From: doelz@comp.bioz.unibas.ch (Reinhard Doelz)
Newsgroups: bionet.software
Subject: Re: Computerized lab notebook?
Date: 10 Jan 93 16:22:47 GMT
Reply-To: doelz@urz.unibas.ch
Organization: EMBnet Switzerland [BASEL]

In article <LMH.93Jan10054705@luke.lcs.mit.edu>, lmh@theory.lcs.mit.edu (Minghsun Liu) writes:
...
|> presentations for the lab meetings only.)  And I mentioned that with
|> the advent and gaining popularity of notebook-sized portable
|> computers,  (I am not sure what the situation is in places outside of
|> Boston but I have seen people WORKING with their Mac PowerBook in
|> subway trains more than once!)  
|> 

From very early on, I was sort of a computer fan. I purchased a HX-20 Computer 
in 1982 - this was one of the first hand-held computers with 16  kByte  memory 
on 2 6301 processors running at some hunderd KHz, full-flavoured BASIC and  no 
applications. Results were viewed with a 4x20 LCD display. It wasn't bad,I fi-
nallyi wrote my thesis on it in conjunction with a typewriter and a disk drive 
180 kByte  each. Recently, I aquired a ZEOS Palmtop with a Nec30 processor and 
MByte RAM with MS-DOS 5.0, Microsoft Works and a PIM in the ROM.  The  new box 
is pocket-size and only about the same price as the old HX-20  was.  Supported 
applications include terminal emulation, word processing, spreadsheet database
operations and a little graphics on a CGA 80x25 character screen. 

But, seriously speaking, what is the use of all that? 

Reading eMail on the road, typing a meeting report (which is quite hard to  do 
in the subway :-) if you return home after a working day),a bit of spreadsheet 
calculations and business graphics late at home to see who's doing the most on 
my ftp server,  and that's basically it.REAL work in terms of reasonable soft-
ware  and data is either too expensive or very difficult to keep in synchroni-
sation if you take the data with you.  Economically, for me it does not really
make sense  to go for the NETWORK as 'the computer' if you interpret 'the NET-
WORK' as a collection of computers with disk mirroring or NFS as the most  so-
phisticated technique of data synchronisation. Once you inquire to use  porta-
ble   computers,you should be aware of the phenomena rised by several hours of
off-line time, both security-wise and with respect to data synchronisation. If
you can afford to pay the licenses on the portable /small unit, and  also  buy 
the software to knit it all together in really reliable way, you are so expen-
sive that most biology departments will welcome the opportunity to shorten the 
budget for computers. Notabene, I am to saying that it is not possible, I just
say that the biologists might benefit from this so  little  that it is not af
fordable. 


Regards 
Reinhard 


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