jln@casbah.acns.nwu.edu (John Norstad) (05/28/91)
Gotcha - I knew that title would make you read this posting! When I got back from the Apple Worldwide Developer's Conference last week, I was all excited about continuing my work adding 7.0-studly stuff to Disinfectant, especially since I had gotten lots of great new ideas at the conference. I could not imagine the nightmare that awaited me (I mean besides getting home to find out that my car's transmission had died)... All the Mac geeks here at NU were dying to get their hands on System 7, and when our site license system software subscription copy of the personal upgrade kit arrived, we put the disk images up on a file server for people to fetch. Lots of them did just that, and soon got thoroughly confused because they had no manuals. Our store will not begin selling the kits until they get them in stock (maybe next week), and the jerks here at NU are too cheap to buy them anyway, so these people had nowhere to turn except ... To me, of course. I'm the only person on campus who knows anything at all about System 7, except for my friend Rob Lentz. Apple would not let me give copies of the beta versions to anybody else (thanks alot guys.) Rob just kind of soaked it up somehow, mostly by reading this newsgroup. He's an undergraduate, so he doesn't have anything better to do with his time. It quickly became clear that I'd never be able to do anything for the rest of my life except answer questions about System 7 unless I did something about the problem. So I wrote my own pair of manuals. The first manual is titled "How to Install System 7." Several people here have had problems installing System 7 on top of System 6, and I think it's a bad idea anyway, so my manual goes through all the gruesome details of how to install a fresh clean System Folder and then reinstall all your old stuff a piece at a time. I emphasize the tricks you have to use to get some of the popular networking software we use here at NU to work (QuickMail, In/Out, and MacTCP in particular). The second manual is titled "How to Use System 7." It describes all the new features of the system in some detail, even the little things. Since many of you out there in netland are in the same boat that I find myself (and it's a quickly sinking boat, I'll have you know), you are all welcome to fetch my docs via anon FTP to ftp.acns.nwu.edu, directory pub/jlnstuff. The documents are available in both MacWrite II format and plain text file format. These documents are rather minimal, and they're only first drafts. They contain just text, no pictures, and they assume thorough familiarity with System 6. They were hastily written, and I'm sure there are errors and omissions. In addition, they are tailored for use here at NU, so you'll probably want to edit them before using them on your campus or in your organization. I hope you find them useful. Please let me know when you find mistakes so I can fix them. Note: To save bandwidth, I have omitted all the smiley faces :-) from this posting. Please insert them in the obvious places. John Norstad Academic Computing and Network Services Northwestern University j-norstad@nwu.edu