 The magazine of the Melbourne PC User Group Editorial Ash Nallawalla ash@melbpc.org.au |
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The Pres Said column suggests that PC Update is a "drain" on our resources. Charles Wright expresses his opinion on that and other matters in his discussion paper. If you agree or disagree with Charles, please make it a point of saying something. Be sure to complete the questionnaire that will appear either this month or next, and s-p-e-l-l out your views. No doubt you'll read more about it.
If I am still around in December, I will probably stand for a Committee position if anyone should care to nominate me. My resignation was made for reasons that don't exist now.
Authors Please Note!
We have a few articles where the authors have not inserted their names anywhere in the body of the submission. We will not print them until we have identified their authors. If you accidentally forgot to leave your name in your last submission then please contact Peter Smith to sort it out - your article travels all over town by telephone and must contain such information.
I only printed some overseas items this month because they were referred to last month in another article and because some last-minute page juggling led to a layout nightmare. I still get items from authors when I am assembling the final copy, so some pages are unedited.
The PC Update BBS is taking more of my time than planned. When I installed the Maximus BBS software I spent a few nights configuring it and over 8 hours at the club office setting it up. (Colin Macauley spent even more time setting up the main BBS that day.) Oh boy! Running a BBS is a time-consuming job! Anyway, you will like the new features that Maximus provides. Why not give either BBS a call to see for yourself?
I have given up the idea of allowing people to upload programs on the PC Update BBS for relay to the main BBS. As we already have some unidentified people logging on, we run the risk of dubious files being uploaded. All I can say is that our group contains an unfortunate sample of the community at large.
I know that about 5-7 new people use this BBS every day, and hardly anyone calls again, so my earlier suggestion to upload files for the other BBS on this BBS was made in the interest of increasing usage of both boards. The editors only use it frantically in the two weeks following the monthly meeting.
Melb PC BBS
The main BBS also uses the Maximus BBS software. If you use a script to automate your login, you will need to change it. Two interesting options have been added by Colin: You can renew your subscription by credit card by means of a menu option; you can see a list of new files uploaded since your last login by another menu selection.
On both boards I have changed the auto-answer settings so that the phone will ring if the BBS is down. That will save you some money because in the past the modem would answer your call and you would lose your 21 cents.
I have written a brief proposal for a USENET facility and will advise you of the Committee's response. If approval in principle is given, I will try and get donated equipment but if not I will make a bid for about $20,000 worth of equipment.
My proposal is along the lines that we provide a multiple line dial-up service for a donation that will help offset a small part of the cost of the equipment. We cannot charge a fee for USENET as such, as it is a free resource at the moment, although there is talk of introducing a very nominal annual fee. My employers have offered to provide a free news feed, and such offers do not come often. My only recommendation is that only adult members be given access to USENET, because it sometimes carries material unsuitable for publication. There will also be a limit to the people allowed to use it, because each user will be given a few megabytes of disk space, and we want to do it on a PC, not a mainframe.
Deakin University (a corporate member of Melb PC) is setting up Australia's main (IBM PC) PD software archive of some 250 MB. Anyone on USENET can request any file from this archive free of charge, as an option to requesting a file from an overseas or interstate archive. I do not regard this as a threat to our PD sales because only a third of our members have modems.
Reprinted from the May 1990 issue of PC Update, the magazine of Melbourne PC User Group, Australia
