Re: Utterly Depressing

[casa@unm.edu (Jim Pittman)]

Re:

Dark_Dude@darkcastle.ecore.fnet.org (Dark_Dude) wrote:

> Don't be all doom-thinkers. Think happy, be happy, enjoy your
> apple II... You folks know what more of us should do? Write
> messages in which you tell what you did with your II today, what
> software you bought, what you like the best of the II(gs).. Quit
> complaining... it won't help.

Amen!

Okay, here's what I did with my Apple II today. One of our club
members brought me an article for the newsletter; it was printed
on three sheets of paper and there was a 5.25" disk. What kind of
disk is this? I asked. WordStar on a (brand-X PC clone), he said.

What to do? I don't have WordStar and don't know anybody who does.
So, cut and paste the article as it was printed? No -- it's too
light, margins are too small, there are typos. Scan it in and use
InWords and then edit the result? Probably too time-consuming and
probably it's too light to scan. Re-type it? No, too much trouble;
I'm not a touch-typist.

I took the disk to the PC guru down the hall, along with a blank
formatted MS-DOS 3.5" disk. He popped the two disks into his
Gateway 2000, got out of Windoze into DOS and in half a minute
handed me back the two disks.

I took the 3.5" disk to my IIgs and popped it into the Superdrive
and opened the disk icon. There was the file, type unknown. I double
clicked; can't open. I went to Hermes and opened the file as data.
No problem, but there are lots of funny characters everywhere. I
told Hermes to modify: change control characters to spaces and
convert highbits. Okay, I can read the words and they look just
like what's printed on the three sheets of paper.

Do a "Save as..." to a ProDOS disk and I'm ready to load it into
AppleWorks and include the article into the next newsletter.

That's one thing I did with my Apple II today.

- Jim Pittman - University of New Mexico - casa@unm.edu