 The magazine of the Melbourne PC User Group Pres Said John Beck |
At last month's meeting Hewlett-Packard gave a presentation of their New Wave programme. The presentation was excellent with the coloured graphics projected through a high resolution colour projector. The program is one which runs through Microsoft Windows. The programs which you run are called from graphics Icons. There is no need to remember any DOS commands. Compound documents can be created from any number of applications, such as text documents, graphics, spreadsheets etc. without having to remember filenames or subdirectories. All the interaction is transparent to the user. There is an extensive online help facility to assist in learning to use the software. Also included is an intermediate "what you see is what you get" word processor, which includes a spelling checker, autopagination, page preview, autosave every 30 keystrikes, ASCII format, cut and paste etc.
In the daily press there is mention of falling real estate prices and a surplus of office space for sale and rent. A sub-committee is investigating what is available in the marketplace. The space available at Cecil Street is proving to be inadequate for our needs, and rather than have to rent additional space to just cope with our immediate needs, it will be preferable to look further into the future at what will be required in several years time. The use of club rooms for SIG meetings will ensure that there is a focal point for all meetings (of course Ian Clunies Ross House will still be used to cater for the monthly general meetings and any large extraordinary meetings). The advantage is that all our equipment will be available in the one building and can be used with greater efficiency. It will be less prone to damage from being carried to different venues, and less onerous on the people who do the carrying. A training workshop could be set up, and with additional equipment installed, courses could be conducted during the day as well as in the evening. The cost could be reduced as there would be no hire charges to pay. Many other activities can be organised when there is a permanent location with space available.
Since Tom Coleman has been back in Melbourne there has been an awakening in the training sphere. Unfortunately, even though one of our main reasons for existing, training has not been featured very strongly in the past couple of years. Tom appealed for assistance in co-ordinating the activities of trainers, and Brett Chapman volunteered. We thank Brett for offering his service and look forward to increased activity in this field. Watch PC Update for details of courses.
It is disturbing to read in PC Update things for which the PC Update BBS can be used. The committee decided to have the extra board because there was a second telephone line which was intended for the BBS, but not used due to difficulty in operating two lines. Another reason was that authors had difficulty in accessing the BBS due to heavy traffic. Also the editorial team could not perform their own housekeeping and had difficulty accessing the BBS to download articles for sub-editing. Also if the time limit was insufficient the same access problem was present when trying to re-access. The use of the PC Update board is to upload articles, letters to the editor, free adverts, messages to the editorial staff. Any messages to other members must be addressed to the main board. Any files of PD or Shareware programmes or Usenet must be uploaded to the main board. There is no point in installing a BBS to facilitate the operation of the editorial function of PC Update and having the advantage nullified by cluttering it up with activities already catered for on the main BBS. Messages to committee or to the Administrative Officer are OK, as in general there are very few of these. In fact committee often wonder if there is anyone out there taking into account the silence.
It is intended to conduct a survey of members with a prepaid reply form. Hopefully it will be in this copy of PC Update, but depends on whether it can be assembled in time for posting. Hopefully all members will participate so that it will be a useful basis on which to base the advancement and direction of the group into the future. The committee intend to formulate a five year plan on the objectives and the means to obtain them. To fulfil this task it is useful to know what are members likes and dislikes, and also what they expect of the Group. It is possible that there is a need for something which the committee has not even thought of.
When looking at the financial reports the greatest drain on resources are the cost of administration and the magazine. The main source of income apart from subscriptions comes from PD software and disk sales. Some of the things which were conducted in the past, when the cost of administration is taken into account have been run at a loss. With the accounting principles put into effect recently, costs will be more accurately calculated.
There has been an increase in demand for Public Domain software in the past six weeks. It is hard to tell if it is due to the revised pricing policy, or new titles. However a survey of recent sales show that the Catalogue disk followed by the Anti viral pack are way in front and then 50 titles above MELB 1400 and then 171 titles spread reasonably evenly through the rest.
This is a fault on the master disk from overseas, and a request for a new copy has been made. From now on the additions to the library catalogue will list the executable files instead of the the archive names. These latter very often do not convey the nature of the files, and it is difficult to compare updates when new disks are obtained. In the course of time all the archive names will be replaced by a list of their contents. A method of
indicating that a file is in an archive will be introduced into the file record for reference. This is a long term project, as at the same time, earlier version duplicates will be culled out as well as old files which have a more
up-to-date version. The ones in mind being BASIC files replaced by compiled ones or rewritten in faster running languages. However more will be said as the project progresses.
Reprinted from the May 1990 issue of PC Update, the magazine of Melbourne PC User Group, Australia
