Denizens of the binary beat have been acronym-crazed since the naming of the world’s first automatic digital electronic computer, ENIAC (electronic numerical integrator and computer), back in 1944.
Since then, like that little girl in “The Exorcist,” we and our predecessors have spewed forth a vegetable soup of abbreviations.
They’re a sorry lot of technobabble, ranging from DOS (disk operating system) to GIGO (garbage in, garbage out), SCSI (small computer system interface) to PCMCIA (Personal Computer Manufacturers’ Card Interface Association, which I remember by mangling as People Cannot Memorize Computer Industry Acronyms).
Today’s topic deals with empowering one’s self with one of the new high-powered computers we’re bringing into our homes and offices, and it starts best with a look at the most irreverent, but perhaps also the most telling, computer acronym of them all: GOD, which stands for giver of data and refers to the person who controls the stuff that goes into the computer in question.
Sophomoric as it is, the acronym GOD makes a key point about computing: The giver of data rules. There are a number of programs that empower personal-computer owners enormously by letting them assume the role of giver of data for themselves.
The software does that by taking full advantage of the machines’ awesome capacities to hold huge amounts of information and then to call up any desired bit of that data in the flash of a key click.
These software powerhouses will not make you godlike, but if you become their giver of data, they will put a huge stockpile of personalized information–and thus power–at your fingertips. Having them up and running, for example, let me trot out all those acronyms.
Over the years, I have made it a practice to feed into whatever computer I owned at the time any scrap of information that intrigued me as I read it, including the definitions of just about every computer term that ever came my way.
To do this I have used a long succession of programs known by yet another acronym, PIM (personal information manager).
For me it started back in the days of DOS, when I encountered Scraps, a brilliant PIM by a Hong Kong-based computer programming pioneer named Raymond Lowe. It was first distributed on the primitive Internet of the mid-1980s.
Scraps still can be had on-line at places like CompuServe’s shareware forum, but, as we’ll see anon, this DOS trendsetter has been greatly outpaced by stuff written for Windows.
The idea behind Scraps and all the best PIMs that have followed is to let you either input your own writings or to import text files from elsewhere into a single, largely unstructured database.
Once the giver of data puts the information into the database, the software allows a user to quickly retrieve any or all of it by using a keyword search.
I started by keeping a diary in Scraps. Each day I’d type in a new entry, starting with the date in a uniform way, along the lines of mm.dd.yr, followed by the word “dddiary.” I’d then hold forth on whatever I wanted to impart to the ages and save it as a text file.
Then, if I wanted to go back and recall past glories, all I had to do was type in the search word “dddiary” and the machine would call up each of my daily entries.
If I wanted to hearken back to a specific date, I’d just type it in as 05.26.89, and the software would call up that entry alone.
Soon I was adding all sorts of other stuff. Every story I wrote for the Tribune went into Scraps. So did stories by friends and by competitors. Soon I was saving text that I downloaded from on-line services and just about anything else interesting that came my way. I’ve never forgotten a bad joke since.
My huge Scraps database came to include every great new quotable quote that I came upon while reading or surfing on-line. Soon I was adding the lyrics to my favorite Nanci Griffith songs and the works of my favorite poets. Recipes I found on the Internet went in right along with news wire stories I called up from the Associated Press on CompuServe.
As my addiction to Scraps progressed I developed a bag of tricks, mainly with the help of wiser computer users who had preceded me.
I tagged each of the Nanci Griffith songs with “zzng,” which, just as labeling my diary entries with the keyword “dddiary,” allowed me to retrieve them and nothing else. Robert Service’s poems were coded “zzrs,” and my Chicago Tribune stories were tagged “zzct” and so on.
There is huge significance attached to this aspect of personal computing and, as machines keep getting faster and endowed with ever more hard drive storage space, the potential of this tool keeps growing.
As we spend ever more time cruising the data troves of places like the Internet’s World Wide Web, we encounter ever more amounts of information that can be added to our personal stores of wisdom by way of modern PIMs.
Keep in mind that moving on the Web is done on a pay-by-the-minute basis, and your costs can shoot right through the ceiling as you jump from site to site. All too often stuff is ignored simply because there’s too much to take in while on-line without busting your budget.
Enter the two modern programs I want to tell you about: askSam 3.0 by askSam Systems Inc. of Perry, Fla., and InfoSelect 3.0 by MicroLogic Inc. of Hackensack, N.J., a pair of PIMs that bring order out of today’s cascading torrents of information.
Both work along the same lines as the outdated Scraps, but they are far easier to use and far faster, thanks to the powers of modern computers.
InfoSelect is the cheaper and less powerful of the two, but it lets you store an unlimited number of documents in a highly robust fashion. This data-gobbler limits any one collection of documents to a 1 megabyte storage area, but it lets you set up as many of these huge collections as you like.
Then, anything from a friend’s phone number to the text of the King James Bible–assuming that, like me, you have included it in your database–can be called up by keywords and other search methods, including so-called Boolean searches that let you search for mixed words such as “Coates” and “Alaska” or “Clinton” and “trout fishing” or “Noah” and “cubit.”
The other, askSam, is even more powerful. It not only lets you build databases of any size that your hard drive can hold, but it also lets you go out on the Internet and download entire World Wide Web sites and reproduce them, complete with hotlinks, pictures and other features on your own machine.
You then can own all the data the site’s publisher has put out and use it at your own pace, on your own desktop, free from worry about connect time.
Another powerful feature comes as an optional module that lets you use a scanner to import any printed text into the same huge database.
In preparing this column, I quickly scanned a number of magazine articles, a half dozen press releases and even a couple of photographs. All went into my database without a hitch.
From now, when I need to know something, I’ll just fire up my highly personalized database and askSam.
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Binary Beat readers can participate in the column by visiting Digital Coffee, its home on the Internet, at http://www.chicago.tribune.com/coffee/ (or by sending e-mail to jcoates1@aol.com).
