Thought for the month: Pioneers are defined as persons with
their faces in the dirt and arrows in their backs.
UPDATES
_______. As a dealer I try to keep my system and my customers
systems as up to date as practicable. As long as Alpha supplied
up-to-the-minute directories it was fairly easy. Since the AM
employee "resizings" the directories have been less and less
frequent - and a little harder to find. So much for the miracle
of computerization. There also used to be a semiannual full
patch listing in the AMTEC Journal. That hasn't been done since
July '90 and Sandi tells me that she doesn't have time to do it
any more. I liked Sandi's format but, since I am doing this for
MY purposes I decided to add a couple of things.
Another problem that this solves is that these lists were
only available to dealers and subscribers to the AMTEC Journal.
With this solution an end user can check his/her own system
(after all - even YOUR dealer doesn't know everything that you
may have on your system).
My solution. Instead of making calls to sell new systems and
upgrades I have taken a lot of Saturday time to call AMTEC- (the
rates are lower then) and get ALL of the patches since 1000. I
then took ALL of the .L files and put them into AlphaWRITE. I
expanded the descriptions to have a discrete line for each
version/release that each patch applied to (according to the AM
supplied info). At this point a word of praise is in order for
the Record/Playback feature that Dave Pallmann put into Write
2.1. I then put the file in a format which CALC could absorb.
After a LOT of retries caused by lack of commas, etc., etc., I
was able to get a CALC file that I could further manipulate. The
end result was two categories of listings (1) a numeric listing
of the patches and (2) a VERIFYable listing (with comments to
identify the patch to produce the result.
My numeric listing has fields for:
(1) the file (the first six characters are SP plus the patch
number. The three after the "
