 The magazine of the Melbourne PC User Group Pres Said John Beck |
At the last count membership had reached just around 3700. As the geographical distribution is very wide, more regional SIGs are being born. Last month Doug Brooke and I went to the inaugural meeting of the Mornington Peninsula group at Frankston. It was held in the library, and there was a large car park right outside the door. Needless to say, not knowing the area or the location of the library, I parked in a kerbside parking spot about half a kilometre away. There were 26 people present when a count was taken and a few more came in later. The attendees were enthusiastic at a SIG to be started, and great interest was expressed in training courses. This information has been passed on to Yahya who will look with renewed interest at the ITEC premises in Frankston to satisfy the demand for training in that area. There is another club which meets in the area, and they may find it advantageous to come under the umbrella of Melb PC User Group.
Brett Chapman is actively asking for interested people to contact him so that a SIG can be formed in the Sunbury area. I have heard on the grapevine that one may be formed in the not too distant future at Wonthaggi or was it Warnambool but then again, why not both.
The response to the Group registering shareware for members in bulk has been very encouraging. The donations to Vernon Buerg towards the development of LIST.COM has topped the $400 mark. Registrations for PC-Write version 3.02 are over 50 to date. John Drake is encouraged by the response and has managed to improve on the prices originally obtained. Prices for other packages have been obtained at a discounted rate and delivery times have been improved. John will be publishing full details and the packages of the month.
As stated in last month's Pres Said, Harold Burstyn from the United States came to the July meeting and told us about User Groups in the US. Although a member of Boston and New York User Groups, he attends the Syracuse Group. He told of the head office in downtown Boston where there is every make of equipment, all of which is donated. There is one or more meetings of SIGs every day of the week. (He was not explicit if Sunday was included.) Training covers many aspects of computing, and the trainers donate their time, and no profit is made from this activity, thus everyone gains. The new users improve their skills, and the experienced users know that they have contributed to the overall knowledge of the community, and have returned what had probably been given to them previously. This is the true objective of User Groups irrespective of the discipline which they embrace. He was impressed with the Group organising registration of Shareware, and stated it was the only User Group which had undertaken this function.
The speaker who was to have given the talk at the monthly meeting on optical character recognition had been stricken with influenza and was unable to be present. On the Monday of the same week Ron Budgeon from Compscan agreed to step in and fill the gap for the evening. An interesting point was that some of the so-called exotic type fonts with thick and thin lines in the letters can confuse the scanners, and the scanners are far behind the human eye in discerning differences, especially in poor copy. Besides giving an insight into OCR Ron also threw in a few notes on people and why they sometimes have mental blockages. The committee thank you Ron for stepping in at such a late stage with no time to prepare a talk.
There is a disk just received into the PD library called "PC/MS DOS Programmers' Technical Reference Manual". It will be reviewed in a later issue of PC Update. When putting it into the catalogue I was intrigued by the title, as I already have a copy of the IBM volume. Three hours later I had learned that the author had researched just about every reference on the subject. The text is archived to fit it on a disk. After an Introduction and support preamble is a table of keyboard extended codes. There are then 10 chapters which are: 1. History of DOS, 2. Memory map, 3. ROM BIOS, 4. Dos interrupts and function calls, 5. Interrupts 22H to 86H, 6. DOS control blocks and work areas, 7. DOS file structure, 8. DOS disk information, 9. Installable device drivers, 10. Expanded and enhanced memory specifications. For a registration of $15 you obtain a manual on disk, appendices and references, a source code disk and updates. Although the contents are very technical in parts, there is information which could give an insight into the workings of a PC to the non-programmer. The information was gathered mainly for use by the author, but he decided to make it available to others, and also profit from his labour. As far as I am aware this disk is not available in any of the commercial catalogues of PD software. It is on disk MELB 1343.
Many members have made enquiries about foreign languages end their use on PCs. With reference to PD software there are many languages covered as tutorials, but few which will print other than the characters in the alternative characters above ASCII 127. Some do Greek, Cyrillic and, with some difficulty, Hebrew. I was given a demo disk of a commercial product called Multi-Lingual Scholar (MLS) which is also the word processor. The language which is of interest to me (or should I say my daughter) is Urdu, which is derived from Persian which in turn is derived from Arabic. The text is put on screen from right to left if that is the way it is read. Five different languages can be put on a line, which is useful for theses referencing other languages. The graphics characters, especially on a VGA screen, are excellent. There is a large selection of languages many of which are not very common. For instance there is Inuktitut which is handy if you are an Eskimo, or Hieroglyphics if you have an old Egyptian mummy. Nine and 24 pin dot matrix, and laser printers are supported.
Reprinted from the August 1989 issue of PC Update, the magazine of Melbourne PC User Group, Australia
