DIMS -- Dan's Information Management System -- Overview

DIMS is a file management program for handling list type 
information which runs under MBASIC on CP/M computers.  (There is 
another version for PC DOS machines.)

The author, Dan Dugan of San Francisco, has contributed DIMS to 
the public domain.  DIMS received a highly favorable review in 
the former MicroSystems magazine some time back.  

DIMS might be regarded as a "poor man's data base manager" and 
will satisfy the file management requirements of many users.  The 
author has used it to maintain mailing lists and to print labels 
for clients, with lists of over 5000 names, monthly updating.  

The user must select record lengths of either 128 or 256 bytes 
for a particular data base.  DIMS uses the direct access 
facilities of MBASIC to get at records.  However, utilities are 
furnished to read in and write out records in the "comma 
separated variable" format used by MailMerge and many other data 
handling programs.  Thus DIMS can incorporate data from other 
programs and DIMS data can be easily exported to other programs.  

Like all powerful programs, DIMS has a fairly elaborate set of 
commands with which the user must become familiar.  Installation 
for a particular computer requires some minimum knowledge of 
BASIC language programming.  Perhaps these requirements for the 
user to invest a little bit of time in learning are why DIMS has 
been largely overlooked in the public domain software area.  DIMS 
is not as simple as ABC, it is only as simple as A C E, or 
thereabouts.  

The main documentation file is a WordStar file entitled 
DINSTALL.DOC.  There are a couple of DWS files included which
are not documentation, but are DWS WordStar files for use in
an advanced DIMS application.  

The meat of the DIMS system consists of 17 BASIC programs.
There are several "main" programs and many auxiliary utilities
which chain to the main program when called from the DIMS menu.
There are some other standalone utilities which process your data
in various ways separately from the main DIMS program.  The public
owes Dan Dugan a vote of thanks for the contribution he has made
of many hundreds of line of sophisticated BASIC code.  

All the DIMS programs are furnished in file type ASC and can be
perused and worked on with a text editor.  They can be loaded
into the MBASIC interpreter.  

CAUTION:  Due to an unresolved bug, the ASCII programs should be 
loaded into the BASIC interpreter, then saved in MBASIC's regular 
compressed non-ASCII format, then re-loaded and run.  This 
procedure is well-explained in the documentation.  

There are 14 short example files furnished by the author of DIMS
for use when breaking in the system.

User's Guide magazine announced in issue #16 (August 85, p.6) 
that the next issue would include a review of DIMS and a detailed 
tutorial by the author of the program, Dan Dugan.  Perhaps that 
will stimulate interest in this fine public domain data file 
management system.  

End of Overview.  RDE