Your Work & Your Health: downloads and instructions

The benefit of .rar format (if you have the necessary software on your PC) is that you can look at the program without needing to download to your hard disk first. Whichever format you choose, the download file contains the same items:

• Knowhow.exe: the "Your work and your health" interface program.
• Knowbank folder: contains the database tables called by the program. (39 files)
• Program folder: contains two files required for program operation.
• Devtstuff folder: contains 1) Prototype documentation (yw-yhprototype.doc) including full data modelling information; 2) Text file of program code (KNOWHOW-PRG.TXT); 3) Htmltables folder, which includes all the information system database tables converted to html format. (Note: all the actual information is in the files with "lkup" as part of their name - the other tables are there to make the connections which bring up appropriate information for the job specified.)

The "Your work & your health" program can still be run on modern Windows PCs, but the DOS interface is far too outdated for it to be seriously considered as usable. If you run it, please note:

• No installation is involved to run the program's executable file, knowhow.exe. Nothing is put in your registry or anywhere else. You just need to download the zipped file to your hard drive, then extract the contents - just under 4 mb of uncompressed data in total. When you extract from the zipped file, a folder called Workhaz should be created automatically, containing the items listed above. For the program to run, you must ensure that the "Knowbank" and "Program" subfolders and their content are present and correct as well as the .exe file.
• To run the program: Double-click on the file knowhow.exe. You'll get an error message telling you "System is not configured for current code page". This doesn't matter - just click the Continue button.
• The program will open in a small DOS window which you can't resize. (And the background is grey when it should be white!) The program was designed for running on PCs with a screen resolution of 640x480 pixels, and information was very deliberately chunked accordingly into screen-sized amounts. You will need to switch down your display resolution if you want something closer to the original experience of running the program!

If the program has loaded correctly, the opening screen will look like this:

• Follow the on-screen instructions. The interface is keyboard rather than mouse-based: running the program on a Windows PC, the mouse may not always work quite as you expect (e.g. you may need to give it an extra click). Running the program in a DOS window, you may also find in some places that you have to press a key twice for it to take effect.
  Use the Page-Up/Page-Down keys to navigate picklists quickly, or type in the first letter of a word to go straight to it. The Arrow keys can be used to navigate picklists too, although the mouse should work OK for this. Esc takes you back to the previous information screen. End takes you back to the program's opening screen.
• When you want to quit the program, just close the window it's running in with the X button in the top-right corner, then select End Now. This is a dirty way to get out of it, but it's easy, and does no harm at all to anything. (In DOS days, it closed with Ctrl-Q.)

Anybody is welcome to use any of these materials for non-profit purposes, but please acknowledge the source if you do so, and let me know what you're doing - contact jos@joskingston.org

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