🚀 go-pugleaf

Hello Everybody:
        At the end of last semester I ran into a recurring "degradation"
in my students' software (dbase iii+) diskettes (maybe 5 of 40).  Things
we so hectic (my first year here), that I just had them go get new copies
(boo).  So I didn't get a copy of the problem disks.  As I started to
recover after finals, I got to thinking...  Here is what we saw.  Whenever
they tried to get a print screen while in dbiii+, the printer went crazy,
started spewing out garbage, and had to be reset (powered down and back)
before the next job could be run.  We were doing joins - might have some-
thing to do with that (but that wouldn't explain the other 35 or so).
        Another wierdness (or maybe not).  If you are (BY THE WAY, WE
ARE TALKING ABOUT IBM CLONES) booting up from a bootable diskette (not a
full DOS disk) with no config.sys file, does it get the files and buffers
limits from the dos disk that originally made the bootable disk?  It
must, obviously.  Where does it keep this stuff?  (I'm digging into dos
and masm this summer, I hope this is not too stupid a question.)  I think
this is unrelated to the above problem - maybe not.
        Finally, I just heard a rumor, myth, . . .  Supposedly,
someone read this somewhere.  Is it possible that the software
packagers are spreading viruses to their competition (for obvious
reasons).  "Hi, I'm a virus, are you a database? Are you my database?
CRUNCH."  Sounds rather strange, but...

                                     Thanks people,
                                     L. Anne Cole
                                     Asst.Prof. Computer Science Dept.
                                     SUNY Plattsburgh
                                     Plattsburgh, NY