HALIFAX AREA
             PERSONAL COMPUTER SOCIETY


NEWSLETTER                             APRIL 1995


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

23 April Meeting

Intro Topics:
     - Windows Feature - Bill Marchant
     - Question & Answer - Rob MacCara  Maybe as of now no
Feature Topic:
     - Hard Disk Drives - Colin Stuart

IN THIS MONTH'S ISSUE:

Announcements

World Wide Web, Robots, Wanderers, and Spiders
Some information on the Internet Web

What Might Have Been
This series on a look back in time continues with part four

How The Computer Bug Bit Me
One member's start in computers

OS/2 Warp Evaluation Update
David is examining a copy

The Newsletter
A few notes about this document

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

General Information

This document is mailed to all paid up members and to anyone who
has attended a meeting within the past three months.  Yearly
membership dues are $15.00.  The text of the newsletter is
available on ATAB 435-0751, (8N1) and other local bulletin
boards.
Society Mailing Address -
     P.O. Box 29008, Halifax N.S., B3L 4T8
Executive
     Chairperson - David Potter
     Vice-Chair - Andy Cornwall - 861-4503 (h)
     Secretary/Newsletter Editor - Colin Stuart - 461-0370 (h)
     Treasurer - Garth Bennett - 492-3368 (h)
     Disk Librarian - Thayne MacLean - 461-0082 (h)
     and but not least Norman DeForest, Henry Hill, Arthur
     Layton, Rob MacCara, Bill Marchant, George Richards, and
     Diane Smith


ANNOUNCEMENTS

A few items this month.  Richard Hill has provided an update on
the printer ribbon recycling program at New Leaf Enterprises and
there will be a draw at the next meeting (see the next page for
the announcement).

I will be doing the main presentation this month on hard disk
drives.  I will talk briefly about the construction and more
extensively on the different types, sizes, and configuration. 
Next month Agnes Ballatyne from Novell (WordPerfect) is scheduled
to come and talk to us.

Last Planning Meeting
The last planning meeting was held on April 3rd.  I forgot to
write down who attended but most of the members of the executive
were there.  The next planning meeting will be held on the 1st of
May, 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
We're going to sell tickets at the April meeting and later in the
evening draw for a 14,400 USR Sportster (Internal) Fax/Modem. 
Tickets $1.00 each or five for $3.00.

This is a top quality accessory and would make a fine addition to
your computer setup.

See you at the meeting!

Membership Expiry Dates
For those of you who are not already aware, the membership expiry
dates are printed in the upper right corner of your newsletter
mailing label.  I have noticed that a number of people's
subscriptions have run out since the beginning of the year.  If
you wish to continue to receive this newsletter and know what
interesting meetings are coming up, you either have to renew ($15
per year) or come to the meetings and put your name on the list
that is passed around.

I will bring an up-to-date member list to the next meeting.

OS/2 Users Group
Meets the second Tuesday of each month at 7:00 pm.

Those who are interested in attending should contact Carey Rolfe
at 462-4551 or E-Mail crolfe@fox.nstn.ns.ca for date and time
confirmation.

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 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).


UPDATE ON THE RIBBON RECYCLING PROGRAM AT NEW LEAF ENTERPRISES

Some time ago we had an article introducing us to the ribbon
re-inking program at New Leaf Enterprises on Kempt Road.  The
latest news is that they no longer re-ink the ribbons, as there
were problems with people trying to get too much mileage out of a
ribbon, and there were an increasing number of failures of warn
out ribbons.

In the new process they completely replace the ribbon fabric in
your old ribbon cartridge.  The process is faster, cleaner and
more reliable as the inking is more uniform on a new ribbon.  The
good news is that the price remains the same.  I have tried the
new service and find it very satisfactory.

They also have facilities for re-filling ink jet cartridges.  I
haven't had the opportunity of trying that service as I am still
using a dot matrix printer.

The address is 3670 Kempt Road (next to TERRI'S Restaurant and
across the road from Bob MacDonald Automotive), telephone
429-9044.


WORLD WIDE WEB
ROBOTS, WANDERERS, AND SPIDERS

by David Potter

Hypertext browsing is easily one of the principle strengths and
reasons for success of the Web (and the growth of interest in the
Internet) but the lack of support for indexing is a critical link
missing from the Web's technological infrastructure (missing at
its inception).

The explosive growth of the Web is making it increasingly
difficult to accomplish an effective search for information in a
specific area.  Effective is defined as "finding everything that
is relevant to the search and excluding things that are not
relevant".

World Wide Web Robots, Wanderers, and Spiders are all terms for
programs that traverse the Web automatically.  These programs are
examples of "Intelligent Software Agents"; programs which
interact and assist an end user in "mundane tasks - setting up
meetings, sending out papers, locating information in multiple
databases, tracking the whereabouts of people, and so on."

A Web spider explores the structure of the Web and takes some
action upon the artifacts (documents) encountered.  This action
might be as simple as counting the artifacts found, or as complex
as a full text indexing of the contents of these documents.

There are distinct benefits to Web spiders, the most obvious of
which is an improvement in user satisfaction through effective
search of the World Wide Web - (the scale of which has
outstripped an individual's ability to assess and completely
comprehend it). 

It is very likely that you have been the beneficiary of a Web
Spider if you have been out  surfing the net'.  Some of the well
known spiders are:

WebCrawler; The JumpStation Robot; Lycos; SG-Scout; and Harvest

The following information provides more information about two
spiders...

The RBSE Spider run by Dr. David Eichmann
(eichmann@rbse.jsc.nasa.gov) Consists of two parts:
A Spider...
...that creates an Oracle database of the Web graph, traversing
links to a specifiable depth (defaults to 5 links) beginning at a
URL (address/path/doc.name) passed as an argument.  Only URLs
having  '.html' suffixes or tagged as 'http:' and ending in a
slash are probed.  Unsuccessful attempts and leaves are logged to
prevent revisiting.  This is effectively, a limited-depth
breadth-first traversal of only html portions of the Web.  It
errs on the side of missing non-obvious html documents in order
to avoid stuff it's not interested in.  A third table provides a
list of  hierarchies to avoid because of  discovered complexity,
or sites not wishing to be probed.

...and an Indexer
This script sucks  html' URLs out of the database and feeds them
to a modified freeWAIS waisindex, which retrieves the document
and indexes it.  Retrieval support is provided by a front page
and a cgi script driving a modified freeWAIS waissearch.

The separation of concerns is to allow spider to be a lightweight
assessor of Web state, while still providing the value added to
the general community of the URL search facility.

Lycos
Owned by Dr. Michael L. Mauldin (fuzzy@cmu.edu) at Carnegie
Mellon University.  This is a research program in providing
information retrieval and discovery in the WWW, using a finite
memory model of the web to guide intelligent, directed searches
for specific information.

The searchable Lycos database of WWW documents,  has information
on over 390,000 documents in 87 megabytes of summaries and
pointers.

This article has been compiled by David Potter from Web documents
that can be accessed using 

Robots and Spiders


WHAT MIGHT HAVE BEEN - PART FOUR

by Garth Bennett

So far in this series we have discussed two machines which many 
people, even though they may have heard about them, have never 
seen.  This month we will discuss a machine that has been seen by
everyone except those that spent the eighties under a large rock. 
The TRS-80 from Model 1-4 and the DOS clones that followed. 
Tandy Radio Shack, from which the TRS was coined, was and maybe
still is, one of those companies which is a little slow in making
decisions and therefore always lags just a little behind in the
marketing area.  When the first machines were being made they
decided to save 10 cents per machine and not put in the chip
which would give it both upper and lower case ability.  That is
why these old machines only type in capitals.  Once they caught
on with the public people were paying 60 to 80 dollars to tear
their machines apart and upgrade for this one little 10 cent
part.  When the first Disk operating system was being developed
it was so buggy and slow that a couple of Harvard University
students decided that their computer program, VisiCalc, would run
faster and better on an Apple computer and so history was made.

The DOS was eventually perfected and the Company went on to build
the Model II, III and IV along with the IVp (a luggable, portable
machine).  Again these machine were developed around the Z80,
from which the 80 was coined, and then got into the 16 Bit world
with the Tandy 1000, 2000 and others.  It hesitated a bit and
made these early DOS machines less that 100% IBM compatible. 
This cost them market share in a big way and it was a number of
years before they got back on track.

>From my perspective, the TRS-80 line of computers biggest result
was a series of first class Computer Magazines.  They were much
more product specific then any thing on the market today and
dealt with issues and products for the Tandy machines. The
original was 80 MICRO.  A great read for anyone interested in
computing and/or programming in Assembly or Basic.  When this
faded away there arrived PC Resource with solid articles that
anyone could use.  Articles from hardware upgrades to a
discussion of the best sorting algorithms.  This is also now gone
and the only one left is PCM which I hear is on the ropes but is
another solid effort.  All these magazines do a heck of a lot
more that 4,612 reviews on the latest software package or
computer chip which is such a part of the big players in todays
market.  Some of the writers from those magazine (Harry Bee,
Hardin Brothers, Eric Maloney) can now be found with DOS Resource
which provides solid help for the non-Windows crowd.

Tandy now sells non-Tandy product in its stores.  After their
near bankruptcy a year or so ago the focus has changed.  Again
the consumer votes with its dollar and the jury is still out on
where this company is going.  A great history, only time will
tell about the future.

Next time let's wrap this up with a look at three operating
systems and the old maxim "as ye sow so shall ye reap".


HOW THE COMPUTER BUG BIT ME

by Richard (Dick) Hill

A long time ago, in the mid 60's, our office (Ice Forecasting
Central of Meteorological Branch) was doing some work on water
column conditions in the Gulf of St. Lawrence in an attempt to
forecast initial freeze-up dates.  This involved some pretty
complicated calculations involving temperature, salinity and
stability.  A bright young researcher from `head office' decided
we could computerize the procedure and came down to give us a
talk.  Up until then the computer had been used mainly for
statistical and climatological work.  How-ever, our system was
working well and we had neither the personnel nor the resources
to program in machine code, so that was a no go.  But I could see
the possibilities, and my interest in computers was piqued.

A few years, a couple of office changes and a couple of `head
office' computer changes later, FORTRAN was being introduced to
the system and I was given the opportunity of taking a very
elementary course in this high level language, although we still
didn't have any computers in the Maritimes Weather Office.  In
1976 several GE Terminet 300 (Bell Datacom 300) printer/
terminals were installed and hooked into the Dalhousie University
computer center.  We were encouraged to play games (rather
limited with no video display) and write small, simple programs
to get used to using the machines.  My projects were a mortgage
amortization program, an investment calculator and a perpetual
calendar.  Being the resident `expert (?)', I then decided to be
more ambitious and since we were at that time in the change-over
from Imperial to Metric and were also developing a new Wind-chill
index, I wrote a program to calculate and print out a table of
Wind-chill values in both Imperial and Metric units.  This was a
surprisingly successful venture, and the results were sent to
head office.  The reply was "good work, but our own computer
people are working on this, thank you."  Oh well, we used it
locally while waiting for the official version.

We soon had our own Hewlett Packard mini computer with all of 16K
ram, huge tape recorders for back-up memory, and a card reader
and several card punch machines.  Now we could really get to work
and the scientific types  were soon working on local research
projects and the 16K ram had to be quickly expanded.  At this
time the U.S. Weather Bureau was developing a computer worded
forecast program, and not to be left behind we obtained a copy of
their work in progress and tried to adapt it to our situation. 
After several weeks work by successive forecaster/programmers, we
found that the huge vocabulary required overloaded our equipment
and also the resulting forecasts were so `wooden' and
uninteresting that it wasn't worth the effort.

However that work on the computer worded forecast did give me the
idea the develop a forecast formatting program which would
automatically set up the proper background text for any of the
many forecasts we produced and the forecaster had only to enter
the actual forecast information.  This worked very well, and
considerably reduced the time and effort in producing the text
for dissemination to the news media and the public.  This system
was in use for several years until headquarters decided they
needed a generic program to use across the country and insisted
we change to their program even though it had several
shortcomings due to its generalized nature.

My next project arose from a stint in an administrative position
where I had to prepare shift schedules with balanced hours of
day, evening and night shifts mixed in with some research shifts,
all of differing lengths.  Also the overtime hours had to be
totalled and paid off every two months, proper leave credits and
debits calculated etc.  Back to the computer (still using
FORTRAN) to try a shift scheduling program.  I was never
successful in actually programming a schedule, but based on some
earlier work of one of my co-workers, I did develop a program to
do all the necessary calculations and greatly ease the work of
submitting the pay sheets.  That was one program that was
accepted across the country as a basis for other offices to set
up similar systems.

I still didn't have a computer at home, and wasn't particularly
interested in obtaining one - I didn't think that I would have
much use for one.  However, in 1981, one of the instrument
technicians got a Sinclair ZX81, brought it in to work and talked
two of us into getting one as well, with the idea of starting a
group.  The group never got off the ground, but I did get
interested in programming in BASIC, and rewrote several of my
FORTRAN programs.  I also found it challenging to modify
commercial programs to make them more useful to myself.

My major project was a Bowling Statistics program which
(including all the data) eventually used up almost all the 16K
available on the Sinclair.  I still keep the Sinclair working
just for that program, rather than trying to rewrite in QBASIC.

Some time in the mid 80's, I acquired a 32K Tandy CoCo (Colour
Computer) from a friend who was upgrading to a "real" PC.  This
came complete with two disc drives and an integrated word
processor/data base and I got started on computerizing our church
rolls, and handling some of the correspondence.  However, it soon
became evident that the data base, although quite good, was not
flexible enough for our requirements.  Also the word processor,
although it could produce good copy, was somewhat clumsy due to a
primitive printer driver.

At this point, in 1988, I talked myself into buying a PC-XT clone
from a local assembler/dealer and installed First Choice, an
integrated word processor-data base-spread sheet which has
continued to serve very well.  I don't have a lot of the 'bells
and whistles' of many of the more advanced systems, but I know
how everything works and it's easy to show someone else how to
take over, and above all it works.

The only problem I have had with the PC-XT was with the hard
drive, which died when one of the read\write heads quit working
just after the warranty expired.  However, one of my daughters
was upgrading and had already cannibalized her old machine for
some parts.  The hard drive was still available and is still
working.  Just recently I finally installed a 3 # inch 720K
drive, and for now, that's all the upgrading I'm planning.

So that's how I got bitten by the computing bug and what it has
done to me.


BIBLICAL BITS #19

-- Dynamic stuff --
they gave of gold ten thousand DRAMS   1 CHRONICLES 29:7


OS/2 WARP
EVALUATION UPDATE

by David L. Potter

After two months of indecision/ dread... I finally figured out
how I would go about my evaluation of OS/2 Warp.  The problem
centered on the requirement for about ninety megabytes of free
disk space and a reluctance on my part to undertake a  no turning
back' install of OS/2 Warp over  top' of my existing Windows
setup.

As I was helping my wife at her office one day I discovered two
 spare' hard drives and persuaded her to loan me a 120mb drive
for the duration of my evaluation.  (Recently I've discovered
that this size drive is relatively easy to find second-hand for
$80-100.)

So now... I've got my computer stripped down and have been
switching back and forth between master/slave hard drive
combinations getting a second Windows setup working properly on
the new  c:' drive.

So far I've invested about four hours... between reformatting,
copying the operating system(s), reinstalling software to get it
to work properly on what was  c:' and is now the  d:' drive; and
installing OS/2 Warp.

How is everything working?  Well... this morning I switched the
master/slave jumpers back again and booted up with my old windows
setup.  I had a lot of work that needed to be done and I haven't
got my modems and a number of software programs working yet... so
I guess I'll have another go at it later tonight. 

I'm glad now that I didn't install over my standard Windows setup
of I would have had a frantic morning trying to get things
running.  I'd rather not be under unnecessary pressure...

ABOUT THE NEWSLETTER

Newsletter Articles
We are almost always in need of good articles.  In the past
couple of months I have received articles from several members
thus enabling Bill Marchant and I to take a short break from
writing. Hopefully the respite will enable us to come up with
some interesting topics to include in future newsletters.   If
anyone has something that they feel would make a good article, an
interesting story to tell, or even a good meeting topic, please
don't hesitate to pass it on.

Articles can be submitted in almost any format, ASCII text, AMI
Pro, MS Word, Windows Write, WordStar and of course WordPerfect. 
How does one 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, Internet, or any type of
e-mail system that has a gateway to the Internet, you can send
something to me via the internet to where I work -
hlfxtrad.educ.stuartce@gov.ns.ca

It does work, that is how most of the articles in last month's
edition were received, but if you are sending a file attachment
to your message, it should be UUencoded and not a mime
attachment.

Newsletter Production Notes
As usual , for those who may be interested, the newsletter was
formatted this month with WordPerfect for Windows 6.1 running on
either a 386SX-25 or a 486DX-33.  Much of the clipart used is
from Novell (formerly WordPerfect) Presentations 3.0.

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.

There was about the same number of copies made this month as last
month, with about 90 copies produced of which around 75 were
mailed out.  Any extra copies from the previous few months issues
that I have 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

Well we are quickly moving through this meeting year.  Only three
more meetings left.  The dates for these are listed below. 

23 April
28 May
25 June

The planning meetings are normally held on the second Monday (8
days) after the general meeting.  They are also located at NSIT,
normally 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.