Tonight's meeting started promptly at 7:00 PM. Stephen Griswold read off last meeting's notes. Looks to me to have been a pretty heavy duty meeting that I missed (moan). Tom Mannion has started the Jim Taylor fund, to collect funds to later present his son, Jonathan, with a gift certificate. We will all miss Jim. Take a moment in silence to acknowledge Jim's recent death before reading on. Treasurer's Report Tom Mannion tells us that the treasury was last confirmed at $553.88, but after new deposits that will be made soon, it will be brought up to around $600. Tom says we need to keep a balance of at least $500, or we, the group, will be hit with extranious charges by the bank he has our account in (sorry Tom, didn't quite catch the name of that banking firm). End of Treasurer's report Breaking developments in the Yasbec project given by Stephen Griswold and Lee Bradley. Steve tried to contact Cam Cotrill to get the official Yasbec Starter Kit. Steve needs to get a new boot-strap ROM. A deal has also been worked out between Lee and Paul Chidley involving EB&C etc. - "Remember, the Yasbec is a high performance, but unfinished computer..." - Al Hathway. Support this project in your own way, contact Lee at his independantly run BBS, The Mouse House at 203-665-1100. Al gave us the rundown on PC Pursuit. PCP is a long distance modem-lover's dream. It can save the average user mondo (I like the word) deniros. There is a $30 flat fee per month, for this service you get 30 hours of connect time + [didn't get the additional $$$/hour over the 30 hours Lee, could you put that in?]. You call one of your local dial-in numbers, and can reach many major metropolitan as well as some good non-industrialized towns in the U.S. But as always they restrict your time to call to between non-peak hours of 6:00 PM till 7:00 AM, unless you want to pay an additional charge. StarLink, PCP's major competetor, had gone outof business recently, affecting many people, so I take it that many of their customers had to go to PCP. You can get info for PCP by calling the 800 directory (1-800-555-1212), ask the operator for PC Pursuit. Lee got a call from a woman who intends to write an article on our group. From what Lee read off at the meeting, there may well be free publicity after all. I hope his letter gets through. Gary Stagliano told us some things we may not already know about Z80MU for the PC. Z80MU is a CPM 2.2 emulator program, that has been released into the Shareware market to help get mainstreamed as much as possible. Typical performance is calculated at about .5 MHZ Kaypro on an 8 MHZ IM XT. On my own Tandy 1000 286-10MHZ it reported a 1.5 MHZ speed. And I have tested it on Central's Zenith computers, and there is a significant speed increase, on the order of 3 times. The faster the host PC, the faster the overall emulation. Many things can be changed in its built in AUTOEXEC.Z80 file, such as terminal emulation (many of the most popular are supported), processor emulation (z80 for the most compatible set-up, but if you have an NEC v20 or v30 you can run 8088 mode and have almost no software slow-down, very nice). Stuart Holden brought up the age old topic of changing the meeting date to something other than Tuesday nights, as this conflicts with his schedule. But seeing such a large group, it's hard to get everyone's schedule modified for any one particular night. Steve Dresser brought up the suggestion of starting SIGs (Special Interest Groups.) Many thought it was a good idea and we tossed ideas around awhile. Nothing was voted on. Well, it looks like our sister group, TCC, doesn't have much more life in them from what I hear from Stephen Griswold. Tom Veile is soliciting articles. If you write something you might find of interest to the other member's, please submit your article, manuscript, or book online to Lee's BBS (# given earlier). Al motioned that we bring the meeting to a close. Gary S. seconded it, Eric Palm thirded. Those in attendance tonight were: Eric Palm, Bob Bates, Lee Bradley, Stephen Veile, Tom Veile, Stephen Griswold, Carolyn Wyman, Gary Stagliano, Ray Brown, Sigurd Kimpel, Steve Dresser, Stuart Holden, Tom Mannion, Al Hathway, Reno Franconi, and CCP/M's newest paid member Mike Dalene. (Well I'm still taking notes so nyaaaaa) Steve Dresser showed us Packet Radio, which looks like a nice, but expensive-to-start-up hobby, that I myself would like to someday get into, when my expenses should die down, and my studies won't be so strenuous to handle it. It looked like ol' Murphy and his Lawbook were at work tonight, because Steve couldn't get things working for us. He DID have it working at first, but something I did had messed things up for him. He did come to his feet with another radio provided by Sigurd Kimpel. They contacted the computer in the parking lot, but for God knows what reason couldn't get a signal beyond the parking lot. Probably something to do with the local of our meetings why Packet radio can't get out. Excellent job Steve. I liked your demo nonetheless. Thanks for sharing it with us. And that's one hell of a braille terminal you have there, wish I knew more about its operation; sorry for making you upset at the meeting. Mike Dalene tells us a little about OS/9 and gave the number to his BBS at 738-3064. Well that's it for tonight's notes. We were kicked out of the Librbary post-haste as usual where members who wished to continue their conversations later reformed at George's Pizza for drinks and talk. Eric Palm Treasurer for the moment cursory edit by Lee Bradley on 1/23/92