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     MICROPENDIUM Microreviews for February 1996
          by Charles Good

          The three products I am reviewing this month are closely related.
     If you use one of these products you should seriously consider
     obtaining the other two.
          ---------------------
          REMIND ME! CALENDAR by R.F.W. Enterprises

          There are only a few TI products I review that I actually use on
     a very regular basis. Remind Me! Calendar is one of them.  It is a
     commercial supplement to Remind Me!.  Remind Me! is a public domain
     program that is the best appointment calendar program there is for the
     99/4A and Geneve.

          The Calendar is a template of already entered daily Remind Me!
     notes and monthly notepads , a whole year's worth.  Included are
     holidays, famous people's birthdays, highlights of United States
     history, and other neat stuff.  Each month's notepad includes the
     month's holidays (including some you may have never heard of), and the
     gemstone and flower typically associated with that month.  On the day
     in which each state was admitted to the union you are given the year
     when this happened along with the state's bird, tree, and flower.  At
     the lower right corner of each day is the astrological sign for that
     day.  Scattered throughout is interesting information about all United
     States Presidents.

          To use Calendar you boot Remind Me! which comes as a freebe on
     the Calendar disk.  If you don't have a clock card you then manually
     input the current month.  If you do have a clock card in your
     99/4A or if you run Remind Me! on a Geneve then the current month and
     day are automatically selected. Once a month and day are selected
     Calendar notes for the entire month are then automatically loaded into
     memory and you see a display of the month's calendar with the cursor
     on the current day.  Just press <enter> to see the day's notes and
     reminders (they are different for each day of the year) or press the
     space bar to see the monthly notepad, which is the same for all the
     days of a particular month.  Use the arrow keys to move the cursor to
     any other day of the month and see the notes for these other days.
     You can also back out of the current month and load in a calendar
     display and notes for any other month of any year.  At any time you
     are free to add your own personal daily reminder and monthly notes to
     those presented to you by Calendar, if necessary overwriting
     Calendar's notes to make room for your own.  From within Remind Me!
     these changes are easily saved back to disk.

          The Calendar is set up for 1993, but since most of its
     information is not 1993 specific so you can use it for any year.  A
     famous person's birthday is on the same date in all years, not just in
     1993.  Just use the Calendar files as a template, renaming the 12
     files from "1/1993" to "1/1996" etc for each of the 12 months of the
     current year.  Here are the Calendar's daily and monthly notepad for
     February 28, the day many of you will receive in the mail the issue of
     Micropendium containing this review:
          --Notes for February 28.  Birthday: Bernadette Peters 1948.
     Note: Republican party founded 1854.  Note: Indians attack Deerfield
     Mass. 1704, kill 40 carry off 100.  Pices.
          --Monthly notes for February.  Stone-Amathyst.  Flower-Violet.
     Holiday: National Freedom Day 1st.  Holiday: Australia Day 1st.
     Holiday: Boy Scouts Day 8th.  Holiday: Lincoln's Birthday 12th.
     Holiday: St Valentine's Day 14th.  Holiday: President's Day 15th.
     Holiday: Washington's Birthday 22nd.  Holiday: Ash Wednesday 24th.

          All of the above birthdays and notes are valid for any year.
     Some of the holidays, like President's day and Ash Wednesday, are not
     on the same days in February 1996 that they were in February 1993.

          Remind Me! is public domain, but the Remind Me! Calendar files
     are commercial.  They cost $7 including postage from R.F.W.
     Enterprises.  The Calendar files come on a flippy SSSD disk complete
     with hard copy and on disk documentation and the Remind Me! files.
          --------------------
          MBP REAL TIME CLOCK CARD by Cecure Electronics.

          Modern personal computers have built in battery operated clocks.
     Now 99/4A owners can have this feature too.  The MBP board is a public
     domain design that includes the potential capability of analog to
     digital conversion along with a real time clock.  Almost no software
     exists to take advantage of the MBP's analog to digital capability,
     but there are a number of 99/4A applications that make use of a clock,
     if it exists.  Cecure manufactured a bunch of MBP boards and
     originally sold them as kits.  Now the company and has built up the
     remaining boards as fully functional 99/4A computer clocks.  Just add
     a button battery from Radio Shack, drop Cecure's MBP card in your
     P-box, and you have a very accurate and useful computer clock.

          Most software that can utilize a Bud Mills Services' Pgram clock
     or a CorComp triple tech clock will work with Cecure's MBP clock.  In
     my opinion the most useful such software is Remind Me! and the Remind
     Me Calendar described above.  Boot also recognizes these clocks and
     will display the time of day on the Boot start up if a clock is in the
     P-box.  You can also access the MBP clock from either Basic by using a
     series of CALL PEEKs and CALL LOADs.  This is not as convenient as
     with a Pgram or triple tech clock which can be accessed as device
     CLOCK.  With these other cards you can OPEN #1:"CLOCK" and then INPUT
     #1 the time of day, day of the week, and date.  Software is provided
     with the Cecure MBP clock that allows you to set the clock, display
     the time and date in basic command mode, print disk catalogs and disk
     labels with time and date stamps, and do some other potentially useful
     things.  You also get some hard cover docs with the Cecure MBP card,
     but you can ignore most of them.  The docs describe how to build the
     kit which Cecure has already built for you, and give suggestions for
     analog to digital hardware and software.  I understand that such TI
     hardware and software exists, but I have never seen any of it.  You
     can ask Cecure for details.

          What you can't do with any 99/4A clock is automatically time and
     date stamp files as you create them.  The Geneve and other PCs have
     this feature.  The 99/4A doesn't.  The inability to do this is due to
     basic limitations of the TI, Myarc, and Corcomp disk controller's DOS.
     The DOS is in rom and cannot be easily altered.   With other clock
     cards that respond to device name CLOCK it IS possible to manually
     time/date stamp all your text files, but you can't do this with the
     MBP clock.  To do this with other types of clock cards including the
     Pgram and Triple Tech clocks, from any version of TI Writer type LF
     (load file) and press <enter>.  Specify 0 1 1 CLOCK for the file name
     (zero, space, one, space, one, space, "CLOCK").  This will put the
     current time and date in line #0 at the beginning of the document you
     already have in the word processor's edit buffer.  When you save this
     document to disk the time/date notation is saved too as line #1 of the
     document.

          If you don't already have a clock in your 99/4A I highly
     recommend one.  Combined with the other software reviewed by me this
     month, a clock card can be very practical.  Triple tech cards are no
     longer in production.  Only limited numbers of new Pgram cards remain
     unsold, and they are kind of expensive if all you want is a computer
     clock.  Cecure sells their MBP clock for $34.95 plus shipping.
          --------------------
          REMIND ME! by John Johnson

          This software was reviewed many years ago in Micropendium and I
     have partially described its operation in my reveiw above of Remind
     Me! Calendar.  I feel the urge to add additional comments.  Remind Me!
     is one of the most useful practical day to day applications ever
     written for the 99/4A or Geneve.  Because of its speed and ease of use
     it is, in my humble opinion, the best calendar and daily reminder
     software I have seen run on ANY type of computer.

          The key to a good computer calendar and daily reminder program is
     speed.  What you are competing against are notes stuck to the
     refrigerator with magnets or scribbled on a monthly calendar hanging
     on the wall, or hand written entries in a calendar notebook carried in
     a purse or pocket.  Seed is the key!  How long does it take to boot up
     a computer calendar reminder program?  If it is quicker and easier to
     make a written note of an upcoming event in one of these paper and
     pencil ways, or to find the location of a paper that contains written
     notes about what is supposed to be happening today, then you are not
     going to use a computer calendar reminder program.

          My 386DX40 takes what seems to be an eternal amount of time to
     get to its first menu.  When I turn on the PC it checks its memory, 3
     times.  Then it boots MS-DOS, loads its hi-mem memory manager and
     checks its memory yet again.  Then it loads all its device drivers and
     sorts them out into obscure memory locations so they won't interfere
     with each other.  These device drivers include the VGA video, mouse,
     sound card, cd-rom, and modem.  This whole process takes 65 seconds
     just to get me to the first menu.  It then takes an additional 10
     seconds or so before my PC's calendar daily reminder program is
     loaded.  It is much quicker to glance at a note stuck on the
     refrigerator.

          On my 99/4A system I have a clock card and Remind Me! on a
     Horizon ramdisk.  From a cold boot takes me 15-18 seconds to turn on
     my 4A, load Funnelweb from the ramdisk, load Remind Me! from a
     Funnelweb central menu, and pop up on screen the reminders for the
     current day of the current month.  This can be done almost as fast
     from a cold boot by selecting extended basic with Remind Me! and its
     monthly reminder files on a disk in DSK1.  It takes 35 seconds this
     way, still much faster than it takes to fire up my 386.  It is often
     said that the 99/4A is slow compared to modern computers.  I guess it
     depends on how you define speed.  The 4A's ability to quickly boot
     Remind Me! is a major reason this software is so practical.

          Remind Me! can be used without a clock card and without
     Remind Me! Calendar.  However the three products together make a
     winning combination.  Just as 80 column Funnelweb by itself justifies
     the hardware upgrade to an 80 column TI system, so Remind Me! and
     Calendar by themselves justify the purchase of a clock card for the PE
     box.

          Remind Me! is public domain.  If you don't already have it send
     me $1 (for the disk and postage) and I will mail it to you on a SSSD
     disk complete with on disk documentation.
          -----------
          ACCESS:
          R.F.W. Enterprises (for Remind Me! Calendar).  111 Oakridge St.,
     Chicopee MA 01020. Phone [phone].

          Cecure Electronics (for MBP clock card).  P.O. Box 22, Muskego WI
     53150-0022.  Order phone [phone].  Info voice phone [phone].
     Fax [phone].

          Charles Good.  P.O. Box 647, Venedocia OH 45894.  Phone
     419-667-3131.  Internet [e-mail] or
     [e-mail]