CLUB INFORMATION The SLO BYTES Newsletter is a monthly publication of SLO BYTES of the Central Coast of California (San Luis Obispo) an IBM/compatible personal computer user's group. Information found in this Newsletter is derived from magazine articles, manuals, books, other PC user group newsletters, and our own members. The purpose of this publication is to inform our members of meetings, their program content, and other information related to the use of IBM-PC's and compatible computers. Dues to SLO BYTES are $18 per year. Newsletter only is $10 per year. As a member you will receive a membership card, a new member manual, SLO BYTES monthly newsletter, and free use of our Public Domain Library. Contributors are asked to submit articles for the next issue by the 15th of each month either in writing or on disk (ASCII format preferred). Address all correspondence to SLO BYTES PC USER'S GROUP, c/o Bob Ward, 2100 Andre' Ave., Los Osos, Ca. 93402. Phone 8am-5pm 756-2164, after 5pm - (805)528-0121. Other user's groups have permission to publish any material found in this newsletter. Treasurer: John Rohde 1214 Vista Del Lego San Luis Obispo, CA 93401 Have a computer related item to sell? Tell the editor and we will put it in our newsletter. For further information call Bob Ward at (805)528-0121 eves or leave a message on our BBS. SLO BYTES BULLETIN BOARD (805) 528-3753 2400/8/N/1 PC Files & Message section. SYSOP: George Campbell All Welcome - 24 hours ****************************************************** ****************************************************** Meetings are held the 1st Thursday of every month, unless noted otherwise in the newsletter calendar, at 7:15 pm. New users SIG 6:15 to 7:00 pm. Meeting place: Cal Poly University Biology Department, Science North 213 (new users SIG) & 215 General meeting. ****************************************************** DI$COUNT$-DI$COUNT$-DI$COUNT$-DI$COUNT$-DI$COUNT$ Discounts usually apply only to regularly priced merchandise. Ask a salesman to make sure. You must present your membership card to receive a discount. Paradise Computers 5% - all computers, peripherals, 441 Marsh St. and software. San Luis Obispo 10% - Ribbons, paper, disks & 544-7127 other expendable items. Star Computers 5% - any software in stock. 655 Morro Bay Blvd. Morro Bay 10% - paper, ribbons, cable & 772-7827 other supplies. Computer Logic 10% - off list - all computers, 973 Foothill Blvd. software, computer periphe- Store #4 rals and products. Contact San Luis Obispo Bruce, Paul, or Dave for 544-8347 your discount. WITCO Computers 10% off complete systems. 3563 Sueldo, 5% off computers alone Building B 10% off already discounted San Luis Obispo peripherals, & supplies but 549-0811 not including software. FISBOSA Systems 10% - off packaged systems, soft- 3121 S. Higuera, F ware &/or peripherals when San Luis Obispo purchased with system. Con- 549-9027 tact Lynne Boisen. $$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$ ====================================================== || || || || || FLOPPY DISKS 4-SALE || || || || @ || || || || THE MEETING || || || || DSDD UNFORMATTED SYNCOM GENERIC 360K || || with labels, tabs, and tyvek sleeves || || || || 1-9 ....... $.75 || || 10+ ....... $.70 || || || || HIGH DENSITY DISKS 1.2 MEG ...... $1.10 ea || || || || NEW LIBRARY DISKS ......... $.90 ea || || || || Epson Ribbons (MX,FX) || || Narrow - $3.00 || || || ====================================================== $$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$ TREASURER'S REPORT John Rohde, treasurer, reported the following income & expenses for the month of June, 1988: Beginning Balance: $ 1564.06 Income: $ 220.00 General Expenses: $ -169.32 ========= Ending Balance: $ 1614.74 BITS N' BYTES *** Notice a difference in the newsletter this month? A facelift to say the least. My many thanks to Teri Sorgatz, our Ventura Whizard, for answering my MANY questions on Ventura Publishing. If it wasn't for her, I'd still be on page one! An expert in her field to say the least. *** Congratulations to Dan Senst, winner of WordStar Professional. After collecting raffle tickets for many months we made the big draw. *** Please be aware that starting with our OCTOBER meeting we will meet on the first SUNDAY of each month. New users SIG will start at 1:30pm and the general meeting at 2:30. Our Public Domain Library will be available at approximately 12:30pm for copying. *** Some of the local BBS's may not be operational this summer due to summer vacation of many Cal Poly students. One SYSOP, Steve Flaherty, who ran SLO PC FILE TRANSFER, is gone and will not be returning. *** A big thank you to our SYSOP, George Campbell, for his dedication on keeping our board up and running. Only one mysterious event for our board so far. He returned home one afternoon to find our computer both "brain and power" dead with the switch still on. When he turned it back on everything started back up but the "system" on the hard disk was destroyed. A fast SYS command from drive A: and it was back up and running. I really like it when a plan comes together. *** Our many thanks to Gus Thomasson for volunteering to be our program chairman. A few letters to the many hardware and software producers and we should see some different speakers at our general meetings *** Executive Systems, producer of XTREE software, is moving their headquarters to San Luis Obispo. We'll give them a month or two to unpack their boxes then ask for a demo at one of our meetings. CALENDAR July 7th Dollars & $ense by Gus Thomasson August 4th Open Our meeting place has been changed for the months of July, August, and September to Fisher Hall 286. The library will remain in Fisher 292. Check the bill- board in the patio for directions. Effective October 2nd, our meetings will be held on the first Sunday of each month. New user's SIG will start at 1:30pm with the general meeting starting at 2:30pm. We're sorry for the inconvenience this may cause some of our members, but due to difficulties in scheduling a room on the Cal Poly Campus during weekdays, we have little choice. THE SHAREWARE CORNER: BAKER'S DOZEN guest reviewed by Dan Lufkin, Capital PC Monitor, November, 1987 Here's another collection of utilities, 14 in all, to add to all those handy function-key definers and subdirectory renamers and directory sorters that you downloaded but never quite got around to installing. Why, you are asking, should I buy still another batch of odds and ends that I'll probably never use? Well, First of all, you don't actually have ty buy BAKER'S DOZEN. At least not up front. (SLO BYTES LIBRARY DISK #212.) It's shareware, a product of Jim Button's ButtonWare Inc., publishers of PC-TYPE, PC- DIAL, PC-FILE+, PC-CALC, plus several well-received games and educational programs. For those of you who came in late, shareware means that BAKER'S DOZEN can be copied freely by private individuals and computer clubs and handed around to others for "evaluation." If you use the utility programs "productively" or for business purposes, then you are on your honor to buy a copy of BAKER'S DOZEN from ButtonWare or from an authorized dealer. If you buy it at the list price of $59.95, you are entitled to a year's free technical hot-line and BBS support, and you get a nicely bound paperback manual. If you don't need the technical support, you can buy the program disk and manual for $25. If you are satisfied with the library version, which contains an 8-page on-disk manual, you can register for the tech support alone for $30. You do all this by calling 1-800-J-BUTTON, and there's a full explanation of the shareware concept on the distribution disk. If you don't need either the manual or the tech support, you're on you own, I guess! That's the way BUTTONWARE works, and it must be doing all right; Button has been in the business since 1982 and both the programming and thr printed manual for BAKER'S DOZEN are first-class specimens with no signs of corporate distress. Earlier BUTTONWARE products were distributed the same way and for comparable prices. The utilities included in the package are a mixed bag; some are ingenious and potentially useful, but some are the software equivalent of those odd kitchen gadgets that show up at Christmas. I'll list the digital garlic presses first and work up to the good stuff. 1. SWCOM12.COM switches serial ports COM1: and COM2: and SWLPT12.COM does the same thing with parallel ports LPT1: and LPT2:. This allows you to have two ports with a printer on each one and send your output to either one. Personally, I think that a regualar A- B switch is more practical, but if you already have an extra port, perhaps on a multifunction card, you could use this approach. 2. SETSCRN.EXE creates a SETSCRN.COM file that you can call under AUTOEXEC.BAT to see boarder and screen colors. DOS'S PROMPT will do about the same, except for the boarder. The border won't work with the EGA adapter, and SETSCRN is incompatible with BORLAND's LIGHTNING. 3. RDIR removes any directory on any drive you specify, so long as the disk is not write-protected. In case the hair just rose on your head as you thought what could happen if you flubbed byping "dir" to get an innocent directory, this gem of the programmer's art gives you a preview of the destruction that is about to be wreaked and waits for a (Y/N) response. If you have to remove directories often and like to live dangerously, this utility is for you. Personally, I won't keep even the printed source code in the same room with my computer. 4. PRNFILE redirects your printer output to a disk. Seems to me that you ought to be able to do this with a redirection under DOS, but here's a neat and handy canned way to save printer output. 5. GKEY tells you more about your keyboard than you may care to know. There are several ways of displaying the ASCII character set in decimal or hex form, but GKEY goes still further and shows you the keystroke values and scan codes returned by interrupts 9 and 16H, respectively, ehen a key is pressed and when it is released. This could be handy for a programmer who is using a non-standard keyboard, or who doesn't have easy access to the DOS Technical Manual. 6. CALENDAR. is another of those instant calendar generators that seem to multiply like cabbage moths. Why is this calendar different from all the other calendars? It keeps track of Passover, that's why. Not only Passover, but also Easter, Thanksgiving, Chinese New Year, Sadie hawkins' Day, Elections Day, or any other day you can define in the civil, Jewish, or Chinese calendar system.s It can be memory resident and may be customized to fitle, color, hotkey, special holidays, and many other features. 7. P90 prints an ASCII file either sideways or upright. Most of us have seen the original SIDEWAYS program, designed to work with 1-2-3 and the multitude of imitations that have folowed. P90 doesn't have the range of font sizes and layout options that SIDEWAYS offers, and it doesn't have any interface with 1-2-3. It does have some nice touches, such as the ability not to print sideways if what you want is a printed video memory image, rather than your printer's version of the ASCII character displayed on the screen. P90 is setup to operate with Epson 9-pin printers, so it will drive a good many popular models, both Epson's and others that use the Spson escape codes. With Epson 24- pin models, such as the LQ-800, the printing is overscale and dotty in normal mode and distorted in compressed mode. 8. SNAPSHOT captures an image of your screen to a file when you press CNTRL-ALT-P. If you're documenting a program or an operating procedure and want to illustrate what the screen will look like at a particular stage, this program can save you some note- taking and keyboarding. You can record up to 99 separate snapshots in a session and review the images already saved. This is a utility that could be worth the price of admission to a consultant who develops training material. 9. PCSORT is an expansion and improvement on the built-in DOS sorting utility. It accepts any ordinary ASCII file with records of up to 999 characters, as big as available memory will allow. It sorts in ascending or descending order, case-sensitive or insensitive, on up to four fields, which may be overlapping. Both the input and output of PCSORT may be piped and redirected as with the DOS SORT command. In other words, if you ever use DOS SORT but are hampered by its shortcommings, you'll find PCSORT useful. 10. LOCATE finds where any file or wildcard group of files is located anywhere on your disk. It also locates a string of data anywhere on a disk. You can add parameters to the command line that will control just about every conceivable aspect of the search and the final report. There are, as fara as I can tell without making a detailed comparison, several dozen utilities in public domain that do the identical task. 11. FILECOMP is the utility I'd need if I wanted to make a detailed comparison between two files. It extends DOS's COMP utility to include a listing of which lines in file 2 correspond to which lines in file 1, even though lines or whole paragraphs may have been reordered. I can see that this utility could be very useful for comparing two versions of a source code listing or a legal document. This is a sophisticated piece of software design and it's interesting to set up pairs of documents and see how it copes with them. 12. BUTTON-CALC is a cross between an on-screen programmable calculator and a mini-spreadsheet. As a spreadsheet it is a pathetic little thing, only six solumns by 20 rows, but it behaves roughly like Arnold Schwarzenegger and Albert Einstein merged into Pee-Wee Herman's body. It supports most of the usual spreadsheets operations: saving and recalling working files, using range names, copying, moving and sorting cells, inserting and deleting rows and columns, and doing date and line calculations. BUTTON-CALC also supports an amazing range of logical, scientific and engineering, and business functions, five help screens full, in fact. It works in hex as well as decimal arithmetic, allows iterative operations through controlled looping between cells, checks the syntax of formulas as they are entered into cells and does date and time calculations. BUTTON-CALC is related to PC- CALC. As it stands, it's an impressive package with many nice features; it's handy as a sort of programmable calculator (though it doesn't have the branching capability need for real programming), but it doesn't have the capacity you need for a serious spreadsheet. It's hard to classify, but it's definitely not in the gadget category. 13. DISKUTIL is the real heavyweight of the BAKER'S DOZEN package. It gives you control over many of the details of DOS disk and file management. In the range of its functions, DISKUTIL is similar to the advanced version of the new Norton Utilities. You can read and edit file allocations tables (the FAT), the directory, and any file on a disk. With these capabilities you can do wonders or you can wreck a disk with months of work on it. Which you do depends upon how well you understand what you're doing. If you know how the FAT works and how DOS deletes a file from a directory, for example, you can undelete a file you have erased by accident. If you don't understand that, you can innocently cut off access to files by changing a single bit in the FAT. The BAKER'S DOZEN manual gives an adequate description of the structure of the fAT and the steps to go through in recovering a deleted file. The on-disk documentation of DISKUTIL, however is sketchy and definitely does not leave the reader qualified to use the program safely. For this reason the strongest program in the BAKER'S DOZEN package is useless as shareware unless you happen to have other material, the DOS Technical Manual for example, from which you can get the necessary background information. To sum up, BAKER'S DOZEN is an interesting mixture of tuilities; all of them are ingenious and some of them are genuinely useful. The most useful ones, though, need much more thorough documentation than you get if you use the library version. Since full documentation is available only with the $59.95 registration fee, that makes the useful one pretty expensive. On the whole, you'd do better to shop the public domain and shareware market for the specific utilities that you need. DR. DOS ANSWERS YOUR QUERIES Dext Marsh, Pinellas PC UG Dear Dr. Dos, I am using a 40 MB hard disk and have many subdirectories. Consequently, my path names are long and I find that I am running out of environment space. Is there anything which I can do? J.T. Dear J.T. There are several things which you may do. First, consider having no more than three levels of subdirectories. Second, try to keep the names of your subdirectories short. Third, if you are using DOS 3.1 or 3.2 - then double your environment size by including this command in your CONFIG.SYS file: SHELL=C:\COMMAND.COM /P /E:20 This will increase your environment size from 160 to 320 bytes. By the way, while you are editing your CONFIG.SYS file, I would like to suggest that you also include "STACK=16,128". The current stack size is too small and if you don't make this adjustment, sooner or later, you will be reading the enigmatic message: "FATAL: Internal Stack Failure. System Halted." DOS 3.2 has a default of nine simultaneous hardware interrupts and exceeding this limit is particularly onerous (you won't like it). So, take a few minutes now and save yourself a great deal of frustration later (not to mention the chance of losing a critical file). The format of this command is: "STACKS = n,s" where n represents the number of stack frames (the range is 8 to 64) and s represents the size, in bytes and has a range of 32 to 512, with a default of 128. SLO BYTES LIBRARY This month we are adding four disks to our public domain/shareware library. #267 Finger Paint - similar to PC Paint with editing, fill, & drawing capabilities. Requires color, supports EGA, mouse helpful #268 World Statistics (PC SIG #668) <197> Population and income per capita are just a couple statistics available in this database. Interesting #269 Application Programs: SCOUT, memory resident hard disk manager; VENTURA, Ventura publishing demo program; LETTERS, 100 form letters.... and more. #270 Computer Utilities: TONTO, a Sidekick look-a- like; SYSLOC, password protect your computer; DIPSET, graphically shows your dip switch settings; a disk analyzer, a memory resident print spooler, etc. DEMO'S #69 a&b BUICK an interesting sales promotion of Buick automobiles. Requires CGA. Good graphics. Meetings are held the 1st Thursday of every month, unless noted otherwise in the newsletter calendar, at 7:15 pm. New users SIG 6:15 to 7:00 pm Meeting place: Cal Poly University Biology Department, Fisher Hall 286. Public Domain Library is in Fisher Hall 292. NEW MEMBERS Welcome to the new members of SLO BYTES for the month of June, 1988 John Bryan 238-5607 Frank Butz 927-8457 Allan McKibben Eric Schug 489-4720 Charles Viescas 543-7524 Willard Osibin 434-1843 TELENET PHONE NETWORK The club is making an effort to bring Telenet, a telephone network by U.S. Sprint, into San Luis Obispo. You can do your part by filling out the questionnaire attached to this newsletter and sending it to the Telenet Communications Corporation in Reston, Virginia. You ask, "Of what benefit is this national telephone network in San Luis Obispo?" Telenet is just the "tip of the iceberg." Besides the obvious advantages of having a local number to call some of the national databases, PC Pursuit would be available to everyone in the area. PC Pursuit is a service of Telenet which, for $25.00 per month, allows you to be in direct communications through your modem and computer to 33 major metropolitan areas in the United States. You may access these areas through a local phone number during evening hours and weekends to call thousands of bulletin boards throughout the country. Yes, the $25.00 covers it all. No extra charges for dialing the number and NO TIME LIMIT for calling throughout the United States. Imagine calling Boston for 3 hours via your computer with no phone charges? Unfortunately, the closest Telenet number to San Luis Obispo is in Santa Barbara. We can change that with your help. Here are a couple "tips" on how to fill out the Local Access Questionnaire. Question #1 asks what area code and exchange you would like to call from. Of course area code 805 and I would suggest an exchange of 543 or 549. This won't help some of you in outlying areas, but the only way U.S. Sprint will consider our request is if we have some conformity in our answers.... and San Luis Obispo is the largest and most centrally located city around. Under question #3 check the appropriate boxes. If you work in a business that uses computers, then check public databases services and electronic mail. The times are also important as well as the number of hours. Make sure to check the OTHER box and specify PC Pursuit during evening hours and guesstimate the number of hours per month you would use the service. Under question #7 fill in the company you work for if computers are present otherwise your home address will do. If you have already filled this questionnaire at the last meeting take this copy, make other copies, and give it to your friends. We will also be distributing these forms to the local computer stores for their distribution. Every questionnaire submitted to Telenet brings us closer to a local number and PC Pursuit. WHAT'S HAPPENING At our general meeting in June, George Campbell supplied us with an excellent overview of the computer magazines around us. To recap his talk briefly, let me list the magazines covered with a short description of each. Byte This is a magazine for the advanced computer user. Contains technical subject matter, interesting but not for the beginner. Computer Shopper Covers all brands of computers with how-to articles. Heavy on advertising and mail-order. Many typos so watch out for written programs. For beginners to intermediate computer users. Compute's PC Intended for beginners. Includes disk. New magazine with many modifications in the near future. Expensive. Personal Computing Geared for small businesses. Hardware and software reviews may be biased. Good ad coverage. Lots of how-to. Business Software Business software oriented. Ads heavy on accounting. Profiles Magazine for KayPro users. Some reviews and how-to articles. CP/M may be covered. Publish Desktop Publishing magazine with tutorials, reviews and good ads. A must for desktop publishers. PC Resources Practical tips, good how to articles. Much DOS information. Excellent for most users. 80- Micro Magazine for Tandy users. Some focus on MS DOS. Some programming information. Family and Home Office Computing For beginner and intermediate computer users. Game reviews, home office information. Not sophisticated but good for kids. PC Magazine Covers all aspects of MS/PC DOS computing. Great in-depth reviews and excellent how-to articles. Both expert and beginner articles. PC World Little less technical than PC Magazine. Good reviews and how-to articles. More business oriented. Another good choice. George also briefly covered Disk Magazines such as Big Blue Magazine on Disk; Programmer's Magazines such as Programmer's Journal, Dr. Dobb's Journal, and PC Tech Journal. Several trade journals, including PC Week, Computer Resellers News, and Computer and Software News were mentioned. Next month Gus Thomasson (remember GEM a couple months back) will be back with us, this time giving us a demonstration of that very popular money management program Dollars and $ense. George gets a month off from the deluge of new user questions at our early meeting. I will be there to "direct traffic" and hopefully answer your many questions. I will cover two DOS commands at the beginning of this meeting: 1. SUBST found in DOS 3.1 and beyond, and 2. XCOPY which has its roots in DOS 3.2. After a demonstration of these commands the floor will be open to questions.