Articles by Barry Simon

For years, the bold entrepreneurs who built the personal computer industry have envisaged - even promised - a day when we'd see a PC on every desk in every workplace, every home. It hasn't happened yet, of course; the general population of the United States is far from being on-line. Scientists can't be blamed for this, however. Indeed, given its density of PCs, the science community probably ranks right up there with banking and a few other commercial sectors as contributing most to the fulfi

Since the hard disk first became widely available, scientists have recognized it as a wonderful productivity tool. Its capacity is impressive indeed; an 80-megabyte hard disk is able to accommodate the equivalent of 80 bulky technical monographs (or 40,000 letters of recommendation). But along with this vast storage capability comes the potential for. trouble: Unless you make systematic attempts to organize your hard disk, you are inviting the kind of disaster that could result in an allday

If you are an inveterate tinkerer—and a lot of scientists can certainly be classified as such—it's likely that you'll eventually develop a yen for customizing your PC once the pleasure of mastering off-the-shelf applications packages wears off. To satisfy that yearning, you will, of course, have to take a plunge into the workings of the operating system- DOS, in the case of IBM family machines and you'll also have to get deeper into the inner workings of user interfaces, such as Micr

Over the years, microcomputers have proved to be a great help to scientists, who are, in a sense, in the information business, and need all the automated help they can get in managing their research data. But scientists often lead busy private lives as well, and therefore can benefit greatly from a system that supports the efficient management of personal as well as professional information. During the past year, the computer press has identified a class of IBM PC-family software intended for

Scientists are busy people. And we’re also human. Which means we tend to forget things—things like deadlines for funding proposals, peer review meetings, special reports to professional organizations, and so forth. Unfortunately, many of us have had to learn the hard way that organization is essential. Without it, it’s all but impossible to track and fulfill professional commitments without compromising precious research time. A little-known category of software products&#

Spending too much time on electronic mail, lately? Maybe Binet is the culprit—and maybe you’d like an alternative. Among scientists in academia who’ve been bitten by the E-mail bug, Bitnet appears to have emerged as the transmitting/receiving network of choice. Since it’s a network run by a consortium of academic institutions, it’s private----essentially only other academics may use it. And virtually all academic institutions—and the National Science Foun

To some of you, April 15 may still seem like a vague date in the distant future; in reality, the ominous IRS deadline for submitting tax returns is only six weeks away. The Scientist ran reviews of a few tax preparation programs last year, but changes in tax forms and tax laws have forced revisions on existing packages and even encouraged at least one new notable program to enter the market. Since scientists are more likely than the average tax filer to have access to a personal computerR

Although the word-processing software package Note Bene is aimed primarily at nonscientific academic users, its impressive capabilities in such areas as bibliography creation and foreign language support make it valuable for scientists as well as those in the humanities and social sciences. The $495 package, developed by New York City-headquartered Dragonfly Software, runs on the IBM-PC and compatible computers. In many ways it takes after another word-processing program, XyWrite, a popular pa

Imagine two scientists working on identical research projects—two astronomers, let’s say, who are both studying paired stars. Each has made a number of observations, and each is ready to do some number crunching. Astronomer Number One loads a statistical analysis program on his PC, and sets the calculations into motion. While this automatic process is going on, he’d like to type some notes, but he can’t—at least not on the same PC—because that machine will

Intel’s 80386 chip holds a lot of promise for scientists working in all areas of computer-supported research. In addition to increasing memory capacity over its immediate predecessor, the Intel 80286, the 386 packs far more power. With it, for example, scientists will be able to run complicated molecular modeling or number-crunching programs on their desktop PCs. But it will be a while before that potential is realized in the IBM-compatible world since, for the full 386 power to be “

When writing computer programs in any language, scientists must solve problems that probably have been faced already by many other programmers. It is silly to "reinvent the wheel," as the saying goes, when a variety of routines (subprograms that scientists can plug into programs they're writing) are already available for the most popular computer languages. I spend most of my time programming in Turbo Pascal 4.0 (produced by Borland International), so I am most familiar with the three classes of

Most people working with personal computers don’t have degrees in computer science and don’t write their own programs. But in the population of people who do program, scientists make up a large percentage. Off-the-shelf software often doesn’t provide just what laboratory scientists are looking for therefore, many of them tinker with altering these store-bought packages or develop their own. If you do a little programming on an IBM PC, you should know that some reasonably pri

Twenty years ago, when I was at Princeton, I and all of my fellow graduate students in physics were required to pass two foreign-language achievement tests in order to get our degrees. Since then, apparently convinced that such skills are of diminishing importance, the Princeton physics department— and most other graduate schools as well—have dropped such a requirement. On the other hand, skill in the “foreign” language of computer programming has increasingly been re

Spreadsheets and outliners are joining scientific word processors and number crunchers in scientists’ software libraries. While it would be nice to add to the nonscientific shelf a package that cleans up grammatical errors and stylistic blunders as well, I’m still in search of the perfect grammar checker. Grammar rules are not easy for scientists to learn and remember just consider how hard it is to create a set of simple rules to teach grammar to what is, after all, a dumb com

Before I had a PC, I wouldn’t have thought of using a paper and pencil outline before writing an article or committee report. Now it’s rare that I don’t use my PC’s outliner. Not only do I compose full outlines before sitting down to write papers, but I prepare most of my course and professional lectures either partially or entirely in an outliner. What makes an outlining program (at least one of the good ones) so much more powerful than paper and pencil is the ease o