Information Letter 8

The press of working flat-out on AutoCAD and trying to run Marinchip at the same time began to tell on Dan Drake and myself. This brief note was the last Information Letter for well over a year. As the pace of activity in the company accelerated, verbal communications over the telephone, via the MJK teleconferencing system, and at the monthly meetings supplanted written summaries.

This information letter is to suggest a new participant in the company, Stephanie Nydell. Her participation letter is attached, which details her background and interests.

Those of us who are ISD old-timers don't have to be told that Stephanie would be an excellent addition to the company. She would be able to immediately get to work on documentation production, and having written manuals for a competing CAD system, is eminently qualified to tear into the MicroCAD manual. Also, she can become the nucleus of our customer support operation, having experience in that at both Nicolet and at Information Unlimited Software.

All the rest of the details are in the letter, so read it. Stephanie will be at the August 1 meeting, so you can talk to her and ask any questions you might have at that time. Assuming there's no objection, we can bring her into the company shortly after the meeting in the long-delayed option issue.

Other Items

Everything else is moving ahead rapidly. MicroCAD-80 (the 8080 version in PL/I) is pretty much running now. The 8086 version has now been completely translated to Computer Innovations C, and Dan and Greg are compiling away and beginning to stack modules into a complete program. Greg has the graphics driver for the IBM PC finished. We've received the digitiser, and it's now running with MicroCAD-80. We finally received our copies of CB80, and they're on their way to the people working with CB80. We got a WordStar, MailMerge, and SpellStar at about 80% off list for documentation use and feature evaluation. Duff and Mauri have the memory-only version of the Window line database working, and are moving on to the backing file pager. Kern has the real appointment calendar in Autodesk, and is designing the database interface. A test version of Communicator has been put together by Peter Goldmann, and Rudolf Künzli will be completing a new version of the screen driver package shortly. We now have the information we needed on the 8086 relocatable format. The QBASIC86 project now has no obvious stumbling blocks, and is moving ahead. We've found two typesetting services so far which accept ASCII text, and we're comparing them and others to choose a way to produce manuals.

See you at the meeting.