HALIFAX AREA
                  PERSONAL COMPUTER SOCIETY

NEWSLETTER                                        JANUARY 1995


Meets 4th Sunday of each month, 7:00 pm
     Nova Scotia Community College
      Institute of Technology Campus (NSIT)
     Leeds Street, Halifax, N.S.

29 January Meeting

Intro Topic - INI Files Continued - Bill Marchant

Feature Event -     The Future of Computing -
          From a Vendor's Viewpoint
          Guest - Ken Porter from K-PC Lte


IN THIS MONTH'S ISSUE:

Announcements

Planning and General Meeting Notes

What Might Have Been
Part one of a series on a look back in time

Recreations With Two Hard Disks
Setting up a new big hard drive to go with the original

Files: Handles and Caching
A quick look at file handles and SmartDrive

About This Document
A few notes about this document

Meeting Schedule 94/95
Dates for the rest of the year


ANNOUNCEMENTS

Andy Cornwall has written an article which directly follows this
with the notes from the last planning meeting.  The next planning
meeting will be held on the 6th of February, at 7:30 pm at the
Institute of Technology Campus (NSIT), Leeds Street in Halifax. 
Anyone wishing to have input into what goes into the next meeting
or has some comments on any other Society business is welcome to
attend.

Society Draw
The next draw will be for a US Robotics 14.4 fax/modem.   As in
the previous draw, the prize has been provided by Rob MacCara. 
Tickets were on sale at the last meeting and will be also
available at the next meeting with the draw being held during the
coffee break.  They are two dollars each or three for five
dollars.

Good luck!

Membership Expiry Dates
Please look at the upper right corner of your newsletter mailing
label for the expiry date and renew if possible.  This is one way
to ensure that you receive a copy of each newsletter and know
what interesting meetings are coming up.


OS/2 Users Group
Meets the third Thursday of each month.  For more information
contact Carey Rolfe at 462-4551 or E-Mail crolfe@fox.nstn.ns.ca

WordPerfect Users Group Meeting
Meetings of the Atlantic Canada WordPerfect User Society are held
on the third Wednesday of the month at 6:30 pm.

For more information contact:

Therese Mackintosh, 435-5456.

Advertising and Want Ads
We don't charge for small individual want ads.  That is any
Society member or other interested person with some computer
related item that they wish to sell, trade, or give away can
contact the editor to place an ad similar to the ones above in
the newsletter.  We would expect that more commercially oriented
advertising provide the Society with some remuneration for
carrying the ad.

An ad will normally only appear once but let me know if you need
it repeated.  Ads can be given to me at meetings or give me a
call two weeks to ten days before the next general meeting
(newsletter deadline).

Biblical Bits #15
-- More Microsoft --
a good WORD makes the heart glad   PROVERBS 12:25


Planning and General Meeting Notes

by Andrew Cornwall

Attending the Planning meeting on January 3rd were David Potter,
Colin Stuart, George Richards, Henry Hill, Bill Marchant, Thayne
MacLean, Mark Morton, Andrew Cornwall, and Rob MacCara.  Two
items were discussed: contributions to the Chebucto Freenet and
the agenda for the January 29 General Meeting.  The Planning
meeting decided to contribute to the Chebucto Freenet at the rate
of $150 per quarter, which during the period of one year will
support the cost of 1 line.  Although the Society Treasury is
modest, this rate of expenditure can be afforded from present
cash flow.  Further the donation is warranted by the fact that a
significant number of members are using the Freenet.

The agenda for the General Meeting on January 29th will feature
Bill Marchant with a continuing exploration of the Windows 3.1
'INI' files, and a discussion by Ken-Porter, proprietor of K-PC
Lte., on the future of home computing from a dealer's
perspective.  Bill's insights into the workings of Windows are
very informative, and often a few words from Bill will unlock
this otherwise inscrutable topic.

Ken-Porter has been spoken at Society meetings several times
before, and his presentations have been insightful and enjoyable. 
We asked Ken-Porter to address the subject of the future of home
computing because micro computing appears to be at yet another
stage of evolution.  As a vender of microcomputer equipment and
software, Ken-Porter has a unique perspective to see where the
industry is going.  In a series of articles elsewhere in this
newsletter, Garth Bennett looks at the milestones of the
evolution of micro computing.  We appear to be a another launching
point for new applications, new software, and new capabilities. 
The impetus is coming from the relatively recent development of
technologies involving greater processing speed, high-quality
sound, CD ROM mass storage, Internet telecommunications, and a
standardized graphics user interface.  Further, all of this
technology is cheap, which creates mass marketing opportunities.

Old technology was the order of the day at the Society's annual
swap and flea market night, held on January 8.  A large crowd of
sellers and bargain hunters were on hand. As in previous years,
there were more buyers than sellers.  There continues to be a
demand for bargain priced older models of microcomputers, parts,
books, and software.  There is a lot that the old stuff can do. 
For those of us who are pinching penny's the adage remains true,
"It is better to have any (PC) microcomputer than none at all".


Biblical Bits #16
-- And Yet More Microsoft --
Those who despises the WORD shall be destroyed  PROVERBS 13:13


WHAT MIGHT HAVE BEEN - PART I

by Garth Bennett

Over the last 10-12 years I've considered myself a computer
hobbyist.  I've always had a fascination for the trailing edge of
technology rather than the leading.  That is probably due to the
fact the first computer I bought was from a manufacturer who,
shortly after my purchase, declared bankruptcy.  When you live on
the 'trailing edge' you get to see how things would have been
very different if people either had a break or were able to see
beyond the horizon.  I thought some discussion of "what might
have been" could be of value.  The value may only be to allow
some relaxation from all that dreaming about multi media and
million baud modems.  Let's look at three machines and two
operating systems and what they offered for the dollar in their
time.  This, the introductory article will cover the Osborne
Executive and the next The Digital Rainbow with its dual
processor.  Then a look at The TRS80 and final article looking at
two operating systems, CPM80 and CPM86.  If you have ever seen
either of these operating systems you should scratch your head
and wonder how Microsoft has the audacity to sue anybody about
anything in the copy infringement department. 

The Osborne Executive was a two disk drive machine.  It had a z80
processor and buzzed along at a tidy 4.7 MHZ.  It was a luggable. 
That is, at 28 pounds, it was like a sewing machine and you could
move it easily from place to place.  The portable battery was
optional and added another 15 lbs to the weight.  Each drive held
180 K and the memory was a banked 128 K.  This left about 53 K
for the programs which was big stuff in 82-83.  The Exec. was the
second machine from the Osborne Computer Company, run by the
iconoclastic Adam Osborne.  The original Osborne had a 7 inch
screen with only 50 characters across.  The one I fell in love
with, at a cost of 3,400 real 1983 dollars, had a 9 inch amber
screen  with 80 characters across.  Next to the Toshiba Gas
Plasma Screens, it was the best text screen I have ever used. 
With The Exec. came Wordstar, a word processor (state of the art
at that time and still pretty good if you consider 54 K of space. 
Also included was Personal Pearl a database program which was
complicated and effective but had the worst manual in North
America.  In addition the package included MBasic ( Bill Gates'
original claim to fame.  Some machines came with DBaseII and
other packages as well.  In addition you also received SuperCalc
2 which is now in a DOS version as SuperCalc 5.  In those days it
was a VisiCalc Clone whereas today it is a Lotus 123 Clone.  So
for the dollars you laid out, you were in business.  In those
days the price was well within the ball park of computers prices
and since I had kicked a pack and a half daily smoking habit I
could financially rationalize the purchase.  Anyway I used it at
work, so I had the write off.

Let me add an aside on compatibility.  I wrote a spreadsheet
program for the financial side of things at the  company I was
then working for.  That was about eight years ago.  Two years ago
I had a friend from that company ask me if that program could be
used on his Lotus123 Spreadsheet.  The challenge was out.  I used
a disk conversion program to convert the CPM SuperCalc2 program
to a MS DOS disk and ran it through my version of SuperCalc5. 
Then converted that to the Lotus123 format using SuperCalc5's
conversion program.  Ran like a top without any tinkering.  Now
that is compatibility.  It also shows that there are a lot of
good programs and program ideas in those old magazines you can
find at flea markets and garage sales. 

We will get back to the Osborne Executive and continue the
discussions next month.


RECREATIONS WITH TWO HARD DISKS

by Bill Marchant

Recently I equipped my 386/33 with another hard disk.  The old
one was perfectly good, it was just getting a bit to small for
modern programs.  My C: drive, (the new one) has a capacity of 
729,530,368 bytes or 695 Mbytes according to CHKDSK, and the D:
drive, (formerly C:) has room for 269,058,048 bytes or 256
Mbytes.

Installation was not a problem, since I enlisted the aid of the
vendor who guaranteed that it would work.  It did.  There are
some interesting quirks in its operation that it are worth
talking about.

The IDE controller is capable of handling two hard disks, so no
extra card was required.  The jumpers on the disk had to be
adjusted so that one disk could be made primary and the other the
last in the line.  This was easy, except you have to know where
the jumpers are.

DOS cannot recognize a hard disk with more than 1024 cylinders. 
Thus a program (driver) is required to convert the 1416
cylinders, 16 heads and 63 sectors per track of my new drive into
a combination that DOS can use.  According to the DOS utility
MSD, DOS thinks that my new disk has 707 cylinders, 32 heads and
63 sectors per track.  The arithmetic for the hard disk shows
that it has 1,427,328 total sectors.  The DOS fictional disk has
1,425,312 total sectors, so I have lost a 2,016 sectors in the
conversion.  This is about 1 Mbyte of storage.  

The use of a driver for this purpose has one  gotcha .  Because
the disk cannot be properly used until the driver is loaded, the
driver must be read from the hard disk at an early stage of the
boot up process.  But during early boot up stages, the disk is
not necessarily spinning fast enough to be read.  The result is
that frequently, I get a message telling me that the driver
cannot be found.  I then press the reset button, and repeat the
boot up.  It always boots the second time without a problem.  I
have read that a start-up delay can be introduced into the BIOS
of the computer to allow the disk more time to reach speed.  I
seem to be unable to find the right combination.  Perhaps it
lurks there somewhere.  In the mean time I can live with that
particular  gotcha .

For reasons of convenience and flexibility I elected to format
the disk in one large partition.  This decision has some
consequences that are worth considering.  DOS cannot handle a
disk with more than 64 K of clusters. That is, the File
Allocation Table (FAT) is not large enough to handle more.  (More
accurately, I suppose is the fact the a 16 bit FAT cannot handle
a number larger than 65,536.) Remember that a cluster is a group
of sectors.  Each sector holds 512 bytes, and DOS handles these
in groups of 2, 4, 8, 16, 32 etc.  With the number of sectors on
my disk now determined by the driver-converter to be 1,425,312. 
It must now be determined how big each cluster is going to be. 
Dividing 1,425,312 by 65536, we get about 21.7.  Since this
number lies between 16 and 32, DOS must select 32 sectors as the
size of a cluster on my new hard disk.  Thus each storage unit is
going to occupy 16 Kbytes of disk space.

This means that any file, or portion of a file, no matter how
small will occupy a minimum of 16 Kbytes.  Any file larger than
16 Kbytes by as much as a single byte, will occupy 2 units of
storage, or 32 Kbytes of disk space.  On the average, for every
file on the hard disk a half a cluster will be wasted space.

Now for the experiment.  With all the files safely on my new C:
drive, I totally deleted the content of the D: drive.  I then
XCOPYed *.* from C: to D: including all subdirectories even if
empty.  I should mention that my old drive keeps data in 8 Kbyte
clusters.  The reader is invited to do the arithmetic as an
exercise.  CHKDSK reveals the following results:  C: has used
257,392,640 bytes in 5828 user files.  D: has used 222,601,424
Bytes for exactly the same number of files.  In other words, the
disk with 16 Kbyte clusters requires just over 33 Mbytes more
space to store the same files as a disk with 8 Kbyte clusters.
this is an average of 5969 bytes per file.

One possible solution for maximizing storage density would be to
divide any large disk into partitions of 128 Mbyte or less.  This
will result in the cluster size being 2 Kbytes.  If you want them
smaller than that, you have to go to 16 Mbyte partitions, which
is too small to be practical.  If you are thinking of doing this,
you need to use FDISK.  And remember  that all the data on your
current disk will be lost.  Do this with care, or ask for some
help.

The use of disk compression as included in the latest MS-DOS (and
the earlier version DOUBLSPACE) overcomes this problem by
permitting a sector to be occupied by parts of more than on file. 
Disk compression also compacts the files so that even without
this feature they would take up less space.  The trouble with
disk compression is that it is another program which needs to be
loaded at boot time.  Some people like it, others wish to stay
away from it at least for the time being.  I count myself in the
latter group.

I am told that OS/2 using the High Definition File System stores
data in 512 byte clusters, or what ever they are called in OS/2. 
I mean to explore this further and I will report when I find
something.


FILES: HANDLES AND CACHING

By Colin Stuart

So what am I going to write about this month?  I didn't have any
good ideas until just the other day when someone I work with was
talking about Windows, file handles and SmartDrive.  I know that
some of you out there just hate Windows but there are some that
are who do use it so I looked up some info on this subject.

First of all, when you open a file up off a disk, DOS needs to
keep track of what you are doing with that file and where it was
and all that stuff.  It uses file handles to do this.  Earlier
versions of DOS limited you to a mere 20 files open at one time. 
Of these, DOS used up a number for itself.  These were used for
things like standard input, standard output, standard error and a
couple of others I can't remember right off the top of my head. 
This lets you use the DOS redirection as DOS can treat things
like your keyboard or parallel port as a file

Later versions of DOS allowed you to increase the number of file
handles up to 255.  This was great for me as I used to have file
problems in dBASE III+ all the time.  When you installed
applications, many of them told you to check the file handle
statement in your config.sys to ensure that there was enough or
it would do it for you.  The thing that I have noticed is that
when installing Windows programs, the subject is rarely
mentioned.

Windows allows a user to have bunches of programs up and running
at once and many of these can have many parts that all act very
much like individual programs.  Sounds like lots of open files to
me.  What does Windows say to set it to I wonder?  The resource
kits for Windows 3.1, Workgroups 3.1 and 3.11 suggest setting it
to 30. What about these new fancy programs that are coming out
these days.   Just look at WordPerfect 6.0 for Windows.  It
doesn't mention file handles during the install but somewhere in
the documentation it says that it probably good to set it to 60. 
The documentation for QuattroPro 6.0 Windows suggests 100.

One person was talking to someone at Microsoft about Workgroups
and was told that setting the file handles to 120 or better.  It
appears that Windows may just lock up if it runs out of file
handles.  I sort of liked the old DOS programs that would just
tell you that you had run out but then Windows does all that
fancy multi-tasking stuff so I guess it treats them differently. 
I'll have to increase mine some and see what happens.  At home I
use around 99 because of the dBASE things I do but I will bump it
up there as well.

On to SmartDrive.  The same person I had been talking to about
file handles said that you should not use SmartDrive with
Windows.  I thought to myself later, gee why does Microsoft ship
SmartDrive with Windows if you are not supposed to use it?  I
looked in the reference manuals and found a couple of interesting
things.  One is that Windows for Workgroups shipped with a 386
mode SmartDrive replace called Vcache.386.  There a number of
other files involved in this new system (there are 18 pages in
the resource kit devoted just to this) and I will do some
research and discuss it in a later newsletter.  For now, if you
want to cache a CD-ROM or floppy drive and you are using
Workgroups 3.11 then you should use SmartDrive 5.0   If you are
mainly working off your hard drive and have the 32 bit disk and
file access enabled, then you may be able to get rid of
SmartDrive.  If you are using Windows 3.1 or Workgroups 3.1 then
the manuals recommend that you use SmartDrive cache even if you
have 32 bit disk access turned on.  By the way, it says this
system does not work with SCSI or ESDI drives.

If it sounds a bit confusing, that's why I will do a bit more
research and prepare another article.


ABOUT THIS DOCUMENT

As I stated last month was that we almost always need are good
articles.  If anyone has something that they feel would make a
good article or even a good meeting topic, please don't hesitate
to pass it on.

I will accept articles in almost any format, ASCII text, AMI Pro,
MS Word, Windows Write, and of course WordPerfect.  We look
forward to hearing from other members who have a good story to
tell or come across something that may interest others.

How to get an article to me?  Various ways are available.  You
can bring it to a meeting or give me a call and upload it to me. 
If you are on the Chebucto FreeNet you can send something to me
via the internet (or have your own account) to where I work -
hlfxtrad.educ.stuartce@gov.ns.ca

It works, that's how David Potter sent me his contribution last
month.

About the newsletter itself, for those who may be interested.  It
is formatted using both the DOS and Windows versions of
WordPerfect 6.0.  Next month it will probably be WordPerfect 6.1 
The original was printed at 600 dots per inch resolution on a HP
Laserjet 4M.  If I don't have access to this printer then we
print it on an Okidata 850 at Bits and Bytes on Portland Street
in Dartmouth where they allow the Society to print the originals
at no charge.

The main body of the newsletter is set in 10 point Palatino with
the article headings being 14 point bold.  The title on the first
page is ITC Zapf Chancery Medium Italic 19.2 and 16 points.

Again for those interested in numbers, we made about 95 copies of
the newsletter this month and mailed out around 80 of these.  The
extra copies from the previous few months issues will be brought
to the next meeting for those who are new to the group or may not
be in regular attendance.  I do have a complete set of all the
previous newsletters and if someone wanted to look through these,
let me know and I can bring them to the next meeting.


MEETING SCHEDULE - 94/95

The dates for the general meetings for this year are listed
below. 

29 January
26 February
26 March
23 April
28 May
25 June

The planning meetings are normally held on the second Monday (8
days) after the general meeting (none in January).  They are also
located at NSIT, in a small boardroom to the left as you come in. 
Anyone is welcome to assist in the planning of future meetings or
events.

Any changes to the scheduled dates will be announced where
possible at the regular monthly meetings and/or in this
newsletter.