Can You Say Network?

Jerry's campaign into computerdom proceeds on all fronts, with particularly heavy activity in networking

Jerry Pournelle

Last month I tried to look into the future. Unfortunately, as soon as I did, everything changed. Well, maybe not everything, but a lot did. Several things happened at about the same time. Novell dropped out of the OpenDoc consortium and began making dark hints about abandoning DOS 7 (aka DR DOS). Microsoft announced that Chicago, renamed Windows 95, won't ship until at least next spring. IBM learned that they won't make the year-end deadline for OS/2 on the PowerPC chip. There were probably some other announcements I missed.

All this is annoying, but it doesn't have to change your life. IBM is going on with OpenDoc and swears that it will be compatible with OLE 2.0--but better. The important point for developers is that you can get on with OLE 2.0 projects. The important point for users is that you don't have to know what OpenDoc and OLE 2.0 are.

Users also don't have to worry about Windows 95, or Daytona, or choosing an operating system. Windows for Workgroups 3.11 is quite stable, if irritating to NetWare users--see below--while any version of DOS from 5.0 up (except for MS-DOS 6, but you know about that) will work. If you need to run both Windows and DOS programs--and almost everyone does--you'll want a better memory manager than DOS provides. Several are good enough, but we like Quarterdeck's QEMM.

If you run mostly DOS but still want to use Windows occasionally, IBM's OS/2 WARP, sometimes known as Personal OS/2, knows about all presently extant forms of Windows. OS/2 is very good for running multiple DOS applications. Get Windows running first, and then install OS/2 WARP, keeping the capability to boot up with DOS. Once you get things set up and running, OS/2 is extr emely reliable and does multitasking, including communications, quite well. Of course, it's not always so simple to get things set up.

We recently got an Iomega Tape250 Parallel Port II tape backup unit. It uses the same DC-2120 tape cartridges and apparently the same format--QIC-80 (quarter-inch cartridge)--as the Colorado Memory Systems Jumbo 250 I mentioned in my November column. The Iomega Tape250 came bundled with DOS and Windows software from Arcada Software of San Luis Obispo, California. Arcada wrote the backup software that comes with MS-DOS 6, and we suspect they wrote the Norton backup software; it certainly has the same look and feel.

Installing the Windows version on the parallel port of Pentafluge, our fire-breathing Pentium computer, was trivially easy, and the backup ran quite well in the background. Actually, we really stressed it, because while the backup was running in the background, Alex put up Caligari TrueSpace (which is discussed later). Manipulating 3-D graphics really ea ts up CPU cycles. We were running the backup program in full-compression mode, and while time-sharing with Caligari TrueSpace slowed it down somewhat, nothing crashed.

Better yet, Word 6.0 for Windows runs fine with the Iomega Tape250 doing backup in the background. You can edit, write, load, and save without noticeable degradation of your system's performance. Word processing is about the only thing I tend to do in multiprocessing mode anyway.

The Iomega Tape250 is much smaller than the Colorado Jumbo 250, partly because the Jumbo has its power supply built into its case and plugs directly into the wall socket. The Iomega Tape250 has a brick that plugs into the wall. Incidentally, it's only a minor quibble, but I greatly prefer the other kind of brick, with a short power cord. Too often, when you have to plug the power-supply box into the wall, you find it covers more than one outlet.

Along with the Iomega Tape250 being smaller than the Jumbo 250, it's a great deal quieter. You don't hea r it running at all except for a few clicks when it changes tracks. I haven't done speed-comparison tests--and I'm not likely to--but it's certainly fast enough for a tape drive. All told, the Iomega Tape250 Parallel Port II is easy to install and use, and it runs nicely in the background, which is, after all, what you want a backup unit to do.

Note that both Colorado and Iomega offer units that will install internally and hang off your floppy drive train, but I don't have that kind. People who have used them say they work much the same as the parallel-port systems but are faster. Parallel-port systems let you back up more than one machine as well as transfer files between machines.

I still prefer DAT (digital audiotape) for backup because it's faster, the tapes are cheaper, and you get 2 GB on each tape. Of course, the DAT drive is a lot more expensive. If your work is worth anything at all, you need a reliable backup system. The Iomega Tape250 Parallel Port II is plenty good enough. Recommende d.

DOS and Windows backup software comes bundled with the Iomega Tape250. They also sent software to let us use it with OS/2, and that's what we tried first. Alas, we never got it to work. We kept getting messages about IRQ (interrupt request) conflicts. Three attempts to get help through Iomega's FAXback help system (which is offered with the software) produced no response whatever.

Eventually I called in the daytime. I got an exceedingly complex telephone tree, a 28-minute wait, and then a technician who didn't know OS/2. Finally, I got someone who said my problem wasn't OS/2 but the computer I was running it on: the current version won't work with an IBM PS/2 (i.e., Micro Channel architecture) machine. With a machine that has a more conventional bus, it works fine under OS/2.

They're working on the Micro Channel architecture version and ought to have it done before you read this. They didn't reply to my request for FAXback help because they were hoping to get a fix for the PS/2 before r eplying. The 28-minute delay in getting to a human being was unusual.

Do note that we didn't need any help installing the Iomega Tape250 Parallel Port II on Pentafluge, which is about as advanced a system as you'll find, and we'd not have needed any help with OS/2 if we'd used a different platform for testing.

So, this time the problem wasn't OS/2 at all. On the other hand, I wasn't terribly surprised when we had difficulties. As I said earlier, OS/2 is very stable and reliable once you get things set up and running, but getting things working in the first place can be nontrivial.

IBM is working on that. They've been adding drivers like mad. They also hired my friend Rich Heimlich to show them how to get the 100 best-selling games running with the most popular CD-ROM and sound cards under OS/2. That will, coincidentally, take care of almost all multimedia software. Games always test the limits of what you can do; if it runs major games, it will probably run anything.

The delay in sh ipping Chicago, or Windows 95, gives IBM yet more time to get OS/2 out there as the true 32-bit system of the future. That's far more important than OpenDoc. IBM thinks that OS/2 is the answer to Chicago, and now they're working on the answer to Windows NT and Daytona. If Microsoft had gotten Chicago out on schedule, the operating-system wars would be over; but just now, IBM is still hanging in there.

Novell dropping DR DOS is no great surprise. It's likely they bought Digital Research mostly as a hedge against the possibility that Microsoft would engage in all-out war. Some of us remember when the slogan in Redmond was, ``The job's not done until Novell won't run.''

Owning DR DOS gave Novell the ability to ship a NetWare-compatible operating system that users were already familiar with. If it came down to war to the knife, Novell could simply put DR DOS in the public domain, letting clone makers ship systems without paying for the operating system. That wouldn't destroy Microsoft, but it sure w ould cut into their cash flow. Because of the history of CP/M and DOS, and the settlement made with the late Gary Kildall (who wrote CP/M and founded Digital Research), neither Microsoft nor IBM can ever sue the owner of DR DOS over look-and-feel issues, another form of insurance for Novell.

DR DOS has fanatical and probably justified support from a small group of users, but Novell hasn't put in the effort to keep it out ahead of current versions of DOS, much less move it toward Chicago and 32-bit operations. It will therefore slowly and quietly vanish. Of course, a few will continue to use it.

The fact is that our hardware has long since run away from the clunky, old DOS architecture. It's high time we had a new generation of software that can take advantage of high-speed video, wave-table sound, enormous hard drives, CD-ROMs, and memory to burn. A lot of the new programs are fat and lazy and need all the new capabilities, yet they can hardly be said to take advantage of them. But a new day is coming.

In last month's col-umn, I said that we'd managed to get NetWare and Windows for Workgroups networks working together. That turns out to be not strictly true. I've now learned more about networks than I really wanted to know, and it's still not enough.

Start with the basics. A network consists of two parts: the hardware connections that physically carry messages from machine to machine and the network software. There are many kinds of network hardware. In CP/M days, we used serial ports connected by RS-232 cables to link machines. Then we graduated to parallel-port connectors. Even today, Traveling Software bundles thin, blue serial-port cables and fatter, yellow parallel-port cables to use with LapLink.

The Mac has always had built-in communications. PCs come with serial and parallel ports, but you still need LapLink or some other software to let machines talk to each other. Other companies developed special chip sets and communications boards for PCs. One of the earliest systems was ARCnet, which had a big play for a while but is now vanishing.

Another early system was Ethernet. Everyone liked Ethernet. For a long time, the chips were very expensive, but now they're not. While other network hardware systems are available, Ethernet is by far the most common. Ethernet chip sets and boards are made by a variety of manufacturers. Two major sources of Ethernet boards are Intel and Artisoft.

There are two major ways to connect systems with Ethernet. One is called thin-wire, or thin-coax, which runs in a great daisy chain connecting all your machines in a single line. Machines are connected to the network cable with T connectors, which attach to the back of the computer. It's possible to disconnect a machine from the chain and still have it work; but if the chain is broken at any point, the entire network collapses.

The other connection system is called 10Base-T (sometimes known as twisted-pair). It allows more flexible configurations (e.g., star and hub) but also requi res more equipment. We plan to convert to 10Base-T, but just now we're still using thin-wire Ethernet, which makes it easy to add stations as long as they're close to the cable line. If we want to add one at any great distance, however, we have to string two coax lines. Those usually run behind bookcases, up walls, and across ceilings. Roberta says that network installations are definitely not decorator-friendly.

Once you have the hardware set up, you still don't have a network until you choose and install software. There are two kinds of networks: client/server and peer-to-peer. Windows for Workgroups, LANtastic, and Traveling Software's LapLink and DeskLink are peer-to-peer systems. NetWare is the best-known client/server network. The network setups are not determined by your hardware configuration. NetWare runs just fine on a thin-wire Ethernet daisy chain, and you can hook up a peer-to-peer system using a 10Base-T hookup.

Peer-to-peer networks are exactly what the name implies: each station on the network has equal access to all the others. In a W4WG network, for example, I may decide to share one of Big Cheetah's drives. If I do, that drive will be available for access from every other workstation on the network. I can go to another machine and access the shared drive as if it were present on the machine I'm using.

In our peer-to-peer network, we have in practice dedicated one machine to be a ``server'' in the sense that it has a few large hard drives, a Pioneer New Media Technologies' DRM-604X CD-ROM drive, and a DE-UH7101 WORM/rewritable optical drive. All those are shared and thus are available as assets to any machine on the network.

I use those assets a lot. I archive stuff off to the optical drive. I keep CD-ROMs I use often, such as Microsoft Bookshelf, on the DRM-604X and reserve the local CD-ROM drive for whatever I'm working on at the moment.

The NetWare client/server network is different. You designate one machine as a network server, which means that you don't u se it for anything else. The other machines are workstations. Each has access to the server, but not to the other workstations. Thus, if the Pioneer optical and CD-ROM drives are physically attached to the server, they'll be available across the network; but if they're not--if they're attached to a workstation (i.e., a client) rather than to the server--other clients can't get at them.

In my case, in addition to the DRM-604X attached to the old Cheetah 386, I have a Maximum Storage WORM drive attached to the SuperCow 486/66, a DAT drive attached to the Cheetah 486/33, and yet other assets attached to other machines. Each of those is connected to the Ethernet, and each can run W4WG. As long as the W4WG network is up, I can get at nearly any asset from any workstation. Given how I work, that's convenient.

Alas, W4WG peer-to-peer file transfer is slow. NetWare has been tuned over the years and is really speedy. Quite often, access over the network is as fast or faster than access from a local drive .

There are other advantages to a NetWare network. Backups are simpler because you're storing your most important work on the network server. The best archiving and backup software, such as Palindrome's Network Archivist, is designed to work with NetWare. For instance, you can set rules that say if you haven't accessed a file in six months, Network Archivist will archive it on tape and remove it from your server drive. Next time you need to access it, Network Archivist will find the file in the archives. W4WG has no way of knowing when you last accessed a file (unless you wrote to it), but NetWare does.

Also, NetWare offers far better and more flexible security than any peer-to-peer network. W4WG does have some capability for requiring a password before you can remotely access a given drive or directory, but it's a lot easier to defeat than NetWare's system, which allows different levels of access to server files and services. Security isn't a big problem at Chaos Manor, but for some places, it' s the most important consideration of all.

NetWare is very flexible. It can network old DOS systems without Windows, Macs, and OS/2 systems. All those can be clients and use network assets. Roberta has several Macs that can talk to each other, but she has refused to take the time to use Windows. Her PC system runs DOS, QEMM, and Desqview. She's not on the network, so backing up her stuff is a pain. I want to get her on the network, and the only practical way to do that is to run NetWare.

Finally, there are many third-party programs (such as Fax<HQ, which I wrote about last month) that are designed to work with NetWare. There are hardware boxes designed to increase the capability of NetWare installations. One, for instance, attaches to your LaserJet printer and makes it available to any network machine. When you print under NetWare, your job is ``printed'' to a file on the NetWare server, which takes over supervision until the printing is finished. One of Pournelle's laws is ``one user, at lea st one CPU''; another is ``no one really wants to share his CPU with anyone, including himself.'' We're not quite to ``one task, at least one CPU,'' but we're getting there.

I wanted NetWare for the increased file access speed, but adding network services was the deciding factor for installing NetWare alongside W4WG. I really like Fax<HQ, and I love talking to my printer at Ethernet speeds. I've got a lot of programs I need but don't use often that may as well be over on a network server rather than local. On the other hand, I need the peer-to-peer assets I get with W4WG.

For a while, it seemed we had managed to have both. There were problems. NetWare grabs drive letters from Z backward, but W4WG starts at the top and works down. Because I have a lot of shared drives--the DRM-604X uses six right off the bat--I need as many as I can get, which means we have to do tricks with the Last Drive statement on start-up.

All that was awkward but endurable; but then other mysterious things happen ed. The NetWare network didn't seem to have problems, but W4WG connections would mysteriously disappear. Sometimes we could get them back by disconnecting and reconnecting. Sometimes we couldn't.

The worst moment came when I attempted to connect the Zenith Z-Noteflex color notebook to the system. My usual system is to attach a yellow parallel-port cable to one of the systems on the W4WG network and run LapLink Pro on both the laptop and the desktop. LapLink Pro then sees every network drive that the desktop can see. After we installed NetWare, that didn't work anymore.

The problems weren't consistent, and I had deadlines. Finally, I told Alex to shut down the NetWare network and restore W4WG. He thought he'd done that, but things still weren't working right everywhere. On some machines, all was as before; but on Big Cheetah, I'd ask for the list of network connections and get an error message. Drive connections would vanish. Inspection of the AUTOEXEC.BAT file showed we were still running some o f the NetWare start-up routine. Remarking those out fixed the problem.

There's one moral to this story. Before you install NetWare, or attach your system to a NetWare network, be sure you keep copies of CONFIG.SYS, AUTOEXEC.BAT, WIN.INI, and SYS.INI.

Now that the deadlines are over, we're going to rethink the situation and try again. I still want both NetWare and a good peer-to-peer system. We'll try to tweak NetWare and W4WG once more, but I haven't found anyone who's really happy running both, so we'll probably try other combinations. LapLink V allows peer-to-peer file transfer over a NetWare network, but it doesn't seem to allow programs to access drives that way. There are third-party software packages said to let me access the Pioneer CD-ROM and optical drives even though they're on a workstation. For that matter, maybe I'll just install the Pioneer assets on the Gateway 2000 machine we use as the NetWare server.

For now, this advice: if all you need to do is share assets from one co mputer to another, W4WG is a good beginner's network. It's easy to set up, and it works fine if you leave it alone. NetWare is harder to install, but it's fast and flexible and speeds up Windows printing. If you get both working before I do, please let me know.

Bill Gates long ago pointed out that computing power per buck was doubling every year and a half, a trend that hasn't slacked off yet. Everyone knows that the average person now has computing power not available to anyone, including the government, a few decades ago. There are also powerful simulation programs to run on desktop computers. Some of these, like PowerSim for the PC and Extend for the Mac (and now for Windows), have nonlinear system-modeling capabilities far greater than were available to Jay Forrester and his World Dynamics projects, made famous in the Carter era.

With all these tools available for the desktop, it would be natural to assume that more powerful modeling tools are available to the professionals, that institutions with big computers can make reliable predictions about nearly anything. Those familiar with Forrester's World Dynamics models, which were discussed in books with titles like The Limits to Growth and Models of Doom, know that the Forrester world model made some pretty gloomy forecasts and contributed to President Carter's apprehension of a ``national malaise.'' Now anyone with a Pentium machine and PowerSim can build models more complex than Forrester's--surely the government can do much better?

That turns out not to be the case. While small computers have become extremely powerful in comparison to what we had in the early 1970s, and supercomputers can certainly do things that were impossible in those days, we still don't have the computing power to reliably model something as complex as the atmosphere. Of course, that doesn't stop people from playing with such models and publishing their conclusions. The results of that playing are about to cost us some $135 billion, and estimates range up to $2 trill ion.

These costs are associated with changes in air-conditioning, fire fighting, and refrigeration, as we rapidly move to ban chlorofluorocarbons, said to cause the destruction of ozone in the upper atmosphere. Clearly, something like ozone destruction is not lightly to be risked. On the other hand, a trillion dollars is no small thing either, not to be risked until you're pretty sure of what you're doing. I mean, a trillion here, a trillion there, and pretty soon it adds up to real money.

I don't think the policymakers know what they're doing. Worse, I think it's the astounding success of our little machines that has the public ready to believe they do. Those interested in the subject should write to the George C. Marshall Institute (1730 M Street NW, Suite 502, Washington, DC 20036) and get a copy of ``The Ozone Crisis,'' a short--20 pages--paper by a friend of mine, Sallie Baliunas. Sallie has studied the ozone-depletion theory and concludes that ``there is no scientific reason for our curren t policy, and there is no economic reason to have a policy that is inflexible and irreversible.'' Her reasons are given in this paper.

I've no suspicion that I'm infallible or that Sallie can't be wrong; but I do believe this is a matter of considerable economic importance that has an impact on every one of us. It's certainly important enough to bring to your attention.

I don't suppose I'm any more vain than the next man (although I suppose that can depend mightily on who the next man is), but I confess I'm rather proud of a picture taken in the White House. It shows me, General Graham, and Max Hunter in the act of convincing Vice President Dan Quayle that we ought to build a single-stage-to-orbit spaceship. Quayle took us seriously, listened to our opposition, got opinions from two other groups, and caused the Air Force to build the DC/X, which I've written about before.

In a couple of hours, I'm catching a plane to Atlanta for a computer show. I'll go from there to Washington, where I'm sitting in on a roundtable discussion convened by the Administrator of NASA. Participants include the CEOs of Martin Marietta, Lockheed, and Boeing; the NASA Administrator; the Deputy Secretary of Defense; a couple of senators and representatives; General Graham; and me. The subject is the future of NASA. Meetings of this sort don't usually accomplish much, but there's a chance this one will. At least we can all trade ideas.

I was putting together some materials for the meeting, and David Mitchell suggested that we scan in the White House picture and include that in my briefing packet. I don't know what the next man would do, but I thought it was a good idea.

The scanned image ended up as a 2-MB TIFF file. David says he also got a 14-MB high-resolution file, which I figured was a bit much. The next question was how to display the scanned image.

I had CorelDraw 3.0 installed on my network, but we recently received CorelDraw 5.0, and this seemed like a good time to install it on Pentafluge. This is our Pentium machine that boasts ATI Technologies' Graphics Pro Turbo Mach 64 graphics card and an NEC MultiSync 5FGp monitor. CorelDraw 5.0 comes on a plethora of disks; fortunately, there's also a CD-ROM shrink-wrapped into the instruction manual. Installation from CD-ROM is absurdly simple and goes swiftly. Once I had that done, I opened CorelDraw PhotoPaint and read in the scanned image.

It was gorgeous. This was the smaller file with lower resolution than the original, but it looked fine to me. Now would it print? I saved it as a .BMP file, opened Word 6.0 for Windows, and did Insert Object. The system trundled for a minute or so, and there was the color image pasted into a Word document. I hit the print icon to send it over to the LaserJet III.

The result was an acceptable black-and-white copy of the original color photo. I'm sure I can tweak it to adjust gray scales and make it sharper, but I probably won't bother.

The next step didn't work as well. The Z-Noteflex notebook I mentioned earlier is what I'll be taking on the trip. I installed Word 6.0 for Windows, using the ``minimum'' or laptop installation choices, and tested it out by reading in a novel. It worked just fine. Alas, when I tried to read in the saved document containing my photograph, I locked up Word. Ctl-Alt-Del got me back to Program Manager, and a test of Word on text documents showed no problems.

It's late at night. I don't know if I didn't install all of what Word needs to read that or if there's a problem because the Z-Noteflex is in 640- by 480-pixel resolution instead of the 1064- by 760-pixel resolution I used on my desktop or if the 8 MB of RAM in the Z-Noteflex just isn't enough memory or if I didn't hold my mouth right. Before I make my presentation, I'll have PowerPoint installed on the Z-Noteflex, and maybe I can get it to display my picture. The Z-Noteflex has a 200-MB hard drive, and I've got another 150 MB on the BSE Flashdrive I carry in checked luggage. If I get a chance, I'll copy Corel Draw PhotoPaint over to the system. And it's not the end of the world if I can't manage to get any of it to work.

I think I'm going to like the Z-Noteflex. I stuck with a monochrome Zenith Mastersport as my portable of choice for the last couple of years because it's a rugged and reliable machine. The Z-Noteflex looks to be as sturdy. We'll see. I'm hard on portables.

Many of the images in Roberta's Literacy Connection reading-instruction program have been taken from the T-Maker collection of ClickArt. You've probably seen a lot of T-Maker's ClickArt images in presentations and newsletters. There's a huge variety of images covering every conceivable subject--religion, business, animals and vegetables, funny beasts, sports, children, and everything else. T-Maker also supplies tools for converting the images to nearly any format your publishing program wants.

The latest ClickArt is called Holiday Seasonings, images suitable for holiday greeting cards and suchlike.

These collections ma ke it easy for somebody who's not an artist to decorate publications and presentations. If you get stuck with doing the club newsletter or the company party invitations, you ought to know about T-Maker and ClickArt. You'll like this stuff. Highly recommended.

Jim Baen of Baen Books uses Ventura Publisher to set type and make camera-ready copy for many--maybe all--of the books he publishes. I try to meet deadlines, but sometimes I cut things pretty close. Once I delivered the final copy of a novel to Jim about three weeks before it was to ship.

The book didn't need much copy editing, and by using Ventura and doing the work in-house, Jim got the masters to the printer on time. Ventura has since been acquired by Corel, which is likely to make a good product better. I won't pretend to be an expert on making books look good, but Jim is a bit of a fanatic on the subject. While he's got some quibbles with Corel Ventura, it's what he uses.

I have fooled around with some lower-cost publishing progr ams, and Roberta, who uses a Mac for her publications, is quite fond of Aldus PageMaker. I have concluded, however, that if I were stuck with the job of publishing newsletters or books or much of anything else, I'd get the biggest and fastest system I could afford. Final-draft desktop publishing can eat computer resources like mad. You can do page layouts with small systems, but you won't be happy doing it.

After I got fire-breathing hardware, I'd get Corel Ventura, T-Maker's ClipArt, as well as the Corel CD-ROMs, and then I'd get to work. Learning the fine points of Corel Ventura will take time, but it's no harder than any of the other desktop publishing programs I've seen. Once you've learned it, you'll be ready for anything. Why fool around with half measures?

For weeks my friend Larry Aldridge has been urging me to look at Caligari TrueSpace, so the package sat accusingly on top of Pentafluge. Alex finally got around to installing it two nights ago. Wow!

I'm not all that familiar with 3-D design programs, but I'm sure impressed with this one. It's fast--at least on Pentafluge it's fast--and you can do incredible things with it. Even the demonstration program is impressive.

There's a huge selection of tools. Start with a shape, distort that, spin it, lathe off some, extrude it to be a solid, lathe away at the solid, change colors, change lighting, turn it into a wireframe and move it around, animate it, and squeeze it through a funnel--all that and more.

It's pretty easy to get started, too, and so far everything has been intuitive. I have no doubt that you can spend a lot of time learning to use all the tools and it helps to have some artistic talent; but if anything can get you going in 3-D design, this is it. Highly recommended.

The game of the month is still MicroProse Software's XCOM: UFO Defense, which continues to absorb far more time than I ought to give it. Another one I like is Sierra On-Line's Alien Legacy, which is similar to the better-known Outpost. Explore another solar system and found a human colony. This game was created by Joe Ybarra, designer of Starflight (the Chaos Manor game of the year nearly a decade ago), and it's pretty neat. Having said that, I confess I've left my human colony half complete to go back to XCOM.

The fun product of the month is Kitty Hawk Software's The Greatest Paper Airplanes, more than you want to know about how to design and fold paper airplanes. It would make a great stocking stuffer.

The computer book of the month is Robert Waring's Doom: Totally Unauthorized Tips and Secrets (Brady Books, 1994). This has more than you need to know about Doom, including maps, where the monsters and treasures are hiding, and how to get Doom enhancements. If you crave using a chain saw on the creatures of Hell, you need this book.

The book of the month is Andy McNab's Bravo Two Zero (Dell, 1994), the autobiographical story of a sergeant of the British Special Air Services Regiment during Desert Storm. Wow!

For More Inf ormation

One game I like is Alien Legacy ($49.95), which is similar to the better-known Outpost, and it is pretty neat. Contact Sierra On-Line, Oakhurst, CA, (800) 757-7707 or (206) 649-9800; fax (206) 562-4223.

If anything can get you going in 3-D design, Caligari TrueSpace ($795) will do it. Contact Caligari Corp., Mountain View, CA, (800) 351-7620 or (415) 390-9600; fax (415) 390-9755.

Installation of CorelDraw 5.0 (disk and CD-ROM, $895; CD-ROM only, $695) from CD-ROM is absurdly simple and goes swiftly. In addition, it made my scanned image of the White House picture look gorgeous. Learning the fine points of Corel Ventura (disk and CD-ROM, $595; CD-ROM only, $495) will take time, but once you've learned it, you'll be ready for anything. Contact Corel Corp., Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, (800) 772-6735 or (613) 761-9176; fax (613) 728-9790.

A range of simulation programs, Extend (Mac or Windows version, $695 each), Extend+BPR (Mac or Windows version, $990 each), and Extend+Manufacturi ng (Mac or Windows version, $990 each), have powerful nonlinear system-modeling capabilities. Contact Imagine That, Inc., San Jose, CA, (408) 365-0305; fax (408) 629-1251.

The fun product of the month is The Greatest Paper Airplanes ($29.95), which would make a great stocking stuffer. Contact Kitty Hawk Software, Inc., Tucson, AZ, (800) 777-5745 or (602) 622-2200; fax (602) 622-3700.

The latest ClickArt is called Holiday Seasonings ($24.95), images suitable for holiday greeting cards and suchlike. The T-Maker collections of ClickArt ($27.95 to $339.95) make it easy for somebody who's not an artist to decorate publications and presentations. You'll really like this stuff. Contact T-Maker Co., Mountain View, CA, (800) 533-0331 or (415) 962-0195; fax (415) 962-0201.

If your work is worth anything at all, you need a reliable backup system. The Iomega Tape250 Parallel Port II ($385) is plenty good enough. Contact Iomega Corp., Roy, UT, (800) 777-6654 or (801) 778-1000; fax (801) 778-3450.

Simulation programs like PowerSim 2.0 ($640) have powerful nonlinear system-modeling capabilities. Contact MicroWorlds, Inc., Cambridge, MA, (617) 225-0025; fax (617) 225-0028.

The game of the month is still XCOM: UFO Defense (call for price), which continues to absorb far more time than I ought to give it. Contact MicroProse Software, Hunt Valley, MD, (800) 879-7529 or (410) 771-1151; fax (410) 771-1174.

I think I'm going to like the Z-Noteflex ($3222). I stuck with a monochrome Zenith Mastersport as my portable of choice for the last couple of years because it's rugged and reliable. The Z-Noteflex looks to be as sturdy. Contact Zenith Data Systems Corp., Buffalo Grove, IL, (800) 533-0331 or (708) 808-5000; fax (708) 808-4483.

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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 J erry 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 .