How the News-Disk is put together¢---------------------------------¢¢Article by Dean Garraghty.¢¢As you know, each issue of the News-Disk is very hard work to produce, but what happens between me starting with a blank disk, and the final thing hitting your doormat?¢¢Well, from that blank disk all the regular stuff is first copied on to it. This is basically DOS, the menu program, cover, XR40, and the print program. The rest is for articles!¢¢The articles on the News-Disk come from all sorts of sources. Some are written by me, some are sent on disk by other readers (very occasionally!), some are taken from postings on the Newsnet, some are screen captured from Cleveland Freenet in the US, and some are borrowed from other newsletters.¢¢Articles by me, from other users, and from other newsletters are the easiest to use. They are on disk in an easy to manipulate form. I simply load them up and correct any mistakes, and tidy up the spacing and such like until it's OK. Then, this just gets put on the master disk.¢¢Articles from the Newsnet and from places like Freenet are not so easy. For a start, the computers they're on are not Ataris! They are mainframes usually running Unix. Also, they're a few thousand miles across the water! Not so easy!¢¢Articles from the Newsnet are stored locally on the DEC 5830 mainframe I use. Any which look useful, I save in my local filestore. But, they are still held on a disk pack on a mainframe! The process of getting them readable on an Atari is a strange one! Firstly, they need to be transferred to something with a disk drive! The terminals I use to access the mainframe are mostly cheap PC clones. These have disk drives, so we're OK. Or are we? PC drives are no where near compatible with the 810 or 1050! But, the PC drive is able to write in some very odd ways. It can, in fact, write to just one side of the disk giving 180K. Ah, but can't we get 180K on a disk on the Atari by way of a Happy Card or US Doubler? Yes, we can! And, thanks to a PC program called UTIL, transferring from a PC to an Atari disk is made easy. UTIL is able to read, write and format MyDOS disks in "HD" (180K a side).¢¢So, I use some terminal transfer sofware to transfer articles from the mainframe to the PC's hard disk. Then along comes UTIL and transfers it to a 180K MyDos disk. It also does the ASCII->ATASCII transfer along the way! Next, I transfer the articles from HD to SD disks using MyDos. Is that it? No!¢¢The articles are usually set up for 80 column screens, and usually have some odd characters in which the ASCII converter didn't spot. These just come out as control chars on the AtariWriter screen. I have to go through the article taking these out, and re-formatting text for the News-Disk format. When this is done, they go on the master disk.¢¢Articles from Cleveland Freenet are not so easy. First of all I have to connect on to the system. Freenet is like a big BBS in the US. I do this using a Telnet link from either the mainframe, or by calling a remote Telnet host. Then it has to make an international connection from their machine to mine. Also, it's VERY slow! I need different terminal software for this, because I am simply screen capturing to disk. The text coming over is re-routed to the PC's hard disk. When I've finished getting the articles, I have to load them in to the newword word processor on the PC. It is painfully difficult to edit a freenet article in AtariWriter. You have to see it in 80 cols. to make sure you're not deleting lines you shouldn't be. Also, freenet splits the articles in to pages as it displays them, and so all the prompts get mixed up in the capture. All these have to be located and removed! Once all this is done, it's on to a MyDos disk and re-edited in to News-Disk style using AtariWriter.¢¢Once the News-Disk is complete, it has to be checked. Have I said something nasty about somebody I shouldn't have? Are the details correct? And so on. Once this is OK, the issue is ready.¢¢Next, the duplicating! What a nightmare this is! I sit there for 2 days just copying disks and printing out letters and labels. Then they've all got to be packed in to envelopes, labelled, and taped. Then at the post office, I stand in a corner furiously licking stamps! All you have to do is open the envelope and boot the disk!¢¢I hope this gives you some insight in to how hard it is to put the News-Disk together, and how many millions of pounds worth of equipment is needed to do it!¢¢Oh yes, this issue contains articles gathered by all the methods I mention in this article, which is why this one took so long to put together!¢
