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.”