PRESIDENT’S REMARKS

a) Membership is now on an anniversary basis (based on the date that you joined) rather than on the old calendar year basis.

b) Our Bits of Blue newsletter is now being prepared using WordPerfect as the publishing program. The Editor would appreciate any and all public domain graphics. Also needed are articles from the members for the newsletter.

c) In response to a comment that some other clubs get more favored treatment from various vendors, it’s because those clubs have more members than we do. Vendors are always looking for the greatest audience to spread the word about their products.

d) A presentation of Lotus 1-2-3 Ver 3.1 is scheduled for next month. In March, a representative from the Software Publishing Corp will present Harvard Graphics. Later in the year, Aston-Tate will discuss the merits of dBase IV.

e) Owners of Magellan (Lotus) are eligible to receive, for free, seven new file viewers. You will now be able to view Quattro, WordPerfect, Word for Windows, etc. documents while in Magellan.

f) MS-DOS 5.0, now in beta testing, is scheduled for release the first half of this year. It is said to have QuickBASIC, handle upper memory usage, and have some elements of PC-TOOLS.

g) Logitech has announced a new mouse. For left-handed people! Comments from the members revealed that the IBM mouse has a button to do the same thing and that some software packages provide a left-handed facility.

h) We have a lot of good material on the Bulletin Board. Log on and check it out. We now have 120 meg of disk space.

i) If you have any ideas for education classes or presentations, please get in touch with me (Harvey Bruneau) or Ed Kant. We might consider a short session of about 15 minutes before the meeting starts. We have to talk to IBM about getting additional meeting space if there is enough interest in having classes on specific subjects. We do have some volunteers.

IBM PRESENTATION

Chris Mayer, our IBM compatriot, gave an excellent demonstration of OS-2 Ver 1.2 running on a 486-95 with an XGA monitor. The XGA video was awesome. Great color and the resolution was remarkable.

Chris had 8 to 9 windows open and zipped from one to the other with effortless ease. The power of the PC and of OS-2 was very obvious in that a program in one window would continue to run while you were working on another program in another window.

Many of the terms unique to OS-2 were defined, including "threads." In effect, programs are "threaded" when they run in the same application window. As an example, he used an animation program that had two eyeballs follow the cursor motion of the mouse; each eyeball was independently following the mouse cursor.

Also the term "concurrent processing" was clarified. A single processor machine, by definition, can only process one job at a time. What OS-2 does is prioritize the various jobs and give control to each of them according to their priority. When a program is suspended, a "picture" of the machine (register contents, current memory address, flag settings, etc.) is stored with that program. Later, when the program is activated, the "picture" is used to restore the machine to be exactly as it was when it was suspended.

Because of time constraints, the Communication and Data Base Managers could not be demonstrated. Chris Mayer did an excellent job of presenting IBM’s newest "products." He knew the equipment, he knew the operating system, and he knew how to communicate. He deserves a "Well done" from all of us.

COMPUTER COMPASS MAGAZINE

Bradley Friedman distributed copies (gratis) of his new magazine. It is a directory of computer and business professionals in the Tampa Bay area. He is looking for feedback from computer users and would appreciate any information you can offer.

SECRETARY’S COMMENTS

If any of you are interested in the "mouse watcher" program, check out EYECON3O.ZIP on our Bits of Blue BBS. u