Open Access User Group - 12 December 1995 End-of-year meeting Our December meeting was mainly a social occasion, with refreshments provided by the Chatswood RSL - thanks to Lindy for organising it. There was some lively discussion about the use of computers in schools and the dilemma faced by teachers in managing the technology. Hardware and software is becoming redundant (or should that be "unfashionable") at a ridiculous pace but the new products do not seem to be any more reliable or bullet-proof than the products they replace. Too much time is spent configuring systems/networks/software and ironing out minor problems - most businesses would probably have the same complaint. Despite the hype about ease of use, it seems that Windows 95 has only compounded the problems. The comment was made that any car manufacturer who tried to produce a vehicle which would need to be replaced after two years would be hounded out of the market! Planning for 2000! The year 2000 is fast approaching. Maybe we are being a little optimistic about the survival of DOS by then, but in writing Programmer code you should be thinking about the change. For example an application which stores years as two digits (eg 96), will need to cope with "00" for "2000". Storing date strings as YYMMDD (eg 960120 for 20 Jan 96) to enable them to be sorted in ASCII lists will not work for the changeover. Holograms for data storage November's edition of Scientific American has a fascinating article about data storage using hologrammatic films or crystals. Through subtle changes to the angle of a laser read/write head 1,000s of "pages" of data can be stored on one piece of film no larger than a CD and thinner than the old style of floppy disk. The storage potential is estimated to be 200 times that of a CD - that is about a trillion bits. The new technology is particularly suitable for storing images and the hologram techniques can be used in a clever way to compare two images. I guess the first use for the technology will be in cruise missiles (if its not in use already)! Datapac releases a Windows NT version of System Manager Don't throw away those "old" 386 PCs - they can be used to run Windows programs at the speed of a Pentium! Datapac have just announced the release of WinFrame. This is a multi-user version of Windows NT with the same remote control features as System manager but much greater flexibility and networking power. Standard telephone lines, LAN, WAN, ISDN. ATM and internet access are supported. Processing can be done locally or remotely, depending on the application needs. The same "remote control" advantages as Datapac's System Manager multi-user DOS operating system are available - database processing can be confined to the host PC, thereby avoiding the tedious transfer of data around the network or over the telephone lines. Concurrently, word processing software can be running under Windows on the local PC. Windows NT is a 32-bit operating system designed for corporate networking and is therefore a much better choice for "serious" networks than Windows 95. WinFrame includes this operating system. A 386 PC with VGA is the minimum requirement for a remote "terminal" on this system although diskless terminals can be run directly off the host PC. Any number of "host" PCs can be linked together to form a versatile network.