Minutes of TAMU OS/2 User's Group Meeting 7 March 1995 -- George R. Welch 9 people in attendance. The users group's computer is fixed! After months of tooth gnashing, the problem was isolated to the power supply and fixed. We now have a functioning 386-33, 8M ram, 120M HD (isn't that right Neal?). The machine has Warp-Full-pack, with HPFS, MM, and TCP/IP all installed. Having all the goodies installed with so little ram definitely impacts performance, but it is still quite usable. Anyone who wants to donate a new MB or more ram is encouraged to do so. Thanks to Frank for advertising the meeting. Small agenda items: Announcements are that the group still has Books that can be checked out: "Inside OS/2", and "Teach yourself REXX in 21 days". We also have several pieces of software that can be reviewed by club members. We have agreed that the User's group web site will (at least temporarily) live on George Welch's office peecee. Web-meister will be Frank Swidersky, so email all suggestions (or completed documents!) to fes2327@tam2000.tamu.edu. The URL us: http://os2www.tamu.edu/os2/ . Thanks to Stan Wood for explaining how to set up a cname alias. The main item of business was a head-to-head comparison of three different word processors: Lotus Ami-Pro for OS/2 version 3.0b was the main entry, and also the word processors from PFS:works and IBM works. As expected, the works word processors were more minimal than the full blown product from Lotus. PFS: This was reviewed by Brett (Last name?). The entire review can basically be summarized very succinctly: He hated it. Brett's machine is a DX2-66 with 16M. Even then, text display lagged keyboard entry by as much as an entire line (no type characters were missed though). It is very disconcerting to type and have the letters be slow to catch up. This was much more pronounced on the group's 386, where text display lagged a fast typist by as much as many lines. It is difficult to see how the programmers made the program be so slow. Other considerations were that font size differences were very strange. Bolding lines tending to increase line spacing, and with some fonts, bold letters did not appear bold on the screen. There was no help feature at all, but this may have been because we had an evaluation copy. Inserting graphics was very bad, it was nearly impossible, and only bitmaps could be inserted. Error messages were really ugly. It is worth pointing out that other tools in the PFS:works package were equally bad. Brett pointed out that although he is a data-base expert, with 3 years experience on many platforms, he was unable to get the PFS database to do *anything*. IBM: This was a much more usable product. It easily keeps up with the fastest typist and has some good features, and most standard features. One lacking feature is the ability to do columns. Another bad thing is that when one emboldens a piece of text, the entire screen is redrawn. This might not matter with a fast computer, but with the 386-33 it was annoying. Lotus: The general consensus is that Ami-Pro is currently the best word processor for OS/2. It is fully featured, and relatively bug free. There are sever complaints however. One is that the bold, italic, etc, buttons do not stay in when the cursor is positioned on bold text. The reason for this is that they are not actually buttons. Sometime import/export feature fails. George reported that he could not read "Word-Perfect for DOS" files. Neal reports problems with tables, and printing. Another problem is that the equation editor seems to be absolutely incapable of producing an hbar (Planck's constant). Although the program is not fast, it responds well to the "hardware solution", and one user reported that on a P90 with 32M, Ami-Pro is downright snappy. This ended the software demonstrations, and we considered two video tapes that had shown up. "Team OS/2 in Action", a short propaganda film that IBM had send the user's group was skipped, and we watched the last 20 minutes of the PBS television series _Computer Chronicles_ episode on OS/2. The review started with IBM's David Barnes doing his standard OS/2-Rah-Rah cheerleader impersonation, complete with pom-poms and bells and whistles. After that, we saw a demo of the "Voice Pilot" software. This is very impressive software. It should be pointed out that the guy doing the demo had probably spent a long time teaching it his voice, and only one minor transcription mistake was made by the computer. (His command for telling it to "back up and change that" was No-No). He ran several programs by voice only, such as notepad, calendar, and some memo program. Next we saw some real geeky guy from a San Francisco law firm talk about how well OS/2 runs Windog programs, and the tape finished with a demonstration of a program called Color-works, which highlighted the multi-threaded abilities of the OS. The meeting then degenerated into various discussions, and broke up.