 The magazine of the Melbourne PC User Group Monthly News |
Chaired by our new President, the most recent meeting of the Group was held on Wednesday 13th March at the regular venue. Approximately 40 people attended, for a very informative evening. As usual the Random Access session took a bit to get going, but some useful information was exchanged on subjects such as:
| Prolok Plus, Educational Software The "CopyWrite" software package PC Write - Public Domain Word Processor Turbo Pascal, PC Talk - Use with compatibles |
Speaker for the evening was Lloyd Borrett from HISOFT, who spoke about
Public Domain Software Utilities and about Hard Disk Directory Structures.
For those present a handout was provided listing all of the Utilities available on the new Melb PC Library
diskette Vol. 5, which contains the best of the utility programs as selected by the Public Domain Software
SIG. A brief description of each was given. Seven additional utilities not included on the disk were
mentioned by Lloyd as being worthy of further attention. Three more complex sets of Utilities were then
discussed, those being the NEWKEY. ULTRA UTILITIES, and PC ENCIPHERMENT packages. These are supplied as "User
Supported Software" packages and generally provide identical facilities to quite expensive commercial
software.
Whilst users were encouraged to make use of these very useful utilities, all were cautioned about problems
which may occur, with the use of Public Domain software.
All the utilities mentioned are obtainable either from the Group Librarian or from Bulletin Boards.
Time was taken to explain the DOS commands provided specifically for use with Directories i.e MKDIR, CHDIR,
RMDIR and the PATH command. Then Lloyd outlined the structure which he had used to set up all PC hard disks
in BHP.
Lastly the simple programming system provided by Lloyd to enable such systems to operated in either a menu or
command driven mode was explained. He hope to see this included in the Public Domain software system some
time in the future.
Felix concluded the meeting by seeking from the people present, indications of the direction which they saw
the Group taking in the future. It seemed that most agreed that the regular monthly meetings should be fairly
general in nature, detailed the discussions being left to SIGs. Some discussion took place on SIGs, it being
noted that a number had started but had faded away. Continuity of SIGs depends entirely upon the interest of
members. AP Calls were made for further assistance, members being asked to help in areas detailed in the Melb
PC newsletter. The formal meeting closed at about 8.00 pm but discussions continued well after.
Gary Bryant has offered his services as Meetings Organiser for the Group. His contributions at the last
executive meeting foretell of his talents and abilities, and I am sure that we are likely to see some very
interesting meetings in the future. If you have any ideas for future meetings, please contact Gary (see
AT-THE-HELM) or any other member of the Executive.
Reprinted from the April 1985 issue of PC Update, the magazine of Melbourne PC User Group, Australia
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