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TSR, anyone?
Oct. 18th, 2002 07:54 pmSpent some time with Curt this morning, and it was just as educational as previous sessions.
He convinced me of the benefits to be gained by writing checks against income accounts, thus bypassing the entry of bills from vendors. However, that meant I had to come up with another way to keep track of events from last year (i.e., not in QuickBooks).
My first impulse was to write something in Perl on my Linux laptop that would create a journal file, one line per item, that I could search later. Actually, if we skip the Perl, we could do the same by creating a simple text file. The prospect did not appeal to me, although in retrospect, it should work.
My mind hearkened back to a program that I lived by back in the early and mid-80s, called Tornado Notes, by an outfit called Micro Logic. The product eventually became known as InfoSelect, and it went on to become a Windows application, and then (in my opinion) a bloated Windows application.
Looking in some of my old files (I used to file all the software I reviewed, and I reviewed Tornado Notes for Byte, way back when), I was pleasantly surprised to see that I still had the software. The bad news: the install disk was a 5-1/4 inch floppy, and none of my machines currently sports such a drive.
Back about a year ago, though, I did buy an old Dell 386 machine at a garage sale (for just about free). It does have such a drive, so I spent about 10 minutes hooking the system together and then installed Tornado Notes.
I'd forgotten that Tornado Notes was a type of program that was called a "TSR" (Terminate and Stay Resident). In the days before Windows, the technique of terminating a program and keeping it resident in memory was used to provide users with the ability to switch between applications on a DOS screen, using a special "hot key." Perhaps the best-known TSR was a program called Sidekick, from Borland, which offered a slew of PDA-like features that was always just a hot keystroke away.
Tornado Notes has a way of being run as a non-resident program, and that's how I'm currently running it on the Dell. The procedure I envision is to enter each receipt, note, bill, invoice, etc. in its own "window" and then to retrieve what I need using the program's "Get' function. If I do a workmanlike job of entry, then retrieval will be a snap, and I should be able to cross-reference the various papers into a coherent whole.
I just have to remember to back up the data, in case the Dell is just fooling me with its apparent ability to run DOS 6.20.
Cheers...
He convinced me of the benefits to be gained by writing checks against income accounts, thus bypassing the entry of bills from vendors. However, that meant I had to come up with another way to keep track of events from last year (i.e., not in QuickBooks).
My first impulse was to write something in Perl on my Linux laptop that would create a journal file, one line per item, that I could search later. Actually, if we skip the Perl, we could do the same by creating a simple text file. The prospect did not appeal to me, although in retrospect, it should work.
My mind hearkened back to a program that I lived by back in the early and mid-80s, called Tornado Notes, by an outfit called Micro Logic. The product eventually became known as InfoSelect, and it went on to become a Windows application, and then (in my opinion) a bloated Windows application.
Looking in some of my old files (I used to file all the software I reviewed, and I reviewed Tornado Notes for Byte, way back when), I was pleasantly surprised to see that I still had the software. The bad news: the install disk was a 5-1/4 inch floppy, and none of my machines currently sports such a drive.
Back about a year ago, though, I did buy an old Dell 386 machine at a garage sale (for just about free). It does have such a drive, so I spent about 10 minutes hooking the system together and then installed Tornado Notes.
I'd forgotten that Tornado Notes was a type of program that was called a "TSR" (Terminate and Stay Resident). In the days before Windows, the technique of terminating a program and keeping it resident in memory was used to provide users with the ability to switch between applications on a DOS screen, using a special "hot key." Perhaps the best-known TSR was a program called Sidekick, from Borland, which offered a slew of PDA-like features that was always just a hot keystroke away.
Tornado Notes has a way of being run as a non-resident program, and that's how I'm currently running it on the Dell. The procedure I envision is to enter each receipt, note, bill, invoice, etc. in its own "window" and then to retrieve what I need using the program's "Get' function. If I do a workmanlike job of entry, then retrieval will be a snap, and I should be able to cross-reference the various papers into a coherent whole.
I just have to remember to back up the data, in case the Dell is just fooling me with its apparent ability to run DOS 6.20.
Cheers...
