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FARGO IBM PC NEWSLETTER CONTENTS -- FEBRUARY, 1986 January Meeting Notes------------------------------------------------1 Freeware: EZFORM-----------------------------------------------------1 Software: Microsoft WINDOWS -----------------------------------------2 Drawing Results!-----------------------------------------------------4 Software: Norton Utilities-------------------------------------------4 Sidekick: Graphics---------------------------------------------------4 Editor's Screen------------------------------------------------------5 New User Notes: Serial/Parallel--------------------------------------5 User Group Officers--------------------------------------------------6 President's Corner---------------------------------------------------6 Fargo RBBS & Library Files (Uploads 1/8/86--2/8/86) ---------------------------------------------------------------------- JANUARY MEETING NOTES ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Around the Table. The Sperry-IT (AT-compatible) computer was brought back for users to see. The Lightning Program (not to be confused with Turbo-Lightning) was demonstrated courtesy of Don Zimmerman. The program increases performance through disk caching routines. Upcoming Programs. In February we'll take a look at Turbo Lightning from Borland. March will focus on hardware maintenance and repairs. In April we're arranging for a company demonstration of the Paradox data base. In May we will host a "White Elephant Swap" in which you can bring hardware and software to buy, sell, trade, or whatever. If you have something that would interest others, bring it along to the May meeting and see what happens. [Plans subject to change.] ---------------------------------------------------------------------- FREEWARE: EZFORM ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Forms. One of the classic limitations of word processing is the difficulty of filling in lines on a printed page. Though most word processors offer a mode where you can send characters directly to the printer, estimating the position of the printhead can make the process cumbersome. A form generator allows you to create and print out customized business forms. EZ-FORM will not compete with the quality of your neighborhood printer, but it does allow you to produce a workhorse variety of forms for personal or business use. Options. You can produce forms that are either blank or filled out. The program includes 48 samples, called master forms, which you can either use directly or modify to meet your needs. You also have the ability to design your own forms. To fill out a form that has already been created, you follow the menu instructions and enter in whatever information you choose. EZ- FORM requires that you use the cursor keys extensively to position your text. It's editor is crude--no word warp, no insert mode, no quick movement by word or line. For short forms, however, the limitations are negligible. You can save the completed form (which will have an FOF extension) without compromising your master form. Both master forms and completed forms can be edited whenever you want. Form Design. To design a form, you set the maximum page width and length. Then you determine whether you want an outside border on your form or not. Lastly, you insert words and draw lines. A line is drawn by marking the beginning and end with the <F5> key. The <F6> key will delete a line. Printing. The easiest way to print a form is from within the program. EZ-FORM uses only the lower 128 printable ASCII characters, reducing the complications with control codes, etc. Your printer options are thus restricted to an Epson type dot matrix and a TTY type daisy wheel. (My Okidata 92 worked fine.) The program will support compressed printing only with Epson series printers and the Prowriter series. You can write the output to an ASCII file and modify it using a word processor. To do this, you simply choose the "Export" option and give the program a filename. I had no trouble editing the text with PC-Write 2.55. Use. For quick and dirty notes and memos, I will probably stick with the Sidekick notepad. There are a few forms within EZ-FORM that look quite attractive. One offers a meeting agenda. Another outlines meeting assignments. EZ-FORM also offers invoices, memos, weekly and monthly calendars. There are forms for bids and estimates and travel reimbursements. Most of the forms are designed within a 65 line x 80 column matrix. For anyone who does not use enough of any one form to justify carton purchases, EZ-FORM will enable you to produce blank or completed copies as needed. Background. EZ-FORM was written in Turbo Pascal. The program itself is 64K. It comes as part of an ARC file called EZFORM.ARC. The ARC file is 115K. Unsqueezing it is a bit complicated, however, as its 61 unsqueezed files will expand to 436K. I put the pre-defined forms (FRM extension) on one disk and everything else on the other. Once you go through the pre-defined forms and omit those you won't use, you can reduce the program to one disk easily. Each pre-defined form occupies about 5K of space; a filled-in form about 10K. Documentation. EZ-FORM is basically a menu-driven program. I found the menus a bit cryptic, and would recommend spending a few minutes with the documentation until you get the hang of the program. Once you understand the logic of the program the menus are all you need. Cost. EZ-FORMS is a shareware product from MaeDae Enterprises, 1826 Wren, League City, Texas 77573. The designers offer three levels of registration. For $40 you receive telephone support, printed documentation, updates, and a $10 commission for others who register from your copy. $30 allows you one update and no commission. Those who register for $10 receive a disk with the program and some of the pre-defined forms. (Add $3 for postage in each case.) ---------------------------------------------------------------------- SOFTWARE: Microsoft Windows ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Prophets foretold that integrated software would soon dominate the market. By designing a word processor, spreadsheet, and data base program that would work together, the user could avoid the hassle of loading and terminating incompatible programs time after time. Unfortunately, the best programs are made by a variety of companies. Most of us have a breakfast table assortment of favorites--the Raisin Bran, Sugar Pops, and Grape Nuts of software. Windowing environments (DesQ, GEM, Topview, and Windows) offer the possibility of moving from one program to another without exiting the first. This switching process can be carried on at two levels. In the first level, program A halts while program B runs. The right key combination freezes B and switches back to A. The second level, called multi-tasking, is a bit more sophisticated. You can switch from program A while it is performing some calculations and it will continue to process the information while program B is running. On an 8088 machine this sharing of the microprocessor seriously slows down the operation of both programs. Either level offers time savings for those who frequently switch between software applications. Installation. Complete installation of Microsoft WINDOWS takes about 17 minutes for a hard disk. The program comes with four disks and over 100 files that need to be copied. The process is foolproof and painless. The only additional information you have to provide is the type of printer(s) you wish to set up and the ports you wish to use. Only 19 printers were supported in my release (1.01)--most of them dot-matrix. Contents. The Windows package actually contains four separate software programs. The first program is the Windows environment, which takes over from DOS to provide a Macintosh or Amiga style shell. Because the display is bit-mapped, you need a color graphics adapter to use Windows. The display will be in black and white unless you have invested $1000+ for an EGA monitor and video adapter. Standard programs that you invoke from within Windows will be displayed in color on a regular color monitor. Windows main menu presents you with a directory. You invoke a program by highlighting its name and hitting RETURN. You can perform all the DOS functions from this menu through pull-down menus. Switching between programs. If you are running an application under Windows, you can return to the main menu with the ALT-TAB combination. Each time you return to the main menu you will see an icon representing each program that is currently active. To jump to program A or D, you highlight its icon and type a three key combination. You can jump in and out of as many programs as your memory will permit. I have had PCFile III, WORD, Sidekick, and QMODEM all active at the same time. What's a PIF? Before you can run a program from within Windows, it must have a 369 byte PIF file. My disk came with 61 such files. QMODEM wasn't among them, so I turned to a PIF Editor program that creates a PIF file for any application. You simply answer fourteen easy questions and the file is created. Though there is some trial and error involved, the process is quite painless. A program can be invoked simply by highlighting the PIF file. If you place your PIF files in one directory, you have control over every program on your hard disk at a glance. Desktop Applications. The second segment of the windows is a set of desktop (Sidekick-like) applications. Seven are included. You get a notepad, cardfile (with auto-dialer), terminal, calendar, calculator, clock, and a game called Reversi. The best of the bunch is the cardfile. It is like the dialer on Sidekick, but has room for nine lines of notes with each entry. The auto-dialer works, but will only dial the first phone number it finds on each card. Windows sorts the cards alphabetically and conducts global searches on any string you enter. The appointment calendar surpasses Sidekick on two points. It allows you to insert any time--say 7:18 a.m. It also offers an alarm. You can also change the interval between appointment lines (1 hour to fifteen minutes) as well as choose between a 12 and 24 hour day. The terminal program is the poorest--I think. Though the auto- dialer of the cardfile worked, I couldn't get the terminal program to work with my modem. Even manual dialing failed. Microsoft owes me a patch on that one. Unlike Sidekick, when you run these programs, they share space on the screen but do not overlap one another. You can only put the calculator next to the notepad, for example, but not on top of it. As a result, there is a lot more moving windows around than with Sidekick. The easiest method is to activate these programs as icons at the bottom of the screen. To invoke a program I select the appropriate icon. Selecting another icon replaces the program. Write! One BIG SURPRISE with the Window package is it's full- fledged word processor called Windows Write. I use Microsoft's flagship program WORD, but found a few things this one could do that WORD could not. First, the display is terrific, even in black on white. The fonts appear exactly as they will on paper, including serifs and proportional spacing. You've got to see it to believe it! More amazingly, any dot-matrix printer with IBM graphics can produce proportionally spaced text as it appears on your screen. The printer output is graphics. This considerably slows down the speed, but it produces some of the best text my Okidata has yet produced. The printer drivers make near letter quality a reality! The files are in ASCII, and can be printed in text mode or shared with another word processor if you prefer. The editing features of Write take a little learning, but overall I would rate them as pretty good. Just about every feature we've come to expect in word processors is included. Write also accepts graphics input from its sister program called Windows Paint. Windows Paint. If you don't have a graphics painting program, Paint is worth the mail-order price of windows. You would think you were using a Macintosh. Paint works best with a mouse, but does not require one. I designed a valentine for my wife that still hangs on our refrigerator, so it can't be all that bad. I really enjoyed the program--especially the Zoom feature that magnifies the screen so that you can work with a pixel at a time. Besides graphics, you have a wide array of fonts and type styles to pick from. You could customize anything that "Newsroom" or "Print Shop" could offer, though no standard files are offered. As mentioned above, Paint's drawings can be merged into Windows Write. The only limitation is that Write's text must be above or below graphics. It cannot share the same line. Conclusions. In general, I like Windows. It would be great for any new users who don't want to face the A> on the screen. (For reg- ular DOS commands, I can move around faster outside the Window shell.) I really appreciate the ability to keep two or more programs active at once. It's desktop functions range from great to poor. Fortunately, I can run Sidekick from within it--so I have both the Sidekick functions I like and the Window Cardfile and Calendar, which I use as well. Windows Write is all the word processor a new user needs, and paint is fun too. One complaint. Windows is a bit sluggish with an 8088. I'll let you know if there is any improvement after my expanded memory board comes. You do get a lot for your money with Windows. For $99 (I paid $64 mail-order) you receive 5 disks with 1.5 megabytes of data, a total of 414 pages of manuals, and a new way to handle your applications. Requirements. Dos 2.0+, 256K (512 recommended), graphics adapter card, two drives or hard disk (recommended). Jim Levitt, Editor ---------------------------------------------------------------------- DRAWING RESULTS ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Members who attended our December User Group meeting may remember the donated software we were given that we decided to give away to members through a random drawing. The winners are listed below!! Congratulations! Fortran Compiler--Dick Sears Basic Program Development--Karl Gunderson P-System--Karl Gunderson Multiplication Tables--Lyle Faurot Dos 1.1--Mark Ugelstad Dos 3.0--Dick Sears Fact Trak--Lyle Faurot Time Manager--Melodee Nowatski Dos 2.0--Karl Gunderson Easywriter--Mark Ugelstad Peachtree Accts. Rec.--Peter Miller Arithmetic Games Set 1--Ron Egge Arithmetic Games Set 2--Jim Levitt Decathlon--Jim King PFS Report--Dick Sears Pascal Compiler--Karl Gunderson Time Manager--Ed Marks Home Budget--Ed Marks Adventure in Serenia--Jim Levitt You can pick up the packages at the February meeting on the 17th. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- SOFTWARE: Norton Utilities ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Our sysop loaned me an evaluation copy of Peter Norton's utility package. Beginning with this issue, we'll be taking a look at some of the features of this widely-used software package. Screen Attributes: This command conveniently allows you to change the display attributes of your monitor. Monochrome users can choose from either standard display or inverse video. Those with color monitors can select from yellow characters on a blue background, bright green characters on a black background, or black characters on a white background (The last is Peter Norton's favorite combination.) The ANSI.SYS driver must be installed for color options. Certain programs, such as QMODEM, will reset the system while in operation, forcing you to enter Norton's command again after exit. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- SIDEKICK: Graphics ---------------------------------------------------------------------- How do they do it? In the message system of the Fargo Board you may have seen callers use graphics in their messages. A recent Byte article gave hints of how to leave graphics in a message for a bulletin board system using Sidekick. Here is a brief outline of the process. First, you create your message using Sidekick's notepad. You type CTRL-Q-G to put the notepad into graphics mode. Once in graphics mode, depress the ALT key and type in the number(s) on the keypad corresponding to the ASCII value of the graphics character you want. Text and Graphics can be mixed in this way. The next step is to mark the block of text. Move the cursor to the beginning of the block and type the F7 key, then to the end and hit the F8 key. Once the block is marked, type CTRL-K-E. You will be prompted for a key to "paste with" Hold down the ALT key and type a key of your choice. You will then be prompted to pick a mode, either line or block. Use the block option for an RBBS message. You can then exit the notepad. Once you are in QMODEM and in the E)nter function of your RBBS, all you need do is depress the ALT key and type the key into which you "pasted" your message. OK, Forget the Graphics. This procedure is perhaps even more valuable as a time and money saver quite apart from the graphics it offers. If you know you're going to leave a message on an RBBS, create it before you log on using Sidekick's notepad and enter it through the "pasted" key. This procedure will also serve you well in moving text into any document from the notepad. Once again, it demonstrates the flexibility of Sidekick. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- EDITOR'S SCREEN ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Bad Image. I was dumbfounded the other day in talking to a local computer retailer regarding the IBM User Group. We were discussing the possibility of examining a copy of Jim Button's commercial program PC-File/R at a user meeting. "I really wouldn't want to do that," he told me. "There would be dozens of copies made. All user groups do that." It was sad to see someone inside the computer industry express such a distorted view of user groups. Worse yet, this gentleman felt no reluctance to question our group's ethics. Needed: Good PR. Anyone who dials the Fargo Board or who attends one of our meetings will soon discover that we condone NO unethical duplication of software. The "Freeware" concept would have died long ago were it not for user group members who believe that quality software programs are worth paying for. Unfortunately, we must combat a "hacker" stereotype. When you and I deal with retailers, we have an opportunity to do just that by mentioning the contributions a user group has made. The best retailers are on our side already. They know that we can help their customers improve their use of hardware and software. We also tantalize those who seek the newest and best in technology. Let's not forget to mention the user group in a positive way when we have the chance. Jim Levitt, Editor ---------------------------------------------------------------------- NEW USER NOTES: Parallel/Serial ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Making your computer communicate with another device ought to be as easy as plugging a phone into a wall--but it isn't. If you are looking at peripherals, here are some tips that might help. Background. The two major ways in which information is transmitted are through serial and parallel ports or connectors. In a parallel connection, each bit of information leaves the computer along with seven friends. The flow is like having eight check out lanes open in a supermarket at one time. Serial processing, however, limits the transmission to one bit at a time. Data goes out in a line or queue (pronounced like the letter q). Parallel processing can be faster, but certain applications, like telecommunications, require serial processing. The IBM PC and other 8088 type computers can currently handle up to two serial ports and three parallel ports. Difficulties. First of all, you need to insure that your computer and peripheral use the same type of port (serial or parallel). My big mistake was buying a Z80 computer with only a serial port. That forced me to buy a serial printer. Hooking it up was a nightmare. It required a cable with the right pin assignments and connectors. Back then, no two spec sheets were the same. Ugh! When I bought another PC everything started over again. I wired a cable to connect my serial printer to a TI-Professional. I dumped the TI 10 days later when the dealer couldn't help me configure the system. Then, when I switched to a Zenith, the cable I'd wired for the TI wouldn't work. The TI expected a male plug and the Zenith a female plug. The pin assignments were different again. It was time to go to Radio Shack and drag out the soldering iron once more. Though such inconsistencies are less common now, they do exist. Tip #1. Buy a printer with a parallel interface. They more likely to be a "plug in and go" operation; and you don't have to mess with start bits, stop bits, and parity as you must with serial communications. Tip #2. If you buy locally, have the dealer hook it up to your computer (or identical model) and test it. It will save you lots of time to have someone who knows DOS's CONFIGUR command set up your configuration software parameters. Tip #3. It is wise to tie up your PC serial ports sparingly. If you use a modem, one serial port is occupied. That leaves only one serial port for a printer, mouse, or other device. Once you have more than two serial devices, you will have to obtain an external switch box to transfer control from one device to another. If you've learned any tricks the hard way, let us know and we'll pass them along to our readers. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- USER GROUP OFFICERS ---------------------------------------------------------------------- President & Sysop------------------------------------------Loren Jones Vice-President-------------------------------------------James Grettum Librarian-----------------------------------------------Calvin Paulson Newsletter Ed.----------------------------------------------Jim Levitt Treasurer--------------------------------------------------Loren Jones Printing-----------------------------------------------------TLC Press User Group Address: Box 9121, Fargo ND 58109 Newsletter Address & Correspondence: Box 97, Wolverton, MN 56594 User Group Phone: FARGO RBBS Phone: 1-701-280-2608 1-701-293-5973 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- The Fargo IBM-PC User Group publishes this newsletter for the benefit of users of the IBM-PC and all compatible computers. The user group is not connected with IBM in any way. IBM is a trademark of International Business Machine Corporation. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- WANT TO JOIN? ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Membership Dues. Prorated dues of $12 are now assessed on an annual basis with October 1 as the starting point. Checks should be made to: "Fargo IBM-PC User Group."