Willamette Apple Connection Vol1No7 Aug87

=" : : August 1987 CONNECTION AUGUST MEETING INFORMATION The meeting is scheduled for August 20th, 1987, with a starting time of 7:00 p.m.. The meeting will be held on the Chemeketa Community College campus, in Building 2, Room 112. We will have a question and answer session; so, bring your solutions, problems and programs to the meeting. We hope we can help one another. CORPORATE BUSINESS September will be the starting of our busy time of the year. We have had the summer to relax, vacation and forget about the workings of the user group. Well that is coming to an end, as next month we will be nominating people for the elected positions within the corporation. You can nominate someone at the September 17th meeting or the nomination may be submitted and ostmarked, throu the U.S. Mail, by eptember 30th, 1987. If you mail the nomination, send it to: Harry Haley, Secretary _ Willamette fpple Connection, Inc. P.O. Box 725 Salem, OR 97303-0053 We will let the members see the membership roster at the August regular meeting, so you may refresh your memory of the current members of the user group. We will also need three volunteers to serve as “Election Tellers" the first week in November. These voulnteers will have to be members which are not on the ballot. __ To be eligible to VOTE or hold office, a person MUST be in “good standing", which means having your dues paid as of September 2nd. WAC Journal Vol. 1 / No.7 A Monthly Publication of the Willamette Apple Connection, Inc. An Apple If & Compatible User Education Group P.O. Box 7252 . Salem, OR 97303-0053 . (503) 588-0811 FCC to Effect Telecommunications In a Notice of Proposed Rule Making released July 17, 1987, the Federal Communications Commission recommended that companies using local telephone exchanges to provide interstate access to “enhanced services" be assessed an access charge. These “enhanced service viders" include companies such as CompuServe, Enie and all other services that provide computer-based communications, information retrieval and network services. Such companies would be charged as much as $5 an hour each time one of their customers used a local telephone exchange to access an interstate data communications network, The new rate structure would take effect January 41,1988. The FCC had “exempted” enhanced service providers from this charge because of concerns hat an access fee would increase operating costs too sharply and threaten their economic viability. Now, according to the FCC proposal, that “exemption” is no longer appropria’ e -- these pomparies must pay more of the cost of providing local telephone exchange services. . The deadline for filing comments on this is September 24, {987. Send copies of comments: to your Congressional Representative Senator Danie] Inouye Chairman, Senate Communications _ SH-227 Hart Buildin Washington, DC 20515 Congressman Ed Markey Chairman, House Subcommittee mas B-331 Rayburn Building Washington, DC 20515 Also send individual letters to: Mr. Dennis Patrick, Chairman; James H. Quello, Commissioner; Patricia Diaz Dennis, Commissioner; and Mimi Dawson, Commissioner Subcommittee on Telecommunications Federal Communications Commission 1919 M Street, N.W. Washington, DC 20554 WILLAMETTE APPLE CONNECTION, Inc. .0. Box 7252 Salem, Oregon 97303-0053 _ President and Editor of the Journal Lawrence E. Tucker (503) 585-0814 Vice President Darwin Wuerch (303) 364-4194 Secretary Harry Hale (503) 371-3197 Treasurer and Telecommunications System Operator eal Layton (503) 370-9321 Salem Public Library Bulletin Board (503) 588-6130 Head Librarian John Moore (503) 838-4966 MEETINGS The Regular Membership Meeting is held on the third hursday of the month, with a start time of 7:00 p.m. The meeting is held on the Chemeketa Community College campus, in Building 2, Room 112. The general public is invited to attend. WAC JOURNAL The journal is published je journa monthly. | Authors should submit their copy via MODEM to the Salem lic Library BBS (Apple SIG), or mail a diskette with the article written in ASCII text file form, Apple works or Apple writer iles by the 7th of the month. Hard copy should be mailed by the last day of the month preceding the publishing month. DISCLAIMER The Willamette Apple Connection, Inc. discourages the unlawful duplication of copyrighted sottware and other materials; and encourages prompt payment for “shareware" which members Keep and use. Persons who do not adhere to these guidelines bear sole responsibility for their actions. Desk Accessories for the Apple Ilgs by Bill Harkins, Southern Maine Apple Users Group Those lucky ones out there that have an Apple IIgs to explore have a whole new world open to them in desk accessories. viously limited primarily to Macintosh users, desk accessories are now available in a variety of flavors to Ilgs users. However, it can be confusing because of the bewildering array of "families" or types of desk accessories available. We hope to shed some light on this situation in this article. Desk accessories are programs, usually small, that the user can invoke to perform some immediate task when some larger program is tunning. When the desk accessory is finished, the interrupted program can continue. Most desk accessories on the GS (as opposed to the Mac) are loaded from disk and reside in RAM full time. . First of all there have been some "desk accessories" previously available to Apple I] users. The Pinpoint and Jeeves people have had several types of accessories that could be called up from within AppleWorks. StyleWare has offered some accessories with its Multiscribe package. And various "desktop" simulations such as MouseDesk, have offered a few accessories of their own. There have also been Ampersand (&) packages that can be installed under ProDOS to be called up when you have BASIC.SYSTEM up and running. The roblem with all of these is that until the GS was released, none of hem had Apple‘sofficial blessing and hardware support. Therefore, they had very little applicability outside of the proprietary software they were designed to work with. . This has all changed now with the GS. Apple has "officially" supported, with the release of the GS system software, not just one but THREE different types of desk accessories! | First and least significant is the the desktop software which Apple has released with the GS system disk. The desktop is basically a remake of Mouse Desk from VersionSoft previously sold by the now defunct International Software. It is not clear that Apple plans to this product in the long run; most of the rumor mills indicate that this may be a temporary solution that Apple made use of for expediency in getting the on the market with mouse-compatible software. (For those who don’t have a G5 yet the Desktop is the GS equivalent of the Macintosh Finder). The esktop does. fuPport some desk accessories, however. The system is shipped with 5 Desktop desk accessories: date, puzzle, calculator, show text file, and sort directory. The first two are fairly useless while the last 3 offer some utility. The main problem is that they are usable ONLY from the eguten and nowhere else. They all are stored in the /SYSTEM.DISK/DESKTOP/DESK.ACC/ subdirectory and have a file type of $F 1. And there does not seem to be any support officially or in the public domain world for creating more of these. . Much more useful are what are Known as Classic Desk Accessories or CDA‘s (nope, I have no idea where the name came from or what makes them “classic"). These desk accessories are stored in the /SYSTEM.DISK/SYSTEM/DESK.ACCS/ subdirectory and have a file type of $B9 or CDA. These accessories are loaded at ProDOS 16 boot time into memory. So the more you load in, the longer the boot time and the more system memory is gobbled up. These desk accessories are accessed by the combination keypress of the Apple, Control, and Escape Keys together. One of the very nice things about these desk accessories is that the menu is accessible from any Apple II pplication that does not disable interrupts. Even older applications will allow these to work. I am writing this with AppleWriter II which allows me full access to my whole list of accessories. There are two accessories which are built into the ROM (read only memory) chips of the GS. Those are the control panel, which vgives ‘ou access to all the display and system parameters of the G5, and Alternate Display Mode, which makes the GS compatible with standard Apple I] programs that create animated displays by rapid alternation or flipping of the two Low-Res graphics or text pages. = There are beginning to a number of very dnterg> ting CDA 's Created both commercially and in the public domain. Glen don, a well-I Apple II assembly language expert, has created at least a half-dozen useful little gems such as Notepad, Calendar, Dumpit, Typeit and so on. a You can get these from lic domain libraries such as our own and major networks and le pporting BBS’s (Bulletin Board Syetens): To install them in your system, simply copy them ae ape icieertory SYSTEM/DESK.ACCS/ of your Startup disk, Then reboot yor system and they will then be automatically be Fee ae one rte Ye re napten CDA you cen ave sublists.of teem to gethunireds: en” . y an have sublists 2 ine Final tyoe of deck accessory may hold the most promise for the future. They are the New Desk Accessories or NDA‘s. These have a lot in common with 's. They are stored in the same place as CDA’s and loaded at the same time. They are available only from IS 16 tions which use the FIXAPPLE MENU call to put them on an “Apple” menu item similar to Macintosh DA’s. Some ations do this and some don’t. For example, Multiscribe, GraphWriter, and PaintWorks Plus all t the Studio does not. So if these Utilities are important to you, make sure that your new epplica tions NDA’‘s. There seems to be some appe: these, but not as much as for CDA’s. Some available ones include clock, locater (shows mouse position) and Meltdown (which gradually simulates a “melting’ of your display picture. Nothing to get too excited about yet, but hopeful for the future. One of the advantages of this approach (NDA‘s) over the CDA’s is that the desk accessories work in windows within a desktop and mouse environment and you could even have several active at a time. The CDA’s on the other hand do not normally operate in a window but rather interrupt the running of the application and take full control of the GS during their operation and is normally not mouse driven. support them but a we wil: Kinds of New Desk Accessories to choose from. Promising thing about NDA‘s is have a tru References: at they indicate Apple’s future direction for the GS. Soon, hope full ie desktop/finder type of program that runs under native 16-bit mode on the GS with a tay tuned there will be lots more ahead. "Technical Introduction to the Apple I19s* from Addison-Wesley Feb] ishing Inc. 1 "Apple Ilgs Technical Reference® by Michael Fischer from Osborne NcGraw-t Government-Approved Washington Apples If you're wondering what Apple® computers are doing in government, the answer is plenty! From the local town: hall to the Pentagon, more and more Apple computers are being recruited for public service than ever before. In fact, Apple users across the country are put- ting their machines to work in all levels of government - from state and local all the way up to the federal level. And, according to what they say, they haven't reached the tip of the iceberg. To date, Apple's biggest involvement with government has been through public education contracts - an area of shining success for Apple since 1978. But today, a new campaign is underway to broaden its support to other areas of government. With last year's opening of Apple’s new Government Sales and Marketing office in the Washington, D.C. area, and this year's introduction of the new Macintosh™ computers aimed pri- marily at large corporate and govern- ment users, Apple is prepared to meet the government's needs head-on. According to John Sculley, Apple CEO, “One of our biggest commitments today is to serve the government market.” Here's a quick snapshot of just how Apple is serving the government, and how User Groups tie in to the picture. Reaching out to Uncle Sam Because the government is the na- tion's biggest business, it's not surprising that its needs are in many ways similar to those of large corporations - the dif- ference often is simply a matter of size. No one publishes more than the federal government for example. so obviously, desktop publishing is a major area tar- geted by Apple. Already. about 200 Macintosh computers are at work in the Pentagon alone, producing newsletters and other internal documents, reports Jim Fitch, cofounder of the Pentagon Macintosh Users Group. The Los An- geles Sheriff Reserves on the county level and the Long Beach City Council ‘on the municipal level are just two other examples of groups using Macin- tosh desktop publishing systems to But unlike some large corporations, the government has to accomplish more with less. ft does not have the luxury of Tac. writing off equipment investments that no longer meet new industry standards. That's why communication among its existing minis, micros, and mainframes is a key issue when it comes to pur- chasing new systems. Many federal agencies request proposals that specify compatibility with the UNIX® operating system or connectivity with their exist- ing MS-DOS® microcomputers and mainframes. Although Frank Sauer, manager of Apple's Government Sales and Marketing group, commented that “people are more interested in solu- tions than operating systems,” the new Macintosh computers in particular are breaking the communication barrier. ‘Continued On Nex Page “in high-stress jobs like these, you need low- ‘stress applications to fun on low-stress ma- chines. The Macintosh provides the perfect solution.” In no small way, Apple users and User Groups within goverment are rallying to support Apple's efforts. Government-Approved Washington Apples And also unlike many private cor- Porations, the government has a more Pressing need for specialized applica- tions. Besides the standard word pro- cessing, spreadsheet, graphics, and database office applications, many gov- emment agencies are looking for specific programs in the areas of advan- ced simulations, engineering, logistics modeling, thought processing, and many others. With the help of third- party vendors, such as system in- tegrators like Falcon MicroSystems. Apple is committed to providing cus- tomized solutions to meet the special requirements of government. One case in point is the C.A.M.E.O. program developed by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administra- tion for use in public safety. C.A.M.E.O. (which stands for Computer-Aided Management of Emergency Operations) is currently being used by the Seattle Fire Department. Other programs. such as Map Graphics that digitizes the topo- logy of an area, are helping firefighters and law enforcement officers with strategic planning and coordinating efforts in an emergency. According to Mike Agron, an Apple account execu- tive for state and local government. there's even a program that draws composite sketches of suspects! As he remarked, “In high-stress jobs like these, you need low-stress applications (0 run on low-stress machines. The Macintosh provides the perfect solu- tion,” Apple is prepared to meet the government's needs head-on. And predictably, Apple also offers government a solution to the high cost of training its personnel - a real chal- lenge for the nation’s biggest employer. In fact, the government has the highest expenditures for training of any other business. This situation suggests that the ease of use and minimal training re- quirements of Apple products is a key to greater productivity. A study conduc- ted at the army training and documenta- tion group at Fort Benning, Georgia, found that it takes approximately 20 minutes for a user to learn to use a Macintosh. Compare that with the 2 hours it takes to learn an IBM® PC, or the 20 to 40 hours it takes to leam most other computers, and the savings in taining time (and tax dollars) begin to add up quickly. But even with the right technology and the solutions to meet the govern- ment’s needs, just reaching Uncle Sam is a tall order all by itself. To that end. Apple has deployed a network of ac- count executives in the field, as well as consultants and other govermment- experienced personnel to help identify ‘opportunities at all levels of govern- ment. Apple's new Reston. Virginia Government Sales office alone includes a staff of 50 professionals dedicated ex- clusively to serving the government market. And, in no small way, Apple users and User Groups within govern- ment are rallying to support Apple's ef- fons. User Group Tie-in Before Apple ever formally targeted the government market, a grass roots movement was already taking place. According to Don Kirkwood, Apple consultant in Washington, D.C., some of the first Apple products that appeared in government offices were brought there by the people who owned them - People who had bought Apples as per- ‘sonal computers and found a need for them in the workplace. It may be these same people who call Apple executives ment is planning to buy microcompu- ters. People call us on the phone or write letters saying there's some pro- curement going on and they'd really like Apple to go after it. And wherever the action is, you'll find User Groups leading the way. Today, Apple User Groups are spring- ing up everywhere within government agencies — a dozen so far this year - and they're helping spread the good news about Apple technology. “User Groups have taken a proactive stance in helping us identify what's going on in government,” Don Kirkwood said. “They share information about the needs of their particular department or agency and provide us with the con- tacts we need.” Don, who works closely with Apple's Government Sales and Marketing group, praises User Groups as a valuable resource in identifying new opportunities for Apple in gov- emment. And so does Apple’s Mike Agron. As he puts it, “Apple User Groups are a microcosm of the overall enthusiasm that is permeating government.” He points out that User Groups are a focused network, and there are lots of champions within government - from people in the field to high-level ex- ecutives - who recognize the advantage of Apple technology. We at Apple applaud our User Group heroes” in government. Those of vou in local User Groups like Mac- Nexus in Sacramento and in agency- specific groups like the Pentagon Mac- intosh User Group and Mac Star in the Los Angeles Sheriffs’ Department have helped Apple look its best. Thanks to You. we're getting the government seal of approval across the U.S. So stay tuned to Quick Connect. ‘We'll be providing more information on our government groups in future issues. Apple Computers as Public Servants — Apple computers are now actively on duty on desks around the country doing all sorts of government work - from scheduling municipal garbage pickups to monitoring experiments aboard the Space Shuttle. Here's just a sampling of some of the creative ways Apple products are being used by per- sonnel at all levels of government. The U.S. Coast Guard enlists Macin- tosh computers to chart inv map waterways, analyze harbor traffic, and track hazardous materials, as well ay handle reports, budgets, records. and personnel assignments. Some FBI offices and many police departments rely on Apple computers for detective work. The computers chart complex case information for every- thing from small crimes to homicides to international smuggling operations. The Arizona Department of Trans- portation employs Macintosh comput- fs to monitor airport operations, access airplane registration and owner infor- mation, and help with facilities manage- ment - all of which earned Arizona national recognition for this innovative state aviation program. A Florida state legislator uses his Macintosh to track bills through the legislative process of the House of Representatives. Public libraries use Apples to assist with book ordering. recordkeeping, inventory processing. and interlibrary communications. The city manager of Dayton. Ohio, updates employees with a monthly newspaper published on his Macintosh desktop publishing system. The Parks and Recreation Depart- ment of Little Rock. Arkansas. used Apple Ile computers to help create 44 Nationwide Computer Learning Month Set for October An exhibition of computer-inspired activities, a time capsule to be opened in 2001, national contests, and “back-to- school” nights for parents are among the activities planned to celebrate Com- puter Learning Month, October, 1987. Co-sponsored by Apple and organ- ized by leaders in the computer and education fields, the national nonprofit campaign will encourage students, educators, parents. and community leaders to explore the potential of com- puters as learning tools. Celebration activities planned for Computer Learning Month include na- tional student and teacher contests. Students are invited to submit comput- er-generated art, noncomputer art on computer themes, essays, and open- ended creative group projects. Teachers are invited to submit innovative lesson plans that use computers to enhance learning. Prizes for winning entries in- clude computer systems donated by Apple and software packages donated by leading software publishers. Dead- line for entry is October 22, 1987. Look for the User Group role in Computer Learning Month in the next issue of Quick Connect. And, for more information on contests, prizes, and activities, contact: Computer Learning Month PO. Box 19763 Washington, D.C. 20036-0763 city parks by managing work order programs, inventories. and the day-to- day operations over the Last ten years Grand Canyon Airport keeps track of its daily operations with Macintosh computers. Plans are currently under- way for a Macintosh-run airport control system to manage every facet of the facility, including airport layout and pavement conditions. * City police and firefighters in Modesto, California have mapped the community, targeted hazards, charted investigations, and planned fast, effec- tive emergency services with the help of Macintosh computers. The compu- ters also aid with fire prevention tactics, arson investigations, forensic analysis, vehicle and equipment maintenance recordkeeping, water pollution monitor- ing. and the tracking and identification of offenders. COMPUTER LEARNING MONTH Air and water quality control Airport and port maintenance Conservation Debt management Education Engineering Executive offices Fire protection Flood control Governor's office Heaith care Highways Human resources Justice and corrections Labor and personnel Law enforcement Legislation Libraries ‘Mass transit National defense Natural resources Parks and recreation Planning Procurement Public assistance Public transportation Safety and public protectior Social security Social services Taxation Tratfic control Transportation Urban renewal Veteran's benefits Water supply systems Congressional bills commemorating October as Computer Learning Month have been sponsored by US. Senator Frank YY WU oL SSVTD LSUd gg00-E0E26 YO6ez0 ‘Wales zSzz xOd “O'd “our ‘yoT}s8UL0D atddy ayyowe[lia | @ || APPLE USER GROUP CONNECTION