How A Dentist's Office Opened A Little Wider

 

Most evenings, when Dr. Laurence Barsh drives from his downtown Boston dental office to his house in suburban Newton, his Osborne 1 computer goes with him. "It travels back and forth about as much as I do," he says.

Two factors aided Barsh's decision to buy the Osborne for his six-person office: its $1,795 price tag and its portability. Barsh, who knew "next to nothing" about computers, started looking at hardware and software dental-management packages, which cost from $10,000 to $20,000. "To purchase something at that level without knowing a megabyte from a floppy disk," he says, would have been "ridiculous." But, he adds, "I was at the stage where $2,000 seemed a reasonable investment to learn whether or not I really needed a computer."

Barsh also considered the more expensive Apple and the IBM PC. When he asked how he could take them from home to office, though, "they showed me [packing] cartons," he says. "That was kind of discouraging."

Barsh settled on the Osborne last August -- "I didn't know other portables existed," he says -- and now spends about eight hours a week, including weekends, using the machine. With the help of the manual, he is teaching himself how to use different applications programs. So far he has the WordStar word-processing program, which came with the Osborne, "pretty well licked" and is working on dBase II, a data management program he bought for about $600.

Barsh isn't completely happy with his purchase. He is annoyed that, after he bought dBase, Osborne offered it as a freebie. And he finds his machine's single-density floppy disk drive inadequate for the programs he wants to create. When he read that Osborne was offering a double-density drive as an option, he was at first interested, but now he thinks he will wait until hard-disk prices drop. "One of the problems as a non -- computer expert facing the computer field is that things change so rapidly," he says. He is, however, "very satisfied" with the hardware itself, particularly after he solved the problem of the Osborne's tiny screen by buying an inexpensive monitor to use at home.

Barsh's first project was a mailing list of his patients. Since the machine is at the office during the day, he can immediately update the list when a new patient calls or when someone has a change of address or telephone number. Recently he sent out a notice to all of his patients introducing his new associate. He generated his own labels on a dot-matrix printer he bought for about $600.

"In the past," Barsh says, "I couldn't simply turn to my secretary and say, 'Type out 1,000 envelopes, please." But now he finds he can communicate with his patients more frequently without hiring extra help. "Even if it goes no further than that, which I doubt," he says, "it was worth the expense."

Barsh plans next to work on programs that will allow him to print billing statements, balance his checkbook, keep track of disbursements, and handle inventory control. He is also developing a program to make the computer easier for his secretary to use, and he is ready to tackle SuperCalc, the spreadsheet program that is included in the machine's price.

One of the Osborne's initial attractions for Barsh was that it seemed compatible with larger systems he might buy. He figured he could use the Osborne at home and transmit information to the more expensive unit at the office. But, as it turned out, he says, "I'm using the Osborne to do all the things I needed a computer to do." That is why, he adds, "I'm happy I bought what I bought and didn't just take someone's word for a large computer system. One or two of the ones I looked at really had very little more capability than the Osborne."