CFOG's PIP, August 1987, Volume 5 No. 10, Whole No. 58, page 5
About the Call for Members to Write Articles
by Kevin P. Murphy
(c) Copyright 1987 Kevin P. Murphy, all rights reserved.
I have been a member of CFOG for several years and have, unfortunately, been one of the passive majority(?) of the membership, sometimes for reasons of pressing demands, but more frequently because I consider myself one of the merely semi-literate members of the group. I am not a "hacker." I don't rub two bytes together and produce assembly language fire. I have little practical experience with BASIC, and don't use most of my software to the extent to which it might be used. I even put my Smartkey software into permanent retirement after briefly experimenting with it and finding that I don't have enough need for it to keep me aware of dedicated meanings for keys I might set up.
Mostly, I use WordStar, Grammatik, and The Word Plus, and a few invaluable CP/M utilities. So, I feel that there is little information I might offer PIP's readers that someone else hasn't done better in some earlier issue. However, Ben Cohen's repeated requests for material, and my own difficulties with telephonic communication, led me to submit the article on modemphobia that Ben ran in the May issue. That information, while not new and revolutionary, may have been useful to someone just turning to the modem, someone who doesn't have that earlier issue (if there is one). For instance, I find that I am now looking for information now that I couldn't have cared less about two or three years ago -- I'm at a different stage of development now than I was then -- and I may be years behind other CFOGGERS who were in the group in those days when I was a true -- as in raw -neophyte.
You, too, have information. You are at a certain stage of growth -- one that an earlier wave of members may have addressed years ago, and that has become buried in our fading early issues. You have a unique perspective, no matter what the stage of your expertise, and your insights may shine lights into corners that earlier writers didn't even see, thus enabling someone like me to understand that which was incomprehensible up until the moment of your explanation.
I just don't believe that we're all the hoary old hackers that the editorials sometimes imply. I think there must be some of us who are still very green, very much in need of all sorts of help but who may not even know what to ask for, or who may be too shy to admit that, in the year 1987, there are actually things that we don't know about our hardware and software.
Recently, I went to a local print shop to make some copies. A 7-year old boy was working an Apple computer at a desk in the front of the shop. (The child of one of the print shop employees.) I asked what he was doing and he gave me a very logical explanation of the program he was using. I was impressed -- probably even a bit intimidated at the fact that a near infant was speaking so coherently about his "work." Then, I observed the screen and watched what he was doing and realized that he was doing what any 7-year old kid in my generation might also have done -- he was making sense out of something that he didn't really understand. He was playing a game of his own fancy, that had only a passing resemblance to what the computer was doing. A person with no computer experience, however, might have been completely taken in by the child's honest, but inaccurate explanation.
Sometimes, when talking about computers to non-computer-oriented friends, I fear that I may be too close to that child in terms of my understanding. Yet, I do know some things that might be useful to others. And that is true, I'm sure, of the rest of the CFOG membership.
Ben is asking us, the shy and uncertain members of the group to also share our insights, our confusion, our frustration, our successes no matter how small we may judge them to be, our failures, no matter how shameful we may fear them to be, so that we may all benefit from the exchange. For instance, have you ever sat at the computer, wondering why the program refuses to print, before finally -- much profanity later -- remembering that you have the peripheral switch box set to the wrong printer, which isn't turned on ...? Or, have you ever had trouble with a disk that Uniform, MFDISK, Media Master, et al., refuse to identify, and then, sometimes months later, actually looked at the disk, observed finally that the label is in the wrong position, and that you've actually been putting it into the disk drive sideways? That's one that I hope I will only do one time...
All right, who's next?