jonh@tekgen.BV.TEK.COM (Jon Howell) (04/05/89)
I want to allow my dad to keep a database of his 2000 book (and ever-growing :-) library on my CoCo3 Level II system. I'll be getting a hard drive soon, so it will actually be practical. ;-) I figure he shouldn't need more than a K per book, (Probably a half K would do nicely) so he could fit his database now into about 2M. That'll leave me 5.5M (Ok, a small drive. I'll upgrade. :-). Soo, this is where I get advice. I have an ADDS terminal for him (and I'll be adding a few serial ports so there'll be room for him and my modem) so I never have to relinquish my RGB monitor for dirty text work. :-) My question: Should I write or buy? Is there a base out there capable of handling his needs? What he'd like to do is have a few permanent fields on each book plus a variable- record field, 'keywords'. Then he could look up a list of books with keyword foo or by author foo or published in a certain year. And, when he had manually pared down the list as well as merging it with others, he could have the database write the list out to a file in programmable formats, either an mroff bibliography page source, a finished bibliography, a numbered list, etc.. Can I buy a program to pull all this off? What's the best? What's fast? If no database will allow formatted exports, could I get one that will just export lists and I'd write a shortie to format the lists? And finally, if I buy, what will run on the ADDS? Does everything have CoCo screen codes inserted all over the place? Gracias en advancio, (That was *Spanish*, heh heh.. :-) --Jon -- ...!tektronix!tekgen!jonh (503) MAK-SEMA Jon Howell | Q: How come they never // // // _ __ _ . . . . ___ . _ | play that on the radio? // // // / \(_ __ (_) |\/| /| |\ | | /| / | A: They should. // // // \_/__) / | | /"| | \| _|_ /"| \_ | --Dave Barry