Communications Issues

A visit to the Interop Conference in Atlanta reinforces Jerry's belief that networking is very important

Jerry Pournelle

Due to a bizarre accident, I'm typing this with one hand while keeping my left hand and arm elevated. It looks silly and does little for my disposition. I suppose I should take it as a lesson in patience.

Before I got my wrist punctured, I went to the Interop Conference in Atlanta. If I hadn't already been convinced that networking is important, that would have done the trick. While Interop wasn't quite as big as Spring Comdex, it wasn't a lot smaller, and it was all devoted to connectivity.

We saw Cisco Systems, which had new additions to their routers (i.e., devices for interconnecting independent networks and sharing WAN resources); Zenith's Z-Stor Personal Server, which painlessly adds peer-to-peer capability to your NetWare client/server system (more later); Microsoft Daytona, also known as Windows NT Server 3.5; a whistle (our own collective noun) of modems from various manufacturers; and all kinds of communications hardware and software. Bell Atlantic tells me there were over 80 ISDN (56- to 128-KB phone lines--many claim it stands for I Smell Dollars Now) and 500 T1 (1.544-Mbps data pipes) connections brought into the Congress Center for this show. That's a lot of bandwidth.

I put off my decision to go to Interop until all the hotels were full and thus ended up in a cheap motel far from downtown. Of course, this had to be the trip where the local congressman wanted me to show him the Internet. So there I was with Newt Gingrich in the least fancy room in Atlanta. This wouldn't have been remarkable except that the phone lines were ghastly, and we got a line spike that deep-fried my Supra modem just as I was showing off the joys of E-mail and BIX.

I was worki ng with the new Zenith Z-Noteflex portable, a neat color system that's about the size and weight of my old Zenith Mastersport. However, it is faster and has a much larger hard drive, more memory, and color. I've named it Zeno, and I like it. The only complaint I have is that although the keyboard is all right, the old Mastersport keyboard has a better look and feel. Alas, I had just gotten Zeno, so I had no internal modem installed. I have several PCMCIA-slot modems (the Z-Noteflex has two PCMCIA slots), but I hadn't brought any with me.

Fortunately, because the Z-Noteflex is new, I had brought the Mastersport with its 2400-bps internal modem as a backup. The bad news was that for some reason that machine wouldn't boot, so I couldn't resume my demonstration of networking. Newt went home, and I went to bed.

Next day I lugged my bags to Interop, because that night I was scheduled to go to Washington, D.C. When I got out on the show floor, I ran into Marty Winston and told him my tale of woe. "You shouldn't have any trouble finding a modem," he said. "Just ask." It turns out he was right: I left Interop with three PCMCIA modems. The next day, two more PCMCIA modems and a new SupraFaxModem 288 arrived via Federal Express at my Washington hotel, but by then I had communications well in hand.

One of the modems I received in Atlanta was a Data Race RediCard RC-1496 data/fax modem, which features V.32bis 14.4-Kbps send/receive data and 9600-bps send/receive fax capabilities. It consisted of a PCMCIA Type II card and a small cable that connects the card to the phone. That's all I got. When I got to the Marriott in Washington, I slipped the card into the Z-Noteflex, plugged the cable into the data port--thank you, Marriott--and turned on the Z-Noteflex. It made a couple of noises on boot-up, flashed a message that it saw a card in slot 3, and went into Windows. I opened Procomm 2 for DOS under Windows, and voila! Not only did it work, but I could connect to one of the really troublesome Washington phon e lines.

I also found out how to boot my Mastersport. For some odd reason, it boots fine on (the newly rebuilt) batteries but not when connected to wall power. Once it's booted, it runs fine with the charger plugged in. I offer no explanation. Other than that glitch, it's as reliable as ever.

Later I experimented with a couple of other PCMCIA cards; apparently they need setup software, because the Z-Noteflex didn't acknowledge they were present. I also tried the replacement SupraFaxModem 288 (working off the serial port), and it worked fine with both Zenith machines. I don't know what that awful line in Atlanta would have done to the Data Race modem. For that matter, I can't be certain the old Supra modem didn't just choose that moment to die: I've carried it all over the world, it has never been treated gently, and this was the first problem I ever had with it.

In all fairness, I should try some of the other PCMCIA-card modems with their installation software, and I really will do it, bu t the Data Race RediCard RC-1496 was plug-and-play at a time when I was desperate. It works as well as any portable modem I've ever had. Recommended.

Communications are increasingly important . Item: the new IBM OS/2 will come with access to the Internet and instructions on how to do it, plus local access to the IBM-owned network that carries Prodigy.

Item: Microsoft wants its own local-access network and will need serious network capability to compete with the new Internet capabilities IBM will furnish with OS/2.

Item: there are now secure systems for encryption and source authentication that work on the Internet. The guy who wrote PGP (Pretty Good Privacy) has made a deal with RSA, and public-key-encryption systems are available to everyone. They can even be used overseas legally. Such encryption and authentication methods can provide communications secure enough to work with banks over the Internet.

Put those together and it's another new world. Banking? Write che cks by Internet; then each evening, Quicken goes out to find the daily balance in your accounts.

Wedding and christening pictures? Scan them in--I have a neat new box that claims to be scanner, copier, and fax machine all rolled into one--and distribute them electronically to all the relatives. You can also use this means to distribute political mail.

Everyone will get floods of E-mail, so much that we'll all need intelligent agents to deal with it. One I'd like--I may have to write it myself--would be a daemon that sorts my mail, indexes and files most of it, and shows me the mail from people on the hot list--there are a few PR people who never send me junk mail--and other stuff it considers important. Later, when deadlines loom, I can ask "What's new?" and get a good summary, ask for details, and so forth. Also, with remote-query services like gopher, I could ask someone else's big database about what was new. I could search the Internet's comp.sys.novell group for information on using NetWare with the NetBEUI protocol.

For those new to the Internet, gopher is a program that runs on some Internet computers--the University of Minnesota is one that has a gopher--at your command. Gopher is provided as a public service, and its operation is paid for by the facility where it resides. You tell gopher what you're looking for, and it goes net surfing for you. Eventually, it reports all its findings. Gophers are supposed to be used for serious research, but they're also used to collect digitized pornography. Every now and then, you hear about a scandal when pornographic files are found at some military or university computer facility.

The Internet is billed as an information superhighway, but it isn't that. At the moment, it's an experiment in self-organized anarchy. That's not likely to change for a while, either. It seems to me we're headed for the situation described in Vernor Vinge's fine novel True Names (out of print), with a large dash of his A Fire Upon the Deep (Tor Books, 1992), but we aren't there yet. If you haven't read those, they're a look at a future we may get to.

The reason I went to Washington was to take part in a big roundtable discussion on the future of NASA and space. More on that another time, but I'm pretty hopeful about the near future. NASA Administrator Dan Goldin made it clear that the old game of leaping to build a "National Transportation System" that excludes everything else is over. The new approach will involve cooperation with industry and development of technologies through X programs, such as Delta Clipper. That, at least, is what I heard, and I like that.

When I got home , Zenith's Z-Stor Personal Server was waiting. This is a small box containing a CPU, SCSI controller, and hard drive loaded with Personal NetWare, the successor to NetWare Lite. Personal NetWare is a peer-to-peer networking system from Novell.

If you already have an Ethernet (or Token Ring) installation, you can add Z-Stor absolutely painle ssly; just plug it in and follow directions. It will take about an hour. If you don't have an Ethernet setup, you'll need cards for each of your machines, and you can add about half an hour for each machine in addition to the hour getting Z-Stor going. I'm allowing time for you to drop screws, plug cables back in, and so forth.

Z-Stor will install alongside your regular NetWare network and add peer-to-peer capabilities to that. It will also work as a stand-alone network, allowing file and printer sharing. It does not have the small applications like scheduling that come with Microsoft Windows for Workgroups networks. If I had to choose between bare-bones Personal NetWare and networking with straight W4WG, I'd generally prefer W4WG unless security were a problem. Novell hasn't built quite as many security features into Personal NetWare as into regular NetWare, but there are plenty of them. Moreover, Personal NetWare has provisions for a systems manager; W4WG does not. Personal NetWare also maintains log s of user activities.

Let me describe a typical installation for Z-Stor. Consider a small business office, say a doctor or an architect. There are several machines, none linked. The owner decides to try networking and buys the Microsoft W4WG starter kit plus enough Intel EtherExpress boards to link all the machines in the office. This is amazingly easy to set up, but then some limits appear, such as an inability to link to the Apple machine down the hall. Printer sharing is possible, but it's slow and no fun at all.

The owner decides to bite the bullet by getting a fancy new server and installing NetWare. That requires bringing in outside help, but it does work--only now W4WG is flaky or doesn't work at all. Meanwhile, the office employees are used to peer-to-peer operations and want them back. (After all, Joe used to let Paul connect to his computer; why can't he now? Sure, Joe's computer crashed without a backup, but it was awfully convenient.)

This is a perfect case for Z-Stor. Buy it, uncrate it, find a place for it to sit, start it up, and link it in; in an hour, you'll have your peer-to-peer operations back. And, because all the data will be in one place, you can actually back it up.

I have not yet got this linked up to the Mac and OS/2, although I believe it is possible. Certainly there are modules for regular NetWare that can link in DOS, Mac, and OS/2 (plus, they say, NT) systems. At the moment we have a hybrid: an Ethernet on which runs OS/2 Advanced Server, NetWare, Personal NetWare, and W4WG. Not all machines are linked by all systems, and sometimes the only way to get from one machine to another is to invoke LapLink for Windows, which also does file sharing over the network.

Of course, those multiple networks run on one wire; Ethernet is Ethernet. No matter what protocols might be running on the wire, they all stay out of each other's way. Those protocols can be translated (which NetWare excels at), or one computer can be multilingual.

My goal is to have one (logical) network that encompasses all my machines. It will allow all machines access to both the Pioneer New Media Technologies DE-UH7101 WORM/rewritable and Maxoptix T3-1300 optical drives, Palindrome's backup system with the Fast 2000 DAT (digital audiotape) drive running Network Archivist, Pioneer's DRM-604X Mini-changer CD-ROM drive, the HP LaserJet III printer, Fargo Electronics' Primera color printer, Kyocera's Ecosys printer, and the Fax<HQ fax server for sending and receiving faxes. It will also have convenient ways I can use the little Xircom Pocket Ethernet Adapter III parallel-port box to attach my portables to the system. When it's all done, the little Z-Stor box will be a welcome part of that system. More on this in months to come.

That Fax<HQ system--it's a Windows-based program, though it needs an Intel Satisfaxtion board to do the faxing--is quite good. My major complaint is that you can't use it with all your computers. That's damning with faint praise, though--no one builds a s ingle network faxing program that supports Mac, Windows, and OS/2 systems. Right now, anyone with a network of PCs and Macs would need two boxes to support faxing for the whole network. Oh, well.

There is an alternative to NetWare . Windows NT Server 3.5 also provides network services. Moreover, it's possible to set up an NT server that interfaces with a NetWare network in such a way that all your Windows machines see is a Windows software interface. Obviously, W4WG runs on the machines running Windows, so you won't need Z-Stor and Personal NetWare; but you'll have complete access to all the features of NetWare.

And yet another alternative: OS/2 Advanced Server speaks more or less the same network protocols as W4WG, and the two can be interfaced with a certain amount of work. OS/2 Advanced Server is a client/server system comparable in features and complexities to NetWare. Meanwhile, Artisoft now provides a LANtastic for OS/2 peer-to-peer network. You can set up your systems i n Windows; change over to OS/2 Warp, which wraps around Windows or W4WG; add LANtastic for OS/2; and have both peer-to-peer and client/server capabilities. Whether that would be superior to NT Server 3.5 depends on who you listen to. They both seem to work.

I should make it clear that while I have the software to do all these operations, I haven't tried most of them so far. This is partly due to lack of time, but also because I'm about to get some new server hardware, including a RAID system. Meanwhile, I intend to continue experimenting with what I have.

One of the nice features of LANs is network printing. Pournelle's laws say that sharing CPUs, even with yourself, is undesirable. Any printer attached to your PC steals cycles; big print jobs in Windows steal lots, and it's even more disconcerting when your computer slows down because of someone else's print job.

Network printers hang directly on the network, so no more sharing CPU cycles or restarting jobs because your c omputer hung up. Just send a job to the server (at Ethernet speeds, and all at once) and go back to work. The network parcels the work out at print speed.

If you can't hook your printer directly to the server, you want a printer with a built-in network interface (Hewlett-Packard makes excellent plug-in cards for theirs). Older printers like my LaserJet III don't have this slot, so we bought a Digital Products NETPrint/150 network print server to hook up all three of our parallel printers to the Ethernet. They also have some models with a single parallel port, as well as boxes for Token Ring and networks like Banyan Vines.

Now, if I want to print a whole manuscript, I blast it all to the network server and go back to work. The NETPrint/150 is easy to install and use. Digital Products have a BBS with the latest software, and their technical-support people are helpful and patient, should you need them.

Traveling Software does it again . If you don't have LapLink 6.0 for Window s, go get it. It works, and it's worth the expense.

I confess I didn't bother to upgrade from LapLink Pro (which is LapLink 4.0) to LapLink 5.0. LLPro works fine on just about every machine I have. It runs as a DOS program under Windows and comes with the .PIF and .ICOn files needed to set it up. Because most of my portables now do Windows, that's how I use it.

LLPro works with W4WG. If the computer you connected your laptop to can see the network, LLPro can, and you can transfer from the laptop to a remote machine. LLPro is hard to beat as a means of putting files on your laptops and peeling them off after a trip. All versions of LapLink from 3.0 and higher have come with a "synchronize directories" feature, making it easier on road warriors.

LapLink 6.0 for Windows adds a number of desirable features to LLPro. For one thing, it works over an Ethernet, so you can use one of Xircom's Pocket Ethernet Adapter III parallel-to-Ethernet boxes to speed things up. For another, it uses a block-by -block file-comparison system. This doesn't speed up the first synchronization of files, but if you synchronize files on two machines very often, the "delta technology" takes over so that only changes in the two files are transmitted, speeding things up something wonderful.

This is especially important if you're doing file transfers over a modem. You can use LapLink 6.0 for Windows to control one machine from another. On the road, I can use my portable to call my big machine, get in with the proper passwords, and operate my system as if I were at home. Clearly, that can be slow on a 1200-bps modem line, but because of object caching and the delta technology, it's nowhere near as slow as you'd think, because only changes are sent. It's possible to update a large Microsoft Word document on my home machine through a modem from a hotel room. For that matter, I can cause my home system to create and send a fax.

Also, the new LapLink will maintain multiple simultaneous connections--up to eight--over t he LAN, modems, AirLink, or the familiar LapLink cables. Mark Eppley, president of Traveling Software, brought three laptops over to show this feature off; Moe, Larry, and Shemp ("Curly is back in Bothell") talked to each other, one via telephone and one through Ethernet. He had two windows open, transferred data from one remote machine to another, and generally looked like a proud papa showing off his new son.

Alex pointed out how wonderful this would be for system administrators--leave the connections "nailed up" but minimized until some user calls with a question. Programs such as PC Anywhere and Carbon Copy can do similar things, but none have LapLink's connectivity and familiar pedigree.

LapLink 6.0 for Windows can be installed on a DOS machine, so it will link DOS and Windows systems. It understands lots of modems, including wireless as well as ISDN. Sometimes it's the only way I can transfer files among the screwy systems on my hybrid network; if LapLink 6.0 for Windows can see the other machine, it sees it by name and knows how to get at all its drives.

Our first attempts to use LapLink 6.0 for Windows did not work, because we were testing Cybermedia's FirstAid for Windows. FirstAid is a good program. It operates like a Mac INIT and watches to see what you're doing; if something goes wrong, it tries to let you know about it. We like FirstAid, and I'll have more on it another time.

I bring it up here because the present version is not compatible with LapLink 6.0 for Windows. This conflict is inherent. Most programs that try to operate Windows remotely do it by changing Windows drivers. LapLink 6.0 for Windows doesn't do that, but instead burrows in under Windows so that Windows doesn't know it's there. Unfortunately, so does FirstAid, and the two clash at a fundamental level. The result is that LapLink 6.0 for Windows thinks it doesn't have enough memory and quits. The two companies are discussing this and will likely have a solution by press time.

We also found some mino r problems with W4WG, and indeed made the discovery that W4WG uses up memory in ways that Windows 3.0 and 3.1 do not. Traveling Software has already fixed the installation problem that caused. LapLink 6.0 for Windows is pretty solid, more so than the other remote PC programs; our only problems were with installation.

If you haven't upgraded your LapLink lately, it's probably time. LapLink 6.0 for Windows is seriously good stuff. Recommended.

If you're looking for a world-class correspondence program, I've got it. Accent 1.0 from Accent Software International is a Windows word processor that can write in 34 languages and five alphabets: Western European and Scandinavian, Central and Eastern European, Cyrillic, Turkish, and Greek. It checks spelling in 17 languages. There are plans to add Hebrew and Arabic.

It's not all that bad as a word processor, either. It looks and feels a lot like Microsoft Word, and it can import and export to Word, WordPerfect, and Ami Pro. It has so me Internet features I haven't tried, but for those who must do electronic correspondence in many languages, I'd think this would be a godsend.

Free idea: someone could easily make up fill-in-the-blank template letters for Accent pointed to individual industries. Fill in the English proper names, and out comes an (admittedly idiomatic) equivalent in another language, ready for faxing. I think this "limited automatic" translation could be quite useful, as long as it avoids converting "Coke adds life" to "Our cola revives your ancient ancestors."

BOOTCON 2.1 is a program that lets you set up about 100 CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT initializations and then choose them from a menu when you reboot the system. I keep it on my experimental machines. Typical installations are the GAME setup (which loads Sound Blaster and the CD-ROM driver and nothing else), WINDOWS FOR WORKGROUPS ONLY, WINDOWS WITH NOVELL, and so forth. BOOTCON will also let you keep different Windows .INI files and choose among them when you boot up.

I've used BOOTCON on my experimental machines for years. Not only has it always worked, it often saves my bacon by letting me go back to a known workable boot-up combination after I've been experimenting with CONFIG.SYS or WIN.INI. The one gripe I've had with BOOTCON is that every time any controlled file changes after boot-up, at the next boot-up, BOOTCON makes me decide whether I want to keep the new configuration or go back to the old one; but because it doesn't tell me what lines have changed in, say, WIN.INI, I get confused.

The new version of BOOTCON will let you compare the new and old versions of WIN.INI, AUTOEXEC.BAT, and so forth before you decide whether or not to keep the updates. You can also disable BOOTCON to optimize your current boot-up initializations and then add your new CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT to BOOTCON's list. And the newest version transparently makes up these files each time instead of putting them in one big file--thus removing my secon d major complaint. You can now use QEMM's Optimize without defeating BOOTCON.

MS-DOS 6 and higher have a BOOTCON-like feature, but Modular Software Systems' program is much more sophisticated. It can even reconfigure your boot-up depending on the time or day of the week--a pretty secure way of defeating remote access on a dial-up PC on the weekend, for instance.

If you do much tinkering with your system, you definitely need BOOTCON 2.1. Recommended.

Microsoft, having found great success with mice , has brought out an ergonomic keyboard, the Microsoft Natural Keyboard. It sort of humps up in the middle, with a section for each hand; those are separated by an inverted V of blank space at the apex of the bump. Your hands come in at a 45-degree angle to each other to meet up with the keys. This feels unnatural at first, especially if you watch your hands while you type. The thing is about 3 inches tall, so you won't get your slimline keyboard drawer to close on it.

Unlik e the Apple Adjustable, the Microsoft Natural Keyboard is all one piece; you can't adjust the two home halves or bring them together like a normal keyboard. For that reason, it will be beloved by typing teachers and cursed by crossover typists--anyone who types b with their right hand will hate it. The touch is light and fast, and the plastic construction makes it much lighter and less tough than the Northgate OmniKey Ultra keyboard I use.

The installation disk has control panels for adjusting the keyboard's performance: international and proprietary keyboard layouts, using the numeric pad as a mouse, key repeat rate, and the like. If you'd like to experiment with a Dvorak keyboard layout, you can try that, too.

There are other improvements I'd make. You can't make "keyboard salad"--mix and match the key assignments. I'd want to put the Backspace key up above the Enter key, as on an IBM Selectric typewriter (and on the Pournelle-configuration Northgate keyboards), and swap Caps Lock and Control. Actually, I'd as soon have Caps Lock up on the function-key row so I wouldn't hit it accidentally. If you were heavily into desktop publishing or occasionally used foreign characters, you might want to assign the õ and å characters to a particular key cap to avoid the annoying Alt+0145 sequence, but that will take third-party software right now (Gateway's programmable keyboards let you do this).

As a silly bonus, you can cause your computer to make sounds when you hit a key--maracas, scissors, or manual or electric typewriter. The electric typewriter sounds were obviously taken from a Selectric, complete with the "golf ball" spinning when you lean on the Shift key and carriage return when you press Enter. I wonder if IBM will sue them for "sound and feel"?

Speaking of IBM, their former Lexmark division would do well to make a competing keyboard with the built-in trackpoint mouse from the IBM ThinkPad stuck in the middle. ThinkPad portables are so good they scare me.

I haven' t made up my mind about the Microsoft Natural Keyboard. I've put it on the machine Larry Niven uses when he works here; he hasn't seen it yet. More on this later.

Pentafluge died the other day . When we turned it on, it gave a series of beeps. Those are the post codes that tell what's wrong. Alas, my Micronics Computers M5Pi motherboard was a late beta version, and I didn't get the full documents with it. Micronics rushed me a replacement motherboard, and I installed it--not difficult--and put in the 60-MHz Pentium chip, complete with its PC Power & Cooling chip fan.

When I turned it on, I got the same series of beeps. This time I had the documents and looked up 3-2-4: it said keyboard encoder failure. I turned over the keyboard and beat on it until some peanut shells fell out, and lo!, all was well. Longtime readers will recall I've had this problem before. Due to a peculiarity in PC design, the keyboard is part of the system, and the encoder is used for certain address handling. The moral of the story is check your keyboard before you replace your motherboard. In my case, the new M5Pi motherboard is a bit more finished than the older test version I had; but I never had any trouble with the old one. The second moral of this story is get your system documents and pay attention to them.

IBM has a neat new system called the Duchess-Blue . It's an integrated multimedia system that reminds me of Tandy's Fantasia. It comes with an integrated video accelerator, full wave-table sound (with the volume control in front), a game port, and a CD-ROM drive. It's very fast: it plays Doom like nothing you have ever seen. It's a small-footprint system with room for five cards (but has sound, video, and CD-ROM on the motherboard). It was simple to put in an Intel network card and connect it with W4WG.

I haven't had this long, and what with being one-handed, I haven't done much with it. But I intend to install the new OS/2 Warp on it, as well as a bunch of other stuff. You' ll certainly hear more about it.

As I write this, the Duchess-Blue isn't available; IBM is negotiating with manufacturers who may bring it out under their product name. I'll let you know about that when I hear more. Meanwhile, if you're looking for an OEM source on a nifty integrated multimedia system, talk to IBM Microelectronics in East Fishkill, New York. This is a neat little machine.

I've had After Dark on most of the Macs and PCs for years, so I was pleased to see version 3.0. Perhaps amused would be a better word. After all, modern Energy Star monitors turn themselves off when inactive; After Dark is less a screen saver than an entertainment package. It does that well. For instance, version 3.0 comes with four-slice toasters and bread with jam. One new module, You Bet Your Head, is an oddball automated quiz show Chuck Jones would approve of, and the Bad Dog digs holes in your screen and pulls things around. Alas, his whining upsets my dog.

I'm as guilty as the next person of enjoying After Dark's antics; we have Boris the Kitten (from More After Dark) romping around on a world clock (from Palo Alto Software's After Dark add-on module) on the Mac Quadra 700. My main writing machine had Mr. Spock examining Hortas (from Star Trek: The Screen Saver) for a year or so. But you could hardly suggest that all this silliness was just to save your screen.

Fair warning: on the Mac, we couldn't get After Dark to install unless we turned off all the INITs, not just the virus-checking software they warn you about. But once done and the system rebooted, we had all the new modules, along with our old ones, available.

There were similar installation problems under Windows, but in both cases, the Berkeley Systems support people were helpful. Sure, Windows 3.0 and later come with a rudimentary screen saver, but can you really live without Bart Simpson skateboarding around your Program Manager?

The book of the month is Hy Bender's Essential Software for Writers: A Complete Guide for Everyone Who Writes with a PC (Writers Digest Books, 1994); it's humorous and well done. It discusses a lot of software of interest to those who use computers to write.

The game of the month is Strategic Simulation's Dark Sun Shattered Lands , a rather good fantasy role-playing game with a new game engine. It got me away from XCOM: UFO Defense for a few days. Alas, XCOM has still got me.

Next month, I'll have a lot more on networks and a whole bunch of new software. By then, I'll be able to type with both hands.

FOR MORE INFORMATION

For those who must do electronic correspondence in many languages, I'd think Accent 1.0 ($379) would be a godsend. Contact Accent Software International, Ltd., Jerusalem, Israel, +972 2 793723; fax +972 2 793731.

After Dark 3.0 ($49.99) is less a screen saver than an entertainment package, and it does that well. Contact Berkeley Systems, Inc., Berkele y, CA, (800) 877-5535 or (510) 540-5535; fax (510) 540-5115.

If you do much tinkering with your system, you definitely need BOOTCON 2.1 ($79). Contact Modular Software Systems, Kent, WA, (800) 438-3930 or (206) 631-5781; fax (206) 631-5779.

The game of the month is Dark Sun Shattered Lands (on floppy disk, $60; on CD-ROM, $65), a rather good fantasy role-playing game with a new game engine. Contact Strategic Simulations, Inc., Sunnyvale, CA, (408) 737-6800; fax (408) 737-6814.

If you're looking for an OEM source on the nifty Duchess-Blue ($2199) integrated multimedia system, contact IBM Microelectronics, East Fishkill, NY, (800) 636-2426.

The Fax<HQ system (standard package with one copy of Fax<HQ Gateway Fax Saver software and 25 copies of the Fax<HQ client module, for a total of 27 users, $1295; Fax Server software and five copies of the Fax<HQ client module, $395; Expansion Kits to add 25 users, $69 5) is quite good. Contact Headquarters Software, Inc., Pleasant Hill, CA, (510) 284-2877; fax (510) 284-3238.

We like FirstAid for Windows ($49.95). Contact Cybermedia, Inc., Los Angeles, CA, (800) 529-2373 or (310) 843-0800; fax (310) 843-0120.

LapLink 6.0 for Windows ($199.95) is seriously good stuff. Contact Traveling Software, Bothell, WA, (800) 343-8080 or (206) 483-8088; fax (206) 487-1284.

The new M5Pi motherboard (with a 60-MHz Pentium processor and 256-KB cache, $895) is a bit more finished than the older test version I had; but I never had any trouble with the old one. Contact Micronics Computers, Inc., Fremont, CA, (800) 577-0977 or (510) 651-2300; fax (510) 651-5612.

The NETPrint/150 ($795) is easy to install and use. Contact Digital Products, Inc., Waltham, MA, (800) 243-2333 or (617) 647-1234; fax (617) 647-4474.

OS/2 Advanced Server 4.0 (on floppy disk or CD-RO M, $2066) is a client/server system comparable in features and complexities to NetWare. Contact IBM Corp., Armonk, NY, (800) 342-6672 or (914) 332-2085; fax (800) 426-4329.

Personal NetWare ($99) has plenty of security features, provisions for a systems manager, and maintains logs of user activities. Contact Novell, Inc., Provo, UT, (800) 453-1267 or (801) 429-7000; fax (801) 429-5155.

With the Pocket Ethernet Adapter III ($349), I have a convenient way to attach my portables into my network. Contact Xircom, Inc., Calabasas, CA, (800) 438-9472 or (818) 878-7600; fax (818) 878-7630.

The RediCard RC-1496 data/fax modem ($299; RC-1414 with 14.4-Kbps send/receive fax, $349) was plug-and-play at a time when I was desperate, and it works as well as any portable modem I've ever had. Contact Data Race, Inc., San Antonio, TX, (800) 329-7223 or (210) 558-1900; fax (210) 558-1929.

The SupraFaxModem 288 ($269.95) worked fine w ith both Zenith machines. Contact Supra Corp., Albany, OR, (800) 727-8417 or (503) 967-2400; fax (503) 967-2401.

It's possible to set up a Windows NT Server 3.5 (server license, $699; client access license, $39.95 each) that interfaces with a NetWare network in such a way that all your Windows machines see is a Windows software interface. I'll have more on the Microsoft Natural Keyboard ($99.95) later. Contact Microsoft Corp., Redmond, WA, (800) 426-9400 or (206) 882-8080; fax (206) 883-8101.

The Z-Noteflex ($3222) portable is a neat little color system. I like it. With the Z-Stor Personal Server ($999), you can have peer-to-peer network operations in about an hour. 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 futu re. 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 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 .