John Fuller phoned after I “tacked up” a notice on a board for Heath owners around Washington, D.C. Rainer Malitzke-Goes, an employee with a large communications satellite company and an invaluable source of technical information, reached me through another local board. Our computers, however, can also talk directly, without a board or network, so I’ll check some technical details in this chapter by zipping it to him electronically.
Besides helping you make business contacts, your computer can ferret out facts in a hurry.
Want to see if anyone else has started a dog kennel specializing in Afghans? Well, a magazine article or abstract, stashed away in a computer two thousand miles away, may tell you. Just dial up the right information service. For a listing of data banks by subject, consult Information Industry Market Place, published by Bowker, 205 East 42nd St., New York, N.Y. 10017.
People living in small towns without good libraries will find electronic data bases especially useful.
A Tennessee doctor, Frederick Myers, spent two and one-half hours on the road when he periodically went to a medical library sixty miles away. Now his microcomputers bring him Medline. It’s one of the hundreds of data bases available through Dialog, the giant information service in Palo Alto, California. Myers told Personal Computing that Medline let him “do in ten minutes what it would take me hours to do at the library going through the hardbound indexes.” His patients have benefited. While a patient in the emergency room lay with stabbing wounds in his stomach, Myers ferreted out relevant abstracts via Medline.
Electronic data bases don’t just save time. With them you can pick up odds and ends of information that printed indexes might not bring out.
Suppose you want to know which celebrities have endorsed electric toothbrushes on television and, searching manually, you don’t find anything in the toothbrush articles. What next? Well, the data banks’ indexes might cover even one-paragraph mentions of electric toothbrushes—little references in articles about advertising or about the VIP toothbrush endorsers.
But beware. Electronic information services and data bases can cost up to hundreds of dollars an hour to use. You need to know what to tell the data bases to spew out the facts you need. And that can take time. Luckily, some companies have developed programs that let you map out your strategy off-line instead of giving commands while the ticker is running. One, called In-Search, runs on IBM-style micros, and can save you thousands of dollars over the years if you’re a heavy Dialog user. Even at $399 In-Search would seem worth it.
I can appreciate this all too well, having squandered $35 in a few minutes trying to tap Dialog for my “Jewels that Blip” chapter. An experienced librarian at a public library operated a terminal for me there. And yet at the time even she could find next to nothing on crimes against microcomputers. In-Search might have saved much—and maybe even most—of the $35.
Under the circumstances, in fact, I would better have spent the $35 on long-distance calls to the right authorities, which is what I did. Information services aren’t panaceas. Most of this book comes from old-fashioned print and interviews.