CompuServe Thread

Chris, we had to sign on with our current software provider for at least another year because of immediate support needs (we went a month without support). However, we will still continue to strive for programming independence. If the building is open this Saturday AND IF AND ONLY IF you happen to be in the area I'll call you by Friday and perhaps you can take a look at our systems. Meanwhile you could answer a few questions put to me by our nervous users. Our present programming provider is telling our naive users that multiple programmers will bring our system crashing down, programs will collide, etc., etc. My reassurance to our naive users is that nobody will write for the system who does not know what he's (or she's) doing. Of course, since our present software provider has had an absolute monopoly on our system he may have gotten sloppy in ways that he shouldn't or wouldn't have if others had been simultaneously writing for the system. As someone else once said isn't all this smoke and mirrors? Another question concerns system memory. We contracted for the maximum 4 Megs possible on the 11/83. Last week we had the unit serviced because it refused to boot up (apparently the CPU board and the memory boards were not placed in the right sequence–on the 11/83 the memory board must come before the CPU, and we had it the other way around–why the system ever worked I'll never know). In any case I noticed that the memory board was half populated with chips. It never occurred to me at the time that this was an indication that we had a 2 meg system; nor had it occurred to me to question the amount of memory the many times that I ran SY/C and noticed that the memory allocation table tallied only addresses 0K to 1024K to start (remember that I don't have any system documentation). I now claim that half the memory we paid for has meant close to a year and a half of TREMENDOUS performance degradation. Am I wrong to argue that had we had the full 4 Megs to begin we may never have needed a second 11/83? Another question concerns the optimum number of files per account. I