<h2>SigMicro</h2>

by Paul Watts

Has this ever happened to you? You're sitting in front of your computer - your baby, your pride and joy. You've made it into an extension of yourself. It's an Extreme, with a super-bad processor on board and more RAM than you can shake a keyboard at. The glow of the 21 inch monitor lights up the entire room, and the chrome SGI logo on the monitor blinds you when you throw an occasional adoring glimpse at it. You're generating 15 gazillion polygons per second, and compiling your programs as fast as you can say "bitchin'," while in the background calculating the 100,000th Mersienne Prime. Your computer is the center of the universe: your computer is the Hand of God.

Then a sudden jolt wakes you up, and staring back at you is a 14 inch monitor with the message "Kernel Panic" flashing incessantly. You don't have an SGI - you have a 486 with 8 megs of RAM which barely runs XDoom on top of Linux. You wake up, fall to your knees and scream at the ceiling, "Why God, why?!" We, at the Special Interest Group for Microcomputing have a name for this: Chronic UNIX User's Syndrome. When you use UNIX often, you have a sense that your PC could be something of a UNIX machine too; alas, your measly computer isn't a real UNIX machine.

There is only one known cure to this growing epidemic: run Windows. And SigMicro is here to help you do that. We can teach you how to use PCs for what they were really intended: running neat graphical user interfaces. We can help you write a VxD to interface your computer with your toaster. We can show you how to run Microsoft Word efficiently (although this is an advanced topic). We can help you overcome your UNIX User's Syndrome.

Currently SigMicro is leading a workshop series teaching the fundamentals of Windows programming. Our next installment is April 6th, where we will cover using ClassWizard to maximize your MFC productivity. Our final workshop for the semester is a lecture presenting Rapid Application Development using Visual Basic. Watch our workshop home page at: http://www.acm.uiuc.edu/sigmicro/windevils/workshop/ for the latest info. SigMicro is here to help you. And remember, if you don't get help at SigMicro, please get help somewhere.

Return to the April '96 BANKS page
Last updated 1 April 1996