A Look to the Future

After visits to some computer giants, Jerry discusses several major trends he sees in the industry. He also looks at new fax devices, CD-ROMs, and modems.

Jerry Pournelle

I've just finished a week talking to Microsoft and IBM, and I'd like to tell you about the future. Alas, that doesn't mean I can tell you what's going to happen, any more than Denver can tell you when they'll be able to open their new airport. It seems their new automated baggage system doesn't work, and it appears to be software. At $30 million a month, that's a lot of software costs. We very much live in interesting times.

Now that was an old Chinese curse, but it's what I'd call a mixed cursing: there are advantages to living in interesting times. Karl Marx said that a sufficient quantitative change becomes a qualitative change; thus, Lenin thought you could create the new Soviet man. That didn't work, but as hardware and software capabilities grow without any limit in sight, we get something very like the Marxian transformation of quantity into quality. Example: three years ago, there simply could not have been a program like Myst. No one would have thought to try it. In another year, it will be the standard.

We're also seeing distributed computing with a vengeance. The special effects on the science fiction show Babylon 5 are created with a network of 40 Amigas, and they're simply unparalleled in TV. In another few years, that quality will be the standard, and Jurassic Park-quality simulations will be common.

I see several major trends in the industry. The first is easy: more and more power in smaller machines. Until recently, the PowerPC was merely a way to make your Mac applications run slower, but that's changing even as I write this. A splendid example is Adobe Photoshop. It comes with both 680x0 and PowerPC nativ e code, figures out which it's running on, and chooses the proper code set. That means it comes fat, but there are remedies for that, too. Apple has clearly put a lot of thought into making it inviting to write applications for Power Macs.

There will be more of that. I expect within five years--and I won't be astonished if it's less than half that--to see a PowerPC system capable of running Apple System x, Unix, OS/2, DOS, Windows, and NextStep applications all on the same machine, and allow some communication between those applications. The first of those machines will be expensive, but that won't last.

This means that the operating-system wars will be quite important for Microsoft, IBM, and some other companies, but not so much for users. There will also be some consolidations in the user interface. Quarterdeck Office Systems' SideBar for Windows is a good candidate: it is easy to learn, has enough functions to get the job done, and is small enough to be easily ported to other graphical interf aces (see my October column).

The second major trend is object-oriented software. I have seen demonstrations of Microsoft OLE 2, and it's wonderful. You can take program ``objects'' from a variety of sources and link them together so they operate as a new program, or even a new kind of program.

For example, one program object may know how to go out on a modem and gather stock-market information. Another one can take that information and stuff it into a database. A third can take selected database information and put it into a spreadsheet. A fourth examines the spreadsheet data for trends and passes that information to a fifth object, which makes predictions and records them in the original database. All this is watched by a neural-network object, which is looking for the best predictions.

Given the required program objects--and many of them are already available--you could build the program I described in a matter of days. The objects might have been written in C++, Modula-2, Visual Basic, Pascal, or COBOL; as long as they follow the published OLE 2 specifications, it won't matter, because you'll never see their source code. The only code you'd write would be the control links, and that can be done in Visual Basic or whatever language you want to use, including some programming tools that don't look like ``languages'' at all. You see the objects as a series of shapes with inputs and outputs and then connect them with drag-and-drop operations.

The OLE 2 demonstration I saw on the Microsoft campus wasn't quite that elaborate, but it was close, and I was much impressed.

Microsoft has become so enthusiastic about object-oriented programming that newcomers can be excused for thinking Microsoft must have invented it. That distresses IBM, because one of the reasons they give for saying OS/2 is superior to both Windows and Chicago is that IBM understands object-oriented programming and built OS/2 around the object concept.

Of course, IBM didn't invent objects either. I'm not sure who did; but the concept of code blocks reusable without new compilation has long been advocated by Niklaus Wirth, was partially implemented in Pascal, and is very much at the heart of both Modula-2 and Wirth's latest system, Oberon. For that matter, the ability to use a few lines to link up chunks of code to build complex new programs was what made Wirth's Lilith such a wonderful programming environment.

I've seen demonstrations of OLE 2. I've seen less of OpenDoc, IBM's answer to OLE 2. Everyone familiar with OpenDoc, though, says it will be completely compatible with OLE 2, but it will have more features and a better developers' interface to make it easier to program. That's important, and we'll get back to it.

The third major trend grows out of the first two: feature wars. We already see them in games. For example, OutPost describes features in the manual that they simply didn't manage to implement, presumably because of great pressure to ship it. MicroProse Software's XCOM: UFO Defense has s everal horrible bugs that must have been encountered in testing. I suppose they had no suspicion that XCOM, which they acquired from the British company Mythos Games, would become a best-seller (and very likely the Chaos Manor game of the year) and thus warrant the necessary investments in bug hunting.

The good news is that object-oriented programming lets you add features without adding bugs by incorporating thoroughly tested objects, either ones you previously wrote or from an outside source. I don't suppose I will live to see programs without bugs, but at least the trend is in the right direction.

Donkey's years ago when I began these columns, the most important people in the industry were programmers who could teach the machines how to do things. I predicted that wouldn't last: that there would come a time when it would be far more important to think up interesting things for the computer to do. That has happened.

Centuries ago, the mere ability to read and write made you an important person. You might have nothing original to say, but you could always get a job as a temple scribe or palace clerk. Over the years, literacy became fairly common (alas, no longer can you say universal). Consequently, what you write is what counts. I said back then there would be a time when the ability to ``write programs'' would be nearly as common as the ability to read and write human languages, so that what you could teach the machine would be what counts. Object-oriented programming takes us much closer to that time.

OLE will generate as big a change in the way software is produced as did the change to interactivity from batch processing. The process has already started. Cruise through the Internet, and you'll find hundreds of public domain and shareware objects, some questionable, some extremely useful. Often they're available with source code, and they get modified, tested, and put back up for distribution. That will continue.

Finally, everyone seems agreed that the next big computer market will be in home systems. Many companies--Microsoft prominent among them--are reorganizing into home and business system divisions. That may not be wise. I agree that the straight business market is somewhat saturated, so that replacement sales outnumber new system sales; but I'm not at all sure that's true of the home-business market.

As federal regulations make it more and more expensive to hire people, the trend toward part-time work, consulting, and independent contracting will accelerate. We'll thus see a consequent expansion of people who work as contractors from home offices. They're going to need computers, not only to do their consulting work but also to keep books that satisfy the IRS that they really are independent consultants; and they'll probably need expert systems with frequent rule updates to keep them square with the EEOC, OSHA, EPA, HUD, and whatever other outfits the Congress sees fit to send to ``protect'' them. Presumably, the Congress doesn't need protection, since it exempts its elf from all those laws, so it may not need as much computing power as the average citizen will.

And we certainly do live in interesting times.

Today we had an adventure. Chip Hilts, industry pioneer and an old friend, had an appointment to show me his new Fax<HQ software. I had forgotten he was coming.

I was late getting in on the fax revolution. For years, I simply didn't bother. People would come show me new fax boards. They seemed like ways to slow down my system. When I decided I needed a fax system, I got a standard low-cost thermal-paper system and put it in an unused area under the stairs. It has its own telephone line, and it works just fine. If we want to send something, we put in the paper, dial the number, push a button, and walk away. That means I have to print a paper copy, and I have to put up with those curly thermal papers that fade. I always knew I would one day have to put in something better.

I've long been an admirer of the Intel Satisfaxtion board, which has an on-board coprocessor, but where would I put it? I don't want anyone else using my main system, so I can't put it there. I concluded that what I needed was a way to install the Intel board in a machine accessible by the network, and I'd begun fooling around with programs that would work under Windows for Workgroups. Meanwhile, Alex had just installed NetWare on a Gateway 2000 486DX2/50 and hooked that into the Ethernet daisy-chain that runs my W4WG network. I'd been told that it's easy to get NetWare and W4WG running together, and we were about to do that when the earthquake hit.

In addition to throwing most of my books, bookcases, computers, and software into a pile and dumping the fish tank on top, the earthquake made a real mess in the cable room. That's the small room in which I keep all my tools and spare cables. It has its own air-conditioning unit, and it's also the home of the Cheetah 386, the machine that runs the Pioneer New Media Technologies DRM-604X CD-ROM drive and the optical drive f or the W4WG network, and the Gateway 2000 486DX2 NetWare server.

The Cheetah sits under a desk and came through just fine. It came back up all by itself when the power was restored. The Gateway got dumped on the floor and was covered with paint cans, tools, cables, the entire disk recycling bin, and heaven knows what else. The machine itself didn't look damaged when we dug it out, but it no longer had a monitor. I kept promising myself I'd get the NetWare network started up again, but I kept putting it off. After a while, the poor Gateway got buried as more stuff got ``temporarily'' stored in the cable room. That was the situation when Chip Hilts and John Hammill arrived.

Fax<HQ lets you set up any machine, such as an older 386, and turn it into a ``fax server'' usable by anyone on a NetWare network. Alas, my NetWare server was in the cable room under piles of junk, and none of my systems were set up to use NetWare anyway.

Thus, the adventure of hacking my way into that cable room to r escue the Gateway, set it up, find it a monitor, and then turn it on.

It booted up, trundled, and John, who is Headquarters Software's technical director, announced that NetWare had come up just fine. Now all we needed was a system with an Ethernet board and a Satisfaxtion board to be the fax server. I looked around and spied the little AST Bravo, another machine put on hold because of the general mess from the earthquake. It already had an Intel EtherExpress network board, so all we had to do was install Satisfaxtion.

That went well, so while John set up the network, I attacked the cable room. I'd actually got about 3 cubic feet of cables untangled and coiled when he announced that NetWare was running with W4WG, and it was time to install Fax<HQ.

The rest is anticlimax. Fax<HQ installed itself on the Gateway that acts as the NetWare server and on the AST Bravo that became our fax server. We then went over to Pentafluge (the Pentium system) and made it a NetWare client and told it a bout Fax<HQ. As it happens, I needed to send a fax to NASA headquarters anyway, so I called up Word for Windows, composed the fax, used Word's Print Setup to tell it to print to the fax server--it sees that as a possible ``printer'' device--and sent it on its way. While I was at it, I sent copies to a couple of people and sent a text fax to my own system downstairs.

It worked like a charm.

Fax<HQ will certainly take care of the fax needs of most small- to medium-size network establishments. It will answer the phone, store incoming faxes on disk, and make them available to the appropriate users. It stores and logs outgoing faxes and sends them by priority or at specified times. It will send to lists. It maintains phone books. If you have a lot of users, it's fairly inexpensive per user. The neat part is that the server does all the work--your personal workstation isn't time-sharing with anyone, including yourself. Fax<HQ is available now.

Meanwhile, Microsoft and Ricoh have a diffe rent approach. They will soon introduce Microsoft WinWriter: a laser printer that has its own CPU, hard drive, network card, and fax capability, including a scanner. It will work with W4WG (and presumably NetWare). It prints, accepts paper or electronic input directly or through the network, and seems to promise most if not all the things Fax<HQ does. Of course, it costs more, but it won't need a dedicated PC and Satisfaxtion board.

I suspect that within a couple of years, you'll have a wide choice of laser printers that will also work as a networkable fax server.

We also have single-user fax systems, which come with various fax modems. Probably the best known (and my favorite) of these is Delrina Technology's WinFax, which is available stand-alone or bundled with modems like those from Supra and Macronix. It's pretty good on DOS as well as Windows. There's also QuickLink, which comes with U.S. Robotics and some other modems; its Windows capability is all right, but I'm not fond of its DOS pe rformance.

Still, any of these are good enough. Add a good low-cost scanner, such as Logitech's ScanMan, and they can be used with both electronic and paper inputs. With a bit of ingenuity and a program like Norton PC Remote or Artisoft's Network Eye, any of those can be set up on their own dedicated machine and controlled remotely. You'll be happier with a real network and something like Fax<HQ or the Microsoft/Ricoh system, but for single users, a good data/fax modem and its accompanying software will do the job for a while.

For years, the telephone and the small computer have looked at each other without communicating, but now the needs of electronic commuters are changing all that. Another sign that we live in interesting times.

Although I was late getting into the fax revolution, I've been using modems since the mid-1970s. Modem capabilities grew slowly for years, but now they change by leaps and bounds. The latest ones we have at Chaos Manor are a pair of U.S. Robotics Courier Dua l Standard V.34 Data/Fax modems. U.S. Robotics advertises that these modems will automatically communicate at the fastest possible rate and says ``just plug it in and forget it.''

I did that. On one machine, I replaced an earlier U.S. Robotics modem with the new one, and on another I replaced an AST modem. Then I called what I call ``the modems from hell,'' a number of nodes I have real problems getting connected to, such as one Tymnet node in Washington, D.C. The new U.S. Robotics modems connected up just fine, although because of the need for frequent retries, the actual throughput to the 9600-bps node in Washington was closer to 1500 bps. I can actually send and receive data faster to an alternate 2400-bps number there. Still, it worked, and nothing I've ever tried before has done so.

My opinion on modems hasn't changed much since last year. If you want trouble-free communications, get the latest and greatest U.S. Robotics external modem, plug it in, and forget it. I say external because ther e are times when you really do need the little flashing lights, and sometimes the only way to get out of a goofy on-line situation is to physically turn off the modem.

When I travel, I generally put the latest and greatest Supra external modem and its power unit into my checked luggage. Supras aren't as absolutely reliable in making an error-correcting connection as the U.S. Robotics modems, but they are much smaller. My typical experience is that I may have to try three or four times to get a Supra to lock on properly on a particularly noisy line, while a U.S. Robotics modem never requires more than two tries. Of course, with normal connections, you can't tell the difference between them.

I'm still evaluating ultralight modems such as the Macronix PCMCIA-card modem. I haven't been able to make it work with every portable that has a PCMCIA slot, but that seems to be a driver problem, which is getting taken care of. When the Macronix modem does work, it's quite good at normal lines, but you can h ave problems locking in when there's a lot of line noise.

I'm in the process of testing some new portables and modems, so I'll have more on this another time.

On the subject of portables, Phillip continues to send us E-mail from aboard the USS Tripoli in the Persian Gulf. He's got one of Zenith's classy new color portables (it's a lot nicer than any portable I have just now), and he sure loves it. A full report on that when he gets back. Certainly, anyone with a relative in the Navy will look forward to a time when E-mail can regularly connect to ships at sea.

The CD-ROM explosion continues. There are commercial products everywhere, and many are splendid. I'll get back to those.

Another vital use for CD-ROMs is in academic and scientific publication. Many extremely important but highly technical journals have small circulations and consequently are very expensive to produce in traditional print media. The CD-ROM not only allows them to be produced at reasonable costs but also to inc lude a great deal more supporting data. A single CD-ROM can contain years' worth of information.

Example: Lightbinders now publishes a number of professional journals, including the Journal of Biological Chemistry, on CD-ROM. The costs to professional societies are kept down, more information goes out in a form that makes it easy to retrieve and search, and the whole world benefits.

On the home front, Microsoft has hundreds of highly motivated people producing CD-ROMs. Microsoft believes that for many people their first computer experience will be with a CD-ROM on a home computer. They want that experience to be positive, and they're willing to spend a lot to make it so.

They spent millions getting their Encarta multimedia encyclopedia right, and it shows. The Dangerous Creatures CD-ROM, produced with the help of the World Wildlife Federation, lets you see through a cheetah's eyes, watch rattlesnakes wrestle, and visit lionfish. The Ancient Lands CD-ROM brings ancient history to life. Din osaurs is self-explanatory. Kids of all ages will love these. I expect what will happen is that parents will buy them for their home. When the kids get tired of them, they'll give them to schools. For that matter, kids may swap them.

I've previously reviewed some of the Microsoft music CD-ROMs. They also have a sports series. I'm not a baseball fanatic, but one of my boys is.

While we're on Microsoft's home division, I should mention some of their non-CD-ROM products. I'm not an arcade-game player, but Larry Niven is addicted to Centipede. It comes in the Microsoft Arcade (for Windows) package that includes Missile Command and a couple of others, and has turned out to be a surprise best-seller. There's a whole bunch of other stuff, and if you haven't seen the Microsoft Home Software Catalog, it's worth while getting one.

Microsoft has the resources to do things right, and they use the new object-oriented programming methods to add features while keeping down the bugs. They seem determined to set new standards for home-use software. I'm all for that.

I couldn't review every CD-ROM worth looking at if I used the whole column, but it's worth listing some more just to show how far things have gone. I have in front of me, in no particular order, the Microsoft Developer Network CD-ROMs; developers would be well advised to sign up for those as they come out. I have Knowledge Media's Language\OS Resource Library, a CD-ROM with about 100 computer languages and operating systems, including Oberon, ICON, Forth, Ada, Amoeba, and a whack of a lot more. Compilers, interpreters, libraries, you name it; if you play with code, you'll want this.

I've got the Xiphias Timetables of History Series, which includes Arts & Entertainment; Science & Innovation; and Business, Politics, & Media. They're the ones who did the The Way Things Work series I mentioned a couple of months ago. Worth looking into.

I've got more dinosaur CD-ROMs than you can shake a fossil at. Microsoft's is the most interesti ng, but I suppose the most complete is Smithsonian Institution Dinosaur Museum published by Software Marketing in conjunction with the Smithsonian Institution. It has maps and detailed information on collections. It also comes with 3-D viewing glasses for those who like that sort of thing.

Incidentally, I'm reliably informed that the movie Jurassic Park really did incorporate the latest and best theories of how dinosaurs looked and acted. They think they got sizes and shapes and motions right. They had to guess about the colors.

Here's Smartek's WordSmart for Windows CD-ROM; it's part of a series for building vocabulary from first grade to college level. This one has about 5000 words. Like most of these self-help systems, you'll get no more out of it than you put in, and few of them are particularly self-motivating. If you want to increase your vocabulary, this is less painful than most methods.

Then there's geography. Software Toolworks has a new edition of their World Atlas. DeLorme pub lishes their detailed U.S. map CD-ROM, called Street Atlas USA, with maps of just about every city and town in the country.

And finally there's a new edition of Microsoft Bookshelf, the one that started it all by putting Roget's Thesaurus, Bartlett's Quotations, Columbia Desk Encyclopedia, American Heritage Dictionary, and a partridge in a pear tree on one CD-ROM; it's still the single most useful one I have.

That's all in this stack, but I can see five other stacks just as interesting that are on the other side of the room. If you don't have a CD-ROM drive, you're missing a lot. Double-speed drives are now available for under $150.

BYTE reader Troy Brooks reports that when he installed his new Creative Labs' Sound Blaster sound and CD-ROM system, he got snaps, crackles, and pops instead of cool sound. Since he'd bought the company's high-quality Yamaha speakers, this wasn't thrilling. It was a while before he discovered that his problem was his video card: one of the first of the Hercule s Graphite 2-MB VLB cards. The BIOS was out of date. That got updated and the problems went away. Brooks is quite pleased with the technical support he got from both Creative Labs and Hercules Computer Technology.

My favorite backup system is DAT (digital audiotape) controlled by Palindrome's Network Archivist software; it's the system I recommend for people who just can't afford to lose their data or work. It's expensive, but you can get 2 GB on a $15 tape bought in a record store, so all the expense is in the tape drive. Ours is external, which means we can carry it over to the Mac and use it there, too.

The Colorado Memory Systems Jumbo 250 tape drive is a good choice for those who are waiting for prices to drop before buying a DAT drive. The most popular size is 250 MB. The tape drive itself is about the size of a cigar box. There are also internal versions, but the external one is handy for transferring data to another machine. The unit connects to your existing floppy drive controller (anot her version, the Colorado Trakker, connects to the printer port with a parallel cable). You can also buy a version that comes with its own high-speed controller card.

Alex has installed Jumbo backup units on a number of systems for clients and reports that about 85 percent of the time there's nothing to it: follow instructions, run the software, and Bob's your uncle. If that doesn't work, you need to understand things like IRQ (interrupt request) and port addresses, so one of Pournelle's laws applies here. If you don't know what you're doing, be sure you buy from someone who does.

Colorado Backup for DOS comes with the Jumbo 250. There's also enough software to allow you to back up and retrieve under Windows. If you want to do something more complex, however, such as automatic scheduled backups, you'll need to buy Colorado Backup for Windows 2.0, the company's more advanced Windows backup program.

If you don't have a backup system or you're still backing up to floppy disks, you're taking needless chances. The Colorado Jumbo 250 and Colorado Trakker tape drives don't cost much, and you can rely on them. Recommended.

Murphy's Law says that whatever toolkit you carry will lack the one tool you need. I don't guarantee that won't happen even if you carry the Kludgewerks Kludge-Kit, but for something that fits in your breast pocket, this is pretty good. Among its tools are screwdrivers, pliers with side cutters, a chip puller, and a little gripper gizmo that will retrieve the screw you dropped down between two slots. There's also some glue, adhesive-backed Velcro, and even a couple of inches of heat-shrink tubing. The case is leather and smells like a new car.

This thing was designed by someone who got tired of having to go back for tools and wanted something that could be carried around. It's neat.

Many academic institutions have one and only one person who knows how to put mathematical papers into the Tex (pronounced ``tech''; the x is a Greek chi) format demanded by most scien tific journals. Tex is a great PDL (page-description language), but no one ever claimed it was easy to learn.

Comes now Scientific Word from TCI Software Research, which accepts input about the way you'd expect and outputs in Tex; and nearly anyone can learn how to use it. It works. You'll still have to write your mathematics or physics paper, but at least you won't have to wait for someone else to format it. Not everyone will need this, but if you need it, you need it bad.

It took a while to get it tuned up, but I'm having a love affair with Pentafluge, the Pentium built up from a PC Power & Cooling tower case, a Micronics Computers M5Pi motherboard, a DEC 3107 1.05-GB digital hard drive, and a Maxoptix T3-1300 1.3-GB optical drive. It has long been connected into the W4WG network; now it's part of the NetWare setup as well. I'll have a lot more on the joys of NetWare another time.

Pentafluge uses a Distributed Processing Technology SmartCache III SCSI controller to run the hard and optic al drives, but we had originally let the motherboard controller run the floppy drives. Last week, Alex tried to add a video features board to the system so we could play with the little VideoLabs Flexcam camera. We got an odd result: the video board worked fine, but the floppy drives stopped working. However, if we removed the Intel EtherExpress board, the floppy drives would work again.

We looked for address and IRQ conflicts, but we never figured out what was wrong. Instead, we solved the problem by allowing the SmartCache III to run the floppy drives as well (like most advanced motherboards these days, the M5Pi has software-configurable IDE and floppy drive controllers; we just turned both off).

While we were at it, we installed another 8 MB of SmartCache error-correcting memory (for a total of 12 MB, probably wretched excess, but it makes saving in XCOM: UFO Defense fast). Not only did that solve the problem, but it speeded up the floppy drives something wonderful.

We generally think of high-end machines as intended for business, but games actually make the greatest demands on small computers. I'm quite fond of Origin's Wing Commander and its sequels, but when I'm flying a space mission against the Kilrathi and find myself in an asteroid field with half a dozen enemies, keeping track of all those rapidly moving objects in three dimensions takes a lot of computing power. There aren't many sequences that can noticeably slow SuperCow, the Gateway 2000 486DX2/66, but a few in Origin's Privateer game can do it. I haven't found anything that makes Pentafluge look slow, except Video for Windows--which should be fixed Real Soon Now.

I'm sure Intel will sell a lot of Pentiums to businesses, but I bet they sell even more to game fanatics.

The book of the month is by James Dunnigan and Raymond Macedonia, Getting It Right: American Military Reforms After Vietnam (Morrow, 1993). It's a good account of how the Army went from Vietnam to Desert Storm, readable but with plenty of detail. It's not as complete on what the Air Force did. I like to think that Possony and Pournelle's Strategy of Technology, which was a text in the Air Force Academy and War College during some of the critical years, had some influence on Air Force weapons and doctrine. That's a quibble, though; Dunnigan has done an excellent job, as usual.

Several computer books this month. First, a whole series on CD-ROMs published by Mecklermedia. Government CD-ROMs, edited by John Maxymuk, is subtitled A Practical Guide to Searching Electronic Document Databases, and that's a good description: it looks at a dozen agencies, describes the kinds of data to be found, and goes into your rights under the Freedom of Information Act. They also have books on games and entertainment on CD-ROM and a series on the Internet. Meckler has a deserved reputation for high-quality technical books.

The PowerPC Macintosh Book by Stephan Somogyi (Addison-Wesley, 1994) is an understandable discussion of what RISC machines are and how they're different from what we're used to. The book assumes the reader is intelligent but fairly new to computers. Old hands may skip past some of the introductory-level discussions, but I guarantee there's something here for everyone. Recommended.

The game of the month remains for now MicroProse Software's XCOM: UFO Defense, and once again, fair warning: this thing is addictive.

Now that we've got NetWare running with W4WG, I'll be doing a lot of experimenting with the joys of full networks--including Macs and OS/2. IBM is bringing out a new version of OS/2 Network, which I ought to get to this month. Now I'm off to moderate a session at the annual meeting of the American Psychological Association. Roberta will be one of the speakers at my session.

For More Information

The Colorado Jumbo 250 ($199) and Colorado Trakker 250 ($399) tape drives don't cost much, and you can rely on them. If you want to do more complex backups, you'll need to buy Colorado Backup for Windows 2.0 ($49.95), the co mpany's more advanced Windows backup program. Contact Colorado Memory Systems, Inc., Loveland, CO, (800) 845-7905 or (303) 669-8000; fax (303) 667-0997.

If you want trouble-free communications, get the Courier Dual Standard V.34 Data/Fax ($795). Contact U.S. Robotics, Inc., Skokie, IL, (800) 342-5877 or (708) 982-5010; fax (708) 982-5235.

Fax<HQ will take care of the fax needs of most small- to medium-size network establishments (standard package with one copy of Fax<HQ Gateway Fax Server software and 25 copies of the Fax<HQ client module, for a total of 27 users, $1295; Expansion Kits to add 25 users, $695). Contact Headquarters Software, Inc., Pleasant Hill, CA, (510) 284-2877; fax (510) 284-3238.

Putting professional journals, such as the Journal of Biological Chemistry ($790; CD-ROM, $65, available only to subscribers or members of the society), on CD-ROM keeps the costs to professional societies down and gets more information out in a form that is easy to retrieve and search. C ontact The American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, Bethesda, MD, (301) 530-7154; fax (301) 571-1824.

For something that fits in your pocket, the Kludge-Kit ($39.95) is a good toolkit. Contact Kludgewerks, Inc., St. Louis Park, MN, (800) 477-6751 or (612) 925-1534.

If you play with code, you'll want Knowledge Media's Language\OS Resource Library CD-ROM ($34.95). Contact Knowledge Media, Inc., Paradise, CA, (800) 782-3766 or (916) 872-3826; fax (916) 872-3826.

Microsoft spent millions getting their Microsoft Encarta ($99.95) multimedia encyclopedia right, and it shows. The Dangerous Creatures CD-ROM ($59.95) lets you see through a cheetah's eyes and watch rattlesnakes wrestle. The Ancient Lands CD-ROM ($59.95) brings ancient history to life. I think Microsoft's Dinosaurs CD-ROM ($59.95) is the most interesting one on dinosaurs. Larry Niven is addicted to the Centipede game, which comes in the Microsoft Arcade for Windows ($34.95) package that includes Missile Command and a cou ple of others. If you haven't seen the Microsoft Home Software Catalog, it's worthwhile getting one. Developers would be well-advised to sign up for the Microsoft Developer Network CD-ROMs (single-user license, $40; Level 1 annual subscription, $195; Level 2, $495) as they come out. There's also a new edition of Microsoft Bookshelf ($69.95)l; it's still the single most useful one I have. Contact Microsoft Corp., Redmond, WA, (800) 426-9400 or (206) 882-8080; fax (206) 883-8101.

My favorite backup system is DAT controlled by Network Archivist ($1695) software. Contact Palindrome Corp., Naperville, IL, (800) 288-4912 or (708) 505-3300; fax (708) 505-7917.

Not everyone will need Scientific Word (corporate/government, $495; educational, $395), but if you need it, you need it bad. Contact TCI Software Research, Las Cruces, NM, (800) 874-2383 or (505) 522-4600; fax (505) 522-0116.

The most complete dinosaur CD-ROM is Smithsonian Institution Dinosaur Museum ($59.95). Contact Software Marketing Corp ., Phoenix, AZ, (800) 545-6626 or (602) 893-3377; (602) 893-2042.

The Software Toolworks World Atlas 5 ($59.95) is the new edition. Contact Software Toolworks, Inc., Novato, CA, (800) 234-3088 or (415) 883-3000; fax (415) 883-3303.

Street Atlas USA ($169) contains maps of just about every city and town in the country. Contact DeLorme Mapping Co., Freeport, ME, (800) 227-1656 or (207) 865-1234; fax (207) 865-9291.

The Timetables of History Series ($39.95 each) is worth looking into. Contact Xiphias Corp., Los Angeles, CA, (800) 421-9194 or (310) 841-2790; fax (310) 841-2559.

If you want to increase your vocabulary, the WordSmart for Windows CD-ROM ($64.95) is less painful than most methods. Contact Smartek Educational Technology, Inc., La Jolla, CA, (800) 858-9673 or (619) 456-5064; fax (619) 456-3928.

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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 welc omes readers' comments and opinions. Send a self-addressed, stamped envelope to Jerry Pournelle, c/o BYTE, One Phoenix Mill Lane, Peterborough, NH 03458. 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 .