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OVERVIEW.DOC
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1986-12-07
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3KB
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65 lines
DIMS -- Dan's Information Management System -- Overview
DIMS is a file management program for handling list type
information which runs under MBASIC on CP/M computers. (There is
another version for PC DOS machines.)
The author, Dan Dugan of San Francisco, has contributed DIMS to
the public domain. DIMS received a highly favorable review in
the former MicroSystems magazine some time back.
DIMS might be regarded as a "poor man's data base manager" and
will satisfy the file management requirements of many users. The
author has used it to maintain mailing lists and to print labels
for clients, with lists of over 5000 names, monthly updating.
The user must select record lengths of either 128 or 256 bytes
for a particular data base. DIMS uses the direct access
facilities of MBASIC to get at records. However, utilities are
furnished to read in and write out records in the "comma
separated variable" format used by MailMerge and many other data
handling programs. Thus DIMS can incorporate data from other
programs and DIMS data can be easily exported to other programs.
Like all powerful programs, DIMS has a fairly elaborate set of
commands with which the user must become familiar. Installation
for a particular computer requires some minimum knowledge of
BASIC language programming. Perhaps these requirements for the
user to invest a little bit of time in learning are why DIMS has
been largely overlooked in the public domain software area. DIMS
is not as simple as ABC, it is only as simple as A C E, or
thereabouts.
The main documentation file is a WordStar file entitled
DINSTALL.DOC. There are a couple of DWS files included which
are not documentation, but are DWS WordStar files for use in
an advanced DIMS application.
The meat of the DIMS system consists of 17 BASIC programs.
There are several "main" programs and many auxiliary utilities
which chain to the main program when called from the DIMS menu.
There are some other standalone utilities which process your data
in various ways separately from the main DIMS program. The public
owes Dan Dugan a vote of thanks for the contribution he has made
of many hundreds of line of sophisticated BASIC code.
All the DIMS programs are furnished in file type ASC and can be
perused and worked on with a text editor. They can be loaded
into the MBASIC interpreter.
CAUTION: Due to an unresolved bug, the ASCII programs should be
loaded into the BASIC interpreter, then saved in MBASIC's regular
compressed non-ASCII format, then re-loaded and run. This
procedure is well-explained in the documentation.
There are 14 short example files furnished by the author of DIMS
for use when breaking in the system.
User's Guide magazine announced in issue #16 (August 85, p.6)
that the next issue would include a review of DIMS and a detailed
tutorial by the author of the program, Dan Dugan. Perhaps that
will stimulate interest in this fine public domain data file
management system.
End of Overview. RDE