chapter 11, but subject to court approval, would be bought by a Swedish

company—and even if the sale doesn’t go through, there would be 100,000 Victor owners, enough to guarantee a market for replacement-part manufacturers. IBM might have the brand name. But the Victor right now was best for _my_ needs.

Footnote 97:

A former Victor employee tells me that charging dealers for promotional material isn’t that uncommon a practice. I realize that some dealers may waste literature, but I still think the practice is dumb.

“When’s a safe time to get here before anyone else gets the Victor?” I asked the sales rep.

“We open at nine o’clock,” he said.

“Won’t do me any good to come several hours earlier?” I asked out of curiosity—I’d show up regardless of the answer.

He shook his head.

That night I called Steve, just to overcome last-minute doubts. The better the bargain, the more suspicious I should be. “You think I should go ahead?”

“Why not? The biggest problem you’ll have is selling your present Victor.”

I’d paid $1,750 for it new, through the mail. It, too, had been a risk. I’d taken out a maintenance agreement with a local company in case the new arrival turned out to be a lemon. It hadn’t been. But could I recover the money selling a supposedly “has-been” machine?

Monday, I arose at five in the morning. If the Victor was still there and if I got to it before anyone else did, I’d save more than $4,000 off the normal price. For four hours of waiting? I’d have to be a regular on all the best-seller lists for my time to be worth $1,000 an hour.

When I pulled into the shopping center, I saw no one else there except for a police car passing through. An old van wheezed into the parking lot a few minutes later. A bearded man and a boy of perhaps ten got out and set up a canvas chair; veteran auction goers? They’d have advice on the best way to fight the crowd and claim my prize.

The man, however, just gestured and grunted. The boy couldn’t speak, either. They were apparently deaf mutes. I pulled out pen and paper and learned they were after Atari-games software.

Maybe an hour later a few others straggled in, one of them a psychologist, with whom I began discussing the great issues of the day.

“You’re not interested in the Victor, are you?” I asked.

“I’m looking for Osborne software,” said the psychologist.

“What about detachable keyboards and monitors?” I asked, remembering my nightmare over the criteria for laying claim to a machine.

We decided that proper auction etiquette required you to defer to the person who carried away the main part of the computer to the counter; an auctioneer later agreed.

Miraculously, a small, orderly line was forming even now, with fifty people in front of the store by eight. Over the next hour a mob came, some in old jalopies like the van, others in Cadillacs and BMWs. There was both excitement and desperation. Many people, like me, simply would forego buying a new computer if someone else beat them to a suitably priced machine. Should I lose out on the Victor, I’d just spend another year or so juggling floppy disks around. Others, however, might have been hoping to be able to afford a serious business computer, period. No, it wasn’t like the Depression, but I couldn’t help thinking of the dance marathons of the 1930s where the hardiest carried off the prizes. I was the first in line—of all the hundreds of people—but I certainly didn’t boast the strongest back. Just a few feet down the line I saw ... T-shirt.

An auction staffer picked up a bullhorn. He said only fifty people could come into the store at once. I heard sighs. Relatively few people, however, left that line. Maybe, just maybe, the others wouldn’t appreciate the merits of the bargain machines that they themselves wanted. I hoped that to most in the crowd the new Victor would be just another dead fish of a micro.

Finally, it was nine. The salespeople—as if at a fire—urged the crowd to stay calm. If the mob lost discipline, the other early comers and I might be crushed against the glass.

As the doors opened, I glanced back at T-shirt. If he was worried about me, he wasn’t letting on. At a pace between a jog and a sprint I entered the store; I tried momentarily to excise the image of T-shirt from my mind.

Oh, look! A friendly sales assistant. I’d offered him advice on electronic mail and—

“Do you think you could help me with the Victor?” I asked.

Suppose he couldn’t. His job might be at stake if he did even a small favor in this every-man-for-himself struggle.

“Sure,” he said. And I’d like to think this was another demonstration of the value of befriending others in The Jungle and sharing knowledge, user to user. With the sales assistant watching guard over the main machine, I picked up the monitor and pushed through the crowd to the counter. I still couldn’t believe the Victor would soon be mine. What if the sales assistant had suddenly developed a fondness for Victors and had himself decided to claim the main machine? T-shirt all this time may have been in the other part of the room; perhaps he was a gracious, mannerly fellow who, having seen me first in line, was decent enough to relinquish the new Victor to me. I don’t know how T-shirt fared at the auction but hope that his own patience was rewarded through the acquisition of the used Victor.

Within half an hour after taking the new Victor home, I had WordStar running on it. There was some tinkering to do with the software so the computer would start up without my having to stick a floppy disk in it, but otherwise it was a perfect machine, save for a little crack in the front of the case, which I discovered after I peeled away the price tape. For $40 or so I could buy a replacement front. The hard disk, at any rate, has been just as handy as I expected for editing this book.

My old Victor is in the hands of Gabriel Heilig, an aspiring screenwriter, who saw my want ad and bought the machine for $1,750, exactly what I’d paid. Gabe is no dummy; indeed, he used to sell cars—Mercedes—and he insisted that his purchase price include plenty of advice and several hours of instruction in WordStar, my favorite word processor. And then what does Gabe do? He goes out and buys a copy of Word Perfect, a new program that he swears is easier to use. I say, “Great if it helps you do your work.” It must. Gabe tells me that the Victor helps him revise five times as fast as he can on his electronic typewriter. “You constantly have a fresh copy in front of you,” he says, “whereas if you’re using a typewriter, you must retype the whole page even if you change just once sentence.” A producer is interested in a proposal for a TV series, and Gabe says: “I did it in three days—it would have taken two weeks with a typewriter.”

Having sold the old Victor to Gabe for $550 more than the price tag on the hard-disk one, I invested $230 in a 1,200-baud modem. I remain a computer communications junky. A draft of this afterword, in fact, reached my technical editor up in New York via the phone lines.

■ ■ ■

My afterword could cover a number of topics, but I’ll resist. Still, you might be interested to learn that the Great Modeming continues between the United States and Sri Lanka.

Because of problems with the Sri Lankan phone service, the link over the past year hasn’t been 100 percent reliable—monsoons can wreak havoc on cables between Arthur Clarke and the satellite station. But Steve Jongeward, who is now an assistant both to Clarke and Peter Hyams, the _2010_ director-writer, reports that the struggles have been worthwhile. The movie will be out in December 1984 (remember: I’m writing this in November 1984), and if a reporter has questions for Clarke in Sri Lanka, Steve will just type them out on the Kaypro in California, and the novelist will typically respond within a day or so. Sometimes the reporters even visit the office with the Kaypro and interview Clarke via modem and get instant replies.

■ ■ ■

The Great Modeming has produced a wonderful outgrowth: an attempt to start an Electronic Peace Corps (EPC) to pipe U.S. technical savvy into the Third World via computers links. (See Backup XIII, “Why Not An Electronic Peace Corps?”)

The idea—in the form of an agency working within or alongside the existing Peace Corps—has won support from people ranging from Clarke to William F. Buckley, Jr., and Chicago _Sun-Times_ editorial writers.

Two established foreign-aid groups, Partnership for Productivity and Volunteers in Technical Assistance (VITA), hope to develop an informal EPC-style project with the Sri Lankans.[98] If successful, it could complement an existing VITA plan for an earth satellite to relay electronic mail to and from the Third World. Ideally, a permanent EPC would develop. Then it could recruit volunteers, help fund projects like the satellite and the Clarke Centre, and otherwise encourage computer communications in vital fields such as public health and agriculture.

—Alexandria, Va. Nov. 15, 1984

Footnote 98:

Kaypro has donated five machines for the project and expects to send five more. Special thanks here to David Kay and Tom Peifer, a Kaypro staffer in charge of the company’s Third World donations program.

BACKUP: More Tips and Tales from the Jungle

BACKUP I ❑ Twenty-Six Questions to Ask at (and About) the Computer Store

The _very worst_ computer stores are like amusement-park arcades. Expect to be clipped. Just aim for the bull’s-eye and keep your losses low. Better still, go to the good stores.

Reading my list of twenty-six before-you-buy questions, please remember that the quality of computer stores can vary tremendously. The proportion of lemons to good ones is higher than in the case of ordinary retailers. That’s because of the complexity of the product. In fact, there’s an old joke about the difference between a car salesman and a computer one: the former knows when he’s lying.[99]

Footnote 99:

The salesman joke is from _InfoWorld_, October 22, 1984, p. 27.

One of the main tricks of the crooked computer hustlers is nothing more than the retail-store version of leaving town ahead of the sheriff.

“The average computer salesman has a half-life of two months,” said my friend the systems analyst. “Then he loses his credibility with his supposed ‘clients’ and goes back to selling shoes or automobiles. If you’re relying on any salesman for expert knowledge, you might be in for a rude awakening. That’s why users groups formed. People got ticked off with this world of hucksterism and created their own little world.”

One of the problems is that many good, honest sales reps will soon leave for more lucrative work as consultants or for manufacturers or others.

Of course, the customer himself may be as impossible as some of the sales reps. He might expect a quick, accurate, lucid answer to his question from a rep working for little more than a department-store clerk’s earnings. Computer stores can be full of ignorance on both sides of the counter. Moreover, even if the sales rep knows his subject forward and backward, many computer problems just defy easy answers. Imagine the frustration of a sales rep working on commission. He can ill afford time to educate complete novices. So do your homework or at least make an appointment when the sales rep isn’t going to be jammed up with lunchtime traffic. That’s the nature of the Silicon Jungle, not simply a series of ripoffs. Cherish the good sales reps.

Perhaps the ultimate bad customer is a middle-aged Missouri man accused of the first-degree murder of a computer-store owner with whom he disputed a $180 bill.

Neither men nor machines “interfaced” well here. Although the customer had bought a printer elsewhere, he was under the impression that no one would charge him for making it compatible with a computer purchased from the store. The owner wouldn’t yield. Allegedly—I didn’t know the verdict at the time of this writing—the man then fired two .38-caliber slugs.[100]

Footnote 100:

_InfoWorld_, June 20, 1983, p. 1, reported the shooting incident.

Short of killing the store owner, how do you protect yourself?

Start by realizing that even at honest stores, your interests and the firms’ won’t be the same. I know of a Washington store that planned to drop the Kaypro. Despite the computer’s generally good technical reputation, the store seems to have been stuck with more than its share of lemons with disk-drive problems. But that wasn’t the real reason, apparently.

“We’re moving out of the lower-priced equipment into systems where we can make a bigger profit,” explained a store employee. “We’re not in this for charity. We’ve got to make a living.”

Understandable. But don’t count on a store like that to sell you the least expensive machine for your needs.

You can also protect yourself by considering the right questions—_some_ of which appear below:

ONE

Do you need a computer? Are you prepared to fire the humans the machine might replace? Remember, a computer can’t make coffee or lie about your whereabouts when _you_ may face an angry customer. Of course, your business may be expanding so that this isn’t an issue.

TWO

Do you have the temperament for the device? A willingness to struggle with mechanical and human frailty—including your own?

THREE

Are you prepared to do your homework? You can’t avoid some preparation. It’s dangerous to dump the whole chore in the lap of a consultant who, however good, doesn’t know your business as well as you do.

Use a consultant if need be. But help him and yourself by knowing what’s going on. If you don’t have time, at least be certain that a trusted employee does—ideally, someone on whom you can bestow a fat raise if computerization goes smoothly.

FOUR

What magazines and reading material should you buy at the computer store and elsewhere?

_The Silicon Jungle_ is just a start. Neither it nor other books can keep you informed about new products as quickly as a weekly magazine like _InfoWorld_ can. I’ve written for _InfoWorld_ and may be prejudiced, but I think it covers the industry well. Some micro magazines, especially those oriented toward specific brands, are namby-pamby in their coverage of the industry or their pet machines.

A good general book is fine for acquiring broad perspective; but now move on to a guide focused on computers for your kind of business. Shop for magazines and books as carefully as you would for the machines. See if the magazines’ articles are as up to date as their ads; I know of one that reviewed the Osborne more than a year after its introduction.

Timeliness isn’t as important with books if they discuss principles as well as specific products. Whatever you read, make sure it’s in English, not gibberish.

FIVE

How do you want to buy your computer and the trimmings? At a store or through the mail?

Unless you have a consultant or otherwise enjoy plenty of technical backup, you should buy your entire system locally, at one store.

Many manufacturers discourage mail-order sales. That’s partly because of price cutting but also because they need local stores to guide customers who are new to computers.

But if advice _is_ available to you from a consultant or friend? Then mail-order software might be a terrific buy, especially since most computer stores can’t supply much software expertise, anyway.

SIX

Do you want an independent store or a chain store?

My own preference is an independent that has been in business several years. Computer sales reps may come and go. The owner, however, should still be in the store and in town when your warranty expires!

If you insist on buying from a chain, well, fine. But learn how long the manager has been around—and how long he intends to stay. He may lie through his teeth. But at least you’re trying.

Also, ask the manager how long his predecessors lasted? How fast does the revolving door spin?

SEVEN

Are the sales reps knowledgeable and understandable?

One of the best ways to find out is for them to demonstrate a program of the kind that you want. Ideally, sales reps or consultants won’t just know a lot about computers. They’ll also know—or learn—something about your business.

Above all, the sales rep should give you accurate information in language you understand. If you’re a businessman shopping for a word-processing computer, a good salesman can tell you how many double-spaced pages each of your floppy disks will be able to hold. Of course, ideally, you’ll walk into the store knowing the basics of computers. But there are bound to be gaps in your knowledge somewhere along the line; even writers for computer magazines argue with each other over some supposedly clear-cut technical matters.

EIGHT

Can anyone go with you to the store, especially on the day when you want to firm up the purchase?

You may at least enjoy a psychological advantage over the sales rep if there are two of you asking well-coordinated questions.

Who should accompany you? Perhaps the person in your office who would use the machine the most; what better source of questions for the sales rep? Obviously, too, it’s good labor relations. Employees who helped choose a machine will be less likely to complain about screens or keyboards.

NINE

What programs will do the jobs you need done?

Don’t just consider costs of the programs; consider their costs versus the cost of _not_ owning particular ones.

I don’t regret spending $250 for a word-processing program to replace the cumbersome software with which my machine came. With the “free” program it would have taken perhaps 40 percent longer to write this book.

TEN

How easy are the programs to learn? How easy are they to use? Some of the easiest to learn are the hardest to _use_.

ELEVEN

Do the programs include good instruction manuals? You still may want them if they don’t—as long as you can buy readable books about them.

TWELVE

What machines will run those programs? And how well will they run them?

Take WordStar. Many machines can run this popular word-processing program; but not all will let you use the cursor keys—the arrowlike ones—to move from place to place on your screen. With some computers you must simultaneously tap on two keys, not just one, to move the arrow. You could have WordStar customized for your machine; but why not instead buy a computer that works well with it from the start?

You also want to consider the operating system that a machine uses. By now, the most widely used operating system is MS-DOS, which has become a de facto standard because of IBM’s endorsement of it. It has supplanted CP/M. Rival machines may not run _every_ program that the IBM computers can. Some, like the Compaq portable, come close. But if a computer exactly duplicated all the IBM’s functions, Big Blue’s legal staff would crush the maker.

The widely used Apples have their own operating systems—one for the Apple II series and another for the Macintosh.

There’s also UNIX. Ma Bell developed it originally, AT&T Information Systems now supports it, and Microsoft sells a microcomputer version called XENIX. The gurus say UNIX could be the operation system of the future. With it programmers can more easily write software for machines of different brands and sizes and “port” their programs from one computer to another. UNIX may also be good for micros with many people using them at once. The negative is that the nonexperts sometimes have more trouble using UNIX than they do good ole CP/M and MS-DOS.

So much for the mainstream and soon-to-be-mainstream formats. What, however, if the program you need comes only in an oddball one? Think hard. Do you need this software—hence, this computer—immediately? Or can you wait until the wonderful program or an equivalent is available for other machines?

By the way, the word “format” doesn’t refer just to the general style like CP/M or MS-DOS. It can also mean specific machines within CP/M and so on. Different makes of CP/M-style computers, for instance, may not read each other’s disks because their exact formats are different.

THIRTEEN

Is the machine 8 bits or 16 bits; and how big is the random-access memory? Remember, 8 bits may be fine for word processing and light-duty accounting, but 16 bits might be better for complicated spreadsheets and is a definite advantage in data-base applications.

At the very least in the business world, you want 64K of RAM for word processing and 256K or even more for intimidating calculations.

You may find that a micro just isn’t powerful enough to handle a mailing list in the tens of thousands or process the payroll of Exxon. They’d be uses fit for a mainframe or at least a mini.

FOURTEEN

What about =mass storage=—in other words, devices like disk drives? Can they hold enough information for your business?

If you need to juggle around great masses of material in a hurry, you may want a hard disk, which is more expensive than the floppies.

Remember—one character equals one byte and you can squeeze most numbers into one or two bytes. Estimate your needs by calculating how many pages by how many bytes per page, etc., then double your result to allow for growth and the unforeseen.

Don’t just consider storage capacity. Think about the ease of making electronic copies of information you squeeze into your computer. A hard disk capable of holding the equivalent of five thousand typewriter pages is nice. But you still must contend with floppies for backup if the hard disk fails. You must either make backup copies as you go along or else, every so often, hold a long, tedious copying session.

Fortunately, the price of hard disks is dropping quickly enough that in the future you might be able to afford a second hard disk to back up the one in the machine. Some micros can back up on a standard videocassette recorder—a good four-hour tape will hold 100 megabytes. Besides, there’ll eventually be cheap, reliable, roomy memories without any moving parts.

Even then, however, you’ll still want copies of some kind, especially if failures would zap thousands of pages of hard-won information.

FIFTEEN

Must your computer system accommodate more than one user? Will it work well with people tapping into it from different terminals—those machines with the keyboard and screens but little or no computing power of their own?

Computer makers ballyhoo many micro systems as being “multiuser,” but often there are hitches.

These machines may let one person do accounting and the other do word processing at once but might not allow two people to run the accounting program simultaneously. And what about data bases and electronic file cabinets? Can more than one person simultaneously update inventory records, for instance? And will the computer slow down much if too many people use it at once?

Still, properly chosen, a multiuser system is a great way to share information with many people and not have to jockey floppy disks around all the time. Then there’s the cost. A multiuser system for twenty or thirty persons may cost less than half of what individual desktop computers _might_.

Instead of a multiuser system, however, you might still go with full-blown computers—but _network_ them.

Networking is basically what it sounds: tying together machines to help them share letters, reports, data bases, and other electronic files. (See Chapter 13, “Net Gain$,” for a fuller explanation.)

SIXTEEN

Can you expand your computer system without difficulty, adding more storage, for instance, or devices like a modem to help you communicate over the phone lines?

SEVENTEEN

Will the sales rep show you that the computer will work well with the printer or other accessories you have in mind?

He or she might not be able to demonstrate this compatibility, simply because he doesn’t have the peripherals in stock; but you should at least obtain a clear written promise saying that everything will work _well_ together. Be sure that his obligation to make it work is clear _before_ you sign the check.

The same idea naturally applies to software.

EIGHTEEN

How clear is the computer’s instruction manual?

In computerese, you want “good documentation”—something that’s “user friendly.” If the manual doesn’t include it, then does a book from an outside publisher? Ideally, the book won’t focus just on the machine but also on the software that comes with it.

NINETEEN

How long has the manufacturer been in business? How prosperous is the company?

Buy from a new company if the technology looks far enough ahead of the pack. But be careful. You don’t want to buy from a computer maker likely to perish soon in the silicon jungle—not when you’ll need spare parts and technical assistance.

TWENTY

Are any users groups around—organizations of people owning the machine?

Ask your dealer or call the manufacturer for the name of the group near you. If there isn’t such a group, that’s a blow against the machine then and there. You still might buy it, but you’ll have less technical advice than you might otherwise get.

Another beauty of good user groups is that they work closely with dealers and manufacturers without compromising their own independence.

With fellow owners just a quick phone call away, you’ll be less at the mercy of know-nothing hucksters.

Obviously, too, before buying the machine, you’ll find that the user groups can be just the ticket for learning the quirks of the dealers and the machines. Ask discreet questions after the meetings. Which machines and dealers are winners? Which are gobblers?

Don’t forget, of course, that the owners would like to think of themselves as having spent their thousands of dollars the right way.

I try to remember that when a computer shopper at a Kaypro meeting asks me about my machine,I say I like it. Then I go out of my way to tick off the Kaypro’s flaws so I won’t have it on my conscience that I offered a bum steer.

TWENTY-ONE

What about maintenance?

You can solve many of your repair problems ahead of time by buying a computer easy to service.

That’s one reason I got the Kaypro rather than the Osborne.

You also want to find out how often the machines break down. Try—whether it’s a computer or a printer—to get an MTBF figure. That stands for “mean time between failures.”

_Failures?_ That sounds fatalistic. But face it. Neither people nor machines go on forever.

MTBF figures are like political polls and deodorant-commercial statistics—subject to gross manipulation. But they’re a start.

Also, consider if you want to pay for regular maintenance, which, in one year, might cost more than a tenth the price of the computer?

Or should you gamble without a maintenance contract?

Here’s a rule of thumb. Don’t gamble if (a) your system is large and complicated or (b) you’ll be up the creek without a paddle if the computer is out of service too long. The second condition is particularly true if one or more of these conditions prevail:

a. If you own just one machine.

b. If it’s an oddball machine—not a commodity like an IBM or Kaypro.

c. If your business grinds to a halt without it.

I gambled for a while and seemed to be losing. During the first year I spent perhaps $150 on replacing a printed circuit board in the Kaypro and $300 on printer repairs. Considering the Kaypro’s dramatic effect on my output, I won’t gripe too loudly. Nevertheless, I appreciated the need for a service contract for even a well-made computer in constant use. And within a few weeks it paid off. A disk drive failed, and the computer shop didn’t charge me a cent for several hundred dollars in repairs. The man worked while I waited at the public library down the street. The shop had promised, before I forked over my $250 yearly payment, that it would at least try to fix up my machine within twenty-four hours.

If possible, negotiate for financial penalties if repairmen don’t do their job—at your location or theirs—within a certain amount of time.

The contract might be with anyone from a national service organization to a good, honest man operating out of a garage who’s been in business a while and has convincing references—and substitutes for the times he’s on vacation. (See Chapter 8, “People,” for rules to consider in avoiding turkeys.) Count on spending 1–1½ percent per month of the hardware costs if you’re dealing with a national service organization.

Of course you _might_ be better off without a service contract. Just make sure you can limp along briefly without a computer, which, alas, I can’t.

If you do try to wing it without a maintenance contract, you’d better be prepared to know as soon as possible if you’ve bought a lemon. That’s not such a bad idea even _with_ a contract.

Theoretically, you should smell the juice within the first few months before the warranty expires. But that’s not how it always works—or doesn’t work. As a novice, you may not be putting the machine through all its paces. So why not invite a more advanced computer owner or a consultant—someone you trust—to tinker around with the computer in ways that you’ll eventually be doing? The sooner the “test drive,” the better. Your tester should do basics like copying disks, transferring electronic files from one disk to another, erasing files, and renaming files. See if there’s a program available to test the disk drives and related circuitry. Often those parts are the ones that fail first, since (a) the drives are mechanical as well as electronic and (b) they get some of the heaviest workouts during the computer’s operation. As soon as you get your machine, you might leave it running twenty-four hours a day for a week or two. Any component that will fail from heat buildup, for instance, will probably quit then—while your warranty is still fresh. Power consumption is typically no more than a light bulb’s.

Whether you have a maintenance contract or not, remember a basic rule:

It isn’t the shop’s diagnostic tests that count. It’s how your newly repaired machine will run _your_ programs.

After I took my computer into a shop for disk-drive work, the repairman said the drives just needed a little cleaning and were now testing fine. The computer, however, flubbed when I tried one of my regular programs.

Result: I forced the repairman to install the new disk drive that my machine needed.

Moral: always keep on hand some _good_ backup copies of important programs that you can take with you to the repair shop to make certain that the people there have done the job right.

■ ■ ■

Rothman’s Law of Computer Trouble-Shooting (Cribbed From an Old Rule for Fliers)

1. If your computer messes up, remember the very last thing you did, whether in hardware or software.

2. See if that isn’t the answer to your problem.

■ ■ ■

TWENTY-TWO

When will the new machine be available?

Be especially wary in buying recently introduced computers—even from giants like Xerox.

Maybe you should go ahead because they deliver more value; but don’t commit yourself even to a partial payment if you can’t pin the store down to a delivery date. Why not negotiate the right to withdraw your money any time you want before you formally accept the computer?

TWENTY-THREE

Will the store deliver your computer system and install it?

For a small portable, obviously, that matters less than it would with a major office system.

Remember, too, that you probably want your software all set to go. Even popular programs like WordStar may be too scary for you to _install_ yourself. The word “install” in this case refers to tinkering with software so it runs right on your machine for your use.

TWENTY-FOUR

If the store or other supplier is supplying the equipment over a period of time, can you break the contract into segments?

That way, if the store or systems house doesn’t perform in the early stages, you’ve retained some leverage.

TWENTY-FIVE

What references can the store provide before you purchase a major system?

Buying a computer isn’t that different from hiring a consultant or any other professional.

Since you probably can’t fully understand the product, you at least have a right to know the reputation of the people offering it.

In at least one case, in fact, a court ruled that the computer dealer in effect was functioning as a consultant and had more responsibilities to the buyer than he would have had if he had been selling a less complicated product. It’s an interesting ruling. And that’s it. Don’t count on it to protect you.

TWENTY-SIX

Will the store owner himself sign the contract? Remember, your trusty sales rep may be on his way out of town.

■ ■ ■

Rules for Buying a Used Computer

1. Know your prices. Study the want ads of the local papers. There’s even a _Computer Classified Bluebook_ that rates micros for value in various areas (such as dependability) and offers possible prices. It’s available from _Computer Classified_, P.O. Box 3395, Reno, Nevada 89505 ($30 a single copy). Micro prices can change faster than a guide can keep up with them, but the _Computer Classified Bluebook_ might be a good start if the local newspaper doesn’t carry many want ads for your particular machine. Obviously, too, you’ll want to ask around user groups and read the classified sections of their newsletters.

2. Pay attention to the machine’s physical condition. A banged-up case—or a chipped one—might suggest that the innards have been roughed around, too.

3. Find out how your pet programs run. If you don’t have any available that work on the machine you’re considering, see if you can borrow some from a friend and have him or her accompany you. Make sure your friend has backup copies in case the programs are damaged by a sloppy drive in machine you’re considering.

Remember that in the secondhand market the buyer normally doesn’t have much recourse if later he finds that the merchandise is defective.

4. As with a car, ask why the seller is selling.

5. Find out what generation of equipment it is. Does it include all the wrinkles of new models advertised.

6. Learn where you stand legally if you’re buying software with the used machine. Some companies may require you to register yourself as the new owner; software manuals or accompanying literature may have this information. If you’re on good terms with the software company, there’s more of a chance its people will answer questions. The company may require you to give the serial number of your disk before it will respond.

7. Call up commercial auctioneers and find out if they’re holding any auctions offering the equipment you’re interested in.

Don’t buy equipment at an auction unless you’ve been around the computer for a while or have a friend who can watch out for you. Very possibly you won’t get a chance to give a machine a good test. Don’t buy unless the price is low enough so you’ll still be okay even if you must spend 25 percent of the auction price on repairs.

8. Obviously you’ll want to consider a maintenance agreement with a local dealer or repair shop if you need the machine for your work. You may, of course, have to pay for an inspection.

BACKUP II ❑ A Few Grouchy Words on Printers

I sold my =daisy wheel=—a printer that prints like a high-priced electric typewriter—and replaced it with a plebeian =dot matrix machine=.

Why? Because all printers, especially my 1975-vintage daisy, are a series of lousy trade-offs.

And one of the trade-offs was about to be my solvency.

The old daisy wheel cost a mere $650 used—quite a bargain for a machine whose latest models go for several thousand dollars—and Anderson Jacobson didn’t charge for minor adjustments if I lugged in the bulky printer myself. AJ, however, kept after me to get a $450-a-year service contract.

Then, one day, a printed circuit board conked out, and the replacement board and some other work came to $300.

“You’ve got to be kidding,” I told the crew at Anderson Jacobson. “Three hundred dollars for a printer that cost me $675 originally?”

No, Anderson Jacobson wasn’t out to gyp me. Quite honestly, the people there had intended to make their money off me through the service contract; and that would have been fine for a company that needed a heavy-duty, industrial-quality printer to pound away, day after day, around the clock, without stopping. But for a lone free-lance writer? However fast I typed, I could never give them the amount of business for which its makers had designed it.

So like destitute parents searching for the right foster home for their children, I looked for better, more affluent surroundings for my printer.

I asked for, and got, $650 for the printer with a =tractor feed= thrown in for free—it lets you use big stacks of perforated computer paper without stuffing in new sheets when you reach the end of the page. The new owner, a Washington consultant, _understood_. He wasn’t just buying a printer; he was buying his right to an Anderson Jacobson service contract.

My AJ’s successor was the Microprism Model 480, a sleek, plastic-covered machine that took up less space on my tabletop than some typewriters.

In a dot-matrix printer like the 480, little pins hit the ribbon, making impressions on the paper. An “A” is one series of pins, a “B” another, and so on. The quality normally isn’t any match for the daisy wheel’s, even though the price may be much lower than a daisy going the same speed. “Prints like a daisy, costs like a matrix!” Integral Data Systems touted the Model 480. That was stretching matters.

The letters from my next printer, a Panasonic KX-P1092, could _almost_ pass for a typewriter’s. It sold discounted at a local store for $489, just a few dollars more than Anderson Jacobson wanted for its one-year maintenance contract.

Here’s what else I could have chosen—rightly or not:

1. Another daisy wheel machine. The daisy wheel is plastic or metal and looks vaguely like some flowers, with many strokes radiating from the center. The spokes contain letters and numbers, and your computer tells what spoke the printer should strike—which it does with a little hammer. Run a noisy daisy wheel at one in the morning in a thin-walled apartment with an early-rising neighbor on the other side and you may get a not-so-friendly visit from the police or zoning department.

2. A =laser printer=. Typically, it works a bit like some copying machines, with your computer controlling the printed image rather than a document you put in front of a mirror. This wasn’t the choice for me; laser printers at the time went for several thousand dollars up. By now, however, the price may be much lower. Political fund-raisers love the nice quality that lasers can add to slick letters saying how badly they need your money.

3. A =thermal-transfer printer=. This uses patterns of heat to arrange the images on special paper; it’s _quiet_. Normally, the paper can be expensive, and the printing quality is poor; so thermal printers were also out of the running for me. Later, however, IBM introduced its Quietwriter printer, which prints beautifully on ordinary paper.

4. An =ink-jet printer=. This kind literally squirts ink against the paper in patterns forming letters and numbers; and the noise level is low, maybe 50 decibels, compared to 65 or more that a daisy wheel might inflict. What a boon to apartment dwellers and people in already-noisy offices.

While I was shopping for the Anderson Jacobson’s replacement, I didn’t take ink jets very seriously because of the broken-up letters that came from them. A year later, however, I talked to Richard Sugden, a Wyoming M.D., the owner of a PT-88 ink-jet from Siemens, selling in the $900 range, who may have had a limited solution.

He used the 88 with a special printing program called Fancy Font and high-quality paper that soaked up the ink neatly.

The program slowed his printer down to a fraction of the usual 160 characters per second but greatly improved his print even if it still couldn’t pass for a daisy wheel’s. You can also team up Fancy Font with some dot-matrix machines, especially those from Epson. Then you can print in a number of sizes and styles, including “olde English.” Don’t overdo. “Fancy,” as its makers joke in a printing sample, “may either kill or cure.”

In printer shopping for myself, I used these criteria:

SPEED

Yes, actually I could have afforded a new daisy—one of those $450-$1,000 models.

The problem was that most crept along at less than 20 characters per second. That sounds fast, maybe 200 words a minute; it isn’t. You must redo an entire page if you want perfect typing but wish to make one change in material already printed; you can’t just white out the wrong word and stick in the correct one as you can with a typewriter. Often, after completing a supposedly final version, I see _many_ changes I should have made on-screen. Somehow my editing eyes are sharper with paper.

People less fallible than I can make do with 20 characters per second. They get everything printed right the first time.

Then again, if their printing volume is too high, a snaillike printer still will bog them down.

And if they’re using their computer system to store and print notes or records, a faster machine is a must. That’s especially true if you’re churning out nothing but long rows of numbers. If best impressions don’t count, you might consider a high-speed dot matrix capable of more than 150 characters per second—or even 200 or greater.

My Panasonic dot matrix was somewhat of a compromise, with a draft speed advertised at 180 characters per second and a near-letter-quality one of around 33 cps.

_WARNING_: Please note that advertised speeds may be one-third or more higher than the actual speeds. The advertised speeds may not consider factors such as the time it takes the printer to go from one line to another. This is particularly true the case of =unidirectional= printers, which print only from left to right rather than in both directions, as do =bidirectional= printers.

The only real way to judge a printer speed in your application is to try it with your own sample material.

PRINT QUALITY

Here’s the hierarchy of printer quality:

1. =Draft quality.= The letters are too dotty for anything but drafts and correspondence with enemies whose eyes you want to torture.

2. =Correspondence quality.= It’ll do for a letter to a forgiving friend or business associate.

3. =Near-letter quality.= You can get away with it for book manuscripts, especially if you already have a contract.

4. =Letter quality.= That’s typewriter quality.

A friend described my Microprism’s supposed “near-letter quality” as looking like “an upscale grocery store receipt.” It was a long way from a daisy wheel.

Still, Judith Axler Turner, a nationally syndicated computer columnist, says dot matrix might actually help her at times; she can print the letters larger than regular typewritten characters. Her manuscripts command more attention.

A Washington lawyer fared worse using a dot-matrix machine without near-letter quality. A judge threw out his brief.

We dot-matrix plebeians, before buying, should test the print quality on a number of people, especially colleagues or clients. Are they happy with the shapes, sizes, and quality of the characters? Do they feel that our dots blend smoothly into each other? Usually, the more pins a dot-matrix printer has, the better will be the printing. Many dot-matrix printers in late 1984 had a matrix of seven-by-nine wires. In 1984 Epson was selling the $1,500 LQ-1500 with twice that density and “letter-quality characters to rival fine office typewriters.” I looked one over. The typewriters were still winning.

Sales reps will bill the LQ-1500 and many other dot matrixes as being capable of both (a) lightning speeds with draft-print quality and (b) slower speeds with good quality. Is it “good” enough for you? If not, consider buying a speedy dot matrix or ink jet for routine work and a daisy wheel for the times you want the best impression. The combined cost may be lower than that of a super-duper dot matrix.

If you’re doing serious work with graphics, look for a printer capable of reproducing details as well as a good computer monitor does. Daisy wheels won’t suffice because of the tremendous number of strikes; doing one dot at a time is incredibly slow, and their preformed characters don’t include the variety of patterns that good graphics require. You really need an ink jet, dot matrix, or other alternative.

COST

With printer technology advancing so rapidly, I didn’t want to sink much into a machine—hence, the $489 Panasonic. Sometime in the 1980s I’ll forsake my cheapie dot matrix for a good ink-jet, thermal-transfer, or laser printer when the price is down.

When pondering costs, don’t just look at a printer’s price tag. What about ribbons? How many pages will they print? And how much do they sell for? My IDS ribbons listed for around $12 apiece, but luckily I could get around that by (1) buying at a discount place and (2) eventually purchasing a little machine called a MacInker, which, for less than a dime, let me reink a ribbon. It’s messy. Don’t inflict a MacInker on a Fortune 500 secretary, or _any_ secretary, but think about one, maybe, as a way of being frugal at home. The MacInker is available from Computer Friends, 6415 SW Canyon Court, Suite #10, Portland, Oregon 97221. The telephone number is 1-800/547-3303, or 503/297-2321. The gadget as of mid-1984 was selling for around $60 if you included ink and shipping charges.

PRINTING VOLUME

I wanted to be able to churn out a book manuscript in one weekend without overwhelming the printer.

Before you buy a printer, ask the manufacturer if it can handle not only your typical workload but also your peak one.

Cheaper printers may overheat—just when you most need them.

A DECENT REPAIR RECORD

A printer is an electromechanical device. That’s a fancy way of saying it may break down a lot.

An electromechanical device, after all, is partly mechanical—which makes it less reliable than the gizmos in your computer system that are purely electronic.

If you can afford backup machines, naturally the repair record won’t be as crucial, but no matter what, do compare statistics on the mean time between failures. Remember, they’re like EPA ratings for automobiles. They’re wrong, frequently, and may not apply to the printer _you_ end up with. But don’t shrug them off entirely.

QUIET (OR RELATIVE QUIET)

My daisy—with the little hammer pounding away—was too noisy for the late hours. Older dot matrixes also can be offenders; they can almost shriek with high-pitched sounds. Some of the newer ones may be better behaved. Sharing an office-apartment or working from an ordinary office, however, you might buy a sound-muffling box and wrestle with pulling paper in and out of it.

When good, cheap ink jets and laser printers hit the market, these noise hassles will end.

SPECIAL FEATURES

“Will it underline?” I asked. And would it offer =boldface=, the dark, heavy print that books often use for emphasis.

And what about other special features? How about =proportional spacing=, for instance, which prints the “M” wider than a “j”—making the type look more like a book’s. That could make the print more readable.

Another question is, “Does the printer offer =justification=?” It’s really a software issue. But we’ll group it here with the other special features.

Justification evens out the spacing of both the right and left margins, though that’s a mixed blessing. Justified margins look more impressive. But =ragged right= margins, the normal typewriter kind, guide the eye more easily and may be better for long reports as opposed to short letters. I did _not_ justify this manuscript. But justification is just the ticket for correspondence with the status conscious.

In the case of all these special features, keep remembering to ask:

1. Does the printer offer them no matter what computer or program you use?

2. If not, will your hardware and software let you use the features?

3. For free, will the store modify your computer system to make the features available to you?

4. Will your desired combinations of features work simultaneously? Unfortunately, with my software, anyway, the Microprism 480 couldn’t use boldface and proportional spacing at once.

OVERALL COMPATIBILITY WITH YOUR COMPUTER

1. Can you use a standard cable to connect the printer and the computer?

2. If not, can the store make one up for you? At what cost?

Remember, it isn’t enough for the cables to plug in. You also want the right wires going to the right pins and for the computer and printer to be on speaking terms electronically.

To connect up with a printer physically and electronically, a computer uses a =port=—nothing more than (a) a plug or socket and (b) the gizmos that let your machine exchange bits and bytes with the outside world.

“The outside world” may be a =modem=, which connects up with a phone, or it may be simply your printer.

Two common styles of ports are =serial= and =parallel=. Data passes through serial ports a bit at a time; through parallel ports, it passes eight bits or more at once.

Serial ports commonly use an industry standard, the RS-232, which is a kind of socket together with the related electronics. As with “IBM compatibility,” this “industry standard” often can be elusive. One brand’s RS-232 may differ from another’s.

The Kaypro has both a serial and parallel port, and with the Anderson Jacobson, I had to wrestle with plugs whenever I used the modem, since it and the Anderson Jacobson both required the serial port.

In between printing one of the last drafts of this manuscript today, I’m adding another criterion—whether a printer has a =buffer=.

A buffer in this case is just some memory, in the printer, that lets your computer pump a letter or report into the machine in a fairly short time. Then you can return to other computer work while the printer runs. You can of course buy a buffer if your machine lacks one and you’re sadistic enough to deprive your secretary of a good excuse for a coffee break. Wait. Come to think of it, your secretary herself might appreciate a buffer if she’s trying to keep a nine to five job nine to five.

You needn’t have buffering by way of your printer. Some programs, such as Word Perfect, even let you “schedule” several printing jobs from different documents on your disk while you’re still writing.

Big Blue’s Quiet One

Do you need a quiet printer that will turn out typewriter-like work but won’t cost as much as a laser-style machine?

Then you might consider the IBM Quietwriter printer or the inevitable clones that will follow. It uses a new kind of thermal-transfer process—heating the ink so it goes on the paper without the ribbon actually touching. The Quietwriter doesn’t need special paper. Its sound is a polite swish. And its print looks typewriter-sharp.

IBM introduced the Quietwriter at around $1,400—less than half of what the cheapest laser printers were selling for in late 1984 (not that they aren’t coming down in price too).

Granted, drawbacks exist The Quietwriter’s speed isn’t as fast as a laser printer’s—effectively a mere 25 characters per second if you use Pica-sized type.

Also, the Quietwriter’s ink doesn’t sink into the paper as with some typewriters or daisywheels; your work might lack the feel of a _traditionally_ typed document. And because the ink is erasable, you shouldn’t use a Quietwriter for legal papers. It won’t make carbons. Moreover, the technology is unproven—at least to me as I write this. Ask me again when the machine’s been out long enough for the lemon-owners to fire off blurred letters of complaint to _InfoWorld_.

Just the same, Quietwriter-style machines are well worth investigating. Hats off to Big Blue on this one.

■ ■ ■

BACKUP III ❑ The Lucky 13: What to Look for in Choosing Software

A friend warned me: Don’t water down your software advice with “In my opinion”-type phrases and other hedges.

“That’s how it seems to me, anyway,” he joked.

Well, Rick, I’m sorry. Just as a critic once called _Citizen Kane_ “a shallow masterpiece,” I’ll qualify my enthusiasm for WordStar. I’ll be a responsible zealot.

Anyway, I like WordStar enough to use it to help explain the Lucky 13—my general criteria for judging software.

ABSENCE OF BUGS

Programs are like people. “Mature” software is more reliable. It’s more like a tried-and-tested salesman or secretary, less risky, say, than a green employee hired off the street.

A complex creation like WordStar, with its thousands of lines of instructions for your computer, won’t ever be 100-percent glitchless. But it’s close. MicroPro, the company selling it, normally tests its programs well before unleashing them on the market, and WordStar has been around since the late 1970s, giving others the pleasure of suffering bugs before you have a chance. Why should you pay for a software maker’s education? Not that you should always buy “mature” programs. Sometimes a newer one looks so promising that you might want to gamble.

GENERAL EASE OF USE

WordStar’s easy for many people—not all but many—to learn and use. Arthur Clarke picked up the ABCs of WordStar in days. A public relations woman at MicroPro International says she was doing serious work with WordStar the first day she used it. I believe her. My friend Michael Canyes explained the basics to me on the phone; but my main training was just hanging around computer stores and trying out Osbornes, which included WordStar as part of the standard package.

WordStar exercise books exist, the computer version of typing ones, but for me they would have been a waste of time. I was too eager to get to work with my new software.

A millionaire swears by WordStar; he has four secretaries deftly running it on Kaypros. A fifteen-year-old I know—smart, though not a prodigy—does his homework on WordStar, and the son of MicroPro’s founder learned it at age ten.

Yes, I’ve heard WordStar horror stories. You’re not dim-witted if WordStar doesn’t come as easily to you as to me. Oddly, I found Select—ballyhooed as a beginner’s word processor—to be more of a puzzle. Oh, well. One person’s dream software may be another’s kludge.

Keep in mind, however, that you must often suffer trade-offs between easiness, speed, power, and versatility. Although WordStar _might_ not give you instant gratification, its speed and power may justify the struggle. Ditto for some of the best spreadsheets and other software categories. The big question is, How much word processing or spreadsheeting, or whatever, do you do? Not much? Then place ease of learning ahead of speed. Ideally, though, a program will give you both. MicroPro has tried especially hard to do this with WordStar 2000, an improvement over WordStar in learnability. Like nearly any powerful program, however, 2000 still takes practice to get up to full speed on.

_Whether you’re buying a word-processing program or an accounting one, look for software with logical commands._

WordStar, in this way, triumphs. Consider the famous SEXD diamond that you use with the Control key. S is the diamond’s leftmost key; it will move your cursor over one space in that direction. E is the uppermost key and indeed moves you up. X, the diamond’s lower point, takes you a space down. Rob Barnaby, in short, has done a superb job of letting me get from place to place on the screen.

You may disagree violently. Fine. Software is personal. You’re letting a stranger—the writer of the program you use—influence your working habits.

Ideally, however, the writer’s logic and yours will be the same, so that, in the end, the stranger becomes a friend. He might be thousands of miles away. He might even be dead. Or you might loathe him if you meet him in person rather than on your disk. But in running his program, you still get the feeling Holden Caulfield got in _Catcher in the Rye_: you want to call up the author after he’s done such a fine job. Holden was talking about novelists. I’m talking about programmers. Ideally, they’ll touch your brain the way Holden’s literary heroes touched his heart.

GOOD DOCUMENTATION

People say WordStar’s manual nowadays is better than the past ones, which _Personal Software_ likened to “the Russian-language version of _War and Peace_.” Don’t memorize even the improved manual, however. Home in on MicroPro’s simple list of WordStar commands, a sheet smaller than a restaurant menu with which I learned the basics.

My WordStar version also included a spiral-bound book with exercises similar to a typing guide, but I didn’t get lost in them. I was too eager to get on with my _real_ work with WordStar.

There’s one other resource nowadays—a tutorial disk, which, because it came only in an IBM-style version, I hadn’t tried as of this writing. Normally, however, I absorb new wisdom better the old-fashioned way: via bound paper.

More than twenty books on WordStar exist—maybe because of the old manuals’ failings—and one of the better guides is Arthur Naiman’s _Introduction to WordStar_. Published by Sybex Computer Books, Berkeley, California, it’s generally as intelligent and helpful as the program itself.[101]

Footnote 101:

Ironically, Naiman wrote _Introduction to WordStar_ with another program, WRITE, the creation of a friend of his, and WordStar itself is far from his favorite word processor. He compares it to a big Cadillac or camper loaded with too many features. My thinking is different; I _want_ to have many to choose from; I’ll gladly ignore the others.

Remember the basic criteria for evaluating manuals of any kind, factory supplied or not:

1. The general logic of the manual. The author should have written it from your viewpoint, not his—from the viewpoint of what you _do_ with the program, not how the programmer coded it. Ideally, you’ll find descriptions of related commands in the same chapter.

2. The quality of the index. I’ll charitably assume it’s there to begin with. It should list even the most obscure commands—telling on what pages you’ll find them.

3. Simplicity of vocabulary and sentence structure. A manual shouldn’t impress; it should _teach_.

USEFULNESS TO OLD PROS AND BEGINNERS ALIKE

WordStar adjusts to different levels of skill. You have some =menus= to guide you, to help you decide, say, whether you want to print or see material you’ve already written. But most of the time you won’t need menus during composition. Not after you’re experienced, anyway. Some rival word-processing programs have menus that bog everyone down, beginners and old pros. But not WordStar. It has four “Help” levels, including one that keeps messages constantly on the screen to guide you. But you can zap all this once you’re a WordStar pro.

WordStar is only as “friendly” to you as you want it to be. It isn’t like a puppy leaping up on you and licking your face at the wrong time.

SPEED

WordStar lets you do your job in a hurry. Well, basically. If you’re _just_ turning out short business letters, for instance, and don’t want to store them on your disk, try something else. WordStar makes you electronically save your words there before you can print anything. And that takes time. For swapping words around, however, for additions or deletions, few programs could surpass this one. Were I writing long sales pamphlets or annual reports, WordStar would be my choice.

Now, I’ll qualify my “speedy” verdict. WordStar will slow you down when your computer has to reach instructions that the program hasn’t already sent on to the RAM—the temporary memory. That means a time-consuming electronic trip to your floppy disk. Also, if you type in a certain amount of material, WordStar will automatically lock some of it on a disk if the RAM is running out of room. WordStar is a =disk-based= rather than a =RAM-based= word processor.

That has its virtues, however, since, by farming out the runover to a floppy, WordStar lets you work with longer files. Some RAM-based programs may limit each document to only 15 or 20 pages in many computers unless you electronically splice them together.

Altogether, I’d say that WordStar, evaluated as a disk-based, fully featured word processor, is fast. And new wrinkles like hard disks will make it run still faster, even without the speed improvements that very likely will come. MicroPro, in fact, recommends hard disks for users of WordStar 2000, even if it will run with two floppies. Very soon most office micros will contain hard disks.

POWER

WordStar is powerful. You can, for instance, type “@” instead of a long name used commonly in your work. Then, when you’re ready, you can plug the name in where the “@” appears. This =search-and-replace= feature is common to every advanced word-processing program; but WordStar implements it better than many rivals.

You can also use it with an accessory program, MailMerge, so you can type a list of names and addresses just once, then automatically plug them into the right spaces in a form letter. Only, it’s individually typed, so people needn’t know they’re getting a form letter.

Of course, “power” isn’t a virtue just in word processing. The best electronic filing cabinets, for instance, boast clever wrinkles to make it easier for you to enter new categories of information or to change individual records. Consider this story, which is true, about a reporter whom an editor was on the verge of firing. The severance pay was ready. The editor changed his mind at the last minute, however, and the final check stayed in his desk. Then, not long after, the paper’s auditor stormed into the city room. “Why didn’t you fire the son of a bitch?” he asked. “Now we’ll have to spend all this time straightening out the records.” Had the paper had a good, powerful electronic filing system, the nonfiring would have been a little less traumatic to the auditor.

FEWER CHANCES FOR BOTCH-UPS

WordStar limits the chances for careless errors in the first place.

While you’re working on a file, for instance, you can use the =Control-KJ= command to delete everything _but_ the document you’re in the middle of.

Granted, WordStar isn’t perfect. Arthur Clarke, for instance, complains mildly of the underlining procedure. If he turns on the underlining, he’ll occasionally forget to turn it off, meaning that, unwittingly, he’ll underline everything that follows. WordStar 2000 corrects this problem by showing you true underlines on the screen, not just symbols at the beginning and ends of the underlining.

In record-keeping programs, especially, the anti-botch-up features can be real lifesavers. One technique is to limit the range of numbers entered. An elementary school, for example, might guard against typing errors in new files showing pupils’ birth dates. The computer might then flash its skepticism if a clerk said a first grader was born more than six years ago.

THE JEWISH-UNCLE EFFECT

Without bogging you down, WordStar lets you reconsider some drastic actions. Suppose you’re about to erase an entire =file=; that is, a whole document that you’ve worked on: say, a letter or a sales report. If you press the control key and the letters “K” and “J,” WordStar won’t act immediately. Instead, it will ask, “Name of File to Delete?” You can even get out of most commands before they’re executed. It’s simple. Just hit the “Control” and “U” buttons, then the “Escape” one. WordStar, in short, is good for the hotheaded. You feel as if Seymour Rubinstein—the MicroPro founder—is watching over you like some kindly, protective Jewish uncle.

A good record-keeping program would react similarly if you were about to erase 8 million names. A payroll program might inquire more than once if you wanted to register the firing of five hundred people. A spreadsheet program could ask if you really wanted to wipe out dozens of numbers that you’d entered. A graphics package, ideally, would do likewise if you were about to erase an electronic equivalent of the Mona Lisa.

Some programs, in addition to saying you’re messing up, will offer you alternative courses of action. The older WordStar isn’t as advanced as some other programs in this respect. But normally the error messages are self-explanatory and the corrections obvious.

DAMAGE LIMITATION

WordStar limits the damage if you or your machine goofs in a big way.

It rarely sends you back to the operating system of your computer. What’s more frustrating than getting, say, an A> prompt—the computer equivalent of, “Buddy, you’re back at square one”? Then you’ll have to reenter your work.

WordStar 2000 corrects one feature missing from the original program. Plain old WordStar doesn’t let you delete a paragraph, then restore it without zapping other changes you made since you last saved your work on your disk. That is, there’s no =yank-back= feature to undo erasures or other recent modifications.

But even the older WordStar makes an electronic equivalent of a carbon copy, a backup file—meaning that you’re probably still in business if a glitch destroys the original. Uncle Seymour makes you think twice, literally, before you erase whole files.

The old saw of the computer trade, however, will always apply, no matter what the program:

“Garbage in, garbage out”—“GIGO.”

Berenice Hoffman, my literary agent, really rubbed that in. I’m the type whose letters and checks take a little time to adjust to a new year. “For your records, if you keep carbons,” Berenice replied to one note, “you might want to change the date to 1983—didn’t the computer tell you?” The best programs in the world can’t detect such mistakes.

But wait; I just remembered. The fancier computers have electronic clocks that potentially could warn you if the wrong date appeared when you were working with a correspondence format.

AFTER-THE-GOOF FEEDBACK

WordStar also provides another service—offering error messages telling you what _went_ wrong. It isn’t perfect. Sometimes you may see combinations of letters and numbers, meaningless to someone without a manual. But normally WordStar is helpful. Say you want to use two markers—one at the start and one at the end—to designate material to be moved to another part of the document. WordStar will tell you if you forget to type out either one.

Ideally, programs not only will offer you a diagnosis after the goof but also a solution. Although WordStar isn’t as advanced as some programs in this respect, it’s very adequate for the experienced user.

ABILITY TO CUSTOMIZE

I adapted my WordStar to the requirements of a writer. Editors normally don’t like hyphenated copy, so now WordStar’s “hyphen help,” which suggests possible hyphen breaks, is an optional feature instead of a normal one. No longer need I turn it off with special commands. WordStar provides a menu in the installation program that makes it easy for you to change normal =defaults=—the settings that your software will have before you tinker with it. The menu doesn’t cover every possibility. But you can vary margins and many other important details, and once you’re experienced, you can do a =patch=—a modification in the program—to change other things.

If you’re a novice buying from a full-service computer store, ask it to set up your WordStar. Better still, try to dope it out yourself so you make your own changes in the future. You might get guidance from a users’ group.

Likewise, you might tinker with a communications program to make it work better with the computers you plan to use and talk to. Or you might set up a record-keeping program to check automatically the accuracy of information fed into it.

ACCESSORY PROGRAMS

WordStar will work with a variety of accessory programs intended especially for it—everything ranging from electronic thesauruses to spelling checkers, word counters, footnoters, and a communications program.

Some word processors, accounting packages, other software, include all the functions you’d need. Others require you to buy the accessory programs. That’s not always bad. Why bother to pay for a dictionary if you’re a perfect speller? Just make sure—before you buy—that the original software either includes good accessory programs or will work with them.

Some outside companies’ accessory programs, by the way, may be superior to those from the main software’s manufacturer.

SUPPORT FROM THE MANUFACTURER

There is one plus that I wish I could have included in my praise of WordStar—good support from the manufacturer. Don’t count on it. In the area of guidance and troubleshooting from the manufacturer, WordStar on occasion hasn’t even been adequate.

Calling as a prospective customer, I couldn’t find out if WordStar in a Xerox 820 format would run smoothly on my Kaypro. The company took down my message, then mailed me literature that didn’t answer my question.

A California man phoned MicroPro with a problem involving DataStar, a sister program of WordStar that eases record keeping. “We do not have time to correct the programming that results in this quirk,” he heard. He complained to _InfoWorld_ that MicroPro “has some really elegant program tools but no inkling as to the meaning of customer support.” Likewise, the head of a MicroPro users group in New York told the magazine that “fully half of the people who called me to join immediately presented me with a problem they were having.”

For a while—I don’t know what it’ll be like when you’re reading this book—MicroPro wasn’t even replying to most customers’ questions on the phone; this supposedly was the dealers’ job. And while Rubinstein’s company indeed sells a Mercedes of a program, some computer stores aren’t up to fixing the windshield wipers.

Ideally, software manufacturers like MicroPro will not only offer technical support but also 800 numbers so you won’t be on hold for twenty minutes, racking up a formidable long-distance bill.

BACKUP IV ❑ On the Evolution of Software (And a “Perfecter and Perfecter” Program)

Mary Matthews, a gifted writer-editor in Chevy Chase, Maryland, favors a WordStar rival called Perfect Writer.

“What a conceited program,” I say.

“WordStar’s a dinosaur,” she shoots back.

In late 1984 we both tried new versions of our pet software (actually WordStar 2000 is more of a successor), and while defending them, we harbor reservations.

First the basics. I myself prefer a program like WordStar Version 3.3, which is in the “get-what-you-see” tradition and shows your copy on screen almost exactly as it will be printed. But Mary makes a good argument for a rival with a different philosophy. WordStar 2000 in fact helps her case. It now has many of the features that her dear Perfect Writer came out with first, including split screens. Interestingly, however, the new Perfect is more useful to the “get-what-you-see” crowd than is the older version, while WordStar 2000 is _less_ get what you see in an important way than 3.3 is. At least that’s true of the WordStar 2000 previewed to dealers. During a demo, anyhow, a MicroPro employee couldn’t coax 2000 into displaying double-spacing conveniently on screen even though we could have double-spaced on paper.

Where does the increasing resemblance between Perfect Writer and the WordStar family fit in the cosmic scheme? I’ll recklessly generalize:

The word processors of the world are becoming like refrigerators; all the deluxe models will have the equivalents of automatic defrosters and ice makers and butter warmers and lettuce crispers. More of the new wrinkles will be marginal. And the surviving companies will be the ones that can explain and exploit the differences and support their customers the best.

Not everyone likes butter warmers. As noted before, WordStar 2000 isn’t an unalloyed improvement for me, and the “perfecter” Perfect in some ways disappoints Mary.

The older WordStar lets you move to the left of a line with the combination of the Control key and the letters Q and S or =Control-QS=. A touch typist could do this almost instantly. WordStar 2000, on the other hand, uses =Control-CL=. =CL= stands for “cursor left,” =CR= for “cursor right,” and mnemonic commands like those are indeed easier to keep in your head, especially if you use a program only occasionally. On the other hand, the new strokes are harder for a touch typist—this one, anyway. Likewise, Mary wishes that Perfect Writer’s new commands were a bit more logical, especially to old Perfect Writer hands.

Concluding, Mary says Perfect Writer users with 64K machines shouldn’t junk them to buy more powerful computers just to run the new version. My thinking is basically the same about WordStar 2000 versus WordStar 3.3. The older program isn’t as good as 2000 in some cases; for instance, when you could use built-in memo format to make temporary employees more productive. But 3.3 is still terrific for people _without such needs_, and I’ll think long and hard before I myself change.

Mary’s impressions and mine are typical of many veteran users of software who can’t stomach features added for novices. She’s 100 percent right except when we disagree. As “host,” I won’t rebut her in the places below where we do.

Here’s what she sent over the phone via her Kaypro II:

Somehow, I’m not sure how, I’ve gotten to be enough of an authority on Perfect Writer—the “old” Perfect Writer, that is, the one released in June 1983—that strangers call me up and say that a computer salesman somewhere told them I was the Sibyl who could answer their questions with a local instead of a long-distance phone call. Luckily, the questions usually run in the “How the heck do you do X?” vein, or I might have to reveal that I’m only a good-hearted writer.

Now the Perfect Writer people have released a brand-new version of their already powerful program, and I think I’m in trouble. The new, revised version of Perfect incorporates some radical changes—sweeping enough to demand 128K of RAM (and IBM PC DOS) to operate. (Actually, after claiming that the new Perfect can edit documents of up to 100 pages, the manual states that “with 64K of RAM you will be able to edit documents about 5 pages long,” so I assume that the new Perfect takes up about 56K of RAM—not being familiar with the PC’s way of juggling numbers, I can’t tell exactly.) I’m in trouble because I won’t be the reigning Sibyl anymore unless I can figure out how to buy a PC-compatible computer with a decent keyboard (most PC keyboards are horrid) and still do things like pay bills and buy the occasional loaf of bread and jug of wine.

The most radical of the changes is that the new Perfect Writer now uses what it calls “pop-up command menus” during editing. When you hit the Escape key, a small (about one-twelfth of the screen) “top menu” will superimpose itself over your text, as close to your cursor as possible, three characters away to the left or right. It lists your choices for subsidiary menus, which eventually lead you to the command you want.

Nearly every command has been changed, so that those of us who are used to the old Perfect Writer must learn the editing commands all over again. The new manual (haters of the old one will be glad to learn that the index is now at the back where it belongs and those frustrating Roman numerals are gone) explains with a straight face that the pop-up menus exist so that you “don’t have to memorize command sequences.” Of course, if you plan to use Perfect Writer more than once a year or so, you’re going to memorize the commands, anyway; and so, as the manual airily says, the Control key does everything the Escape key does, identically; the only difference is that you “bypass” the top menu—because, it says, you aren’t always going to want to see it. Mind you, if you use the Control key, you’ll see every menu but the top menu, anyway.

Is this enough reason to change all the commands but one—to bypass _one_ menu?

To me, this is not an improvement over the old Perfect Writer—not unless you actually _like_ added keystrokes. All the old two- and three-keystroke commands are now three-keystroke commands at least, and often four or five. This is progress? The new Perfect Writer has indeed taken pity on us and assigned to the PC’s function keys twenty frequently used commands, so that if, for example, you don’t feel like keystroking =Escape-DS-Carriage-Return= to save your document and continue working on it (=Control-X-Control-S= in the old PW), you can keystroke =SHIFT-Function Key 9-Carriage Return=. Whoopee.

Let us not carp too much about what strikes me as suspiciously similar to kludge, since the new Perfect Writer is as fast or faster than the old Perfect Writer. We’re probably only talking about a few microseconds, mind you, but it still seems to me that the execution of Perfect’s new commands is usually close to instantaneous. This is a thing to marvel at when you compare Perfect Writer to WordStar 3.3, where unless you have a specially speeded-up version with specially reassigned command keys and fingers with a lightning-fast touch, it takes forever to execute certain commands (well, ten or twenty seconds) and perceptible time (say, one or two seconds) even if you do have the speed. But I still say the 50, 100, or 200 percent additional keystrokes are a pain in the you know where. The program may be faster, but the human being is now 50, 100, or 200 percent slower.

One improvement in particular is one to run through the streets singing about: Perfect Formatter has been incorporated into Perfect Printer in the main menu (inexplicably renamed “PSI”), and the two of them together are approximately a million times faster than they used to be. Thank you, Perfect Writer!

For a couple of years now, I have been using Perfect for the long, complicated projects, like books, that demand powerful editing capabilities and Perfect’s special strengths—such as split-screen editing, automatic footnoting, automatic construction of a table of contents, etc. For shorter things, like personal letters, I’ve been using WordStar, for its what-you-see-is-what-you-get screen. The main failing of the old Perfect was whether or not you were using the document design capabilities, you had very little idea of what the final product was going to look like. (The main failing of WordStar, which as far as I’m concerned has been a dinosaur for several years now, is that it can’t do half of what Perfect can—and it does it slowly, too.)

Shout “hallelujah,” brothers and sisters! The new MS-DOS PW allows you to choose between using its old “@@ commands” and having what-you-see-is-what-you-get. Or you can mix the two of them (not that I know why anyone would want to, since with the PC I’m using, you can’t tell when a word’s been underlined).

You can now get on-screen justification if you want it; and if you want to underline a sentence, you don’t have to worry about your on-screen justification being thrown off 4 or 5 characters—you just position the cursor in front of the material you want to underline, go to the end of it, and tell the machine to underline it. The exact command sequence for underlining a sentence is =Escape-T-B= (begin marking), =Escape-F-S= (go to the end of the sentence), =Escape-A-M-U= (underline the marked area). This looks like a lot of work, especially compared with the old PW’s @@ux{}, until you stop and consider what the same thing would be in WordStar. Suppose it’s a ten-word sentence you want to underline: you’d go to the start of the sentence and keystroke something like this: =Control-P-S=, =Control-F=, =Control-F=, =Control-F=, =Control-F=, =Control-F=, =Control-F=, =Backspace=, =Backspace=, =Control-P-S=.

I’ll break discipline and object to Mary’s description of the WordStar underlining procedure. You could underline a sentence just by starting with one =Control-P-S= and ending it with another. What’s the big deal, Mary? Your described procedure would apply only to material that you underlined _after_ you wrote it. All those =Control-F=s do is make the cursor jump a word ahead. _Grrr!_ Then again, maybe I’m simply a more decisive underliner. I _know_ what I want! If nothing else, this little disagreement shows how work habits influence choices in word processors.

Not only does the new Perfect Writer have the old Perfect’s strengths—split-screen editing of up to seven documents at a time, a zillion powerful editing commands, still another zillion powerful document structuring options—but it’s added a few more just for fun. For example:

◾ The old Perfect allowed you to delete from wherever the cursor is to the end of whatever sentence you’re in; the new one lets you do that, of course, and also lets you cut to the end of whatever paragraph you’re in—or an entire paragraph, if you’re at its beginning.

◾ Now you can delete not only the next word ahead of your cursor but also the word behind it—a small thing but amazingly handy.

◾ You don’t have to delete text before you copy it. (However, the process is more complicated than it used to be.)

◾ You can flush right material on screen—useful for the what-you-see-is-what-you-get feature.

◾ You can more or less paginate on screen—although this instruction is only good for the what-you-see-etc. editing; it’s useless for the document-design mode (@@ commands).

◾ You can use the “Search” function to search not only the document you’re working in now but any and all other document files on your diskette. This strikes me as amazingly handy for editing multiple documents when you can’t remember what the name of the other document is or where the reference is you’re thinking of. For example, suppose you’re writing to Joyce Davenport and you want to add a paragraph from a letter you wrote to James T. Kirk but you can’t remember more than that it was about artichokes. You would invoke “search document”; the prompter then asks you what you’re searching for, and you say, “Artichokes.” Pretty soon you have a list of the documents the word “artichokes” appears in, and you can then call up the one you want for multiple-document editing.

◾ Similar to this is something new the main menu offers: you can compare two files, and Perfect Writer will show you their differences—useful for comparing edited and unedited versions of a report.

◾ If you have a color monitor, you can “paint” the letters and backgrounds of the up-to-seven files you’re working on different colors (eight background and sixteen letter colors), so as to tell them apart. For me, this falls into the “who cares?” category, but some may like it; and I have to admit, you can get some very pretty (though not always easy on the eye) combinations.

◾ Perfect Writer now has the printing option “End at page X.” Shout hallelujah, brothers and sisters!—the new Perfect at long last has caught up with the dinosaurs like WordStar.

◾ Some of our old favorite document-design commands have been renamed, usually for the better. And we have one absolutely dandy new command: =@@need=. =@@need= makes sure that there’s enough room left on the page for a chart or similar material. If you’ve just written a 15-line poem that can’t be broken between pages, immediately after the last line of your poem, type in =@@need{15 lines}=; if there isn’t going to be enough room on the page, your poem will automatically be “forced” to the following page. Hot diggety!

All is not completely rosy in Perfect land. The new Perfect has lost some of the old Perfect’s advantages. For example, the old Perfect had an automatic feature that told you where in your document you were—35 percent of the way through, or whatever. Moreover, the old Perfect had a command that let you know how long the document was in terms of both number of lines and number of characters, and where your cursor was in all this. I’ve searched the new Perfect manual and haven’t been able to find any equivalent new command. The closest I’ve been able to come is a command that lets you know only how many characters there are in the file, not where you are, or anything else; and the command isn’t listed in the index, nor is there any equivalent command that I can find. Great work, guys. This is what I call a major frustration. It’s maybe bad programming, and it’s certainly bad documentation.

The new manual is slightly better organized than the old one, but that’s not saying a lot. I’ve rarely been able to divine the new name for the old command in the new manual, and when I’ve found it, it’s usually been by accident. It would have been an enormous service if the Perfect people had put in some sort of comparison chart for us old-Perfect old pros.

Like the old Perfect, the new Perfect is very cavalier about the number of spaces it leaves after a period or colon; sometimes it’s the two you typed in, and sometimes it magically gets transformed into one. The new Perfect goes the old Perfect three better and is randomly cavalier about the number of spaces it leaves behind a period, colon, quotation mark, question mark, and parenthesis—not only deleting spaces where you do want them but also inserting them where you don’t want them. Instead of mildly annoying, this quirk is now big-league annoying. May whoever thought it up and liked it so much he/she expanded it spend eternity brushing gnats out of his/her face!

You still can’t tell the Search feature to search for something X number of times. For example, if three times you use the word “pishtosh” and want to change it to “nuts,” you can’t tell the search-and-replace feature to “do this three times”—as with the old Perfect, you have to do it twice with the “Ask me” and then “Cancel” the third time and do it by hand, or do it three times and then have Perfect search wastefully through the rest of the document for something you know is not there.

The new Perfect’s printing menu is better than the one the old Perfect came with but not nearly as good as the menu that David Hite developed in 1983 for the old Perfect Writer. The only improvements are the “compare” feature mentioned earlier and the ability to step outside Perfect for a while into Perfect Calc, Perfect Filer, or a telecommunications program—nothing I’d write home about.

We’ve lost the “one word” command—a serious blow for those of us who used it to get around Perfect Writer’s cavalier treatment of periods and colons. This command caused the characters placed within it to be considered one word, so that Perfect Filer wouldn’t split certain words between lines.

Perfect Speller, which is now on the same diskette with Perfect Writer, Perfect Formatter, and Perfect Printer, is much faster than it used to be. Alas, it is just as stupid. Unlike better spelling checkers, Perfect Speller works on the system of prefixes, suffixes, and roots. In other words, if the word “check” is an acceptable root, then “checker” and “recheck” are acceptable. So are “checkment” and “checkation.” And like the old Perfect Speller, the new Perfect Speller doesn’t recognize its own vocabulary—it queried words like “blankline” and “ux,” which are Perfect Writer commands and ought rightly to be ignored. My recommendation is to get The WORD Plus, which can be renamed to be accessed as if it were Perfect Speller and which is far superior.

An interesting—I don’t say terrific—addition to the Perfect family is Perfect Thesaurus. You substitute the Perfect Thesaurus diskette for your document diskette in drive B, position the cursor on the word you want to look up, type =Escape-S-T=, and Perfect Thesaurus checks its dictionary. If the word is there, you may substitute any of the synonyms for your original word, type in your own replacement, or say “forget it” and go on to look for another synonym. The hype says that Perfect Thesaurus “holds nearly 50,000 words (entries plus synonyms).”

The parenthetical remark is the key one to home in on. I asked Perfect Thesaurus to look up “transform,” and it did; one of the synonyms it offered was “metamorphose.” When I asked it to look up “metamorphose,” it told me, “Word not found.” (Perfect Thesaurus has also never heard of “fanatic,” “asinine,” “pop,” “airy,” “bypass,” “instantaneous,” or “shrug,” among about fifteen others of the forty-five words I tried.) I’d estimate that the average number of synonyms offered for each word is between five and ten—if we compromise and say seven, that’s only 6,000 or so words that Perfect Thesaurus can recognize. Moreover, Perfect Thesaurus can only look up fifteen words before it starts yelling, “No more marks,” and refuses to cooperate any further.

In other words, Perfect Thesaurus is a nice toy, but I question its usefulness for serious writers. Having a copy of _The Synonym Finder_ by your desk offers you about a million words that you can recognize, and is about as fast to use.

The new Perfect Writer itself still has many of the annoyances of the old Perfect Writer:

◾ The automatic swapping feature still cuts in at inopportune moments and makes you wait before you can continue typing or execute a command. It’s now only one second or so instead of five seconds or so, but it’s still annoying.

◾ There is still no automatic indicator showing where you are in your document or how long it is, a feature of every other word-processing program known to humankind.

◾ You still can’t customize the document-design commands (although it’s usually possible to get the look you want if you’ve used Perfect Writer for many years and know some tricks they don’t mention in either the old or the new manuals)—if you want some _real_ customization, tough noogies.

◾ You can still start printing by referencing page and section numbers, but if you want to start with footnote 125, you’re in for a major pain.

The new Perfect is more powerful than the old one, but not by as much as its creators fondly think. After spending two days evaluating the new Perfect for this article, I went home and spent several happy hours with the old Perfect. Oh, I admit I thought now and then, I wish I could cut to the end of the paragraph, or, I wish I could delete the word behind the cursor instead of only the word in front of it—and the old Perfect Writer is indeed slower than the new one (by maybe 5 percent?)—but on the whole I found I preferred two keystrokes to five and three keystrokes to six.

Many of the improvements of the new Perfect Writer fall into the category of kludge: lots of flashing lights and ringing bells and chrome and racing stripes and wow, look at that dashboard! Perfect Writer is still the best word-processing program I’ve ever run across, but for those of you who don’t want to give up your 64K non-IBM PCs, don’t worry: you’re not missing enough to make spending all that money worthwhile.

BACKUP V ❑ “3-D” Versus Mail-Order Software—and How to Shop

How to pick the right disk?

People like Dusty Park know how to improve the odds. Park was at the top of his class at a computer school, worked as a customer support man at MicroPro, then joined a mail-order house called 800 Software in a similar job.[102] I phoned him there when my mail-order copy of WordStar didn’t work on my machine. It was a common industry problem, this incompatibility. _Theoretically_—which doesn’t mean that much—my Kaypro could read disks in the electronic format of the Xerox 820. Yet my machine in this respect seemed functionally illiterate.

Footnote 102:

Since writing this section, I’ve learned that Park has left 800 Software for another company.

Park told me on the phone that many other Kaypro owners were suffering similar difficulties, that if need be he’d send me another disk set up for my computer. Step by step he went over the WordStar installation procedure with me.

As it happened, I succeeded without him—by having WordStar electronically piped over to the Kaypro from another machine when my micro wouldn’t reach the disk. Park had been ready with patience and empathy. I took it for granted that he would suggest buying by mail in many instances; but what advice, based on his MicroPro days and other experiences, did he offer about buying “3-D,” as he called it—buying in the flesh from a store, in other words?

“The best place to go if you’re buying software retail,” he said, “is to someone who’s doing a training seminar in the same program you’re buying. That way you’ve got it aced, because the person who’s doing the class is going to know the program well.

“You don’t have to take the class, but at least you know that there’s somebody there who could be asked a question.”

Not that a dealer has to know _every_ wrinkle of a program to teach it. But you’ve still got a head start if you do choose a store with classes.

Just be sure that the instructor isn’t a circuit rider, so to speak—that he isn’t flying out of town to another store as soon as he completes a series of classes. You want him around to answer your questions later on.

This principle would especially hold true when buying software from franchised stores. Some stores may be excellent. Others, however, as Park pointed out, “may be a bunch of small businessmen who used to sell shoes and bought into a franchise at an exorbitant price.”

Offering, obviously, a mail-order perspective, Park said that the computer-store managers he knew didn’t always know their software lines because there were so many products to keep track of. “It takes too much time,” he said. “There’s too many things to do in a 3-D store to handle that. Mostly you’re showing people hardware.”

His opinions rang true. Trying out WordStar with Osbornes, I’d run across sales reps who couldn’t show me how to make printouts of the letters on the tiny black-and-white screen. Some sales reps were “terminally” dumb. Others were bright and helpful but too busy selling too many machines to pick up the basics of WordStar and other heavy-duty programs. WordStar wasn’t _that_ hard to master, however. I wondered how stores could counsel customers if they couldn’t even train sales reps.

I asked Park about mail-order software.

croPro,” he said, “I told people, ‘Don’t buy by mail. The dealers are the ones who can answer your questions. You have a real, live, 3-D person.’” MicroPro had instructed Park and five colleagues to try to duck the time-consuming questions from businessmen and others using computers and to refer them back to their dealers. And yet Park and the others had actually ended up spending half their time responding to the pleas of “end users.” And many were the customers of mail-order houses.

But now, Park said, some mail-order people were competing not only with low prices but also with technical support; 800 Software had even hired a software guru from the University of California at Davis to evaluate programs it was going to sell and support. I myself had paid $250 for WordStar, or about half the $495 list price; however, after talking to Park, I felt I was in better hands than I would have been at the typical computer stores I’d visited.

I got everything I paid for; 800 didn’t pull any cheap tricks like sending the software without a manual, which, in fact, some mail-order houses may do. This isn’t an endorsement of 800 Software. It shows, though, that at times you can successfully bypass the wretched support and high prices that many stores inflict on software shoppers.

“Save by ordering some software by mail,” advises _CPA Micro Report_, “but only if the package is easy to install and easy to use. If you’ll need training before you can use it or if the package must be configured for a hard disk, buy through your local dealer. Word processors and spreadsheets are examples of software you can safely buy through the mail. General accounting, client write-up systems and communications software should be purchased through a dealer.”

It’s good advice, basically. Park says few people call him about spreadsheets, that they’re easier to unravel than many programs. So what’s the most trouble? Data bases, sometimes. “But word processors definitely take the cake.

“You’ve got to deal a lot with special features on printers, like boldfacing and underlining and whether the software will let them work right,” Park says. He suggests the obvious—that before buying new software, you find out how it will run with your printer and computer. Of course, as stated earlier, you’ll ideally select your hardware _after_ you’ve chosen your general range of software. Park says most people don’t fully “realize the implications” of the software they’re ordering “because they haven’t thought of it yet.” There’s the old problem, of course. How do you know you’ll like the software until you’ve tried it at leisure? And then you normally can’t get your money back. Before you order by mail, give serious thought to asking someone locally for a “3-D” demonstration.

A very leisurely tryout, in fact, is a good idea no matter how you’re buying, mail or “3-D,” and ideally you’ll have someone with you—a clerk, a secretary, anyone who’ll actually be using the system.

You might even want to bring along your accountant or somebody else working with the information that comes out of your computer system. At the very least, show him the software manual before you buy the program. Don’t take the software seller’s word that the software will keep the IRS or the SEC happy. Instead, trust the accountant or lawyer you use in your business. If he’s uncomfortable with computers, ask him to recommend someone in his profession whom he could work with. You don’t have to fire him. Just get him the backup he’ll need.

A computerwise accountant, for instance, can tell you if a general ledger package has a good =audit trail=—a way to keep track of what was done on the computer system to make the records come out the way they