At the July 31 meeting Glenn Fetter and I worked on the machine we had been trying to get ready for a missionary effort in Jamaica; it kept crashing everytime I installed software on it. I finally discovered that if I disabled Internal Cache it would not crash, but then it ran about as slow as molasses in January (during a snow storm), so we clearly cannot ship it that way.

At the August 7 meeting a member brought by a scanner for us to use, and we brought in a 386 that someone brought by my house. James Kirkpatrick, Gary Ludwig, Brian Miller, and I worked verifying that some computers we had in the "Shipping Department" still worked, and combining them with monitors and keyboards for Brian to take to Belieze to the Belieze Bible and Trade School. Paster James Amburgey of the Gleaner Missionary Church in Tulsa came by, looking for a computer with a word processor to organize a database, mailing list, post cards, letters, flyers, calendars, and children's resources. We gave them a 386 with 8 meg memory, and two hard drives totaling over 300 meg, which should do the job for them.

For the first time in months, our "shipping department" is now empty, with the exception of a couple of 286s we thought were operational, but which did not work when we checked them out again planning to send them to Belieze. Perhaps their CMOS batteries finally died while they were sitting in the shipping area waiting for a new home.

If you have computers that you are willing to donate to our project, the best thing would be if you could bring them to the Bethesda Boys Ranch, 17424 S Union Street, Mounds, OK on the 1st, 4th, or 5th Saturday from 10:00 a.m. till noon (sometimes later) and you can see where we work on the units. If that is not convenient, you could bring it by my house at 3311 South 127 East Place and put it in my car, and I can take it in the next time we meet. Alternatively you could bring it to one of our meetings, and put it in the car there.

If you know of a non-profit organization who could use one of our machines, have them contact me by phone at 622-3417 or by email at djs@ionet.net telling me what they need, and what they will use it for. If we have something, we will invite them to come out to Bethesda Boys Ranch to bring something to identify their organization, and to pick out a machine from our "shipping department".

For more information on the Tulsa Computer Society click here