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MY EXPERIENCES WITH COMPUTERS - BYE, BYE COMMODORE
by Bill
Wood: 
ws.wood@virgin.net
(Ed: In E-Journal 2 Bill related his early experiences with computers from the Commodore range. He now takes up the story from where he left off last time.)
About 1985 the government department where I worked had started to move over to the new technology of computers and, as I was involved on the Estates side of the business, we worked closely with our New Technology section. In Scotland alone approximately 63 offices had to be cabled and power points provided in readiness for the arrival of computer equipment. This was a daunting task but the roll-out was completed in advance of schedule, no mean achievement.
At this point in my experiences with computers, 1992, I was becoming demob happy. My D Day was the 6th June 1993, a significant day in my life as I reached retirement from the department which had been my employers for the previous 20 years. During the seven years prior to retiring I took advantage of every course that I could possibly get. They included courses for SuperCalc and Word Perfect. Naturally these programs featured on my machine, for household accounts and word processing respectively.
I had been thinking about upgrading my computer equipment, from the Commodore C128D, and discussed this with my friends in the New Technology section. I was encouraged to consider building a PC. A specification was drawn up and costings prepared with various suppliers advertising in Micro Mart. Eventually it was decided that the machine would be a 486/33 with 4Mb Ram and a 120Mb hard disk. Nationwide Computer Maintenance (NCM), a national supplier who had premises in Penicuik about 12 miles from my home in Edinburgh, was supplying kits - great, go and get one. When I contacted NCM told me they had stopped supplying in kit form but were supplying ready built at kit price. So ready built it was, and delivery was taken on 23 December 1992.
The first upgrade, fairly minor, was to install a second 3.5 floppy disk drive. This allowed me to copy my driver disks with ease. (Ed: I guess this extravagance was a hangover from C64 experiences. With limited RAM on the C64, copying a disk with a single disk drive took lots of disk swapping. However, with the 4MB of a PC the number of disk swaps is much reduced, especially when DOS had been altered to make full use of the memory. I have never heard of anyone having twin 3.5 floppy drives on a PC before!). A sound card soon followed. This was a full size card with 4 watt output straight from the card. Next came a CD-ROM followed soon after with a second hard drive of 580Mb. The final upgrade was a new CPU, a 486DX2/66. What had started life as a fairly modest machine had turned into a fairly potent little beastie housed in a somewhat overcrowded Mini Tower case. A Cardinal 14400 data/fax modem was added to provide access to the Internet and fax facilities.
In the autumn of 1997 I decided to upgrade my system completely and house it in a Midi Tower case. The Motherboard was a TXPro with an AMD K2/166 CPU and 16Mb EDO Ram. The 580Mb hard drive was retrieved from the redundant machine. A new S3 Graphics Card with 4Mb Ram, a 16X CD-ROM and a sound card completed the basic machine which was set up running Windows 95 without any problems. The Cardinal modem from the redundant PC was retained and installed on the new machine as it had proved to be a useful workhorse.
You will recall that I had mentioned previously, (in E-Journal 2), that CP/M and SuperCalc had been used with the C128. Thanks to Archie Swan I became a devotee of this Spreadsheet. Naturally with having been on courses for SuperCalc it was my choice of Spreadsheet for the PC. As I was still working on a relatively small hard drive, which was rapidly running out of space, valuable data was stored on 1.44K floppies.
A digression - when in London a couple of years back, I spotted a shrink-wrapped copy of SuperCalc for Windows 3.xx complete with a video tutorial, all for £10.00 - a bargain I thought. On my return home, much to my disappointment, I found that it would not run under Windows 95. An e-mail to Computer Associates explaining my problem brought a set of upgrade disks - gratis.
Now you must be curious what one would use this type of machine for, particularly as I have already mentioned that I am a Senior Citizen. I had again become interested in Genealogy and restarted research on my family tree, which had lain dormant since 1967. Fortunately, I had retained all my old notes so it would be great to have all this information on computer.
As it appeared that the latest computer was a prime contender for genealogy a search began for a suitable software program for the family tree. Several demo programs were downloaded from the Internet for evaluation. The program which appeared to serve my purpose best was called ReUnion so the early notes were input to see how it performed. As seems to be my luck, by the time I had finally decided to purchase a copy of ReUnion the company had been taken over by Sierra. No supplier had a copy in stock. Eventually, Sierra released a program with the name Generations. This was ReUnion under a different name so Generations was purchased and now the family tree back to 1799 is on computer. With all family files being stored on floppy disk progress was at last being made. The infrequent articles by Betty Clay on this topic have been of particular interest to me, in particular her description of her visit to Salt Lake City to do research. The family history centres of the Mormon Church are well worth a visit if you are researching your Ancestry. In this respect I am extremely fortunate in having one only about 12 minutes drive from my house.
(Ed: For those not so fortunate the database of the Mormon Church, which is available for viewing on CD-ROM at some family history centres, is now being put on the web at www.familysearch.org).
In the next episode I will detail my experiences with an upgrade which started in October 1998. I will reveal the frustrations which led to the tearing out of the remaining hair and the lessons which have, or should have, been learned. Some of these pitfalls were encountered and recorded in the printed journal and many will say I should have learned from the experiences of others. However, to err is human.... (... to really bug**r things up requires a computer. -Ed)
The completion date of the upgrade was 19 April 1999 and so far all appears well.
