
[20C[0;1mWindoWatch (c.1994)  We Do Windows!

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[15C[0;1mDesign by Fernado Madruga of Cainbra, Portugal
[0m[255D


 EDITORIAL
 Editor                                               Lois B. Laulicht
 Contributing Editor-at-large                               Herb Chong

 Contributing Writers          Derek Buchler, Ambrose Campbell,Gregg
                               Hommel, Paul Kinnaly, Jerry Laulicht,
                               Angela Lillystone,  Peter Neuendorffer,
                               Joe Rotello, Ben Schorr,Paul Williamson.

 EDITORIAL BOARD               Herb Chong, Gregg Hommel, Lois Laulicht,
                               Paul Williamson.

 SUBMISSIONS                   Email using Internet lois.laulicht@channel1.com
                                                or
                               WindoWatch@ins.infonet.net
                                                or
                               To: Editor WindoWatch
                               Valley Head, WV 26294


 Submissions remain the intellectual property of the author. Manuscripts will
 NOT be returned if not used.

 Electronic Access             FTP>ftp.channel1.com

                               WindoWatch is found on Channel One in several
                               formats by calling 617-354-3230 (9600 and
                               14.400).We publish in a Windows compatible
                               format and soon in HTML formats. The DOS format
                               uses ReadRoom (*.TOC) The Readroom format runs
                               flawlessly under Windows for those with
                               limited disk space and is a very much smaller
                               file than the Windows format   One can also
                               read online from the Reader Room itself -
                               Door 48. Non-members of Channel One can
                               download the latest WindoWatch issue by typing
                               J Free from the main board prompt

 Beginning January 1, 1995, annual shareware subscriptions at $10 per year for
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 Comments, letters, and requests can be sent to us at various  locations.
 Postlink to Lois Laulicht ->15 tagging the message "receiver  only" and on
 the Internet at Internet:lois.laulicht@channel1.com

 WindoWatch (c) 1994 all rights reserved, is the property of Lois B. Laulicht
                           and CCC of WV





  A Note about the Windows formats for the Premiere Issue


  This  Premiere   edition of WindoWatch  is  being  published using  ACROBAT  the Adobe Systems authoring tool.   Because
  of  the  many entrants into the world of on-line publishing, we decided
  to give them all a good solid sampling.  As we go to  press the WordPerfect
  Corp. is announcing at Comdex that they  will make their viewer freely
  available using the many electronic services for distribution.  Adobe
  Systems in the last month did exactly that. The choices are growing at a
  very rapid rate and include even more features than those we talked about
  in  this same space in the Preview  Issue  of WindoWatch. In addition, we
  should mention our late editorial decision to publish this Premiere edition
  using ENVOY, too. It seemed to us that given the newness of the Acrobat
  viewer we felt it necessary to release in a stand alone Windows format.


  Traditional on line publications for Windows platforms have been limited to
  the Windows help engine.  Recently, the Windows help tool has been enhanced
  by a variety of add-ons including Help Magic, RoboHelp, and Doc2Help which
  are on our list for evaluation. Other authoring packages will include Common
  Ground by NoHands Software, WorldView 2 byInterleaf Inc., the Quarterdeck
  HTML authoring tool Normandy and still other new and emerging contenders
  like Middleware by netApp Systems.


  All of the product managers have heard the same  words  of caution  about
  file size either for distribution of separate articles  to be  read  by a
  viewer like the Acrobat reader...Acroread.Exe or stand alone compiled issues
  like the Envoy authored Preview Issue of WindoWatch.  Envoy was a v.1 which
  has been replaced by their v.2 iteration. We are presently using Acrobat v.2
  and have been told that it is far superior to their first. Paul Kinnaly's
  evaluation  and review of v.1 Envoy appears in this issue. Jim Plumb will do
  the same for Acrobat v.2.  At another time, several of the editorial staff
  will look at all the tools and describe their strengths and weaknesses.


  We hope you find these articles useful and welcome your criticisms. We
  promise to forward "bug reports" to the developer in question. These tools
  will become even more sophisticated as more features are added and other
  venders come into this market.  We must wonder aloud if conversion tools
  from one format to another will become  one  of  the "new" features!   I
  certainly hope so.  lbl

...........................................................................

   WindoWatch                The Electronic Windows Magazine of the InterNet

  The Premiere Issue                                         DECEMBER  1994
WWP-1                                                The WindoWatch Staff
WWP-2  Where You Can Find Us and the Various Formats
WWP-2B From the Editor's Desk                            LOIS B. LAULICHT
WWP-3  Is Software Bloat Here to Stay?                         HERB CHONG
WWP-3B Is There a Santa Claus?                              DEREK BUCHLER
WWP-3C The Future of DOS                                  PAUL WILLIAMSON
WWP-3D The Authoring Tools: An Envoy Review                  PAUL KINNALY
WWP-3E ASPECT: A Scripting Language                          GREGG HOMMEL
WWP-3F Alice Travels: Washington                       PETER NEUENDORFFER
WWP-3G Alice Travels: Mudville                         PETER NEUENDORFFER
WWP-3H Alice Travels: Paris                            PETER NEUENDORFFER
WWP-3I New Approaches to Computer Assisted Training        JERRY LAULICHT
WWP-3J Polling The Web                                         LEN BAYLES
WWP-3K An Old Friend Revisited: Quicken v.4 for Win      LOIS B. LAULICHT
WWP-3L The Last Word:                                       BEN M. SCHORR
WWP-3M NEXT ISSUE
WWP-3N The OS Wars:



  It's  Barefisted  Mayhem!                               The OS Wars

  Stephen Manes in his recent New York Times review of the newest IBM
  OS/2 offering was not very charitable in his assessment of WARP. One
  got the sense that the man was really offended by a piece of software
  sent out for evaluation and review that crippled his config.sys and
  rejected standard "off the shelf" hardware.  All of the earlier OS/2
  ills Manes replayed like a flashback from a very bad film. As a
  matter of record, the planned release date of Warp was pushed back
  to early November to recall and repair the damage.  Almost no comment
  from Big Blue. A number of weeks later OS/2 users were still standing
  on one foot...waiting for the final.

  I asked around to get a sense of early WARP experiences and was quite
  astounded by what I learned.  The non-OS/2 users said they had fits
  with slow installs, groaning hardware and system failures while the
  regular OS/2 users said they had few problems installing and then
  using WARP.  Is it possible that non-OS/2 users were missing crucial
  operating system requirements which caused this havoc while
  experienced OS/2 users understood the nuances and therefore had
  success?  Or perhaps we are discussing operating system partisanship
  of an extreme where everyone is lying.

  The contrasts between public success and failure cannot be ignored
  amid this rotten egg tossing. One assumes that all the diddling with
  IBM's Windows specific OS/2 add-on, coupled with corporate
  statements of easy use, speaks to the economic reality of attracting
  Windows users prior to the competing 32 bit WINDOW95 release sometime
  next year. Charges of lies, libel and other low life behavior, while
  very funny and at times outrageous, are really an incredible phenomena.
  We had to share some of the debate resulting from the WARP offering
  while lurking in the darker corners of the net. We requested permission
  to reprint expecting silence...which is what we got. It's too good to
  bury on a Sysop's hard drive which is why we throw caution and prudence
  to the Gods!

  As an aside there are two issues this donnybrook has put to rest. The
  first is that the silent horde of users will take it all in and
  ultimately draw their own conclusions using other criteria. The second
  is that off-line readers do not necessarily help temper the words of
  users determined to continue the operating system wars.  The various
  last entry on the TOC should really give you a case of the giggles!  LBL



  ESSAYS ON SOFTWARE ENGINEERING

  Software Bloat - Is it Here to Stay?    (c)  1994  by Herb Chong


  Have you ever wondered how all that space on your hard disk is used? Doesn't
  it seem like yesterday that a 10M hard disk, or any hard disk at all, was an
  incredible amount of storage that would take a long time to use up? I went
  through my old Byte magazines to research this article and tallied up the
  hard disk sizes in some of the systems reviewed and previewed. Combining
  that with some data published in PC Week and a little black magic, I ended
  up with this chart. It purports to show the average hard disk size shipped
  with the "average" system today. The 1994 figure is PC Week's estimate for
  the end of 1994.  Extraordinary -- isn't it?

  If you take the numbers and do a little arithmetic, as I did, you will find
  that the average disk size almost doubled each year from 1986 to about 1990,
  and then more than doubling since then. I don't think it is any coincidence
  that Microsoft Windows 3.0 hit the market place in May of that year. People
  have more applications on their systems if they are Windows users than if
  they are DOS users and those applications are bigger. Windows applications
  tend to come with more features and are just generally bigger than their DOS
  counterparts.

  Is there an end in sight to this rapid growth? To answer this question, we
  need to look at some of the reasons for the rapid software size growth these
  past several years, what causes lie behind those reasons, and finally, what
  assumptions they create about how people use their systems.

  More - Cheaper - Faster -, and Sooner!

  Take a look at the Windows applications on your computer. Have you upgraded
  any of them since you got your first version? What has changed from version
  to version? Each upgrade promises that you simply cannot do without the new
  features that the older version doesn't do.The packages are getting skinnier,
  especially if you get the CD-ROM version. They seem to come out at an ever
  increasing rate on ever increasingly tight delivery schedules. It's a trend
  that started in the `80s and is continuing. Let's look at these and other
  factors and how they influence software size.

  Staying Even with the Competition

  It seems that the only real justification for an upgrade is to get new
  features that you want. Marketing's job is to convince you that you really
  need these features. Otherwise, they are not going to make any more money
  from you. A software vendor in the PC world doesn't sell you a subscription
  yet....they make a one-time transaction. To stay in business, a software
  vendor must continue to sell to new customers. What better way to get new
  customers than to convert all your old customers to new ones by obsoleting
  everything they own? If they're going to make people pay for their software,
  they have to convince people that they need something they don't already
  have.

  Just in case you have any doubt, the marketing department spends a lot of
  time and money convincing you why the latest features are ones you really
  need to have and what new things you are going to be able to do with their
  new version that you can't do with the old. There is no doubt in my mind
  that all new features are useful. The real questions are how useful they are
  and to how many people? As the software market and consumer sophistication
  mature, it's harder and harder to find genuinely useful features for a large
  portion of the users.

  Nonetheless, if you decide that one or two features are sufficiently useful
  to you to upgrade, you'll upgrade to get them. When you do, you get all the
  features you don't need as well. The programmers spent time writing and
  debugging the code,and the code ends up on the installation disks and your
  hard disk. You pay for them all. The software vendors and the programmers
  will argue that the cost of adding all these features isn't a lot more than
  adding some of them, and this will allow them to satisfy more people than
  they would otherwise be able to. No doubt this is true, but there is a fine
  line between adding a feature simply for the sake of adding a feature and
  adding a feature because many users can't do without it.

  Let's use Word for Windows as an example. I use Word for Windows the most
  of all the applications on my desktop.  One of the handiest features to come
  along in Version 6 is the AutoCorrect feature. If I forget to hold down the
  shift key when I begin a sentence, it capitalizes it for me when I press the
  space bar.  If I forget to hold down the shift key in the middle of the
  sentence when I press the "i" key, and then space, it upper cases it for me.
  If I hold down the shift key too long and the first two letters of a word
  are capitalized, it lower cases the second letter. It remembers that I type
  "don;t" frequently when I really mean "don't" and fixes the mistake.
  Autocorrect is a really useful feature because I'm a self-taught touch
  typist and I have picked up some bad habits.

  Again using Word as an example, I have yet to find someone who prefers to
  move text by using drag-and-drop instead of cut and paste, either via the
  keyboard, toolbar or menus. It's harder to position the cursor for an exact
  paste and so people frequently drop the text in the wrong place. I know that
  it took someone a some nontrivial amount of time to get it working...and it
  does what it is supposed to do. How many people really benefit from it? Not
  nearly as many as Microsoft hoped when they introduced Word for Windows
  Version 2.0 and highlighted this as one of the most significant new features.

  There's the competition too. After Lotus introduced SmartIcons into its Ami
  Pro word processor and received favorable press, Microsoft and WordPerfect
  had to follow suit, whether or not it fit into their style of working. As
  soon as one of the big three word processors introduces a new feature into
  their program, it becomes a point of comparison between the programs. Adding
  features becomes a game of marketing and programming one-upmanship to come
  up with new features for these programs. The features themselves makes the
  competition play catch-up and allows the program to reach out to yet more of
  the users who might otherwise choose something different. Every extra line
  on the features comparison chart cost you more money and disk space, whether
  you use it or not.

  RTFM (Read The Fine Manual)

  Have you noticed that manuals are getting thinner and thinner? I have. As I
  upgrade my one hundred or so Windows applications on my main computer, I
  manage to find more and more shelf space to put the third party books I have
  to keep on buying to understand something that isn't in the manual anymore.
  That shelf space comes from the new version's manuals occupying less space
  than the ones the old version occupied. I somehow manage to net out at about
  the same amount of space as I used to.

  The information that used to be in the manual has to go somewhere. If you
  are willing to live with slow access times and keeping the right CD-ROM in
  your drive at all times (I'll ignore those of you with jukeboxes), you need
  any extra disk space for the on-line versions of the manual.  If you don't
  want to do this or don't have a CD-ROM drive, you have to put the manuals
  onto the hard disk. Yes, it's nice to be able to look up things from wherever
  you are, but how many of you actually prefer the on-line manuals to the
  paper ones?  There are too many things that just aren't easily suited to
  on-line use. This includes tutorials and detailed reference information.

  I ordered an upgrade from Microsoft Visual C++ 1.0 to 1.5 recently. It only
  comes on CD-ROM media and doesn't come with manuals. You need to pay $100
  for the manual set.  This is a continuing trend in Windows software
  distribution.  Hardcopy manuals have been shrinking and shrinking. The
  information formerly in hardcopy is being shifted to on-line documentation
  because it's cheaper for the vendor. In this day and age of increasing
  competition and ever diminishing profit margins, trading a $30 manual for a
  few $1 diskettes is something that can't be ignored.  Reducing the cost of
  the software is somewhat offset by the extra disk space for the floppy
  disks and the space taken up on the hard disk.

  Guess who has to pay for the exchange of disk space for manuals?  Marketing
  has always managed to sell or at least confuse the issue by concentrating on
  the great things you can do with on-line help like hypertext and searching,
  that you can't do with a hardcopy manual.  Frankly, the Windows Help Engine
  isn't anything to brag about. I can do a few things with the on-line help
  that I can't do with the manual. There are also, a lot of things I can't do,
  like reading it without turning on the computer, or having to use low
  resolution text and graphics instead of phototypeset output, or being able
  to mark it up with notes and little drawings. On-line help is great when I
  can't carry the manuals with me, but when I'm in my office surrounded by my
  bookshelves, on-line help is annoying if it's all I have.  I rely on the
  Visual Basic On-line Help because the manual is too thin to be helpful.  It
  keeps referring me to the on-line help for the real answers and I get to
  pay for this privilege.

  I Want It Yesterday !

  The average Windows program is much more complicated than the average DOS
  program trying to do the same thing.  The event driven model of application
  interaction places a heavy burden on the application programmer to take
  care of all sorts of details about making their application run. A few years
  ago, object-oriented class libraries and C++ became the next great thing in
  Windows programming. Some people went to a lot of trouble packaging up all
  the details and providing defaults for everything so that unless you, the
  programmer, wanted something different from the default, you didn't have to
  write anything. The class library took care of everything.  Programmer
  productivity shot up. What used to take a year to design and write now took
  a couple of months.  Marketing folks went nuts. Now they could promise even
  more to their customers and still have a good chance of delivering.

  With such pressure from all sides, programmers really haven't got much
  choice. They have to use development tools that let them get as much correct
  function as possible with as little effort as possible. Everybody else is
  using them.  The tools, however, have a major drawback: they are profligate
  in their use of memory and disk space. People used to complain that the
  Windows equivalent of the famous "hello, world" program took up 20K of
  memory, which in the DOS equivalent would occupy a measly 800 bytes. Yet a
  program that takes up 10 times that much space barely rates a blink, because
  that is what C++ class libraries like Microsoft Foundation Classes and
  Object Windows Library impose on the programmers. Turn on debugging and then
  you see disk and memory requirements grow by another factor of five.

  It's all part of how the C++ language and the Intel object format are
  defined. Whenever a programmer references a variable, it has to be included
  as part of the program whether it is used or not. The compiler can't even
  try to tell until you bring everything together at linking time whether
  something might or might not be used. In the days of C programming, it
  wasn't so bad because all the various variables a program could use were
  split across many header files and a programmer could be selective about
  which ones they used.  That helped cut down on the number of referenced but
  not used variables in a program. With C++, whenever you use a class library,
  you have to include the entire class hierarchy every time.  Doing otherwise
  is extremely error prone and just plain inelegant. Declaring a variable of a
  type in the leaf of the class hierarchy brings in everything above it right
  up to the top, - all their member variables and all their member functions!
  In the case of MFC and OWL, this can be a total of several hundred for every
  variable a programmer declares in their program.

  When a linker processes object files to produce an executable, it knows some
  thing about which functions and external variables are used throughout. C
  and C++, however, do not permit the linker to eliminate unused code. Partly
  it is because of how C and C++ allow you to abuse the language and cause
  references to such objects outside of the compiler's knowledge, and partly
  because the Intel OBJ format doesn't store enough information for the linker
  to unambiguously tell if a function is really unused or not.

  There isn't much choice but to leave them in. Borland thought this was
  enough of a problem to invent an extension to the OBJ format to allow the
  linker to know for sure whether something was needed or not and eliminate
  redundant code. So Borland Pascal for Windows programs using the same OWL
  class library can come in at 2/3 to 1/2 of the size of C++ programs using
  OWL.  Do you see a stampede toward using Borland Pascal as the standard
  Windows development tool? Most developers don't seem to care. Most can't
  afford to care.  Productivity is what they are measured on. Once again, you
  pay extra for the programmer's productivity. Unfortunately, the programmer
  doesn't benefit from what you pay.

  It Works! What More Do You Want?

  Imagine you are a new programmer on a project. The program you will be
  working on has been around for about three years. Remember this is Windows
  and C++, not COBOL.  There have been four programmers before you who have
  worked on the code. They are no longer working on it because they have been
  promoted or moved on to other things.  Your job is to take the list of
  features the team leader has negotiated hard with the marketing folks about
  and turned your part of that list into something that works. There's no
  documentation, - one hundred thousands lines of code, - and no-one to ask!

  Do you dare take out any code?  After all, it works now, more or less.  Much
  safer to work in this bit here, work in that bit there, and generally change
  something only after you are absolutely sure of how it works. During testing,
  you find that sometimes garbage appears in your input.  If you fiddle with
  it a bit, the program doesn't crash, and things seem to keep on working. All
  your predecessors except the original programmer probably did the same thing.

  Any Windows program that has been around for more than a version or two is
  going to become harder and harder to add features to.  First of all, new the
  features are more and more pervasive and more and more complex. They just
  can't be hacked in an afternoon. Second, adding these features stretch the
  original design more and more, frequently pushing it in directions that were
  never intended or deliberately avoided.  Programs more than a few versions
  old quickly become frightful patchworks of elegance and ragged code right
  next to each other.  It becomes harder and harder to enhance.

  Put another way, programmer productivity is not as high as it should be.
  With today's deadlines for software delivery, especially in the Windows
  software arena, delays in delivery are very unhealthy. The faster a company
  can deliver new releases, the more money they make and the happier the share
  holders are. It doesn't leave much room for tuning, redesign, and other such
  things that refine the way a program works inside. If it's not visible to
  the user, it's not a feature. Features sell. Taking that long pause to
  re-architect for the future means no new releases for a while. No releases
  means no income. Guess where management wants you to spend your time?

  When Will It End?

  Just how far can these trends continue? Remember reading about how cars were
  made in the `50's?  Each year, there seemed to be a different bump or lump
  (some people called them fins) on a car.  This year's lump was in and last
  year's lump was out.  It kind of came to an abrupt halt in the mid 60's.
  People suddenly wised up. Cars weren't really all that different from year
  to year.  It was marketing of features that didn't really have much to do
  with what people wanted in a car.

  I think that we are in a situation with Windows software where there are so
  many people new to software and using tools when they really don't know much
  about computers yet.  They are swayed by the advertising and press that new
  versions of programs receive in review after review.  When most people are
  able take a serious, educated look at what they do and what they need in
  software, I think that software sales are going to drop off.

  Corporations are slower to adopt new version software because they spend
  more time defining the real costs of software. They understand that the real
  costs includes payment for upgrades they don't need, advertising to convince
  them that they can't do without some feature or another, or that they will
  be left behind by an implicit warning against obsolescence without some
  wonderful  upgrade or another. They know they will pay again because after
  the upgrade, they won't have enough room for all the other software that
  they need, or enough CPU to run that essential piece of software, and never
  enough colors to bring those games truly to life.

  When consumers get fed up with being led around by the nose by the major
  software vendors, we'll see the rate of growth in computing power, RAM and
  hard disk space slow. Until then, we're going to continue to make everyone
  in the business richer.

  HERB CHONG has been a contributing writer for Windows Sources, is a
  Contributing writer for The Cobb Group's Inside Microsoft Windows; and is
  the Contributing Editor of WindoWatch.

  -------------------------------------------------------------------------

  And then there was Derek..........

  Here is a piece that I posted on the Channel One main board last winter just
  around Christmas time.  It doesn't really have much to do with computers but
  you might want to include it for the Holiday Season.  Again, I'm not the
  author ...* ho-ho-ho... but rather, I found this somewhere.......
                                                                                             Derek Buchler


  A Christmas Carol:

  IS THERE A SANTA CLAUS?                           (c) 1994 by Derek Buchler

  As a result of an overwhelming lack of requests, and with research help from
  that renowned scientific journal SPY magazine (January 1990) - I am pleased
  to present the annual scientific inquiry into Santa Claus.

  1)  No known species of reindeer can fly.. but there are 300,000 species of
  living organisms yet to be classified, and while most of these are insects
  and germs, this does not completely rule out flying reindeer which only
  Santa has ever seen.

  2)  There are two billion children...persons under 18,  in the world. BUT
  since Santa doesn't appear to handle the Muslim, Hindu, Jewish and Buddhist
  children, that reduces the workload to 15% of the total - 378 million
  according to Population Reference Bureau.  At an average (census) rate of
  3.5 children per household, that's 91.8 million homes. One presumes there's
  at least one good child in each.

  3)  Santa has 31 hours of Christmas to work with, thanks to the different
  time zones and the rotation of the earth, assuming he travels east to west..
  which seems logical! This works out to 822.6 visits per second.  This is to
  say that for each Christian household with good children, Santa has 1/1000th
  of a second to park, hop out of the sleigh, jump down the chimney, fill the
  stockings, distribute the remaining presents under the tree, eat whatever
  snacks have been left, get back up the chimney, get back into the sleigh and
  move on to the next house.

  Assuming that each of these 91.8 million stops are evenly distributed around
  the earth-which, of course, we know to be false. For the purposes of our
  calculations we will accept this and are now talking about .78 miles per
  household or a total trip of 75-1/2 million miles, not counting stops to do
  what most of us must do at least once every 31 hours, plus feeding and etc.

  This means that Santa's sleigh is moving at 650 miles per second, 3,000
  times the speed of sound!  For purposes of comparison, the fastest man-made
  vehicle on earth, the Ulysses space probe, moves at a poky 27.4 miles per
  second -- a conventional reindeer can run, tops, 15 miles per hour.

  4)  The payload on the sleigh adds another interesting element. Assuming
  that each child gets nothing more than a medium-sized lego set of 2 pounds,
  the sleigh is carrying 321,300 tons, not counting Santa, who is invariably
  described as overweight.  On land, conventional reindeer can pull no more
  than 300 pounds. Even granting that "flying reindeer" (see point #1) could
  pull ten times the normal amount, we cannot do the job with eight, or even
  nine.  We need 214,200 reindeer. This increases the payload - not even
  counting the weight of the sleigh-to 353,430 tons.  Again, for comparison -
  this is four times the weight of the Queen Elizabeth.

  5)  353,000 tons traveling at 650 miles per second creates enormous air
  resistance -this will heat up the reindeer in the same fashion as a
  spacecraft re-entering the earth's atmosphere.  The lead pair of reindeer
  will absorb 14.3 QUINTILLION joules of energy.  Per second. Each!  In short,
  they will burst into flame almost instantaneously, exposing the reindeer
  behind them, and create deafening sonic booms in their wake. The entire
  reindeer team will be vaporized within 4.26 thousandths of a second.  Santa,
  meanwhile, will be subjected to centrifugal forces 17,500.06 times greater
  than gravity.  A 250-pound Santa, which seems ludicrously slim, would be
  pinned to the back of his sleigh by 4,315,015 pounds of force. In conclusion
  - If Santa ever DID deliver presents on Christmas Eve, he's dead now.

  DEREK BUCHLER is a former network adminstratorand presently functions as
  part of computer management.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------



 The Future of DOS                        ( 1994 by Paul Williamson

 What's in store for DOS users and developers in the coming year?


 As the time approaches for the release of WINDOWS95 more and more people are
 asking "What do you think is going to happen to DOS?".   Some are very sure
 that there will no longer be a DOS and that "DOS is dead". I just don't
 believe that's the case!

 It is my professional opinion that DOS will be with us for many years to come
 ...and not just as standalone computers shunted into the corners of major
 businesses to be relegated as dumb 3270 terminals.  There are a  multitude of
 DOS based systems running DOS based applications still in use today doing
 real work reliably- all over the world.

 In order to speculate on the future of DOS with any degree of ball park
 accuracy, one needs to have an understanding and appreciation of the brief
 history of the Microsoft's Disk Operating System or MS-DOS.  Since the
 introduction of version 1.0 in 1981, DOS has gone through more than 10 major
 changes.  Version 1.0 was originally designed for the IBM PC and only
 supported single-sided diskettes.  In 1983, version 2.0, the first major
 revision, was released adding support for a hierarchical directory structure
 and the implementation of fixed (hard) disks.  1984 brought versions 3.0,
 3.1, 3.2 and the highly acclaimed version 3.3 to market, which added support
 for the 1.2Mb diskettes, Microsoft networking support, 3.5 inch floppy drives
 and disk partitioning.

 It was at this point in time, that the business community was taking a very
 serious look at the microcomputer to off-load some of the processing burden
 from their mainframes.  At least two major industries invested heavily in the
 development of DOS based applications, betting on its future as well as their
 own, the banking industry and the insurance industry.  DOS 3.3 provided the
 most stable platform available at the time and there are some who still
 believe that.  Many mainframe and minicomputer manufacturers also saw the
 potential that the personal computer and DOS provided and started including
 the PC as an integral part of their product.

 The introduction and acceptance of DOS 3.3 became more evident as time went
 by without further updates from Microsoft.  Hardware manufacturers sprang up
 in numerous garages and basements throughout the country.  DOS 3.3 and the
 Personal Computer became dominant during this period.  It wasn't until late
 in 1988, four years after the release of version 3.3, that Microsoft released
 the next major version: MS-DOS 4.0. This was the first release to add support
 for expanded memory and logical disks or partitions greater than 32 megabytes.
 This was also the initial release of a graphical shell. Using this interface,
 almost everything that had previously been accomplished from the command line,
 could now be done by pointing and clicking with a mouse.  No matter how many
 good things were put into MS-DOS 4.x, there was so much bad with it, that
 many users, and developers alike, were forced to retreat to DOS 3.3. But the
 concept, the ideas, and the methodology brought to the market by DOS 4.x
 dictated that this trend would have to be continued and it was!

 Probably the most powerful version of DOS came in 1991, with the introduction
 of MS-DOS 5.0.  Now, users of the 80386 and 80486 processors, and even some
 80286 machines, regained hundreds of kilobytes of conventional memory.  The
 memory management capabilities of DOS 5.0 enabled DOS itself to load in the
 High Memory Area, which only exists because of a quirk in the way DOS uses
 the Offset:Segment addressing scheme.  DOS 5.0 also allowed TSR (Terminate
 and Stay Resident) programs and device drivers to be loaded in to the Upper
 Memory Area, which previously had been reserved for hardware devices and the
 system BIOS shadowing. Additionally, DOS 5.0 included an upgraded shell which
 allowed for task swapping, a full-screen editor replacing the archaic, but
 functional, Edlin.  BASIC was replaced with QBasic, which allowed for a full-
 screen editor.  DOS 5.0 soon became the "operating system of choice" for the
 '90s.

 The year before the release of MS-DOS 5.0, Microsoft introduced the most
 exciting and revolutionary graphical interface environment: Windows 3.0.
 Windows 3.0 took the computing public by storm.  According to many, Windows
 is one of the most significant software products to be developed for
 microcomputers, if not the most significant. Even though developers and users
 alike were entrenched in using DOS and DOS based applications, Windows
 offered the end-user the control interface that had been missing since the
 invention of the PC.  Within a very short period of time, corporate America,
 as well as most other developers, recognized the need to not only develop new
 and exciting software for this environment, but also to port existing DOS
 based applications into Windows. But, there already existed a large installed
 base of applications that ran under DOS.  Microsoft provided for this by
 allowing Windows to create DOS virtual machines (VMs) so existing DOS
 applications could still be used while maintaining the Windows graphical
 interface, functionality and Windows applications.

 A few evangelists started proclaiming that the future of DOS is limited and
 that it will only be a matter of time before DOS is completely eliminated and
 replaced by Windows.  This may be true, but not in the foreseeable future.
 Microsoft's implementation of Windows 3.0 was not without problems, however,
 and a lot of those problems centered around handling DOS applications in the
 DOS Virtual Machine (VM).  Windows 3.1 has become even more popular because
 of its major improvements over version 3.0.

 These improvements do have their price though, in a more complicated
 environment.  No longer is the system configuration maintained in just the
 CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT files.  DOS applications and those who support
 them, must also survive in the Windows environment.

 Early in 1993, Microsoft announced their latest Disk Operating System - -
 DOS 6.0.  This version of DOS is very similar to DOS 5.0 simply because the
 base functionality of DOS 6.x is built on DOS 5.0, but that's where the
 similarity ends.  DOS 6.0 became a full blown package of utilities and
 applications.  DOS 6.0 introduced better memory management, a utility called
 MemMaker that is designed to take the guesswork out of establishing memory
 management and optimization to get the best possible use of the HMA and UMA.
 Many users, including this author, feel that the combination of MemMaker and
 EMM386.EXE can do as good a job as other memory managers, except in the case
 of stealth .  The stealth ability to move ROM shadowing to extended memory
 provides  more UMBs for TSRs and other drivers.  Microsoft's implementation
 does not offer the stealth capability, but not everybody really needs it.
 Given the price, one would be very hard pressed to surpass  the Microsoft
 memory manager on a cost -perfrmance basis.

 The addition of a hard disk compression utility included with the operating
 system was a unique concept, to say the least. Notwithstanding the excellence of the concept the original
 implementation left a lot to be desired.  Disregarding the recent court
 battles and settlements, DblSpace and DrvSpace are ideal disk compression
 utilities.  Again, Microsoft provides the best bang for the buck although
 not necessarily the most optimal when compared to other disk compression
 providers.

 Other additions that Microsoft has included in the latest release of DOS,
 include a system information/diagnostic report generator called MSD
 (MicroSoft Diagnostics).  This tool is also included with releases of the
 Windows software, which Microsoft also touts as being an Operating System.
 (We will save discussion on what makes an operating system for a later date.)
 Multiple configuration support coupled with the different start up options,
 single-step and clean booting, and the CHOICE command, round out the top of
 the list of improvements made in DOS 6 since DOS 5.

 It must be noted that most of the changes, at least the major changes,
 weren't made to the Operating System itself, but to the utilities and
 support modules for users to better use the existing operating system. Does
 this mean that DOS has reached the end of the line as far as core development
 goes? More than 5 years ago, Microsoft designed a new operating system - DOS.
 That operating system has flourished and matured and fulfilled the design
 criteria.  Some statistics show that 80% of the personal computers in use
 today, sport the MS-DOS operating system.  What more can be done?  Inducing
 from the plans released by Microsoft, Novell and IBM for the software to be
 released within the next 6 to 12 months, it certainly doesn't appear that
 much serious development will be done on DOS as we know it.

 However, DOS isn't dead, and it won't die from lack of use either. There is
 still a very large installed base of DOS applications out there to take into
 consideration.  Latest reports show that Novell may not make any more versions
 of NW-DOS, formerly DR-DOS.  Speculation has it that there just isn't any
 more that Novell wants to do, so there isn't a need to do it.  With the IBM
 PC-DOS 6.x versions, very little has been done to the operating system itself,
 with most changes being to the utilities.  No new PC-DOS versions are on the
 immediate horizon. The next "planned" version from Microsoft will probably be
 MS-DOS 7.0 and won't be available until after WINDOWS 95 is released.

 According to published information from Microsoft, WINDOWS 95 will fully
 support the current implementation of the DOS and the DOS memory structure.
 WINDOWS 95 allows for an improved DOS VM as well as being able to create a
 stand-alone "real" DOS environment, which removes Windows completely.
 "Support for MS-DOS based applications, device drivers, and TSRs does not go
 away in Chicago.  In fact, Chicago offers better compatibility for running
 MS-DOS based applications than Windows 3.1 does, including applications that
 are hardware-intensive, such as games."  See Microsoft Windows' "Chicago"
 Reviewer's Guide

 So what are these improvements?  Let's say that DOS itself hasn't changed, as
 we have seen from the past, but the environment in which DOS and DOS
 applications run certainly has.  According to Microsoft, the improvements in
 WINDOWS 95 provide the following benefits from running DOS based applications
 in the Windows environment:

      Zero conventional memory footprint for protected-mode components

      Improved compatibility

      Improved robustness

      Better support for running DOS based games in a window

      Support for running existing DOS based applications without exiting
      WINDOWS 95 or running MS-DOS externally

      Consolidated attributes for customizing properties of DOS based
      applications

      Toolbar access to features and functionality to manipulate the window
      environment while running DOS based applications

      User scaleable window by the use of TrueType fonts in the DOS window

      Ability to gracefully end DOS applications without exiting the
      application

      Ability to specify local VM environment settings on a per-application
      basis

      Support for new DOS commands, providing tighter integration between the
      DOS command line and the Windows environment


 Zero Conventional Footprint Components

 WINDOWS 95 helps to provide the maximum amount of conventional memory
 available for running existing DOS based applications by providing 32-bit
 protected-mode components to replace many of the current 16-bit real-mode
 counterparts.  The most notable sets of components include Microsoft and
 Novell network client software, CD-ROM drivers and extensions, Adaptec SCSI
 driver ASPI4DOS, SmartDrive disk caching software and the Microsoft Mouse
 driver.  This can result in quite a remarkable memory saving that can be
 over 225Kb!

 Improved Compatibility

 The goal of WINDOWS 95, ambitious as it may seem, is to support running DOS
 based applications better than is currently done in Windows 3.1. Not only to
 be able to run the existing "clean" applications that run flawlessly today,
 but also to support running the "bad" applications that tried to take over
 the hardware or required machine resources that aren't available under
 Windows 3.1.

 Many things are being done to provide for better support, including better
 virtualization of system resources such as timers and sound device support
 which is needed for today's interactive games and multimedia processing.
 The use of 32-bit protected mode drivers which in turn freed up more
 conventional memory, allows a class of memory-intensive applications to run
 properly under WINDOWS 95.

 To provide support for the most intrusive set of applications that only work
 under a unique DOS configuration that requires 100% access to the system
 components and resources, WINDOWS 95 can provide "Single MS-DOS application
 mode."  Entering this mode is like exiting Windows 3.1, then running the
 specified application under DOS, and then returning to Windows. In this mode,
 WINDOWS 95 removes itself from memory except for a small stub, and provides
 the application with full access to all the resources of the computer.

 Improved Support for Graphic-intensive Applications

 Rather than forcing graphic applications to run in full-screen mode as
 in Windows 3.1, DOS based applications that use VGA graphic video modes
 will be able to run in a DOS window.  However, for the best level of
 performance, full-screen mode will still be the mode of choice.

 Improved Memory Protection

 WINDOWS 95 will employ a "global memory protection" attribute in the
 Program Properties that will allow the DOS system area to be protected
 from errant DOS based applications.  When this attribute is set, the
 DOS system area sections are read-protected so that applications can't
 write into this memory area and corrupt the DOS based application,
 support area or DOS based device drivers.  In addition to the system
 area protection, enhanced parameter validation is performed for file
 I/O requests issued through the DOS INT 21h function.

 DOS "Defaults" Changed

 DOS applications running under WINDOWS 95 default to running in a
 Window with background execution set.  With Windows 3.1, the Program
 Information File (PIF) had to be modified to run a DOS application in a
 Window or in the background.  This change was incorporated to provide a
 more seamless integration between running DOS based applications and
 Windows-based applications.

 Consolidation of Customization of DOS-based Application Properties

 With Windows 3.1, the PIF Editor application was needed to create or
 change any property associated with running DOS-based applications.
 Numerous problems were encountered, including difficulty in accessing
 the PIF editor or changing PIF settings; the disassociation of the
 properties in a PIF file from the DOS-based application; the lack of a
 single location for storing PIF files other than placing them all in
 the Windows directory; and as previously discussed, the
 less-than-intelligent defaults for running DOS-based applications.

 WINDOWS 95 enhances the ability to define and change properties for
 running DOS-based applications by consolidating PIF files into a single
 location - the PIF directory within the directory where WINDOWS 95 is
 installed.  Access is accomplished swiftly by using the secondary mouse
 button to simply click the icon or application window.  The property
 information and the simplified user interface provides better
 organization of property settings through the use of property sheets.

 MS-DOS Window Toolbar

 Many Windows based applications provide a toolbar to implement quick
 access to common features and functions of a product.  WINDOWS 95
 extends this simplicity and power to making it easy to access
 functionality associated with an DOS application, including: cut, copy
 and paste buttons easy access to switching from windowed to full-screen
 mode quick access to the property sheets access to DOS VM tasking
 properties such as exclusive or foreground processing attributes easier
 access to font options for displaying text in a windowed DOS VM.

 User-Scaleable MS-DOS Window

 Since WINDOWS 95 supports the use of a TrueType font in a windows DOS VM,
 the DOS window can then be scaled to any size, when the font size is set to
 "Auto".  With this setting, the DOS window is sized automatically to display
 the entire window within the user-specified area.

 Local Virtual Machine Environment Settings

 Under WINDOWS 95, a batch file can be optionally specified for a given
 DOS-based application allowing customization of the DOS VM on a local
 basis before running the application.  This is like have a separate
 AUTOEXEC.BAT file for different DOS-based applications, which can set
 environment variables and install TSRs for the local VM only.

 Support for Universal Naming Convention(UNC) Pathnames for Network Access

 The WINDOWS 95 shell allows users to browse and connect to network servers
 without mapping a drive letter to the network resource.  WINDOWS95 supports
 the same functionality at an DOS command prompt and allows for using the
 contents of shared directories on servers from both Microsoft Network servers
 and Novell NetWare to: View the contents of shared directories
 dir \\server\sharename[\pathname] Copy files from shared directories
 copy \\server\sharename\pathname\file destination Run applications from
 shared directories \\server\sharename\pathname\filename

 New MS-DOS Commands

 The MS-DOS command processor and utilities have been enhanced to provide
 better integration between DOS functionality and the Windows environment.
 Not only can DOS applications be run in a DOS window, butby using the start
 command, a user can start a Windows-based application from the command prompt.
 Syntax:	start  <application name> | <document name> Start an
 application by specifying the name of a document to open, and WINDOWS 95 will
 launch the application associated with the given file type.  For example, a
 user types "start myfile.doc" and the application associated with the file
 specification will start, assuming there is a valid association. Start
 another DOS-based application in a different MS-DOS VM instead of the current
 VM.  For example, to start a telecommunications session called TELECOM in
 another DOS VM, type "start c:\comm\telecom.exe" at the command prompt.  A
 new DOS VM will be initiated and TELECOM.EXE will be executed. Start a
 Windows-based application from an DOS command prompt by simply typing the
 name of the application.  For example, to start Word for Windows, simply type
 WINWORD at the command prompt.  This would be the same as typing "start
 winword".

 Commands and utilities that manipulate files have been extended to include
 support for long file names (LFN). The dir command has been extended to show
 long file names in the directory structure, along with the corresponding DOS
 filename construct, commonly referenced as the 8.3 filename. The dir command
 has a verbose /v switch to provide additional file details. The copy command
 has been extended to allow copying oflong file names to/from short/long
 filenames.  For example, typing: copy myfile.txt  "this is my file" will
 create a new file with a long file name.

 So what happens to DOS and DOS applications when WINDOWS 95 becomes reality?
 Microsoft has pledged a commitment to continue to support DOS in the future.
 However, as history has shown, it doesn't necessarily follow that there will
 be any improvements or enhancements to MS-DOS itself, only to its surrounding
 environment.  This means, that DOS will continue to exist tomorrow as it does
 today, but getting there will be different.  Today, PCs boot into DOS and run
 Windows.  Tomorrow, PCs will boot into Windows and run DOS.

 PAUL WILLIAMSON is an on-site consultant to Chase Manhattan Bank, a software
 developer and the RIME host for the DOS conference. He is a member of the
 editorial board of WindoWatch.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------


   THE   AUTHORING  TOOLS  ...a   WindoWatch  series


   WordPerfect's   ENVOY 1.0

   A Review                                      (C)  1994   by Paul Kinnaly

   If you read the October 94 Preview Issue of WindoWatch , you have already
   had a look at Envoy.  Published by WordPerfect, a division of Novell,
   Envoy 1.0 is a Windows authoring tool and represents one of several
   operating system formats used to publish WindoWatch electronically.

   As a result of a series of critical comments about the WindoWatch
   Announcement issue, it was suggested that if I really had the need to
   critique I should put this latent talent to work and review the Envoy
   product for WindoWatch readers. I tried to demur, but soon found a
   package in my mailbox containing one write-protected 1.44mb diskette and
   a trifold document entitled "Envoy QuickStart Card".

   Having been victimized too often by ill-behaved Windows programs, I
   backed-up my system, scanned the diskette for viruses, and took the
   leap...

   The installation of Envoy proved to be simple and straight forward. The
   near standard setup program politely informed me that installation would
   take 1272kb of disk space in the program directory and a further 288kb in
   the Windows directory. Setup asked for my name, company, and license
   number, allowing each to remain blank, and then proceeded to install itself
   on my system. There were no options or choices other than selection of
   drive and directory.

   The completed installation gave me the "WordPerfect Envoy" program group
   containing icons for the Envoy Viewer, several sample documents, and an
   on-line users guide, itself an Envoy document.  The sample Envoy
   documents were apparently produced by such varied applications as Excel5,
   CorelDraw 4, and several word processing and desktop publishing programs.
   One further icon featured the ubiquitous Readme.Txt file, which I promptly
   selected. This was a very pleasant surprise: a truly useful listing of
   information. There were sections on topics such as System Requirements,
   Troubleshooting, both during and after installation, Compatibility,
   Customer Support, as well as a section detailing the uninstallation of the
   program. This section contained a listing of every file installed on the
   system, where it would be found, and what its purpose was - an excellent
   feature I wish more developers would copy!

   The on-line user's guide was somewhat sparse; while it made use of Envoy's
   hypertext links to take you from a subject list to a topic, the information
   provided was brief and assumed a degree of knowledge. As a supplement to a
   manual it would be ample, as a substitute for one it is weak. Telephone
   support is also available for the program using either a toll-free number
   with a $25 per call service fee or on a no-fee basis for a toll telephone
   call to Utah.

   From a user's perspective the installation was simple and swift.
   Technically, however, it left something to be desired as it modified -
   without asking - the WIN.INI file heavily, adding lines to the [Windows],
   [PrinterPorts], [Ports], [Devices], and [Extensions] sections. Not only
   didn't it ask, it didn't make a backup copy of the ile before altering it.
   Thus, the detailed directions for uninstalling the program became not just
   a "nice touch", but a necessity.

   The raison d'etre of this and other authoring tools is the ability to
   create hypertext links within a document. Those who viewed the WindoWatch
   Preview issue saw these in action; a mouse click on the highlighted name
   of the author in the table of contents would jump the reader immediately
   to the article itself. This feature allows the reader to jump through an
   electronic document viewing only chosen sections without tedious scrolling
   through the entire document. From an editorial and layout standpoint, it's
   important that the creation of these hypertext links be easily understood
   and appropriate - while still flexible.

   Envoy loaded rapidly and presented me with a screen with standard Windows
   menus at the top, a button bar, a large white area covering most of the
   screen, and a status bar at the bottom. I found that merely placing the
   mouse cursor over a given button caused a brief description of the button's
   function to appear on the status line. Generally, as is true of most
   Windows applications using such a button bar, functions available there are
   duplicated in the Windows pull-down menus.

   Creation of Envoy documents (.evy) is done in a manner similar to that used
   by many PC fax programs - Envoy installs itself as a standard Windows
   print driver. One merely "prints" the desired document to Envoy instead of
   to a hard-copy printer. I was pleasantly surprised to find that Envoy
   simplified the process even more. The File menu contained an Import
   selection. A click here brought up the standard Windows file selection
   menu. A double-click on the desired file name launched a whole sequence of
   events: Envoy started my word processor, Word for Windows, loaded the Word
   document, "printed" it to the Envoy driver, shut down Word, and presented
   the resulting Envoy document on the screen. Elapsed time - less than a
   minute. Simple and quick!  I was impressed.  Envoy's printer driver may
   be customized to allow specific PostScript or TrueType fonts to be
   "embedded" in the document. This feature ensures that the reader will see
   the document as you created it, even if some fonts are not on his system -
   but it greatly increases the size of the resulting file.

   Within this Envoy document, I could utilize any of the three authoring
   tools built into the program: annotations, bookmarks, or hypertext links.
   What I could not do, was add to, modify, or rearrange any of the text!
   This work must be done using a word processing program before importing the
   file to Envoy. This struck me as a strange limitation for an "authoring
   tool".

   Creation of a hypertext link is simple; the program leads you step-by-step
   through the process. After selecting the hypertext tool from the button
   bar, the key word(s) that will form the "source" of the link are
   highlighted using the mouse. A message appears on the status bar directing
   the author to now highlight the destination of the link. As soon as you
   begin to highlight this area, a new message appears on the status bar
   telling you to click the right mouse button to select the link properties
   - such as text color or underlining.

   Rather than highlighting text as the source of a hypertext link, the author
   may highlight a blank section of the page and have Envoy place a "button"
   there. Several different icons are provided to use as buttons including
   arrows and the "information" icon (an "i" within a circle). These buttons
   may be dragged around the page to place them where desired.

   Envoy also features another potentially useful form of annotation through
   the creation of "bookmarks". The author selects the icon for bookmarks
   from the Button Bar, highlights an area of text, then types a label for the
   bookmark. Upon receiving the document, the viewer merely clicks on the
   bookmark icon on the status bar to get a list of all the bookmarks in the
   document. Clicking on any one of these takes the viewer to the appropriate
   section marked by the author. Envoy's third main authoring tool is "sticky
   notes". A click on the "Note" icon, followed by a click on the appropriate
   section of the document places a yellow "sticky note" there, within which
   you may type comments, corrections, etc.

   Saving a document in a compiled and Windows ready format was as easy as
   selecting File | Save As from the menu. The dialog box that appears offers
   the choice of saving as an "editable" Envoy document (.evy) - which is only
   usable if the full Envoy program is on the system, as a text file (.txt)
   - which could be copied to the clipboard, or as a file incorporating the
   Envoy run-time viewer (.exe) - which can exist as a stand-alone application.
   The dialog box also contains a button for "Security" which allows setting
   a password to access the document and controls the degree of access a user
   will have to the document: Unrestricted - i.e., annotatable with Envoy's
   authoring tools, read and print access only, or read-only access. For
   those systems with electronic mail access using either the VIM or MAPI
   standards, Envoy can activate your mail program to allow electronic
   transmission of the newly created document. This is a particularly useful
   feature in a workgroup environment.

   The biggest drawback of creating a stand-alone application is the size of
   the Envoy run-time viewer which gets packaged with your document. A 41kb
   Word for Windows text document was a whopping 399kb Envoy run-time file.
   Curiously, when I repeated this process with a large 397kb Word newsletter
   - replete with graphics, the resulting Envoy run-time file was only 416kb.
   Clearly the program stores the data (including graphics) in a very compact
   form; only the viewer itself is large.

   Some of the buttons available on the Button Bar are usable by both the
   author and the reader to move around the document and customize the view,
   even in restricted access documents. These include Page Forward and Page
   Back, Return to the source of hypertext link , Zoom In, Zoom Out, etc.  A
   particularly nice touch is the File | Preferences | Main View dialog
   allowing the reader to choose their own default view. Onefinds choices of
   fitting the document to the width of the window, to the height of the
   window, the entire page in the window, or a specific percentage zoom
   setting. Envoy allows selection of  nine 'standard' zoom percentages
   using the Zoom In/Out buttons or from the menu. Another button lets you
   return all of these to the default settings.

   A concern of many these days is the amount of resources a program takes
   during its operation. This can be a significant consideration in a
   multi-tasking environment - particularly for an author. Envoy acquitted
   itself well in these areas. Nortons SystemWatch showed that Envoy used
   only 2% of GDI and 7% of User resources. Exiting the program freed up the
   User resources, but not the GDI. Restarting the program, however, did not
   further deplete GDI, so apparently whatever is left by Envoy in the GDI
   heap remains available to it when it is re-run.

   Overall, despite my proclivity towards criticism, I found little to
   criticize here. My gripes about its actions on installation and its
   inability to add or modify document text were counter-balanced by the ease
   of use and the flexibility of the software. While we at WindoWatch did not
   utilize its capabilities given the content and the targeted reader, the
   program certainly has good potential in an authoring environment. The
   combination of hypertext links and bookmarks provides the author with a
   readily accessible means of leading the reader through a complex, multi-
   part document with ease. I'd recommend its consideration by anyone in need
   of creating such distributable - but protected - documents.

   PAUL KINNALY is a Management Analyst with the Department of Veteran
   Affairs. He has been involved with personal computers since buying an
   Apple ][+ in 1978 and is a regular contributor to the ILink and RIME
   Windows conferences. He can be reached for comment and questions at:

   paul.kinnaly@channel1.com
----------------------------------------------------------------------------


  PROGRAMMING   NOTES

  WINDOWS ASPECT: A Scripting Language	 A Tutorial - Part One
  For PROCOMM for WINDOWS v.2

  GHOST BBS v.3.20  (c) 1994 by Gregg Hommel


  Some time back, about six months after I first installed my copy of
  Procomm Plus for Windows v.1,  I took a serious look at the Host mode
  supplied by Datastorm. Earlier I had written a freeware script to
  manage the widely accepted QWK mail packet format on a PCBoard BBS
  running a Qmail mail door.  I called the script PCBMail  (still in use
  by a lot of people to this day), and decided to develop a shareware
  version of it, to be called PCB Freedom. PCB Freedom would extend beyond
  the rather restrictive limits of PCBMail into a more generic mail
  management utility.

  I thought that perhaps the Datastorm supplied Host mode would offer an
  additional method of supporting the users of both scripts. It took
  only a fairly quick look for me to realize that, although Host mode
  was sufficient to handle the task at hand, it certainly was nothing
  more than barely adequate, as far as I was concerned.  Not to
  disparage the Datastorm Host script, but I found it "ugly" in
  appearance, and somewhat in need of a few other modifications in other
  areas.

  Thus began a saga which led to GHOST BBS that continues to this day. It
  led me to discover things about the Windows Aspect (Wasp) programming
  language of Procomm Plus for Windows,  that I did not dream were possible
  when I first read their manuals.  All of this led me into writing and
  posting on various BBS networks a twelve part tutorial in Wasp programming.

  Although some information in that tutorial is now out of date, due to
  the release of Procomm Plus for Windows 2.0 with its new version of
  the Wasp language, much of it still applies. It is my intention to
  update that tutorial as necessary, and to post it in this ezine as a
  semi-regular column whenever the editors will let me stick one in an
  issue. So far they seem agreeable to the idea, but editors have been
  known to change their minds before. Red flag and charging bull mode ON!
  Talk about a public challenge! YOU  are publicly hired at your
  current stipend for as many tutorials as you can come up with.  Wise
  guy! This column is the first in that (semi-?)regular series of
  columns.

  When I first began looking at modifying the Host script for my needs,
  I admit it... I was a neophyte, with a whole truck load of naivet
  trailing behind me. I had already written and posted PCBMail and had a
  beta version of PCB Freedom in the works, but on a comparative basis,
  those scripts were not remotely close to what I had gotten myself into
  with what eventually became known as GHOST BBS.

  For those of you who already know what GHOST BBS is, please skip to
  the next paragraph. For those that don't.... GHOST BBS is a shareware
  replacement for the Datastorm provided Host mode which ships with
  Procomm Plus for Windows. It features additional security levels,
  multiple log-on bulletins, multiple download libraries, support for
  ANSI and non-ANSI menus and displays support for multiple languages,
  editable prompts and displays, and many other enhancements over Host.

  Logging onto a BBS, getting a mail packet, and uploading a reply
  packet is a relatively simple procedure. You let the communications
  application do most of the work. All the script really has to do is to
  watch what is happening on the BBS and send the appropriate responses
  that will perform the desired actions. The script doesn't have to read
  and then handle everything coming in the port.  It only needs concern
  itself with that incoming data which requires a response or action.
  The rest of it can be ignored.

  Not so with "host" scripts. They have to watch and interpret
  everything coming in, and expect the unexpected. The hardest thing to
  adjust to in writing GHOST BBS was the fact that my script was no
  longer the passive object, acting only upon a limited set of selected
  items from an external source. It was now the active object, responding
  and initiating to all information being sent by an external source.

  There is much more to it than that, of course.  An example, --when
  you log onto a BBS, effectively Procomm manages what appears in the
  terminal window while your script looks at that information and, when
  certain key words or phrases are present, responds to them. With a
  host mode, the script manages what appears both in your terminal
  window, and on the remote end, based upon characters, etc. sent to it
  by the remote, which it must trap, interpret, and act upon. Not quite
  as simple as a log-on script, even one as complicated as PCB Freedom
  became.

  This need to have the script do everything also caused a second problem,
  at least, under Procomm Plus for Windows 1.0x. The Wasp 1.0 compiler has
  certain very restrictive memory limits made upon a script at compile time.
  These limits involve a combination of factors, including the total number
  of global and local variables in use and the total number of "nested"
  code segments in the script. PCB Freedom was fairly complex, but nothing
  compared to the code required to make GHOST do what I, and my users,
  wanted it to do.

  Indeed, GHOST was so complex a collection of code that when I released
  GHOST BBS 3.00, the first shareware version of GHOST, I thought that
  it would actually be the last version of GHOST released, period !!  I
  was able to successfully compile the script, but only by using the PCP
  for Windows v.1.01 of the Wasp compiler. It had, if memory serves,
  something like 149 bytes of extra memory available for use at compile
  time, versus the  compiler in PCP for Windows v. 1.02. I didn't think
  that it would be possible to add any additional features or enhancements,
  unless or until Datastorm delivered a compiler with more available compile
  time memory.

  But, in the end, I did. GHOST BBS 3.10/3.20 is currently in final beta
  test, and has a lot of new features.  How I did this, and what it
  taught me about programming in Wasp is the point of all this rambling.

  Although it is quite possible that you will never write any script as
  complex as GHOST BBS, the things that I learned, or was forced to
  learn, in the process of writing GHOST expanded my knowledge of Wasp
  and how to programme using it at a fairly rapid pace. I don't know if
  that is enough to qualify me to offer a series of columns on Wasp
  programming, but it will certainly help and the editors of WindoWatch
  seem to think that it will work, so we'll give it a shot.

  This column then, on an irregular (sheesh!) basis, over the next few
  months at least, will offer tutorials, based upon my experiences as a
  Wasp programmer using that script language and writing usable scripts
  with it, starting with this column....

  At the risk of losing some of you, we are going to start at a very basic
  level, with the question "What is a script?".

  In Wasp, a script is a series of commands which Procomm Plus for Windows
  will read when told to, and execute as specified. These commands are
  written using a particular form, following a particular syntax, to instruct
  Procomm Plus for Windows to perform various tasks at specified times, and
  in a specified order.

  A script can be a complex thing telling Procomm Plus for Windows how to
  do almost everything. It can leave very little for Procomm Plus for Windows to do
  on it's own without instructions from, for example, GHOST BBS. It can
  also be a simple little set of commands to automate a given procedure or
  task.

  One of the most common, and simplest scripts many Procomm Plus for Windows
  v.1.0x users were interested in writing had to do with the barest attempt
  at automating their log-on to the bulletin boards they used. What they
  wanted to do was to create meta keys in Procomm Plus for Windows which
  would send their user name or password out the comm port when they were
  asked for the information by the BBS.

  At this point, we shall "create" an imaginary, neophyte Procomm Plus for
  Windows user named George. He wants to use Procomm Plus for Windows to
  access several different bulletin boards, and like all good BBS'ers,
  uses different passwords on each system. But, he also wants to
  automate sending his name and password, because that is easier than
  trying to remember the correct information for each system when he
  logs on to it.

  To accomplish this, George might start out by assigning scripts to be
  run when each of two meta keys are selected. This is how a lot of
  Procomm Plus for Windows 1.0x users get their first taste of script
  writing. This  process is not a concern under Procomm Plus for Windows
  2.0 that it was under 1.0x.  In version 2 there are icons which
  perform these functions which can be added to your action bar and
  don't require the attachment of a script.  However a lot of Procomm
  Plus for Windows 2.0 users still use these meta keys for that job.

  Let's look at the two scripts that he could write to be attached to
  those meta keys...

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
  ;SENDNAME.WAS - send the UserID for this system when meta key used

  proc main
    transmit $USERID
    transmit "^M"
  endproc

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
  ;SENDPASS.WAS - send the password for this system when meta key used

  proc main
    transmit $PASSWORD
    transmit "^M"
  endproc

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
  Although not fancy scripts... in truth quite simple, they do the job,
  and automate the task of having to remember the name and password
  George uses on each BBS he logs onto and they introduced George to the
  concept of a script and what it does, along with a couple of basic
  principles of script writing.

  1) ALL scripts must contain at least one procedure (proc) called MAIN.

  2) ALL procedures in a script must begin with a "proc name" statement and
    mark their end with the "endproc" statement.

  3) Variables in Wasp which begin with a "$" are pre-defined, system
   variables which contain values obtained from within Procomm Plus for
   Windows and its setup.

  All of that from such a simple script !  Of course, for many users,
  this turned out to be just a start... once they discovered that it
  was a fairly simple task to automate a portion of their log on and
  they wanted more. So, we'll help George get a little further along,
  by writing a simple log on script to be used.

  Let's assume, for now, that every system George uses, right after
  connection, asks for his name, and then his password, using the
  prompts "What is your name?" and "What is your password?". George
  might then write a script to automate this procedure that might look
  something like...

  proc main
    waitfor "name?"
    transmit $USERID
    transmit "^M"
    waitfor "password?"
    transmit $PASSWORD
    transmit "^M"
  endproc

  A script such as this would be "attached" to the dialing directory entry
  for each BBS, to be run after a connection is established-the default for
  Procomm Plus for Windows. In truth it is really not much more than the
  two scripts George first had, but combined into one script and with
  two "waitfor" commands added. The WAITFOR command in Wasp is fairly
  straight forward in concept, and easy to understand, even for a
  George, which is why we used it here.

  We now have our imaginary, neophyte Procomm Plus for Windows user writing
  his first script. But George is an incurable optimist, and knows that he
  can do better, especially so, now that he is getting more sophisticated.
  He has added a couple of new systems to his list...systems which do not
  follow the simple log on pattern of his earlier systems. Now he wants
  to automate those log-ons which is where we will leave George for now
  in the hopes that the editors want me to write a second one of these....

  Gregg Hommel has been a Data Storm beta tester and is presently a
  consultant for Delrina.  He is an active participant on many nets and
  is presently Co-Host of the RIME Windows conference. Your questions
  and comments to gregg.hommel@canrem.com

  Editorial Note: Gregg and I tease but we both know he is always welcome
  here. Do let us know what you think about these tutorials - either to
  Gregg directly or to lois.laulicht@channel1.com

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------


  Alice Travels


  WASHINGTON

  Washington DC
  September 25, 1994

                                                 Alice Awards Trolleys

  A new arrival to our town this week was Alice, the noted computer bon
  vivant, and my friend.  She was reported to be here to present free
  copies of WindoWatch magazine to all federal employees along with a
  complimentary cardboard computer for wallet or purse.

  The talk around the cocktail circuit is that old Alice has a few
  tricks up her sleeve to ease the bipartisan tensions. She intends to
  unveil Translator 1.01 for Windows, and Translator 1.01 for DOS 8.0.
  Each is quite different, and the two together are expected to make a
  splash at the upcoming Computer Press Party that is being thrown at
  the Lincoln Memorial real soon now.  In gratitude to us hardworking
  writers, we will get chicken a la king and jelly donuts and a free
  trolley ride between the Building Museum and the Botanical Garden.
  Workers are hard apace laying the tracks for the trolley, which have
  been appropriated from excess Education funds.

  Anyhow, the buzz at the latest Garden Club Institute bubbler is that
  Alice has devised a device for divining exactly what congressmen are
  saying, and translating it over headphones so that the guys in the
  opposite corner will understand. She calls it delicatessen translation,
  and we can hardly wait to try it on for size. And just in time for that
  recess period we have all been counting on.

  by Peter Neuendorffer    (c) 1994

  and.....................................................................


  MUDVILLE

  Mudville USA
  August 15 1994.

                                             AliceA  Wows them Again


  Since the baseball game was canceled, an impromptu rock concert was set up
  last weekend. It was the true epitome of sweetness and light, and featured
  many of the top names in the music business who were not invited to the
  "other" festival.

  Among those present was  AliceA., my friend, who gave a rave rave with the
  help of 2000 processors that were on loan from the IRS. Reporters were on
  hand from the major media, including the networks and WindoWatch Magazine.

  Alice's set opened with three tons of virtual mud, that descended from the
  light towers. She breezed into Sweet Adeline, accompanied by virtual
  symphonies in multicolored outfits, and then baffled the crowd with a
  lengthy description of exactly what Windows does when you are not looking.
  She used a large ethnic dance troupe to illustrate this, and a giant
  football player who impersonated a mouse.

  After that, she invited the crowd to sing along with Home on the Range,
  with a virtual bouncing ball provided by an unnamed operating system of
  yore. She played peek and poke with security, until finally the crowd began
  yelling "When will it ship?".  At which point she finished up with the uncut
  version of Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands, all 142 verses,  featuring a
  virtual electric guitar, virtual drums, virtual costumes, and virtual
  applause.

  Since the only speakers were provided by a home multimedia system, no
  one could hear a thing.

  by Peter Neuendorffer    (c) 1994

  or.......................................................................

  PARIS

  Paris, France
  December 1 or thereabouts

                                              WindoWatch Is There

  When we got a card in the mail  from the new on-line Windows magazine
  WindoWatch, we were not surprised as it disappeared into thin air.

  WindoWatch had organized the luncheon at the Louvre the day that we
  attended. A very dapper young man took our coat, and we sat down
  gratefully to witness a staggering feat of computer wizardry that was
  performed by our old friend Alice A.

  "I'm so glad you came," said Ms. A., smiling profusely and wearing an
  irradiated Paris gown. "You don't know how long I've worked on this
  feat." As we did not know, we sat back and watched.

  "Imagine," she said, turning to the gathered press, "that this picture
  is actually a three dimensional illusion. Then she pushed a button,
  and there was no more picture.

  The crowd was amazed, as were we. "And now imagine that this wall is
  computer generated." We tried to imagine this as she pushed the button
  again, and now there was not a wall there at all.

  "Now imagine, if you will," shouted Ms A., "that this museum, the Louvre
  is entirely fake." We did, and she pushed the button. We were now
  standing on the grass, with no Louvre in sight.

  "Now,  imagine, if you will," she slyly whispered, "that you are really
  back in the real Louvre." And we were back in the Louvre. Except, much
  to our surprise, a maze of wires and transistors was in view...as when a
  trampoline appears at the circus.

  "This is the part I like the best," as she winked at us. "Now imagine
  that this picture is an illusion." We were no longer sure where we
  were at all.

  With apologies to The New Yorker.

  by Peter Neuendorffer (c) 1994

  *************************************************************************
  Peter Neuendorffer is a programmer with a growing client list here and
  abroad. He is the author of a transit program for the Boston
  transportation system (MBTA125A.ZIP) which assists riders in finding
  their train route.  Most recently he has developed Ibid List Maker 2.0
  for Windows which predictably creates lists or a browsing multi-linking
  data base. (IBID20.ZIP)
............................................................................


  NEW  APPROACHES  TO  COMPUTER  ASSISTED  TRAINING


  Part II  of  a  WindoWatch  Series.     (c) 1994  by Jerome Laulicht

  The  Training  Dilemma: Teaching People How To Use Computers

  Our public school system does not have a monopoly on educational
  problems nor are children the only students being short-changed!
  Desktop computers have been a mixed blessing because of the many
  difficulties in teaching people to use them at all or to begin to use
  them at all well.  We can't be satisfied with the notion that learning
  to use computers is merely playing games,  typing letters or entering
  data correctly. For tasks like data entry or production typing, quick
  and dirty training is possible and friendly interfaces are desirable.
  The simple and rather unfriendly truth is that "user friendly" is an
  advertising slogan for a vaguely defined objective, with an elusive
  meaning and easily changed goals. Many companies advertise that it is
  easy to navigate the Internet and while doing so accomplish great
  things---if  you would only be so wise as to use their product.

  There are many people who have the need to use complex programs in rather
  sophisticated ways but have  little or no access to training experts
  on site.  It does little good to marvel at how quickly some people,
  particularly children, can learn to play Nintendo and other computer
  games. Obviously, whatever skills are learned with games, there is
  limited carry-over to doing other computer tasks. Game developers have
  discovered that they can deliberately give little help and make
  learning a challenging part of the entertainment.  No  developer of a
  program for real work would want to do this notwithstanding that
  instructions, both the on-line help and in the manual,  are too often
  written as if  users are being dared to decipher some sort of secret
  code!  The worn out Unix mantra is RTFM  which provides little help if
  one's Jack Armstrong secret ring decoder is on the blink.

  Some people have coped with this situation fairly well probably
  because others have provided alternatives.  However, what there is of
  computer education has been riddled with stumbles and lost chances.
  Many software companies have played down these difficulties with their
  insistence, vital from their perspective,  that their programs are
  easier to learn and come with oodles of help.  Those who see the
  problem as real and pervasive are partly dismissed as having a stake
  in making the learning issue seem overly complex.  In any case, these
  arguments appear in magazines which few computer users ever see. Part
  of the problem is simple.  Adults with limited education about
  computers have had to learn skills and concepts which have been
  defined as vital for their jobs and economic well-being.

  Using a computer has its full share of frustration and people do resent
  the time spent and the difficulties encountered in learning how to use
  a new program. The resulting pressure for better information has meant
  that the simpler programs now often come with help adequate enough to
  learn by doing.  This improvement is due in no small measure to the Help
  Engine provided with Windows, made even better with one of the many
  add-on programs, and the rapidly growing use of common Windows
  program interface features.  The more complex programs, however,
  still leave many of us floundering when we want to take advantage of
  one of the more complex or less-used features. The amount of
  information can be overwhelming and the on-line help files can often
  be even drier and more boring than those textbooks we dearly loved.
  Hypertext jumps are jazzy but they're only useful as technical aids
  and to navigate through a document.

  Help engines and API's do not write the words we see on the screen or
  construct the tutorials which will have us flying within a few
  hours. The standard and usual approach  has not been enough, certainly
  not for the unschooled. Important elements are missing from
  the perspective of many who are critical of how we too often go about
  teaching.  In learning computer programs, where is the fun in both
  teaching and learning which make it more gratifying and more likely to
  succeed? Where are the multiple methods  of communication?  Where is
  the needed interaction among the learners and between learner and
  teacher?

  The alternatives available to teach or learn how to use software are
  quite limited. The StarTrek solution of just telling the darn thing
  what to do and it will do it is not imminent. We can read words; look
  at graphics and animations; watch and hear about the actions of a
  disembodied mouse on a captured set of screens;  look at more
  movie-like films on the VCR or even our monitor; listen to teachers
  and cassettes; or learn by doing and by trial and error.   No way
  offers guaranteed results for all of us even though many of us manage
  somehow to discover our preferred way to learn.  Relying on the normal
  combo of on-line help, trial and error and,  if all else fails, the
  manual in the box and whoever we can find to ask questions does
  work...sometimes!  The cost in time and struggle is unpredictable, and
  the quality of the result too often depends on keeping  our criteria
  for success low enough to justify our claims.   For complex programs,
  people often add the step of giving up on the manual and finding a
  book which explains the manual. My favorites are those with titles
  like "X for Dummies"--both Alice and I refuse to buy them on
  principle--and those books which tell all in much less than half the
  official manual's length.  I am enchanted by the authors' chutzpah!

  Normal people, not teachers, who appear knowing are attractive
  alternatives to yet another book. They can be readily available, teach
  for free, commiserate with us, and may actually show us how to do some
  things.  They also may not have enough time and get impatient or
  emotional with us. Even worse, they may know little more than we do
  and give wrong information, or not know much about how to teach....a
  common but excusable failing.  It can also be a failing of authors of
  program manuals, programmers who provide on-line help,  even authors
  of those replacement books we buy with such hope and finally--even
  people who conduct classes.

  When knowledge is critically important, it makes sense to search for
  alternative methods and ways of finding teachers.  Audio cassettes,
  films and lately even multimedia tutorials have been devised and sold
  in the hunt for new possibilities. Its no secret that one of the main
  obstacles to effective and creative use of computers is not simply
  teaching people how to use them well but teaching teachers the skills
  to communicate the complexity of the subject using easily understood
  language. It is for these reasons that this article focuses on
  computer tutorial  programs which  are available on CD-ROM.

  PERSONAL TRAINING SYSTEMS (PTS)

  Personal Training Systems has a track record as a creator and seller
  of tutorials on audio cassettes.  They have involved  Peter Norton, a
  well regarded writer of books on computers, in their efforts.
  Recently, they completed a CD-ROM tutorial on Microsoft's  Office for
  Professionals--Version 4.3. They also offer CD-ROM tutorials on
  PageMaker, Excel, Word for Windows, Access and Windows 3.1.  Since
  Office is in fact four complex programs which are partially linked,
  the effort is ambitious.  It is no mean feat to teach people the use
  of  a full fledged word processor, spreadsheet,  data base and
  presentation program in one sweep--even if you restrict it only to
  lessons for beginners.  A number of assumptions and decisions have to
  be made.  Some examples: (1) what features to include or omit from
  each lesson; (2) how slowly should the teacher speak (not a trivial
  concern); and (3) should  you assume the ready availability of a
  teacher or at a minimum a mentor?

  I got a clearer sense of  their problems and assumptions when I saw that
  (1) basic lessons on Windows were included with the Office tutorial but
  (2) then it was assumed that these instructions were not learned well or
  would be skipped even by many  people who needed them.  This is the hoary
  and familiar pre-requisite headache in high schools and colleges.  The
  stark reality for Personal Training Systems and others--not a
  criticism-- is that no-one could learn to use these complex programs
  without being first being quite easy with Windows.  I would not have
  expected anyone to design a single set of beginning lessons intended
  for both Windows beginners and sophisticates for fear they would
  satisfy neither group. Perhaps I was naive.

  The message to inexperienced learners is: if you learn the rudiments
  of working with Windows, you can jump right into a set of powerful
  programs. The message to the computer schooled is to patiently bear
  with the simple and familiar stuff on Windows.   This approach  is
  somewhat self-defeating since no-one is going to be very happy with
  the inevitable compromises. I am even more convinced of this after
  going through the tutorials.  This mixing of audiences is typical in
  the earlier grades in school but to do this with learning programs for
  adults and older students goes too far. Yet this mix is also commonly
  done in computer classes sponsored by public high schools and even
  colleges.  However, the tutorial teachers sensibly hedge their bets by
  assuming ignorance rather than knowledge. They frequently give quick
  basic instruction in elementary Windows 'moves'  in the midst of
  teaching the applications. Inevitably these instructions must be
  repeated almost word for word as needed. People who know Windows need
  only be told to move a specific window. It is rather surprising to
  hear how many words must be said about this action to give clear
  instructions certain to be understood by someone struggling to learn.
  There is no apparent way of avoiding these instructions, except
  perhaps by fast forwarding? Much of the tutorial is like an audio
  cassette on a CD-ROM so you have controls which act like those on a
  tape player.

  Analogous compromises surely had to be made about many other parts of the
  tutorials on the four applications.  I presume that the choices again
  assumed sharp limits of knowledge among many users.  You would have to
  expect that the beginner will have no tolerance for omissions,  while
  the more experienced person would  tolerate repetition.  The choice of
  beginner topics, for example, were likely defined largely in terms of
  people who have hardly used any word processor or spreadsheet before.
  Don't misunderstand me--I know this can work if you do not ask
  awkward questions about boredom and frustration.  However, we do not
  have to perpetuate the questionable education traditions of the past
  nor do CD-ROM lessons have to be like frustrating classroom sessions
  often seen as  too fast or too slow.

  Good practical reasons like costs, earnings and likely sales must be the
  logic for teachers rejecting the more sensible approach of at least two
  versions which rely on differences in capacities and  knowledge base. As
  in a computer classroom, they then make assumptions about how to make the
  best of a flawed scene.  Since there are alternatives to the way they
  set up the tutorial, I suspect there might also be other less obvious
  reasons.

  The better classroom teachers do manage to partly compensate for the
  one-for-all approach. Since only a handful of teachers are employed by
  companies like Personal Training Systems, they can choose from among
  the best, thus bypassing  a major headache of more conventional
  education. There is no compelling reason for these tutorials to obey
  the flawed character of the classroom model unless the economics are
  compelling. It is possible to allow for interactive choices which go much
  beyond giving the user the option to skip sections, especially if a
  CD-ROM is being used.  Even if the medium is a VCR film or the cassette
  Personal Training Systems has standardly used, there are options. In
  fairness, though, we might be running into the higher costs of
  providing options versus the sales potential for such tutorials.

  I want to emphasize that this tutorial, given the choices, is not
  bad or even mediocre. Much of it is quite good!  It is clear as it
  takes you through many of the necessary steps. The teacher clearly
  knows her subject and what she is about.  I even learned about  useful
  options in programs I know well. I got a clearer indication of the
  quality of the tutorial when I moved to programs with which I was
  barely familiar.  Clearly, I was getting an excellent introduction
  not only to PowerPoint but to similar programs which enable you to
  create presentations.  I  quickly and clearly saw that something I
  had vaguely thought to be beyond my capacities and interests could be
  learned and used. I am not being critical then of beginning lessons as
  such and realize that facile and creative use of PowerPoint would
  clearly demand more learning time and experience.

  While doing the tutorials, my biggest problems were: (1) a growing
  impatience with the inability to skip the repetition of points common
  to Windows programs; (2) being reminded that I had not installed all
  the Office graphics files where the program assumes them to be;  and
  (3) finding some of those tiny toolbar icons quickly enough from the
  teacher's verbal description. A small point perhaps, but  I often had
  to pause the tutorial--a somewhat awkward procedure when you have
  minimized the audio control window, as you must do, in order to have
  the screen largely available for the application itself.  The real gap
  is the almost complete lack of any graphics on this CD-ROM, the inability
  to get visual help from either photos or animations. I know that they
  intend to change this in the new version of this tutorial due in the
  Spring but I do not know the directions they will take and how well
  they will capitalize on the strengths of a CD-ROM.  They did use
  simple graphics in the Windows tutorial, screen captures of  how tasks
  and commands are done with the mouse, and plan to make more use of
  this technique. Their approach works well within the boundaries they
  established but the limits are unnecessarily narrow given the
  complexity of the programs, the varied needs of their clients, and the
  option of anyone to skip any lesson they do not need.

  The structure of the approach is straight-forward, simple and useful. You
  can have the application operational, hear the instructions at your pace,
  learn mostly from being told what to do and then do it.  You can
  easily repeat any part of any lesson--or the whole section--as often
  as you want, repeating your error until you finally catch on. You go
  through the tutorial largely at your own speed; pause and restart at
  any point; go back to any of the sections at any time for a refresher
  or skip around at will. I  have to caution that my work has
  necessarily made me a quick learner in many areas in the process of
  evaluating tools as decent learning devices for young adults who are
  aiming for a variety of professions. This has provided me with
  experiences and biases that may not be the best for determining the
  value of this tool for other kinds of people.  Reliable evaluations
  of the pros and cons of the tutorials for any  intended audience are
  only possible with an actual trial with real learners. This would have
  to include observations, interviews and discussions with the users. In
  effect, this means doing a relevant and useful Beta test. The cost,
  complexity and tricky nature of such evaluations  explain why these
  tutorials are seldom evaluated very thoroughly.  Instead, we depend on
  word-of- mouth, names, endorsements, and personalized judgments.
  However, the situation is just about the same if we look at the more
  conventional ways of teaching computer programs. We do not demand nor
  are we accustomed to looking at these issues as carefully as is done
  by so many magazines for computer software and hardware.  A somewhat
  curious state of affairs given our collective search for better public
  education and the projections of great growth in the use of
  computers.

  My most serious criticism is that these tutorials rarely explain anything;
  rather, they show you what to do. They take you through the steps making
  sure you know about the existence of most of the commands available in the
  menus and through toolbar icons by using quick assertions--so fast and
  terse that they will be hard to remember or understand.  It's as
  though people taking beginning lessons are not supposed to be
  interested in understanding as opposed to just learning how to do
  things. Perhaps it is assumed that employers who provide their
  employees with these tutorials want the trainers help not to waste
  time or money helping students to get insight?  The consequence
  remains that to stint on training costs can create unknown and
  negative prices to pay later.

  Yes, I want that new version.  Even better will be those CD-ROM tutorials
  which I know can be created and likely will be--rather soon. The new
  learning tools will aim for an audience of many skill levels so that it
  will give people the latitude to individualize their learning. One disk
  will meet a variety of needs and the learner can return to it after
  she has become competent enough with the program to be ready for more
  complexity.  Such developments depend upon potential purchasers,
  developers and users demanding and prepared to pay for more
  comprehensive and sophisticated tools. Already we use CD-ROMS for very
  elaborate multimedia encyclopedias and for convoluted  games and
  puzzles. We author and produce books which cover the complexities of
  programming languages and of major programs.  We can therefore do
  analogous things to enable more people to learn and use tools which
  are rapidly becoming critically important to their economic
  well-being.

  The alternative is to fall back on the over-optimistic fantasies of
  voice commands to Hal-like computers. It is of limited value to define
  beginning lessons so restrictively that it drastically limits a
  tutorials value.  Too much of the serious  tougher stuff can be
  easily omitted, left for self-teaching or for others to handle.  Too
  often this approach does not work very well.  Many people--granted,
  not the majority-- are trying to learn concepts and get knowledge
  about computers--more than just task skills.  Even those curious
  people with good learning talents or reasons for wanting to go from
  the how to the why, and who want to be able to do complex tasks, will
  get too limited help from tools focused only on beginners.  People do
  not get too many opportunities to learn and the time should not be
  thrown away on rote learning of rudimentary tasks.  Individual
  differences are a normal fact of life and one I hope the tutorial
  creators will heed.  Many employers, large and small, who could make
  good use of computer tutorials would prefer to use them to train
  professional and semi-professional employees,  not just entry level
  people who largely do data entry.

  The  Multimedia Tutorial on CD-ROM

  Why would an individual, small organization or school spend money for
  computer program tutorials on CD-ROM given the extra costs.   Are such
  tools cost-effective only for larger organizations with considerable
  turn-over? Training people quickly to use new software is a not an
  insignificant cost.

  There is probably only one good reason for even thinking of doing
  this--a feeling, belief or evidence that the manual and help files are
  simply not sufficient and that buying additional books will not
  suffice.   How can one sensibly cost out the original purchase and
  employee training time in these terms?

  Perhaps the real choice is between a classroom situation or working alone
  with a tutorial program--a disembodied teacher at your side.  Personal
  Training Systems describes their effort as the "best way to learn to
  use a program is to have an expert talk you through it..to be at your
  side."  The cost factor then favors computer assisted learning,
  especially when more than one person will use the tutorial.  There is
  a catch: tutorials of presumably high quality are available for only a
  handful of programs.  The classroom with a live teacher is still
  liable to win out in the face of uncertainty and ambiguity, primarily
  because its a familiar and safer choice. As a business, the whole
  idea looks like a loser except for three facts: (1) some companies
  have been successfully selling  learning tools;  (2) CD-ROMS seem to
  hold  promise beyond what books, audio cassettes and VCR's  offer; and
  (3) the major training costs are employee time rather than the
  differences in price between a book and a CD-ROM.

  Schools Using Tutorials

  Teachers of young adults and high school students usually want them to
  learn more than the basics. The better schools are painfully aware of
  the huge differences in motivation, readiness, and other factors
  affecting the ability to learn which make it so difficult to close
  knowledge gaps. These schools are a major potential market for
  companies like Personal Training Systems for both the basics and
  beyond. The MS Office tutorial, for example, makes it possible for
  many students--not all by any means--to get most of their instruction
  without a teacher, only someone available to answer questions. This
  should not be seen as a threat but as one of the better uses of a
  school computer lab. All kinds of schools have difficulty finding good
  teachers on the use of computers and programs.  Neither Departments of
  Education or Computer Science train people to do this competently nor,
  in fact, does anyone else. In truth, few schools even seek to hire
  such people. Yet computer literacy is becoming more vital and valued.
  It must include knowledge of an operating system, how to use the
  important general purpose programs, and finally, the increased ability
  and skill to learn additional programs, as needed, through self-study.
  This is a classic chicken-egg situation in which enterprising
  companies might find rewarding opportunities. There is the corporate
  market and an interesting and exciting potential in smaller commercial
  and non-profit enterprises.  Schools and libraries represent an almost
  untapped depository for training tools on content, teaching people to
  be computer trainers and for mentoring purposes.

  Tutorials, be they videos, cassettes or CD-ROMS, can also be useful
  to high schools, junior colleges and other colleges responsible for
  adult-education programs covering a wide range of topics using the
  computer as a tool for self study. The institutions offering these
  courses are effectively the only ones which can meet the computer
  education needs for many people,  but they do have some real
  dilemmas: (1) how to find local people for low paid part-time work who
  have both the needed knowledge of content and teaching skills; and (2)
  finding the means to purchase multiple copies of the tutorial and the
  associated program.  Efforts to teach people how to use  software
  could be much enhanced by the use of expert teachers  to produce
  tutorials which get wide distribution within a given system.  The
  local teacher could meet the vital needs of answering questions so
  people do not get hung up and giving  individualized  brief tutoring
  sessions as needed.  The important need in learning to use computers
  is doing and  trying while moving at a comfortable speed--which is not
  necessarily the group pace defined by a teacher.  The important skills
  for the teacher should be knowledge and ability to advise and consult,
  as opposed to lecturing skills and following a prescribed curriculum.

  Perhaps software companies need to strengthen their standards for site
  licensing to make multiple copies of  many of their programs more
  available to teaching institutions and their students at special
  rates.  This could be an important addition to software standards more
  commonly in use and would be a prudent economic and social investment.
  We must also rethink distribution of the tutorials themselves so that
  they are available at affordable prices for wide use in the education
  process. For example, could videos and CD-ROMS be made available to
  borrow from libraries and used in school computer labs equipped
  properly.  This would be an educationally useful extension of the
  computer lab now common in many American colleges and could make
  computer literacy a mainstream expectation and reality.

  How can smaller companies producing these tutorials be helped to
  improve their capacity to distribute their products at prices
  significantly lower than those offered to business?  These are not
  software giants. What would it take to arrange for sensible
  distribution of the applications and the tutorials, without loss to
  the companies and without special government subsidies, for the
  benefit of both young people in school and the many adults who need to
  learn these skills for better jobs?

  There are obviously many questions, a need for new practices and
  procedures, and a tradition not conducive to this kind of thinking.
  There are also solid opportunities for meaningful change to prepare
  people to qualify for employment where computer skills are required.
  Computer assisted learning with tutorials on CD-ROMS are not magic
  pills nor are they the only means to enable us to deal with some real
  social dilemmas.  Some years ago, a new company which has since become
  a major producer of both computers and software,  made a serious
  effort to get computers into schools at quite low cost.  Perhaps it is
  time for other computer companies and their experts to make the effort
  to effect serious change in the educational process for the use of
  computers.

  Personal Training for Office by Personal Training Systems retails at
  $90 for a single copy. The training cassettes retail for $37.00.  The
  street price for both of these items are somewhat less.  They will
  soon release a major upgrade for their CD-ROM  THE MICROSOFT OFFICE
  PROFESSIONAL  including training at various skill levels. They can be
  reached at 800-832-2499 for more information and orders.

  JERRY LAULICHT is professor emeritus from the University of Pittsburgh.
...........................................................................


      POLLING  THE  WEB


   The WEB is a collection of Internet sites which provide both text and
   graphical information. The WWW or World Wide Web is one of the fastest
   growing parts of the Internet.  This growth covers tools, homepages and
   visitors.  Len Bayles, who is the author and creator of the following
   poll on suggestive demographics of the WWW has allowed us to present his
   results posted to the Internet world on Oct. 13, 1994. This is his
   report. lbl


   On July 21, 1994 I posted a poll to comp.infosystems.www.users ( a
   news group or conference) which I reposted three more times to the same
   group. During the one month period I received 332 replies to the poll.
   In the 332 replies I had 3 duplicate respondents.  Here are the results
   of that poll.

   1.  Software used to access W3, for example, Mosaic, Lynx, Cello, etc.

     Mosaic    	          	            	  85.71%
     Lynx        				   6.99%
     MacWeb     				   3.65%
     Cello      				   1.22%
     Other      				   2.43%

     * Users having access to multiple software packages represent 36.17% of
     the sample.

   2.  Platform used, i.e., Unix/XWindows, MSDOS/Windows, Macintosh.

     Unix                  	    62.31%
     MSDOS/Windows  		    19.45%
     Macintosh       		    15.81%
     Other              	     2.43%
     Users who have access
        to multiple OS's            26.14%

   3.  Does your software-system display graphics?

     Yes   			    95.73%
     No    			     4.27%

     Some users commented that they disable graphics due to speed
     considerations.

   4.  Can you utilize sound files?

     Yes  			    67.17%
     No   			    32.83%


   5.  How many hours per week do you spend accessing W3?

     1 to  5 hours       	    51.53%
     6 to 10 hours       	    28.53%
     11 to 15 hours        	     6.13%
     16 to 20 hours        	     7.98%
     21 to 25 hours                  1.84%
     26 to 30 hours      	     1.23%
     31 to 35 hours                   .31%
     36 hours or more                2.45%


   6.  What is your primary motivation for using W3, i.e. business,
     pleasure, scientific?

     Business                       46.34%
     Pleasure                       37.20%
     Information gathering          16.46%

     Most of the responses fell into the above three categories.  I
     categorized the results from the primary answer only. A large
     percentage of the respondents use the Web for a combination of the
     above reasons.


   7.  What is the bandwidth  of your connection, i.e., dialup 14.400, 56Kb,
       T1?

     T1 or faster                   33.13%
     56k to less than T1       	    22.80%
     14.4 to 28.8                   20.67%
     9600                            1.82%
     2400                            1.82%
     Unknown                        19.76%

     I suspect that most of the "Unknown" group fall into the T1 or faster
     category. Many of the respondents in this category said that they were on a
     network but were unsure of the speed but said it was fast.


   8.  Are you a W3 provider?

     Yes                            62.33%
     No   			    37.67%

    I think this was a confusing question.  Many responded "yes" to this
    that were not providers as such.  It seems that many accounts today let
    you have your own personal home page. While this does not make you a
    "NCSA" it does allow for the average user to look like the big guys.

    Although the following two questions were optional, most did respond to
    them.


   9. Age

     16 to 20          		     9.15%
     21 to 25        		    26.76%
     26 to 30         		    22.54%
     31 to 35         		    12.32%
     36 to 40         		    15.49%
     41 to 45                        5.63%
     46 to 50          		     4.93%
     51 to 55          		     2.11%
     56 an up                        1.06%

     As a side note,  I did get one answer that said "as old as dirt."  I
     was unable to place this in the above categories, but it was worth
     mentioning.


   10. Sex

     Male       		    87.19%
     Female    			    12.81%

   The general comments were very interesting.  If anyone is interested
   in seeing them please Email me.  I will be compiling a file containing
   them in the near future. Please feel free to mail me with any comments
   or questions about the poll.  I would like to do this again in six months.
   If you have suggestions for new or re-worded questions please let me know.

   Len Bayles  len@yar.cusa.com
............................................................................



  UPGRADING  SOFTWARE

  AN OLD FRIEND REVISITED:                     (C)1994  by Lois B. Laulicht
  A  product review -- Quicken v.4 for Windows


  Intuit's Quicken for Windows v.4 is one of those pieces of software
  that almost anyone can use at their own level of expertise and
  discover that the program is essential for money management.  Not
  everyone has investments to track or other than payroll income to
  report.  However, most of us do have checks to write, budgets to
  maintain, and tax items to collate.  Quicken accomplishes these tasks,
  and more, in a straight forward and easily understood manner.  If one
  were so inclined, one could manage the many details of a small
  business using the Quicken tools. The newest Quick Books as a
  companion to v.4 caps off this versatile suite of money management
  tools and will be reviewed in the next months by WindoWatch.

  It seems to me that the question of upgrading to the disk version of
  Quicken v.4 is one that falls into two separate categories.  There are
  some of us who carefully upgrade to make sure their installed version
  has the most current features. There are others who must justify the
  upgrade in terms of what it will do for them. The new features on the
  disk version are quite limited.  There are some nice account buttons
  at the bottom of the check register to insure complete records of
  charges and credits and the snapshot feature is very nice.  I'm also
  sure that I'll really appreciate the improved links to Turbo Tax in the
  months to come.  However, the disk edition of v.4 might have waited a
  bit. It is my understanding that the CD-ROM version is filled with all
  sorts of reference data and other goodies. However---it's very hard to
  improve upon excellence!

  Installation of the program was hassle free!  I was upgrading from an
  earlier version and was impressed with how well data was protected
  while the software was installed and then configured. The handy quick
  tour of what the software offers for VGA monitor users can be referred
  to at any time and covers all the high points of the program.  The
  On-line Help is very complete but not very interesting without any
  graphic examples.

  The guts of any money management software is the check register. As the
  assorted items are entered into the register, Quicken's Quick Fill
  feature will later access the name of the payee and the amount of the
  check for regularly scheduled payments, or with minor editing, an
  unusual amount. This saves many keystrokes and is a real time-saver.

  One of the powerful features that Quicken provides is a way of
  categorizing entries in the check register or any other register one
  decides to establish.  For new users,  it might be wise to look at the
  categories options carefully before one starts entering or
  transferring data.  Taking the extra minutes to specify tax categories
  and other tax related items using the "splits" feature,  particularly
  for pay checks and credit cards,  pays off at tax preparation time.
  The "Getting Started" guide gives one a quick overview while looking
  at the manual provides the necessary in-depth guidance crucial to
  really utilize Quicken's fine points.  To use Quicken in ways that
  save one from the tedium of assembling canceled checks, receipts, and
  other supporting documents at tax time, one  must plan  before
  plunging.   It should be pointed out that entries can be categorized
  later using these more sophisticated features.  Using the single entry
  approach of the register,  one can also establish cash, investment,
  credit card and savings account registers, calculating and projecting
  interest earned. The versatility of the register approach to money
  management is inhibited only by the limits of the user's imagination.

  The Electronic Payment option means that one can schedule payments
  well in advance and order Checkfree to pay bills on a specified date
  using their 800 telephone number and a modem.   Checkfree needs five
  business days to process your payments.  Should you make a mistake or
  choose to change an amount or stop payment on a specific item, the
  handy Email feature can send a stop payment instruction.  If a vendor
  you do business with cannot handle electronic payments Checkfree will
  instead send them a paper facsimile of your check.  Quicken obviously
  has the capacity to print checks with items for payment ready for
  signature.

  Balancing one's bank statement becomes a less tedious task with the
  Quicken drop down menu that prompts for the correct information and
  uses data already stored in program data files. A printed report can be
  generated listing the uncleared checks by date issued, check number,
  payee, category and amounts outstanding.

  These  tools keep you on top of your checking account chores. It
  simplifies the cash flow process and keeps one abreast of how money is
  spent.  Like many of us, you may not have quite enough money, but you
  won't ever be surprised by that short fall using Quicken. The
  financial calendar coupled with billminder keeps your transactions
  moving out and properly recorded in a timely fashion.

  For those with investments, the familiar Quicken interface makes
  somewhat complicated transactions easier to understand.  The trick is
  to keep transaction records current with sufficient detail to identify
  profitable instruments from questionable investments. One no longer
  has to wonder about the real cost of trading stocks or what the net
  profit or loss is.  Its all there....from stock splits, dividends,
  reinvestment of capital gains, and cash withdrawals of funds.  The
  amount of detail one chooses to enter for specific investment(s) is
  left entirely to the user. It becomes clear how this information can
  be used for general investment, retirement, college and tax planning.
  The manual  is most complete in this area and could easily become an
  investor's accounting bible.

  Quicken provides a very complete reporting interface and graphic
  capability. For instance,  if one is planning a home office addition
  one can easily determine the appropriate dollar investment with
  graphic display to determine the best option of either depreciation
  and/or expensing items for tax purposes. One can do interim reporting
  in terms of the planned dollar investment and quickly see if one is
  within budgetary and/or time constraints. These can be integrated for
  use with tax tools summarizing information consistent with year end
  tax planning. Additionally, comma delimited data, for spread sheet
  conversion, can be sent to the clipboard and then on to Excel or Lotus
  1-2-3. Other data or report material can be transferred to other
  Windows applications using normal cutting and pasting tools. If
  Quicken has any built in limitations it is the lack of DDE or OLE.
  Hopefully this will be one of the areas that Intuit will strengthen in
  future versions. The recent merger of Intuit and Microsoft increases the
  probability of inclusion of these features into future upgrades of
  Quicken.

  This is one of many money managers I have looked at over the last
  twelve months and is the one I have found the easiest to learn, the
  most versatile, and the most comprehensive. It is very reasonably
  priced at around $35 plus s/h.


  LOIS LAULICHT has been involved with computers since the early
  eighties.  She lives with her husband and their pair of German
  Shepherds in the West Virginia mountains writing and editing
  WindoWatch from their electronic cottage.
.............................................................................


   .... The Last  Word

  Consulting in the 90's                      (C)  1994 by Ben M. Schorr


  The times they are a changin'.  That phrase is true of few enterprises
  more than the fire engine paced change in the computer industry. As
  this industry changes, so do its' consultants. The entire field of
  computer consulting only got big when computers went mainstream in the
  early 80s.  Before then it was mostly major corporations and hobbyists
  that had computers.  We are now approaching the end of the century and
  look to see a computer on almost every desk. And for all of that
  computing power there is a veritable army of support personnel setting
  it up and training end users on how to use it - at least in the
  business sector and for specialized tasks.

  As the home and home office markets heat up with a resulting flow of
  computer information, even more people are gaining confidence in their
  abilities to configure, repair and add computer components to new and
  existing systems. This  challenges consultants in at least two ways:

  1.  Everyone has a brother-in-law who is a "Computer Expert." You know
  the type. He's the office guru because he knows how to change the
  toner in the laser printer, subscribes to PC Magazine and bought a 486
  at the swap meet for his house. Suddenly everybody is calling him for
  free advice and he is more than happy to get wrist deep in their
  WIN.INI files. Well folks, if you think working with professionals is
  expensive, try working with amateurs. I get a lot of calls from people
  who've either messed up their own configuration or, more often, had a
  "friend" come in and "fix" it for them.

  The real problem begin when these so-called "experts" get laid off or
  get ambitious and decide to have some business cards printed up that
  read "Computer Consultant."  Now they're out in the marketplace
  alongside the professionals disguised as a professional consultant....
  and they may not be easy to spot at first. They'll have their Paper
  Direct business cards and brochures. They'll toss out buzzwords like
  "Information Super Highway" and "Scuzzy." AND they'll offer their
  services at ridiculously low rates and are often pleased to get much
  below prevailing local rates. But you can quickly separate
  the pretenders when the work begins.

  I've heard reports of "experts" who left a system unbootable because
  the AUTOEXEC.BAT and CONFIG.SYS files were in WordPerfect format. I've
  seen "experts" who deleted key .EXE files trying to free up hard drive
  space. I've also seen hard drives mounted backwards in the case, laser
  printers plugged into UPSs and systems with three copies of Windows
  installed.

  Where and how does this hurt ? Perception. It can sometimes take a
  little while for a professional to spot a pretender, especially if we
  haven't had a chance to see his work.  Imagine how difficult it is for
  a lay-person to spot one! Let's assume as a lay- person you've just
  paid a "Computer Consultant" $500 to set up your system. Nothing works
  well or at all and that computer is a constant headache. The fellow
  rarely returns calls and when he does, seems befuddled and has no
  answers. Yet another person hands you a card that reads "Computer
  Consultant" and offers to take a look at your systems...for $75/hour!
  Wouldn't you be a bit wary of being taken by yet another pretender...
  and this time for a lot more money?

  Many prospective clients have been swindled by not one, but two, three,
  four or even a longer succession of these impostors. They've paid a lot of
  money for minor success and as a result are justifiably wary and more
  cynical when we tell them what we can do for them and for how much. They've
  heard our song before...and they can't tell if it's live or Memorex.

  Making yourself visible:

  How can we show and then prove to the public that we're the "real deal"?
  It's not easy and it requires a lot of determination and time. First of all
  you must establish yourself as a legitimate expert and viable businessperson.
  Join the Chamber of Commerce and a local community organization like Kiwanis.
  Get involved and establish yourself as a stable and hard working member of
  the community with a telephone which is regularly answered and where phone
  calls are always returned. Establish yourself with your local bank.  Write
  articles on your subject of expertise and actively seek speaking engagements
  on your subject. Offer seminars and classes. Offer to teach part-time at a
  local school or be a volunteer at a "Career Day" at the local high school.

  Encourage your clients and colleagues to refer business to you and, most
  importantly, be honest and straightforward in your dealings with clients,
  prospects and vendors. They will remember this and you will get a reputation
  as someone who can be trusted.

  What They Say....

  2.  As "Plug-and-Play" becomes a reality,  the PR spin, is that systems will
  become easier to setup and maintain. The implication is that there no longer
  exists a need for a consultant to setup a system if the end user can simply
  twist three thumb screws, plug in a card, close the case and voila - it's
  finished. Even the brother-in-law, the computer expert can't go too far
  wrong with this. They are saying that as applications become more intuitive,
  the need for training will be reduced. They, also say, that as hardware
  prices continue to fall, having a system that is robust and new becomes more
  realistic for all commercial users. Further, if a system fails...replace it.
  The parts are cheap and "Plug-and-Play."

  The above is the party line that Microsoft, IBM and other big vendors would
  have us believe. Until just recently I feared that they were not far from
  reality. However, the more I see of the new operating systems, new hardware
  and new applications the more confident I am that we are not an extinct
  species just yet -- or  for  some time to come !

  Custom programming is still very much alive.  What about the new "intuitive"
  programs? How many times have you been called because the end user forgot to
  turn on their monitor and assumed their system crashed? No matter how simple
  developers try to make their programs, there will always be a need for end-
  user training...primarily because it IS very foreign terrain for most users.

  As for Plug-and-Play, many of the upgrades we now do could be done by end-
  users. The fact is that many end-users don't want to do their own upgrades.
  Just as I don't want to wash my own car, they prefer to pay somebody else to
  do it for them...and if PCMCIA is any example, there will be plenty of
  compatibility and configuration problems to go around.

  There is lots of information but very little confidence!

  The more robust systems are just great and mean there are more things the
  end- users can do. I have a client who told me that he thought that buying
  a computer would save him time...now he spends just as much time as before,
  if not more! The difference is that he's accomplishing ten times as much.
  The new systems will take end-users to a level of productivity they never
  dreamed was possible ...and good, experienced, honest consultants will be
  their guides.

  I rest my case!


  BEN M. SCHORR is the Director of Operations of Watson/Schorr Consulting, a
  Canoga Park, California-based computer and business consulting firm. Ben is
  the moderator of the CONSULTANT and LANTASTIC conferences on the Ilink Email
  network and the SMALL-BUSINESS conference on the Intelec Email network and
  has been a computer professional for over 7 years. Ben can be reached at
  (818) 993-8640 or via the Internet at ben.schorr@ panasia.com

  ...........................................................................


   N E X T    I S S U E

   Vol. 1  No. 2                                    January   1995


  Jeff Marchi is a consultant who is widely known on the various BBS
  nets. He will be discussing WINDOWS95 focusing upon the changes for
  good and for ill in this newest Microsoft operating system.
  Additionally there will be reports from Joe Rotello's bunch at
  WindowGroup on Windows NT Server 3.5 and Ambrose Campbell looking at
  the Windows NT client software with an applications update. Herb Chong
  will look at these Windows operating systems and help the rest of us
  understand what this specialized trend means for all Windows users.

  Who is Dan Bricklin?
  In 1979, Dan Bricklin, with his partner Bob Frankston, created
  VisiCalc, the first electronic spreadsheet. That program was
  instrumental in moving personal computers into business offices, and
  formed the basis for all spreadsheets since. Dan has brought to the
  software market another contender -- OVERALL -- which provides a
  unique way of looking at and manipulating data. Bricklin is providing
  WindoWatch a demo of the software which will be included for
  distribution to our readers. There will also be an evaluation and
  review of the product by Jerome Laulicht planned for issue three.

  As part of our AUTHORING TOOLS series, Jim Plumb who has used
  Acrobat v.1 for some time will put Acrobat v.2 through its' paces.
  Jim is a very versatile guy and has experience and expertise with
  many operating system platforms.  Mr. Plumb is also putting together
  the WindoWatch presence on the Channel One homepage for WEB visitors.

  Peter Neuendorffer does have a serious side! The creator of Alice is
  also a very committed programmer who is making the transition to Windows
  programming. He's going to share some of the problems he's encountered
  along with the gains of using Windows with the WindoWatch community!

  Paul Williamson has both the WexTech DOC2HELP and the Blue Sky
  Software RoboHELP in his portfolio for evaluation and review and will
  begin his series on Windows HELP tools in this upcoming  issue.  Paul
  is our resident DOS expert and serves on the Editorial Board of
  WindoWatch.

  Angela Lillystone  is a personal information manager expert who can be
  found with the Symantec Electronic Support people on CIS providing
  Windows consulting, testing, and training. Angela will report on
  askSAM for Windows v.2 developed by askSAM Systems. From what my spies
  tell me this is a new approach to organizing information. askSam has
  been a long time favorite for text management with researchers and
  authors alike.  askSam 2.0 for Windows offers several new features,
  among them searches on highlighted words or phrases, true hypertext
  and searches across all files.  The new import filters and automatic
  field recognition are purported to make askSam a viable tool for
  managing email from various sources. We put askSam through its paces
  for email management and as a technical support database.  Did we find
  what we needed when we needed it?  Read our report in the upcoming
  issue of WindoWatch!


  Gregg Hommel  continues his tutorial on WASP, Part two.  Gregg very
  modestly took on this task reminding us that it would be difficult for
  him to be impartial as he necessarily looks critically at the
  DataStorm offering.  Because there are so many new comers on all the
  "nets" we felt that learning to automate one's on-line sessions would
  be of interest to many readers.

  Derek Buchler continues to "wow" us all with his talent to amuse and
  his witty way with words.  I know that Derek will "find" us something
  funny.  Don't let his easy style deceive you into thinking that he is
  a computer light weight.  He is a highly experienced computernik!

  There will be a few more surprises from Paul Kinnaly and Jerry Laulicht!
  Who knows what bolt of genius will overcome one or even all of us!
 .........................................................................



  ...ON  WARP and WINDOWS 95

  The WindoWatch quest to get solid information on WARP was, frankly,
  side tracked into this thicket of opinion and discussions of "my OS is
  better than your OS".  The author of this piece is unknown. Curtis
  Brewington picked it up off a BBS and posted it to the RIME OS/2
  conference.... I think of this as a pox on both your houses.


  "The workers at Microsoft are by contract required to wake up every
  morning and genuflect in front of pimple-faced figurine of Bill Gates.
  Tracing the sign of the dollar across their foreheads, they reverently
  say,

  Our Father which art in Redmond, hallowed be thy DOS. Thy Visual BASIC
  3.0 come, thy sudden crashes be done in Windows as they were in
  Desqview. Give us this day our daily upgrade order form, and forgive
  us our prior versions as we forgive those undocumented calls. Lead us
  not into DOS 9.23,  but deliver us from SNA.  For Thine are the
  platforms, the compilers, and the law-suits forever and ever.  Amen.

  IBM workers are required by contract to wear blue underwear, and
  paint their bedrooms baby blue. Every night before taking off for home
  in their blue cars, they must stop and kneel in the direction of the
  CEO's office, and sacredly whisper this holy prayer:

  Our Father which art in Armonk,  hallowed be thy initials. Thy XGA
  come, thy OS/2 version 3 be done on RISC as it is on CISC.   Give us
  this day our daily press release,  and forgive Northgate and Dell  as
  we forgive your mainframe mind set. Lead us not into PC Juniors and
  Topviews, but deliver us from Unix. For Thine are the profits, the
  blue skies, and the market domination forever and ever.  Amen."
  AUTHOR UNKNOWN


  It heats up, and although there are moments of light, the discussion
  poorly conceals pure vitriol!

  On the PC Week Warp evaluation:

  IBMer> No, please re-read the Microsoft document.  The OS/2 configuration
  was not "standard".

  MSite> YES it was, you are making up stories because OS/2 came out so bad..

  An uncommitted observer jumps in and said:

  "OS/2 vs Windows 95 Performance!  By now you've probably heard the
  4M mantra "Performance equivalent to Windows 3.1 on a 4M machine". Here's
  how we're doing vs. Windows for Workgroups 3.11, and OS/2 Warp.  OS/2
  performs poorly overall.  Performance for Windows 95 is about equal to
  Windows for Workgroups."

  The IBMer fights back!

  IBMer> Yes, I've seen the "benchmarks".  These definitely fall into
  the "lies, damned lies and statistics" category.  In all cases,
  "apples vs. oranges" were compared. Here's my take on how these
  numbers were generated and a list of several things that are wrong
  with the way this test was conducted...

  1)IBM's recommended configuration for running on a 4MB machine were not
    followed.
  2)The High Performance File System was not used.This would improve
    performance significantly on the 8MB & 16MB configurations.
  3)The fast-load option for Windows applications running under OS/2 was
    not used as this improves Windows load time.
  4)Under OS/2, the applications were run in separate Virtual Machines.
    In this configuration, performance is compromised in order to prevent
    one Windows application from crashing all of the others.  Chicago does
    not offer this choice.
  5)The applications were run in "seamless" mode rather than from a full
    screen Windows session.  This mode compromises video performance in
    order to gain convenience.
  6)No tests were conducted to determine the speed at which Windows can
    execute OS/2 applications.
  7)The graphics cards used and the drivers used were not disclosed.  IBM
    does not recommend this video mode on 4MB systems.
  8)Why was the 4MB dual-applications test omitted?
  9)Due to NDA agreements and non-availability of Chicago, these
    benchmarks cannot be verified by neutral 3rd parties.


  It goes on...........

  An exchange On WINDOWS95 between an IBM supporter and a Microsoft supporter.

  IBMer>All Microsoft has done (with Windows '95) is use their portion
    of OS/2 to develop their own version of WARP.

  MSite>Nonsense, they have come out with a MUCH better product than IBM
    with much better performance. You just sound jealous. You have reason
    to be from the comments you made.  You are trying to fabricate anything
    you can to discredit Windows95 from what I can see.


  Nat Weiner  brought this to the RIME community's attention:

  Just saw a "WARP" ad on TV. Not the most persuasive ever, but it did
  cause me to look up the meaning of "WARP".  My Random House Dictionary,
  circa 1967, defines "warp" in part as:

     "to bend or twist out of shape; ... to distort ... from the ... true
      meaning; ... a mental twist, bias or quirk...;"

  After reading reports by some of the early users of "Warp", including
  a detailed factual piece by one Michael Putzel in the Nov. 11, 1994 Boston
  Globe about his experience, my funnybone wonders if the name was chosen
	(a) by Microsoft;
	(b) by entities from another world;
	(c) at IBM, a warped choice of warped minds;
	(d) by IBM as a description, warning and legal defense; or
	(e) by a comedian who submitted it as a joke?

  The final slur from an alleged European Source!

  Remember when the New York times blasted OS/2 just recently?  I just
  heard, via post on Internet, that a German Magazine reported that New
  York Times is HIRING Bill Gates to write columns for them!

  I think we have completed the circle!

