| October 1984 |
Volume 256, Track 0D |
Library Micro News
Computer Cat User’s
Newsletter
BC, the grand dame of school
library micro computing forwarded vol 2. no 3 of the CC user’s
newsletter. In it she reports that Mountain View will once again
become her home (until January that is) because somebody is taking a
maternity leave. She’s going to put the newly released CC circ
system up but my question is how’d she get the genetics going to
come back at the right time in the right place, etc., etc? Also
confirmed was a Computer Cat users meeting to be held Friday
night in Atlanta (During AASL). Nothing replaces support when it
comes to good micro software for librarians.
A Firm Book Trak
This kinda slipped out one day
when I was on the phone but Follett is going to show a hard disk
version of Book Trak at AASL. Rumors had been floating “6
months”, “12 months”, and the such before we would even see it…… but
they tell me there will be a version on display. Remember “showing”
and “shipping” are separated by quite a few letters in the
dictionary. To be quite honest I didn’t believe I would see it
before the April fool’s issue of WLN (not the bibliographic
utility). And that’s no joke.
They are going to put this firm
version out in a whole bunch of site for extensive testing and won’t
release it perhaps for a year, which is a smart move on their part.
It is much better to have something thoroughly tested before final
release rather than making
patches to cover all the
“what abouts?”
Professional Bibliographic System
On rare occasions (everyone at
times strays from the path) when we have even thought (it hurts to
write it too) of buying a compatible blue it has been because of the
efforts of Vic Rosenberg and the crazies in Ann Arbor. I really
thought I’d have a copy of PBS for the Mac by now (they’ve
pushed the release date back to November) but as me sainted mother
says “if wishes were horses then CLSI would die”. Hey,
remember, I live in Illinois were kids spend their lunch money on
lottery tickets not on drugs. After several hours with VR &PBS
in Dallas, I waited for the release to tell you about Pro.
It walks, talks and wets it’s
pants like Personal
Bibliographic Software
(one of the best pieces of micro software I’ve ever seen) but the
Professional is even
better. 1,000
citations/floppy; 30,000 when it gets firm and with print options
and user control equaled in few offerings. The flap over ANSI is
gone: you may choose it or APA or MLA or a “science” format.
That’s not flexibility, it’s damn good design!
A good companion program,
Biblio-Link
will allow you to download OCLC; RLIN or DIALOG records right into
PBS.
‘Oh give me the code, where the
bibliographies roam, and a blue box to reduce the phone charge’
(sung to the tune of Home on the range. If I could just find
a job in a university I’d have all the tools. Nah, it doesn’t run
on an Apple (but blue compatibles love it). If you have to do
bib’s, you have to have
PBS.
School Library Journal joke?
Long ago and far away I
contended in some stuff I did for my masters that when
“Booklist
and
School Library Journal
started treating micros as they did the various media, a lot of
school librarians would be out of the woods” when it came to micro
software. The bible of lisci has been doing software reviews for
nigh on three years now and I actually got a little excited when I
picked up the September
SLJ and saw they were
going to do the same. Then I started reading…
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Wired Librarian Newsletter |
| October 1984 |
Volume 256, Track 0D Page 02 |
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Up to this point I can remember Ruth
Glotfely’s fine piece one of the perils of Paulinesqueness of
previewing micro software and another really mediocre (oh to have
the freedom to be more blunt) piece on library management software
(to get enough copy she had to cover library instruction as well)
within the last two years.
One out of two isn’t bad;
unfortunately we need current, straightforward reviews.
In five full pages they
struggled to get nine reviews in (replete with stock photos of Susie
and Johny ooh-awing over an Atari keyboard) but the killer was how
dated the stuff was. One review was of a 1982 piece; two from 1980;
and the remaining six were from 1981. I could find that stuff in a
lot of books – I thought journals were supposed to keep you
current? By the time SLJ
gets to Appleworks
I’ll have a gigabyte drive attached to my IIc!
In hope there is strength and
we here at WLN (not the bibliographic utility) hope that if
they are going to apply themselves to the task that they do it with
a little more verve. At least a little more recency.
Softalk dies
I can’t imagine kids growing
up, using Apples, and not reading Softalk. The December
issue stays on my desk all year; I always checked to see if the
stuff I reviewed favorably was selling well; and I never won a
single contest. When old friends go, a tear unashamedly rises.
Alas poor DOSTALK, I read you well. I guess too may people
bought too many Apples and they gave away too many issues.
Robert Elliot Purser had that problem too. I’m not even caring
if I’ll get a refund.
New and Dynamite Software
DiversiCopy
Old pros will identify
immediately the telltale mark of an Imagewriter, a drastic change
from the Epson days of old. Everyone thought I was going to run
away with the subscription money and leave WLN (not the
bibliographic utility) to be produced by my daughter. Actually it
was time to replace the old plus; Becky uses it too much; and no
matter what sort of mystery card I slipped in her she wouldn’t run
Appleworks. I was going to cue up and get in the II line
(schools bought so many that it’s 90-120 days wait and is Santa
going to be PO’ed) but I liked the size, the performance and the
keyboard of the “c” that is weighed heavily in my mind. The
clincher was Bill Basham’s DiversiCopy.
DiversiCopy
is not a nibble copier for a file manager nor an alphabetizer nor
does it call you mother on holidays: it makes quicker than a bunny
on the operative end of a ten gauge copies of unprotected software.
It packs as it goes and I can make more copies on a single drive “c”
with it than I can on a double drive “e” with any other copy
program. It’s secret is packing everything into RAM and it supports
massive cards if you have them. If a piece of software ever carried
the Wired Librarians Seal of Approval, DiversiCopy does.
Send $30 to Bill Basham, Diversified Software Research, 5848
Crampton Ct,, Rockford IL 61111.
Blazing and Arrow
SM over at Sunburst sent some
new stuff over last month and it has the distinction of joining a
growing list of software that appears to be useless when viewed by
adults but absolutely outasight when the rugrats get their
hands on it. Highly refined logic skills are tough to teach in our
relevant oriented curriculumns (perhaps that’s why I always
recommend that computers go first into philosophy departments in
schools.) Blazing the Basic Trail and Arrow Dynamics
are games designed to put kids heads into the right frame to write
code. My staff (and I was right with them) thought they were trite,
uncalled for uses of the micro. The kids came back and said exactly
the opposite. These offerings are the type of resources to have
lying around for the kids to work with on their own. |
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Wired Librarian Newsletter |
| October 1984 |
Volume 256, Track 0D Page 03 |
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Bombastic Baby Blue Hype
Originally it was my intention
to share this bit of news (pun intended) last month… it’s tough
going to back to work, dealing with the kids, etc…..etc. Not only
that it took a month to sink in.
It seems as though, in an
attempt to crack a market that has been absolutely unaccessable, the
blue boys (read IBM) hired some hotshots with a great idea. Bring
the leading computer educators from across the country in for two
weeks all expenses paid in Berkley (so far so good); train
them how to use the baby blue in education; provide their school
districts with fifteen loaners for a year; and expect them to pass
the knowledge on to the unaflicted in their local terrain (charging
megabucks for the experience and not offering college credit for the
sainted salary schedule.
A friend of mine who attended
said it was a real bust. The trainees knew more than the trainers;
baby blue’s internal editor is worse than the Apple’s (Alas I
hope we can be safe that Beagle Brothers will never bring GPLE
over to their side); the LOGO is garabamundo; and the only reason
they went through with it was to get some more hardware in their
buildings that they could run stuff like Homeword on for
their kids.
Another aside, not directly
related to this series of meetings bet definitively germain to the
issue and a concept my father taught me a long time ago – “Never go
to a user’s group meeting with a tie on”- was shared by one of my
development friends. “It’s amazing he said said he “that most of
the technical stuff we get from Apple is hand written (or corrected)
xerox’s while absolutely everything from blue is typeset and shrink
wrapped.”
Suppose just a minute (and need
I remind you that it still is 1984) we turned American Public
Education completely over to IBM. Our kids would never have to
worry about having enough workbooks; the pay would be at least
triple (it would have to be to pay for the blue suits) and nobody
would care about the football team! Other tertiary benefits would
include low cost hardware; mediocre software; and a standard
monogram for awards, letter sweaters and paraphernalia (not to
mention stationary, etc.) We could do away with the Department of
Education (not that Ronnie really cares but watch him talk about the
rise in SAT scores as an effect of his administration when we really
know it’s due to BM’s marvelous software). I could go on and on
and……..
A move with this foresight
would virtually swamp private education and more than that we would
no longer have to worry about our schools…because IBM just wants
wants best for us (them). What a nightmare. Nah, they’d never take
the challenge.
The local Blue “customer”
center has a school mailing that I am sure is similar to the ones
you’ll all receive. It extorts the value of overpriced hardware
(hey 256K is great for management and I’d love to have twice that on
my “c” but bongo bucks for color and what kid is ever going to write
enouth code to fill that memory?) and pushes that dog writing to
read down our throats. Beneath all the humor is something worth
noting. It confirms in a way a lot of the thoughts I’ve been
hearing in the blue underground.
The new blue AT with it’s
twenty meg and conventional keyboard supposedly starts a new
“cycle”. Blue watchers say “three years and it’s gone” intending to
say bye bye to the pc. The crux is a new operating system numbered
3.0 which is supposed to be the most proprietary thing since Ma
Bell. Now back to their mailing…
The price listing shows new and
old dollar signs (remember they graciously give an educational
discount of 20% - yet the business discount is 25%) for everything
but the junior. To get the price you have to look several pages
back and low and behold you find the baby blue but it comes with
DOS 2.1 You’re smart enough to figure out the rest for
yourself.
The point of this tirade (not
paranoid rambling) is that very soon now you are going to see a lot
of the good guys names on all sorts of blue ads. Remember, they
had a good time, they get to use a little hardware for a while
(at least it will run a word processor) and after it is all over
will they have stories to tell……..and this mentality probably is one
of the reasons Apple II e’s are on 90 – 120 days with something like
100,000 (according to Inforworld) ordered. |
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Wired Librarian Newsletter |
| October 1984 |
Volume 256, Track 0D Page 03 |
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Man, Bytes, Dog
Jeane Nolan was nice enough to
forward one of the best pieces of computer satire I have ever read.
James Gorman entitled the piece Man, Bytes, Dog.
Unfortunately I don’t have the citation, but it looks like it came
off one of those big brow eastern rags. I looked in
Microcomputer Index and LAMP but was unable to locate
it. I will provide a complimentary one year subscription for the
first reader to supply the correct church, aisle, and pew for this
piece. (Old reader’s will notice how I keep getting the contest back
into the forefront.) Without games, micros would be no more than
the tools of physicists plotting to pave a parking lot.
A New Frontier……continued
Last month we started this
journey with the idead that micro based online catalogs are going to
require more than one access point. We mentioned that the Corvus
omninet was the current
Apple solution and cast aspersions
on some of the hard times that particular company is having. From
there………
Another concern we had, until
recently, was that the Corvus system employed the old Apple
DOS 3.3. PRODOS, the new operating system, is far superior to the
good old, slow and steady 3.3 friend. Applebus (in now way
related to Schoolbus) was recently announced for the Mac
family by the fruit company. Early reports indicate it is slicker
than slots in a “c” but a major concern is that bringing this system
down to the II family is still light years (read at least 18 months)
away. What are we going to do about PRODOS networked II’s?
I would like to say that the
solution is Mac based catalogs and I am sure one will be developed
in time. Unfortunately for a majority of school libraries this
causes problems. Micro based online catalogs are going to require
dedicated hardware, there is no way you can borrow a micro from the
math department three periods a day to do the job. School
administrators get real shaky when you start asking for
different brands of micros for specific applications. You’re going
to have to do one hell of a selling job just to get them the write
the check for the 60 meg drive, start switching horses in midstream
and they’ll drop like flies!
My friends tell me that the
first networked PRODOS hard drive is going to come from Corvus, and
we should expect to see it “real soon now” (see comment below). In
addition the only drive you’ll be able to buy is one with
Omininet. Sort of two birds with one stone. But without
competition the price will stay ski hi, so start them bake sales
now.
to be continued…….
Swap Shop
Anybody in the market for an
Epson MX-80 with graftrax and an Orange Micro Grappler Plus parallel
interface? Since I committed myself to the serial “c” and am real
happy with the Imagewriter, I have no need for the fine old
standby. Drop us a line and let WLN (not the bibliographic
utility) and let us know what it is worth to you.
Real Soon Now
MS in WA commented that the
phrase “real soon now” should actually be attributed to Jerry
Pournelle of Byte rather that my practice of crediting John
Dvorak of Infoworld. Since I gave up the soldering iron,
Pournelle is about the only thing I understand (and sometimes he
loses me) in that fine old journal; but Dvorak is such an
inspirational writer he could pull an FDR on anyone. If any of you
research types can dig up the first occurrence and settle this earth
shattering crisis, it would be greatly appreciated. |
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Wired Librarian Newsletter |
| October 1984 |
Volume 256, Track 0D Page 04 |
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Template Clearinghouse
Things are rolling along smoothly, and to my knowledge we only
have shipped one set of bad disks. If I could ask you to mention
this concept and pass the word along at users groups, workshops,
etc, we would really feel good. Anyone can simply write to Micro
Libraries for details.
Wired Librarians 2nd ½
Sprititual Enlightenment and
Social Hour
I cordially invite any of our readers and any of their friends
who would care to join us Thursday night, November the 1st,
beginning at 7pm and going until whenever; in my room at the Westin
Peachtree in Atlanta Georgia for the 2nd and ½ Wired
Librarians Spiritual Enlightenment and Social Hour. If you care to
meet some of the movers and the shakers in the library micro world,
discuss where the micro library world is going, and generally enjoy
the evening, please feel free to join us. Bring your own
firmware
Track
OF….next issue
A complete rundown on AASL/Atlanta (we’ll be few days late ‘cause
it’s not over until the 4th)….Perhaps we will have a
PRODOS spelling checker to comment on …a couple of new word
processor’s for the kids…and some new Library Software Company
offerings…………
65535
In it’s infinite wisdom, many state departments of education
are considering the qualifications and certificate requirements for
computer teachers (or whatever they choose to call them). I
don’t know why it is but every time a new idea comes around
education has to create another position. As far as I am concerned
the micro is another piece of AV Equipment. But I guess you need to
coordinate toys; if we thought of micros as tools we’d just put
them to work.
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