We held meetings on July 16, and on August 20, both were at the Vestal Library, and started at 7pm. Attendance was 16 and 17 respectively.
-Dues were collected at the July meet. Charlie Koeth took over the magazine library from Ed Tribe. Good luck in the upcoming school year Ed!
-Gary Ennis, our vice president, started the meeting with a demo of Vufile. Handing out 3 x 5 cards, and having volunteers sort and select data, he compared the old card file system to VuFile. The Vufile is available on both the 1000 and 2068 computers. While Vufile has been around since 1982-3, Gary felt that the power and use of the program had never been truly appreciated. With just two sorts-select and order, the user has the ability to pick out records by selecting data fields, and with order can arrange them alpha-numerically. The speed of the operation was appreciated by the card handlers when trying to sort alphabetically. Gary promised to continue the demo in August if there were no questions. There wasn’t, and in August he did. At the July demo, he used MY computer and MY 2040 printer to show the various ways to print out different bits of data. Thanks to Stan’s worrying, the printer paper wasn’t used up.
-The August meet was quite busy, in fact demos ran from 7pm to nearly 10pm. A video tape made by the Milwaukee User Group of the Cincinnati Computerfest was shown on the 5′ screen while the meet went on. Anyone interested in borrowing the VHS tape, contact Paul Hill.
-Gary had his VuFile demo back, Dave Schoenwetter had a EPROM burner to show, I had TIMACHINE to demo, and Wes had his light pen to demostrate.
-Wes built a light pen that plugged in to the joystick port. He had written enough software to demo how it could draw a vertical line on the screen.
-Gary went into Vufile, this time on HIS computer with a SINCLAIR microdrive and composite color monitor. Speed and color-Wow! Gary talked about designing the overlay or format for setting up a file system. How to design with mailing labels in mind. He has had much expirience in using VuFile both in hobby and business to generate lists and labels.
-Dave cranked up a 1000 with several boards hanging off it, and it was up and running, as quick as plugging it in. The whole burner program is in EPROM. He can do up to 8K on a chip. He set it up to read the EPROM before, after. Not quite understanding what he has, I let him describe in another news article. The possible development of boards with several chips on, may give the user access to 2 ROMs, 8 or so programs all menu selected when the 2068 is turned!
I had a couple programs, one in BASIC and the same in compiled machine code. Both were graphic printouts of large letters spelling out the club’s name. The compiled program was 3 to 4 times faster than the BASIC. Then I loaded in TIMACHINE, and compiled FRACTORALS. The actual compiling once I remembered the REM statement took about 15 seconds, the FRACTORALS were generated in 5 minutes instead of 1/2 hour! TIMACHINE data in the news and views section page 1.