Crash, Bang--Quake

Orchids and Onions issue forth despite an earthquake, operating-system wars, and a Flying Windows ordeal

Jerry Pournelle

I had been working late on part 2 of my User's Choice Awards and got to bed about 3:15 a.m. At 4:31 the earthquake hit Chaos Manor. We knew it was bad because it went on and on, and we could hear things crashing all over the house. Eventually it stopped, and we could escape from the bedroom by clambering over the bookcases that had torn loose and fallen.

We determined that no one in the house was injured, so I went upstairs to the office. When I got to the head of the stairs, I could go no farther. The Great Hall is 30 feet high, with built-in bookcases extending up 12 feet. Many of those had torn loose, and all of them had shed their books. Way over at the far side of the room, I could see that P ercy, the IBM PS/2 Model 77, was running off the Best Patriot UPS (uninterruptible power supply), but there was no way I could get to it. I could see that both the Cheetah 486/25 and SuperCow, the Gateway 2000 486/66, had fallen over, or at least their monitors had.

I could also see that the tropical fish tank had fallen in shards, making a horrible "soup" of books, splinters, fallen plaster, hardware, software, disks, cables, unanswered mail, dead fish, and everything that had been on the ready-line tables. It was impossible to get to the other machines, although I was pretty sure they were still turned on because I could hear the Clary UPS screaming its "Power Is Off" warning. It would just have to wait until the morning.

Alex and I got out the tools and flashlights and did a quick inspection. Three feet of the back chimney had fallen into the pool--right through the pool cover. The front chimney had new cracks. Amazingly, all the brick facing was intact. We'll need some repairs, but the outsi de of Chaos Manor wasn't badly hurt.

Alex and I then went around the block checking on neighbors. Everyone was outside despite the cold. We noted things like down power lines, fallen transformers, and burst water mains, which we reported as soon as telephone service came back.

I don't suppose the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power collects these things, but I've got a big Chaos Manor Orchid for them. Within hours, they had patched all the water lines, got a new transformer up on the pole, and strapped the dead one so it was harmless; and well before dark, we had both power and water. Thanks, fellows.

Amazingly, we lost very little. The important computers all work. SuperCow's NEC MultiSync 4FG monitor fell onto a pile of wet books. Part of the built-in swivel base broke, so it now rests on a wok stove ring; otherwise, SuperCow was undamaged. Big Cheetah fell over still running, and the Nanao FlexScan T560i monitor fell on top of it. Neither one seems damaged. The cat ran away and wa s gone for three days, but she came back dirty and hungry and now angrily ignores the aftershocks. The dog stays close to humans and seems to know when new shakes are coming.

I brought in some help from the Los Angeles Science Fantasy Society to box everything, so that I could get into the office quickly and rebuild. My particular thanks go out to LASFS Vice President Bob Null and Librarian Leigh Strother-Vien for their assistance.

Although there was a lot of destruction, nothing irreplaceable was ruined. A great deal of software was part of the soup and has gone away, as have a number of CD-ROM drives, boards, modems, some gadgets, and countless disks. A lot of books were ruined, but not one rare edition. The Falcon I was awarded by the U.S. Air Force Academy has been shattered, but I still have the base with the plaque. We did lose some Venetian glass, including a decanter of 70-year-old port, but the Apollo commemorative glasses Mrs. Heinlein gave me from Robert's collection were untouched.

Chaos Manor went from its usual mild but chronic chaos to an acute state, but we've pretty much returned to normal. The truly amazing part is that despite all the stuff that was destroyed, there's still more to write about than I'll ever get to.

IBM showed up a week later. Dave Whittle had made an appointment weeks before. He brought with him an IBM PS ValuePoint Pentium, alas incomplete; a full report on the machine another time. He also brought Charlie Brown, an OS/2 LAN Server 3.0 Advanced guru. They got here after the worst was cleaned up, but there was still plenty of damage control going on while they set up the system.

The first thing was to install network cards in both the Pentium (which we have named Ozzie) and Percy. I have always named my machines and some of you have laughed at me, but now the network software demands it. Anyway, we had an IBM Ethernet card for the Pentium; but, alas, there wasn't one for the Micro Channel PS/2. We called a number of electronics stores: no one stocked either IBM or 3Com Micro Channel Ethernet cards. We did find a Danpex EN/2, which is compatible with NE 2/T (Novell), so Alex went right out and bought that.

Unfortunately, while the card would work with NE 2/T, there is no OS/2 driver for it, as we found out after making a number of phone calls and BBS downloads. (The IBM OS/2 BBS at (919) 517-0001 is a great source of such information, and I should have consulted it before getting the board.) We returned the EN/2 and ordered a 3Com EtherLink III board. It works just fine, but we didn't have it while the IBM team was here.

Of course, our mission wasn't to demonstrate that two OS/2 machines can talk to each other, but to get an OS/2 machine networked with Windows for Workgroups systems. I'd intended to use an Intel EtherExpress card in the Pentium, because that's what I have in all my other machines, and under Windows, the EtherExpress card really is "plug and play"; but the IBM team wasn't sure there was an IBM-certified driver for that . I fear I was rather rudely sarcastic about that. Anyway, by sheer accident we did have an ISA-bus genuine IBM Ethernet card, and while getting that running under OS/2 wasn't quite as simple as installing an EtherExpress card in W4WG, it was easy enough. (As it happens, the EtherExpress card would have worked as well.)

Then the fun began. First, open up the OS/2 LAN Server network and look at what assets are available. Not many. That turns out to be my fault, sort of; that is, the name of my workgroup is JERRY ONE (note the space), and the name of my Cheetah 486/33 is BIG CHEETAH 486. The Cheetah 386 is, of course, CHEETAH 386, and the 486/25 is CHEETAH 486/25. Those are all legal names to W4WG, but not to OS/2 LAN Server.

Fortunately, there is a workaround: open an OS/2 window and issue commands. NET VIEW "\\BIG CHEETAH 486" (the quotation marks are part of the command) gets the name of all available assets on Big Cheetah, including the fact that the C drive there is named BIG C. Then: NET USE G: "\\BIG CHEETAH 486\BIG C" (once again, the quotation marks are part of the command) connects the OS/2 machine to the W4WG network, so that local G is the C drive on Big Cheetah.

IBM OS/2 LAN Server 3.0 Advanced has a GUI that works well with other OS/2 machines. It supports drag and drop, and all that sort of thing; but if you try to invoke it for W4WG connections, you get an error message. OS/2 systems work with 32-bit operations, and W4WG can't support those. [Editor's note: Windows for Workgroups 3.11 does support 32-bit file access.] You may now decide just whose fault that is: Microsoft, for not supporting full 32-bit network standards, or IBM, for not making provisions to dumb down its network requests so they'll work with W4WG.

Fortunately, Norton Commander, which is plenty good enough as a file manager, works just fine across the network. Launch Commander for DOS, log on to the foreign drive (G in this example), and Bob's your uncle. You can copy, delete, view, and edit files; cut and paste from Word for Windows documents; run programs; and so forth across the network just fine. Commander isn't quite drag and drop, but to me it's intuitive enough. It's quick, too.

Once you figure out how to set up the network connections from the command line, you can write a .CMD file (similar to a DOS batch file) that will do all that for you, on start-up if you like, and let Commander take care of the rest.

The next thing to try was printing. My Hewlett-Packard LaserJet III is physically connected to the Cheetah 486DX2/33. We had no trouble seeing the printer across the network, and not much more connecting the OS/2 machine to it; and when we sent a file across, the printer lit up. Alas, what came out was garbage. The IBM team spent a couple of hours trying to fix that, but they never did, and I have yet to print a file sent from an OS/2 machine to a W4WG machine.

It does work the other way; that is, once you get a W4WG machine to connect to an OS/2 machine that has a printer, you c an print easily enough. I'll get to how in a moment. First, you need to connect your W4WG machine to the OS/2 LAN Server 3.0 Advanced network.

Go to the W4WG system, open File Manager, and click on the little share directories button to open a window called Connect Network Drive. When you do that, you will not see any OS/2 systems at all; but if you go to the area entitled PATH and type in \\PERCY (or whatever name you have given your OS/2 machine), the connection will be established and the networkable assets on the machine will appear. You can connect them to a physical-drive letter in the same point-and-click way you make any W4WG connection.

Unfortunately, you're still not done: while you have access to the OS/2 machine's drive, you can't see any files on it. This is because OS/2 LAN Server 3.0 Advanced has rather sophisticated security provisions, and they have to be turned off before an outsider can tamper with your files. You do that by going back to the OS/2 system, opening the Net Confi guration icon, and making account GUEST an administrator account. Guest is the default name for an outsider. Once that's done, you can access the OS/2 machine from W4WG.

Now you can connect the printer. Leave File Manager and go to W4WG's Print Manager. Do the PATH trick, and you'll see the OS/2 printer. Select it, leave Print Manager, and go to the Control Panel. Open the Printers icon there and assign your OS/2 printer; in my case, I called it LPT2. It's tedious but simple, and when you're done, you can print just fine.

OS/2 LAN Server 3.0 Advanced is considerably more complex than W4WG. In general, it's more powerful, but there are maddening anomalies. If you want your W4WG systems to see all the assets available on the OS/2 network, you have two choices: do as I described above, typing in the name of the OS/2 machine in the PATH area in the Connect Network Drive box; or, seeing that your workgroup name is the same as the name of the domain you have set up on the OS/2 LAN Server. Alas, OS/2 LA N Server requires that both machine and domain names be no more than eight letters and contain no spaces. W4WG workgroup names don't have that limit. The GUI part of OS/2 LAN Server isn't as consistent as W4WG's interface.

First conclusion: it works, provided that you have the right equipment. Remember, it is OS/2, meaning that while there's a lot of hardware it works with, there's a lot more it can't use: recall my first attempt to find an OS/2-compatible Ethernet board on short notice. OS/2 LAN Server 3.0 Advanced is harder to set up or reconfigure, but it has considerably more security and power than W4WG. In fact, it's a real network, comparable to NetWare in capabilities, reliability, and difficulty in using.

It's an expensive way to go if you're networking only a couple of machines, but the cost per workstation goes down dramatically as you add to the system. If you need to network OS/2, DOS, and W4WG workstations, it will do the job, and if you have many OS/2 systems to network, it's clea rly a good choice.

Which brings us to the real question: should you change to OS/2? I have no final answer, but I do have guidelines. If you run mostly DOS programs, OS/2 remains a better DOS than DOS, and a lot better DOS than Windows. It's still not a better Windows than Windows, but if you have good enough hardware, that may not matter. We installed a SoundBlaster Pro 16 board in the Pentium and ran Wing Commander. Even with a lot of other stuff, including the network, running in the background, it ran absurdly (and unplayably) fast, faster than under DOS with a 486DX2/33.

Moreover, when we ran the Texas Instruments Windows benchmark utility Win Tachometer on the Pentium (which has the latest ATI Technologies Mach 32 video board with OS/2 drivers), it pegged the meter. That is, we could see that it was very fast, but Win Tachometer reported unrealistically low numbers--11.3 overall. My guess is that we should add 64 to that total.

Incidentally, the reason Win Tachometer wouldn't run ear lier (see my March column) is that the Win-OS/2 default for program installation is to have it run in a windowed session; you must go into the settings and tell it to run Win Tachometer in a full Win-OS/2 window or it will crash. Maybe that's not so incidental: if you hate having to learn little arcana like that, you probably won't like OS/2. This is a system that gives you a great deal of control over things, but it demands that you learn how to use it properly--and comes with some singularly ill-chosen defaults.

If you do become an OS/2 enthusiast, be prepared to get on-line to BIX or GEnie and spend some time learning these tricks and more. The good news is that OS/2 users are like early computer enthusiasts (or BYTE readers, for that matter): proud of their system and willing to go out of their way to help newcomers.

And that, I guess, is the real bottom line. OS/2 will do all that DOS and Windows will do and more. Many DOS games won't run in Windows but give OS/2 no trouble at all. OS/2 net works extremely well to other OS/2 systems and acceptably well to W4WG. It's true 32-bit code, it truly does multitasking, it really knows objects and object linking in ways Microsoft doesn't seem to have learned, and as long as you're not experimenting to find the limits, it's solid as a rock. Technically, OS/2 is a winner, and it's sure to get better.

On the other hand, the user interface seems to have been an afterthought, and changes have to be cleared by a committee within the most hierarchical top-down company I know of. Moreover, its success depends on IBM learning how to do mass marketing. The OS/2 2.0 and 2.1 marketing strategy was definitely a step in the right direction. That strategy was designed by two very bright people, but both of them are gone: Lucy Baney is not with IBM at all, and John Patrick has been promoted out of OS/2.

Microsoft is a big company, but Bill Gates gives his managers a lot of authority. Big ships like IBM turn slowly; Microsoft is more like a fleet of medium-s ize ships--some elements turn quite quickly. Moreover, PC operating systems are Microsoft's heart of hearts, the flagship product of a company built on software sales; OS/2 must compete with many other products within IBM. Microsoft will always give DOS and its follow-ons high priority and a great deal of top management attention. OS/2's priority depends on how skillfully its product managers play corporate power games.

There's a lot at stake for developers, who have to decide where to allocate their resources. Do they go into Windows products, where the market is larger and likely to stay that way for a while, but where they may have to compete head-on with the Microsoft Applications Group; or into OS/2, which at the moment has a distinct technical edge and needs applications badly. I'm glad I don't have to make that choice.

It's easier for users. OS/2, particularly OS/2 for Windows, is cheap enough that you can afford to try it. Many BYTE readers will love it; every time I get infuriated with OS/2, I find some new feature that I just love. It is powerful, and it really does multitasking.

On the other hand, you should prepare to be infuriated: while OS/2 is technically complete, the user interface has lots of "gotchas." The defaults seem to have been chosen at random by an unlucky gambler. If you've been in the PC world very long, you probably own hardware that OS/2 doesn't support.

Andy Seybold and other industry analysts have pronounced the operating-system wars over, with Microsoft the winner. I'm not so sure. I think IBM has a window of opportunity for about one year. It won't be easy to take advantage of it, because it's not clear that IBM's top management knows what they must do.

First, they must get OS/2 finished; they've pretty well done that. Technically, OS/2 2.1 is a superior product. Second, make it easy to go from Windows to OS/2. They took a big step in that direction with OS/2 for Windows, and if they'll get OS/2 LAN Server out at a low-enough street price, they'l l have finished that job; OS/2 LAN Server is neat. Third, make the user interface more friendly. That's not hard.

Finally, they need some luck, because most people aren't going to change operating systems just for a lark. There has to be something you can do with OS/2 that you can't do with Windows. I'm not real sure what that will be, but as a guess it will involve multimedia. Whether it's written by IBM or a third party, they need that killer application, and they need it soon.

Me, I'll stay with OS/2 for a while; but I'm still writing this on Big Cheetah running DOS 5 and W4WG. I may change that. When I do, I'll let you know.

Two bug reports, both concerning W4WG. First, the problem with the Maximum Storage Duette optical drive was not W4WG, but the Maxsys SCSI driver. If you run the Duette with a Corel driver, the problem goes away. Moreover, I cured the problem we had with the Pioneer read/write optical drive by switching to version 3.11 on all W4WG machines.

Second, a rare but infuriating bug in both W4WG 3.1 and 3.11. How we found it is instructive.

The earthquake put me way behind on fiction, so I didn't cancel the afternoon writing session with Larry Niven when Whittle showed up by appointment in the morning to install OS/2 LAN Server. As it happens, the Cheetah 486DX2/25 that he usually works with was the most convenient machine for the IBM team to link up with for their network tests. That should have been no problem: but suddenly--and without explanation--Larry's machine popped up a blank-error dialog box and completely locked up. Fortunately, we had lost little text, but this was definitely not good. Moreover, it appeared that the only thing that had changed was that the IBM OS/2 LAN had logged on to that Cheetah.

I disconnected the Ethernet T connector. We worked until dinner with no problems. Everyone went home. I reconnected the Ethernet and did some file transfers from that machine to the OS/2 network. Nothing happened. I left the machine with Norton Comma nder in the foreground and went to bed. The next morning everything was fine: Commander had brought up its "twinkling stars" screen saver. The system was operating perfectly.

Then I switched to Program Manager and left that on-screen while I did some more network tests. Within 5 minutes, the machine was locked up tight. This time, the dialog box wasn't quite blank: it said "Application Err." Nothing worked, and I had to do hardware reset to recover. Test again: log on to the machine from the OS/2 system, leave Program Manager up, wait. Crash in 2 minutes, dialog box totally blank, hardware reset. Do the same thing again, but disconnect the Ethernet T connector. Wait an hour. No crash. Connect the Ethernet. Crash in 5 minutes.

It has to be the OS/2 network, right? I called the IBM people. They reasonably asked, why didn't it crash any other machine? Clearly, this ancient Cheetah has a BIOS problem. "Let us send you a new motherboard. Install that, and I guarantee you won't have that problem."

So, what the heck, I did. Alex bought 16 MB of new memory chips. It took about 2 hours to change motherboards, and it really wasn't hard to do. The new board has VL-Bus slots, which the Cheetah doesn't have, and an updated AMI BIOS. When I got the board fastened down, I carefully removed the Intel OverDrive chip from the Cheetah and installed it on the new motherboard. Plug in the power lead. Turn it on. Everything works. Do some tests, and discover that this is about 10 percent slower than the Cheetah had been. Connect the Ethernet, log on to the system, wait--and it crashed within 5 minutes.

This is getting annoying. What's different about this machine from other systems that are not being crashed by the OS/2 network? Well, surprise: it's running W4WG 3.1, not 3.11. OK, install version 3.11 from floppy disks. Test that. Crash again.

Time to apply logic. Had we ever had problems with this machine locking up? Well, yes, there had been a couple of times when the Berkeley screen saver would pop up and suddenly the machine would die. Not often; and I knew it wasn't really Berkeley's fault to begin with, because, for rather complicated reasons, I had an old version of the screen saver on the Cheetah 486DX2/25. And by coincidence, the night before the IBM troops came over, I turned off the Berkeley screen saver and turned on the Flying Windows screen saver that comes with Windows. It was still turned on.

But surely it couldn't be the Flying Windows screen saver? One way to find out. Disconnect the IBM machines from the network. Log on to the 486DX2/25 (no longer a Cheetah, but I don't have a new name for it) from another W4WG machine. Wait. Crash within 5 minutes. OK, go into the Control Panel, bring up desktop, and say NO SCREEN SAVER. Exit. Wait. No crash. Connect the IBM systems in. Still no crash. Turning off Flying Windows did the job.

Moreover, I then installed the newest version of Berkeley's Star Trek screen saver and left it on: still no crashes. But turning on Flying Windows wi ll reliably and repeatedly bring the machine down if it's connected to the network and another machine is logged on to it. This seems to be specific to this machine, or at least this speed (486DX2/25). I have since got SuperCow up and running and connected to the network, and it's had Flying Windows going for two days while I've been moving files through the network. Incidentally, SuperCow has that Hercules Dynamite VL board, and those windows really fly.

I hate to give short shrift to User's Choice Award winners, but that's what I'm about to do. I generally like to write a short squib on why I've chosen some product for an award, but I haven't enough space.

Hard drive controller: An Orchid to Perceptive Solutions for their WinStore/6 IDE controller; drop one into an IDE-drive machine and see real performance improvement. But for solid trouble-free SCSI caching controllers, this year's User's Choice Award goes to Distributed Processing Technology's SmartCache III SCSI host adapters.

Word p rocessor: This tends to be a matter of taste, because many of them are good enough. For example, WordPerfect 6.0 for Windows is now acceptably easy to learn and gets a Chaos Manor Orchid; but I have found Microsoft Word for Windows 6.0 to be outstanding. I particularly like its version controls, including document comparison and merging. It handles footnotes splendidly. The user interface has been improved, the help system is really neat, the hints and cue cards make it easy to learn features I never knew about, and so far I haven't found anything I really dislike. Hands down, this gets my User's Choice Award for Word Processor.

I talked about Quantum Leap 2.1 in the December 1993 column. It's an OS/2 business modeling and forecasting program that's so good you might change to OS/2 just to run it. It easily deserves a User's Choice Award.

Monitor: A User's Choice Award to Nanao. The FlexScan T560i monitor survived the earthquake: it fell face-down on the floor from a considerable height. Fortuna tely, some books had fallen first. Anyway, we set it back up and turned it on, and there was my bright, colorful, glare-free, rock-steady, eyesight-saving screen. I love this thing.

Micro 2000's Micro-Scope and Post-Probe are available separately and in a small kit (the Toolkit) containing diagnostic software and a diagnostic board. If your system fails to boot, this will tell you why, if anything will. If it boots but behaves oddly, this gives you a fighting chance of finding out if it's a hardware error. Software for low-level formats of IDE, SCSI, RLL, ESDI, and MFM drives. Memory tests. IRQ (interrupt request) tests. You name it, this tests it. If you maintain PCs, you'll love it. It gets a User's Choice Award.

A renewal of last year's User's Choice Award to BSE for their Flashdrives, which are pocket hard drives (see my March column). They really work.

The User's Choice Award for Windows Shareware of the Year: Plug-In for Program Manager (see my May 1993 column) does neat things for Wi ndows, and does them unobtrusively. I've seen no problems with it in nearly a year of use.

When we decided to change motherboards on the Cheetah 486/25, we wanted to do a backup, preferably over the network using Palindrome's Network Archivist and Fast 2000 DAT (digital audiotape) drive. I didn't manage that because I didn't read the Network Archivist documents correctly. It turns out that it's absurdly simple and can be done from either Windows or DOS: the W4WG network works quite well from command-line DOS once the network is started. Network Archivist will act as if it wants a lot of information, but in fact all you enter is the drive letter. In my case, the C drive of the Cheetah 486/25 is X, so X is all I needed to tell Network Archivist. Then tell it to export the contents of that drive to tape and go to dinner.

Network Archivist gets a small pearl Onion for its documents, which have too few examples; but it also gets the User's Choice Award as backup and archive manager of the year. Despi te rather cryptic documentation, Network Archivist has saved my bacon a dozen times in the last year, and I have yet to lose 1 byte of data it protects. It even protects against operator stupidity.

The biggest Orchid I can find for NASA's Dan Goldin, who came up with $990,000 for a last-minute save of the DC/X spaceship after ARPA refused to spend money already appropriated to keep her flying. NASA may be changing, moving back toward the gung ho, can-do outfit that flew the X-15 and led America to dominance in aerospace. I sure hope so. Low-cost routine access to space will change the world.

An enormous Chaos Manor Onion to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, which managed to award Dr. Roger Billings a patent for inventing distributed file systems in 1982. Specifically, he claims to have invented the notion of sharing data between computers using devices known as "dedicated servers" with software "pursuant to an access-control program."

I'm a firm believer in intellectual property, but h ow could he possibly have invented that? Distributed file systems have existed since the 1970s. I wrote about distributed computing, including networking, in some of my early columns. Billings' claim is analogous to my getting a patent on the letter e.

An even larger Onion to Bank of America for paying Billings $125,000 to drop his lawsuits so Bank of America can use its Ethernet systems in peace. I know that settling was cheaper than fighting, but Bank of America has done none of us any favors by feeding the energy monster. And the largest Onion I can find, with garlic clusters, to those who have "invested" in shares in Billings' lawsuit.

In any rational world this mess would be settled in weeks, but I have no doubt that it will wind its way through the courts for years, enriching lawyers and harassing business users of NetWare and I suppose IBM OS/2 LAN Server. No wonder this nation is in trouble.

On which score, the book of the month is Edward Luttwak's Reclaiming the Endangered America n Dream (Simon & Schuster, 1993). In my judgment, Luttwak is better at diagnosing than prescribing, but this book deserves a careful reading by anyone who is concerned with just where this nation is going. Agree with him or not, he clearly gives you much to think about.

There are two computer books of the month. One is Bill Camarda's Inside Word for Windows 6 (New Riders, 1993). Word 6 has many features, and they're all covered in this readable book. I keep it right near my desk. There's also Microsoft Professional Editions' Word Developer's Kit (Microsoft Press), which gives you the software and instructions for doing Word BASIC and customizing Word 6. Some tough slogging, but all the information is right in there.

We've been too busy to play games, so there's no game of the month. Meanwhile, although floods of soggy software went out when we cleaned up the horrible mess in the Great Hall, a steady stream of very neat stuff has come in. If anything will save us from Luttwak's fear that we're be coming a third-world country, it will be this industry.

Product Information

A portable, battery-powered hard drive that's smaller than a cigar box, the Flashdrive (available in 80 to 520 MB from $499 to $1149; smaller sizes are also available) gets a renewal of last year's User's Choice Award. Contact The BSE Co., 2114 North Fourth St., Flagstaff, AZ 86004, (602) 527-8843; fax (602) 527-1540.

A User's Choice Award for Monitors to Nanao's FlexScan T560i monitor ($1999), hands down. It's a bright, colorful, glare-free, rock-steady, eyesight-saving screen. I love this thing. Contact Nanao USA Corp., 23535 Telo Ave., Torrance, CA 90505, (800) 800-5202 or (310) 325-5202; fax (310) 530-1679.

Micro-Scope ($399) and Post-Probe ($299) can be bought separately or as the Toolkit ($698), containing diagnostic software and a diagnostic board. You name it, this tests it. If you maintain PCs, you'll love it. It gets a User's Choice Award. Contact Micro 2000, Inc., 1100 East Broadway, Glendale, CA 9 1030, (800) 864-8008 or (818) 547-0125; fax (818) 547-0397.

Microsoft Word for Windows 6.0 ($495) gets my User's Choice Award for Word Processor. The user interface has been improved, the help system is reallyneat, it has easy-to-learn features I never knew about, and so far I haven't found anything I dislike. Contact Microsoft Corp., 1 Microsoft Way, Redmond, WA 98052, (800) 426-9400 or (206) 882-8080; fax (206) 883-8101.

Network Archivist ($1695) gets the User's Choice Award as backup and archive manager of the year. It has saved my bacon a dozen times in the last year, and I have yet to lose 1 byte of data it protects. Contact Palindrome, 600 East Diehl Rd., Naperville, IL 60563, (708) 505-3300; fax (708) 505-7917.

OS/2 LAN Server 3.0 Advanced ($1460) is a real network comparable to NetWare in capabilities, reliability, and difficulty in using. If you need to network OS/2, DOS, and W4WG workstations, it will do the job, and if you have many OS/2 systems to network, it's clearly a good choice. Contact IBM Corp., 1 Old Orchard Dr., Armonk, NY 10504, (800) 342-6672 or (914) 765-1900; fax (313) 225-4020.

A User's Choice Award for Windows Shareware of the Year to Plug-In for Program Manager ($20). It does neat things for Windows and does them unobtrusively. Contact Plannet Crafters, Inc., 2580 Runic Way, Alpharetta, GA 30202, (800) 651-1000 or (404) 740-9821; fax (404) 740-1914.

Quantum Leap 2.1 ($695, stand-alone; $995, client/server) combines a powerful math tool set, including simplex and reduced gradient solution algorithms, with an easy-to-use spreadsheet interface, what seems to be a fully relational database, and the capability to incorporate expert-system rules. There may be a more advanced business-modeling and problem-solving system available for mainframes, but I don't know of any for small computers. Contact Quantum Development Corp., P.O. Box 970, Claymont, DE 19703, (302) 798-0899; fax (302) 798-6813.

SmartCache III SCSI host adapters (from $285 to $595) are a family of solid, trouble-free SCSI caching hard drive controllers that receive this year's User's Choice Award for Controllers. Contact Distributed Processing Technology, 140 Cadence Dr., Maitland, FL 32751, (800) 322-4378 or (407) 830-5522; fax (407) 260-5366.

An Orchid to Perceptive Solutions for their WinStore/6 ($159) IDE controller; drop one into an IDE-drive machine and see real performance improvement. Contact Perceptive Solutions, Inc., 2700 Flora St., Dallas, TX 75201, (800) 486-3278 or (214) 954-1774; fax (214) 953-1774

WordPerfect 6.0 for Windows ($495) is now acceptably easy to learn and gets a Chaos Manor Orchid. Contact WordPerfect Corp., 1555 North Technology Way, Orem, UT 84057, (800) 824-3323 or (801) 225-5000; fax (801) 222-5077.

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Jerry Pournelle holds a doctorate in psychology and is a science fiction writer who also earns a comfortable living writing about computers present and future. Jerry welcomes readers' comments and opinions. Send a self-addressed, sta mped envelope to Jerry Pournelle, c/o BYTE, One Phoenix Mill Lane, Peterborough, NH 03458. Please put your address on the letter as well as on the envelope. Due to the high volume of letters, Jerry cannot guarantee a personal reply. You can also contact him on the Internet or BIX at jerryp@bix.com .