The following material comes from two issues of the Raised Dot Computing
Newsletter (July/August 1991 and Jan/Feb 1992). For subscription information,
call (800) 347-9594.
 
 
             X*PRESS: Cheap Electronic News Delivered to Your Home
 
     At any time we want, we can ask our computer to collect a mountain of news
stories for us. It gathers exactly what we want: hard news, personality gossip,
weather information from across the country, or sports. The hard news comes from
the Associated Press and from the French, German, Taiwanese, Chinese, Soviet,
and Japanese news services. The computer collects all this information for us,
limited only by the buffer size (about 200,000 characters on our system). We do
not tie up the phone or incur any billable charges. How can we get electronic
news on our computer without having to pay anybody for it? We have X*PRESS.
 
     X*PRESS is a news system that comes piggyback on the cable TV system.
X*PRESS may be available on your cable system; it is available on over 700
systems. To find out if it is available in your community, call X*PRESS at (800)
772-6397, which you can remember as (800) 7PC-NEWS, and ask. They will want to
know the name of your local cable service. If your local cable service does not
carry X*PRESS, call them up and complain.
 
     Some may argue with the "it comes free" tone of the first paragraph. After
all, you cannot get this service unless you have cable TV, and cable TV is
pretty expensive. But in our case, we were already subscribers to cable TV. So
using this system did not cost any more than we were already paying to be couch
potatoes. If the only reason to get cable TV is to use X*PRESS, then the monthly
costs really mount. But if you've wanted cable TV service and need an excuse,
here it is.
 
     To use X*PRESS, you need to buy a converter box. The folks at (800)
772-6397 will be glad to handle all the details. The box costs $100 plus a few
bucks for shipping. Less than a week after we placed our order, the UPS driver
delivered the package to our house.
 
Installing X*PRESS
 
     You can run X*PRESS with the PC, the Atari, the Amiga, the Apple IIe, the
Apple IIc, or the Macintosh. At our home, we installed the system on our PC. So
we do not know the details of making X*PRESS accessible on other computers.
However, it is our impression that outSpoken on the Macintosh makes X*PRESS
accessible. Because of a timing problem, X*PRESS does not work on the Apple
IIgs. This is a shame, since otherwise X*PRESS would be accessible through
Textalker-gs.
 
     To get both cable TV and X*PRESS, you split your cable signal with one
cable going to your TV set, and another going to the X*PRESS converter box. A
serial cable goes from the converter box to your computer. A cable TV splitter
and a short length of coaxial cable are provided in the box from X*PRESS.
 
     You have everything you need as long as your computer is next to your
television set. In our household, this is not the case. We went to Radio Shack
to buy a longer length of coaxial cable to substitute for the short segment
provided. Coaxial cable is made up of a single wire surrounded by a plastic
insulator which is in turn surrounded by a mesh of thin wire. You cannot cut or
splice these cables. You need to purchase the necessary connectors at an
electronics store such as Radio Shack.
 
     Unscrew the cable system from your television set or other convenient spot.
Insert the "Y" cable splitter, and reattach your television set. Before you do
anything else, make sure you still have cable TV. Now connect the length of
coaxial cable from the cable splitter to the X*PRESS converter box.
 
     On the X*PRESS converter box, there are three red lights marked "power,"
"data," and "carrier." The "power" light should go on as soon as you plug in the
power cube. The other lights should go on as soon as you insert the coaxial
cable. For Robert Carter, an occasional contributor to this Newsletter, the
lights would not go on. It turned out that his cable signal was too weak. Once
the local cable people came and boosted the signal to the standard level,
everything worked fine.
 
     X*PRESS gives you both a 5.25 and a 3.5 inch PC disk, each with the same
200k of software. Once you run the program called EXEC, you can start picking up
news stories.
 
Using the System
 
     The X*PRESS software lets you choose sources of news from a substantial
menu. For example, you can ask for opinion columns and reject news from China.
When X*PRESS gets a story from the cable system, it looks to see if the story
meets your criteria. If it does, the software adds it to a memory buffer. Once
the buffer is full (about 200k on our system), then the software does not accept
any more stories.
 
     If you leave the X*PRESS program, you lose your memory buffer and therefore
lose all of your collected stories. So you need to set up your voice, braille,
or large print access technology before you enter the X*PRESS program; once you
are in it, it is too late to back out to set up your screen access. You can,
however, set your voice system for quiet as long as you can change the setting
back to voice from wherever you are.
 
     Reading stories on the screen is easy. You follow the simple menus. The
left and right arrow keys take you to the previous or next story; if you are
looking at the third story from Japan, the left arrow key takes you to the
second story and the right arrow key takes you to the fourth story. The up and
down arrow keys take you up or down a line on the current story. The page up and
page down keys take you up or down a screen in the current story. The backspace
key backs you up one step in a menu, and the escape key always takes you back to
the main menu.
 
     A sighted person or a blind person using a screen access system has access
to a vast amount of current information. We have picked up sports scores, TV
schedules, news reports not covered in the US, the address for writing support
letters to Pee-Wee Herman, and the daily schedule of the Japanese prime
minister. In many reports from the news services of other countries, we find the
angle or emphasis very different from U.S. stories on the same subject. As long
as we pay our cable bill, we can continue to use this fascinating service.
 
Saving News Stories
 
     The X*PRESS system is not very useful unless you can save articles for
reference or braille. There is an option to save a file onto disk, but it seems
to change spaces and carriage returns into difficult control characters. You can
view these previously saved articles with the X*PRESS software. The makers of
the X*PRESS system do not want you to make independent use of saved X*PRESS
articles.
 
     You can also print articles to a printer attached to your parallel port. We
have found that it is easy to redirect the output from the parallel port to a
serial port. With our set-up we issue the command MODE COM2:=LPT1. We connect a
serial device to the IBM serial port. It can be a Braille 'n Speak, an Apple II
running BEX's Input through slot option, a VersaBraille, etc. When we ask for
printed output of a story, the material actually goes to the serial device.
 
     On our system, COM1 (serial port 1) is dedicated to the speech synthesizer,
and COM2 is used for all other purposes. We have a four-position switch box to
change what is plugged into COM2. On the switch box, position A is an Apple II,
and position B is the X*PRESS converter box. When we want to send stories to the
Apple, we change the position of the switch box, and then we give the Alt-T
print command in X*PRESS. We have discovered that once you output, the X*PRESS
system does not receive any more information. You have to leave the program and
start over again to get the system to start accepting stories again.
 
A Menu Dump
 
     To give a sense of the range of material available through X*PRESS, here is
a complete listing of the menu choices.
 
     The Main choices are: News; Sports; Weather; Lifestyles; Entertainment;
Tech Talk; Shopping; and Inside X*Change.
 
     The choices under News are: Headlines; Business & Finance; Canada; Mexico;
Soviet Union; People's Republic of China; Japan; Taiwan; Oil Exporting
Countries; West Germany; France; and Opinions and Editorials. Please note that
these labels are the source of the material, not the subject matter. For
example, a typical item from China might be a roundup of the headlines of the
major newspapers in Pakistan. All the items from Mexico are in Spanish, and all
the other items are in English. The items in Opinions & Editorials are all from
US columnists. These include George Will, Phyllis Schlafly, Nat Hentoff, William
Raspberry, Ellen Goodman, Tom Shales, Jane Bryant Quinn, and Lou Cannon.
 
     Sports contains the following items: Headlines; General Schedules; Pro
Football (News, NFL, and CFL); Pro Baseball (News, Major leagues, and minor
leagues); Pro Basketball; Pro Hockey; Pro Soccor; Pro Golf & Tennis; USA College
Sports; Canadian Sports; Sports Quiz; and Quiz Answer.
 
     Weather contains the following items: International; USA National; USA
States (you can select weather for each of the 50 states); Canada National; and
Canada Regional.
 
     Lifestyles contains the following items: Food; Fitness & Fun; Moneywise;
Family Today; Careers; and Trends & Events.
 
     Entertainment contains the following items: What's Happening; Movies,
Books, Music; In the Stars; TV Schedules; and TV Scope.
 
     Tech Talk contains the following items: News; IBM; Apple; Commodore; and
Other.
 
     Shopping contains the following items: Best Buys; Shopper's Showcase;
Travel & Leisure; and Fleamarket.
 
     Information X*Change contains the following items: Using Information
X*Change: Students, Teachers, Parents; Religion, Sex, Politics; Inside Your
Head; World Around Us; Teen Talk; Computers & You; Pot Shots. These items seem
to come from computer bulletin board discussions between students.
 
     Inside X*Press contains the following items: Bulletins; News; What to Watch
For; User Tips; New Services. Inside X*Press is the only category on the system
which you cannot shut off.
 
Why X*PRESS Exists
 
     X*PRESS has two levels of service--Basic and Executive. The Basic service
is also called X*Change. We have been describing the Basic service, which gives
access to news at no cost other than the purchase of the converter box and the
regular cable bill. The Executive service gives you access to lots of financial
data (such as the New York Stock Market report with only a 15-minute delay). If
you need to monitor your investments daily, we would recommend the Executive
service, which costs an additional $20 per month.
 
     At this point, the cable systems seem to be marketing the Basic system to
schools to encourage schools to install cable TV. The X*PRESS system carries a
lot of items (such as advance schedules on what is coming on CNN) to be useful
for schools. It certainly is useful and entertaining for a blind person who does
not have access to Newspapers to have access to all this information. This is a
system too useful just to put in the hands of junior high school students.
 
--------------------------------------------
 
   X*PRESS Update (Jan. 1992)
 
     In the July/August 1991 Newsletter, we described a wonderful service called
X*PRESS. This is a system that pipes wire service information from your cable TV
system to your home computer. For this system to be available to you, several
things must be present. Your community must be covered by a cable TV system,
your local cable system must subscribe to X*PRESS, you must subscribe to cable
TV, and you need an X*PRESS convertor box. You also need a PC, a talking PC if
you are blind.
 
     In the July/August article, we said that the convertor box costs $100. In a
phone call from X*PRESS, we just learned that the price is going up to $150.
Apparently, the company was subsidizing the distribution of convertor boxes and
selling them for less than their cost. X*PRESS has been ordered by its parent
company to stop this practice. The result is a significant price increase.
 
     I was also informed that quite a few blind persons have contacted X*PRESS
because of the previous article in the RDC Newsletter. Several callers had just
found out that their local cable companies do not carry X*PRESS. They were
calling to find out how to convince their cable companies to carry X*PRESS.
Since X*PRESS makes its money from fees from the cable companies, they were very
gratified for this attention.
 
     The equipment needed for a cable system to pick up X*PRESS costs about
$1,000. For a cable system this is small change. The only extra work is checking
every now and then that they are carrying a strong signal from X*PRESS. The fees
to subscribe to X*PRESS are more significant: about 20 cents per subscriber per
year. This means that a system with 50,000 subscribers has to pay about $10,000
to carry X*PRESS.
 
     Many cable systems are affiliated with or owned by larger networks, such as
TCI or Heritage. If the network has a contract for X*PRESS, an affiliated local
cable company is covered by the national contract. This means that the local
cable company has to pay only the $1,000 for the equipment. They have a right to
carry X*PRESS for no additional charge. If your local cable system does not
carry X*PRESS and is covered by a national contract, you should have little
difficulty convincing them to offer this service that they are already paying
for. Contact X*PRESS at (800) 772-6397 for information about your local cable
system.
 
     Some networks, like TCI, go a little further. They offer two free convertor
boxes to any school that asks for them. Contact X*PRESS for details. They can
mail or fax you the request forms. This service would be ideal for a school for
the blind. The computer could pick up news from around the world, sports scores,
and many other items of interest to young people. This could be an interesting
vehicle for motivating more students to learn how to use a computer.
 
     I also learned that you can pick up X*PRESS using a satellite dish. You
need the big 10-foot size (the C band dish). The smaller KU band dishes do not
work. The fact that you can pick up the X*PRESS signal with a big satellite dish
is fascinating. But I doubt if many people will be setting up big dishes on
their roofs so that they can pick up sports scores or soap opera summaries.
 