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file FIDONEWS.DOC, available from Fido 107/7.
Disclaimer or don't-blame-us:
The contents of the articles contained here are not our
responsibility, nor do we necessarily agree with them;
everything here is subject to debate. We publish EVERYTHING
received.
This week we have a guest editorial by Robert Mitchell.
This editorial was originally published in the February 1984
issue of The Underground Grammarian.
A Sense of Ease
Computer literacy doesn't require speaking a computer
language, nor does it require programming skills, nor does
it even require extensive knowledge of already-written
programs. All it requires is a sense of ease around
computers, and the knowledge that personal computers are
powerful tools, and not menacing characters from science
fiction.
--Peter McWilliams
The advanced [ETS] placement course in computer science
includes such topics as recursion, operations on stacks,
lists, and trees, and the heap sort. These are complicated,
machine-independent abstractions that are not learned while
sitting at a terminal. They are learned by hearing competent
lectures, studying a textbook, and by sitting alone gleaning
insights from drawing diagrams and walking through
FIDONEWS -- 26 Aug 85 00:18:01 Page 2
prospective codes.... Replying to the question, What is the
best single indicator of an applicant's programming ability,
one of today's most respected computer scientists, Edsger W.
Dijkstra, wrote: '...an absolute mastery of his native
tongue.'
--Merrit & Stix
Here's what we wish: We wish that we were running a very
expensive private school for little children, and that
McWilliams wanted us to take his sxi-year old daughter and
provide her with a good dose of literacy, the antiquated
kind, 'book literacy,' they probably call it nowadays.
First we'd take his certified check for our standard,
large, unrefundable deposit, and then we'd tell him about
our real neat, absolutely painless, and invariably effective
Book Literacy Education Program.
The yoke of book literacy is easy, we would tell him, and
its burden is light. Quite contrary to the foolish notions
of self-appointed reformers, book literacy does NOT require
reading and writing in book language. Nor does it require
any noticible knowledge of already-written books. All it
requires, as you would surely be the first to understand,
McWilliams, is a sense of ease around books!
Little children, you see, are afraid of books. Yes,
afraid. They see them as menacing characters from the walls
of doctors' waiting rooms and quiet, dreary libraries, where
fun is not allowed. Our program teaches children that books
are powerful tools, good for building walls and castles, and
for keeping drawings from blowing away, and even for
standing on to reach the good stuff that grown-ups like to
keep to themselves. Why we actually let our young scholars
PLAY with books, open them, close them, even turn some of
the pages, and all by themselves. That's the REAL
education, you know, learning by doing. You just leave your
precious little tyke with us, and in no time at all--say
ten, twelve years max--she will be the most book-literate
kid on the block, chock full of a sense of ease. And all of
that for a measly fifteen thou a year!
And may the future bring you a million RETURNs without
GOSUB, buster.
We are, you see, ready to consider 'computer literacy.'
We suspected, mostly because the educationalistic faddists
were so enthusiastic about it, that it was all bunk. Now,
having done some homework, we can reach a better informed
opinion: It IS all bunk.
To begin with, it is not 'literacy' in any reasonable
sense of the word. 'Literacy' has become nothing but a
pretentious title for an 'awareness' conjoined with any
modicum of acquaintance. If you know that slide-rules exist,
you have achieved slide-rule awareness, which is already
FIDONEWS -- 26 Aug 85 00:18:06 Page 3
quite enough to earn you a splendid grade in a mathematics
education course. If you can actually use a slide-rule, or
even if you have just slid one a bit, you have slide-rule
literacy.
(That's just for now of course. The school people have
obviously not yet received the pedagogical doctrine of Peter
McWilliams, who is a 'syndicated computer columnist,' just
the kind of expert they take from. When they hear the word,
they will discover that slide-rule literacy calls for
nothing more formidable than a sense of ease around slide-
rules.)
And then there's all that bunk about computer
'languages,' which are languages in just the same way that
the 'language of the flowers' is language--not at all. They
are codes, ingenious and elaborate codes, which is what they
must be if they are to work. Computer languages provide the
possibility of an exact and precisely limited correspondence
not only between what is said and what is meant, but also
between what is meant and what is so in the strictly defined
system about which, and ONLY about which, statements can be
made.
For computing, that's good, and it works. But those same
attributes are characteristic of the very least of the
powers of language, communication, a power also wielded by
wolves and crows. If wolves and crows do not devise
computers and computer 'languages,' it is because they have
none of the higher powers of language, especially meatphor
and discourse. It is in those powers that we grow when we
study language, and to pretend that the study of computer
language is the study of language is primarily a convenience
for those who pretend that they teach the powers of
language.
And then there's another thing--that bunk about 'fear of
computers.' It is, of course, possible that there are
certain people who do fear computers, even as there are
probably people who fear shredded wheat or party hats. They
are loonies. Computers are no more likely than rulers, or
even sextants, to provoke fear in people who are not
loonies. What we see at work here is a longstanding
educationalistic con job that has been eagerly adopted by
peddlers as well as politicians, who also make their livings
by preying on emotions.
It is the pose of the big-hearted giver, who so
charitably understands your shortcomings, and so selflessly
seeks only your good. He kindly tells you that there IS a
little something wrong with you, maybe just a little
learning disability, or an unraised consciousness, or this
irrational fear of computers, that you can't seem to
overcome all by yourself. But don't worry. Your deficiency
is 'perfectly natural' in one who has not yet had the
inestimable benefit of his ministrations, which he will be
only too happy to provide.
FIDONEWS -- 26 Aug 85 00:18:11 Page 4
And there is yet one more thing--the pernicious notion
that learning to work a computer has something to do with
education. One of its versions suggests that no one can be
educated without learning about computers, which confuses
training with education and information with knowledge, as
is the custom in the schools. An alternative version
pronounces, as is also the custom in the schools, that NOW
we know what to do. NOW we can teach those students who have
stubbornly refused to be taught by 'traditional' methods,
i.e., the LAST few paroxysms of innovative thrusts.
The other quotation is from a letter to the NYT by Susan
M. Merritt and Allen H. Stix, members of the computer
science department at Pace University. When they say
'science,' they seem to mean SCIENCE, which is neither a
pleasant feeling nor a vocational skill, but a discipline in
the mind. It is to be learned just as they say, which is
just as ANY mental discipline is to be learned, by hearing
competent lectures, studying books, and sitting alone.
Those things are not allowed in the schools. Competent
lectures are elitist and authoritarian, books are just NOT
experiential, and sitting alone is aberrant behavior. The
schools will have to teach computer science in THEIR way.
Spending somebody else's money brings a great sense of ease.
The Underground Grammarian is available from:
R. Mitchell, Asst. Circulation Mgr.
Post Office Box 203
Glassboro
New Jersey 08028
for $15 per year to Persons in USA & Canada. (It is $25 for
Institutions.)
There are a few public domain utilities I would like to
locate for my Fido host, which I have unfortunately not yet
found in my random wanderings around other Fido systems.
I'm running a Tandy 1200HD, which is an IBM XT-clone.
If you have any of the things I'm looking for, either send
them to me by Fidomail, or send me a message detailing how
I can get them. Emphasis on public domain. Sources
desirable but not absolutely necessary (beggars can't be
choosers!)
1 - A disk utility like DU for CP/M. When setting up my
system, I was faced with the need to patch ATDT to ATDP in
Fido, and ended up Kermiting the file over to my CP/M box
to make the patch. Not too hard, but someone out there
must have a good disk patch utility. The search command in
particular has been usefull in DU.
2 - A full-screen filer similar to the VFILER program
distributed with ZCPR3 for CP/M compatible systems. What
would be nice is a full-screen view of the files in a
directory node, with commands to do individual and group
file manipulations, as well as printing, bouncing up and
down the directory tree, etc.
3 - A good incremental backup utility. Something that
would allow me to do an occasional full backup, and then on
a daily or weekly basis cut a floppy with all of the files
that have changed or appeared since the last full or
incremental backup.
4 - A directory entry raw editor. Something like FDBED
under Tops-20. You give it a filespec, and it puts up all
of the information contained in the directory entry on the
screen and lets you move around and edit the entries with
absolutely no error checking. Usefull when directories get
trashed, or when you do a file transfer that bombs before
the file gets closed, and you want to hack on the directory
entry. I'm not yet experienced enough on MS-DOS to know
how practical this particular utility would be.
I suppose that's enough for this time. If I get enough
responses, I will summarize what I find out, and how the
things I get actually stack up to what I want, in a future
article for the news...
This article has two purposes! The first one is I have a
friend who is looking for a bbs that works on a Ti pro and
TI's internal program and the second is some response to
this article. I think it is self explanatory! Contact me
at fido 437 net 117 or call the people that wrote the
messages directly at the RCP/M I found them on wich is
RAPID (409)-845-8931.
Date: 08/06/85
From: JIM COBURN
To: ALL
Re: KAYPRO LIVES
No matter their stock doesn't appreciate in value at any
fast pace their is one masterful use for kaypros. Put TBBS
Bulletin board on a 2700 10m machine and show me something
more powerful for major companies to run their in house
BBS's for terminal users from around the country . salesmen
etc , sure it can't except 12 incomming lines but $ 2800.00
beats the pants off of having your big mainframe 40-50-60-
100000.00 computer played around with by hackers. Cp/m will
live and will resurface because most people haven't the 1st
idea of what computer to buy but run out and buy IBM or
clones and spend fortunes to run What. Simple programs
excluding Lotus etc but then again they usually aren't the
buyers of Lotus. As soonn as some advertising exec gets
smart and sells the idea of all the wonderful prgms for cpm
that exist plus the p/domain prgms you will see c/pm again.
Really how many of the users of 16 bit computers know the
difference between 8 and 16 bit and for sure the home buyer
isn't going to be the programmers of the future except for
a few. Kaypro is now the largest selling C/pm system in
the usa and it won't be long before some one figures a
marketing stradgy out to renew interest. How many IBM clone
programs came from c/pm.
Date: 08/06/85
From: DON BUZZINGHAM
To: ALL
Re: Jim's comments
Too true, unfortunately most purchase decisions are made on
the basis of information derived from some marketing jock
who may never have even put a disk into a computer. All he
is doing is pushing a product. Think about it! How many
computer salesmen are competent users? How many computer
salesmen even own a personal computer (purchased with their
own cash, not provided by the employer)? Come to think
about it, how many people here at A&M have invested their
own cash in a microcomputer? I have decided to postpone
buying a new computer until a decidedly superior product
appears. Until that time, and it ain't here yet, I'll keep
running my Kaypro. After all, why should I pay a premium
to SLOW DOWN?
FIDO 19/918
An Idea for FidoNews
I am a Fido user in Lubbock, Texas. I have a
suggestion for the newsletter that I am sure many people
who are in the same fix will agree with. Here is my
problem: I own a low speed (300 baud) modem. I don't have a
dedicated line, either, so I use our one phone in the
house. We also have this diabolical thing called "call
waiting" that is one of AT&T's attempts at destroying
useful telecommunications. Last, I would love to be able to
read all the issues of Fidonews when they come in, but for
one problem: They are so long!
It seems as though everytime I start downloading one,
an incoming phone call fouls up my carrier, and I have to
re-download the whole thing, read and unread articles, all
over again. What would be nice is a feature that would let
the user jump around in the newsletter, reading only the
articles they want to. I know this would entail lots of
modifications to Fido, but surely it wouldn't be that
difficult? The newsletter could be packaged with a "Table
of contents" at the beginning describing article titles,
authors, content, and a logical record offset in the file.
(Page number!) Then they could be called up via a special
command, and the user could read only the articles he/she
wanted to, or read some and read the rest later, and so on.
For die-hards that wish to download the thing w/ Xmodem and
print it out later (It saves eye strain) they could still
go into the File area and download...the table of contents
file format structure shouldn't be any problem, it may even
help them, too!
I don't have a Rainbow or PC or anything nearly
compatible, so I don't know what sort of modifications this
would require, perhaps the file format would not make it
possible to jump around like that. But, I believe that
FidoNews is the best thing to come around since local
bulletin boards.
--------------Also possibly of some interest---------------
I have written a freeware bulletin board that has a
network system similiar to Fido but incompatible, called
TI-SUB. You can call the headquarters board, sysop Matt
Storm, at 806-792-5831 if you want to look around. Number
two is in Philadelphia PA at 215-676-7393, sysop Mike Bell,
and a major magazine is looking into it right now. For more
info, write to Erik Olson, 3712 68th, Lubbock Texas, 79413,
or FidoMail to 19/67 or 19/918.
From Spiv's Fido #346 in Region #10 (408) 972-8164:
(The ONLY FIDO devoted to the IBM PC AT)
********************************************************
Part of an article in PC WEEK:
GTE's PC Pursuit Offers Users Electronic Links Via Local
Call:
GTE Telenet last week introduced PC Pursuit, a service that
will allow PC users to connect to database services,
bulletin boards, or individual computers by making a single
local phone call.
According to GTE Telenet Vice President Floyd Trogdon, PC
Pursuit "links the user's terminal to any off-network phone
number... that he wishes to call, whether it's a free
database in Boston, a specialized bulletin board in Los
Angeles, or his brother in Denver."
The new service, though officially launched to allow PC
users to contact other PCs in distant locations, also was
designed to take advantage of Telenet's nationwide
distribution network.
The PC Pursuit service will make use of the excess capacity
of GTE Telenet, and as a result is only available at night
and on weekends. During the day, Telenet's network capacity
is dedicated to large corporate uers.
To use PC Pursuit, a caller dials the PC Pursuit access
number in his area. The GTE computer asks for the caller's
number, and the city and number to be called. At this
point, the caller hangs up.
Shortly thereafter, the PC Pursuit service calls the user
back, and makes the long distance connection requested.
While the connection is being made, PC Pursuit keeps the
user informed of the progress of the call through periodic
status messages. A call can last up to an hour.
GTE charges subscribers $25 for using the service regardless
of the amount of time that the service is actually used.
Users can pay by credit card.
Currently, only 12 cities have access to PC Pursuit:
Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Dallas, Denver, Detroit, Houston,
Los Angeles, New York, Philadelphia, San Francisco, and
Washington.
The system supports 300 and 1200 baud modem operation. 2400
baud service will be available in October.
On-line sign-up for the service is available by calling 800-
835-3001 or 703-689-2987 (in Virginia.)
FIDONEWS -- 26 Aug 85 00:18:32 Page 11
Analysis:
GTE is offering an off-hours, flat rate ($25 per month)
gateway to any dial-up system. For the cost of a local
phone call, any dial-up system is now reachable from 12
cities.
Shades of FidoNet! Just think what will happen when
outbound hosts are formed in these 12 cities! Nationwide
FidoMail/FidoNet forwarding of unlimited message traffic for
a flat fee of $25 per month!
I don't know if the 800 number listed above is voice or
data, but I'm waiting to get through (busy tone) to get all
the details.
Those of you not in the selected 12 cities, get on your
local BBS systems and start lobbying everyone to call GTE
and request that your city be added as soon as possible.
Unless I am wrong, this is the first time a major company is
creating a product/service that shows they fully understand
the potential of the hobbiest/hacker telecommunciations
community.
Let's prove their right.
(Typed in and comments by: Robert E. Spivack, Fido 10/346)
Review of Alpha Software's "Keyworks" keyboard macro
software.
By Mark Perloe, for the National PCjr Users Group
Alpha's KEYWORKS lets you redefine combinations
of keystrokes to customize any operation. You can
personalize your software with up to 380 macros and save
7000 keystrokes. KEYWORKS also lets you easily customize
menus that can be called up for a variety of functions.
Although these features alone justify the purchase price,
the few extras are also appreciated. The ability to encrypt
files, copy files, format disks, and search directories is
very useful. KEYWORKS comes with suggested macros and pop-
up menus for many programs. If you are presently using
PROKEY, but wish to switch, Alpha has included a simple
conversion program.
WORDSTAR is a breeze with KEYWORKS. It loads its
macros from the autoexec file but macros files can be
interchanged without even exiting from the file you are
writing or you might choose one set to use when writing
reports for school and another for writing letters.
Paragraphs for form letters can be stored as separate files
on the floppy disk and called up with two keystrokes.
Menus are provided for WORDSTAR but in less than one hour
you can customize or create additional mouse compatible
pop-up menus for any command you wish.
KEYWORKS can come to the rescue when problems occur.
More than once I've had Wordstar files too big to fit on
partially filled disk. Rather than lose the files, KEYWORKS
allowed me to format a new disk. When logging to another
drive in Wordstar you are required to have overlay files on
the logged drive or the program may freeze. This can be
easily solved by using KEYWORKS copy command to transfer the
necessary files. File encryption and test window creation
can be valuable aids for any user.
A single macro can call other macros or pause for
fixed or variable lengths which is great for designing
forms. This has made data entry a much faster task with
DBASE. Frequent entries can have their own macros which
pause for certain fields. For instance, recurring monthly
checks can be recorded easily with minimal keystrokes. You
can design the macro to pause only for entry of the date and
amount. The remainder of the data fields will be supplied
by the macro.
KEYWORKS `USER GUIDE' is short and sweet. The way
to learn KEYWORKS is to use it. The menus are so well
designed that you can easily learn to edit, list, create,
change macros or menus without ever opening the manual.
FIDONEWS -- 26 Aug 85 00:18:39 Page 13
Compatibility has always been a problem for those
of us using expanded PCjr's. If I had a dollar for every
supposedly "compatible" program that crashed my IBM PCjr's
RAM disk or erased the video memory, I would be able to
afford a real PC! Alpha Software has come to our aid with
KEYWORKS. This program is an invaluable tool just waiting
to make life with Jr a little bit easier. It coexists
happily with ramdisks, print spoolers, and Racore expansion
boxes. This is not true for PROKEY and SUPERKEY, its
competitors.
If versatility, user friendliness and price are
important in your software decisions, then KEYWORKS is a
powerful program that you will want in your autoexec.bat
file.
Mark may be reached for comment or question at FIDO
No.15 in Region 900 PCjrUserGroup Tulsa, OK
(918) 496-2055 300-1200-2400.
FIDONEWS -- 26 Aug 85 00:18:41 Page 14
============================================================
WANTED
============================================================
Help Wanted for SEAdog
System Enhancement Associates, the developers of the popular
ARC utility, have developed a full-featured electronic mail
system for the PC. This is a fully developed system for
sending and receiving messages and files which includes the
following features:
o Full Fidonet compatibility
o Automatic message routing
o Message forwarding
o Return receipts
o File requests
o File update requests
o On-line, context sensitive help
o Easy installation
We are now seeking sources of venture capital so that we may
begin our marketing operation. Interested parties should
contact Jim Kennedy at (201) 575-5144 or send Fidonet mail
to SEAdog Leader at node 107/8.
