Traveling Light

A quick trip to a SCSI summit gives Jerry an opportunity to explore minimalist on-the-road computing

Jerry Pournelle

I've just returned from the second annual SCSI Technology Summit in Orlando, Florida, and I think I've seen a vision of the future. Of course, most of the people who come to the conference already agree that SCSI is the right way to go. But even so, both the list of attendees and their arguments were impressive. They all seem to agree that the future is the PCI (Peripheral Component Interconnect) bus and plug-and-play SCSI. It can't happen soon enough.

I'm weary of system setup problems: memory address clashes, IRQ (interrupt request) settings, DMA channels, and all the rest. I detailed some of these problems last month. I've since had more. They're interesting enough that we still don't have our new Pen tium machine working properly, so you'll have to wait for the rest of the story.

A reader recently suggested that Apple ought to buy the rights to republish my columns and run them as ads for the Mac: look at how much trouble it is to set up a PC. Now see how easy it is to add new devices to a Mac. Plug and play with automatic SCSI configuration and the PCI bus are supposed to end all these problems, and I can't wait.

Incidentally, the ``almost quote'' I opened with is from Lincoln Steffens, known as ``America's philosopher,'' who traveled to the U.S.S.R. in 1920 and came back to proclaim, ``I have been over into the future, and it works.'' It turns out he was dead wrong, but it does make a good quote.

The main presentation at the SCSI Technology Summit was given by John Lohmeyer of NCR/AT&T. Lohmeyer chairs the X3T10 committee that sets standards for SCSI architecture. He noted that the market has splintered, spawning a number of interface designs. They all have their good and bad points.

One of the most significant differences is the maximum permitted cable length, and whether or not you can attach external devices. The latter alone is decisive for me: I move my SCSI-2 external DAT (digital audiotape) drive from machine to machine all the time, and I'd really hate not to be able to do that. The committee is taking due account of backward compatibility (they call it legacy), connectors, speed, automatic configuration, and hot plugging, and a number of both obvious and not-so-obvious details.

I'll leave discussion of the technical details of SCSI and the PCI bus to the other BYTE editors, who know far more about it than I do; but I came away with the conclusion that SCSI and the PCI bus are evolving into the system most of us will be using in the future.

The SCSI Technology Summit was hosted by Distributed Processing Technology. It was followed by a meeting of DPT dealers and distributors. That meeting included a hands-on workshop: along one wall were about 30 PC and RAID- drive cases with power supplies, while the opposite side of the room held a large pile of DPT caching drive controllers, cables, SCSI hard drives, DAT drives, and CD-ROM drives. Dealers were to mix and match, building up both simple and RAID (more on that below) systems from these components. DPT put on an impressive demonstration. They also showed new RAID enclosure boxes with controllers and software that looked pretty good, but I'll know more about that when I've got it going here. I've been in this business too long to write much about demonstrations.

I was in Florida for only two days, so this was an opportunity to travel light, which meant I'd carry only one computer. It would have to be a Windows computer: Larry Niven, Steve Barnes, and I are finishing up Beowulf's Children, the sequel to Legacy of Heorot, and I owed them a scene immediately on my return. We're doing the book in Microsoft Word for Windows, and it exists as two large files, each about half the book.

I'd also be working on t he updates to A Step Farther Out and Two Steps Farther Out; and those too are in Word, partly because it handles footnotes well. In the first book, I'm adding notes to admit where I was wrong and crow when I was right. Very little of it needs revising even now; not bad for science nonfiction that started as columns in the old Galaxy science fiction magazine. I find that Word for Windows does very well for editing a whole book.

The two obvious choices were Old Reliable, my Zenith Mastersport 386, and the Hewlett-Packard OmniBook 425. The Mastersport has the advantage of a backlit screen, an adequately large hard drive, high reliability, fast disk access, and one of the best portable keyboards in the business. It's heavy, but I can live with that. The real disadvantage is battery life: with new batteries, it would run for nearly 3 hours on a charge. Over the years, however, those batteries have gotten weaker and weaker, and now I get less than an hour, clearly not enough time to get any work done on an a irplane.

The second disadvantage of the Mastersport is that even with new batteries, it's not much use in meetings. It's heavy and bulky, and I just don't want to carry it around in a briefcase. Instead, I carry a Gateway HandBook for use in meetings and leave the Mastersport in my room; but that's two computers, and I'm on a 12-step program to break this addiction to carrying multiple computers on trips.

All this argued for the OmniBook 425. It's light enough to carry to meetings, it runs Windows, and the battery life is extremely good. There's a price for the battery life: no backlit screen and limited hard disk space. The OmniBook has Windows and Microsoft Word for Windows on one PCMCIA card, and another one has 20 MB of flash RAM for general program and data storage. There's no floppy drive.

While there was room for the three books I wanted to work on, there wasn't much room left over for Q&A Write. I use it for first drafts of articles and columns and general meeting notes, especiall y since I load Q&A Write with the Word Finder thesaurus and Definitions Plus, which contains The American Heritage Dictionary. I certainly don't need all those extra goodies. For that matter, I could do drafts in Microsoft Word for Windows, but old habits die hard, and trips are precisely the wrong place to try to change the way you do things.

The remedy to limited disk space was a BSE Flashdrive. This is a 300-MB hard drive packed into a box about the size of four packs of cigarettes. The box also contains batteries that will run the drive for a good 3 hours or more. Don't confuse the Flashdrive, which is a genuine spinning metal hard drive, with PCMCIA flash RAM, as used in the OmniBook.

I used LapLink Remote, which comes on the OmniBook, to transfer the Flashdrive software from Big Cheetah to the OmniBook. Then I needed to edit CONFIG.SYS to include the Flashdrive's driver. I discovered to my horror that the OmniBook doesn't have EDIT.COM or even EDLIN, nor does it have the Windows configurat ion editor. More time lost transferring QBasic and EDIT to the OmniBook, but once I got the Flashdrive driver statement into CONFIG.SYS and rebooted, everything worked fine.

I connected the Flashdrive to one of the machines on the network and loaded it with everything I thought I'd need, including Q&A Write, backup copies of all three books, backup copies of columns, Norton Commander, and some other stuff. The Flashdrive with its little power supply went into my wheeled carryon along with my shirts and toothbrush. I also stuffed in a couple of PCMCIA 14.4-Kbps fax modem cards; the OmniBook I have has a built-in modem, but I figured I'd give these a try.

I tried to get an extra 5- or 10-MB PCMCIA memory card before I left, but I thought of it late, and we didn't find any in stock locally. Instead, we got a 4-MB memory-expansion module from Kingston Technology. Kingston makes RAM upgrades for most machines; they began back in the days when every company offered proprietary memory at outrageous pri ces, and they've been one of the leading third-party memory sources ever since.

Alex installed the 4-MB memory-expansion module in about 4 minutes, giving my OmniBook a total of 6 MB. That speeds up Windows operations quite a bit, and anyone using an OmniBook would be well advised to make the upgrade. (Of course, PCMCIA memory cards can be moved between different machines, but Windows looooves extra RAM.)

Carrying the OmniBook as my sole machine went pretty well. There was enough light on the airplane to work despite the lack of a backlit screen. The little mouse gadget was a bit frustrating, but not excessively so once I got used to it. I'd had Microsoft Word 6.0 for Windows save off my books in Word 2.0 format, so there was no problem about reading them in.

Incidentally, the change from Word 6.0 to Word 2.0 cost nothing I could see. The curly quotes (i.e., inverted commas) that Word 6.0 uses in place of the straight quotes you see in ASCII or Word 2.0 text remain in place, as do the ``th ree em dashes'' that Word 6.0 makes out of double hyphens. Of course, Word 2.0 doesn't insert those in new text, but Word 6.0 will read those files just fine and has an automatic format program. All in all, reading in and editing worked just fine on the airplane, and I got a lot done on the way to Florida.

The problem came when I'd save my work. I started writing with computers back in CP/M days, and I'm in the habit of saving early and often. Alas, saving a half-megabyte file to the flash-RAM PCMCIA card on the OmniBook takes slightly more than a minute. That's with 6 MB of RAM; if you have less RAM, it takes even longer due to the way flash RAM works. While the system is saving, you can't do anything else.

Of course, when you turn on the OmniBook, it comes back to the exact place where you were when you turned it off, so you can argue that you don't need to save your work often. That's probably true, but like most writers, I don't consider my work safe until it's saved in two places. In any ev ent, I kept forgetting that I shouldn't save so often and wasted a lot of time.

My saves were slow because I had disabled the ``fast save'' feature of Word 2.0 in favor of ``always make backup.'' If you allow the ``fast save'' option, the first save will still take about a minute, but saves after that take only a few seconds. By all accounts, the ``fast save'' feature works fine in Word 2.0, and I don't recall ever having any problems back when Larry Niven and I were using it on our desktops. However, and be sure you see this: ``fast save'' is deadly when you're using Word 6.0.

The save bugs have been reported to Microsoft, and they're working on them. As I write this, there's an upgrade to Word 6.0a that fixes a number of Word 6.0 problems, and by the time you read this, there will probably be another maintenance upgrade. Microsoft isn't always consistent about letting users know about maintenance releases, so it's important to ask.

You can tell what edition of Word 6.0 you have by pulli ng down the Help menu and clicking on About Microsoft Word; if it doesn't say at least 6.0a, it's only a question of time before you will lose text and have other problems. Run, don't walk, to get the upgrade. Before you do that, get into Word 6.0, pull down Tools, select Option, click on the Save folder, and select ``always make backup.'' Don't go back to ``allow fast saves'' until you're absolutely certain Microsoft has fixed that bug. Niven and I lost several hours work to it.

With that caution, I still like Word 6.0. I know it's too large. I've heard it's slow, but it's just fine in the Cheetah 486/25 running Windows for Workgroups 3.11. It's also plenty fast enough in Win-OS/2 on both an IBM PS/2 Model 77 and a ValuePoint Pentium.

I've already mentioned one thing I like about Word 6.0: it uses real open and close inverted-comma quotes rather than the double-quote you get in ASCII. It can also correct mistakes on the fly. I'm forever mistyping Windows as WIndows and suchlike. Word 6.0 correct s those mistakes, and if for some reason I want a word to begin with two capital letters, the Undo command will take care of that. There are other automatic corrections, all under my control. The document-comparison and merging features are quite useful. I like the way Word 6.0 works with PowerPoint.

Even when Larry and I were having real problems with Word 6.0 bugs, we didn't want to give it up. I still do many first drafts, particularly these columns, in Q&A Write, but I suspect that will change, too.

Alas, I was in Florida before I realized that in addition to EDIT, I should have imported HIMEM.SYS. That's not on the OmniBook either, and the result is DOS windows with a maximum size of 317 KB. This is too small for many programs, including Norton Commander and Q&A Write, if you're going to work on a file of any size at all; the result was that I had to use Word for Windows for all the writing I did.

HIMEM.SYS would have fixed that, if I'd had it with me. Even better would be QEMM, exce pt that I can't get the OmniBook to work with QEMM. I may not be holding my mouth right, so I'll keep trying; meanwhile, HIMEM.SYS should be good enough.

Incidentally, MS-DOS 6 has considerably better memory management than MS-DOS 5. Even with MS-DOS 6, however, I much prefer QEMM; with MS-DOS 5, there's no contest at all. On most machines, QEMM is easy to install and puts memory management in the category of one less thing to worry about. I've used it for years and years. Recommended.

I carried the OmniBook to most of the SCSI Technology Summit sessions. It fits nicely into my briefcase and has good quiet key action. While it's too large to hold in one hand, it doesn't take up a lot of room on a desk or table. I still made most of my notes in pencil in the margins of the conference briefing book, but when I got home, I was surprised to find I'd done over a thousand words of notes in the OmniBook as well.

All told, then, the OmniBook worked fine for writing and editing. The next test was c ommunications.

The OmniBook I use has the optional internal modem. I've never had a good experience with an internal modem in a laptop. They're almost always limited to 2400 bps, and they tend to curl up and die when they encounter really noisy phone systems, such as are common in Washington, D.C. Still, I was going to be gone only a couple of days. The OmniBook comes with built-in communications software, and this would be a good test: see if I can make it work from a hotel room with no documents.

Alas, the Disney World Hilton had one of those internal telephone systems that are utterly incompatible with any kind of computer communications. They say they're fixing that, but in any event, I didn't even attempt modem communications on this trip.

That turns out to be just as well, because I have now spent 7 frustrating hours trying to make this OmniBook communicate with Tymnet and BIX. I finally managed courtesy of BYTE's Ben Smith, who is an OmniBook enthusiast, but it wasn't easy.

First I tried the internal modem and the built-in program. That one has BIX as one of the things it says it understands: just fill in the phone number. I plugged in a phone line, called up the BIX setting on the internal program, and let fly. Heard the system dial. Heard it answer. Heard some tones indicating negotiation. And then silence as the OmniBook hung up with a ``NO CARRIER'' message.

I won't bore you with details of the next hour, but I did everything I could think of. I tried 1200-bps Tymnet numbers. I tried 9600-bps Tymnet numbers. Finally, in desperation, I took the trouble to transfer Procomm Plus onto the OmniBook and tried that; and I got the same results, a connection followed by total inability to get any communications. OK, thought I, it's the internal modem. I connected an ATI Technologies' external modem to port 1. I know I can communicate with the OmniBook through port 1 because I used that port and LapLink Remote to put Procomm Plus on there in the first place.

Same results . I hear the modem dial, I hear the answer, I hear all the tones, and the OmniBook completely ignores all that. Wait, thought I. This is DOS under Windows. Let's try DOS alone. Exit Windows. That has the side benefit of uninstalling LapLink Remote. LapLink Remote is a good communications program if you don't need the COM1 port, but as long as it's running, it continues to poll the port it's looking at, and that drives external modems crazy.

I couldn't get the internal modem to connect to Tymnet using Procomm Plus in DOS without Windows.

OK, desperate measures. Connect the USRobotics external modem to the COM1 port of the OmniBook. Now invoke Procomm Plus from DOS, calling a 1200-bps Tymnet number. Voila!, I was connected. At 1200 bps through a 14.4-Kbps modem, but at least I was connected. Now try to connect at 9600 bps. Nope, I hear it negotiate, I hear it lock, but the carrier is dropped. OK, do MODE COM1:9600 and try again. Voila!, I am actually connected.

Alas, I was connected for onl y about 5 seconds. Something on that OmniBook just can't handle it, because after a while I could receive, but attempts to send produced no result, and soon I was dropped out with ``NO CARRIER.''

At that point I went to bed. This morning, I called HP's technical-support people. They confirmed that the internal modem is 2400 bps maximum. They hadn't a clue as to why it wouldn't connect to Tymnet, or why the COM1 port won't work reliably at faster than 1200 bps no matter how good an external modem you connect to it.

At that point I got smart: I called BYTE in Peterborough and asked to speak to someone who likes the OmniBook. That turned out to be Ben Smith, who'd had the same problem I did. You can cure it by going to terminal mode and sending the command AT&Q0 to the modem.

It's easier to specify the cure than to explain why it works. The &Q commands set different communications modes; AT&Q5, for instance, sets a modem to the error-correction MNP level 5. That's my usual setting for deskto ps when I want to talk to Tymnet. There's also the command ATS36=n. If n=0, the modem disconnects if it fails to get an error-correcting connection. If you tell the modem ATS36=1, it stays on-line and falls back to basic asynchronous operation, which is what it starts with if you send AT&Q0. I've known about these things a long time, but since most modems default to S36=1, I tend to forget about them.

With the OmniBook, it doesn't matter. If you send it AT&Q5 and ATS36=0, the result doesn't change: you still hear it negotiate, drop out, and you never get a connection. On the other hand, if you're happy with fairly vanilla communications at 2400 bps, you can use the OmniBook's internal modem and the software that comes with it. Just be sure to start by doing AT&Q0 and be sure the modem returns OK. Then make certain the parity settings are done properly, and you can use the dialing program that comes with the OmniBook. I don't like it as much as I like Procomm Plus, but it does work. (On a related note, I've found that I need to use the AT&Q0 commands with other modems, even when I use them on the Mac PowerBook.)

I'm not sure why I can't make the OmniBook work with an external modem. I'll keep trying and let you know, since it's really impossible to do reliable communications out of Washington, D.C., without good error correction, and besides, who wants to be stuck with 2400 bps? Which means that for longer trips, I'll still have to carry my old Zenith Mastersport and a Supra external modem. The combination of Zenith, Supra, and Procomm Plus always works.

I also have both Supra and Megahertz PCMCIA modem cards. I think I'm going to like them: a 14.4-Kbps modem with MNP level 5 and V.42bis capability on a card. Until now, the only way to get that capability was to carry the Supra external modem and its power supply. Unfortunately, I'll need a different computer to try these with, because the OmniBook operates at such low voltages that it doesn't believe there is a card in the slot. I get the sam e result with both modem cards.

The OmniBook 425 is a lot better than adequate. The communications are no worse than those I put up with a few years ago. If you can't stand the slow speed and limited storage space of the PCMCIA card, you can get an OmniBook 430, which has an actual 120-MB spinning metal hard drive. It operates for 6 hours on a battery charge, as opposed to the 425's honest 12 hours. With that large a drive, you can carry all the Windows and DOS accessory programs, and configuration should be a lot easier.

There's always a trade-off between features and convenience. The OmniBook 425 was designed for those who want a laptop to be light and handy with long battery life and still run Windows, and it does that job extremely well. If that's what you're looking for, be sure to look at the OmniBook 425.

We've almost caught up after the earthquake, but mounds of new software have come in. This means it's short-shrift season at Chaos Manor: time to see how many items worth mentionin g I can cover. They all deserve more space than I can give.

I've wanted a good Windows debugger kit for months. iniExpert from Landmark Research International Corp. isn't quite it, but it's valuable all the same. This looks at your various Windows .INI files and offers explanations of what many of the statements do, along with an opportunity to edit them. It doesn't understand all the statements in WIN.INI, but it knows a lot of them. Editing your initialization files is not for the faint of heart, but iniExpert does take some of the sting out of it. Recommended.

Mac fans may think I've been ignoring the Mac, but actually I'm gathering material. Roberta has been doing a lot of work with HyperCard 2.2 as well as Hyperstudio. My partner Steve Barnes uses Microsoft Word on a Mac and brings us disks we can read into Word 6.0 for Windows. I've got a ton of new Mac CD-ROMs and several simulation programs for the Mac. In general, we do more work on the Mac here than might be inferred from my columns.

One reason is that my best columns are generated when I overcome a lot of difficulties. The Mac, on the other hand, doesn't generate that kind of problem. Mac problems tend to be fewer, but when you get one, it's a brass-plated doozy. Roberta is in the middle of one right now.

The fact is, though, the Mac with HyperCard is an extremely powerful tool for getting things done, and as soon as my next novel is finished, I intend to take some time off and write a bunch of HyperCard stacks simulating things from ecological systems to strategic analysis.

Meanwhile, one neat Mac accessory is Icons for the Masses: The Complete Guide to Creating, Editing and Customizing Icons by David A. Lai (Peachpit Press, 1993). It comes complete with the Icon Wizard icon editor and about a thousand icons, everything from coffeemakers to hard drives to wishing wells. Mac users tend to have more fun with their computers than PC types. This book can add to the fun.

I've also got spiffy new CD-ROM updates of T he Manhole and Cosmic Osmo, the precursors of Myst. They're a bit dated for us old, jaded types, but kids just love to explore the world of The Manhole, and if you have kids and a Mac and don't know about these, get them. Trust me, you have a real treat in store.

On the subject of fun with computers, if you like computer adventure games, you really have to know about Shay Addams and his QuestBusters series. He has several QuestBusters clue books, plus for the hard-core game adventurer, a monthly newsletter. I have QuestBusters: The Book of Clues (Clue Books Express, P.O. Box 85143, Tucson, AZ 85754, (602) 743-3709, $18.95), which contains solutions to 35 games, including Dusk of the Gods, Betrayal at Krondor, Star Control II, and a whole bunch of other games I've liked. Addams is a games fanatic; if you've ever been stuck in a computer adventure game, you need to know about him.

One earthquake victim at Chaos Manor was the Forminco Condor cage, a startlingly comfortable computer workstation. One of the bookcases fell on it, and while it protected the computer installed on it, some of the steel frame members were bent just enough that it's a bit lopsided. Even so, it still works better than any other computer workstation system I've seen. While I find most claims about ``ergonomic design'' to be mere hype, I've concluded that Forminco's claims are well founded. At first I thought their hypermodern design was mostly for appearance, but it all seems to have a purpose.

Their furniture is easy to assemble: our son Richard, who isn't mechanical at all, took a disassembled Forminco workstation to Washington, and got it together with no problems. He loves it.

They keep updating designs. The other day I got a new system for supporting a tower-configuration computer by attaching it to the side of the workstation. It works like a charm.

They also make the Mouse Arena, which is the ultimate mouse pad complete with wrist rest. I tend to do most of my work from the keyboard, but many games lik e Civilization and Masters of Orion are almost entirely mouse-controlled, and Microsoft Word for Windows requires a good bit of mousing around. After playing Masters of Orion for 2 or 3 hours, it sure feels better if I've been using the Mouse Arena. Try one, you'll like it.

Larry Niven, who likes to work in a chair without arms, is very fond of the Forminco typing chair. I'm waiting for their new version with adjustable arms, which should be out about the time you see this.

If you spend much of your life sitting at a computer, you should think seriously about furniture design; which means you should study the Forminco catalogs. The longer I use their stuff, the better I like it.

I don't usually do retractions, but sometimes I have to explain... Last month, I underestimated the popularity of the Kodak Photo CD. Kodak tells me there are over 13 million ROM drives that can now use Photo CD, and over 30,000 places where you can drop off negatives and get a Photo CD back.

I find that I t ake a lot of pictures that I look at once and stuff into a box, where they are never seen again. Photo CD is probably the remedy to that. Get my pictures put on disks, build a good database and index for retrieval, and I'll have those pictures easily available when I need them. More than that, Kodak furnishes software (Create-It and Arrange-It; see last month's column) for incorporating them into presentations to spruce up lectures.

Electronic photography hasn't gone anywhere much because of the low resolution, but Photo CD is another story. Watch for new developments.

Memorize-It, for both the Mac and Windows, makes electronic flash cards that can include art and sound. It also does quizzes. I made 3- by 5-inch flash cards by hand when I was studying for my qualifying exams. Some people don't care for this method of learning things, but I think it's nifty. Recommended.

The Shareware of the Month is Neverlock, a program to remove copy protection. It doesn't always work, but it generally will. (What I had was a version that is a few years old. A newer fully licensed shrink-wrapped version of Neverlock is also available. I'll be getting a copy and will report on it when I do.)

There are ethical issues here. My view is that if I legally own a program or game, I have a right not to be annoyed every time I use it; and some copy-protection schemes are really annoying. A few are downright obnoxious. One of Pournelle's laws is that any company that depends on copy-protected software should have a good expert system for going through Chapter 11 bankruptcy, but that was more relevant a few years ago than now; today, few important programs have copy protection.

Some software publishers complain that they're losing billions to pirates. A few of them may be right, but I suspect most pirated business software is either not used or is soon replaced by a legal copy.

Games are another matter. It's questionable how many stolen games represent a lost sale; many software pirates have no mon ey and so would never buy the game. Some of the best and most popular games, like Origin's Privateer (see below), have no copy protection at all, and they seem to make plenty of money. Still, I'm sure game companies lose money to software thieves, and they have my sympathy.

Sympathy or no, I still get weary of having to find the manual and look up page 62, line 19, word 5, especially since it's seldom clear which is line 19. Moreover, software publishers are beginning to cut corners on packaging, so that the box becomes useless as a place to keep a manual you probably won't be using except to answer copy-protection questions; and if the manual is lost in the general swim, the program is useless.

Thus, Copyware's Neverlock, which can often modify a copy of your game file so that the copy protection goes away. Use it with due regard for ethics.

bject I've ever seen. Naturally it comes with a CD-ROM of useful stuff, but mostly you'll want it for the text. If you think you ought to know more about CD-ROM, read this. I'm keeping mine on the reference shelf.

The book of the month is Fred Saberhagen's Seance for a Vampire (Tor Books, 1994), another in his series that brings Count Dracula and Sherlock Holmes together. If you don't like this sort of thing you'll hate it, but I love it.

There are two games this month. One, Privateer from Origin, is set in the world of Wing Commander, and it lets you fly around and blow away Kilrathi cats, religious fanatics, and pirates. Or, you can turn pirate and drug smuggler yourself.... The other one is Spectrum Holobyte's Fields of Glory, a Napoleonic game that comes as close to playing with miniatures as any computer game I've seen. The computer opponents aren't very smart, and it needs a modem capability to let you play against a friend; but I love the graphics, and there's a feel to this that seems ri ght.

Once again, I'm out of space long before I'm out of stuff to write about. Next month, with luck, I'll get to more Apple and OS/2 stuff. There's wonderful new multimedia stuff from Grolier and Knowledge Adventure, and about a ton of CD-ROMs.

For More Information

If you have kids and a Mac and don't know about Cosmic Osmo ($34.95), The Manhole ($34.95), and Myst ($59.95), get them. Trust me, you have a real treat in store. Contact Broderbund Software, Inc., 500 Redwood Blvd., Novato, CA 94948, (800) 521-6263 or (415) 382-4400; fax (415) 382-4671.

Fields of Glory ($59.95) is a Napoleonic game that comes as close to playing with miniatures as any computer game I've seen. Contact Spectrum Holobyte, 2490 Mariner Square Loop, Alameda, CA 94501, (800) 695-4263 or (510) 522-1164; fax (510) 522-3587.

If you spend much of your life sitting at a computer, you should think seriously about furniture design; which means you should study the Forminco catalogs. The longer I use their stuf f, the better I like it. Contact Forminco, 9610-A Ignace, Brossard, Quebec, Canada J4Y 2R4, (800) 663-6764 or (514) 444-9488; fax (514) 444-9378.

Kingston Technology makes RAM upgrades for most machines. Alex installed their 4-MB memory-expansion module ($375) in about 4 minutes, giving my OmniBook 425 a total of 6 MB. Contact Kingston Technology Corp., 17600 Newhope St., Fountain Valley, CA 92708, (800) 835-6575 or (714) 435-2600; fax (714) 435-2699.

Editing your initialization files is not for the faint of heart, but iniExpert ($49) does take some of the sting out of it. Contact Landmark Research International Corp., 703 Grand Central St., Clearwater,FL 34616 (800) 683-6696 or (813) 443-1331; fax (813) 443-6603.

Memorize-It ($49) makes electronic flash cards that can include art and sound. Contact Side-Eight Software, P.O. Box 5004, Garden Grove, CA 92645, (714) 952-4114; fax (714) 995-6725.

Microsoft Word 6.0 for Windows ($495) has just about become the official Chaos Manor word processor. Contact Microsoft Corp., 1 Microsoft Way, Redmond, WA 98052, (800) 426-9400 or (206) 882-8080; fax (206) 883-8101.

Neverlock is a program that removes copy protection (shareware version with 200-250 titles, $5; fully licensed shrink-wrapped version with more than 500 titles, $78). Contact Copyware, Inc., 152 Nelson Cir., Newmarket, Ontario, Canada L3X 1R3, (905) 830-1961; fax (905) 830-5064.

The OmniBook 425 was designed for those who want a laptop to be light and handy with long battery life and still run Windows, and it does that job extremely well. If that's what you're looking for, be sure to look at the OmniBook (with 40-MB hard drive, $1795; with 10-MB flash disk, $2095; optional internal modem, $379). Contact Hewlett-Packard Co., 1000 Northeast Circle Blvd., Corvallis, OR 97330, (800) 433-1254 or (503) 757-2004; fax (800) 333-1917.

Privateer ($79.95) lets you fly around and blow away Kilrathi cats, religious fanatics, and pirates. Contact Origin Systems, Inc., 12940 Res earch, Austin, TX 78750, (800) 245-4525 or (512) 335-0440; fax (512) 331-8559.

On most machines, QEMM ($99.95) is easy to install and puts memory management in the category of one less thing to worry about. Contact Quarterdeck Office Systems, 150 Pico Blvd., Santa Monica, CA 90405, (800) 354-3222 or (310) 392-9851; fax (800) 354-3329.

If your job involves understanding how to speed up disk I/O operations, you'd do well to get the Technology Focus papers on RAID and hardware caching controllers. Contact Distributed Processing Technology, 140 Cadence Dr., Maitland, FL 32751, (800) 322-4378 or (407) 830-5522; fax (407) 260-5366.

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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, stamped envelope to Jerry Pournelle, c/o BYTE, One Phoenix Mill Lane, Peterborough, NH 03458. Please put your address on the let ter 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 .