CARINET, says the answers often come in just a day.
“Mail takes too long and Telex is too expensive,” notes another Peace Corps alumnus, now heading a nutrition group that works to export U.S. technical savvy through more conventional means.
Many foreign aid and computer experts have similar feelings. The technicians, sure enough, are far ahead of the politicians. One of the most distinguished technicians of them all—Arthur C. Clarke, the father of the communications satellites—describes the EPC proposal as “an excellent idea.”
Reaction from Third World countries has been favorable. Naren Chitty, a Sri Lankan diplomat, says the concept is “a positive approach to technology transfer” in “these days when ‘electronic imperialism’ is a catchword.” And a Saudi Arabian communications specialist likewise advocates computer and networks for the Third World. He says: “I had a terrible argument with this Indian man who said, ‘My people are starving to death, and you talk about microcomputers.’ And I said, ‘It’s because of food distribution—the food isn’t getting there. The reason they’re starving is that they don’t have the benefits that computers could bring.’”
■ ■ ■
POSTSCRIPT:
Just as I was finishing this book I heard from my friend the Saudi Arabian communications specialist, Omar Alfarouq. Omar says EPC-style efforts are already realities in some places—not just dreams.
Via MCI Mail from California, he told me of “the creation of an Information network throughout Third World, accessible within our own cultural reference.
“It has bloomed under sponsorship Gulf Cooperation Council; data banks for farmers, medical workers in Arabic accessible by personal computer from Oman to Kuwait; anyone can access though it is most often done through local Ministry of Information office; will be tied in with university information systems. It’s moving alhamdullilah [thanks to God].” Omar says the idea for this net goes back to 1981.
He continues:
“Your Electronic Peace Corps is alive and well and working wonders in Africa at present time, am surprised you are not there doing it. I just returned, am here to regroup, energy burn-out terrible. For example Sahel 84 is a French group 30, lorries w/ food/medicine, one light plane with ground station tied into INMARSAT; satellite shows ground picture where people have sunk down hopeless in endless reaches of Niger, Mali etc., guides convoy to place of need; communication link back to Paris advises of further food/medicine need, diagnostic advice, these helped while other abandonees are being located. That’s Sahel 84.
“Mobility 84 is British with land-rover as ground station with a computer, word-processing, works in west central Africa, put together by Alan Benjamin of CAP software in England, Contact him he is doing what you are brooding about.
“Medecines sans Frontreres also has sat-data link to Paris from its camp south Soudan just over border from Ethiopia for Tigre refugees; Tigre people in terrible shape. Data banks can insha’allah [if God wills] save Soudan from becoming like Ethiopia—it’s getting that way fast. Contact Gordon MacRae, deputy editor of Economist in London for further up-dates, also Jim Grant of UNICEF.
“Congratulations on yr book. But the real point of data exchange is its tremendous humanitarian impact which is so desperately needed in places that will never ever see anything like a telephone. Timely forecasting can prevent Third World suffering. Or even in America. That’s your next book. See you in Addis.... wa salaam [good-bye], Omar.”
Americans invented the transistor, the microchip, personal computers; now if only we’ll catch up with the British, French, and Saudis in bringing the technology to the people who most need it!
Thanks!
My Victor 9000 and Panasonic printer ideally could spew out a list of people to thank—starting with those who most deserved it.
As a mere human, however, I don’t feel up to ranking anyone other than to mention the big nine:
● Michael Canyes, a professional computer consultant who gave dozens of hours of his time in the best user-to-user tradition.
● Mack Truslow, an old friend on whom I cruelly inflicted page after page of rough drafts.
● David Fay Smith, a writer/computer expert who was the technical editor and who himself is the author of A Computer Dictionary for Kids and Other Beginners (Ballantine, $9.95).
● Don Carrol, the cover artist.
● Robert B. Wyatt, editor-in-chief of Ballantine Books, who had the imagination and courage to make this a mass-market paperback.
● Richard McCoy, his assistant.
● Frank Lavena, the copyeditor.
● Pat Ehresmann of the Random House production staff, who is an innovator in the spirit of this book.
● Ruth Aley, a legendary literary agent whom writers have been thanking for decades—perhaps beginning with Irving Stone.
● Berenice Hoffman, her partner on this project. Shopping for a computer while I was writing The Silicon Jungle, she was a perfect test reader.
In addition I’ll thank the Fairfax County Public Library System, especially the Fairfax City branch’s business room. Thanks also to the Martha Washington, George Mason, and Sherwood branches. (Computerized databases will never do away with first-rate librarians.)
With the understanding that my list isn’t necessarily complete, here are other people to whom I’m grateful:
John Allen; Joseph Auer; Stephen Banker (will someone please locate a $1,200 hard-disk Victor 9000 for him?—Steve deserves it for the help he gave me); Lindsay Baird, Jr.; Rich Baker; Rob Barnaby; Richard Barry; Jane Bator of Susan Croft Associates; Nancy Beckman; Mike Bell; John Bennett; Tom Bennett (he really should be in the top six); Dan Berger; Robert Bertini, Jr.; Ed Bigelow; Janice Blood; Jay BloomBecker; Jack Bologna; Ed Boland; Kenneth Bosomworth; Charles Bowie; Mike Bradley; Barbara Brubacker; Ted Buchholz; David Bunnell; William F. Buckley, Jr.; John Butler; Robert Campbell; John Carroll; Elizabeth Carlson; Steve Caswell; “Cheshire Catalyst”; Vinton Cerf; Naren Chitty; Chris Christiansen; Ward Christensen; Ken Churbuck; Arthur C. Clarke; Joseph Coates; Jeanette Counsellor; Glenn Cowan; Chris Daly; Martin Dean; Judy-Lynn del Rey; Dick Diluciano; Kathleen Dixon; Frank Dobisky (“B.C.E.,” friend and PR man extraordinaire); David Eisen; Margaret Engel; James Fallows (my Victor guru); Guy Farley; Tom Fay; Paul Fessler; Jack Fitzgerald; Geoff Fobes; Ron Fowler; Jim Fox; Steve Frankel (author of The Compleat Kaypro); John Fuller; Bill Gladstone (who, while remaining loyal to his friend Andy Kay, respected my right to call the shots as I saw them and in fact nurtured this project); Jerry Glenn; Geoff Goodfellow; Gil Gordon (his new telecommuting newsletter, TELECOMMUTING REVIEW, offers common sense and humanity along with insight—a combination all too often missing in the computer world; you may write for subscription information to Telespan Publishing, 50 W. Palm St., Altadena, Ca. 91001); Sandy Gossman; Etienne Grandjean; Adam Green; Judy Gregory; Sue Grothoff; Tom Hacker; H. Glen Haney; Richard Harkness; Charles Harris; Patricia Hausman; James Hayhoe; William Hole (ace library researcher); Gabe Heilig; Carl Herrman; Jeremy Joan Hewes; Harold Joseph Highland; Clauda Houston; Hugh Hunt; Peter Hyams; Chris Jensen; Peter and Trudy Johnson-Lenz; Steve Jongeward; Phil Judkins; Mitch Kapor; R. A. Karasek; Esther King; Marc King; Carol Kaplan; Lloyd Kaufman; Andy and David Kay; Kay Keeshen; Richard Koffler; David LaGrande; Jack LaVriha; John Lewis; Bob Lucas of Trigram Systems (who let me try out his useful MicroSpell spelling-checker on this manuscript); Art Lundquist (owner of Clinton Computers); Nick Lyons; Jim Mahony; Mary Matthews; Judi McClean; Bill McDonald; Jan McGowan; Chodi McReynolds; John Madden; Rainer Malitze-Goes; Basil Malony; Glenn Marcus; Clyde Merritt; Maxine Messinger; Eric, Eugene and Rima Meyer; Greg Minjack; Rolf Moulton; Ian (“Captain Zap”) Murphy; Peter Nero; Rick Nelson; Jack Nilles; J. Michael Nye; Cliff Odendhal; Dusty Park; Donn Parker; Ann Patrick; Tom Peifer; Joseph Pelton; Margaret Phanes; Don Pierce; John O’Mara; Greg Platt of PeopleTalk Associates; Joe Policy; Michael Pond; Liz, Mitzi, David and the rest of the gang at the Computer Shoppe; Doug Rickman of The Disk Connection (who donated the copy of MITE I needed to talk to Arthur C. Clarke); Don Ramsey; Peter Ross Range; Gary Rinkerman of The Computer Law Reporter; Hood Roberts; Mark Robinson; Harry Rothman (research); Seymour Rubinstein; Marilynne Rudick; Bruce Rupp; Richard Russell; Gabriel Salvendy (source of invaluable perspective for the “HAL” chapter); Timothy Schabeck; Alan Scharf; Joe Schopen; Michael Scott of BCI; William Scrivo; Frank Schiff; Ezra Shapiro; Joe Shelton; Ben Shneiderman; James Schweitzer; Mike Slade; Michael Smith, David Snyder; Harry Snyder; Jo Steele; Bill Stern; Barbara Sturken; Ann Sumner; Jim Swanner (for approving the MITE donation); Geoff Sweeney; Jeff Tarter; Bonita Taylor, Jerry terHorst; Chris Torem; Murray Turoff; Terian Tyre; Stanton Umans; Bernard Urban; Holly Vail; John Verboon; Nick Vergis; Barbara Wagner; Robert Waters; James Watt; Harvey Welch; William Wewer; David Whiters; Lynn Wilson; Edward and Patricia Wright; and Kitty Yaney.