 The magazine of the Melbourne PC User Group President's Page John Drake |
April is shareware month at Melbourne PC User Group. We are continuing to offer a wide range of shareware to our members and our meeting, at Clunies Ross House, will be devoted to "my favourite shareware program.
Shareware is one of the great successes in the history of the PC. Once upon a time the program used by the prudent PC owner came from a big commercial software firm; it was expensive but it was reliable. If you were more adventurous, or needed to save money, you might have experimented with one of the growing number of public domain programs, written by computer enthusiasts in their spare time and launched, like thistledown, into the air to fall and take root where they might. They were cheap and they were often very risky.
Today this has all changed. In a few gelds commercial programs still dominate an application - one thinks of Ventura Publisher and Aldus Pagemaker in the field of desktop publishing. But for most applications there are public domain programs that match the performance of the commercial programs. And they are cheap; indeed if you want to be unscrupulous about it they are virtually free of charge. Some software merchants encourage the notion that when you have bought a public domain program for five or ten dollars your payment obligations are at an end.
This is rarely so. Public domain software falls into two groups. A few programs are truly "freeware"; once you have paid your five or ten dollars for the original disk there's no more to pay. The Lharc program this Group uses for compressing programs falls into this category.
But most public domain programs are "shareware"; your initial payment covers an evaluation copy of the program. If you use it and like it sufficiently to go on using it there is a moral obligation to pay an additional registration fee. In fact it is a legal obligation but I don't know how an author could pursue a user who doesn't pay up, unless it is a big corporation whose use would be obvious to all the world.
In the Melbourne PC User Group we take this obligation very seriously. We sell a very large number of shareware programs every year and we have encouraged our members to pay out tens of thousands of dollars to the authors. As a result we are well known internationally for our support for shareware authors. It shows what morally upright characters we are and it also shows that we have an eye to the future. If we don't support the authors of shareware they're going to get fed up and there won't be any new shareware. So there's a more than a bit of self interest mixed up with our high moral stand.
Membership Renewals So, my message is to look at the membership date on the address sheet of this issue of
PC Update and if your membership is up please renew it You can send us a cheque or authorisation to charge your credit card, you can authorise credit card payment on the telephone or you can do it on the Group's BBS. 0ur March meeting at Clunies Ross House was devoted to communications and our Hardware SIG advised members on the fabrication of cables to connect modems to PCs; the savings one can achieve by making up your own cable can be quite extraordinary. As a follow up, at the end of our April meeting some Hardware SIG boffins will once more be in the hall to give further
advice - if you bring your pieces along (a pair of DB25 male and female plugs and enough 25-lead ribbon cable-26-lead will also do) they will probably help you assemble your cable. If you're at all handy with a screwdriver and curious about how a computer ticks you might be interested in participating in this very active SIG. Felix Hofmann is the man to talk to, or Committee member Doug Brooke. Our communications meeting showed that a lot of members are interested in accessing the BBS but are nervous of modems and bauds and communications programs and all that sort of thing. I think that we should organise an early workshop where the communication procedures are demonstrated and members' more detailed questions answered (watch this space).
Reprinted from the April 1991 issue of PC Update, the magazine of Melbourne PC User Group, Australia
April Meeting
To come back to our April meeting, I have asked a number of shareware enthusiasts to make presentations of their favourite programs.
Members will be invited to talk about other programs from the floor and if they are suddenly inspired to demonstrate them, and it won't take too long to load them up on our computer, well the more the merrier.
This is that time of year again when, by historical accident, most of our members decide if they want to stay with us another year or if they want to get out. And a considerable number of members want to continue their membership but don't get around to shooting off a cheque until they have had one or two expensive reminder notes or a telephone call. It's an annual trial for the Committee and deciding what to do takes up a lot of its time and, whatever the answer they reach, it involves unnecessary expenditure by the Group.
Modem Cables
