CCP/M Meeting Notes - 11/29/87 Only 1 day overdue. Not too bad. Z-Fest on the horizon. Let's see. Where to start? I'm writing this on a Royal. This Royal is running CP/M 2.2. It's showing me yellow letters. Which makes this the first (and only ?) color-capable CP/M machine that I know of. Isn't it great that in 1987, a full 12 years since the first commercial version of CP/M, new products are coming out that run under it? And let me tell you. This little baby ain't no toy computer. It may not run Z (yet...) but it does a few things Kaypro never tried... I'm going to save the details for a future article, 'cause there's news to tell besides this and the deadline is already history. Here's my December list. Not my Christmas list. Speaking of XMAS, check out "Twas the Night Before XMAS" elsewhere. Compliments of GEnie guru J. Taylor, whose upload stats at Mouse House belong in Ripley's. Also, an original piece on GEnie itself in "Accessing the Lamp". Jim even gives me GEniegrams to convince me of the GEnie service. We are all indirectly GEnie users because probably well over 50% of the material he has put up on my system was downloaded from there. But I digress. The list. Z-Festival on the Horizon, Making Boards, Membership drops (ALOT...), UNIFORM on the IBM PC and Royal etc. computers, ON!ward and Upward or Waiting for my 7th computer, No meeting on the second Tuesday, Easter in Mouse and dBase etc., personal WORDprocessor for the Commodore 64 owner, CCP/M catalog has 3668 files on 103 disks, Recent Uploads, and as they say, Much, Much more... The last meeting of CCP/M went well despite the many counts against it. The weather was bad, the newsletter was not on time so some may have thought it was not going to be a meeting night plus our main speaker fell ill and was not able to make it. In way, it was one of our better meetings strangely enough. Reno Franconi expressed again his interest in a Pascal Programming workshop, and it was decided to have just this. I have not worked out the details at all on this but will be putting something together in the coming weeks. The more I think about it, the more I think the course should be on programming techniques in general with Pascal emphasized only after the "pseudo code" has been worked out. Daryl Gehlbach brought WordStar Release 4 and distributed it to those who had bought it. Reno visited me later in the week and after an initial unsucessful attempt to null modem the Kaypro formatted software over to his Televideo we later got it over over to his format after using the services of UNIFORM on an IBM PC. This is a non-PD program which understands many formats, among them, Royal alphaTronic PC, Kaypro II, 4, 10, Osborne SD and DD, Televideo, etc. etc. Anyone have an IBM PC they could bring to the Z Festival so we can use it to copy software, both that Jay Sage will bring (he has expressed an interest in having such a copy facility) and that I will bring? If so, please let me know! The CCP/M Public Domain Software Library now has 103 volumes. There are 3668 files in it. This represents a project that I have been working on for several years actually. Almost all redundancy has been removed, a catalogue has been printed and will be available at a modest cost ($2) at the Festival. It's a 20 page (double sided pages) document and was generated using FATCAT, the FATter but faster CATaloguer. Almost all squeezed files have been unsqueezed and then crunched. Related files (source, help, doc, object, example, etc.) have been LiBRaried. I lost track a long time ago, but if I were to guess, I would say these 103 Kaypro DD (191k) floppies used to be about 300 disks! What a project. I have not been able yet to put together what is really needed, namely a one or two line description of what the files are for. But I do know that everything in the library has been tested, edited, fixed, compiled, assembled, enhanced etc. etc. I had a ball doing this and am proud of what we have. I would even venture to say that CCP/M may very well have one of the best CP/M (ZCPR3 etc.) libraries around... Check it out. Since the Z Fest is so close to the second Tuesday, I have decided to cancel the regular meeting of CCP/M. ie. DON'T show up at the Farmington Public Library on Tuesday the 8 th!!!!!! Unless you need to take out Stephen King's "The Eyes of the Dragon" or the like. In my PD Software Library project, I ran across once again what I find to be one of the funniest pieces of writing I've ever seen. See "How to Make a Board" elsewhere in this issue. Speaking of funny writing, the following definition is part of an extensive list of equally amusing ones and was shown to me at work. We'll print the full list as soon as I can type it up: COPY-PROTECTED: A clever method of preventing incompetent pirates from STEALING software and legitimate customers from USING the software. Here's a brief list of uploads to my RCP/M during the last few months. This is not meant to be exhaustive. It's meant to show that there's been a tremendous amount of very good software and text uploads and I encourage you to look into our very active collection. VDE262FX.LBR 2k JIM TAYLOR UNERA32 .LBR 21k JIM TAYLOR XMAS .WZ 4k JIM TAYLOR WT20 .LBR 5k JIM TAYLOR ST-TNG .TZT 4k JIM TAYLOR HEADROOM.TZT 2k JIM TAYLOR DOS+ .LBR 103k GARY ZUREK 1KUTILS2.LBR 13k JIM TAYLOR SOURCE .CPM 2k JIM TAYLOR NEWBATCH.LBR 5k JIM TAYLOR MXM-2416.AZM 15k STEPHEN KISNER NTWRK-11.TZT 6k JIM TAYLOR NOAH-ARC.INF 5k GARY ZUREK CPM+C128.LBR 22k GARY ZUREK CPMARC .LBR 92k GARY ZUREK NTWRK-10.TZT 5k JIM TAYLOR KENMORE .LBR 61k RICK SWENTON PACK10 .LBR 25k RICK SWENTON PACK10 .LBR 25k RICK SWENTON NZEX-D .LBR 16k RICK SWENTON Z33LIB05.LBR 8k RICK SWENTON MB-TUTR1.LBR 52k SYSOP EASTER .MSE 1k LEE BRADLEY Z-SIGNON.NOT 1k WALT WHEELER JOURNAL .LBR 36k SYSOP TCJ .INF 2k JIM TAYLOR Z-NEWS .8Z5 11k JIM TAYLOR Z-FEST .LBR 6k JIM THOMPSON SPRI2LSM.TXT 4k DAVID WRIGHT CCP/M-11.87 20k SYSOP EASTER .PAS 4k DAVID WRIGHT Z80D-MOD.LBR 3k RICK SWENTON MXO-RV12.ASM 18k STEPHEN KISNER NETWRK-9.TZT 7k JIM TAYLOR TRINITY .DIR 3k GLEN GROSS PCFILE .LBR 113k GARY ZUREK TCJ29 .MZG 26k JIM TAYLOR NETWRK-8.TZT 8k JIM TAYLOR SWEEP .EXE 46k LEE BRADLEY SHOW12B .LBR 40k RICK SWENTON DDTZ26 .LBR 75k RICK SWENTON NHSH-Z33.LBR 14k RICK SWENTON Z33VER10.LBR 32k RICK SWENTON NETWRK-7.TZT 6k JIM TAYLOR LT23 .LBR 39k JIM THOMPSON NETWRK-6.TZT 7k JIM TAYLOR I have been talking with the folks who make the ON! computer. They are shipping me a new one! They will be getting a full write up in these pages soon I expect. But I just want to say that John C. and Bill E., their hard- and software technical team, are terrific. The original ON! suffered from what John could only term "infant mortality". They've had hardware trouble in only 3 of those they've shipped. The new one will have 4 mb RAM disk, which is what I wanted in the first place. The ON! is a state-of-the-art Z system. I am quite confident it will work fine and will be bringing it, and my new Royal, to the Festival. Strange combo I know. The Royal system cost me $970 (I got a lot of software, the color monitor and the better printer). The ON! $3700. And they both appear to be excellent buys. A consultant I work with named Rich Zlatkus gave me a PD full screen editor for the Commodore 64. He wrote it. It appears to be very good. If you are interested in this, I will be bringing the disk and the hardcopy documentation to the Festival. It was written in Commodore Basic. And compiled. Rich is also trying to market a front end to KEDIT, an XEDIT work-a-like for the IBM PC. This guy is very sharp. Check out his Personal WORDprocessor (for this is what he calls his C-64 editor). He's looking for feedback on it. Don't let this pass you by if you have a C-64 (or -128). I am trying to finish this so I can visit Mort Fabricant. He needs an up-to-date list of CCP/M membership. At Tom Veile's and my last count, 24 people have paid up. This is out of some 45 odd members in 1986-87. I know a few who are just absent minded. At least I hope they are. But there are going to be quite a few people who may miss this Dec. news because they did not renew their dues. We cannot operate without the money to pay for the news. Please send in your $15 to Tom Veile if you feel membership is something you want to continue having. We'll miss you if you don't !!! Mort sent me a solution to my First Annual T-Shirt Giveaway Programming Contest. It was not machine readable and so I asked his to supply same. Hope this all comes together in time. I've included my BASIC solution. If you don't recall, this problem had to do with automating the evaluation of all those worthless lottery tickets we've been buying lately. Mort's solution appears at first glance to be an interesting example of dBase I programming. Can't wait to try it out. Thus the need for machine readable copy. Machine readable copy is ALWAYS advised. It makes an editor's job infinitely easier. Thanx Mort for contributing. And also for your ambitious work on the database for the YOU-CCP/M gang. Well done. Now all we have to do is keep people interested in having their names stay on the roster! Well, better close this. I look forward to Dec. with some uneasiness. I know it's going to be fantastic. But I see lots of work yet to do to make it so. I hope everyone that comes has a good time. PS. Linda's baking a million cookies and I'm bringing Finast's 100 cupper for coffee. Bring a friend. Stay for a while. Ask Jay Sage an interesting question. Keep in touch.