Disk Librarian

By Michael K. Kato

When I first started coming to the TPC, circa 1992-1993, Bill Auckerman was President and, one of the prominent execs was a high school student named Nick Millington. Nick was a very funny, loquacious dude, and he brought to each meeting a few floppies of interesting, fun, and useful software. At the time, Windows 3.1 and 3.11 were the modus operandi, and 1.4 Mbyte disks were more than adequate for many essential tasks.

But alas, Nick graduated high school, went to college, and I hear now works for the devil himself, Gill Bates, Beve Stallmer, and Megalosoft.

By that time, though, Win 95 was just around the corner and, along with it, the bloatware and 18-wheeled hogware running on the information superhighway. Most software had to fill CD-ROMs, then, and, now, multiple CD installations make it essential that people buy 20-, 40-, and 80-Gigabyte HDDs just for their OS and applications.

Fast forward to early 2002, when I was researching some things about mobile telecommunications infrastructure and I realized that applications had to get small again. With a smaller footprint, limited memory, and very frugal storage capacity, mobile phones and, to a lesser degree, PDAs force developers to develop with frugal resources, much like their counterparts up until the early 90's. While the desktop and notebook computer applications, in general, continue to grow beyond reason or need, some things have started to shrink and extend usefulness.

This realization has enticed me to volunteer to reincarnate Nick's old position, the Disk Librarian. Each month, I will bring 10 floppies (sometimes I will cheat and use disk spanning) of a useful application or other item. For a 100-yen donation to the club, you can save yourself the trouble of downloading it yourself. The application or tool may be a PC or DOS item, but it may be, in some cases, for a PalmOS or Pocket PC (still WINCEing) or even mobile phones. All will be small. The items may be Freeware, Shareware, Demoware, Crippleware, or something else, but all will work.

I will write a short review of each item we distribute, but it will appear in the AJ subsequent to the meeting I bring the disks. I will let people know at the meeting, however, the essential information for getting the software on your own. Still, the items will be worth the donation to the club.

Preference will be given to members in the dissemination of disks, so join us and support your club. We try hard to provide everyone with a plethora of information to help you to compute better. Without members and support, those of us who are trying to help as many people we can are spending more of our time and money to help others. Fair, or no?

For now, I will give a sneak preview of what I will bring to the March meeting. It is going to be about clip utilities that make the Windows clipboard look like not much more than what your teacher used in grade school. I am not sure which of the several I am looking at is going to be the one I bring.
But these tools are AWESOME!

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