Sierra Service's Easyfind & Turbo Easyfind.

[+Allan]

I picked these up recently on eBay. All disks copied without errors. (Let me know if there are any issues. I printed out the on-disks instructions for both and included them below. These indexes were for Antic, Analog and Compute magazines. Included are indexes for 1983, 1984, 1985, 1986 and 1987. I am assuming that Turbo Easyfind was an upgrade to Easyfind. There was also a manual on Archive.org which I am guessing is another printout of the on-disk instructions but may be different.

 

 

Easyfind_Docs.pdf Turbo_Easyfind_documentation.pdf 1983_A.atr 1983_B.atr 1984_A.atr 1984_B.atr 1985_A.atr 1985_B.atr 1986_A.atr 1986_B.atr 1987_A.atr 1987_B.atr Easyfind_A.atr Easyfind_B.atr Turbo_A.atr Turbo_B.atr

[+Allan]

Forgot to add the paper flyer/catalog that came with the disks.

Sierra_Services_Flyer_Catalog.pdf

[+Allan]

If anybody has any related material from this company, please post it here.

[+Allan]

Here is a link to the May, 1987 issue of Analog magazine that featured a basic listing of the Easyfind program. I am not sure if they stopped selling the program at this point and sold it to Analog magazine but that may be the case.

 

https://archive.org/details/analog-computing-magazine-54/page/n63/mode/2up?view=theater

[+videofx]

Very cool

 

Thanks for this! Cant wait to try it!

[+Larry]

I've had this for years, and it is really useful.  I typed in many of the magazine data entries and also created a Turbo Basic version.  But alas, it is quite slow, grinding through the databases, even with TBXL.  Not too troublesome when you first use it, but if you search with it very much, chugging away in a floppy drive becomes irritating. Then I made a giant leap forward in speed, converting the data sets into PC format with true CR/LF line endings and merging all the data into one large file.  Then it is easy to load into a PC word processor and use the "FIND" function to do the searching, now at modern speeds. Excellent find, Allan!

[+Allan]

It would be great if someone could make a short video doing a couple of searches with Turbo-Easyfind.

[Mrshoujo]

I typed in Easy Find and then spent hours going through my collection and using TextPro, typed up my own indexes. All that work and I never used it.

 

I did one for The 2600 Connection newsletter and for Tim Duarte, wrote a program to print it out and sent that to him.

 

Fun times.

[+Larry]

I was going to edit my post above, but can no longer modify it.  So I'll add one other thought.  EasyFind really exercises your disk drive, and generally that's not a good thing.  (Less so with a track buffer.)  If you copy the ATR's onto a ramdisk, things go much faster, and of course, no wear and tear on your drive.