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1. amp fO0a5kl6d2L Skip up to Char t 6 amp f0a6kl6d2L Void e Input u 1 amp f0a7kl6d2L Toggle Insert v 8 amp f0a8kl6d2L New ern nn nn Line w 9 2 amp jB NOTE In this listing I have substituted periods for blank spaces Thus where you see a period you should press the space bar when entering the file The symbols in the above listing stand for the ESCAPE code ASCII character 27 This little character is what triggers the computer into changing the function keys Keying the ESCAPE code into the file is a good trick here s how to do it Press the three keys Ctrl V and You will see V on the screen This will change to when you view the file later When you have finished entering the file and are sure that all is as it should be go ahead and end the editing ses sion You should press the E key when you see edlin s prompt on the edge of the screen Then press the Return key The file will be saved on your Edisc You may test this file to see if it gives you the desired results A simple test would be to set the function keys off by pressing the Menu key Then key in the line type X doskeys and press the Return key The prompts for the keys should turn on and the keys should behave as they normally would when you are running your Portable in DOS mode If you have managed to get the doskeys file working then you are ready for a real challenge keying in th
2. LI h inti Lad ip tje 1M in mi T ah in Bn t tan hin bitin ng unm d uin ima niinni hod bed tou a see LI in ed T OPTIONAL EXTRAS Southern Software of New Orleans creators of SideWinder have also created two companion utilities that work only on The HP Portables SideChar lets you create your own sideways characters BURIOICRLTRAARAXOXI1A2 AGI S68 BER SEER an SRR MEER BEN HHH HHH te Quit P te Print E ESENES i teiesd 6 to Save Select te tensile block Coreor keys to weve Simply fill in a grid on your Portable to modify SideWinder s built in characters create italics Hebrew letters integral signs whatever sideways characters you wish Sketch amp Print lets you make line drawings on your screen using the cursor and function keys It s a lot like those Etch Sketch toys you played with as a child Actually it s even better because you can draw not just horizontal and vertical lines but also diagonals with a single key Sketch amp Print also lets you print and save anything you draw on the screen 10 for both utilities when purchased with SideWinder Order form and guarantee are on inside back cover or send check or credit card number to Personalized Software PO Box 869 Fairfield IA 52556 515 472 6330 dio Juauidojaaaq sn30T Jo sxreuropea poaojsida1 are c c pue sno 105 rows for QuietJet Printer 1ne command language file must b
3. Personalized Software is authorized to distribute THE NORTON UTILITIES on 312 disk customized for users of the HP110 Portable Portable Plus and HP150 phrase a penny saved is a penny earned into a text file on your electronic floppy or hard disk but you can t remember which file it was or even which directory How to find it No problem Just type ts for text search specify the phrase and the program will display every occurrence of the phrase iden tifying each occurrence by directory and file Or let s say you can t remember which sub directory you put a given file into Instead of hunting for the file manually just type ff find file and specify the name of the file and the directories to search through The program does the rest Other useful features include the fa com mand which lets you change file attributes for example to make erasable files unerasable or vice versa and the fs command which tells THE NORTON UTILITIES are among the most helpful utilities I ve run across I use them myself every day and in my opinion they re a must Here s why By Hal Goldstein Publisher The Portable Paper you the total file size of a group of files I often use it to find out the total disk space occupied by my Lotus worksheet WKS files or by all my text files from a given project Because of their great helpfulness and ease of use THE NORTON UTILITIES are already a best seller in th
4. The example command file listed in my article is another method for loading the softkeys DISPLAY amp fla4k13d2LHangup Modem f Appendix H summarizes HP escape sequences Ap pendix I summarizes VT escape sequences 3 Appendix J of the PC2622 User s Manual would answer your questions It contains a list of control codes and their function Unfortunately no such table exists in the Reflec tion 1 manual However most any printer manual will contain such a table I hope I have been of assistance in answering your questions If you should need some additional help please write again Reflection 1 can be both very exciting and very con fusing Once mastered it opens some exciting possibilities I wish you the best of luck in your endeavors with the Portable Plus Sincerely David J Hughes MO Dear David Thank you so very much for you long and informative let ter of December 8 I really appreciate your taking time off to answer questions from a stranger Your suggestions were very helpful and quite revealing Especially the trick of saving a logged manual command file with display func tions on and of course Appendix J with a list of control codes That changed the color of my life With your help I now have four automated com munication links established with Reflection 1 1 Call the internally linked TVA Wang word processor system to upload drafts of memos letters and reports for official finish 2 Call an i
5. they can THE NORTON UTILITIES won t recover the entire file of course but they can help you restore the portions of the file that still remain on the disk It s done with a powerful utility called nu that lets you display change and capture to a file any information on any disk In complex cases you may need to do some detective work but nu will help you find whatever remains on the disk thereby saving you from countless hours of retyping lost data In my opinion the ability to recover lost les alone makes THE SVORTON UTILITIES well worth the price But there s even more to the pachage THE NORTON UTILITIES RUNS ON HP Portable Portable Plus e HP150 o IBM PC HP Vectra are also an excellent disk management Sys tem Here are some examples of what you can do Let s say you want to sort directories and files physically on disk either by name ex tension size date time or by any combina tion of these Just use the ds disk sort com mand I use this one to sort my electronic disk files by size all the time Then when I display the directory the larger files come at the end of the list and I can see at a glance which ones to move elsewhere to free up any needed amount of disk space Or let s say you remember putting the Indispensible PC Magazine Don t compute without it The New York Times You ll bless this disk Peter MeWilliams The Personal Computer Book
6. 44 95 59 95 34 95 89 95 89 00 49 95 59 95 2 gt Z Aajluniciiuni iu u gt SUBSCRIPTIONS HP9114 Empowerer Power Supply w Battery Pack p 17 225 00 Link HP IL Connector p 23 80 00 101 Macros For Lotus 1 2 3 69 95 99 95 Norton Utilities Version 4 0 p 3 99 95 Norton Utilities Advanced Edition p 3 150 00 Milestone gt Includes free 1987 Subscriber Disk Available only to subscribers 3 Available only to those whose subscrip tions include at least one 1987 issue The 7 50 includes shipping Alter natively you may mail in a formatted disk and a 39 self addressed stamped enve lope to receive the software at no charge 5Specify whether HP110 Portable Plus HP150 or IBM PC 6 Subscriber price is 39 95 if you pur chased any other Turbo product from Per sonalized Software PrinterIalk p 19 49 95 PRODUCTS Printerlalk Format110 p 19 89 90 Project 8 9 105 p 32 99 95 RightWriter 95 00 Shelp works on Portable Plus only p 10 55 00 SideWinder p 14 69 95 SideWinder Utilities p 14 79 95 69 95 FREE SHIPPING FOR U S ORDERS 3295 29 95 s Turbo Pascal p 7 r 99 95 Turbo Pascal Programs For The Portables p 7 49 95 89 95 44 956 149 00 62 95 35 95 Credit Card holders may order by calling 515 472 6330 Monday through Friday or by sending CompuServe EMAIL to ID 72257 714 Turbo Pascal Starter Kit Pascal Tutor
7. 9 3 TxD Transmit Data Output BB RxD 3 lt 5 5 RxD Receive Data Input AB Gnd 7 lt 3 4 Signal Ground gt 8 6 TxD Balanced Transmit Output I am not sure that I can explain why the cable works especially when you look at the BYTE pin out labels but it works The only problem I have noticed is in transferring text files with tables the Mac word processors all use propor tional spacing so you have to realign the tables File transfer works very well using the techniques described by Michael Rhodes in the Nov Dec issue of The Port able Paper have used two different ter minal programs Versalerm and Maclerm on the Mac with no significant problems Another minor note This letter was printed on one of the least expensive NLQ printers on the market the STAR SG10 I used serial parallel converter Model 770 by Tigertronics Ventura CA 805 658 7466 As you can see all Memo Maker enhancement features work with the SG10 The only problem with this in terface appears to be Lotus PrintGraph I get extra line feed in my graphics result ing in blank lines and a not too pretty graph Jim Patton Crofton MD Help With Taxes Tax time is on us and looking through E i LOTUS magazine January 1987 I find many tax programs for Lotus under Tax Planning and Preparation starting on page 114 I have a basic question being still a real novice in determining whether or not an advertised item can be ru
8. The Word Plus best dJerry Pournelle Author of Chaos Manor column Byte Magazine THE WORD PLUS works with MemoMaker The Editor and other word processors that can produce ASCII files Our version of THE WORD PLUS includes a 3 5 disk and simple instructions for customizing the program to the HP Portables RUNS ON HP Portable Portable Plus IBM PC HP Vectra 60 DAY MONEY BACK GUARANTEE See order form for details TO ORDER Use postage paid order form inside back cover or send check or credit card information spelling causes a change in line length Leave the word as is but mark it in your document for later consideration Lotus add ons to work with either the HP110 or Portable Plus RAM Cards With Greater Capacity Just before the deadline for this issue our office received a call from David Burch in England Unfortunately I wasn t available to take the call but apparently his company now makes higher capacity RAM cards that will work in the Portable Plus drawer He was interested in the possibility of us distributing his products I have no more details but promise to report fully next issue If you would like to contact him his address and phone Softword Astage House Rectory Lane Windlessham Surrey England GU20 2EG 44 276 76440 Tell me of your results EPROM Update We are making slow but steady progress on the EPROM front Our plan at this time is to off
9. This file should contain straight text material If you don t have such a file handy you can use the following command to generate it Just type in the line dir gt files and press the Return key This will create a file containing a listing of the files on your Edisc Now just type in the command edb files and press the Return key The screen should clear the message PRESS g AND Return should appear The next line will showa minus sign and the cursor The function key prompts should also turn on Press G and then the Return key and you will see the message End of input file On the next line you will see edlin s prompt We re ready to use our record manage ment program To page through all the information in the file simply press the f5 function key repeatedly Eventually you will run out of material and the f5 will let you go no fur ther HP110 owners will have to use the cursor keys to view the part of the file that scrolls off the top of the screen If you want to page through a file starting with line 10 for MARCH APRIL 1987 29 WordPerfect It s the best selling word processor for the IBM PC Ac cording to many reviewers it s the best word processor on the market Now there s a version for the Portable Plus the full blown Ver sion 4 2 complete with compre hensive thesaurus and 115 000 Wol word spelling checker This means that if you already have WordPerfect for your PC you now can freely tr
10. maximize the storage capacity of your Portable Now back to the original question If you run a pro gram from PAM you need enough memory not only for your application but also to account for the system overhead of 4K for PAM and 27K for DOS Therefore you need a minimum of 131K in RAM to run the 100K program If the program is from HP or a vendor familiar with the Portables usually they will take that extra 31K into account when they tell you how to set system memory In general if a program does not load try increasing system memory quite often that solves the problem Instant Access Choose Calculator and get a 4 function calculator that works just like a pocket calculator with memory You can Bi paste results at the cursor location in whatever application you Bl save results in ten different storage registers and retrieve Example f you type United States a lot you could assign the entire phrase to the U key Just move the cursor to U in the Keyboard Macros menu and type United States To recall United States simply press Ctrl Extend Pop Ups for the Portable Plus B CALCULATOR Bi NOTEPAD B MACROS AND MORE were using when you invoked Shelp them again with two quick keystrokes char then U Presto United States appears at the cursor location in your application Keyboard Macros Calculator S United States ESC to ezit A is Cc D Bok F G H J
11. owners already have it as part of their machine For many circumstances Lotus is a quite acceptable database manager Its strengths are familiarity ease of use visual simplicity of record structure computational ability sor ting ability and the macro feature Its weaknesses are found in the areas of searching report writing and data entry Furthermore as a 1 2 3 database grows 1 2 3 gets more cumbersome to sort and search and is memory in efficient When I started Personalized Software Lotus seemed the obvious choice where to keep my customer informa tion I could easily transfer Lotus information back and forth between my HP110 and my IBM compatible Compaq DeskPro To create the customer database using Lotus I simply put the label FIRST in cell Al LAST in Bl COMPANY in Cl and so on The first customer record got entered in row 2 the next in row 3 and so on In Lotus a record takes up one row Each field takes up a column So the field contain ing last names are found in column B each customer record takes up one row After each mailing of a Portable Paper issue I print out three customer listings one is ordered by last name another is ordered by zip and the third is listed by com pany These listings have proven invaluable to our staff in tracking customers and orders Sorting in Lotus and creating the different lists are sim ple using the Data S command One thing I learned quickly was to put everything in upper
12. shipping and sched uling system for a gift manufacturer with over 400 outlets nationwide e atyping tutor for SRA an IBM sub sidiary e a grammer teaching package for South Western Publishing a major educational and business publisher e an upgrade of a major award winning product line for Peachtree Software of Atlanta in progress e Plus 20 other software products for major publishers SATISFIED CUSTOMERS Second Fairfield Software has earned a reputation for delivering on time on spec amd within budget Sometimes they even complete contracts early How often have you heard of that happening Fairfield Software can develop high quality custom software for you in these areas e Sales force automation using the HP Portables e Telecommunications e Telemarketing Sales Tracking e nventory Control e Accounting e Order Entry e Purchasing e And more e Scheduling e Manufacturing e Graphics To discuss your needs call Hal Goldstein at 515 472 6330 The following is typical of what their clients say easily one of the best diskettes turned over to us for Beta testing Commitment and professionalism are outstanding Dee Lee and Rob Rohm Scott Foresman and Company have continued to support us better than any other computer firm that I have dealt with Tom Vermeer Controller Crystal Forest Ltd The creative solutions you ve offered have contributed sig
13. vertical bars and underlines Prefixes apostrophe caret quote and backslash are used to left justify center right justify and replicate The vertical bars periods and carets under the columns entitl ed LEFT CENTRE and RIGHT are left justified centered and right justified The row of periods hyphens equal signs and asterisks are created with the backslash replica tion operator For example cells A14 and B14 contain 34 MARCH APRIL 1987 and cells C14 and D14 contain Now the fun starts Once you have designed a model _ _ similar to the above you can start copying and moving cells and groups of cells to empty spreadsheet space and create different patterns You can experiment with dif ferent column widths All sorts of interesting designs in cluding text if you wish can be created and printed Send us your creative or practical fruits of this techni que and we will publish your explorations in a future issue Macro Trick Way back in the first issue I promised to publish the follow ing chart The chart is for you macro aficionados who like to save space and keystrokes in your macros It turns out that you can substitute most of the first 25 ASCII characters for Lotus release 1A macro symbols For example ASCII number 1 CTRL A stands for the macro symbol up and ASCII 23 CTRL W stands for edit Therefore a CTRL A followed by CTRL W in a macro is equivalent to the macro up edit Not
14. 39 95 For an understanding of tbe PACK program and its bug see Vol 1 issue 2 of The Portable Paper page 13 2 As reported in this issues Plus Notes Lotus release 2 for tbe Plus is still montbs away from release If you bave access to someones release 2 on tbe IBM PC or HP150 I believe tbere is a translation utility to convert from tbe WKI files to WKS files MARCH APRIL 1987 1 THE PORTABLE PAPER 3 There is no plan to put dBASE III or RBASEV on a chip HP tells us both pro grams are just too large 4 I think you are out of luck unless anyone else has suggestions HP Corvallis engineers take note in your work on Release 2 of Lotus 5 No comment except that the Reflection 1 manual the PC2622 upgrade was rewritten The upgrade costs 135 although North American users will see little difference in the product itself I have still heard complaints about the new manual Beginning this issue from time to time we will publish questions and answers about Reflection 1 formally PC2622 Charge Your Portable Off a Car s Cigarette Lighter Recently you sent a disk to me asking for some words about our unique applica tions of the Portable Plus and peripherals in the environment of our totally PV photovoltaics powered office We operate and recharge all of the HP equip ment and CRT s from our 12 volt DC power source Murphy s Law says that after having done the research and after having fabricated and debugged t
15. 6816 PR Arnhem The Netherlands Spain Club de usarios HP 110 Pont Reyes S A A la atencion de D Enrique Serra Ron da Universidad 15 08007 Espana MARCH APRIL 1987 33 THE PORTABLE PAPER B Drive continued from page 16 Lotus 123 By Hal Goldstein Easy to Create Graphics Using Lotus A request I hear most frequently is for a Portable product that can create graphics Paul Grimmer the author of SideWinder and Link promises me an exciting new such product for review and resale In the meantime avail yourself of the following idea shown to me by Michael Kabay of Montreal The idea is simple fun and as far as I know original I met Michael at our booth at INTEREX the HP inter national users group conference in Detroit last September He spent about five minutes in Lotus on my Portable creating the following file A B C D E F G H EFT CENTRE RIGHT Oh DEDA A amaan aeann saaa a O we eee gt lt lt e gt 0 0 0 ff ES StS 5 S S S SS SS s 8 220 gt lt qom LETTE ELTETT ETTI TT ME E E E E wk RRR oy ww eee eee ee Caen wen A gt gt gt gt gt gt gt gt D gt gt gt gt gt gt gt gt gt gt gt gt gt gt gt gt gt gt The chart occupies columns A through H each col umn using the default column width of 9 characters The characters in the chart are hyphens periods asterisks equal signs greater and less than signs carets
16. ARC 5 12 and previous versions ASK COM Adds interactive capability to batch files Prompts user with message and waits for yes no response BEEP COM Makes a beep sound CHANGE COM Changes or displays file attributes read only archive system hidden CLEAN COM Converts WordStar HP150 or Portable Plus MemoMaker document files to ASCII and removes control codes COPYNEW COM Backs up files if no identical file on the destination disk Also backs up whole directory structure creating matching subdirectories CPU COM Displays computer s clock speed CVTBIN COM Converts files from ASCII to binary when downloaded with CompuServe READ command CYPHER COM Enciphers and deciphers a file to keep it confidential DIRALL COM Displays attributes and pathnames for ALL files on a disk DIRS COM Gives total disk space occupied by a set of files DUMP COM Dumps and edits a disk or file in hexadecimal and ASCII FDATE COM Changes the time date stamp on a file FDUMP COM Lists a file in hexadecimal and ASCII FF COM Sends a form feed to the printer FGREP COM Searches a group of files for a specified string HC COM Converts binary files to from hexadecimal ASCII files HP IBM COM Does a best fit translation from HP ROMAN 8 character set to IBM PC Line Draw character set IBM HP COM Does a best fit translation from IBM PC Line Draw character set to HP ROMAN 8 character set INSTALLP COM Automates installing an application progr
17. CHIP COMPUTER SYSTEMS gy newer 17958 Ventura Blvd Encino CA 818 996 3132 Model List Special HP 11C 56 00 48 00 HP 12C 99 00 80 00 HP 15C 99 00 80 00 HP 16C 120 00 89 00 HP 41CV 175 00 135 00 HP 41CX 249 00 190 00 HP 71B 525 00 394 00 PACKARD Authorized Dealer List Special 636 00 396 00 19 95 79 50 495 00 29 00 99 50 Our Ad was designed using Desktop Publisher by Lexisoft on an HP LaserJet Plus This Word Processing and Page Composition program is now available at Blue Chip For any given field the length may differ between the cardfile and print format Data that exceeds the length of the print format is conveniently truncated data that is less than the length of the print format may be padded with spaces After placing the data fields you may enhance the report by adding headings page numbers the date or ac cumulating statistics Although ECM was not designed to support extensive numerical analysis of a database or card file you may calculate and print the sum or average of all the values in a given field or fields The report writing capability of ECM is so flexible that it is possible to produce elaborate columnar reports mail ing labels and even form letters Interfacing With Other Programs Perhaps the most exciting feature of the Executive Card Manager is that its data is easily shared with other pro grams It is possible to share ECM data with Condor dBase II Basic WordStar MailMerg
18. CarlV amp f0a8k15d5L Quit NoSaveqCtr1VMyqCtr1VM 9 Ctrl V 2J Ctrl V amp jB Owners of the Portable Plus should substitute 21 for 12 in line 4 of the above file The best way to key in the above lines of nonsense letters is to have someone read them to you while you hunt and peck Or if you don t want to practice your typ ing skills see the offer at the end of this article When you have finished keying in the file be sure to use the edlin E Return command to save all your work This dbkeys file should only be used by the edb bat program When the edb bat file invokes this file the func tion keys will be redefined to perform the following com mands in the edlin program Function Command Key f1 Show the current line number f2 Search for a string of text from beginning of a file f3 Copy all text from previous line f4 Display screenful of text beginning at cur rent line number f5 Display consecutive groups of 23 lines of text 110 users will need to press Extend Prev to view the text that scrolls off the screen f6 Insert text beginning at current line number f7 Save current file create a backup copy and exit the program f8 Quit both the edlin and debug programs without saving any changes Trying It All Out Now that you have done all the hard work let s see if the program will work Since this is supposed to be a database management system we need a data file with which to work
19. K L M exit It s a program called Shelp shell help and it runs on the Portable Plus from within any non graphics program Here s all you do Choose Off and your Portable Plus turns off without having to return to P A M and without having to save your application file When you turn your computer back on you ll be in the same place in the same application with no data lost All the capabilities of IBM PC programs like Borland s SideKick and SuperKey Certainly not but Shelp s the only such program for the Portable Plus It s a clean easy to use and highly useful helper you ll want at your fingertips always Shelp runs on the Portable Plus only It works with Time Manager MemoMaker Reflection 1 Lotus and any other non graphics program Shelp does not run Choose Notepad and a scratch pad pops up on your screen Type whatever you want into it exit to your application and then recall the notepad whenever you want No more having to scribble notes on paper to remind you of phone numbers things to do or bright ideas ESRAS UNE Note Pad Press Ctrl Shift Extend char and up pops the Shelp menu Call Pers Softw 515 472 6330 4 15 mtg w Alice ey fatp EL eee Yote Fa Ee Macros Cf SideKick and SuperKey are registered trademarks of Borland International Inc 10 MARCH APRIL 1987 Choose Key Macros and you can assign strips of up to 31 typewriter cha
20. Pascal Programs p 7 179 95 Turbo Toolbox p 7 69 95 Turbo Tutor p 7 39 95 Typing Whiz p 15 49 95 99 95 WordPerfect Portable Plus only disk based p 30 495 00 299 00 The Word Plus p 26 150 00 129 00 SHIPPING AND HANDLING Portable Paper subscriptions Subscription prices include U S Second Class mailing Outside the U S add the following amounts Mexico and Canada 3 surface mail 6 air Other countries 6 surface 18 air All other products In North America Add 4 for one item 7 more than one item FREE SHIPPING FOR U S ORDERS OVER 200 Outside North America Add 3 surface mail 10 airmail We bill or charge non U S orders for the actual postage if it exceeds these amounts MISC Subtotal Iowa residents add 4 tax Shipping and handling see box at right TOTAL MARCH APRIL 1987 BRIEF CompuServe Starter Kit Gets you started on the Electronic Information Service CompuServe which includes the HP forum Includes 25 worth of free time com plete Users Guide permanent user ID number and preliminary password and CompuServe s monthly magazine Online Today see PO DOS Tools Portable Utilties Disk Vol 1 Well over 50 excellent public domain programs that enhance DOS all tested on The Portables Documentation has been rewritten for clari ty and ease of use and includes examples index and table of contents See 38 The Editor The Fo
21. Portable Plus threshold 150 change this to 2 for a Portable Plus interuptcounter integer 0 type regpac record ax bx cx dx bp si di ds es flags integer end str80 string 80 str255 string 255 THE PORTABLE PAPER PROJECT 8 9 10 Project Management Power for Lotus 1 2 3 Fulfill your project management needs with your favorite software tool Project 8 9 10 delivers PERT Critical Path planning and analysis through integrated templates based in Lotus 1 2 3 Features e PERT Time Estimates e Critical Path Plans e Project Calendars e Multi Project MasterPlans e Complete 36 Page Manual RUNS ON Exceptional Value at 909 95 esas Te CT NEAL 89 95 0 pes e for Portable Paper subscribers IBMPC HP Vectra 9 Postage paid order form and 60 day guarantee are on in side back cover or send check or credit card number to Personalized Software P O Box 869 Fairfield IA 52556 515 472 6330 Lotus and 1 2 3 are trademarks of Lotus Development Corp VAR oldvect_ofs oldvect seg newvect ofs newvect seg integer int count integer absolute interuptcounter reg regpac The following procedure will get the date and time function get datetime str80 begin get datetime 02 01 87 14 12 end The following routines is for setting and getting int vectors Procedure Get vector vnum integer Var vseg vofs integer Var register regpac begin Re
22. Svein Vigander Norris TN Dear Svein Reflection 1 isn t the easiest software program to master even for an experienced user I can appreciate your frustra tion The HP documentation for Reflection 1 does not give sufficient guidance about implementing the program s powerful command language Although I m certainly not a master at using the command language I have been suc cessful in automatic log on and file transfer with my MARCH APRIL 1987 13 THE PORTABLE PAPER B Drive No more cutting and pasting Now Nue can I it eiii i Aa gh 2 nt ETU Viti I u is mi i ui m i gi r Bi wad f m uM ey ilieos 1nd iin sli At last Sideways printing for the HP Portable Portable PLUS and Thi nk Qt And the HP150 Vectra IBM PC MS DOS computers and most HP graphics printers Its called SideWinder and it s perfect for Lotus 1 2 3 print files MemoMaker files or any other text ASCII file that s too wide for a normal page Just type in the file name and SideWinder does the rest printing up to 53 rows sideways for as long as your paper supply lasts You ll never need to cut and paste again SideWinder s high quality graphics characters are indistinguishable from ordinary characters and SideWinder prints just as fast as your ThinkJet can In addition a built in mini text editor lets you get inside your print files and easily create double
23. and sales information The database editor operates on plain ASCII text It is used to enter revise or delete data from a database file A database file consists of several definitions A record defini tion defines the data structure Screen definitions define the presentation of the data on the display Numerical in formation can be manipulated within the database T Master also includes report writing capability Tune in next issue for more information Condor Junior A 110 By Hal Goldstein As I reviewed this database section I realized that there 3 was no simple database program written for the HP110 and its 16 line screen Then the day before this material was to go to the typesetter I received a call from Bob Walters of Huntington Beach CA He told me that he just purchased Condor Junior for the HP110 manufactured by Condor Computer Systems Ann Arbor He is pleased with the product Bob told me the whole program is menu driven and very simple to learn and use It has the normal flat file database capabilities With Condor you can define your database and enter data easily sort search do file manage ment print address labels and do limited report writing Bob runs the program off the C drive with no problems I called Condor and talked with Jeff Joll He told me that the program is very modular The main program is on ly 25K Depending on whether you want to enter data define the data base search sort cre
24. and others who use HP technical com puters Each monthly issue includes sana PAESHETAME A SI iod ATRL DL oD costa pd NDS MAR lini for miris Vertra s Enhanced Graphics Display programming Pits bo serial ties tutorials new product updates applications features and technical trouble shooting and Training SVP Software Video Productions USING M WALKER RICHER Training courses for amp 5 the HP computer user ES T EXECUTIVE Software Video Productions MEMOMAKER offers USING EXECUTIVE fORTHERETSG MEMOMAKER for the HP 150 and USING WALKER RICHER amp QUINNS REFLECTION SERIES for the HP 2622 and 2392 Communications Up to date training techniques and individualized instruction at affordable prices E SUBSCRIPTION MEMBERSHIP APPLICATION Nane e eee Nt e e o oe Check one box COMPANY ss a es The HP Chronicle US 38 Forei 72 Address oreign l l O HP Design amp Manufacturing NY a Ne a et ee E ER DRE US 42 Foreign 78 Phone _______________________ Equipment O Please send me more information on HP L Check enclosed nae i training videos O Bill me O Charge to VISA MasterCard American Express Card Expiration Date Signature Mail to PCI Publications amp Communications Inc P O Box 399 Cedar Park Texas 78613 9987 U S A 800 531 5093 or in Texas call 512 250 9023 PP 11 86 THE PORTABLE PAPER B Drive the Upload Config file as up
25. can get a 3 1 2 IBM disk Joe s note is the first I ve heard that Portable users can read files on an IBM formatted disk Alternatively you can download an evaluation copy from a bulletin board or call ButtonWare to find a local users group who can supply you with an evaluation copy If there is enough interest we would be happy to distribute it on 3 1 2 HP formatted disks with Tom Page s and our customization and put the product on our price list Last year PC Magazine did an exhaustive review of databases In its August 1986 issue page 294 it discussed PC File I will paraphrase some of their comments about the program below According to the review PC File III is a strong price 5 performer for the inexperienced or weekend database user who needs a speedy database with a no nonsense ap proach The program is simple to set up and use and you won t need the manual except for occasional reference For protection data can be encrypted You can enter up to 42 fields of between 1 and 65 characters The last Super field is left for lengthy com ments or notes You can also designate numeric data fields of fields with automatically generated input such as dates Most PC File modules are simple and self explanatory with plenty of prompts A report writer is included but somewhat cumbersome to use Through the master menu you can request sorting searches global updates and deletes and edit masks for controlling input The prog
26. companies tell us your experience and we ll share it with other readers Demco Introduces A D Software Drawer SPC Demco Research and Development supplied us with the following information about several of their new products for the Portable Plus They have been working with the Buick Oldsmobile Cadillac Division of General Motors and with the HP Portable Computer Division at Corvallis OR while developing a new drawer for The Portable Plus This drawer features a 16 channel A D converter and 256K of space for EPROM s or ROM s At the same time Demco wrote a Statistical Process Control SPC software package Together using Demco s own gauging transducers Demco is providing the auto industry with a totally portable SPC system The A D drawer provides the user with the ability to carry programs and acquire analog data without support of numerous peripherals The SPC software is available on EPROM or diskettes With it you can quickly translate raw data into accurate sampling results The Demco SPC soft ware offers XBar R with graphic output random sampl ing histograms with graphic output and process capability The Demco SPC software also allows for easy transfer of data to Lotus 1 2 3 For more information contact Barry Demers 4500 N Grand River Ave Lansing MI 48906 517 321 4500 Updated Technical Reference Manual The Portable Plus Technical Reference Manual 45559K has been extensively revised The original
27. dress book record structure we might use the fields men tioned above first name last name company and so forth The ability to create and later modify the record structure of the database is the most fundamental capabili ty of a data base system Secondly it should be easy to enter information A form which you or the software designs should appear on the screen for you to enter data It should also be easy to delete or modify data in the database Once you have entered data you will want to be able access the information easily For example you will want to be able to locate quickly the address you are looking for Or you might wish to find the oldest person in your ad dress book or all the individuals under 40 Different database programs have different capabilities in the area of searching and creating subsets of your database For example you can get almost any kind of informa tion you want out of a dBASE II one of the products reviewed in this article However you pay the price in that you may have to do a great deal of the work to get certain kinds of information Other products might not let you get at that same information However they or dBASE II will be able to answer many of your queries with very little ef fort on your part Another major feature of a database system is its abili ty to sort You may want a listing of your address book sorted alphabetically by name Or maybe you need to print address labels s
28. executives don t have the time to learn the complex details of a comprehensive full featured database manage ment program Some database managers require you to think of your information in terms of fields within datastructures and sometimes require you write the database application This way of thinking may seem foreign and too much trouble to people who want a per sonal solution with minimal investment in time and resources ECM approaches data management in a manner very similar to the way you would traditionally manage data without a computer it creates a computerized version of the rolodex cardfile However ECM does most of the work for you Whereas a rolodex card is limited to a physical size the rolodex card offered by ECM can vary in size from one to ten screens of information In addition while a rolodex file is limited by the number of cards contained in the file box or rotary an individual ECM card file has a limit of 65 536 cards In other words system memory is the only limitation on the size of your database 20 MARCH APRIL 1987 Using The Executive Card Manager Creating a cardfile with ECM is an easy and uncomplicated task In order to design the format for the contents of a cardfile you must first determine what information will appear on the individual card After tne field labels are placed the data fields are easily created by making them via the function keys and adjusting their position and size on t
29. it it wastes memory After deleting test com in MemoMaker remove the two lines in pam mnu that reference test The Portable Plus built in test is more extensive It tests the system the screen the timer the serial port and the modem as well as RAM ROM and HP IL HP110 owners can find a more extensive test on their utilities disk called test com To use the built in self test first turn off the Portable by pressing the f8 key from PAM Next invoke the hidden self test which requires hand acrobatics while holding down the CTRL Shift and Extend char keys press f8 A menu for testing appears on the screen in about 15 seconds IMPORTANT PORTABLE PLUS USERS READ THIS OR YOU LL BE SORRY The RAM test contains a bug and will wipe out your A disk Therefore be sure to backup your A disk before testing If you have the new ROM B version of the Plus the problem should be fixed Watch the upper left of your screen after you press CTRL Shift and Break and you ll see the ROM ID letters signifying the version Of the three basic tests you are most likely to use the HP IL test You ll use it to see why your ThinkJet printer disk drive or IBM PC does not respond to the Portable To test the HP IL loop first connect the Portable to itself with one HP IL cable Then from the HP IL test menu choose fl no devices on the loop If all is well add your peripherals one by one to the loop and test using the f2 op tion from the HP IL
30. of who is out there As mentioned above Lauren Hansman created pro totypes in EPROM of some of our software He is most knowledgeable He even rewrote the extract program in THE PORTABLE PAPER cluded on the Shelp disk Lauren can be contacted at Totalogic Systems LTD 156 D Valley Stream Dr Nepean Ontario K2H 9C6 Canada 613 726 1616 Lauren recommended FirmWare as a good U S con tact There you can speak with Craig Battrick 605 N W Fifth St Suite 2A Corvallis OR 97330 503 753 9314 Craig told me of a new product of theirs that should be of great interest to HP110 users a 300 1200 Hayes compati ble HP IL modem In next issue s peripherals issue we plan to review that modem along with a portable serial modem from Touchbase design You can also contact Barry Demers of Demco Research and Development They are the makers of the SPC software and A D Plus software drawer discussed later in this column They are at 4500 Nortb Grand River Ave Lansing MI 48906 517 321 4500 Also mentioned in the issue s Letters section is S O S 1850 East 17th St Suite 102 Santa Ana CA 92701 714 558 1806 A contact person is David Erbas White S O S are the folks that make the nifty cigarette lighter Portable charger Finally Peter Bogdonoff is launching PROMotion 23 Laurel St Salem MA 01970 617 744 5628 Since he is just starting he might be more aggressive in his pricing If you deal with any of these
31. outliner like Ready on tbe IBM PC However even a stand alone outliner would be wonderful Any takers out there among you super programmers Come up witb a good product and we ll be bappy to market it for you and use it More Questions I am really enjoying The Portable Paper and have recommended it to others Of the products that I have from you Shelp is a really a gem Sidewinder is very useful but is the ThinkJet s 21 cps mode possible The utilities on the subscriber s disk are great Questions about present and poten tial products 1 Your Norton Utilities ad talks about customizing to the Portables does this refer to the 3 1 2 disk or is there more 2 The EPROM developments how much actually is the capacity How is it in tended to be packaged As custom back ups of any file up to its capacity Is it possible to have more than one file per chip Is the H amp L option available for larger files As an application for exam ple can Shelp be on a chip If so can it be expanded to work also with MSWord and other graphics applications 3 Is there a decent Time amp Appointments Manager that complements the Portable Plus environment including the pam alm I think it should include time asset management including activity priorities a convenient entry and edit routine a seven day week at a glance print out options ThinkJet tied to the pam alm 4 How about a buffer utility for printer T
32. t let you keep working WE HAVE THE SOLUTION The official HP suggestion is to buy another battery pack and keep both plugged in When one loses power replace it with the other This seems clumsy to us What if you want to do several hours of disk intensive work At Personalized Software we have a better solution 2 in fact Either will solve the problem SOLUTION 1 This is a special power sup ply It will allow your HP9114 disk drive to run forever Just remove the battery pack plug Solution 1 into the open slot and into your wall outlet It s that easy And lets you run your HP9114 to your heart s con tent It costs 129 if you re a Portable Paper subscriber 145 if you re not SOLUTION 2 A power supply and battery pack Solution 2 includes Solution 1 and a modified HP battery pack you can substitute for yours How many times have you wished you had a 2nd external disk drive Personalized Software is selling for a limited time complete HP9114A units including power supply at a substantial discount Call Our special battery pack lets your Portable run directly off your wall outlet You can plug in the regular HP charger at the same time so your battery pack always stays completely charged Solution 2 sells for 199 to Portable Paper subscribers other wise it s 225 Both solutions are custom made Both solve the HP9114 battery prob lem And both will let you finish your work 60 DAY MONEY BACK GUARANTEE
33. ter From DOS or PAM type the following command terminal t cs ter u cs upl Once you are logged onto CompuServe type go email Then press the user system key followed by the To Host key and everything is handled automatically Be pa tient Nothing seems to happen while the first block loads the message on the screen indicates 0 retries and 0 blocks loaded However your file is transferring This XMODEM transfer may take a bit more time but if you edit text on your Portable with MemoMaker and name the file in the Upload Config the whole process should be speedier and cleaner than doing a compose in EMAIL Sending Data Straight To The Printer You can echo everything that appears on your HP110 screen to the printer during a Terminal session with a host computer To do so set To Local File in the Download Con fig menu to prn Here is how you might do so while log ged on to the host computer Once you are in the Terminal program and have set up communication with the remote host system do the following 1 Go into the Download Config menu f4 2 Set the To Local File to prn 3 Set Protocols to off 4 Leave all other fields at their default value and hit Exit Config 5 From the main Terminal menu hit the User System key which will display the Terminal softkey labels When you want to have the screen contents go to the printer hit the From Host key you will then get a printed copy of anything that subseq
34. the scratch pad space that holds the program you are running and the data it produces So for example when you run MemoMaker a copy of MemoMaker gets copied into this system memory scratch pad space In addition the file you create in MemoMaker occupies that same space This system memory is temporary This means for ex ample if you are in Lotus and your system freezes up or you press CTRL Shift Break to restart reboot your system you lose changes inthe Lotus file you were work ing on To save your work you must copy it to a disk The Portable has a built in electronic disk called the A drive You can choose with some restriction what portion of that 272K of memory you want as system memory and what portion you want as electronic disk Simply go into PAM s 6 System Config and press the function keys for Next Choice or Prev Choice to create the Memory Edisc division you require Why would you want to change the Memory Edisc setting If for example you were using Lotus and your worksheet gets to big you might get the message memory full Then you probably will want to increase Memory thus decreasing Edisc Or to get back to the original ques tion you may be running a program such as MSWord that requires more memory to run Then you would have to in crease Memory In general after taking into account all system memory requirements of your application you will want to keep the Edisc as large as possible That way you
35. the upgrade will be available HP is investigating whether Portable Lotus users will be able to use HAL the new much heralded natural language Lotus front end However I don t think we should be very hope ful HAL has large memory requirements In addition much of the HP Portable version of Lotus runs directly out of ROM Most other applications such as MemoMaker are copied into RAM in the same way an application would be copied into the RAM of an IBM PC My guess is that it would make it take a good bit of ad ditional engineering to get HAL to work with ROM based Lotus Hopefully I am wrong Please drop me a note or give me a call to report your successes or failure in getting HAL or any other of the new MARCH APRIL 1987 25 THE PORTABLE PAPER How to fin By Hal Goldstein Some spelling checkers only tell you which words aren t in their dictionary Others tell you the most likely correct spellings Still others correct misspell ed words for you automatically But THE WORD PLUS does all these things and more and it does them fast First of all THE WORD PLUS con tains a hefty 45 000 word dictionary You can use a 35 000 word dictionary instead this saves 30K of memory space On the HP110 this leaves 40K for your document The full dictionary and main spelling program take up about 165K Second when you ask THE WORD PLUS to check spellings for you it lists every word it doesn t recognize and then for each s
36. we were wrong drop me a note or call me Maybe we can get Jack to finish the manual 4 Anybody bave a solution to Frank s printing problem Three Holes For The Paper I like to keep my copies of 75e Portable Paper in a notebook and I m sure others do too Therefore it would be helpful if they were pre punched or drilled for a three hole notebook Robert T Streutker Glendora CA Hal Sorry it bas taken so long to act on Ibis request tbat many of you bave been asking for from the start I can t think of a good excuse of why it bas taken so long Portable To The Mac First I would like to add my name to the list of appreciative readers Your coverage of the Portable is no less than outstanding I have been using my Portable for about three years and have had to solve prob lems and answer questions without the aid of the information you are now sup plying I have solved a couple of interface problems which may be unique to my world but I ll pass them on anyway My office is equipped with a Macin tosh Plus computer system eight Mac s tied together with a Corvis network which includes three printers While most of my work is done on the HP110 the ThinkJet is not suitable for final letters and reports I had to develop a method to interface with the Mac s and or the Corvis network The network does allow MS DOS interface but requires a card on the DOS machine I have not pursued this avenue but it would be ni
37. width characters and underlines SideWinder 969 95 59 95 for Portable Paper subscribers SideWinder 1 01 owners may upgrade to current version 2 01 which supports 8 chars inch by sending Personalized Software 7 50 or by mailing a self addressed 39 stamped envelope and the SideWinder master disk HP150 which uses Crosstalk XVI If you are having prob lems communicating with an HP3000 or a DEC minicom puter you should consider contacting Hewlett Packard directly I will attempt to answer your questions by reference to the paragraph numbers in your letter My comments pertain to the vt mode menus hp mode may follow an alternate menu tree p A 3 All instructions for the com puter assume a Return at the end of the instruction 1 If I understand your first question correctly you have been able to transfer files to and from a host computer manually but not automatically Assuming you have matched all the necessary communication parameters baud parity stop bits pacing word length and have suc cessfully used the xs and xr commands manually then all you need to know is how to automate the process 14 MARCH APRIL 1987 ra oo w we ta e a m toge E Ir HEU Pree tI Din rte a ns 33 me m mA am ar Do fum Bn D Cham CRURA os O me mos ne mm mnm a ia p Sie hE a Mr mE ua t int sd Pg 9 68 Feet s Doch d eun na vy u
38. with Some times you ll need to experiment with the control charac ters or host responses in order to be successful at creating a command file that works More than often the wait statements need to be changed to adjust for timing errors between the command file and the host s response Another important concept is that the host needn t run Reflection 1 software in order for you to control it My example illustrated controlling an HP150 running Cross talk XVI It is possible to invoke the other system and con trol it by transmitting the commands recognizable to the host If your host runs Reflection 1 pay special attention to the note on pages 7 10 2 Reflection 1 doesn t use the Datacom Configuration or its menu variables available from PAM f2 Therefore Power to Interface should set to be off conserving bat tery power The power to the modem interface is auto matically turned on upon entry and to off upon exit If you log off from a host that doesn t hangup after a session depress CTRL Shift f2 This will hangup the modem with out exiting from the program Appendix D lists some ad ditional useful control functions Disconnecting the modem may also be programmed to one of the user defined softkeys by following the in structions in chapter 8 of the User s manual Remember to use display functns to enter the escape character and car riage return and M won t work Specify either L local only or N normal keyboard input
39. 110 you can purchase the other for 19 95 If you bought The Editor from us and would like The Formatter just send 19 95 l The current version of Turbo Tutor is 2 0 If you have an earlier version you can send Borland International your master disk and 10 They will send you a completely revised Tutor on three single sided disks along with a new manual Borland is at 4585 Scotts Valley Dr Scotts Valley CA 95066 Finally we discontinued The Portable Paper On Disk If you would still like a rough version of the product for issues 1 through 7 you can send us 25 and we ll send you the disk with the 60 day money back guarantee that now covers our entire product line Sorry Wiz Date 07 Jan 87 23 24 CST From Cliff Looyenga 75106 2130 Reply to next issue Hal Yes I will get you the next Wizardry article to you by the end of January I just got my issue of The Portable Paper and enjoyed it I appreciate the paragraph about PCVIEW thanks Just a couple of things the area code for my phone number is 509 NOT 505 Also the company name is Advanced Solutions not Advance Solutions I hope you had a nice holiday season and that all is going well for you Keep up the good work Cliff Date 07 Jan 87 23 25 CST From Cliff Looyenga 75106 2130 Subj one more thing Oh one more thing I thought it was great to see a picture of what you look like in The Portable Paper Cliff Date 04 Feb 87 15 33 CST From Hal Goldstein 72
40. 257 714 Subj Sorry Cliff To Portable Paper Readers For those of you who haven t used electronic mail the first two notes from our Wizard Cliff Looyenga were captured directly from CompuServe EMail Most of my correspon dence with Cliff including receiving Wizardry articles is done through CompuServe EMail Cliff is over 2000 miles 6 MARCH APRIL 1987 away from the Iowa farmlands the home of Personalized Software It is too bad I blew the plug for Cliff s PCVIEW As you may recall page 10 of last issue describes Cliff s Turbo Pascal product PCVIEW consists of excellent routines for Pascal programmers These routines accelerate the development of your user interface they make it easy to display or input data Routines for the HP110 Portable Plus the HP150 and IBM PC are included You can order the product from Advanced Solutions PO Box 567 Veradale WA 99037 509 928 4147 24 95 plus 2 shipping Buying Disks There is a definite difference in quality between different brands of 3 1 2 disks Our knowledgeable supplier of disks Joe Meidlinger of Software Production Services of Fairfield Iowa tells us that Sony HP they buy from another source JVC C ITOH and 3M have proven to highest quality disks Joe also says Maxell is inconsistent and that you need to be more cautious with Brown BASF Verbatim double sided and no name brands If you lose an important file to a bargain priced disk the disk may prov
41. 30000 wait for person calling to hang up delay 30000 end if int__count gt 0 then int count 0 until int__count lt 0 reset vector set__vector interupt oldvect__seg oldvect__ofs reg ax 0 intr 59 reg disable ring interupts CLASSIFIEDS Classified ads are 50 per word plus op tional 5 for bold headline maximum 30 characters Ads must be received by the 5th of every other month beginning February 32 MARCH APRIL 1987 Complete Portable Systems For Sale Portable HP 9114A ThinkJet with cases Excellent condition Make offer John Rothbarth 314 291 8540 We ll Sell Your Software Well manufacture market and distribute your high quality Portable software in cluding Lotus templates Hal Goldstein Personalized Software POB 869 Fair field JA 52556 515 472 6330 We Convert Disks We will convert your 5 1 4 disks to 3 1 2 or vice versa Send us formatted disk and source disk 9 50 per source disk Add 4 for second day delivery Personal ized Software P O Box 869 Fairfield gt Iowa 52556 515 472 6330 For Sale HP 110 ThinkJet 1 500 or best offer Includes subscription to The Portable Paper Ted Apking 313 375 0304 THE PORTABLE PAPER 110 continued from page 6 tor checking for bad sectors in the process If there are no bad sectors each file name is displayed followed by the message File s copied If a file is bad its file name is foll
42. 330 provided your 150 or PC is equipped with an HP IL interface card available from Hewlett Packard gramming language like Turbo Pascal or BASIC What s the j advantage of dBASE II over one of these other programm ing languages These are good questions The answer depends on how fluent you are in BASIC or Pascal If you are proficient in Pascal you might be able to write your own database management program in a week or so I daresay that if you were proficient in dBASE II you could write the same database program in less than one evening If you are a complete novice to programming then dBASE II will still be a chore to learn but you will get results more quickly than you would using BASIC dBASE II handles many programming tasks automatically in a way that is transparent to the user You don t need to be con cerned with writing the code for a file indexing routine for instance In short the greatest advantage is that the learning curve for dBASE II is much shorter than it is for Pascal or BASIC dBASE II does have some drawbacks however One of the things you will quickly learn about dBASE II is that the built in editor is not worth using When developing pro grams in dBASE II it is far better to use the HP110 s MemoMaker program for entering the text of dBASE II ap plication programs Doing so will reduce the amount of your frustration by at least 50 In short dBASE II for the HP110 and or Portable P
43. AIZACOEV ouod io dee RS eerie BS 27 HP Portable User Groups Classifieds 0 0 00005 32 Read this list It may look long and bori ng bui it car an incredible amount of time It s a list of the more than 50 programs on Port able Utilities Disk Vol ume 1 DOS Tools Each program performs a spe cific task to make life with your Portable more enjoyable and productive The programs are all in the public domain which means that if you search ed long enough you could find them for free on var ious electronic bulletin boards in magazines and in the archives of local user groups But consider this Even if you had the time to track this many programs down what about evaluating them and making sense of the documentation It would be a formidable task but we have good news You don t have to do it we ve already done it for you That s right we ve combed through hundreds of public domain utility programs that run on the Portables and HP150 and have selected only the best ones for inclusion in Portable Utilities Disk Volume 1 DOS Tools We ve not only made sense of the document ation but in many cases we ve actually rewritten it A printed 65 page user manual con taining program documentation ADDCOL COM Joins two files horizontally by appending corresponding lines ARC512 ARC Archived ARC file compression and library utility ARCE COM Extracts ARChive files from
44. ASCAL le ee Retail subscribers E Turbo Pascal 99 95 89 95 Turbo Toolbox Disk Turbo Tutor 39 95 35 95 ae Wr Turbo Toolbox 69 05 62 95 bird t SUR Pascal programs for Portables 49 95 44 95 Starter Kit 179 95 149 95 Turbo Tutor Disk and manual for learning Turbo 39 95 for Portable Paper subscribers if you purchase any Turbo product from Personalized Software Pascal Includes many features for experienced users Order form and guarantee are on inside back cover of this issue or send check or THE PORTABLE PAPER Foundations By Hal Goldstein The Foundations column contains material that we feel every Portable user should know We assume the reader is a novice computer user however readers novice through expert should find at least some of the material covered bere useful If you would like to write articles for this column or want us cover some topic in this space please contact us Built in Self Test Hidden within every HP110 and Portable Plus is a built in self test If your HP110 starts acting strange this self test can be most useful in identifying the problem On the HP110 the test lets you check RAM that is the electronic A disk and internal memory ROM the built in software on the B drive and the HP IL loop the loop of thin black wires connecting the ThinkJet and disk drive to The Portable If the factory installed diagnostics pro gram test com remains on your Portable s A drive delete
45. HE PORTABLE PAPER Volume two Number two March April 1987 Editor Publisher Hal Goldstein Department Editors Ed Keefe Cliff Looyenga Editorial Consultants Steve Cooperman Edward Goldfinger Contributing Editors David Hughes Art Director George Foster Typography The Word Form Corporation Circulation Rita Goldstein Frances Kempton Glen Frank Advertising Manager Steve Cooperman The Portable Paper ISSN 0886 9138 is published bimonthly by Personalized Software at R R 4 Box 310 Fairfield IA 52556 Sub scription rates one year U S and U S posses sions 55 Canada Mexico add 3 surface mail 6 air other countries add 6 surface mail 18 air Please allow four to six weeks for receipt of first issue Executive Editorial Circu lation and Advertising Offices PO Box 869 Fairfield IA 52556 Telephone 515 472 6330 Copyright 1987 Personalized Software all rights reserved No part of this publication may be reproduced without written permission Reasonable efforts are made to provide accurate and useful information but the reader must make his or her own investigations and deci sions the Publisher and Editorial Staff cannot assume any responsbility or liability for the use of information contained herein Application to mail at second class postage rates is pending at Fairfield IA 52556 POSTMASTER Please send address changes to Personalized Software The Portable Paper P O Box 869 Fairf
46. PC EI Now all that is changed thanks to a software program called LINK LINK lets you transfer data from any RUNS ON HP Portable K Portable Plus E Missing Link A breakthrough for users of the HP41 71 75 and series 80 hand held computers HP IL device to any other HP IL device This means for example e You can transfer data between an HP41 71 75 or series 80 computer and your Portable HP150 or IBM PC This gives your hand held direct access to your MS DOS machine s computational power and unlimited storage capability e You can use your Portable or desktop computer s video screen to display entries made on your hand held e Your hand held can access and control any peripheral device that connects to your Portable 150 or PC including modems printers plotters mainframes graphics tablets and more In short without adding a single piece of hardware LINK extends the power of your hand held to include a whole world of peripherals and capabilities And it does so for less than the cost of a single peripheral Order this breakthrough in hand held computing power today LINK HP ILSoftware 80 75 95 for Portable Paper Subscribers 60 DAY MONEY BACK GUARANTEE See order form for details B TO ORDER Use postage paid order form inside back cover or send check or credit card information exp date signature to Personalized Software P O Box 869 Fairfield A 52556 515 472 6
47. See order form for details TO ORDER Use postage paid order form inside back cover or send check or credit card information exp date signature to Personalized Software P O Box 869 Fairfield I 52556 515 472 6330 Please allow 3 4 weeks for delivery 515 472 6330 for details So for example in a relational database one file might consist of records with our address book fields Another file might be just for business acquaintances The acquain tance file contains records with fields for first and last name birthday name of wife names of children and com ments but does NOT include address A relational database lets you relate the two files So for example assuming all business acquaintances are in your address book you could print the names and ad dresses of all business acquaintances with birthdays in March by combining the two files With flat file systems such as most of the database systems that run on the Portables you could easily create an address book file and a business acquaintance file However it would be difficult or impossible to relate the two files Accounting systems are generally relational database systems We will review several such systems in a future issue There are common features that are found in all database systems First of all you must be able to define the record structure That is you must be able to name the fields included in each record If we were to define an ad
48. Volume 2 Number 2 The HP Portable Portable Plus Users Newsletter March April 1987 Portable Special Feature Database Software Management Publisher s Message 1 Letters Charge Portable Off Car Lighter 2 Portable To Macintosh 110 New HP Portable os cose oe hws eae OE one 5 Updates on Personalized Software Products gt Buying Disks X rays And The Portable lt 0 cae or xS 6 More Info On Backlighting 33 HP IL Link Program Foundations Built in Self Test llle 8 Six Ways To Restart Your Portable 8 Getting Program To Run 8 B Drive DOS Bypassing TAM srr x Urge URS C Sd 11 Terminal CompuServe Autologon Uploading Revisited 11 ROTC CH OM ou et nih Git dae beoe ebd toS dH SOS 13 Special Feature Database Management Software rt FOC UC HOLT e uot o SUE aR EN SEU RE 16 Database Management Product Summary 16 Lotus As A Database Manager 18 Executive Card Manager 18 dDASE LE tc deta btc tor ua ERU 22 Turbo Pascal Toolbox sess 24 PCFile III J MASIET ins read qp UR UG hog GN Oe ER M 25 Condor Junior COBDCIUSTOD 2 24 ir 4 a SE Vos e doas 25 PLUS Notes Lotus 2 01 and HAL RAM Cards With Greater Capacity 26 EPROM UDGIIe a uet aod ES UE EE 26 A D Software Drawer amp SPC lusu 27 Through The Looking Glass 27 W
49. ables Allow you to recover deleted Portable files and organize your electronic and external disks Peter Norton has authorized Personalized Software to include an extra 37 disk formerly available only on 5 4 disk with each package sold The disk includes The Norton Utilities addi tional utilities and instructions for running The Norton Utilities on the Portables and the HP150 Both version 4 0 and the Advanced Edition are now available The Portable Paper The only publication exclusively for Portable and Portable Plus users 1987 Portable Paper Subscriber s Disk Software on disk includes 1 DISKPACK a pack utility that can work with subdirectories usable with Edisc external disks hard disks Com mercial equivalent sells for 50 2 Time Manager s Calendar Utility Prints WEEK AT A GLANCE calendar from Time Manger s appointments list to the ThinkJet 3 ThinkJet Cartridge Tester 4 C Drive Copy Utility Copies file from one disk to another WITHOUT having to copy file first to your Portable 5 Other surprise goodies 6 The PLUS HP Calculator program also comes on this disk Se R Portable Pascal Programs These 600 000 plus bytes of Turbo Pascal routines and documenta tion for Portable and Portable Plus users include programs that access Portable graphics and sound plus business statistic utility game and other routines Great for beginners and professionals alike P 19 PrinterTalk and Format110 MemoMaker E
50. am on RAM disk the HP Portable Portable Plus Install Utility Program LABEL COM Labels or changes the label name on a disk LC COM Counts lines in each file useful in determining amount of paper needed to print LF COM Sends a line feed to the printer LJET COM LaserJet pronter configuration program for the HP Portable Makes selection LaserJet format easier MMTOP COM Causes Portable Plus MemoMaker to print without usual 5 line top margin MOVE COM Moves one file to another directory without copying MOVEALL COM Moves a set of files to another directory without copying the programs them and plenty of examples in included with the disk The manual is conve niently indexed by subject so all you have to do is look up the name of the task you want done You don t have to selves so they work better and so their message displays are easier to under Contents of Portable Utilities Disk Vol 1 DOS Tools remember the names of the programs And we ve even changed some of OFF COM Shuts off the HP Portable from DOS PACK COM Packs a disk Does not have subdirectories bug of earlier version PC EXE Allows some IBM programs to be run on HP150 PCBOSS COM File manager for IBM PC and compatibles only PRINTIT COM Print formatting program simple but effective PRNCONF COM Allows ThinkJet printer to function as Epson printer also sends escape se quences to the PRN device RAMDSK ARC Archived utility for HP150 only
51. ams will be easier to use when we put them in EPROMs For field testing before marketing or safety and convenience EPROMs make your Portable Plus even better Call or write for our low prices today Firmware Corp 605 NW 5th Street Suite 2A Corvallis OR 97330 503 753 9314 language the same effect as hitting the Return key This works manually but I cannot get it to work with the com mand language I suspect some control statements may be needed How do I do this 2 Also I want to exit Reflection 1 with the exit command but have to shut off the power to the modem port as warned by HP with the escape statement amp bR I have tried to type this into at least half a dozen command statements in various ways but when I check the Com munication Configuration in PAM the power to the port is still on Sure I can turn it off manually but that s not the point Do you know how to transmit this escape sequence so the port is turned off 3 I see in your article on calling the HP150 frequent use of M I use similar command statements as for instance dialing with the transmit command but with no control statements and it works So now you ve got me thoroughly confused Is there a list of control codes and what do they do Practically none of the things you do in your article seem to be explained in the manual but perhaps this is again a reflection of my illiteracy I would very much appreciate a response from you
52. ansfer text files to and from your Portable Plus The same WordPerfect features and commands work on both machines The only difference is the Plus s function key lay out which is simple for most PC users to adjust to As always you have to plan memory space in the A RUNSON HP Portable Portable Plus HP150 IBM PC HP Vectra Go instance key in 10 alongside the edlin prompt and then press the f5 key Pressing the fl key at this point will let you see the current line number For example if your file had 24 lines in it you would see the following I 24 lt C Now suppose you wanted to search for all the files that have the extension com To do so just press the f2 key You will see 1 S Type in the search string COM all upper case letters and press the Return key If you have any such files on your disk this routine will find and display the name of the file Otherwise it will tell you Not found On the next line will be the question OK If you press N or the space bar the routine will search for the next such COM file If you press Y or the Return key the search will stop If you want to view the next 12 or 21 lines in the file just press the f4 key The f4 key does not change the cur rent line number The f5 does You may check this out by pressing the fl key To go to a particular line just key in the line number alongside the edlin prompt and press the Return key The line w
53. as who has bought what product and who owes us moncy To do this requires a more sophisticated relational database We will be moving shortly to a program written in DBASE III Plus on our IBM compatible Leading Edge If your HP Portable database takes less than about 1200 total cells say 200 records and 6 fields 1 2 3 s limitations may not affect you significantly Lotus 1 2 3 may be all you require to meet you database needs Executive Card Manager Executive Card Manager By David Hugbes The Electronic Rolodex Just as the word processor has replaced the typewriter as the new guard of office communication HP s Executive Card Manager ECM has replaced the traditional rolodex card file as a means for maintaining a personal database of useful information Installed in the Portable Plus the ROM based Executive Card Manager gives you powerful easy to 9 pis use tools to quickly develop a truly portable relational database Who Needs a Database Manager Virtually anyone who needs to maintain more than a simple name and address list could benefit from the advantages lt 7 PrinterTalk takes up 39K disk space Shorter 25K version sufficient for most applications included on Printerfalk disk rinterTalk The MemoMaker M cmomaker users Now you can take advan tage of all your printer s features not just bold and underline PrinterTalk Version 1 2 A an easy to use software package fro
54. ased productivity you gain I feel that THE EDITOR is a truly exceptional buy I urge you to try it Order yours today
55. ate mailing labels you can add individual 10K programs for each function Therefore Condor sounds very well suited for the Portable environment and that it can be run from the A drive The HP110 version is a subset of a more robust prod uct that runs on the IBM PC The IBM PC version takes up much more memory the files are over 300K The main difference is that the PC version allows you to relate two files with different structures and has more advanced report writing abilities Jeff said he would send me an HP110 version and an IBM PC version to review He thought the both the HP110 version and the IBM PC version might run on the Portable Plus The purchase price for Condor Junior is 195 If you would like to order the product from Personalized Soft ware send us 169 95 plus shipping THE PORTABLE PAPER Conclusion If your HP Portable database needs are simple there are products available to fulfill your needs With the exception of dBASE II and possibly T Master all the products review ed here are flat file systems That is they all manage one file of like defined records reasonably well whether the contents be addresses accounts receivable a coin collec tion or recipes However with these flat file managers you cannot relate say the addresses file with accounts receivable You are probably best to use your desktop PC for more sophisticated data management needs If you do want to relate files customi
56. ave to use dBASE II to accomplish such a task dBASE II A By Ed Keefe There is a saying in the computer business that software sells hardware I wonder how many people bought their computer because it would run the database management program dBASE II from Ashton Tate This was certainly the case for me when I made the decision to purchase an HP110 almost three years ago If dBASE II had NOT been available for the HP110 I would probably have opted for a computer system with less port ability and more dBASE ability Nowadays both dBASE II and the HP110 are con sidered passe by state of the art users Three years ago both the dBASE II program and the HP110 WERE state of the art Today both the HP110 and dBASE II are classified as classics Hewlett Packard no longer makes the HP110 but it still sells the dBASE II program for the HP110 and the Port able Plus at the classy list price of 500 That s a pretty steep price to pay for a piece of soft ware that many would deem to be out of date difficult to use and even slightly buggy So why even consider buy ing or using dBASE II with your HP110 or Portable Plus The answer to that question depends on what you want to do with your portable computer Most users want a record keeping program that will help them keep track of a list of customers or keep an up to date list of products If this is what you want a database program to do then you might be able to get b
57. base Software E Management Introduction By Hal Goldstein In this special database issue we look at various database products that run on the HP110 and Portable Plus This introduction defines basic terminology and discusses com mon elements found in database programs The conclu sion compares the relative advantage of each product A database is a collection of information stored in some orderly fashion A most common example is an ad dress book We will use the example of an address book to explain database concepts An address book consists of a collection of names and associated addresses Using computer terminology each such address book entry is called a record A record con sists of fields For example one record of an address book might contain the following information Hal Goldstein Personalized Software PO Box 869 Fairfield IA 52556 515 472 6330 39 In this example we might name the fields first name last name company address city state zip phone age Each field is of a certain data type Most database managers want you to define the type of information each field contains In this example all but the age field are text fields The age is the only field with numerical significance so it becomes a numeric field Other possible field types include date currency boolean and so forth Products vary as to what they consider distinct data types The collection of all the records in the address book make
58. c IIGS HP 300 Series NCR Tandy Various UNIX XENIX Supermicros DEC VAX PDP 11 Rainbow IBM 32 34 36 Burroughs B67XX B69XX A reputation for excellence George Reid front row second from left and his expert staff at Fairfield Software The synergy creativity and enthusiasm you feel when walk in the door at Fair field Software are simply incredible As one client said after sitting in on a staff brainstorming session I ve been looking under rocks all over the country to find just a couple of people like this DISTANCE NO BARRIER Now at this point you may be wonder ing what a high powered computer com pany like Fairfield Software is doing all by itself in Fairfield Iowa The answer is that it s not all by itself A whole lot of other computer companies including my own are alive and thriving in this small univer sity town Fairfield in fact is rapidly becoming known as a major center of high technology These Fairfield companies and their customers have found that with tele phones express delivery and modems distance is no barrier to doing business successfully And being in Fairfield ac tually benefits Fairfield Software s clients because the lower cost of living allows the company to charge lower prices HIGHEST RECOMMENDATION Please note that in recommending Fair field Software to you I m putting my com pany s reputation on the line And although I cannot take responsibility for a parti
59. case The Lotus sort commands considers a capital B to come way before b in the alphabet This is due to the ASCII representation of up per case letters coming before lower Case letters Therefore Joe Smith and FRED SMITH might find themselves far apart Data entry using Lotus is awkward With Lotus you are forced to press right arrow rather than Return when mov ing to the next field Entering labels beginning with numbers such as street addresses requires the most pa tience Such a label must be preceded by an apostrophe or Lotus beeps and puts you into edit mode For example if you enter the address 1240 Cherry St without the apostrophe in front of the 1 Lotus gets confused It thinks you meant to enter a number and doesn t unders tand Cherry St A more sophisticated database product would let you predefine the address field as text Lotus just assumes if you enter a number first the type of that field is numeric I solved both these data entry problems by writing a 18 MARCH APRIL 1987 simple macro With the macro Return moves the cursor right one cell and labels automatically begin with an apostrophe However it s easy to confuse the macro ifa data entry error must be corrected I also wrote a complicated macro to print mailing labels with my HP LaserJet printer This was necessary since there is no simple way as there is with most data management programs to print mailing labels fro
60. ce to get directly to that LaserWriter I did discover a cable combination which allows con nection between the 110 and a Mac The cable uses two 9 pin male connectors and is then connected to a Mac Plus adapter cable 9 pin female to an 8 pin round con nector The Mac pin out labels were taken from BYTE June 86 ALEXANDER 1 ERHRHUH IE D D 5 36 alkley Hill Road Paddan CT GET 3E Editor hs Fortable Faper Q box EE EU bex Be Jona 52556 Dear Sirs 12 December i986 B Here is the method I devised to print using the Print Screen style Configure the 116 for Graphics Onig Access the 005 screen and blank it cut using CExt Chard Linel pror desired messa unable to continue DVE lype pe E ae and edit it using the arrows Return his will cause the OOS prompt to appear SE UA for seme unknown reason the cOMputer will buzz an a line so that none of your work will be overridden press CReturn Wipe out the offending lines and continue after E cursor down The only exception is f prou Will be moving the curser back te the point from which you left off f the screen scrolls mowe the cursor up to the top of the screen to I reveal the hidden portion When you are satisfied with the screen press E 5ShbiftlEPrintl Sincerely a F Preece H J Earnasch D D 5 4 MARCH APRIL 1987 Uo not press HP110 TO MAC CABLE HP110 MAC PLUS 9 pin male 9 pin male Mac Plus adapter BA TxD 2 gt
61. cessor with this many useful features at this low a price For the Portables THE EDITOR simply can t be beat See for yourself Order your copy risk free today RUNS ON HP Portable Portable Plus e THE EDITOR 99 95 79 95 for Portable Paper subscribers 60 DAY MONEY BACK GUARANTEE See order form for details TO ORDER Use postage paid order form inside back cover or send check or credit card information exp date signature to 3 Personalized Software P O Box 869 Fairfield IA 52556 515 472 6330 Application to Mail at Second Class Postage Rates Pending at Fairfield IA 4 L THE EDITOR gives you all these great text editing features and more Search and replace Just tell THE EDITOR what word or phrase to look for and it will find every place you ve used it At your option it will display each occurrence or replace the occurrences either selectively or globally e Edit two files at once THE EDITOR will display two separate portions of text at the same time one above the other You can view and edit two parts of the same file or even two different files simultaneously Backspace delete You can erase the last character with a single keystroke No limit on file size If you re an HP110 Portable user you re no longer confined by MemoMaker s 819 Line limit You can have as large a file as internal memory allows File merge You can merge two
62. cludes easy to follow examples of all commands Use you printer s full potential Order PrinterTalk Version 1 2A today 49 95 including manual 44 95 for Portable Paper subscribers FREE UPDATE If you already have version 1 2 or earlier send it to us with a self addressed stamped envelope or send us 7 50 and we ll replace it with version 1 2A 20 less disk space than 1 2 RUNS ON HP Portable E rote rus Dmm e mro e 60 DAY MONEY BACK GUARANTEE Ni odes Aa E TO ORDER Use postage paid order form inside back cover or send check or credit card information exp date signature to Personalized Softwar P O Box 869 Fairfield A 52556 61 e 4472 6330 B Special Low Price BOTH PROGRAMS now ONLY 59 95 A 90 VALUE Format110 lets you format headers footers and page numbers all centered left or right justified chain or merge documents and preview your document on screen Formatl10 also lets you send your document to your disk file or printer and compensates for widow and orphan lines Disk includes the manual and Turbo Pascal source code Format110 usually sells for 39 95 now with Printerlalk it s only 59 95 Order both today and get all the text formatting and printing control you need SPECIAL OFFER Personalized Software s Hal Goldstein and FastAid s Ed Keefe Team Up Putthe MemoMaker enhancing utilities of B PrinterTal
63. creates internal RAM disk RENDIR COM Renames subdirectories RNGNAME COM Displays and restores range names for Lotus worksheet ROMANS8 WKS Provides ability to enter any Romane8 character into Lotus worksheet SDL COM Produces directory listings sorted by name size date or extension SEPARATE COM Breaks large text files into smaller files for MemoMaker SM COM SpaceMaker Converts EXE files to COM files and thus saves disk storage space and disk access time SQPC COM Squeezes files to make them take up less space Unsqueeze with TY TEE COM Causes a program or file to be output to both the screen and a file or printer TJETA COM Configures ThinkJet printer easily from the HP Portable TOWS COM Converts ASCII document files to WordStar and Portable Plus MemoMaker format for editing and reformatting TRANSLIT COM Converts one or more characters of one file to different character s and copies result to second file TREEDIR COM Displays names of all files in each directory along with date time and file size TRIM COM Extracts selected columns from a file TY COM Unsqueezes files squeezed by SQPC VDL COM Allows user to selectively delete files from a group of files Program lists files one by one and asks user whether to delete WAIT COM Delays execution of a batch file until specified time WD COM Saves and restores the working directory WHEAROUT COM Gives percent of wear on disk in HP 9114 disk drive WHEREIS COM S
64. ction with a desktop based database product The main strength of the Executive Card Manager lies in its friendly familiar rolodex style interface and its abili ty to share information with a variety of other programs Although it may not surpass the capabilities of other tradi tional disk based database managers it may be the best and most productive data management program for the travell ing executive Ed Gerald Fuller of Williston ND also sent us a review of ECM tbat almost identically ecboes David Hugbes sen timents about tbe product Gerald adds You will be MARCH APRIL 1987 21 THE PORTABLE PAPER running tbe program in less than an hour with HP s Get ting Started part of the ECM manual Tbe program needs 128K minimum but works faster if you set up more main memory A final point tbat sbould be mentioned about ECM Like most of tbe other products reviewed in this issue ECM is a flat file database system Tbat is ECM does an excellent job of managing a card file However if you create two distinct card files witb one field in common ECM would not be belpful in relating tbe files So for example suppose you bad one card file con taining customer ID name and address You bad another file with customer ID and a history of purchases but no address You could not combine the files using the common customer ID field in order to do a mailing to your best customers thanking them for their business You would h
65. cular outcome that of course is between you and Fairfield Software I want you to know that making a recommendation like this is not something I do lightly In short if you want great people to work with and great software as a result I feel you can call on Fairfield Software in com plete confidence The best way to contact them is to call me first at 515 472 6330 I ll talk to you briefly about your needs sug gest some options for further discussion and then put you in touch with the proper person at Fairfield Software THE PORTABLE PAPER comes back the program doesn t load Why A For the answer to the question go to the last paragraph below For some background information read on Any Portable user should know about the System Con fig menu and its most important option To enter System Config press the f6 key from PAM The first choice is Main Memory Edisc This is the option that lets you determine how you want to divide your memory If you have an HP110 you have 272K to play with Portable Plus user can build up their system to 896K and more if they want to use their software drawer Here K stands for 1024 bytes of memory A byte is enough memory to hold one alphabetic character Therefore 272K holds a little more than 272 000 characters of information For this discussion we will assume you have 272K of memory RAM space That 272K can be divided between system memory and electronic disk System memory is
66. cumentation I have included a short list of my favorite dBASE reference books at the end of this article These are books that I pull off the shelf whenever I get ready to re learn dBASE II You might even wind up getting the IBM PC version of dBASE II There are some programs that come with the IBM version of dBASE II that are not included in the HP version These programs are called menugen prg for mgen prg filegen prg and labelgen prg They will speed up your program development immeasurably however they are available only on 5 1 4 disks Also they must be modified slightly to be used on the HP 110 s 16 line display So all in all what you are paying for when you buy dBASE II is a learning experience That means hours and hours of frustration in order to get the feeling of satisfac tion and accomplishment that comes with designing your own computer program You may be asking If I m going to spend my time learning to program my computer why not learn a pro Hewlett Packard s HP IL interface lets you transfer data from certain HP IL devices to certain other HP IL devices for example from hand held computers to printers and disk drives or from your HP Portable to an IBM PC Unfortunately the HP IL interface does not allow all possible combinations notably missing is the ability to transfer data from HP hand held com puters to MS DOS computers like the Portables the HP150 HP150 and the IBM
67. dheld HP41 71 75 or series 80 computer to your HP Portable or to your HP150 or IBM PC with a HP IL card then Link is your program Link retails for 80 Subscribers may purchase it from Personalized Software for 75 95 Thanks to so many of you who are will ing to help organize local users groups Users groups give an opportunity to share tips answer questions discuss other pro ducts trade free software and Lotus templates and meet other professionals As you will notice some areas have more than one contact person and some major areas have none If you are in a miss ing area and would like to organize a group contact us If your groups combine also tell us We will publish this column each issue keeping it up to date Write Local Users Groups Box 869 Fairfield IA 515 472 6330 California Southern California We meet 2nd Thur 7 9 at HP sales office 5161 Lankershim Blvd North Hollywood Re quest PORTOVEC Notes Newsletter Dave Mark 818 794 4969 Los Angeles County Southern California Call during day Blue Chip Computer System 9701 West Pico Blvd Los Angeles Elmar M Gomez 213 553 3393 San Diego Stephen L Eyre 619 452 8530 San Mateo Santa Clara Counties San Francisco Bay Area Herbert L Hamerslough D 415 340 8811 E 415 323 9618 Los Altos Mountain View Marge Sutton D 415 949 0509 E 415 948 0627 Colorado Colorado Springs Dan Ritt 303 528 8080 Denver Call Bob Presse
68. e Visicalc Lotus 1 2 3 MS Word and MultiMate The BASIC format is readily used by most word processing and database programs the DIF for mat is used by Visicalc and Lotus 1 2 3 Instead of main taining mailing lists with the word processor they can be maintained by ECM What s nice about ECM is the transfer utilities are an integral part of the main program not a c disk based utility ECM Templates In addition to the Executive Card Manager HP has developed a set of templates as a companion product The templates provide a series of ready made cardfile and report formats as ECM solutions for a variety of business disciplines The templates can be used as is or modified for your special application Solutions include employee record task scheduler stock portfolio sales prospects travel expense report in ventory patient client information payroll and more Twenty one solutions are provided on disk in this sup plemental package Recommendations The Executive Card Manager is a flexible and powerful database manager for the Portable Plus It is currently the only database product offered in ROM format making it ideal for field use If your personal solution database re quires the frequent manipulation of customer records products or work order information etc while in the field then ECM should be ideal for you If you need more sophisticated mathematical capabilities you should con sider using ECM in conjun
69. e dbkeys file This file will redefine the function keys for use with edlin When you have finished keying in the nine lines for this file you should type in the IP Return command Here is what you should see C 1 A amp f0alk7d6L Line I amp f0a2kl16d4L Search FromLn711 S amp f0a3kl6d2L Copy All szzEwexx wn r amp f0a4k15d8L View Q Line 1 12L amp f0a5kl6d2LPage UseNextPrevp amp fOa6kl4d2L Insert Texti A amp f0a7k15d2L Save amp BackupE yq8 amp f0a8k15d5L Quit NoSave 9 2 amp jB RJ oO G1 4 G N NOTE Once again I have placed periods in the text where you should press the space bar Hopefully this will alleviate some of the problems when this article is printed using proportional typesetting Now to get this file keyed in you will have to use the keystrokes shown below Do this carefully Where you see the letters Ctrl do NOT type C t r l Rather press and hold the Ctrl key while tapping the key that follows this in the text You should see V for example l Ctr1V amp f0alk7d6L Line ICtr1VM lt CtrlVC 2 Ctr1V amp f0a2k16d4L Search Fromin 1l 8 3 CtrlV amp f0a3skl6d2L Copy Albis CtrlV x THE PORTABLE PAPER 4 Ctrl V amp f0a4k15d8L View Line 1 12LCtrIVM 5 Ctrl V amp f0a5k16d2LPage UseNextPrevpCtrIVM 6 CtrlV amp f0a6k14d2L Insert TextiCtr1VM 1 CtrlV amp f0a7k15d2L Save amp BackupECtr1IVM 8
70. e HP Port ables more about record keeping programs and more of what you might want from a database program if and when you buy such a commercial program To get started on this project you will need the following program files from your MS DOS collection debug com edlin exe and sort exe For owners of the Portable Plus these programs are already built into your computer For those of you with the HP110 you will need to procure copies of these programs from your PC MS DOS disks at work The programs were not provided with the HP110 You should look for some of the programs on the Supplemental disk for PC MS DOS version 2 1 You may have to transfer the files to 3 1 2 disks or put them on the Edisc of your computer Altogether they will take up about 20K bytes of disk space Ed Be sure not to violate any licensing agreement Once you have lined up the MS DOS programs you will write a batch program and a couple of text files which will make using these programs easier I ll tell you up front that the resulting program will not be user friendly merely cordial or user tolerant Let me show you what the files look like tell you how you can key them into the computer and then finally tell how to use the batch program The batch program is called edb bat and looks like this echo off cls type dbkeys echo press g and return debug edlin exe 1 type doskeys cls You may even use edlin the very small and crude line editor t
71. e IBM PC market Personal ized Software is authorized to distribute them on 3 1 2 disk for users of the HP110 Portable Portable Plus and HP150 All it takes is a few keystrokes to customize THE NORTON UTILITIES to your machine just follow the simple customization instructions included on the disk Also included in our package are the stan dard 5 1 4 disk sold by Peter Norton for IBM PCs and as a bonus several public domain utilities we ve tested on the Portables There s also a utility called PC EXE that allows THE NORTON UTILITIES to run on the HP150 THE NORTON UTILITIES are a time saver for you and a life saver for your data Use them just once and you ll wonder how you ever did without them Order your copy at no risk today ENORTON UTILITIES M DISK MANAGEMENT THE NORTON UTILITIES 4 0 99 95 89 95 for Portable Paper subscribers THE NORTON UTILITIES ADVANCED EDITION includes version 4 0 150 129 for Portable Paper subscribers 60 DAY MONEY BACK GUARANTEE See order form for details TO ORDER Use postage paid order form inside back cover or send check or credit card information exp date signature to Personalized Software P O Box 869 Fairfield IA 52556 515 472 6330 THE PORTABLE PAPER Since he must form each character graphically the ThinkJet only delivers a row Of dots each pass across the page Considering what the program do
72. e able to exactly re produce the keystrokes needed for the transfer In order to determine what keystrokes are needed proceed as follows a Type open filename gt This command opens a disk file with the name you have specified b Type log The Portable Plus will now log the session to disk file of your choice c Select mode keys and then display functns Now the Plus will not only log the text of the session to a disc file but all the control characters as well You ll need to know these in order to build an accurate command file d Manually log into your host computer e Conduct a file transfer session with the host logging the entire session to a disk file Don t worry about the carriage returns and line feeds that show up on your screcn They are perfectly normal THE PORTABLE PAPER B Drive f Once the session is complete type close disk Then select modes keys and turn display functns off This action terminates session logging closes the disk file and returns the display to normal 2 Using Reflection 1 s display memory or a text editor like MemoMaker load the disk file you ve just created Study it well because the command language file you will create must properly respond to the host with all of the keystrokes you just entered manually Although this seems a bit generic for an answer it is the only guidance that I can presently give you not know ing what kind of host you are communicating
73. e directory and file allocation table it will not find bad sectors in a file If you suspect a problem in your files on your A drive or external disk you can use the DOS copy command To check all the files in a given directory type from PAM or DOS copy nul This command will copy every file in the current directory to the nonexistent nul device The copy command goes through the motions of copying every sec continued on page 33 Turbo Pascal Customized To Your HP Portable or Portable Plus at No Extra Charge Turbo Pascal is clearly the Portable and Portable Plus pro 4 gramming language of choice Hal Goldstein Publisher The Portable Paper THE ENTIRE SYSTEM INCLUDING EDITOR CONSUMES LESS THAN 40K Turbo Pascal is superior in terms of suce EVEN IF YOU ARE NOT A performance PROGRAMMER THE WORDSTAR TYPE portability to other machines EDITOR ALONE IS WORTH THE programmer s environment PRICE OF TURBO PASCAL memory consumption When You Buy From Personalized Software You Receive l 10 Subscriber discount Other Borland Additional disk developed with permission of P E Borland International that customizes the products agg Turbo editor so it can use the normal Portable Extend Char editing keys The disk includes programs to access EU Portable graphics Turbo Pascal Starter Kit Includes Turbo Pascal Turbo Tutor and Pascal Programs for Portables TURBOP
74. e not to be such a bargain Although 3 1 2 disks have proven to be much more reliable than 5 1 4 floppy disks to really be safe you should have several backups of your most important files regardless of disk brand According to Joe another strange fact is that sometimes a disk will format correctly for an Apple Macin tosh but will fail to format for an MS DOS system such as an HP Portable Joe tells us that the MS DOS format pro gram is hypercritical on a disk that is sometimes the for mat program fails when the disk is fine and occasionally it passes a disk when it shouldn t X rays And The Portable Hans Finzel of Austria sent us a copy of an article from the January February 86 issue of England s HP 100 User Magazine by its editor Tim Cullis According to Cullis HP advises that you not put your Portable through airport security X ray machines as it may destroy the contents of RAM memory sometimes you may have problems getting the securi ty personnel to accept that the Portable should not go through the machine Cullis suggests that you put a label on your Portable saying that it should not be submitted to X rays Tim created his own label when he points it out the security personnel they assume it was put there by the manufacturer and check it through Checking The Integrity of Files It is possible to have a bad file on your Edisc but chkdsk says everything is fine chkdsk checks only the integrity of th
75. e that this substitution only works in Release 1A and not in Release 2 CTRL ASCII MACRO CTRL ASCII MACRO CTRL ASCII MACRO o 0 10 AT 20 backtab A Up K i x U 21 PgUp B 2 Down L R Esc V 22 PgDn C 3 Left M B W 23 Edit D 4 Right N 14 Graph X 24 Table E 5 Name O 15 Del Y 25 Query F 6 End P 16 Home 26 G 1 Q 17 Calc H 8 Golo R 18 Window 9 Abs AS 19 tab In the chart the in the CTRL column stands for CTRL The number under ASCII is the ASCII equivalent The MACRO column contains the Lotus 1 2 3 macro symbol Therefore for example CTRL I is equivalent to ASCII 9 which can be substituted for Abs in a macro There are several approaches to generating these lower value ASCII characters in the Portable environment They all involve create a prn file containing these special ASCII characters Once the prn file is created the characters can be imported into any spreadsheet using the File Import command If you happen to own a program such as The Editor MSWord EDLIN built into the Plus or other programs capable of generating these ASCII characters then you can create the prn file directly Alternatively you can use the command copy con codes prn and from the keyboard using the control key and the ap propriate letter generate the desired codes Corporate users let us send a Portable Paper to all of your company s Portable users Contact us for special cor
76. earches disk to find the specified file APPENDIX A Describes the contents of subdirectories HP110 SOURCE 123DEMO found on the DOS Tools disk UTILS DOC Reprints on disk The Portable Paper Vol 1 Issue 4 utilities Gives practical examples of many of the files on the DOSTools disk RUNS ON Pomme o Petru e 60 DAY MONEY BACK GUARANTEE See order form for details Personalized Software P O Box 869 Fairfield IA 52556 515 472 6330 stand Given the state of the art in writing and test ing software there s no guarantee that every item of software works as doc umented without a hitch However most of the test ing and evaluating was done by Hal Goldstein publisher of The Portable Paper and by Gary Good man and Thomas Page Anyone who has read Gary s and Tom s articles in past issues of The Port able Paper already knows of their conscientiousness and thoroughness So look through the list If even one program proves useful DOS Tools could pay for itself immediately With more than 50 docu mented and tested pro grams to try out and use it s the bargain of the cen tury Order yours today Portable Utilities Disk Volume 1 DOS Tools 49 95 39 95 for Portable Paper subscribers TO ORDER Use postage paid order form inside back cover go 4 or send check or credit card information exp date signature to PUBLISHER S MESSAGE We have reade
77. ears and you have lost the work done since your last save If nothing happens using Break you must issue a hard reset which means you lose current data For a hard reset hold down the CTRL Shift and Break keys PAM will ra reappear If that reset fails hold down the half moon contrast amp key for 15 seconds and your computer resets This key is wired directly to the Portable hard ware hardwired All other keys can be controlled by software If you still can t reset your computer the chances are that you have created or modified a file named config sys incorrectly In any case this solution is worth a try Nor mally when you reset your Portable the system first looks to the A drive for a config sys file A bad config sys file can cause the computer to hang The way out of this jam is to press CTRL Shift Extend char with the Break key The system bypasses the A drive and PAM reappears Then you can delete or modify your config sys file A more drastic step especially if you have a Portable Plus is to remove the cover that protects the battery pack and press the little button This resets your computer and restarts the battery indicator at 99 even though the bat tery may not be fully charged Use this method only as a last resort it may wipe out your HP110 A drive and it definitely will wipe out your Portable Plus A drive If all else fails you can remove the Portable s battery warning HP does not approve Open
78. er backups on much of the Software we sell in EPROM Thanks to Lauren Hansman of Totalogic Systems I am writing this article us ing The Editor in EPROM in my Plus He also put Shelp Printerlalk and SideWinder in EPROM for me It all works 26 MARCH APRIL 1987 THE WORD PLUS 150 129 for Portable Paper subscribers exp date signature to Personalized Software P O Box 869 Fairfield IA 52556 515 472 6330 so far with no problems By next issue we definitely should have some pricing and ordering information both for EPROM backups of our products and backing up other company s products The EPROM chip that best balances economy with storage capacity is about 32K There is also a 64K chip but this chip wholesales about 5 5 times the cost of the 32K chip 128K ROM chips are also possible If we can figure out which combination of our products to put ina 128K chip we could have them burned in quantity That would be the best solution for selling our products on chips We our open to suggestions In the past several weeks I have discovered quite a few companies that can also do EPROM backup for you These companies are appropriately cautious not to violate any licensing agreement when making the backups so you should check with the original manufacturer before engag ing their or our services Of course if you want to backup your own program or data there is no problem Here is a brief description
79. ers Like COBOL it is a business oriented computer language It deals with collections of informa tion rather than with mathematical formulas Like other programming languages it teases you with an illusory promise that you may be able to write some ap plication programs that you could sell to others One or two good application programs in the dBASE language would let you recoup this 500 investment quite handily On the other hand many other dBASE II program mers have gone before you They have left a rich legacy of application programs that do everything from producing mailing labels to doing all the accounting for a medium sized company These applications tend to be well written and sell for anywhere from 50 up to 1500 Of course there is a slight hitch in this money making amp scheme All your customers must also own the dBASE II program On the HP Portables dBASE application pro grams must use the dBASE program itself in order to work Also the 500 cost of the dBASE program is just the start of your investment You will also invest a goodly amount of time learning how to program in dBASE II You could spend weeks trying to figure out the documentation that comes with the dBASE II program Doing so would be like trying to learn English with only a dictionary and a grammar book So not only will you spend a lot of time learning how to use the program you will probably spend more money on books that supplement the dBASE do
80. ery well on the HP110 just choose ANSI ter minal within PC File during configuration Unfortunately the 16 line HP110 display is a bit awkward since PC File was designed for a 25 line display However all data displayed by PC File can be made visible since you can scroll the HP110 s display The display of PC File will be improved if alternate character set is selected in the Portable s configuration menu Do not select alter nate console mode The main subset of PC File will even run from the HP110 s A drive The PC File manual indicates 128K of 24 MARCH APRIL 1987 RAM is necessary to run PC File I have run it in as little as 120K I have not created any serious databases so I do not know if trouble will result from using such a small RAM I have not fully evaluated operation of PC File on the Portable If you make any discoveries or modifications please tell me Joe Lischka sent me the following on CompuServe Ive acquired Jim Button s PC File III database program and so far it runs with no problem on the Portable Plus I first downloaded an evaluation version of the program from a bulletin board then ordered the program from ButtonWare for 70 Got it on both a 5 1 4 floppy and a 3 1 2 microfloppy The microfloppy is in IBM format and could not do a diskcopy but was able to copy all files separately to the Edisc PC File III Version 4 0 retails for 59 95 see box for details For an extra 10 you
81. es it still is pretty fast Now to answer your other queries 1 We supply the original Norton Utilities packaging along witb a copy of tbe Utilities on an additional 3 1 2 disk Tbe customization refers to written in structions for running tbe programs on the Portable These instructions are taken directly from tbe article that appeared in the March 1986 issue of The Portable Paper Also on the disk are several public domain utilities including a program that lets you run the Norton Utilities on the HP150 2 Some of your questions are answered in Plus Notes in this issue You can put as many files as will fit on a chip And it is my understanding you can spread a file across a bigb low pair of cbips Unless Randy Salo decides to rewrite Sbelp making it about tbree times larger Sbelp will never work witb MSWord or otber grapbics packages I am writing tbis on a Portable Plus con taining Sbelp in EPROM We would like to be able to offer it to you in EPROM by next issue 3 Tbe only sucb program commercially available is Time Manager included in the Plus MemoMaker ROM and available from us for Tbe Portable Jack Bowers author of Typing Whiz and Private File told me tbat be bas written a better more complete and robust Time Manager However tbe manual never got written In discussing it with Jack we decided that given the widespread use and liking of Time Manager there would not be much of a demand for bis program If
82. f utility by just typing off from DOS The off utility is available in the THE PORTABLE PAPER HP CompuServe forum or from Personalized Software as part of the DOS Tools disk found on the order form at the end of this issue A final vital note of caution Carefully type in the config sys shell linc If you mistype the command you will probably put your Portable in limbo when you initial ly reboot with CTRL Shift Break Here is the way out If you have an HP110 or a Port able Plus without Shelp installed press CTRL Shift Extend char Break Press the Break key last Up will come PAM You can now re edit your bad config sys file If you have the Plus with Shelp do a CTRL Shift Break reset Then quickly before Shelp can be installed press CTRL Shift Extend char Break as described above You have now retaken control of your system So re edit con fig sys Terminal Autologon and Uploading To CompuServe Revisited By Hal Goldstein In the July Aug 1986 Data Communications issue of The Portable Paper we gave an automatic logon sequence for CompuServe and discussed uploading files Since then a number of readers have complained that both stopped working for them For an overview I suggest rereading my article on page 5 of that issue and Gary Goodman s article on page 9 Here are some modifications to that discussion that should help frustrated readers First of all increasing the wait time should solve any problems of the aut
83. gister ax 3500 or vnum Msdos register 4 With register do begin x vseg es vofs bx end Procedure Set vector vnum Integer vseg vofs integer Var register regpac begin With register do begin ax 2500 ox vnum dx vofs ds vseg end MSDOS register end procedure where the interupt occurs The first thing this procedure does is increment the interrupt counter int count It then clears the interrupt for the Portable Plus procedure phoneint begin INLINE 50 55 push AX amp BP BD int count mov bp offset int count 2E 8B 46 00 CS mov AX bp 0 40 INC AX 2E 89 46 00 CS mov bp 0 AX E4 A0 IN AO B0 18 mov ax 18 E6 A0 OUT A0 clear interupt 5D 58 CF pop BP amp AX end MAIN begin writeln The Phone Watcher By Cliff Looyenga writeln redirect the ring detect interupt get__vector interupt oldvect__seg oldvect_ofs newvect seg cseg newvect ofs ofs phoneint 7 set__vector interupt newvect_seg newvect_ofs handle incoming calls reg ax ffff intr 59 reg enable ring interupts int count 0 repeat while int count 0 do if M keypressed then int count l1 wait for ring if int count gt l then delay 12000 let it ring some more writeln int count if 2 gt threshold then begin must be an incoming call writeln get datetime int_count delay
84. hat comes from MS DOS in this batch file The best way to do this is to get your computer out of PAM and in to the DOS mode of operation Do this by moving the ar row to the DOS Commands prompt on the PAM screen and then pressing the fl key to start the application When you see the A gt prompt on the screen type in the line edlin edb bat and press the Return key You will get the message New file The asterisk is edlin s way of telling you that it is waiting for your next command So type in i and press the Return key i stands for insert The prompt will change to you may proceed to key in the above pro gram Be careful when you are using edlin It is not a word processor This means that if you see a mistake in line 1 when you are typing on line 3 you can t simply move the cursor up two lines and correct it edlin is a line editor It will let you work with only one line at a time The only key that works well for making corrections is the backspace key Also you must press the Return key at the end of each line However you can generate lines of up to 28 MARCH APRIL 1987 254 spaces something MemoMaker can t do In edlin the characters beyond the normal right edge of the screen will m be shown as wraparound lines When you are almost finished your batch program will look like this l echo off cls type dbkeys echo press g and return debug edlin com 1 type doskeys cls 8 T
85. he card with the cursor and function keys Key fields can be designated for sorting and automatic dialing Although ECM doesn t possess a dedicated help facility the program is straightforward and self explanatory Accessing information with ECM is as easy as work ing with a rotary card file The cardfile can be sorted with up to three keys or special fields at any one time To extract information from a cardfile you enter the information ECM will search for into the desired fields on a blank in dex card with your cardfile s template A workset of cards will be created for further manipulation or for report preparation It is possible to narrow or widen your search and to perform numeric or wildcard searches ECM provides you with the necessary tools to divide a large cardfile into smaller cardfiles and the ability to make a larger cardfile out of smaller ones Report Writing With ECM Designing clean looking comprehensive printed reports with ECM is as easy as designing the cardfile format You begin designing a print format by selecting the desired fields from the cardfile format Once selected the fields may be moved with the cursor to their desired position on the screen HP 9114B NEW HP IL DISK DRIVE 795 00 HP 2225B THINKJET PRINTER HP 92261L THINKJET PAPER HP 92261B THINKJET PRINTHEADS Box of Ten Cartridges CALCULATOR SPECIAL 9701 West Pico Blvd Los Angeles CA 213 553 3393 BLUE
86. he cursor will be on line 8 At this point press and hold the Ctrl key while tapping the Break key once This will return you to the prompt Check your typing If you see any mistakes just type in the offending line number e g 4 and press the Return key The whole line will ap pear along with a blank line beneath it This line would also be labelled 4 You may then key in the correct ver sion of the line and press the Return key When you are finished or if you have made no mistakes type in the command IP after the prompt and press theReturn key This will give you a complete listing of your batch program If you are satisfied press the E key and the Return key to end the editing session and save your work on your Edisc Do not run the program yet You still have to create two other files that are needed by the edb bat file RJ O GI A G DO However when you do run the program it will clear WU the screen and shut off the backtalk from DOS The pro gram will automatically set up the top row function keys to work with your database program The edb bat program will also give you a very short reminder of what to do next PRESS g AND Return It will then load the debug program which in turn will load the edlin exe program which will in its turn load your datafile This last file loading is accomplished by the 1 in the fifth line of the batch program This may seem like a lot of goings on I will try
87. he hardware a commercially manufactured product will be introduced to the marketplace Well that is exactly what has happened and that is great news for everyone who wants to recharge Portables and peripherals in their car We ordered the product as soon as we saw it we have received it and tried it and it works fine I highly recommend it From the accompanying instruction sheet The MNR 2 mobile recharger is specifically targeted for the HP75 C D HP41C CV CX HP71B HP9114 Disk Drive HP2225 ThinkJet HP82143 amp HP82162 Printer Plotters HP82161 cassette dr HP Portable and Portable Plus computers 11 4 15 0 VDC input Neg ground vehicle system Standard Auto motive Cigarette lighter socket Input and output are transient protected The MNR 2 mobile recharger costs 29 95 and is available from S O S 1850 E 17th St Suite 102 Santa Ana CA 92701 714 558 1806 A couple of comments about HP designs should be made in regard to charging from either AC or DC sources 1 Because HP uses AC voltage for charg ing all of the above mentioned devices they have a full wave bridge in the charg ing circuit to rectify the incoming low voltage AC source A bridge automatically sorts polarity of an applied DC voltage therefore there is no need to observe polarity at the plug in point of the device being charged 2 The percent of charge indicator in the Portables is not up to par for HP design standards and is no
88. he subdirectory 123DEMO was contributed by Tom Page not myself All I did was select it Hope you can fix the credits in a future printing I did discover A MAJOR ERROR that you should cor rect IMMEDIATELY As I see it you left the old version of pack com on the disk the one with the bug in it The documentation says this is the new version Also note that there is a new version of copynew available that will backup files by date As soon as Gary pointed this out we put the correct p 896K pack and the new version of copynew on the DOS Tools disk However for those of you who have the 792K pack we apologize just mail back the DOS Tools master disk in a 39 envelope to Personalized Software P O Box 869 Fairfield IA 52256 we ll put on the correct pack and the latest copynew and mail the disk back by Hal Goldstein DISKPACK Don t Use With DOS 3 2 John Buchanan of Costa Mesa CA writes the following WARNING to Diskpack users This letter is written as a warning to any user of Diskpack with MS DOS 3 2 don t To date Diskpack has worked well with DOS 2 11 on both the Portable Plus and the HP150C 9133H however Diskpack when run with DOS 3 2 confuses the drives changing A to B and vice ver sa The cure requires using Wipedisk Norton Utilities and reformatting the disk Although Diskpack was written and distributed prior to the development of MS DOS 3 2 please inform your readership and incl
89. ield IA 52556 output MSWord s Print Queue which supposedly has a buffer function will not run on the Plus per my experience and later per HP Helpline And considering my daisywheel LQ printera full page of text takes 5 to 7 minutes to print I could should be able to work on a document same or other file during this time Frank Keresztes Fiscber Brigbton MI Hal 1 think Paul Grimmer bas Side Winder Souped up as fast as it can go Erased your files Get them back with The Norton Utilities Version 4 0 Advanced Edition also available It happens to the best of us One slip of a finger and a whole week s worth of text or data is past history But not if you have THE NORTON UTILITIES Just type qu for quick unerase give the first letter of the name of the file you erased and the file gets restored Miraculous as it sounds in many cases that s all there is to it How can a deleted file get unerased Simple The file isn t really deleted in the first place When you delete a file all that actually gets erased is part of the file s directory en try That s why it only takes an instant to delete an entire file Without a directory en try DOS can t find the file but THE NORTON UTILITIES can Now what about those cases where you can t possibly recover a file because you ve already partially overwritten it with other files Surely THE NORTON UTILITIES can t help you then Wrong
90. ill appear on the screen with a similarly numbered blank line below it If you do not want to change this line press and hold the Ctrl key while tapping the Break key DO NOT press the Return key or you will lose all the in formation on the line If you DO want to make some changes press the f3 key This will give you a copy of the line with which to Work You may use the backspace key to back up to the point of change and re enter the rest of the line The right 30 MARCH APRIL 1987 dua esse Soles OC Portable Plus You ll need 512K of RAM in order to allow space for WordPerfect and still leave room for other files on your electronic disk To save space you can op tionally remove the the saurus and or the spelling checker from RAM and run them from your HP9114 WordPerfect s powerful yet easy to use features have made it a best seller It s perfect for the Plus and it just may be perfect for you Order a copy today and use it at our risk If within 60 days you are dis satisfied for any reason simply return it for a full refund WordPerfect 495 299 for Portable Paper subscribers 60 DAY MONEY BACK GUARANTEE See order form for details TO ORDER Use postage paid order form inside back cover or send check or credit card information exp date signature to Personalized Software P O Box 869 Fairfield IA 52556 515 472 6330 r3 and left cursor keys do not work prope
91. ion of this little program but that s enough for now You can try it out with a database of your own making For example you could use edb to create a mail 110 gt WIZ by The Wizard Cliff Looyenga Which Database to Choose Given the vast number of databases available for the Port able it s hard to know where to start Actually the lack of choice is more serious than funny So often I wish I had a database system for the Portable that would fit easily on the Edisc Lotus does quite well except that it is unfriend ly and has no report generation capabilities Datafax and dBASE II both require the external disk so be prepared to wait awhile Besides I don t know if either of those prod ucts are still available for the Portable Ed HP no longer sells Datafax For me I want to be able to quickly check my database to find out what box number has some item in it in storage or what the address is for a friend Portable Plus users have the luxury of having Executive Card Manager available but Portable users are left without Not for long Iam working on a new database package is in the works that will run on both Portables fits on Edisc nicely has a report generator and can import and export files of different formats Keep an eye out for it in The Portable Paper Anyone Home For this issue I figured I d tackle something a little more fun than useful Have you ever thought about buying a telephone answering
92. k J amp Formattio to work for you a Existing Format110 owners get Printerlalk for only 19 95 Existing PrinterTalk owners get Format110 for only 19 95 INPUT SYSTEMS INC 1700 South Willow Street Manchester NH 03103 HP 9114B HP IL DISC DRIVE HP 2225B THINKJET PRINTER HP 18C CALCULATOR CA eackarn Authorized Dealer LIST SELL 795 00 636 00 495 00 396 00 175 00 140 00 HP s new idea will change your mind about calculators Here s why You can tell it what you want it to do In your own words Just Define your own special business formulas Or push a few buttons to get built in business formulas Then fill in your own numbers The Business Consultant gives you answers unmatched by any other business calculator And oh yes It also does everything other business calculators can do Only more easily Order the Business Consultant today PHONE 603 669 1641 In New Hampshire 1 800 227 8090 In New England 1 800 227 1687 CALL NOW FOR MORE INFORMATION ON ALL HEWLETT PACKARD PRODUCTS Offered by a database manager Traveling executives and salesmen will reap an extra benefit from ECM since the program resides in ROM Since many executives maintain rolodex files containing information on clients products or services ECM s rolodex style interface should be a very natural flexible and familiar approach to handling database information ECM Concepts Most
93. l infor mation 59 95 They will point you to a local users group for a demo copy Condor Computer Systems CONDOR JUNIOR HP110 1490 Eisenhower Pl Ann Arbor MI 48108 313 971 8880 195 The Portable Paper subscribers can purchase from Personalized Software PO Box 869 Fairfield IA 52556 515 472 6330 for 169 95 T Maker Company T MASTER PLUS 1973 Landings Dr Mountain View CA 94043 415 962 0195 295 A more complex relational database consists of the collection of one or more files Although each record in an individual file must contain the same structure each file in a relational database may contain a different record structure S NM THE HP9114 B EMPOWERER If you ve been frustrated trying to use your HP9114 external disk drive only to have the battery quit before you ve finished your work then you know the problem Now you need the solution THE PROBLEM The charge on your HP9114 battery doesn t last long enough for you to do all you d like to For that matter in some cases it doesn t last long enough to do half of what you d like to According to Hewlett Packard you get up to 40 minutes of continuous usage before the battery dies We ve never gotten more than 20 Just formatting disks transferring files or running disk intensive software and getting it to work can be a major triumph Plugging in the HP9114 doesn t help either That only recharges the battery it doesn
94. lus is not for the faint hearted nor the penurious Rather it is for those who are willing to invest money and time in order to make their computer do more of what they want it to do References Rob Peter Programming with dBASE II and dBASE IT LINK was written by Paul Grimmer author of SideWinder the sideways printing program for HP Portables Wadsworth Publ Co Belmont CA 380pp Contains chapters on using microcomputers and an introduction to the terms used in database management programs About half of the book is devoted to using dBASE The other half deals with programming in dBASE II III Green Adam B Advanced dBASE II User s Guide Prentice Hall Inc Englewood Cliffs NJ 1984 250pp 29 00 This book assumes familiarity with dBASE II The book discusses such topics as macros in dBASE handling strings dates and numbers It also has a section on recovering damaged dBASE data files and debugging dBASE II programs Stultz Russell A The Illustrated dBASE II Book Word ware Publishing Inc Plano TX 312pp This book can serve as a learning tool for dBASE II but is better used as a reference book All dBASE commands are arranged in alphabetical order Each dBASE command is described in detail and is shown in several typical applications Krumm Rob Understanding and Using dBASE II Brady Communications Co Bowie MD 308pp This book uses a series of lessons that get increasingly more complex as they g
95. ly for The Portables and the HP150 Immediate numeric and graphic feedback of your progress See P 30 WordPerfect 4 1 Disk based Portable PLUS version of the best selling word processing package Includes spelling checker and thesaurus See P 26 The Word Plus An excellent spelling checker with a choice of two dictionaries 45 000 words and 35 000 words plus the ability to input addi tional words and abbreviations of your own Also does word counts Customized to the HP Portables Beyond MemoMaker You won t believe all the word processing features this 99 95 program contains and it takes up less than 40K of memory only 79 95 for Portable Paper subscribers by Hal Goldstein Let s face it MemoMaker is an adequate word processor but it has its limits No search and replace No simple way to merge files No destructive backspace key To delete the last character you have to use the left arrow key and the deletion key s No compressed or expanded printing No but why go on If you use Memo Maker you probably have your own list of things you wish it could do Well we have good news Now there s an easy to use text editor that runs on the Por table and Portable Plus that will satisfy almost every item on your wish list And the program comes with a built in bonus It also runs on the HP 150 IBM PC and HP Vectra which means that now you can use the same program and files on your desk top that you use
96. m Personalized Software prints your MemoMaker files allowing you to e Change attributes type styles anywhere within the files you print Bold underline italic compressed amp xpanded whatever your printer supports e Control numerous print functions including number of copies lines per inch lines per page spacing including double triple quadruple automatic page numbering Avoid paper waste by preventing annoying form feeds Use your HPIIO as an electronic typewriter PrinterTalk connects your keyboard directly to your printer Great for labels envelopes short notes any small typing task e Perform advanced features supported by your printer such as superscripting and subscripting CUSTOMIZED FOR YOUR PRINTER PrinterTalk stores the escape sequences command codes that tell your HP printer how to perform attri butes and print functions Escape sequences are already built into PrinterTalk for ThinkJet LaserJet and car tridges and other HP printers and you can easily customize PrinterTalk for any other printer as well Enhancer It does the things you wish MemoMaker could do SINGLE KEY OPERATION Instead of a hard to use intricate series of control codes a single labelled function key sends commands to your printer Simple help screens in plain English tell you what to do and all commands are summarized on a single sheet of paper for ready reference The user manual is clear and concise and in
97. m within Lotus The macro was painstakingly slow five minutes a page I eventually solved the problem by purchasing Lotus Report Writer for my Compaq The program is copy pro tected so I haven t been able to test it on The Portables I dislike 1 2 3 s primitive and arduous searching capability I avoid defining criteria input and output ranges necessary to form searches and queries in Lotus Normally I store my database sorted by customer last name In order to be able to search quickly I spend about five minutes modifying my database What I do is find the cell containing the first customer with a last name starting with B I assign that cell the range name of B using the Range Name Create command I traverse my list assign ing the range name C to the first last name beginning with C do the same for D and so on Now I can find a customer quickly If I want to find George Thompson I simply press the f5 GoTo key followed by t and I am quickly at the start of the T s Mr Thompson cannot be far away The only trouble with this method is that I have to start over renaming cells every time a lot of customers are added to my database since the placement of the range name cell gets shifted with new entries As our customer list has grown Lotus has become more cumbersome to use Sorts take forever and even retrieving and saving a file takes a significant portion of a lifetime Furthermore we want to keep track of such things
98. machine but didn t know if it would THE PORTABLE PAPER ing list You could even use the Tab key to maintain even ly spaced columns Then you could sort the list by first last name company name or zip code With edb you could then keep the list up to date very easily and you will be able to do this with only about 20K bytes of pro grams on your Edisc Oh sure edb bat is not as elegant as some of the commercial products but you will have to ad mit that the price is right For those who would like to try this database com position but dread the thought of typing in all the esoteric code for the doskeys and dbkeys files let me make the following offer Just send me a formatted 3 1 2 disk in a self addressed stamped mailer I will return the disk with the edb bat dbkeys and doskeys on it Sorry but I cannot provide any of the MS DOS files on the disk They re not mine to give away However I will provide a 38K byte file called words prn that contains a glossary of almost 100 computer terms You can use that file as a datafile Send your request to FastAid Co 314 SW Logan Ankeny IA 50021 Until next time Happy Porting Ed Keefe is an author programmer and Computer Science instructor He is the president of The FastAid Co 314 SW Logan Ankeny IA 50021 Ed s CompuServe I D is 73277 1064 be worth it because you don t know how many calls you miss when you are out Well I figured that since the Port able ha
99. manual had over 20 6 of its pages edited or expanded and a whole new section has been added about the SNA 3278 drawer If you already own this manual you can purchase the update pages 45559U You must order the manual or update through your local HP sales office Converting Software to French German or Italian It is possible to convert Portable Plus applications software to French German or Italian Simply install the appropri ate localization ROM in your software drawer along with Executive Card Manager Reflection 1 and or MemoMaker Time Management revision A 02 00 These applications will then run with local language menus messages and help Localization kits consist of a localization ROM plus local language manuals for the three supported applica tions The applications ROM s will always ship with manuals in English You should be able to purchase these kits from your HP sales office By Ed Keefe You are sad the Knight said in anxious tone let me sing you a song to comfort you Is it very long Alice asked for sbe bad beard a good deal of poetry that day It s long said tbe Knight Tbe name of tbe song is called Haddocks Eyes Ob thats tbe name of tbe song ts it Alice said NO the Knight said Thats what tbe name is called The name really is The Aged Aged Man Then I ought to have said That s what the song is called Alice corrected herself No you ougbtn
100. n suc cessfully on the HP110 Many of these items indicate that the requirement for Lotus release 1A is 256K RAM which the 110 has However none of the advertised items indicates that the program is available on a 3 1 2 disk and gives no hint regarding its applicability to the 110 Another statement in the ads is that the program will print out various IRS forms in IRS approved format There is no indication as to the printer required to do this For the past two years I have been putting together using Lotus my own tax spreadsheet This is time consuming If an existing program for under 100 is avail able and will work on the 110 I would prefer to buy it and save valuable time which could be spent on more rewarding activities Therefore before I start calling various vendors I thought your operation might have looked into some of these pro grams and could offer some comment I have looked into The Portable Paper Volume 1 issue 3 page 24 reference to TaxTime and find that tax programs adver tised require 320K for Lotus Release 1A Obviously this won t work on the 110 James D Small Alexandr a VA Hal Can anybody belp THE PORTABLE PAPER Making more of your HP110 New HP Portable About every three months I start hearing rumors about a new HP Portable or a significant enhancement to the Port able Plus These past weeks many readers have called to ask me what I know I checked with HP The re
101. nhancers These two independently developed programs expand the formattin capabilities of MemoMaker With PrinterTalk you can change type styles in the middle of a document change number of copies and lines See P 14 per page do automatic page numbering and much more Format110 lets you format headers footers and page numbers chain or merge documents compensate for widow and orphan lines and much more Purchase both products at the same time and receive a 3396 discount subscribers only Private File Protects your confidential letters documents spreadsheets programs and data communication files Private File scrambles your file so only you can unscramble it See P 10 Whether you re a Lotus spreadsheet a Memo Maker memo or almost any program Shelp gives Ghel ou immediate access to a notepad and calculator and lets you define up to 26 keyboard macros oo A that is assign up to 31 characters to a single keystroke Written exclusively for the Portable PLUS SPENT EE NER UN EEO PMuyusv us This program written specifically for the HP Portables the HP150 and the ThinkJet printer allows you to print your spread sheets or any other text file sideways This means you can print your 60 column by 40 row spreadsheet on the ThinkJet from your Portable as one long printout without cutting and pasting 3 Project Management Packages All 3 work on the HP110 Plus HP150 and IBM PC Pr
102. nificantly to our competitive edge Lincoln Norton President Corporate Education Resources TOP PERFORMERS Third and this is what has me most ex cited about Fairfield Software the peo ple who work there are exceptional George Reid company president has over 20 years of experience in data processing and DP management His real genius is in recruiting the best people available and then motivating them to be even better Of the 25 analysts and software engineers at Fairfield Software many hold PhDs in computer science many have been design ing programs for 10 years or more and many have had distinguished and brilliant careers before joining the company like the engineer who completed a microcom puter version of Scrabble a month after Byte magazine said it was impossible and the UNIX expert who was a chief computer architect at Bell Labs I ve personally visited Fairfield Soft ware many times and I am always im pressed It s a tribute to George Reid s management skill that he s allowed his people all the creativity of accomplished artists yet has instilled in them a real world concern for deadlines and specifications At Fairfield Software the client s needs always come first The engineers at Fairfield Software write pro grams in every major computer language and database mangement language And they write software that will run on HP Portables IBM PC XT AT HP 150 Apple Macintosh lle ll
103. nternal TVA electronic news service to download reports on the corporate state of affairs features idy mic lea au TO ORDER Use postage paid order form inside back cover or send check or credit card information exp date signature to Personalized Software P O Box 869 Fairfield LA 52556 515 472 0330 HP150 IBM PC HP Vectra Typing Whiz is one of the better typing programs on the market and is priced competitively If you want to learn or improve your typing buy Typing Whiz Typing Whiz is on my highly recommended list Dave Mark L A Scrug Notes newsletter MARCH APRIL 1987 15 THE PORTABLE PAPER B Drive 3 Call the US Corps of Engineers in Cincinnati to down load daily reports on the navigation conditions at all the locks of the upper Mississippi inland waterway including all the navigable tributaries 4 Call our own HP1000 A900 mini computer to run programs So I wish to thank you again so very much Svein Vigander Ed If you have Reflection 1 questions you may write David Hughes c o Personalized Software PO Box 869 Fairfield IA 52556 and we ll forward your query to him Because David will be answering questions from bis own time we cannot promise to answer your question per sonally or in print We will print tbe questions and answers that we think will have tbe greatest value to tbe most readers B Drive continued on page 34 SPECIAL FEA TURE Data
104. o along When you have finished this book dBASE II should be a tool with which you feel comfortable Castro Luis Jay Hanson and Tom Rettig Advanced Pro grammer s Guide Ashton Tate Publ Culver City CA 1985 665pp This book along with its optional 5 1 4 disk is the bible of dBASE II III and contains a wealth of tips techniques and programs As far as I can tell almost all of the programs contained in the book and on the disk work on the HP110 The book contains a treatment of microcomputer usage and database management There is even a whole course outline for use by instructors who want to teach dBASE II III to others MARCH APRIL 1987 23 THE PORTABLE PAPER Turbo Pascal Toolbox A By Ed Keefe For those who are interested in designing their own database management program on the HP Portables I would recommend a more than casual look at Borland In ternational s Turbo Toolbox which is also available from Personalized Software I say more than a casual look because that is what it will take to get the job done In order to use Turbo Toolbox you will need a working knowledge of Turbo Pascal The Toolbox contains a dozen or so well designed procedures that you may use to electronically paste together your own record keeping program The Toolbox comes with a sample database program on the disk This program when compiled and run will keep a list of customers in the computer It will also let you search for name
105. oject 8 9 10 a Lotus template Helps you manage small to medium projects Milestone also for small to medium projects On HP110 you need to scroll to see entire Milestone screen Pertmaster for medium to large projects specify which machine AII three are reviewed in Vol 1 Issue 6 of The Portable Paper RightWriter Flags errors in grammar style usage and punctuation inserting comments directly into your document without mistakes Also produces overall critique of document strength of delivery use of jargon grade level Uses more than 2 200 rules and a 45 000 word dictionary and works with most word processors Tiger Fox A great video game of changing mazes and double pursuit First video game designed for The Portables SeP7 Borland Turbo Pascal Customized For The Portables Turbo Pascal the HP Portable programming language of choice out strips others in price performance compatibility memory consump tion and programmer environment The WordStar type editor alone is worth the price Borland has authorized Personalized Software to include an extra disk with their product customizing the Turbo editor to The Portables editing keys Also available Turbo Pascal Toolbox which creates a data base file management system and Turbo Pascal Tutor 2 0 a step by step interactive tutorial on Turbo Pascal program ming See P 15 Typing Whiz Better than almost any typing program on the market designed spe cifical
106. omatic logon string In the original ar ticle the logon string began with W2 Begin it with a four second wait as in the following logon string This logon goes in Logon String field of Terminal Config of the HP110 Terminal program W4 c ID 72251 24 E ord PASS WORD E c stands for pressing CTRL and c together Substitute your user ID and password in the logon string CompusServe made a slight modification of its EMAIL uploading procedure obsoleting some of the material in the previous 75e Portable Paper Gary Goodman has once again come to the rescue with a simple method for uploading ASCII files in EMAIL using XMODEM protocol From the Terminal s Upload Config screen create the following In the From Local File field put the name of the file to upload Leave the To Remote File field blank For File Type put 8 bit Text In the Remote Invocation field type in the following upl type a pro x Protocols should be On Let s say you save the Terminal Config file as cs ter and MARCH ADDII 10297 11 PCI delivers the news News The HP Chronicle The only newspaper devoted exclusively to HP 3000 computer users Each monthly issue includes the latest news productivity tips new products help columns and classifieds Scientific Data Chronicle launches electronic publishing HP 3000 Sertes 2 not altogether new CPU HP Design amp Manufacturing The journal for scientists engineers
107. on your Portable The program is called THE EDITOR It does everything MemoMaker does plus a heck of a lot more And you don t have to go to the expense of buying WordStar for the Portable or MS Word for the Plus to go beyond MemoMaker s capabilities THE EDITORS s most valuable features are listed on the chart to the right It s quite a list isn t it To me THE EDITOR is a real blessing I use it daily instead of Memo Maker and I ve silently given thanks to its author Ed Gilbert many many times Just afew minutes with THE EDITOR that s all it takes to be up and running and I think you ll be a fan of his too In addition to the many great features listed to the right there are five more I especially want to emphasize 1 THE EDITOR s Lotus like menus make it incredibly easy to use The Portable Paper Personalized Sottware PO Box 869 Fairfield Iowa 52556 2 THE EDITOR creates ASCII files which means you can send your files to and from almost any other program or computer without special formats or codes 3 THE EDITOR will automatically back up your files to protect you against mistakes When you save a file THE EDITOR saves not just the current version but the previous one as well 4 THE EDITOR takes up less than 40K of memory 5 THE EDITOR loads and saves files and Hio D executes commands IBM pc HP Vectra m exceptionally fast Even in the desktop market it is dif ficult to find a word pro
108. or more files to gether with ease Compressed and expanded You re no longer restricted to bold and underline You can imbed control charac ters in your text to tell your printer to print all or part of your text compressed expanded bold underlined or whatever else your printer can handle Unlimited line length Your files are no longer limited to 80 characters per line This means for ex ample you can print 132 character lines on your ThinkJet printer in compressed mode Lines per page You can specify the number of lines per page using the control codes required by your printer Easy in easy out You can exit from THE EDITOR run another program then type a one word command and be back in THE EDITOR in a flash exactly where you left off This includes exiting and returning from DOS which means you can delete copy and rename files while running THE EDITOR Right justification and automatic paragraph indent A simple command right justifies your text and at the same time automatically indents your paragraphs however many spaces you wish Undelete Erased something you want back No problem A simple command will un delete the last word line or block of text deleted Upper lower case conversion Another simple command lets you change upper case to lower case and vice versa without having to retype anything In terms of useful features per dollar and in terms of the convenience and in cre
109. order for 7 50 to the same address Please note that FastAid Co is handling the updates to the program for previous owners Personalized Software will include the updated version with new purchases of Format110 along with its own Printerlalk program NORTON UTILITIES Release 4 0 and The Advanced Edition of The Norton Utilities should be available the first week in March We MARCH APRIL 1987 5 THE PORTABLE PAPER will be selling both versions All upgrades of current ver sions must be handled through the Peter Norton Company You can upgrade to either product If you mailed in your registration card you will receive the details in the mail We will provide more information and perhaps a review of the two products next issue Once you have upgraded through Norton send us proof of purchase a formatted disk and a self addressed stamped envelope and we ll send you the new version of Norton Utilities on 3 1 2 disk Alternatively send us proof and 7 50 and well send you the update on 3 1 2 disk OTHER UPDATES Most of you now have the current versions of PrinterTalk 1 2A and SideWinder 2 01 to be sure look at the label of your master disk If you have a previous version you may upgrade easily and inexpensively Just send us your master disk and a self addressed stamped envelope Alter natively you can send us 7 50 per upgrade and we ll send you a new disk Also if you have purchased either Printerlalk or Format
110. orted by zip to meet some mailing specification Perhaps you want a listing by company then last name The fields that you want to sort on such as name zip or company are known as keys or in dices Any data base system will have some sorting capability Finally you may want reports These reports might contain a subset of your database such as a list of all those in the address book over 40 The reports may require numerical manipulations of fields in your database file Maybe you want a count of all Californians in your address book or want a total of all accounts receivable General ly databases have some such ability to calculate We will begin by briefly discussing the use of Lotus as a database manager Since most Portable users are familiar with Lotus Lotus will be a good starting point for readers not familiar with database concepts MARCH APRIL 1987 17 THE PORTABLE PAPER If you know of other database programs you like not found in this article give us a call or drop us a note In par ticular we understand Notebook II is a good program for the Plus but we couldn t track down its whereabouts For ordering information about the various products discussed in this article we have included a box containing the names of the different vendors and the costs B Lotus As A Database Manager By Hal Goldstein The biggest advantage of using Lotus for your database needs is that all HP110 owners and most Portable Plus
111. owed by the message data error reading drive a abort retry ignore In response to this message you should type i to ignore each error More Info On Axonix We ve had a number of people call requesting additional information on the backlight upgrade from Axonix With the upgrade you are able to run the backlighted display in two modes low intensity or high intensity According to Dave Cox of Axonix the low intensity mode cuts down your battery power more than 50 for the Plus The HP110 can run in low intensity mode for only about one half hour The high intensity mode can be run only off an out let using the power supply and jack supplied by Axonix Cox says that you can save battery power by turning off the backlighting when you have enough light the display will still be legible although not as good as what you get on the Portables without the backlight upgrade According to Cox the upgrade allows the display to be easily read in any lighting condition including total darkness reduces eye strain and user fatigue and enhances group presentations The illumination is uniform across the screen Visibility is slightly degraded in high bright ambient lighting that is in direct light from the sun or a desk lamp From first and second hand reports this is what I gather If you mostly use your Portable or Portable Plus at your desk where you can easily plug it in this backlight upgrade is a significant improvement If you travel a lo
112. ower surges found in some countries The most ex treme fluctuation levels I have seen were in India where voltage meters ranged be tween 120 and 360 volts One friend burned out his printer s battery pack within an 8 hour period He was using an HP 220 adaptor Secondly I have always felt that the HP keyboard was very good It s relative ly quiet and feels good to the touch How ever upon using two other keyboards I found that my speed and accuracy were noticeably improved over that of the HP Portable keyboard A little experimenting with the HP keys response has shown that the sensitivity is excellent when a key gt is pressed from the top but less so if struck from an angle thus characters do not al ways register Has anyone else noticed this problem and if so are there any sugges tions for improvement Thirdly the ThinkJet printer is a great little printer One wish is that near letter quality printing could be generated By near letter quality I mean text whose let ters are shaped like typewriter generated letters Can a software program be created to produce the desired effect Jim Keersemaker Mabarisbi Nagar India Hal According to HP charging The Portable s battery should have no effect on the unit itself However your friend s experience speaks to the contrary HP does not approve of removing tbe Port ables battery but as reported by Tom Page tbe July 86 issue of The Portable Paper page 22 it i
113. porate rates Buy Quality 3 2 Double Sided or Single Sided Double Density Disks For Your HP9114 gousie From Personalized Software Why pay HP 69 for 10 disks in a fancy shrink wrapped box with lots of artwork We sell you quality Sony disks without the Sony boxes We ll package your disks in an ergonomically designed 4 95 library case instead at no extra charge Now only 29 95 Portable Paper subscribers pay 935 for 10 unlabeled you ll need to trust us Sony disks the same disk that HP sells Price to non subscribers 64 90 HP150 users Be sure to write single sided disks on your order form 60 DAY MONEY BACK GUARANTEE See order form for details TO ORDER Use postage paid order form inside back cover or send check or credit card information exp date signature to Personalized Software P O Box 869 Fairfield LA 52556 515 472 6330 NO POSTAGE NECESSARY IF MAILED IN THE UNITED STATES BUSINESS REPLY MAIL FIRST CLASS PERMIT NO 1047 FAIRFIELD IA Postage will be paid by addressee Personalized Software PO Box 869 Fairfield LA 52556 FOLD HERE LE LR ee ig A Name Attention gt Credit Card Holders Title You may order by calling gt 515 472 6330 9 00am 4 30pm Company LL gt Central Time Monday Friday or by send nr ing Sis ee EMAIL to ID 72257 714 City State Zip es Telephone Specify
114. racters to any of the 26 letters in the alphabet This saves you having to type the same phrase over and over again Shelp with MS Word Shelp was written by Randy Salo the former HP engineer who authored MemoMaker on the original HP Portable een nn nn ns 55 49 95 for Portable Paper subscribers 60 day no risk trial f after 60days you are dissatisfied with this product for any reason you may return it for a full refund To order use the postage paid form at the back of this issue or send check or credit card number to Personalized Software PO Box 869 Fairfield IA 52556 515 472 6330 Bypassing PAM By Hal Goldstein Many Portable users are used to the DOS command prompt and for speed would like to permanently bypass PAM It is possible to disable PAM by creating or appending a file on the A drive named config sys In that file add the follow ing line shell b bin command com b bin p Save this file as config sys then press CTRL Shift Break to activate the file You will be prompted for the time and date just press Return at the two prompts Now you will find yourself in DOS with a simple A gt prompt If you type 123 to get into Lotus you will get the message Bad command or file name To add more informa tion to the DOS prompt and to be able to enter directly into a ROM program such as Lotus from the A drive you must create an additional file named autoexec bat If you have an HP110 the autoe
115. ram has been translated into 13 languages PC magazine con cludes that PCFile III is strong on ease of use and speed but is not as flexible as some other File managers T Master A By Hal Goldstein I sent David Hughes a review copy of T Maker to see if he liked it and could get it to work on The Portables David got it to work on the Plus and thinks he will be able to get it to work on The Portable David raves about the product every time he talks with me on the phone He wants me to have the program burned into ROM for the Plus What is T Maker First of all David has just received a newer version called T Master T Master logically in tegrates a full featured word processor a 55 000 word speller a database manager a spreadsheet barchart graphics a macro programming facility and file manage ment A comprehensive communications module should be available by the time this issue of The Portable Paper goes to press David promises us a thorough review In the mean time in this Database issue we ll use a few of David s com ments about T Master s database management capabilities The database manager is powerful enough to compete with dedicated database products Sonja Roizen vice presi dent of T Maker Research told David that the database features of T Maker the earlier product and recently T Master have been used to maintain all of their company s database information including payroll inventory
116. rly in edlin Be sure b to press Return at the end of the line to lock in your changes Do not use the cursor keys to go to the next line To delete a line just type in the line number follow ed by D and press the Return key Thus to delete line 7 you would do the following 7D Return To insert a new line between the current lines 6 and 7 for example key in 7 alongside the prompt and press the f6 key You will see 7 followed by the cursor You may enter a line of text and press the Return key This will give you 8 followed by the cursor again If you want to stop entering text just press the Ctrl C keys to get back to the prompt It is usually a good practice to save any changes that you make while you are working on the file You can do this by pressing the fT key This key will save your current file and cause you to leave the edlin program You will see a minus sign on the edge of the screen This means that you are now back in the debug program You can get back into the edlin program by pressing G and Return If we were not using debug to run the edlin program we would have to re start edlin at this point If you want to return to DOS now just press the Q key and follow that with the Return key If you want to quit the edb bat program without sav ing any changes simply press the f8 key This will put you o back to DOS A gt prompt and reset the function keys What more could you ask for in a record managemen
117. rmatter separate packages The Editor Many features not in MemoMaker including search replace embedded printer codes up to 255 columns per line Also does word wrap right justify Easy to learn and use Uses less than 40K Versions for HP110 Plus IBM PC HP150 all on master disk The Formatter Sophisticated text formatter for large reports program documentation etc Multi line headers footers page numbers table of contents glossary capabilities and mroe Works with almost all printers Note Documentation is in draft form no technical support available See P 17 HP9114 Empowerer A hardware product that prevents the HP9114 disk drive from running out of juice in the middle of your work Plug in empowerer to your HP9114 and a normal wall outlet and you can run your HP9114 forever See P 23 LINK HP IL Connector A software program that lets you transfer data from any HP IL device to any other HP IL device Now you canaccess your main computer HP Por table HP150 or IBM PC its unlimited storage capability and all its peripherals from your HP41 71 75 or series 80 hand held 101 Macros for Lotus 1 2 3 Useful as themselves and also as learning tools for novices and experts alike these macros include recalculating ranges double spacing spreadsheet prior to printout hiding notes next to data cells addressing form letters and printing labels automatically SeeP 3 The Norton Utilities Customized For The Port
118. rs that use The Portables at sea in the Alaska wilderness and for anthropological studies Many other readers take their Portable in their travels for sales presentations to communicate with their of fice and to write memos Another group of readers use The Portable as their personal computer to write letters and keep track of their investments In this issue we have an Hal Goldstein profile you our readership manager expanded letters column which gives a flavor of the varied use of The Portables However we want to start our Portable Profiles column To do so we need your input Whether you use your Portable in sales or at sea you pro bably do things of interest to other readers Send me a note Unstable Power And More While travelling in foreign countries A Where the power supply is very unstable I am afraid to plug my computer into an outlet even with the aid of a step down transformer One of my friends blew out the board of his HP110 in the Philippines Fortunately HP replaced it on warranty I was wondering if it is possible to charge the battery without affecting the compu ter s innards For example when in less developed countries I always take the bat tery pack out of my printer and disk drive before charging them Any suggestions on safeguarding the HP computer while charging I am aware of surge protectors but some electrical experts say they are not designed for the frequent p
119. s a modem that can answer the phone I d write a program that would just monitor and count how many phone calls I miss when I m not home This is accomplish ed by intercepting interrupt 4B hex ring detect Handling interrupts from Turbo isn t real trivial because you don t know where all your registers are point ing Because of this you can t execute any Turbo code without first setting the registers to point to the appropri ate segments where Turbo is For the program included below I cheat Instead of trying to figure out where Turbo is in memory I found that the code segment remains the same during the interrupt so I leveraged off that and made my interrupt counting variable in the code segment To do this I declared the var INT COUNT to absolute to a constant The program included below will give you the date and time of every call that came in since the pro gram was started Note that if you have a pulse dialing phone and you make a phone call while the program is running it will count that as a call Dialing the phone will usually generate more than 200 interrupts Here is the pro gram I hope you have fun with it Finally I have made provisions for the program to work on either Portable If you have a Plus simply change the constants at the top of the program as indicated in the comments as program to count of phone calls since program starts runn ing program phone const interupt 4B change this to 42 for a
120. s and customer codes and print a sorted list on the screen or the printer If you buy the Toolbox from Personalized Software the accompanying 3 1 2 disk contains this sample program in a version that will work on the HP110 If you want to make any further modifications to this program you will be in for a very good challenge The Toolbox will send you up and down such things as B trees and into ISAM Indexed Sequential Access Method files However if you are proficient in reading Pascal source code you should be able to see what the sample program is supposed to do The comments in the source code are scant and sparse The documentation for the Toolbox is all contained in the first 85 pages of the Users Manual This documenta tion assumes that you are very conversant with Turbo Pascal It is not a textbook for beginners in Pascal I have used this Toolbox for several application pro grams and found it to be a workable solution to designing my own record keeping systems If you need to develop your own database management system the Turbo Tool box may be just what you are looking for PC File III A x By Hal Goldstein si Thomas Page of Houston Texas and Joe Lischka of Ft Lewis WA sent me positive reports about running PC File on the HP110 and Portable Plus respectively Tom Page sent me a disk containing PCFile III and detailed instructions for customizing it with the HP110 and PAM Tom says PC File III runs v
121. s simple to do so Open the battery compartment and remove the plug witb tbree wires attacbed by careful ly sliding it upward Unfortunately you lose your Edisc and configuration infor mation in tbe process Does anyone bave a better solution I know of no way of improving tbe keyboard Paul Grimmer autbor of SideWinder and Link will be coming out with new character generator graphics software I am not sure that you will be able to form a character set bet ter than HP did it but with Paul s new software you ll be able to try Some Questions I have several comments that seem not to be addressed by others so I will go on record 1 PACK Jan Feb p 5 referred to the 792 bytes 1985 and 896 bytes 1986 versions of Pack My machine has the new board and my Pack program is 792 bytes and dated 4 3 86 Does this mean I have the newer version 2 Lotus 2 When will it be available if ever If not scheduled to be made is there any way to work with WKI1 schedules on the Portable Plus 3 Is there any plan to put dBASE III on a a file on disk an audio cassette or give me a call so we can I will publish profiles of interest or practical value to Also in this issue we take a look at a number of data base systems that run on The Portable For those unfamiliar with database concepts read the introduction to the sec tion and the subsequent article on Lotus as a database Next issue we will look at peripherals that run wi
122. s up a file All the records in a file have the same fields That is every entry in the address book has space for first name last name company address city state zip phone age These records in the address book are said to have the same structure or format A file then consists of records with the same structure A flat file database as opposed to a relational database consists of files all with the same record struc ture Most of the products reviewed in this article with the exception of dBASE II are simple flat file database systems 16 MARCH APRIL 1987 Database Management Software Product Summary Below is a summary of database management products discussed in this special issue of The Portable Paper Hewlett Packard These products can be obtained through your HP dealer or through the HP Direct Marketing Divi sion 800 538 8787 California Alaska Hawaii 408 738 4133 dBASE II HP110 PLUS 45468D 500 EXECUTIVE CARD MANAGER PLUS 45555K Option 400 295 Plug in ROM soft ware requires software drawer 8292A 150 EXECUTIVE CARD MANAGER TEMPLATES PLUS 45441D 125 1 2 3 FROM LOTUS HP110 Built in 1 2 3 FROM LOTUS PLUS software drawer 8202A 3150 Personalized Software PO Box 869 Fairfield IA 52556 515 472 6330 69 95 The Portable Paper subscribers pay 62 95 PC FILE II VERSION 4 0 HP110 PLUS P O Box 5786 Bellevue WA 98006 800 528 8866 206 454 0479 technica
123. size of disk L 3 LJ 514 n MEME pecify 3 2A To Order by Mail IMPORTANT Check here if you require single sided 32 disk 1 Staple your check to this order form What kind of computer do you use check all that apply US funds payable to Personalized L HP110 Portable Portable Plus J HP150 touchscreen Software or note your credit card IBM PC or compatible information in the space provided 2 Fold this panel back first then fold the top panel down so it covers this panel Card 7 Expires 3 Tape shut and drop in mail We pay postage Method of payment L Check L MasterCard O VISA Cardholder Signature IMEEM M M SA M m S E O S O aU AA Jo Lo LLL LL Luo Loos Loo Loo La Lo o Lou oo o o e e ma LS LL LLL Lu e me mm LLLLZLLL rrr EN NN el ea D e a Personalized Software ORDER FORM Products that make HP Portables smarter PO Box 869 Fairfield Iowa 52556 515 472 6330 Subscriber Product Retail Discount Qty Total N A The Portable Paper 3 Year Subscription 149 00 Check one O New subscriber Renewal 99 00 Begin with Li Jan 1986 JJan 1987 Current issue 55 00 Back Issues indicate numbers 9 20 Time Manager Pack HP Calculator N A j N A z gt 2 Year Subscription 1 Year Subscription a e a co ee eee 7 504 7 504 35 95 29 95 39 95 79 95 49 9 99 9 35 9 129 0 199 0 75 9 62 9 89 95 89 95 129 00 545 00
124. sponse was that of course HP is always working on future products However we should not expect anything for many months When I worked at HP HP had the philosophy that the real strength of the company was not in the next product about to be introduced but on the progress of subsequent products I think many of you would be surprised all the steps a product must go through before it can be released especially a hardware product Even though I have ex perienced the release cycle many times I am always sur prised how long things take There can be a last minute bug in the product some problem with a supplier or with the manufacturing process a manual not finished in time a distribution channel not in place so many things can cause a delay These delays are frustrating both for the con sumer and the manufacturer but seem to be inherent in the process My feeling is that it will be sometime yet before HP has a new product or significant enhancement for the Plus We ll see Updates On Products From Personalized Software DOS TOOLS UPDATE PACK Gary Goodman who did most of the work finding testing and refining the programs on the DOS Tools disk wrote me the following Ijust got the DOS Tools package The manual looks absolutely great very well laid out and easy to read Now that you have one completed it can serve as an example for producing others It will be a lot easier next time One note on the manual t
125. t program With edb bat you can add delete and change records view them move around in them and even search and find items in the data file About the only thing that edb bat won t do is to sort your file for you However the MS DOS sort com program will do a respectable job of that Say for example that you wanted to sort the database called files so that the files were arranged in order of in creasing size To do this just type in the following com mand alongside the DOS A gt prompt again wherever you see a period in the line press the space bar instead type files sort 14 gt filesize and then press the Return key This command relies on the use of the l and gt sym bols to send the output of the type files command THROUGH the sort program The sort program will sort the file based on whatever is in column 14 and higher of each line It will then send the result TO the file called filesize Running this routine is confusing to beginners since if everything works no message appears on the screen You simply get the A gt prompt back again after a short delay Now you can issue the command edb filesize to get into your database program and play around with this file As a test of how much you have learned see if you can have the edb program find all the files created or updated in December Hint Search for lines with in them There s a lot more that we could do to refine and ex pand the operat
126. t that s quite another thing The song is called Ways and Means and tbe tunes my own invention Lewis Carroll Through tbe Looking Glass Beginners in the wonderland of computing often look at the field of database management programs and become sad very quickly The words used in database manage ment are confusing to say the least There are fields and records files and databases searches sorts B trees relational hierarchical and flat file manage ment programs and on and on To add to the confusion there are all the different pro grams available for doing database management PC FILE dBASE II Executive Card Manager List Manager Notebook II Like most country amp western songs these programs sound almost alike on first hearing To paraphrase Lewis Carroll if you re sad about all this let me sing you a song of databasing no let me show you how to write your own song of databasing and call the song some Ways and Means The words may be someone else s the tune will be our own invention MARCH APRIL 1987 27 THE PORTABLE PAPER Designing Your Own Database Program With DOS Long before there was PC FILE III or dBASE III or even Lotus 1 2 3 there was MS DOS the disk operating system for the HP110 and Portable Plus MS DOS has several routines that you can use to build your own database management system And when you are done you will know more about DOS on th
127. t and use your Portable many hours at a time only on battery you should consider the tradeoffs carefully before upgrading The installation is performed at the Axonix factory with a one week turnaround guaranteed The cost of the backlight upgrade is 300 For information or scheduling contact Axonix Marketing at 417 Wakara Way Salt Lake Ci ty UT 84108 801 582 9271 GWBASIC Update The 150 110 GWBASIC product 45450D has been up dated with the addition of a Portable Plus version and bug fixes for the HP150 and HP110 versions If you have a copy of the old product you can order an upgrade from Direct Marketing Division Send back your old master disk but not the manual and ask for the 45450 63002 upgrade Write Verify Bug When using HP110 DOS diskcopy it is possible to get the error message Data error writing drive C Abort Retry Ig nore The files still get copied and work fine The problem is a bug in the HP110 s built in Write Verify function accessed via the PAM f6 System Config menu When this function is turned on it is supposed to operate similar to the MS DOS verify option however there is a bug To avoid any copying problems turn the Disk Write Verify field in System Config to off HP IL Link Program Paul Grimmer author of sideways printing program SideWinder has done it again On our price list at the end of this issue you will find a program called Link If you want to transfer data from your han
128. t what it appears to be The percent of charge reading is not reliable unless the charging current has been present for about 12 16 hours It is very common to see a 100 in dication after an hour or two of charge but if the charge is removed at that point A MARCH APRIL 1987 a low battery warning will be experi enced after a few minutes use The bottom line is don t believe the of charge in dicator unless the unit has been charged for 12 16 hours Mike Mooney Heavener OK Don t Give Up The Ship We take our HP110 to sea aboard ship not unfortunately yachts where it has served us well in the many disciplines involved in the seagoing profession Your publica tion has been most helpful in broadening our knowledge of our machine Don t abandon discussions of up grades for the 110 and or the Plus after having seen the marvels both HP and third party hardware types came out with for the 41 75 and 71 surely anything is possible I can live just fine thanks with the 16 line display with or without back light if only I could get great gobs of ad ditional Edisc RAM Howard W Newton Jr Pasadena TX Outline Processor Anyone know of an outline processor for the Portable Plus The new version of MSWord on ROM would be perfect any other ideas Mattbew B Wallace Sac City IA Hal I too really miss tbe presence of an outline processor on The Portables The ideal would be a Sbelp type memory resi dent
129. test menu HP11O users if you test RAM heed warning not to reset your computer during the test The test copies your data from one segment of RAM to another so resetting 8 MARCH APRIL 1987 your computer likely means the loss of data on your A drive Also for HP110 users the diagnostics program in cluded in your utilities disk tests the display keyboard modem and CPU in addition to the built in test functions Use it if you suspect your RAM even though your RAM passed the built in test It s possible for bad RAM to hold charge for a few seconds thus passing the built in test However bad RAM will not pass the 30 second utilities disk RAM test To start the utilities disk diagnostics put the utilities disk in drive C and type c test from PAM When you run either self test the Portable does not shut itself off after several minutes of non use as it usual ly does So if you forget to exit the self test you will run the battery down Six Ways to Restart Your Portable In the unfortunate event your computer bangs that is no matter what you do nothing happens there are six ways to reset it The gentlest thing you can try if you are in the middle of an application like Lotus or MemoMaker is to press the Shift key with the Break key This is the same as pressing the CTRL key with the letter c If you re lucky with this method you lose no data and things go back to normal Otherwise either nothing happens or PAM reap p
130. th your Portable We will discuss printers modems disk drives and plotters Write to us with your experiences or questions on any such peripheral particularly letter quality printers ROM chip 4 Is it possible to reconfigure the NUM keypad when using Lotus The problems are twofold A The slash on the zero is hard to remember and I would prefer to leave the slash next to the shift key Can this be done B When the NUM is on you cannot access the letters under them without turning off the NUM The problem is most inconvenient when you try to enter Qsum You must now turn off NUM get your total and turn NUM back on If we could access the letters with the shift key like IBM with their cursor num keyboard it would be more convenient 5 Has anyone ever figured out how to use the PC2622 communication chip The manual is terrible Good luck and keep up the good work I m looking forward to your answers to the above questions Jerry Warsbaw New York Hal 1 My best guess is that if you do not bave a PACK witb 896K bytes you have an old PACK The old PACK is also on the initial DOS Tools disks we sent out DOS Tools owners witb 792K PACK send us your master disk and well up date your disk Any subscriber wbo wisbes tbe current PACK S96K can send us a formatted disk and self addressed stamped envelope order Time Manager for tbe HPIIO which includes PACK for 7 50 or order DOS Tools from us for
131. the battery com partment and remove the plug with three wires attached by carefully sliding it upward Unfortunately you lose your Edisc and configuration information in the process In general exit naturally from any program you are us ing rather than doing a hard reset otherwise it is possible to lose data or even destroy files on your disk I Can t Get It To Run Q When I try to run a program from PAM that requires 100K of RAM memory after a few seconds the PAM screen Need custom programs for your Portables The people at Fairfield Software are tops in the business When you read this you ll know why By Hal Goldstein President Personalized Software It will probably be a waste of five minutes for you to read the rest of this ad unless you re looking for a source of high quality custom software delivered on time at a reasonable price But if you are in the market for custom software the next five minutes could save you hun dreds of hours and thousands of dollars In my opinion when it comes to soft ware development you won t find a better company than Fairfield Software They do excellent work I d stake my reputation on them without hesitation Here s why TRACK RECORD First of all in the last two years alone Fairfield Software has developed e 17 educational software products for Scott Foresman the largest textbook publisher in the U S a portable computer based payroll sales inventory
132. to ex plain why using debug to run edlin is a good strategy later in the article Finally when you are finished with your database the edb bat program will reset the function keys to their nor mal DOS use Now for the files that will set and reset the function keys dbkeys and doskeys We will use edlin to generate these two files When we are finished we will have two text files that will redefine the top row function keys on either of the HP Portables You may even use the doskeys file apart from the edb bat program to reset the DOS function keys This comes in handy on the HP110 when you have been run ning MemoMaker or Terminal while in DOS mode Both of those built in programs fail to redefine the function keys completely doskeys will compensate for that deficiency Let s start with the doskeys file since it is the easier one to create Again let s use edlin to construct the file Get back into edlin with the command edlin doskeys and press the Return key When you see the New File and prompt use the edlin insert command i followed by the Return key to get started When you have finished keying in the following nine lines your file will look like this which you may confirm by issuing the 1P Return command as above 1 A amp f0alk16d2L Copy 1 Char p 2 amp f0a2k16d2L Copy up to Char q 3 amp f0a3kl6d2L Copy All 222v r 4 amp f a4k16d2L Skip 1 Char s 5
133. uch word it gives you a wide range of options These include e Look up and display all dictionary words with similar spellings e View the word in context right in your document e Correct the spelling nsert the correctly spelled word into your document and option ally print a message if the new spelling d spelinie errors and fix them in a flash e Leave the word as is and add it to the main dictionary e Add the word to your own dic tionary of special terms for in stance jargon or technical terms you only use in certain types of documents THE WORD PLUS also tells you the correct spellings of individual words independent of any document It can find all the words with a given prefix or suffix or even find words that rhyme It can do a global search and replace on multiple words in a single pass And its hyphenation feature inserts soft hyphens into words making it easier for many word processors to format text properly Additional utilities within THE WORD PLUS will count all the words in a file count the frequency of each word in a file and alphabetize the words in a file automatically If you ve ever worried about spell ing errors or embarrassing typos worry no longer Order THE WORD PLUS It s fast it s friendly and it never forgets a spelling THE WORD PLUS A Great Spelling Checker And More Of all the spelling checkers I ve used I like
134. ude a warning in the future distribution of the program Making It Work Many of you wrote in complaining that you could not get the diskpack on the 1987 subscriber s disk to work There are two tricks that should solve the difficulties First of all not only the arguments but also the disk drive letter must be in LOWER case Secondly the disk drive letter should follow the arguments So for example the dpack bat file included on the subscriber s disk should have contained the following line c diskpack w a w and a are both in lower case and the a follows the w This command will pack the A drive when the diskpack program is on the C drive We apologize for the confusion FORMAT110 By Ed Keefe After extensive fine tuning the Format110 utility program is available in an updated version 5 0 This new version of the program has all the same features as previous versions but now it really does get the ThinkJet printer to do underlined and boldface printing The program will also let you run other programs from within it The disk also contains another program which will let you convert MemoMaker document files to ASCII text files very quick ly The documentation has been revised to reflect all the changes To get your update send your original Format110 disk along with a self addressed stamped disk mailer to FastAid Co 314 S W Logan Ankeny IA 50021 Alternatively you may send proof of purchase and a check or money
135. uently appears on your screen You can use only printers that can be connected to the two wire HP IL interface because the hardware that controls the modem also controls the serial port Both the modem and the serial port cannot be active at the same time The Portable s Terminal buffer is 2K That means that nothing will be sent to the printer until you exit Download mode or more than 2K of data has been sent to the printer Reflection 1 B PLUS Reflection Questions Solved Dear Mr Hughes As an Portable Plus user I came across your name in The Portable Paper Vol 1 No 4 in which you authored the ar ticle on the HP Reflection 1 communications program I have had considerable difficulty using this program for automatic file transfers The major reasons for this seems to be that I am practically computer illiterate and the HP documentation is practically useless Therefore I am writing to you as the only person I have ever heard of who has apparently mastered the use of Reflection 1 I hope that you can find a few minutes in your schedule to briefly answer a few questions 1 I need to transmit to the host through the command PUT YOUR PORTABLE PLUS PROGRAMS IN aft if ar Pitt pE P EPROMS FAST ECONOMICAL SAFE EPROM PROGRAMMING FOR THE T PORTABLE PLUS 32K OR 64K EPROMs Larger Programs can be accommodated by multiple devices Quantities from 1 to 1000 or MORE e Your EPROM or ours Your progr
136. xec bat file can look as follows path a b b bin prompt h t h h h h h h p This tells the system all possible places to look for pro grams before giving up Typing 12 3 from the DOS prompt will now load Lotus If you appended c Nto the path com mand DOS would also search the C drive for the program file to be executed If you have a Portable Plus make sure you include all the subdirectories listed when you give the dir b com mand For example my autoexec bat file contains the following path command path a b b bin b 45548k b hp82861 b memo tm prompt h t h h h h hg h p Included in the path command are subdirectories for PC2622 Lotus Memomaker and Time Manager The DOS prompt command causes a simple DOS prompt with the time and current subdirectory to be displayed on either the HP110 or Portable Plus Unfortunately if you have to reconfigure the system in some way e g you want to change the Memory Edisc parameter you have to get into PAM first To enter PAM type pam from DOS From PAM f6 will put you in System Config Exiting System Config will put you back in DOS If you are ambitious and a programmer you can study Cliff Looyenga s Wizardry column in the Jan Feb 1987 _ issue of The Portable Paper There Cliff outlined the mechanism for changing configuration values from DOS Send us your successes we ll put them on a future utilities disk To turn the system off from DOS use the of
137. y 303 777 0326 Georgia Atlanta Call Brian Walsh D 404 394 2500 E 404 399 6842 Hawaii Honolulu Rodney Y Fukuya if in terested 808 945 3111 Indiana Indianapolis Bob Glass 317 638 2326 Iowa Mid Iowa Ed Keefe D 515 964 6644 E 515 964 7064 Southeast Iowa Hal Goldstein 515 472 6330 Minnesota Minneapolis St Paul John Fer man 612 822 1372 Meet 2nd Wed 7 00 at HP on Larpenteur Ave St Paul Maine Yarmouth Every last Tue 6 30 US Route one Yarmouth ME 04096 846 5497 North Carolina Charlotte and surroun ding area John Jacob 704 334 3468 Texas Dallas Ft Worth Metroplex D E Pennington D 214 349 0190 E 214 331 4402 Houston Thomas R Page D 713 759 4259 E 713 528 7138 Utah Utah County Donna Hoover D 378 4421 E 375 4812 Washington Eastern Washington Nor thern Idaho Western Montana and possibly Western Washington Bob Sand berg 509 466 4999 Eastern Washington Stephen S Warner D 509 534 1588 E 509 535 3322 Washington D C Greater Wasbington D C Area 8 00 PM Third Monday of Each Month Ballston Tower 1 800 N Quincy St Room 519 Call to confirm and to say Hi William F Cross D 202 696 4112 E 703 845 9508 Australia 8 Avoca St S Yarra Victoria Australia Nigel S Ball 03 267 8344 England Trafalgar House Grenville Place Mill Hill London NW7 3SA England Tim Cullis 01 959 4359 Netherlands Mr R M Franquiner Men thenbergseweg 13 NL
138. y with a pro gram such as Lotus 1 2 3 You might even want to experi ment with the routines in the Through tbe Looking Glass column in this issue of The Portable Paper to see what kind of a database management program you can design with plain old MS DOS Both Lotus 1 2 3 and MS DOS have routines that will help you sort your data And both contain procedures for letting you locate items in your database Lotus 1 2 3 and even the EDLIN program will let you add to your database and keep it up to date However if you want to design your own fancy data input screens and develop your own routines for printing 22 MARCH APRIL 1987 reports then EDLIN falls down on the job Lotus 1 2 3 is more capable in this area but it demands that you learn something about macros On the other hand dBASE II will let you design your own input forms very quickly It will let you generate col umnar reports even reports which include subtotals much more quickly For example to design such a report you simply type in the command report and answer a standard set of questions dBASE II will automatically create the report for you However this relative ease of data input and output does not justify a 500 price tag When you buy dBASE II you are really paying for a programming language like BASIC or COBOL Actually dBASE II shares some of the characteristics of BASIC and COBOL Like BASIC dBASE II was designed to be used by novice programm
139. ze a user inter face or design your own reports then your choice is prob ably limited to dBASE II If you want to easily integrate text spreadsheet or communications data with your database the simplest ex ample being a merge of a form letter with customer names then T Master will be your choice If you have a Portable Plus and want an easy to use file manager in ROM and don t mind paying a little extra for the convenience then ECM is for you With either The Portable or Portable Plus if you want a straightforward easy to use database system and don t want to spend a lot of money PC File is your choice If you have an HP110 and want to use a simple clean program that is memory efficient and designed for your 16 line screen choose Condor Junior If you are a Pascal programmer or a would be pro grammer get Turbo Toolbox You ll receive the Turbo Pascal source code for a database system that contains ex cellent sort and search routines Knowledge of sorting and searching is fundamental for programmers Finally if your database needs are simple and don t re quire a lot of searching or a lot of records use Lotus or the Time Manager address book Since most Portable users have Lotus in ROM Lotus is a good starting point for hand ling database needs PLUS Notes Lotus 2 01 And HAL The Lotus 2 01 upgrade for the Portable Plus is at least two to three months away and maybe longer HP will give no firm date as to when

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