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Saxonia Issue 02 Part 038
Amiga for schoolwork
By Rumrunner/VOID
[l
I have a feeling that most people who have Amiga only use them for scene
purposes and other, non-work related activities. I cannot understand why,
as I have been able to use my Amiga for much school-related work.
Among the most common things to do on a computer at my school, "Høyskolen
I Vestfold", is writing long texts on one subject or another. Ofcourse,
the most common program for this is that nasty Word from Microsoft. I
don't like it at all. Even when you switch off all auto-correction
functions, it seems to mess up once in a while. I remember when I,
together with two other students wrote a socalled "Kandidatoppgave". It
was a piece of work we did for a compani here in Norway, they wanted to
know more about their market and so we made a survey for them, along with
describing all theoretical phrases used in the report. We wanted to
include a question-form we used for the survey, and put it into the Word-
document. It was all fine for a while, but suddenly, we were not able to
save the document anymore. "Not enough free space" was the message we got.
That's a bad joke, shouldn't a couple of gigabytes be enough to save a
document of, let's say 20-30 pages? Well, as I was the one who was most
into computers, I took a look at it, and the only way we could rescue our
work was to copy blocks of text and paste it into a new document. When I
got to the question-form, which we had included as a list, things crashed.
So, my best guess it that, for some reason or another, Word had suddenly
decided that it didn't need the end-of-list marker anymore, and so, it
didn't know where the thing stopped, thus trying to save forever. This
happened on the computers at school, and I spoke to those who run the
system, but they didn't have any better idea. Before I found out the
error, they spoke about macro-viruses. But, as you can see, that wasn't
the case.
Well, that was a little discression, what I'm heading for is that even
the programs that almost everybody use for their school-needs isn't
bugfree, so why shouldn't I use an Amiga? It's very easy with plain texts.
If I write anything in school, and want to continue on it at home, I
simply rip out the text of the Word-document with a hex-editor, strip out
all bytes that the Amiga doesn't use (such as the CRLF for breaking a
line), and then I write on in CygnusEditor or similar. Ofcourse, if I
write the paper alone, I save the file as plain text, so I won't have to
rip it out later on, but I cannot be too greedy about this when working
in a group. Since I have to use manual linebreaks in a texteditor, I have
made a couple of simple assemblerroutines to help me. One breaks the lines
when I take the text from the Worddocument, and the other ones remove the
linebreaks when I want to use it in a wordprocessor again. That's only a
matter of using two linebreaks where I want the paragraphs, and keep
one if it found linebreak in the previous byte too. There are no user
interfaces to these routines, just a piece of sourcecode where I incbin
the file and assembler and run it, then I save out the altered text from
memory to a file. I have only found one downside to working this way, and
that is that all kinds of formatting disappears, but that it not a big
problem as you need to reformat the text when the paper is finished
anyway. The reason for this is that Word seems to change the text now and
then, you know programs that are made in a way that should make life
easier for you does the opposite in practical use. Who said I always want
to have capital letters after a full stop? I didn't as that is not always
the case, for instance when you are typing in lists or something like
that.
When working with spreadsheets, there's ofcourse a slightly bigger
problem, as they are not so easy to convert into another format, and
Amiga spreadsheet programs doesn't seem to like pc-formats. However,
I have still been able to use spreadsheet programs on Amiga for school
use, as I don't always have to have the file for it. Sometimes, I just
want some often used setups, like budgets or such, and then it's just
a matter of making it and printing it out. We cannot use computers for
the exams in economic courses anyway, so solving every task on computer
is not a good idea. It is too easy to forget important formulas at the
exam then.
I would also like to mention that, in my last school, I and another
person who should be quite known among you used Amiga exclusively for
one of our projects. Each year, three days were set aside for a bigger
project, that only had to relate to one course or another in order to be
valid. So, I and [1 Punisher[0 made a project about the opportunities of
Amiga, and made a little movie about it. We shoved parts of demos and
a little clip from common utilities such as ProTracker and Asm-One. It
turned out very good and the teacher thought that we had used much time
making this impressing show. You should have seen his face when we told
that we had used little more than a couple of hours.
One question people might have is [1 why[0 go through such work just to be
able to use the Amiga? In my case it's a question of stubbornness. I want
to do things my way, no matter what. I also don't want to spend lots of
money for a pc that I will not use for anything else than schoolwork.
Still I think that the best program ever to come on pc is the FastTracker
for DOS. It worked good, and resembles ProTracker enough to make working
with it worthwhile. While I'm on the subject, I have to critisise the
Windows-Trackers a little. Why is it so diffucult to make a tracker
where you have most commands available at hand without swithing from
screen to screen? I prefer the system used since the time of SoundTracker,
that is, change part of the screen only. Flicking through lots and lots
of "bookmarks", if I can call it that, is not good at all. And do
something about that replayer. When buying a new pc hearing the wallet
screaming for mercy, you should be able to expect something that could
play a module and at the same time manage to move a window on screen.
Moving the program manager should be possible while listening to a four-
channel module in the background when you have a pro-mod (for those of
you who are familiar with that racing-term) computer.
Yes, it seems that this have become another of my "I have pc's" article,
but that's a good sign. Stubborn and enthusiastic people is what has
given us the most impressing things so far, so I hope that there are more
of them out there.
