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Show You can find low-cost programs MUThe kjgyjffiusiiiess Computer by Frankly nil Peterson and Judy K-Tarft&el The computer business is weird. While hundreds of companies are trying to get rich quick selling computer programs, hundreds of programmers are practically giving away their creations. If you know where to shop and what you're shopping for, you can find some surprisingly good programs on the cheap or even free. Some are written by midnight programmers, computer revolutionaries revolution-aries hell-bent on giving computer power to the people. Others are written by or for taxpayer-supported government agencies such as NASA. Not all cheap programs are for desktops; many are for mini and mainframe systems. ; Many of these programs ardi uncopyrighted "in the public domain," in legal jargon so they're often referred to as "public domain software." Others are known as "freeware," something of a misnomer because (proving that computer revolutionaries revolution-aries twist the language as much as computer capitalists) their authors not only hope you'll like the programs well enough to mail them a donation, they also specif how much the donation ought to be. The ' author of one popular freeware program is rumored to have grossed $100,000 in donations. How can you find these cheap programs? Some may be lurking in your own home town. More and' more computer dealers now maintain libraries of public domain software. Customers can copy these programs for the price of a floppy disk. . Another good place to find them is $40 from NTB, Springfield, Va. 22161. ' In it you'll find, for instance, that for $320 you can buy one of the newest programming languages, ADA, for your DEC VAX11780. Or, if you have an IBM 360 or 370 and have always wanted to produce complex cross-tabulated charts like the Bureau of Labor Statistics, you can buy the BL's own program for $400. The nicest thing about these cheap programs from federal agencies is that they've been tested, debugged, and used for years before you got to them. That's a guarantee you won't get with most list-priced commercial software! If you own a microcomputer, you can get more information on free programs from two books available at local bookstores: "How to Get FYee Software" by Alfred Gloss-brenner Gloss-brenner (St. Martin's Press, $14.95) and "IBM PC Public Domain Software" by Gary Phillips (AshtonTate, (Ashton-Tate, $24.95). The authors will answer questions and send a checklist of available back issues. Send a stamped, self-addressed self-addressed envelope. A new 4,000-word special report, "Educational Programs for Children," Child-ren," gives details on price and performance of computer-age products pro-ducts for children. For your copy, send $3 for Report FP01, in care of the Park Record, P.O. Box 3688, Park City, Utah 84060. Make checks payable to Newspaperbooks. . (c) 1985 PK Associates, Inc. Distributed by Tribune Media Services, Inc. at local users' clubs. IBM users' clubs, in particular, multiply like lemmings. They're everywhere, and they make many free programs available to even "compatible" user members. Watch for notices of meetings on bulletin boards at busy computer stores. Also check out "Bowker's 1985 Complete Sourcebook Source-book of Personal Computing" ( ($19.95), available at most bookstores. book-stores. It lists users' clubs for practically every popular computer. At many club meetings, you can simply show up with a supply of floppy disks and copy the public domain or freeware programs you want to try. Many clubs also run listings of their available software on electronic bulletin boards, and often you can just dial up and copy by hooking your computer to a modem. Many cheap programs for desktop computers are written in BASIC, a programming language that's easy to write but tends to run slowly and makes horrible rounding-off errors when it does math. But we've also copied plenty of fine programs from club bulletin boards that were written in the better programming languages. Good bulletin boards guide neophytes through the proced-. ures needed to copy programs written in these languages. Are any of these cheap programs good? You bet! Many, of course, are amateurish. Some are just plain cute, like the program, found on darned near every IBM bulletin board, that makes your IBM or "compatible" play IBM's corporate fight song while a little ball bounces word to word on-screen. But two of the finest telecommunications telecommuni-cations programs for microcomputers microcom-puters are in the public domain, X-Modem and PC Talk m. And NASA, for example, writes programs not just for spaceships but for everything from business management manage-ment to engineering to education. Most of what they write is available through an agency called COSMIC (112 Barrow Hall, University of Georgia, Athens, Ga. 30602). COSMIC'S 1985 catalog ($25) lists programs for micros to mainframes, from the Radio Shack Model 3 to the very large Control Data Cyber. Most are for larger systems, and almost none of them costs as much as $1,000. Here's another lead if you've got a mini or mainframe. The National Technical Information Service collects col-lects and sells programs that were originally written for about 100 U.S. government agencies. Like COSMIC COS-MIC they sell cheap. The catalog is. |