DAVE'S DIGITAL DELI
                                 by David W. Barrow III
          
          Thought for the month:  Pioneers are defined as persons with
          their faces in the dirt and arrows in their backs.
          
          UPDATES
          _______.  As a dealer I try to keep my system and my customers
          systems as up to date as practicable.  As long as Alpha supplied
          up-to-the-minute directories it was fairly easy.  Since the AM
          employee "resizings" the directories have been less and less
          frequent - and a little harder to find.  So much for the miracle
          of computerization.  There also used to be a semiannual full
          patch listing in the AMTEC Journal.  That hasn't been done since
          July '90 and Sandi tells me that she doesn't have time to do it
          any more.  I liked Sandi's format but, since I am doing this for
          MY purposes I decided to add a couple of things.
              Another problem that this solves is that these lists were
          only available to dealers and subscribers to the AMTEC Journal.
          With this solution an end user can check his/her own system
          (after all - even YOUR dealer doesn't know everything that you
          may have on your system).
          
              My solution.  Instead of making calls to sell new systems and
          upgrades I have taken a lot of Saturday time to call AMTEC- (the
          rates are lower then) and get ALL of the patches since 1000.  I
          then took ALL of the .L files and put them into AlphaWRITE.  I
          expanded the descriptions to have a discrete line for each
          version/release that each patch applied to (according to the AM
          supplied info).  At this point a word of praise is in order for
          the Record/Playback feature that Dave Pallmann put into Write
          2.1.  I then put the file in a format which CALC could absorb.
          After a LOT of retries caused by lack of commas, etc., etc., I
          was able to get a CALC file that I could further manipulate.  The
          end result was two categories of listings (1) a numeric listing
          of the patches and (2) a VERIFYable listing (with comments to
          identify the patch to produce the result.
              My numeric listing has fields for:
              (1) the file (the first six characters are SP plus the patch
          number.  The three after the "
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