In a message on 07-13-94, Tom Oehser said to All:

TO>I am interested in the developers CDrom from IBM- but,
TO>they seem to only sell it as a subscription, not just
TO>a single issue- could I get some feedback on:
  :
Not at all true.  You can always buy a single issue for roughly 2/3 of the
price of the annual subscription.

TO>1) What exactly is on this CDROM?
  :
Too much for me to list individually, but you should be able to find other
posts that cover this if you look back through the last week of messages.
Basically an awful lot of online documentation, and a wide variety of
development tools, beta or pre-beta products, miscellaneous (IBM) Employee
Written Software (EWS), and so forth.  Volume 3 actually comes on two CDs,
so you can understand there's a lot there.  Very good buy.

TO>2) How much does it change from quarter to quarter?
  :
Relatively little, in my experience.  It depends on whether you are doing
a wide variety of development, and on whether the latest issue just happens
to have that killer product/devkit you wanted.  I was planning to buy only
every other copy, but at the time I didn't know about (a) the limited 
licence I mention below, or (b) that IBM would sell me volume 3 about one
week before volume 4 came out!  With the new EPM (6.0?) on it, I think I'll
have to shell out the cash for another copy right away. :-(

TO>3) Would you be interested in selling me a 3-month-out-of-date copy?
  :
This is not really a good idea.  For one thing, as I said, you can get
a single copy for fairly little money.  Secondly, each issue has a
limited licence that expires when the next issue comes out, or after
a certain amount of time (90 days?).  Except for a few items that 
are explicitly not limited by that licence, I don't think you could
legally use a second-hand copy for much anyway.  Probably just a few
of the basic documentation items, but I'm not sure about it.  Somebody
else will surely correct me if I'm wrong (it's happened before :-).

Peter Hansen  ***  Engenuity Corporation  ***  Guelph, Ontario, Canada
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