1988 01 The Computer Paper mockup

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British Columbia's Computer Information Source

December 198V Issue 1

FREE

Canadian

Payroll PackageS

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Inside Wendy Wood's

NEWSBFTES

Bedford's ยนw Accounting Package

for the Mac

BBS Listings

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British Columbia's Computer Information Source

December 1987 Issue 1

Contents

Two ComruYaa Paean

Columns

Vol 1. No. 1 PUBLISHERKDITOR Kirtan Sin h Khalsa 12

PC s and Compatibles Macintosh

Atari.

Amiga The Stock Market Report.

14 15

EDITORIAL

16 17

CONTRIBUTING EDITORS Wendy Wooh, Ken Maize, BanaBlankenhorn,Masayuki Keixzo Yamamoto, Grant Buckler and Bill Hayes.

7

Letters to the Editor

....4 10

Wendy Wood's Newsbytes.

BBS Numbers .

User Group Listings..

Computer Calendar.

11

12

ClassiTieds.

Indexof Advertisers

CONTRIBUTING PHOTOGRAPHERS Dan Brown and Gloria Alder EDITORIAL CONSULT'ANT Micheal Bertrand DESIGN

ART DIRECTOR Kathryn Anders

Features Impressions of CD ROM What's a Neural Networkg Buying a PC Clone Used Computers Are They Worth the Risks'i Bedford's Neiv Accounting Software for the Mac PayMaster Canadian Payroll Package ..............

Cover by CameraWorks

ART CONSULANT John Homes, Moonlight Grapllics

20 19 17 .14

.13 .7

TYPESETTING Glacier Press ADVERTISING A DVERTISING MANAG E R

Allan Calderwood DISTRIBUTION DISTRIBUTION MANAGER Syed Yalonda PRINTING PRINTER Valley Web Graphics

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SUBSCRIPTIONS:The Computer Paper is published momhly. If you would like 'lite Computer Paper mailed directly to your home, please senda cheque for$14 to 3350 Valley Drive, Vancouver B.C., V6L 2K2. This will cover mailing and handling for 12 issues.This is Volume 1, No. 1, December 1987.

The Computer Paper, British Columbia's Computer Information Source is pubbshed by Glacier Press, 3350 Valley Drive, Vancouver B.C. V6L 2K2. Phone {604) 733-5596.

All rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or in pNt without the permission of Pub1isher is strictly prohibited. Unsoliciited material is gratefully accepted, but we can't be responsible for returning it unless it is accompanied by a stamped self-address@ envelope.

ISSN No. 123456 Second Class Postage Application Pending Printed in Canada.

2 The Computer Paper• December 1987

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C ONTROL D AT A D O W N G R A D E S CANADIAN OPERATION MISSISSAUGA, Ont. (NB) — Control Data Canada Ltd. has laid off 45 employees and shiftedmost responsibility for Canadian operations to its U.S. parent. Former chaizznan and president T.S. Allan and former senior vice- president of sales and marketing Gary Glover have retired. Rather than zephcing them, Contml Data Canada has announced that the vice-presidents in charge of its

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4 The Computer Paper• December 1987

TORONIO (NB) — Book-sized computers that talk, take telephone messages and can retrieve information fmm remote systems without specific instructions fmm the user maybecommonplaceby

erema ybe

the early 21st century. But even then, th no real market for home computers. So said John Sculley, chairman of Apple Computer Inc., at the Canadian hunch of his book "Odyssey: Pepsi to Apple," onNov.23. Sculley's Canadian publisher, Fitzhenry and Whiteside of Toronto, invited an assortment of Apple dealers, journalists and other . guests to Tomnto's King Edward Hotel foraluncheon that marked the Apple chairman's first visit to

OTI'AWA (NB) — Frantek Computer Products Inc. has dropped plans to list its stock on the Vancouver Stock Exchange and might seek a listing on the Toronto Stock Exchange instead, C ANADIAN C O M P U TER D E A LER N E W S

used no technologies that don't exist today, al-

reports. The paper quotes Mike Anderson, president of Frantek, as saying the company wants to look for a hrger financial market than Vancouver.

He said a listing on the Toronto exchange, Canada's largest, is possible within the next 12 months. Anderson also says the company wants to

though most of them are experimental at present.

He said new technologies usually need an incubation period of about 15 years. Sculley also confirmed that Apple ismoving away fmm homecomputers, a market he thinks is largely illusory at present. All that exists today is a "home-business" market in which people use computers at home so they can bring work home from the office, he said.

"There will eventually be a home computer market," he said, "but my sense is that will be many

TORONTO, NOT VANCOUVER

sized in the past.

CLINIC

SCULLEY SPECULATES ON FUTURE AT BOOK LAUNCH

Canada since his Pepsi-Cob days. As part of his after-lunch speech, Sculley showed a short video depicting his view of a possible computer of the future, much like the Dynabook concept pioneered at Xerox Corp.'s Palo Alto Research Centre.

Sculley pointed out that his hypothetical machine

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remain 100 per cent Canadian, a trait it has empha-

COMpUTER

Toronto facility has grown rapidly in recent years to about 1,100 employees. Bjorn Anderson, director of the laboratory, said the lab's zesponsibilities include software development for IBM's midrangesystems, image systems,and programming language standards for IBM worldwide.

P ROVINCE GIVES TECHNO L O G Y GRANTS TORONTO (NB) — The Province of Ontario has announced C$24.1 million in grants from its Premier's Council Technology Fund. They will go to three Ontario companies working on airbozne zadar, analytical instruments and computer-aided design. The projects are all being funded thmugh

anew industrialzesearchanddevelopmentfundset

up as part of the C$1 billion technology fund.

American Standard of Toronto will get C$3.8 million to help develop an automated factory in cooperation with IBM Canarh Ltd., Markham, Ont.,

SparAerospace Ltd.and Canadian General Electric Ltd. of Toronto, the University of Tomnto, McMaster University in Hamilton, Ont., and the

University of Western Ontario in London. Canadian Astronautics Ltk of Ottawa will get C$2.48 million to develop radar for reconnaissance work,

and Sciex, a division of MDS Health Group Ltd. of Toronto, will get C$17 million to develop analytic instruments for measuring trace amounts of industrial chemicals.

IBM LAB CELEBRATES 20TH AN-

NIVERSARY TORONTO (NB) — IBM Canada Ltd.'s Toronto development laboratory celebrated its 20th anniversary at the beginning of December. The third largest private-sector laboratory in Canada and the fourth-largest software lab in IBM worldwide, the

years into the future."

Sculley also took the opportunity to call fora change in education. Students must learn to think and not just to memorize and follow instructions,

he said. "Our educational system in the U.S. is largely focused toward training young people for the early industrial age," he said. (Sculley added that he couldn't comment on the Canadian educational system, but NEWSBYTES CANADA believes his comments apply as well here.)

VANCO U VER FIRM UNVEILS REPORT WRITER FOR LOTUS 1-2-3, DBASE VANCOUVER (NB) — Krieger Data Corp. of Vancouver has introduced ProMark IQ, which produces reports from files created by Lotus 1- 2-

3, dBase III and Krieger's own ProMark database software. David Galloway, senior marketingrepresentative for the firm, said the package is adapted, under license, fmm software developed by a U.S. firm. It can extract data fmm 1-2-3 and dBase files

to produce reports with summary totals and perform "all kinds of calculations" on the data ProMark IQ can also produce graphs, Galloway said. continued on page 13 NEWSBYTES Canadian bureau chief is Grant Buckler, Source ID IP2008, voice (416) 285-0644, or 859 Kennedy Rd., ¹203, Scarbozough, Ontario, Canada MlK 2E3.

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PayMasterCanadian Payroll Software

by Bill Hayes worthwhile to put your companypayroll on I saitpersonal com puters.Yes and no. It depends.

program uphasmultiple departments and employees who sometimes contribute hours to these dif-

The PayMaster programby Etc. Software does a

deduction would then look like: 4.000. This approach I found somewhat less than intuitive and managed to enter a.04 rate which resulted in.04%

good job of speeding upthedata entry and tedious

rate rather than 49o.

this situation well. Acall to thecompanyconfirmed

table look-up portion of paymll processing. It's the

A second potentially confusing area I discovered was in defining the ending period of employ-

this fhcL The option they suggested, was to not use

process of getting that information back into your existing bookkeepingsystemthatputs the utility of this program into question. Let's have a look at

ment. Dates are formatted as MMDDYY. The

program uses acodeof"010101" todefineemploy-

what the program does well first.

ees who are still working for you. Since the major-

System Requirements Theprogram runs onIBMPC or compatible m achines with a minimum of 256K of meinory. The programcomesononedisk. Itispossible according to Etc. to run up to 75 employees on a one disk system,75 to 250on a dual floppysystem, and 250 to 999 on a hard disk.

Set-up Routine

ity of employees who you are taking the time to enter into yournewpayroll progruu are likely tobe still employed by you, it would have speeded up data entry to havethe program default to this value except in those rare cases you are entering an employee whohasalready left. Again its all in the manual, but the best judge of a program is often how far you can gowithout looking at the manual.

The system set up is a simple menu driven

procedure run though a file called Housekeeping.

Itishereyou decidewhether toinitialize the system on one, two or a hard drive. The short manual (32 pages+ appendix) included in the package doesa good job of taking you through the initial routine.

Creating a Company The initial bootup takesyou to the main menu window. You are advised as a first step tocreate a new company name file so that the T4's which it prints at the end of the year have that information

The third problem I encountered was in defin-

ing the claim amount. Here the program differed slightly from the manual. The manual shows a screen with theword "Claim". The program in fact says '"H)1 Claim" which to me suggested that I 4l

N a nu -

Eayloyos Dsymtaeat

on them.

Job Costing Sistotic&1

Security

trinal

You can also at this stage set up four level password protection. Level 1 has access to all

— — Sse. to ~-

Chorus

Zeal Snl

CESlp4hp 840%I

SoclltlC'f

QuttPtogxaa

functions. Level 2 can change everything but the

company nameand the Security functions. Level 3 is allowed access to the Department, Job, Historical, Cheque and Print files. Level 4is only allowed

to access Department, Job and Historical files.

Passwordscanbeupto 8 letters, but onceyou start to use passwords, every time you enter the program, you will be required to enter your password.

Windows The program makes intelligent use of windows to assist in datahandling. For example when you ate in the cheque writing file, as you toggle through the fields, a window box will pop up to show your options for such things as employee numbers or JobCosting categories. Another window pops up everytime you enter the Employee, Cheque, Department, Job Costing or Historical files.'Ihen youaregiventheoption to Add, Update or Delete to the file.

Employee Files The next step is to enter employees into the pmgram. This process is greatly facilitated if you have everyone's Tax Exemption forms up todate.

A few potential problem area in entry occur here. The first encountered was in entering Vaca-

tion Pay rate. The field is defined with a number and three figures after the decimaL A four percent

ferent departments.PayMaster does not handle

Departments atall, instead usethe JobCosting file to divide up the labour. This suggestion has only limited applicability, because the reporting from the Job Costing is only very rudimentary. It does not break down the amounts between wages and the various benefits such as UIC, CPP etc.

This brings me to my final and major complaint againstPrryMdsrer. The reports PayMaster

generates seemmore geared to getting me to purchase my cheques from Etc. Software than to

providing accessible information. Etc. Software says that youhave threeoptions with the program.

1) use their pre-printed chequesand report sheets which means buying a whole other series of cheques and entering the adjustments directly in the General Ledger,2) print out on plain paper, and transfer the information to another accounts payable system, 3) get Etc. to customize the system at a rate of $25/hour to include the report hbels. The first option of buying from Etc. is really the only

choice that is reasonable if you want to use this pmgram. This of course is the ideal for them, but maynotbeso for yourcompany. The secondoption doesn'treally workbecauseof theway theprogram prints out just raw numbers with out any header information(it' s onthe pre-printed forms yousee).

The report ends upwith a closely grouped bundle of numbers with no labels to help sort out what is what. The third option of engaging in contract

ante firstloner ot use arrov asys ana ptasa Caature Zsc to act.

Start up Scree» should enter the code used by the government to define the different categories. This idea is reinforced by thenext field'TPDIV Chim" (again not in the manual) which is a computed field. The suggestion by this layout is that all one needenter is the government defined classifications, and the program will fill in the next field. In fact it doesn't work that way. It turnsout thatyou are supposedto enter the actual claim amount in the'TDI Qaim" field. Surprisingly, nothing shows up in the 'TPDIV Claim" field. One wonderswhy itis there at all. All this becameclearer after reading the appendix of the manual. Another hint was given by the format shown in themessagebar at the bottom of the screenwhen you enter the' IDI Claim" field which is (XKXX.KX).

Of course all theseproblemswere minor, and nothing thata quick perusal of themanual couldn' t solve, but nonethelesscould stand tobeimprovetL Departments Vs. Job Costing This is wherefor metheprogram fell down the most. The company for which I intended tosetthe

programming doesnot seemreasonable for a program designed to inexpensively save time and money.

A Bug? In the process of discovering about the difference between the Department and Job Costing approach to breaking out payroll, I discovered a bug in the program. I first entered a number of Departments, then I decided todelete them all and use the Job Costing approach. When I moved the cursor into the Job Costing area while entering a Cheque, instell of the Job Costing category window appearing, I got lines of code onthe screen. I had to re-initialize the system to get rid of this pmblem losing the data I had entered in up to that point.

Additional features The program allows you toeither pay holiday pay in each pay period, or accumulate it til a specified date. The way to then get itout, is to enter

the Employee file, chooseUpdate andthen change theRetain item to Y. Theprogram then willinclude

the accumulated holiday pay up to and including the current pay period.

PayMasteralsocan handleadvancesand the continued on page14

'Ihe Computer Paper • December 1987 • 7

DEALERS R CONSULTANTS ONLY Please Cal/ For Complete Confidential Price List

Seagate IBM PS II Model 30-002/021 .... . .'1230/1625 PS II Model 50-021 ..... . . . . . . . . . . 2 525 PS II Model 60 44MB/70MB...3650/4195 PS II Model 80 44MB/70MB...5085/6095 AT 339 (8MHz, 512K, 30 MB) .... . .3495 AT 068 (6MHz, 256K)..... . . . . . . . . 2395 XT 286 (6MHz, 640K, ZOMB)...... .2295 Mono Display 8503 ..... . . . . . . . . . . . 1 89 Color Display 8512 .... . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 39 Color Display 8513 (EGA).... . . . . . . . 5 10 5~/4 External Drive.. . . . . . ... . . . . . . . 295

SEAGATE SEAGATE HARD DRIVES 20MB/30MB W/Conuoller..... . .'269/299 30MB/40MB Full Height .... . . . . 4 75/565 40MB (STZ51)/65MB (277N) ....365/565 80MB (4096)/80MB (277R).... . .875/599

I BM Mouse for system II... . . . . . . . . . . 8 5 I BM Modem for system II ... . . . . . . . . 3 1 0 Pro Printer II/XL .. . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 75/545 Pro Printer X24/XL24 ... . . . . . . . 5 55/695 Quiet Writer II/III.. . . . . . . . . . . . 9 75/1195

HARD CARDS 20MB/30MB for XT...

30MB for AT 20MB/30MB for PS/2 ..

MM SCRIBE ZOMB/30MB RLL W/Cont...... .'265/295 40MB (3650)/40MB (3053) ..... .325/525 4 0MB (6053) Full Height.... . . . . . . . . 5 85 80MB Full Height (6085).... . . . . . . . . 7 99

MSCELLANEOUS

I BM DOS 3.3 (min 5) ..... . . . . . . . . . . 8 5

...'1750 ....225 ....195

130MB Maxtor 28Mlsecond .

20MB Tandon 3'/z inch.....

10MB IBM Full Height ....

CALL FOR ALL OTHER COMPUTER PRODUCIS ' QUA%I'ITY DISCOUVI' AVAILABLE

*

....$365/399 ... . . .455 ....399/435

DESKPRO MODELS 386/20 MHz 60/130/300 MB.....In Stock 386 40 MB (Factory Upgrade) ..s4295/4095 386 70 MB (Factory Upgrade) ..4895/4595 386 130MB Factory Only..... . . . . . . 5 895 286 Model I/With 20MB..... . 1850/2295 286 Model 40 (Factory).... . . . . . . . . 2950 Deskpro 2Drive 256K/20MB...1050/1395 PORTABLES NEW 386 Portables In Stock..... . . . . C a ll II Model 4 (Factory/Upgrade) ..s2595/2395 II Model 2 2dr., 256K (80286).... . . . 1895 Portable 2 Drive 256K (8086) .... . . . 1550 "Portable 286 Model I... . . . . . . . . . 1 795 ' 'III Model 20MB" ... . . . . . . . . . . . 3495 "III Model 40MB". ... . . . . . . . . . . 3995 Compaq Amber/Green..... . . . . . . . . . 1 95 C ompaq EGA Monitor.... . . . . . . . . . . 5 4 5 C ompaq EGA Adapter.... . . . . . . . . . . 4 1 0 386 Memory Exp. Board..... . . . . . . . C a ll I MB Memory Exp. Kit.... . . . . . . . . . . 2 9 5 Compaq DOS 3.1/3.Z..... . . . . . . . . 5 9/71 Quantity Discount Available '

Quantity Discount Available Dealers R Consultants Only

*

Corporate P Retail Customers Call For Quotes a •

8087-3 XT/80Z87-6 AT ..

8087-2 XT/80287-8 AT .

80287-10 AT IOMHz...

80387-16/80387-20 ....

•

•

a

I

a

10 MB. Inter. /External... . . . . . $265/399 ZO MB. Inter. /External ... . . . . . .345/475 40 MB. Inter. /External ... . . . . . .399/535

s95/160 ....145/249 ... . . . . 289 ....465/765

Call for PS/2 Tape Back Up Units Call for Archive, Tecmar, Sysgen

Laser Series II.... . . . . . . .

Laser Jet 500+ IMB Mern. Expansion HP ..

ZMB Mem. Expansion HP ..

H P Plotter 7475A ... . . . . .

H P Scanjet Scanner... . . . .

s1695 '3295 .... .369 .... .699 ....1395 ....1150

•

321SL (216CPS)......

341SL (216CPS).....

351-2/351-2 Color ....

Toshiba T1000/1100 ..

Toshiba T3120 MB ...

Modem for Laptops...

182/182 Serial 120 cps..... . . . . . ' 199/269 ML192+/193+ 200 cps..... . . . . 289/409 ML292E/293E 200 cps,100 nlq...369/499 ML393/393 Color 450 cps..... .945/1029 ML294/2410 .... . . . . . . . . . . . . 737/1695 Lazer Line 6.

1299

***

LOTUS 1-Z-3 '289 * * *

... . . . . . '479 ... . . . . . 645 ....865/1019 ....825/Call ... . . . . 2995 ... . . . . . 299

***

• ss

•

...'67/82 ....75/95 ....73/95 ... . . . 95

Fujitsu 360K/ I. ZMB...

Teac 360K/1.2MB.... .

Toshiba 360K1.2MB...

Toshiba 3.5 " Internal ..

LOTUS SYMPHONY '429

***

One stop shopping for dealers R consultants. We also

carry NEC • AST • HERCULES • DRAMS • MODEMS • CITIZEN • MICROPOLIS • SONY • MICROSOFT • SAMSUNG 474Z Woodman Avenue Sherman Oaks, CA 914Z3 For phone order call:

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(818) 905-0994 (213) 859-3410 8 The Computer Paper • December 1987

ZZ53 Westwood Bl. Los Angeles, CA 90064