.IF DSK1.C3 ^^^^^^TEXTWARE, SOFTWARE, and ELSEWHERE ^^^^^^^^^Goings-on in our TI Community ^^^^^^^^^^^by Jack Sughrue ^^^^^^^^^^^^^DMing the TI Way It is 3:30 in the morning. You can't sleep. You try counting spreadsheets, but nothing seems to work. One way to cure insomnia is to get a pile of, say, 15 disks full of games and utilities and tutorials and generic stuff. Then get a pile of blank disks (Keep all these things on hand for those nights of insomnia.) and copy the full pile onto the blank file. You'll finally have those backups you've been wanting in case something Dreadful happens to Guess My Number and Loan Amortization and other impossible-to -live-without files. Anyway, shove in your Disk Manager and start initializing all those 15 disks. This, alone, may put you to sleep, but if that fails, copying the disks - file by file - is sure to do it. Great for insomniacs; not great for making backups. So, if sleep's your reason for making copies, stay with Disk Manager. If getting the stuff copied is your reason for making copies, try Floppy Copy ($24.95 plus $2 S&H from Softspot, P.O. Box 8786, Silver Spring, MD); or from mail-order houses for maybe less. Floppy Copy copies quickly. With 2 drives it is capable of copying some disks completely in 24 seconds. It will copy ALL disks within 3 passes at 138 sectors a sweep. FC can be loaded with any of the following: Mini-Memory, Extended BASIC, or Editor/Assembler modules. (M-M & E/A load 24 seconds; XB takes 50 seconds.) If all FC could do is make backup copies super fast, it would be worth the price. But that is not all it can do. It catalogs: displaying the complete status of the disk, including disk name and file index. It validates the duplicating process. Error messages will appear if the disk is not transferring data. It initializes. And it does that faster than Disk Manager, too. It has REDO functions (great for initializing or duplicating a number of disks). It has an immediate menu. Ease of back-and-forthing among the functions is just right. Within the larger functions, there are other menus: you can take just files for a quicker copy, or you can copy the entire disk (including the blank sectors), for an example. You can copy SSSD or any other configuration established by the DM or by CorComp. So far I've found that FC will copy everything but itself. FC comes with a single page of documentation. But you can choose some rather lengthy on-screen directions if you so choose. Once you've gone through the four sets, you really don't need to bother again. FC operates smoothly and with great ease. Even I got it working within a minute or two. One night I initialized 22 blank disks for a club swap. I stopped for a beer and a telephone call and returned to the task of copying the club's 22 disks. I did it with dread, in spite of the fact I really wanted to give Floppy a real test. I did all 22 disks before I went to bed. A piece of cake, thanks to Floppy Copy. The next night I did all kinds of things to check out its default system. I put in initialized disks. Floppy told me and gave its name. I put in damaged disks. Floppy gave me an error message. I put in disks with only 5 sectors used. Floppy read in 1 second, wrote in 2. FC always behaved and always protected me (and my disks) from myself. I'd highly recommend this fast, versatile tool to anyone with a disk system. ******* Then a week or so passed and some disks I ordered (and some unexpected birthday disks) arrived at our post office on the same day. The disks I had bought contained DM1000 and MASSCOPY. The gift contained ULTRACOPY and DMIII. I tried ULTRACOPY and loved it. It was about as fast as Floppy but lacked some of Floppy's features. MASSCOPY was about as fast as Floppy and had a pile more features (getting closer to the DM cart). Then I loaded DMIII (which came from an Apple-owner friend who felt sorry because I had such an inferior machine). Pitiful creature, this friend. But, still, I appreciated the wonderful gift. And I thought it WAS wonderful! "Imagine, a resident DM, just like the big computers," my friend remarked. It was, too. A resident DM to draw from whenever my heart desired. With a few simple CALLS I could not catalog or copy or rename or printout or many of the other activities permitted only through the cart. For the next week I played with DMIII and MASSCOPY and ULTRACOPY and with a lot of the other programs I bought and the other (mostly utility) disks I got as the gift. I noticed, but I didn't "have time" (read inclination) to download DM1000 docs. I'd get to them and the program when I could to see what I had purchased, but it sure couldn't beat Floppy and ULTRA and MASS and, particularly, DMIII. How wrong I was! DM1000 (now up to version 5.0? and distributed Fairwarely and as part of the new FUNNELWEB and freely through GENIAL TRAVELER and, hopefully, your local user group) is stupendous! As a disk-manager environment all by itself it has no equal among any home computers. It simply makes the TI an immense tool. Developed by Bruce Caron for the Ottawa Users Group, DM1000 lets you move, copy, rename, protect, unprotect files; lets you rename, copy, catalog, print contents, initialize disks; lets you read ALL DV/80 files on screen; lets you initialize in box format (but also automatically initialize before copying disks); lets you change screen colors; lets you... But why don't you get DM1000 from your group, unload the docs, read them over WHILE running the program, and amaze yourself and flabergast your Apple-owning friends. I did just that and it was great fun. A few months later I got FUNLWRITER (which has an updated DM1000 built in) and couldn't wait to show that same friend what my "inferior machine" could do. An even bigger flabergast resulted. Elaine, my wife, says I am a truly evil person to be so heartless to my Apple friend. My four kids concur. So do I. Ain't LIFE grand!?! [Jack Sughrue, Box 459, E.Douglas, MA 01516] ******** If any newsletter editor prints these articles, please put me on your mailing list. Thanks - JS Հ