The Silicon Jungle by David H. Rothman

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: