 The magazine of the Melbourne PC User Group Editorial Ash Nallawalla ash@melbpc.org.au |
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Nominations for Committee
Nominations close on 7 November, so if you want to nominate someone for a position on the Committee then you have very little time to do so. If there are no nominations in respect of those not presently on the committee then you will get another year's worth of the same faces. Subject to your agreement, there may be up to five additional positions created as the present committee sees a need to share the workload. I mean no offence to the present committee, but some fresh blood and fresh ideas would be beneficial to our continued success.
Resignations
Some of you may have noticed that for the past two months I have been filling a casual vacancy on the committee at present. I have tendered my resignation (not as editor) because I have seen no improvement in my ability to help the group from this position. I would like to free up a position to make room for another person with separate duties. I am quite happy to revert to my previous position of a non-committee member as I enjoy producing the magazine. Colin Macauley has also advised that due to an increase in work commitments he is not interested in standing for re-election.
PC-DOS 4.01
I have seen a few comments on the BBS to the effect that DOS 4.01 is still incompatible with some software. My employers sell 80386 machines (and a few other larger machines), and a new 25 MHz model that came with DOS 4.01 would not let one of our project teams use the Phar Lap VCPI development package. So it is back to DOS 3.3 for that group.
Wyse BIOS Saga
I did manage to run Fontware on the group's other Wyse 3216. which runs the BBS, but it was still running Phoenix 80386 BIOS version 3.51. My machine could not run it with BIOS 3.52 or the new 3.53. When BIOS 3.53 was installed in the BBS machine it caused a few incompatibilities, so that machine has gone back to version 3.51. Wyse Australia has been asked to comment. Some of these incompatibilities lie with other cards or software, and it is quite a challenge to find the source of the problem. For example, I was going to say that Adobe Illustrator had stopped running after I installed BIOS 3.53, but I believe that the real culprit was HIMEM.SYS. The new version of HIMEM.SYS (2.06) seems to have cured the problem. Unfortunately, even booting with the DOS distribution disk has no effect on Fontware. Today I received a fax from Wyse USA saying that we need BIOS 3.55 (illegible, may be 3.53) and that they are sending me a free set. Last time they billed us for the 'free' set. I am not Wyse-bashing, as I have pointed out before that my friends with 80286 models have had no problems with running similar software. They make excellent keyboards too.
Membership Database
Please check your mailing label and advise the Administrative Officer if there is anything wrong with our interpretation of your name or address. Some entries have no postcode, for example, and we don't want you to get your magazine late. (We can look up the postcode in such cases.) The renewal forms on some mailers did not have scope for providing one's full details, so if you have been a member for over a year and have changed employers, telephone numbers, job description etc please fill out the form in the centre of the magazine.
Are you listed on our Dial Help page? Please check your de-tails and advise Roger Sewell, as we continue to receive com-plaints about incorrect phone numbers. The AutoCAD entry has been deleted as the harassed person on that number says that he has had the number for almost a year and knows nothing about AutoCAD. If you are no longer a member of the group then you won't be reading this message - this is the problem with some entries.
Talking about my employers (I refuse to give them free publicity by naming them - I am trying to twist their arm to advertise here!), I was surprised to see in the database that a branch in Paoli, Pennsylvania is a corporate member. (My E-mall number is 299/EMSN, If you folks in the keystone state are reading this.) How on earth did our group's fame reach that corner of the world?
Our database is housed on a slow, ancient Olivetti M24, which was kindly donated by Olivetti Australia. I know that they are corporate members, so I hope they can take a hint. I am trying to influence my employers into donating some hardware too.
We Need More Members
Do your friends borrow your copy of PC Update or get you to buy PD software for them? Are you the office PC guru by de-fault and know users who wouldn't waste your time if they picked up some survival tips such as those given at our meetings or published in this magazine? Time and again I see remarks on the Unix PC-specific newsgroups from people who obviously are business PC users but don't appear to read any PC magazine. I know someone (he's the guru) who cost his company thousands of dollars by accidentally formatting a hard disk, which contained project management data. He did not know how to un-format a hard disk (provided it was formatted with a non-destructive formatter). Feel free to promote the benefits of membership to the thousands of PC users out there. I believe that the industry is more likely to take notice of us if we represented even 25% of users. Even 25% of corporations would be an attainable figure. The rest are too busy making money and can afford to have PC disasters.
Why don't we attract more PC users? Can we offer more services, given our present circumstances? Would you be interested in an optional higher-cost membership if it supported another employee with the time to provide an unspecified range of services to this group? What would such services be? Then again, if we had 50,000 members we wouldn't need to increase subs, but our meeting venue would have to change to the MCG!
Our group expects to join the international (read USA-based) Association of PC User Groups (APCUG) for a sum of US$25. An automatic benefit is that you would get discounted subscriptions to US magazines such PC Magazine, PC Computing and PC World. I have held off my own PC Magazine renewal until we find out more. Perhaps Australian computer magazines may be inspired to give us similar privileges.
Reprinted from the October 1989 issue of PC Update, the magazine of Melbourne PC User Group, Australia
