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PAS'I'<JR GENERAf.
1
S REPORP, JULY 19, 19B5
elder, and Mr. Wally Young was ordained a deacon in the Durban church. Our
full-time ministry now totals 14, four of whom are in the Cape Town office
and 10 in the field. There are also eight local church elders.
There is continuing unrest in several areas of the country, including the
occasional stone throwing incident, cars being set afire and clashes with
the authorities. Many of thes• occurrences are politically motivated, with
people of the same racial group clashing over their political differences.
So far, no members have been affected by these disturbances and we give God
thanks for His continued protection.
A computer system has been installed in our office. The system is based on
the IBM AT, personal computers and a local area network system called
Novell--Sharenet G. The objectives of our system are to streamline general
administration functions, general word processing and correspondence,
financial reports and forecasting and subscriber services.
The advantages of this system are many. Each personal computer is on-line
to the AT computer, which acts as the central processor where all pro
grammes and variable data are stored. The central processor holds the fol
lowing programmes, or software: 1. dBase III for administration and sub
scriber services; 2. Multimate for word processing; and 3. Lotus 123 for
financial modeling.
Each personal computer acts independently; that ·is, one operator could be
inputting a letter via the word processing package, while another operator
could be· inputting financial statistics via the Lotus 123 package.. The
procedures take place simultaneously. This is called a multi-user environ
ment and is made possible by utilising the local area network, better known
in the computer business as LAN.
The price/performance ratio of this system is far better than that of a mini
computer, and there is greater flexibility if it becomes necessary to ex
pand. The installation can be made to go on-line to a large mainframe com
puter via a modem. There are certain advantages to this, since information
from one town or country could be automatically transfered into the local
system without human intervention.
Our office in South Africa and Drake Computer Systems (a Canadian based
company) have pioneered our system with minimal "teething" problems.
--Joseph Tkach, Ministerial Services
UPDATE FROM MAIL PROCESSING
Recent Telecast Shatters Previous Record
This past weekend (July 13-14) we reached a new milestone in the number of
WATS calls received. The program "The United States and Britain in Proph
ecy" brought in a record 20,064 calls.
This is more than 2,000 calls higher than the previous record. In January
of this year, the same program resulted in 15,836 calls, which also broke
all records. When shown one year ago, it produced 10,105 calls.�
The video "superimposure" of our toll-free number was displayed five min
utes earlier than usual. This resulted in two "ring-throughs" instead of