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

Editor’s note: This is the final article in a three-part series on utilities for IBM PCs or compatibles. The first part, on enhancing input! output operations, appeared Feb- ruary 8, 1987, P. 22. The second, on DOS utilities, appeared March 21, 1988, p. 14. In this final installment, I’ll consider the so-called desktop utilities, (not to be confused with the term desktop publishing). When SIDEKICK first came out in 1984, it used the desktop metaphor in an attractive way. Just as y

Editor’s note: This is the second article in a three-part series on utilities for IBM PCs or compatibles. For the first part, on enhancing input/output operations, see February 8, 1988, p. 22. A future article will deal with desktop utilities. The disk operating system (DOS) that you purchase to run on your personal computer consists primarily of a set of routines that application programs can call upon, together with a facility for loading programs. The various built-in commands like &

Nothing is certain but death and taxes, goes the old saw. And while there are programs that can help you write your will (and I suppose one could devise a far-fetched scenario involving medical databases) there really isn’t much that you and your PC can do about the former of these certainties. There is, however, a class of programs that can make filling out tax returns more pleasant and less time-consuming, if not outright fun. One of the leading IBM PC programs is TURBO TAX. The lead

Editor's note: This is the first of three articles on utilities for personal computers that will appear over the next several issues. Part 2 will deal with DOS utilities and part 3 with desktop utilities. What are "free" programs and "shareware" programs? Free programs are exactly what they sound like: If you can get copies, they cost nothing. They are often called "public domain," which is a misnomer since most In fact are copyrighted. Shareware is often confused with free software. Its ce