Computer generated keys & interactive keys

[Eric Zurcher]

At 03:51 PM 2/23/96 -0500, Gary Noonan wrote:
>         Some colleagues have commented that they and their institution
>simply can't afford the $400 for first user at an institution, $100 for
>additional users at an institution, $20 for manual, $10 for learning guide,
>$20 handling fee for manual or disks. Colleagues have suggested that the
>pricing structure is keeping people from using the program and is especially
>expensive for smaller institutions. Do Taxacom readers have any pricing
>information for competitive products?

Just a small word of clarification from the DELTA development team regarding
DELTA prices: The prices quoted above are for the complete DELTA system. For
those interested in using only the interactive key system, INTKEY is
available for one-half of the prices quoted (i.e., $200 for the first user;
$50 for each additional user). Further, the cost of the manuals is intended
only to recover printing and handling costs. Electronic versions of the
manuals are included as part of the shareware distribution of the programs,
and may be downloaded and printed for free (the manual files are in TYPSET
format; the TYPSET program used for printing the manuals is also distributed
with the shareware version of the programs).

We have done our best to keep the cost of the DELTA system as low as
possible, as we are well aware of the limited budgets within which most
taxonomists must work. We believe the price of the DELTA system is not
particularly high when you consider that we provide a substantial amount of
free support to users, reported "bugs" are usually fixed promptly, and
upgrades to newer releases of the programs are free (when was the last time
Micro$oft could make any of those claims?).

Cheers,
Eric Zurcher
CSIRO Division of Entomology
Canberra, Australia
E-mail: ericz at ento.csiro.au