The Silicon Jungle by David H. Rothman
2. If not, can the store make one up for you? At what cost?
1540 words | Chapter 177
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:
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