By William LaMartin, Editor, Tampa PC Users Group
lamartin@tampabay.rr.com

This month the newsletter well went dry. Well, almost dry. Doug Mullis sent in his usual minutes, and on a second request for material, Mary Sheridan sent me an article. But that leaves a whole lot of space to fill. And since I long ago instituted a policy of using only material from our group, I have a problem. I could reduce the newsletter to four pages this month, or I could try to fill up about three pages myself. Some months when I have purchased a new computer item or had some interesting computer experiences, I could easily do that. But this month there is no new item, and my computer experiences have been mostly redoing web sites and writing computer code in Visual Basic .Net.

The Newsletter and Me I have been doing the newsletter one month short of 10 years. That makes 119 issues of the newsletter, all, if I am not mistaken, produced on time (arriving in your mail before the monthly meeting). And for every one of those newsletters, there is an Adobe Acrobat version. In December of 1995, I took over the job from someone who was burned out, and I would not be adverse to now yielding the job to someone else. I have been thinking of creating a CD with all the Adobe Acrobat files along with a searchable index. It would be sort of a history of what we were doing in computing for the past 10 years. To fill up all that empty space I mentioned, let’s look inside some of those issues.

In that December 1995 issue, Larry Anders had a review of Street Atlas USA 3.0 . I assume if they were still numbering the product in that manner we would now be on version 13 since they put out a new version each year. However, I note that the product is now called Street Atlas USA 2006. Also in that issue the president of the group, Harvey Bruneau, described his recent trip to COMDEX in Las Vegas. Changing times killed that event, which used to be enormous. There were also reviews of Adobe Photoshop 3.0 and Lotus SmartSuite for OS/2 copied from other user group newsletters. I don’t think there are any new OS/2 programs out there at the moment. The newsletter, as it was until recently, was 12 pages, and our meetings were on the Hillsborough Community College campus in Ybor City.

The January 1996 issue had a column from our new president, Connie Kincaid. There were also reviews of Syncware Fill by William LaMartin, Seattle Film Works (a business) by Bruce Register, Zip Explorer by Larry Anders and Partition Magic by Don Patzsch. That was version 1 of Partition Magic. I note that Zip Explorer is now on version 7 and PartitionMagic is at version 8. Remember, you probably heard about them first via the TPCUG.

In the March 1996 issue, I wrote an article about Microsoft Publisher for Win 95, as that version was called. That was the first issue I had used Publisher to do the newsletter, the previous three issues having been done in Microsoft Word. Let me tell you, I found out quickly that a word processor is not the ideal vehicle in which to create a newsletter. I have been using Publisher ever since. My current version is Publisher 2003. In that issue, Larry Anders wrote about an early version of PaintShop Pro. There was an OS/2 article from outside the group. (At that time, I struggled to secure articles about OS/2 since there was a small but active part of the group using OS/2 as their operating system.)

Do you remember Microsoft Bob? If not, you can read about him (it?) in the May 1996 article by Tim Condon. The June 1996 issue had a very long article about OS/2 Merlin. In the July 1996 issue, we announced our first web site which was hosted by member John Meroth as a subdirectory of his site. It would be a few more months before we got our own domain name of tpcug.org. Remember the Zip Drive from Iomega? Larry Anders wrote about an early one in the August 1996 issue. Iomega is still making Zip Drives but no longer appears to make the parallel interface ones of that era.

In the September 1996 newsletter, I wrote about PC Hell--a topic I would return to not infrequently over the years. The October 1996 issue inaugurated a short-lived column by Will Goble titled Ask PC Willy. And again since OS/2 was of interest, Charles Howe had an article on OS/2 Warp.

The November 1996 issue has articles about Delrina CommSuite 95, of which WinFax Pro was one of the components. Faxing from your computer was a big deal back then. There was mention of Internet Explorer 3.0, and it was noted that Netscape was the runaway preference for most of the Internet world. Mention was also made of a beta version of Microsoft Net Meeting.

In December 1996, Larry Anders had a review of Street Atlas 4.0. (See they had put out their yearly update from 3.0 to 4.0.) And there was mention of our move in February 1997 to a new location for the general meetings to MOSI, the Museum of Science and Industry.

Those are some highlights of my first year of newsletters. And there are nine more years to go, but I will spare you that for now. If you go to our web site, http://www.tpcug.org, you will find Adobe Acrobat versions of the newsletter for the past 12 months. There are HTML versions of the newsletter going back to 1998, and a list of articles going back to March of 1996. There are opinions, hardware reviews and software reviews. All that should give you an idea of the members’ interests over the past years.

Anyone interested in manufacturing those CDs I mentioned? u