[speaker001:] so do you have PC
[speaker002:] I have a personal computer at home it's an AT compatible
[speaker001:] huh-uh
[speaker002:] I don't use it very much any more I used to use it quite a bit
[speaker001:] uh-huh
[speaker002:] I also have a PC at work that I use as a terminal I do some PC stand alone work on it and I can transfer data back and forth between the PC and the main frame
[speaker001:] uh-huh
[speaker002:] what about you do you own a computer
[speaker001:] um well I sort of own a computer we have two PCs at home but neither one do we really own um both are no both of them are sort of work related and
[speaker002:] are you leasing them loners loaners from work
[speaker001:] yeah that's the nicer way right of
[speaker002:] do you work for TI
[speaker001:] no no um I actually I'm doing consulting right now because I just had a baby and my husband's working at Bell Labs but he's really from France and these computers actually are from France
[speaker002:] what brand are they
[speaker001:] one of them's a Compaq
[speaker002:] um-hum
[speaker001:] it's a three eighty six
[speaker002:] I'm jealous
[speaker001:] and the other is actually a IBM PC compatible it's a three eighty six guess it's twenty five yeah three eight six twenty five C maybe I don't know no we don't have the cash that's right we decided not to get the cash which is actually another loaner one too that we've picked up for a consulting job that my husband was doing and
[speaker002:] what kind of consulting do you do
[speaker001:] um well I actually do some work working at MIT and at NIST National Institute of Standards and Technology
[speaker002:] uh-huh
[speaker001:] in Washington and then I worked for Dragon Systems for a while
[speaker002:] what kind of work do you do when you're consulting
[speaker001:] um well it depends it's very different in the different places but
[speaker002:] is it programming related
[speaker001:] yeah yeah program related research related I've I work in speech the speech field and I I do a lot about acoustics phonetics and
[speaker002:] uh-huh
[speaker001:] looking at the uh acoustic characteristics of speech and so I do that type of stuff typically for other people and we use uh here we use the PCs to do that and mostly I use it for writing papers and things like that
[speaker002:] word processing
[speaker001:] well more uh do you know Latek
[speaker002:] no I'm not familiar with it
[speaker001:] word text word text processing so I don't I don't use I mean you can call it word processing but I don't usually use a word processor to do it
[speaker002:] um-hum
[speaker001:] and we don't have too much standard software like I haven't bought we haven't really bought any commercially available software at all so we don't use it for things like our accounts and addresses and things like that we use it more for just writing programs when we need to or um doing research looking at the speech signal and then doing writing and also as a just as a terminal and we connect to other computers to read our net mail and things like that
[speaker002:] so you've got you've got a modem in it then
[speaker001:] uh neither one has a modem but we have a modem
[speaker002:] at home you have a modem that you can connect to each of them
[speaker001:] neither one right
[speaker002:] uh and so it's an external modem I got when I got mine I had an internal modem in it I used it uh quite a bit when I was um
[speaker001:] yeah we have uh-huh
[speaker002:] uh looking at uh information on a large bulletin board sponsored by a newspaper in a in Fort Worth but uh went out of town for a while and and sort of got off the uh uh bulletin board and of my micro completely
[speaker001:] um-hum uh-huh
[speaker002:] and after a while the modem started making noises on its own without uh even without using it on the computer I could turn a computer on it'd start squawking so I finally opened up the box and took it out
[speaker001:] so that was it
[speaker002:] I think that's the thirty second warning
[speaker001:] oh I didn't hear it do you hear the the beep in the background
[speaker002:] yes
[speaker001:] oh that's a an ambulance or something going on here I think
[speaker002:] okay where
[speaker001:] I haven't ever noticed the thirty second warning actually
[speaker002:] where are you and uh
[speaker001:] in Manhattan
[speaker002:] are you at home now so you've got a lot of traffic noise real close
[speaker001:] yeah I'm at home uh-huh so it'd be interesting for the people that look at this signal I mean because there's a lot of background noise that you know people can hear so it'll be interesting how much of it actually gets picked up um yeah and often times that I can't talk on the can't do this much later than now between sort of like six five thirty and six thirty or something like that because the traffic outside they honk the horn so loud I can't even hear the phone conversation
[speaker002:] what time is it now where you are
[speaker001:] uh about twenty after four
[speaker002:] so you're an hour ahead of where I am I'm in Central Central time zone
[speaker001:] okay yeah we're Eastern and um what did did you ever try using like Prodigy or any of those systems
[speaker002:] no I haven't done that uh I know someone who has and and she's uh very uh pleased with it she told me some of the things you can do and it's just a a very uh handy tool to have
[speaker001:] uh-huh
[speaker002:] yeah and and you can do a lot it it makes things very convenient you can save a lot of money too certainly cut down on long distance charges if you if that's what you have in mind
[speaker001:] uh-huh yeah I've never tried using that I don't know too much about it what about have you did you use commercially available software or
[speaker002:] I have uh I have used Lotus I have used uh Word Perfect uh I not heavy use I've used uh D Base and uh I've used a substantial amount of shareware
[speaker001:] uh-huh
[speaker002:] um I haven't done much Lotus work connected with my job I've been through three classes and I have a great deal of respect for it
[speaker001:] uh-huh uh-huh
[speaker002:] um I haven't done much word processing work with my job I do some and I and the D Base work I've done was strictly class related
[speaker001:] um-hum I've never used D Base um but I've heard both good things and bad things about it
[speaker002:] well it's probably the granddaddy of most uh data base management systems there it's got some pretty uh strong competitors some of them have reviews that are better than D Base so I uh I uh I think uh by now it's a matter of uh personal taste
[speaker001:] uh-huh yeah people told me that it was sort of cumbersome to use
[speaker002:] I can understand that very easily I've used uh I've had a class on um R Base and also in Paradox and both of those seem very easy to use compared to D Base
[speaker001:] uh-huh uh-huh do you think you D Base is more flexible or allows you to do more or do you think the others are pretty much compatible these days
[speaker002:] um I wouldn't say compatible but there certainly comparable
[speaker001:] well I don't I yeah I didn't mean compatible I meant comparable my brain is going to mush
[speaker002:] um
[speaker001:] and what do you work on at TI
[speaker002:] I'm a computer programmer on the IBM main frames I do uh main mainly business data processing
[speaker001:] um-hum uh-huh uh-huh
[speaker002:] I also handle production support for the systems in my area of responsibility
[speaker001:] uh-huh okay
[speaker002:] um sometimes I get called late at night at home because there's a production problem and that gives me the opportunity to come in to work and fix it if I can't think of some thing to tell the trouble shooter while we're on the phone
[speaker001:] right
[speaker002:] um
[speaker001:] fun
[speaker002:] I also uh handle most of the calls from our users and other programmers who need to find out something were connected