The Professional Developer

The Newsletter of the Dbase Language Professional Developers Group

September1990 Volume 1 Issue 6

Page One

Computer Incantations for WorldPeace.

By Bob Balocca, DLaP and

VCUG Board Member

(Title borrowed from the musical

piece of the same name by Jean

Luc Ponty, Atlantic Records CD:

Individual Choices.)

Late last week, while at a meeting of the DLaP Board (getting the August newsletter in the mail), I was casually informed that the Page One article assignment was rotated among the Board members and that it was my turn! Linda and Therese quickly added that I could write about anything I wanted. Fm sure they didn’t really mean anything, as I flashed on my last river rafting trip. How about bungee cord jumping or skydiving? Probably not relevant to the venue, I thought.

We are, after all, a group of application developers and computer users. The perception is that we are a sedate and sedentary lot, sitting before our screens and keyboards manipulating symbols, crunching code, making voodoo magic to some. An activity which many would be hard pressed to describe as thrilling, physically demanding or having much of a worldly importance.

A stereotypical view, certainly, for those of us so engaged know the truth. It takes tremendous concentration and just plain old hard mental work to manipulate those symbols and turn someone’s computer fantasy into working reality. Hopefully, we have also experienced the exhilaration of finding a particularly elegant or creative solution to a coding problem. Personally, that is the one thing which keeps me in touch with this business. (It certainly isn’t the money!) But let’s face it, there is not much physical impact to it. Physical stress, absolutely, but change the world impact? No!

Well, such thoughts are long overdue for challenge. It’s time we demanded some respect for our hard and creative work; our individual ideas. There has been, of course, a great deal of discussion about the “computer revolution” and the “silicon age” and the whale-sized wallop it is having on our way of life and material well being. Those social historians who have analyzed and documented this amazing occurrence have done a good job, as far as it goes. But I think they may be understating the case!

Did you ever consider that, perhaps, the fall of the Berlin Wall ultimately happened because of a kid they called “The

Woz”? That maybe world communism is falling apart because a couple of hackers put together a worktable personal computer? Far fetched thinking, you say? Perhaps, but it’s fun to think about; impossible to prove. There is a thread there, though, a “Connection” (a la Alistar Cooke).

If you can recall the mid to late 1970s, it was a bleak time for American causes. We were in the depths of the Cold War; we had failed at holding back the communist tide in Viet Main. We were being held hostage in the Middle East (some things never change) and were losing our manufacturing base and switching to a service economy at home. It was during this time that the two Steves, Wozniak and Jobs, built their Apple Computer which was to become the first broadly marketed personal computer.

The story is legend now, its been told so many times. The two Steves, of course, became wealthy and by the early Eighties “Big Blue” had legitimized the “micro” and the floodgates of personal computing were opened. No longer were governments and large corporations the only entities with access to computers. I remember reading articles decrying the “mainframe

Continued on Page 2.

LA. Fox President’s Report by Greg Dunn Page 4.

dClip 2.5 - To use or not to use Reviewed by Robert Kantor Page 5.

Builder, a batch file language

cztcnder/compiler

Reviewed by Bob Balocca

Page 8.