European Stars And Stripes (Newspaper) - June 13, 1987, Darmstadt, Hesse                                The Saga of the Yuppie handbook by Steve Lohr new York time the product has been around Lor three quarters of a Century and can Lay a fairer to no proprietary technology. A generous estimate at the Cost to malts it would probably be $30, yet the company has the Cheek to charge americans an average of $160 a piece for its product. A sure fire formula for failure just he opposite the Story of the product in question the Filofax is an extraordinary Saga of business Success. In recent years the Loose Leaf personal organizing system a Bulky address Book and diary brimming with options has become a cull product among the upwardly striving professional classes worldwide earning it the nickname of the Yuppie  and with Britain Stilt accounting for More than two thirds of sates the leaders of Filofax pc think there is plenty of room for expansion overseas. To finance the push Filofax went Public in London in april Selling tour million shares to outside investors at 120 Pence or $1.93 a share by now Flo lbs Enthus Olaiti Are legion and sometimes famous. Movie making users include Steven Spielberg and Woody Allen who reportedly organizes his hectic life among 20 Fil faxes. The actress Diane Kealon reportedly invented one of the options a detachable insert Lor carrying Cash and credit cards. Several of the organizers Are in use at Buckingham Palace. Young lawyers Bankers doctors advertising executives and others from London to new York to Tokyo swear by them it s highly organized and i m not said Lauren a. Gormier a Chicago based writer who finds the file fax especially useful for travelling because everything is in one  in Japan the craze has spawned a hot Selling How to Book tie Filofax manual which is helpful to japanese users since the Filofax diary maps and Olhorn inserts Are printed Only in English but no language Barrier imitator or competitor has slowed Filofax s recent growth. In four years the company s sales have jumped 22-fold, to the equivalent of $10.8 million last year while pretax profit has climbed 24-fold, to about $2,3 million. In years to come people will look Back at Filofax As one of he great marketing Phenomena of the 1980s," said David co Tischon 49. Chairman of Filofax. Collection has a vested interest in the product s Success. Even after the Slock offering he and his wife Lesley the director of personnel and administration in the us person Enterprise will own about 70 percen of the company. Tho United slates where sales reached si.2 million last year looms Large in Filofax s Hopes for the future. What became the Filofax organizer originated in the Umed states in 1910. It was invented by one , Parker and first produced by a Philadelphia company Lemax. In its Eaily Days the biggest customers Ware Power Plant engineers Whoso technical handbooks had grown too big to carry. In 1921, a London Printer and stationery marketer Norman & Mill ltd., began importing the organizers called let axes. Several years later alter being persuaded by an enterprising typist Grace Scurr the London firm began to make the personal files itself under a name she thought up Filofax. Norman & Hilt eventually took that name As its own. For its part Lemax which was bought out a few years ago by London Wood partners a British firm is also enjoying a Renaissance Lemax still makes its own organizers and has seen its sales increase roughly ninefold in the past three years. Yet no competitor can rival the Rise of Filofax the Clear Industry loader thanks to Collischonn s marketing acumen. A former publishing executive he recognized Filofax s potential and in 1976 began to Market the product by Mart order from his Home. In 1980, the Collischonn bought 76 percent of the company and picked up the res Over Iho next five years. When they took control Filofax had no sales Force and the organizers were sold in 40 shops mostly British stationers. Today the products Are sold in 2,200 retail outlets worldwide., including such leading British stores As harrods Harvey dicots and Fortnum & Mason and such . Vendors As Neman Marcus Saks it Flat Avenue and Bloomingdale s. Under Collischonn the Filofax Range has also been drastically expanded to 600 product types from 250. The binders Range form a Vinyl Low budget version that Sells for the equivalent of $21 to the top of the line Crocodile offering at around $940. But most of the variety is in the paper inserts costing the equivalent of $2 to $5 each. These include a planners City guides with data such As where to eat after Midnight in new York and Paris and a wide selection of specialized information inserts for activities that include cooking Golf windsurfing Bridge wine tasting and Bird watching techno Babel by Erik Sandberg-d1ment new York times n endless Stream of new words and concepts bombards the computer user. Once you become familiar with the prompt the cursor Fields cells line wrap unease and other terms Basic to the running programs such As spreadsheets database managers and word processors you begin to feel fairly conversant with techno Babel. You May even drop a phrase or two at cocktail parties. Then the technology changes or electronic needs expand and it s Back to the computer school of hard knocks simply to be Able to use what s offered in the held. Two concepts becoming both More commonplace and More confusing Are spooling and buffering. Both have been around for some time. Buffers in fact have been used extensively by compute exists without their Ever knowing or indeed having to know anything about them. Now however particularly since the Advent of laser printers recognizing the difference Between buffers an spoilers is becoming integral to dealing with one s computer system. Buffers and spoilers temporarily store data being transferred from a High Speed device such As a computer to a slower device such As a Printer. They allow continued use of the computer while the Printer goes about its task rather than waiting until the Printer is finished. To see buffering at work in one of its most Basic applications Type something on your computer screen. As you Type the characters appear on screen. But they will not actually be led of the computer s Central processing unit As you a typing them rather they Are stored temporarily in a butter an Aiea of memory set aside by the computer s operating by stent because the physical codes representing the letters you have typed Are not immediately passed on to the processing unit of the computer an error does t count. Spooling and buffering Young computer users learning new concepts. If you Type wird by mistake it s an easy Mattor to erase the offending i without provoking the computer into rebuking you with yet another of its Sassy error messages. Once you have typed and corrected the material you enter it into the computer Only then does the operating system dump the contents of Trie Buffer into the main processing Stream of the computer. The Buffer is there because none a us can Type As fast As the computer can accept characters. A True Lechie might say that the human machine is too slow to keep up with the electronic one. So a Buffer is needed to enable the computer to work on other tasks White it Waits for us maintaining in that Way its optimum running Speed. Personally i prefer to think of the device in terms of Comfort Artof convenience to the human. As laser printers become More prevalent the disheartening message status processing Job becomes an increasingly frequent frustration. A laser Printer brings to the Job its own built in processing unit to handle the Complex task of producing hard copy Replete with fancy fonts and saturday june 13, 1987 detailed graphics. The Printer like the human can t keep up with the personal computer. So while the Printer is chugging away you Wail. Where a number of personal computers Are hooked up to one Lasar Printer it can seem like you be drawn number 53 at he deft counter when your cac is double parked and number t4 is being served. It your computer is equipped with a spooler on the other hand when you select the print function from a menu All the data to be sent to the Printer the text font choices and All the formatting commands is instead transferred to a spool file on your disk. Loading the information into a spool file particularly if the disk involved is a hard disk is very fast As compared to sending the data directly to the Printer. As soon As the transaction is Complete you can go about your business with the computer while a de spooler goes to work feeding the Printer its data at just the right Speed. The bursts of data Are sent Between the lines so to speak of the other processing tasks in which you and your computer might be engaged. You Type and the Printer prints at what appears to be More or less the same Lime. But in reality portions of each task Are being performed alternately. The problem with spooling is that it takes up a Tot of memory including its own Buffer and disk space also it stows the computer Down in general. The straight Buffer a hardware alternative to the software spooler does not have the same shortcomings. Such a Buffer is a whole extra memory Board with its own processing unit the function of. Whose chips is solely to Buff. Adding a Buffer to your system is like giving your computer an extra hand just to help it Deal with slower peripherals. Software print spoilers in the $ 100 Range Are tar less expensive than the hardware buffers for the same purpose which Tail into the $1,000 Range. Thus a spooler is probably the better bet for the individual computer is for the corporate set however the added advantages of the Buffer particularly when several personal computers Are sharing Ona laser Printer May make she More expensive device Cost effective. Either solution is a practical remedy Tor those tired of waiting for their printers to gel on with the Job the stars and stripes Page 17