Date   : Mon, 17 Oct 1983 10:00:00-PDT
From   : ABN.ISCAMS@usc-isid
Subject: Church Support Software Distribution

Friends in Netland:

A few weeks ago I replied to an individual asking about software to
support church administration, offering a program of mine.

About six people jumped in and offered to test it, look at it, accept
it no matter what it was, etc.

Well, I finally have Toad Hall's KERMIT up and running, and I've transferred
my church program up into ABN.ISCAMS@USC-ISID (my directory).  The
files involved are:

               MBRS.BAS.1                      The runnable version (no comments)
               MBRSCMT.BAS.1               The bigger one, full of comments,
                                           that overflows 64K of memory,
                                           so don't even try it!

               MBRS.DOC.1                  The operator's manual and
                                           commentary/explanation.

The program is in Microsoft BASIC (version 5.something), is formatted
for an 80-column screen or printer, and has only a very few machine
or terminal-unique items (Clear Screen, Cursor Addressing a la common
terminals (ESC,=,32+vertical, 32+horizontal), and a special debugging
section (you don't have to use it) that uses the Freedom 100's special
ability to display but not act on control characters so you can look
directly at records with their data separators, relative file LSET's,
etc.)  You can weed all them out if you want.

I tried to make it pretty simple to use, but the code AIN'T SO SIMPLE!
Example:  To get 13 weeks of regular donations, 13 special donation
names, and 13 weeks of special donations into one FIELD line isn't
easy, much less trying to fit all the data into a 126-character record.
So...I MKI$'ed or MKS$'ed them all and concatenated them!  Flashy,
works fine, nice and tight, but lord, don't try to figure the code!

All are welcome to download via FTP and try them out on their micros
(unless you happen to have Microsoft BASIC running on your Cray).

I only ask that you tell me the name and address of the church (or
person) using it so I can help with bugs, updates, and just get a
good personal feeling out of it all!

(Why give it away?  Well, I owe a lot to those public domain authors
out there, but from actual useful utilities and the chance to learn
from their documentation and programs.  Even KERMIT came free! So
this is a small payback.)

David Kirschbaum
SGM, USA
(civilian persona Toad Hall)