*** AUGUST 1998 ************************** ISSUE #195 ***
VILLANOVA UNIVERSITY, ST. AUGUSTINE CENTER
MEETING STARTS - 09:30 - AUG 08
NOTE! SECOND SATURDAY!
Following the usual announcements, we'll plan to have our Commodore Q & A, plus problem solving. Our 8-bit using members are very much urged and encouraged to bring their needs to the meeting where more than one mind can be applied to easing one's way. Remember the credo: "there is no such thing as a stupid question" - and that includes YOURS! Ya'll come.....
For our PC users, we'll start by covering the changes since the last meeting (and problems encountered). This will include the LINUX v5.1 install. Time permitting, we'll go to the internet to demo updating our virus software from the Symantec web/ftp site. And there'll be time for our usual Q & A .....
MAIN LINE AMIGA USERS - Room 210
Despite the low turn out we did abide by our intended agenda. That is, we did focus on the Catalyzer video. During the early part of the meeting, we spent some time looking inside Ted Dean's Micronik Infinitive A1200 tower unit.
For our August meeting we plan to continue from where our presentation ended last month. We will continue our review of ImageFX through the use of the Catalyzer video tape, watching a section of the tape and then replicating the presentation on the Amiga 1200. We will continue our comparison of the latest version of ImageFX, version 3.0, to the previous version, version 2.6.
Beginning in June and continuing thru October, our meetings will be scheduled for the SECOND SATURDAY of the month. This change was made because of the confluence of the Fourth of July and Labor Day holidays, plus end of school year festivities at Villanova. Please mark your calendars and re-check the dates in each newsletter.
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[The following is a Brief History]
Creative Micro Designs, Inc. (CMD) was founded in the fall of 1987 on the strength of JiffyDOS, a new DOS speed enhancement product for the Commodore 64 and 128. Company President and co-founder Mark Fellows developed JiffyDOS during 1985 and 1986, and began marketing JiffyDOS nationally through his own company, Fellows, Inc., in the fall of 1986 via classified ads in 'Computer Shopper' and 'Keyboard' magazines. Mr. Fellows continued marketing JiffyDOS alone until fall of 1987, when he was joined by Charles A. Christianson, a relative and recent college graduate majoring in business and marketing.
Mr. Christianson began helping out part-time with the marketing, sales, and business aspects, and helped to formally incorporate CMD at the end of 1987. Sales of JiffyDOS continued to rise steadily, and a partnership was soon formed with Charles R. Christianson, father of Charles A., who operated an export business of his own at that time. The senior Mr. Christianson brought years of business experience to the company and helped to transform it from a basement operation into a full business.
In April of 1988, Creative Micro Designs, Inc. became a full-time business, and tripled its annual sales in dollars each year in the first three years of operation. The company made its first jaunt to the annual World of Commodore show in Philadelphia in November of 1988. Work continued on improving JiffyDOS, and CMD rolled out the present version 6 of the product in mid-1989.
Amidst the rise in popularity of JiffyDOS, CMD began work on a SCSI- based hard drive system that featured a highly-compatible DOS coupled with partitioning options that helped it to emulate other Commodore disk drives. CMD began development of this product in 1989. Special attention was paid to assuring compatibility with important software products such as GEOS, CP/M, and Superbase. The level of compatibility of this new series of hard drives, along with its expandability and versatility, made it an instant hit when the product began shipping in 1990.
With the development of the CMD HD Series hard drive and DOS completed, CMD turned its hardware development capabilities toward developing a RAM-based disk device. This effort resulted in RAMLink, an expandable RAM drive with a capacity of up to 16 Megabytes. RAMLink was also capable of maintaining its contents indefinitely through its own power source, or for several hours of actual power loss through the use of a battery backup system. Many other features were employed into RAMLink, such as a parallel interface to the normally serially-operated CMD HD Series hard drive, a slot for using memory from other third party RAM expanders, and a pass-through port for other types of utility and I/O cartridges. The HD Series hard drive DOS was ported to this new device, along with some changes and improvements, and again compatibility with important software was kept very much in mind.
Initially, RAMLink could not be used directly with GEOS. However, gateWay, a new GEOS 'front-end' provided GEOS compatibility, and was offered with RAMLink units that shipped in 1991. While gateWay provided some capabilities that GEOS itself could not, it also presented some trade-offs and added to the learning curve of using RAMLink. A new GEOS CONFIGURE file was replaced gateWay in RAMLink shipments beginning in 1992, while gateWay was further revised as an independent product.
(Part II - next month)
For the foreseeable future, we will continue with our monthly meetings in the St. Augustine Center at Villanova University. The 8-bit and PC meetings will be in Seminar Room 110 and the AMIGA meeting in Seminar Room 210.
Please be sure to enter the campus from the ITHAN AVENUE main gate, then proceed to the 2-level parking building adjacent to the St. Augustine Center, on the Ithan Avenue side. Note, you may have to enter the building via the front door, as shown in the following sketch:
NOTE: maps on our webpage - http://astro4.ast.vill.edu/mlcug/index.html
NO CONGRATULATIONS! - since we had a pretty low turnout for the July meeting, there was not enough interest to have the raffle. We'll plan on one for the next meeting(s), if the turnout picks up.
CHRISTMAS IN JULY!!! - one of the local merchants vigorously advertised his Christmas in July sale. I guess we all knew that the fierce drive for sales would gradually move the retail community to having Christmas sales starting on December 26th and continuing without interruption until December 24th of the following year!! However, for the club - this is just an oblique way to announce that we will likely try for a flea market sale for the holiday season at our November monthly meeting. This would include hardware and software for Commodore, Amiga and PC (maybe Mac???) systems - as YOU ALL might bring. Keep it in mind and, as the time approaches, we can firm up details.
SUPER CPU 128! - no new experiences have been reported this last month from our members. I urge our SCPU owners (4-128 and 2-64) to let us know what they learn - good and bad about their systems and SCPU units. The best way to do that is via a post on the BBS (saves me a lot of typing!).
"Chaos reigns within.
Reflect, repent, and reboot.
Order shall return."
FOR SALE: MLCUG has a lot of hardware and software that is available for you to purchase at very attractive prices! By the time you get this newsletter, the listing should be updated and POSTED on both our BBS and our webpage. This new listing has ALL items priced. Check out either of the site postings. For items, you can contact Charles Curran to make arrangements to purchase (610-446-5239).
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For July, we again had a few absences because of the City transit strike (as we had in June) - hopefully, that will not be the case for August!
Following the regular announcements and feedback from the attendees, the Commodore portion of the meeting had a short Q & A. This was followed by a brief demo from Emil on using the macro capabilities of THE WRITE STUFF to produce a quicky editor for HTML files as used on the World Wide Web - see the item elsewhere in this issue.
For the PC users, we had a pretty long Q & A - there seems to be an ample supply of problems and mysteries with the complex systems most folks have or have been getting! Then, we did a couple more demos on the new PC list - see the next article. In response to a question on finding addresses and/or phone numbers, we made a quick excursion to the internet to show the Infospace search engine which can be a big assist. You can try this out by pointing your web browser to:
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By Emil Volcheck
Last month, we continued with our demonstrations of start up activities on the club's new PC. The idea being to provide ideas along the way as a guide to members who have purchased a new PC and are wondering just what to do first????
The list of actions below has been updated to include what we have reviewed thru 07/11. AND, to provide an indication of what will be coming up in future meetings. I'll continue and modify this listing as we work our way thru it. Experience and member interaction will guide its evolution:
"A file that big?
It might be very useful.
But now it is gone."
By Emil Volcheck
When I first got a Windows 95 system in early 1997, I found an annoying problem with CD-ROM installable software. Namely, the CD has autorun capability - meaning that it will automatically start up to do an install when it is placed in the CD-ROM drive. That's OK for the first time when you install the software; but, later, when you just need the CD for its (extensive?) data files, it still wants to do an install every time you put it in (it does not recognize that it has already been installed).
So, I used the following sequence to turn off the autorun feature - and have had no further hassles:
START
When the machine is re-started, the auto-run will be off. If you like to play music CDs while you work <grin>, you'll have to activate the CD player yourself, after this change (maybe via a desktop icon???).
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by Emil Volcheck
In some past meetings, our webmaster, Peter Whinnery (and sponsor Frank Maloney), had presented the beginning of web page editing - or Hyper Text Markup Language (HTML) for the novice! Both urged folks to start with a simple (text) editor and stay with a short list of HTML tags to make it easier and quicker for yourself - and easier and faster for your viewers.
I wondered if I could not make HTML files with The Write Stuff. No reason why not - but there are all those laborious tags to type over and over - at the beginning and end of everything you do.
Ah, ha - but TWS has this real nice macro capability - why not use that to ease the tag typing chore???
So, I asked master Peter for his list of commonly used tags. He obligingly posted them on our BBS for me. I downloaded them and put them into TWS, then converted the list into a TWS macro set - using the symbol / to mark beginning tags and \ to mark ending tags.
[If you want to fool with this, I have uploaded this TWS macro set to the BBS's C-128 utilities library in a file called, obviously: -html macros. You can download it and feed it into TWS on the fly to have a temporary HTML editor without messing up your regular macro features]
Then, I got a listing of a simple model webpage - courtesy of the webmonkey of the Main Line Macintosh Users Group (their page is at www.mlmug.org) and entered it - using my new (TWS) HTML text editor. When the file was finished, it was put on a PC disk with Big Blue Reader.
At the July 11th meeting, I briefly reviewed the process on the club C- 128, then with the club's PC, we fired up the Netscape web browser and viewed my masterpiece. It looked just as it should - and no one would be the wiser that it had been prepared on a Commodore!
Now, if only there were a browser for the 64 or 128; so one could view or review one's creation on its own platform!!!!!
----------
1) save the file in regular TWS format (for a bit more speedy access if you want to further edit/modify the file)
2) to save as an html file:
If you want to have a little fun, go to the BBS, download the macros and give it a go!
A crash reduces
your expensive computer
to a simple stone.
by Emil Volcheck
[Being a tale of woe of recent experience.]
One recent Wednesday evening, we were attempting to disable the password prompting on the club's new PC. As a guide, we had a magazine article that was the step-by-step kind, ie. do this, if it doesn't work, do this, etc.
The first thing on the list we tried did not work; so we did the second. Got the kind message that things had changed and we needed to restart. OK, so we did.
BUT, as the computer booted up, it told us that "Windows protection has been violated. You need to restart". So, we did (again) and got the same result.
We tried many restart modes and no matter what we tried (including reversing the action that had started this dismal chain of events), we could not get the system to successfully boot up.
Fortunately, just the day before, we had made a set of RESCUE DISKS in contemplation of some other future actions that might screw things up. Unfortunately, they were at my house not at Charlie's with the PC. So, we folded our tents for the night.
Thursday morning, I mailed the rescue disks to Charlie. The US Postal Service came thru in good fashion and delivered the disks about 24 hours later - glad they're around!
So this afternoon, Charlie ran the rescue disks while reporting the behavior to me on the phone - in real time. They detected changes in three of the critical system files and restored them to the Tuesday AM format.
When thru, the PC booted backup as it should! Charlie has so far not seen any mis-behavior; so it appears that we lucked out making that set of rescue disks when we did. [Actually, it just shows how smart we are <big grin>]
CREATIVE MICRO DESIGNS - I
DIRECTIONS FOR ST. AUGUSTINE CENTER MEETING ROOMS
-----------------------------------------------
64/128/PC/Amiga Meetings 1998 Steering Committee Meetings
August 08 * August 12
September 12 * September 16 **
October 10 * October 14
* = second Saturday ** = third Wednesday
*********************************************
EDITOR: Emil J. Volcheck, Jr. 1046 General Allen Lane
West Chester, PA 19382-8030
(Produced with C-128/SCPU 128, RAMlink, HD-40/85, 1571, FD-4000, THE
WRITE STUFF 128, XETEC Super Grafix, Canon BJ-200ex, Swiftlink and
Motorola 288 modem)
MLCUG BBS: 610-828-1359 (300 --> 28800 bps), 24 hr/day
WWW: http://astro4.ast.vill.edu/mlcug/index.html
PUBLICITY/BOOK LIBRARIAN: Robyn Josephs 565-4058
DISK ORDERS: Charlie Curran 446-5239; Bill Bacon 441-5908
VILLANOVA SPONSOR: Prof. Frank Maloney, Dept. of Astronomy
MLCUG STEERING COMMITTEE:
PRESIDENT: Emil Volcheck 388-1581
SECRETARY: Charles Curran 446-5239
TREASURER/MEMBERS: Dewitt Stewart 623-5145
AMIGA SIG/SYSOP: John Deker 828-7897
INTERNET: Peter Whinnery 284-5234
DATABASE: Layton Fireng 688-2080
AT LARGE: Tom Johnson 525-3440
########################################
ANNOUNCEMENTS & SPECIALS
########################################
IMAGINE IF INSTEAD OF CRYPTIC,
GEEKY TEXT STRINGS, YOUR COMPUTER
PRODUCED ERROR MESSAGES IN HAIKU!
$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$
$ TRADING POST $
$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$
64/128/PC MEETING
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YOUR NEW PC - PART III
a) send in warranty cards
a) consider getting a full tutorial
--------- 06/13 ---------
--------- 07/11 ---------
NOTE: any opinions expressed above are those of the editor! They are subject to change from either new knowledge or persuasion from the members!
IMAGINE IF INSTEAD OF CRYPTIC,
GEEKY TEXT STRINGS, YOUR COMPUTER
PRODUCED ERROR MESSAGES IN HAIKU!
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AUTORUN DISABLE
SETTINGS
CONTROL PANEL
SYSTEM
DEVICE MANAGER
CD-ROM
the listed DRIVER
SETTINGS
remove checkmark in box for
AUTO-INSERT NOTIFICATION
HTML EDITING
BTW, once you have composed the file in TWS, you can save it directly as an html file readable by a browser. Just do as follows:
Your file will be saved in browser readable True ASCII format. Just upload it to your webpage and away you go. That is, assuming you are maintaining a webpage with your Commodore <grin>.
IMAGINE IF INSTEAD OF CRYPTIC,
GEEKY TEXT STRINGS, YOUR COMPUTER
PRODUCED ERROR MESSAGES IN HAIKU!
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NEED RESCUEING?