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?