CFOG's PIP, January 1986, Volume 4 No. 3, Whole No. 39, page 1

PRESIDENT'S MESSAGE

by Benjamin H. Cohen

HELP WANTED -- A familiar refrain: we need some people to help out with PIP, a paste-up person to do the actual pasting up of each issue, and one or more people to mine exchange newsletters for articles that ought to be reproduced in PIP.

One of the things we've been trying to do is to cut the Editor's job down to size. Our early Editors were in charge of printing and mailing PIP, aspects of the job that have been removed from the present Editor's bailiwick. What we'd like to do now is to get the paste-up aspect of the job out, too. Henry the Editor cajoles members to write, receives articles from members, prepares his own material, edits it all, counts lines, and lays out what goes where. He puts the pile of text on a disk or uploads it to the RCPM. The disk or data comes to my office where it is printed on the HewlettPackard LaserJet.

In the meantime, Art Koudelka, our Advertising Manager, contacts advertisers, and gets in advertising copy.

What we need is someone to handle the next step: taking the hard copy output and pasting it in place on the art boards. It's a job that takes about two or three hours, an evening's work, once a month. It's a job that could be split up -- two people could take it in alternate months. What we need are some volunteers -- call me at 965-8142, evenings or 726-3555 at the office (between 5 and 6 is a good time).

The other job we need a volunteer for is the mining of exchange newsletters for good material for PIP. This job has a number of aspects -- initiate and/or maintain contact with other groups, read newsletters as they come in selecting articles that ought to be reproduced, keying them in, and getting the files to the Editor either by sending or bringing in a disk or by uploading to the RCPM. At present I'm receiving and reading the newsletters -- more than a dozen of them each month -- and keying in selected articles. But to keep a steady flow of this material coming to supplement the articles submitted by our members, I need some help. If you'd like to get involved in this interesting project, even if it's only to volunteer to key in some articles, please contact me (see previous paragraph).

RCPM NO. 2 "ON THE AIR" SOON -- "Real soon now." After a lot of delay FOG finally got us the Metal Message System for our second RCPM. We were told a number of times that it was coming "soon", but the 'revision a week gang' kept coming up with more bells and whistles. Finally, about the middle of December we received the software.

That left one more link -- the hard disk. When we got the new pricing on WestWind Computer's Trantor disks, Glen Ostgaard asked us to get a Trantor for the second RCPM because using the Design One 10 MB hard disk would mean two drastically different software setups. With the 21 MB Trantor now at $1095, we'd get twice as much hard disk as the Design One for a price we could afford. I called Dave Price at WestWind who suggested that they had a few of the (now discontinued) 35MB size. At a price of $1350, it was hard to resist. The drive was promised for shipping not later than January 3, and it should be up and running by the time you get this. Check RCPM #1 for the number, it will be posted there when #2 is up and running.

ONE KAY -- We ran an ad in the December issue of ComputerPeople Monthly, aimed at CP/M users -- Osborne, Morrow, Kaypro, and other. We used a telephone number that had not been used before, so we would be able to isolate the responses. By the end of December we had received eight responses from owners of Kaypro, Morrow, Commodore C-128, and other CP/M systems. We'll be pleased to add them to our ranks and to expand our horizons. I hope that you'll all make them welcome, and that they will be able to set up some special interest groups within CFOG to further their own specific interests. I note that the Cincinnati Osborne Group's newsletter COGWheels includes about a page or so of ONE KAY, the Cincinnati Kaypro Users' Group Newsletter. Is this a sign of something to come here?

[An article in the Cincinnati Osborne Group's newsletter COGWheels reports that there's a file WSPROPOR.LBR in the public domain with similar information. Those interested can see the article at a meeting. If anyone sees the file somewhere, get it and upload it to our board!]