Re: HP Software

[Sue Dupre <DUPRE%PUCC.bitnet@vmd.cso.uiuc.edu>]

Dale,
I appreciated your response to my inquiry about HP software.  We are a fairly
small HP group overloaded with work as it is.  I want to make us more efficient
and not burden us with more work, especially work that's not directly HP re-
lated.  The programs we do have were developed on an as-needed basis by various
people who have worked for us and all are somewhat quirky and unrelated to each
other (some are in Dataease, others are in R-base - depends on what the person
doing the programming was comfortable with at the time).  I've had one of our
technicians developing a radiation-producing machine inventory program - he
started two years ago, working on it as he could, and it's still not in a form
I'm happy with.

So the upshot is that if I'm going to get this done in my lifetime, paying for
a reasonably priced commercial program is starting to look good.  I do appre-
ciate the advice of the people who have managed to organize their databases on
their own, but practically it's not going to work for us in the near future.

Thanks for your offer to collect data on what people are using.  I'll let you
know what we decide to do and would be happy to hear what you find out.

Sue Dupre/Health Physicist/Princeton University