Williamsport Area Computer Club

Meeting Minutes / Newsletter

April 1998

President Dan Yoas called the meeting to order at 7 PM, April 14 1998. Total attendance was 14 people.

There were no corrections to March's minutes.

Treasurer's Report:

Our balance as of the meeting date is $430.11. During March, our primary expense as usual was $13.75 to the Sun-Gazette for a classified ad to be run for three days.

Committee Reports:

Advertising / Awareness / Public Relations / Home Page:

• Gene questioned whether we should continue the newspaper ad in light of the fact that it has drawn no attendees as of late. The membership decided to continue advertising for the time being, but we may shorten the ad to reduce expenses.
• Secretary Jim Shaffer was instructed to announce meetings on the wacc-chat mailing list and to send a program report and announcement of forthcoming programs to Jan at the Sun-Gazette.
• No correspondence was received through the Club's web page feedback form since the last meeting.
• Business cards have not been ordered yet.

Computer Show / Swap Meet:

• We received estimates of $275 and $300 for insurance without food vendors.
• The likely location appears to be St. Mark's Church, which can be rented for $50. It can hold 10 tables, however, we won't be able to provide electricity for most of them.
• The Bloomsburg hamfest charges $10 per table with electricity. We may not be able to charge that much for tables without electricity.
• We need to have a membership drive table.
• We decided to look into the possibility of having refreshments provided by the church.
• The committee will draw up a list of tasks which need to be completed for the next meeting.
• The committee still needs volunteers. We have four, but would like to have at least six.
• The expenses involved won't leave much money for ads, so we need to advertise via inexpensive methods such as flyers.

Computer Recycling (finding charitable uses for old computers):

• Robbie, admin@lycoming.org, reported that he has one `386 system up and running from our stock of donated parts.
• He hasn't purchased any hard drives for the remaining systems yet, and hasn't received a reply from the person who e-mailed an offer of them.
• Kathy reported that someone will be donating another `386 system.
• Jerry Baker told Kathy that we could obtain obsolete systems from the federal government, but Dan pointed out that they were 8 MHz PS/2 Model 60s, which don't even have compatible cases.

Computer Networking / ISP News:

• There is a multi-search-engine system at http://www.dogpile.com.
• Some members again expressed surprise at Jim's obsession with high-speed access methods such as ISDN and ADSL, and wondered what he might be doing that required such things. He explained that high-speed connections would be useful for downloading such things as operating system upgrades which now require an entire night and a clean line, and that he was also tired of waiting for dial-up connections to dial each time he wanted to look up something, not to mention that it precludes use of the telephone line for voice calls.
• (For those coming in late: Jim would like to see the government provide both the mandate and the funding to either offer nationwide ADSL in the near future or dismantle the entire POTS system and replace it with ISDN. He feels that this would be a more worthwhile expenditure of his tax money than anything else they're doing.)
• It was also discussed, without resolution due to total lack of data, whether the Nortel / British Telecom wide-area carrier-current system would be viable in the United States. (Jim has read that it wouldn't be, and is, uncharacteristically, inclined to agree.)

Other Business:

• The club agreed to ask SkyCable for a demonstration of DirectPC, possibly in October.
• We need suggestions for gifts for our guest speakers.
• Cellular One's program has been postponed until June. Willis's program on basic computer upgrading will be rescheduled, probably for August or September.
• Next Month's Program will be something new for our club: Favorite Web Site Show & Tell! Bring the address of your favorite web site (or two) and a sample printout to share with the Club. If you can't attend, please e-mail your favorite URLs to jshaffer@csrlink.net so they can be included.

Beginner's Night / Q&A:

• A question was asked concerning the maximum serial port speed with an 8450 UART, and it was agreed that it was around 28.8kbps, but noted that most systems now contain high-speed UARTs.
• Packet radio, a computer networking system for amateur radio operators, was explained.
• An overview of RAM-related concepts such as access time, level 1 and 2 cache, and EDO chips was given.
• The difference between RAM cache, disk cache, and web page cache was explained.
• Shared libraries and virtual memory were explained.
• It was explained that a program which doesn't preserve the user's choice of directories to save files in has either not been configured or is simply a poorly-written program.
• The different types of system crashes were explained.

The meeting was adjourned at 8:32 PM.

The next meeting is Tuesday, May 12, at 7 PM, in the Lycoming College Academic Center room B309.

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