Rich's Ramblings
by Rich Schinnell
As most of you know, I have been running a Bulletin Board System (BBS) since about March of 1982. I initially wrote my own BBS system because I wanted the challenge and felt that I could do better than the ones on the market. I ran my PC-HOST up until about September 1993 and now have finally given up on keeping the code updated with all the latest DOS iterations that Microsoft has put us through. Along with our past MIX director, Roger Fajman, I went through a period of testing WildCat and PCBoard, both highly regarded professional BBS software systems. I finally decided that PCBoard gave me much more freedom to tinker with the code in that it has an add-on compiler that allows SYSOPs, if they understand a bit of programming, to write modules for the BBS that can be used to personalize it. The PPL programming language in PCBoard is very similar to BASIC, and I really bit for it.
I finally purchased the software and have been very happy running it since last September on the software library BBS. (301) 949-8848. This was one of the reasons that I was so enthusiastic that the MIX change over to PCBoard from its old-shoe RBBS-PC. The RBBS software served us well, but it has not been significantly upgraded since June of 1992. It was slow, and the new features in the professional BBS package will give the SYSOP and the user a better interface (my opinion). I put away all the source code to my own BBS, PC-HOST, and now I don't have to worry about re-compiling my code each time a new version of DOS comes along.
There are some real nice features in PCBoard from the user's point of view. You can attach a file to a message to someone. The SYSOP's work will be much easier to accomplish from remote. With the new MIX, many more files will be available, and I will probably move all my files and such to the MIX. Now I can get a life and not have to worry about how the BBS is doing. After 12 years, it is about time. Entering a message will be much easier as PCBoard supports a full screen editor, and it has a built in Quick Mail option. You can sign on, gather all your mail in a QWK packet, download it, and read and answer your mail at your own leisure. Maybe this will give some of us the necessary time to properly compose messages and not respond to the "Flame Wars" in the heat of the moment. All in all, I think that this is a giant step forward for the MIX.
On a lighter side, I have been really getting into Lotus Notes. Where I work, at Vitro, we have a humongous Novell corporate-wide network stretching from Texas to California to our facilities in Rockville. I installed Notes on a 386 PC with a Gigabyte drive and, of all things, the Notes server runs under Microsoft Windows. You all know how much I bashed Windows in the olden days. I am now, almost, a convertee. Not an evangelist, but each day I find that I am doing more in Windows, thank God for the 16 Mbytes of RAM on my work and home machines. In fact, as I write this in WordPerfect 5.2 for Windows, I can jump back and forth to other programs quite easily. Back to the issue: Lotus Notes is a real powerful data base server program that allows you to do key word searches on massive amounts of information. You can conduct work group projects and keep track of who changed what in a document. Its security is quite robust--and sometimes gets in the way--but it is the new way to go. It allows anyone who has a license to be allowed into a data base with different levels of access. As I figure out how to use it better and more easily, I will write more about it. It is not a cheap product, but it's very powerful.
Talking about Windows and WordPerfect, I found that I had chewed
up over 40 Mbytes of disk space when I installed WordPerfect for
Windows 6.0. It did not take me much time to recover the space.
MS-DOS 6.2 allows you to delete complete directory trees and all
their files with a single keystroke. Type DELTREE and enter Y for
yes. This gets rid of those pesky subdirectories and all the
little ones underneath it. WordPerfect 6.0 slowed my machine down
when I was printing, and also in most everything I tried to do.
It has all the features of a real powerful word
processing/desktop publishing program, but I am back to WP for
Windows 5.2. Now I know why WP is going to be charging for
technical support. People will really need it, especially if they
don't retain their older copies of WP, so that they can get some
real work done. It even screwed up some documents converting from
WP 5.1 to 6.0 and the reverse. I don't think that this was an
improvement. Back to Rich's number one rule on upgrading
software: If it works better and allows you to get your work done
faster, upgrade, otherwise pass on it.
While I am talking about Windows, I was reading one of those Windows hints and tips books and found a neat feature that you can add to your SYSTEM.INI file under the [Desktop] section. Adding these three lines will make the characters under your icons into a larger font:
IconTitleSize=12
IconTitleFaceName=Arial
IconTitleStyle=1
The TitleSize is the font point size. FaceName is the font that I selected. I am partial to Arial but you can pick most any typeface you wish. The "1" in the TitleStyle makes the text bold, while "0" would make it normal.
Sure is nice to see the larger characters when you get older and your eyesight gets a bit dimmer. Even in high resolution, this really works.v
Rich Schinnell is president of the Capital PC User Group and works as an Analyst at Vitro (a Tracor company) in Rockville, MD. He has been the SYSOP of the CPCUG Software Library BBS since 1982.
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