Windows 95 Arrives

Jerry is both successful and unsuccessful at installing Windows 95 on the Chaos Manor machines

Jerry Pournelle

Last month I went to Washington, where I participated in hearings about the future of NASA. What I said, along with contributions from many others, including Edward Teller and Hans Mark, should now be available from the House Committee on Science. Write your congressperson for a printed copy of the March hearings on space policy.

There were many different views presented. I'll summarize mine by saying NASA ought to develop far-out high-risk technology (i.e., X programs) and leave production vehicle design and operations to private space lines or the military services. You can find out more by looking at my papers on the Internet, at SCIENCE@hr.house.gov, or in the listings section of the tojerry conferenc e on BIX.

It was an exhausting trip, but I was able to get a lot of work done using the Gateway 2000 Liberty 100-MHz 486DX color notebook. When I got back to Chaos Manor, I was faced with the usual flood of software, including the nonfinal "final-beta" version of Windows 95.

Let me start by saying that I had no problems installing Windows 95 on Pentafluge, our big PCI-bus (Peripheral Component Interconnect) Pentium system, and it runs just fine there; more about that later. Having said that, I want to talk about problems we had with Windows 95 and Big Cheetah, our 66-MHz 486DX2, because what I learned was all interesting and mostly useful.

Windows 95--I'll call it W95 from here on--comes on one CD-ROM or 12 3-1/2-inch floppy disks. Unfortunately for me, the CD-ROM was labeled "Windows 95 SDK Kit," and I rather stupidly thought it held only development tools rather than W95 itself, so I used the floppy disks. That was tedious, but eventually it stopped asking for disks, to ld me to clear the disks from the drives, and rebooted. I got messages such as "Preparing to run Windows 95 for the first time," what looked like an attempt to run with my old CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT files--and then a total lockup of the system.

Rebooting produced a screen announcing that W95 hadn't installed properly and offered several choices, the default being safe boot. Alas, that produced another lockup. The installation process had generated a floppy disk to be labeled "Windows 95 Start-up." That wouldn't boot either.

Of course, I had thoroughly backed up the machine before I started, so it was no great trick to boot up with my "panic" DOS 5 floppy disk. Windows wouldn't load, so I used Norton Commander to investigate what W95 had done to my system. It was a lot. There were new files in the WINDOWS\ and DOS\ directories, a new WINDOWS\COMMAND\ subdirectory full of stuff, and a lot of new hidden system files in the root directory. Worse, almost everything I tried got me the me ssage "Incorrect DOS Version." Worst of all, there's no uninstall program; getting rid of W95 is a tedious manual job.

I had two backups. The quickest would have been the Maxoptix T3-1300 optical drive, but that's on the network, and until Windows for Workgroups is running, I have no way to get at the network from this machine. However, I had everything stored on DAT (digital audiotape) with Palindrome's Network Archivist. Tape is slow, but it beats reloading five years' worth of stuff. I brought up the machine from the "panic" floppy disk and told it to SYS the C drive. That worked just fine, and now I could boot up from the hard drive.

About half the items in the CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT files weren't working properly. I had a moment of panic when Network Archivist wouldn't work, but that was because W95 had removed my Files statement, and it was fixed by adding FILES = 30 to CONFIG.SYS. I told Network Archivist to restore the DOS subdirectory; that was when I discovered that the W95 instal lation had put a lot of new files in there. I erased the whole directory before letting Network Archivist do its thing.

Then I tried CHKDSK and got "Incorrect DOS Version," unless I logged on to the C:\DOS subdirectory. This led me to look at my PATH statement in AUTOEXEC.BAT. WINDOWS\COMMAND\ was now the first item in the PATH, meaning that it would be the first place DOS would look for a file not in the currently logged subdirectory; and sure enough, there were new versions of CHKDSK and other DOS tools in WINDOWS\COMMAND\. At this point, I did what I should have done in the first place: I used BOOTCON to restore my CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT files to what they had been before I started working with W95, and rebooted yet one more time.

This time DOS worked, but I still couldn't get into Windows.

I installed W4WG a long time ago, and over the years a lot of gubbage had accumulated in my WINDOWS and WINDOWS\SYSTEM directories. In addition to a few hundred fonts, there were tag ends and pieces of programs I've deleted. I had no way of knowing which of those fonts and stubs were needed.

In addition, W95 had changed some things and added others. This looked like a perfect opportunity to reinstall Windows from scratch. Windows could decide which fonts and INI files it needed, and if an application needed something, I could always find it on tape. I copied my PIFS and ICONS subdirectories and all my GRP files to a safe place, and used Norton Commander to delete the entire Windows directory with all its subdirectories. Then I got out the floppy disks and had at it.

That all went well, and Windows loaded so fast it scared me. Having over a hundred fonts installed really slows things down. It was easy enough to get my desktop back, because it's no trick at all to restore a group. Just tell Program Manager the name of its GRP file. I had to run the ATI Technologies and Creative Labs Sound Blaster installation programs again. It took a bit of mucking about to get things the way I wanted them, but none of this was a real problem. Provided you have a good backup system, I can recommend that you reinstall Windows every few years; it speeds things up and gets rid of a lot of garbage.

Now I was back where I started, and it was time to figure out why W95 wouldn't run. I got out my logbook. When the W95 installation program reboots the machine, you first see what looks like your old CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT files being executed; then W95 takes over. Perhaps, I thought, the problem is that I've been using DOS 5 and Quarterdeck's QEMM 6.03. This is partly sloth, but it's mostly the theory of not fixing what ain't broke. Maybe it's time to update to MS-DOS 6.22 and QEMM 7.5, and then see if W95 will install.

If I'd thought about it a little longer, I'd have realized that was silly. Why should a new OS care what DOS and memory management I'd been using before installing it? I realized this as I was about halfway through the upgrade, but by then it was easier to continue. I got MS-DOS 6.22 installed and rewrote CONFIG.SYS to use HIMEM.SYS. Once again I was thankful for Norton Commander, which makes it a snap to view, copy, and edit files such as CONFIG.SYS.

I got the DOS start-up message. HIMEM.SYS began its memory tests--and I got a message that the A20 line handler wasn't working. There would be only the base 640 KB of memory; it couldn't find the other 15+ MB. I rebooted a couple of times and got the same message.

The A20 line controls the way in which high memory is addressed. When the IBM AT was designed, IBM gave the A20 line-handling job to the keyboard encoder chip. This is why you sometimes get spurious memory-error messages if you've spilled coffee or popcorn into your keyboard. It can also generate spurious keystrokes in some versions of WordPerfect.

Not all computers use the keyboard processor to handle the A20 gate. HIMEM.SYS is supposed to figure that out for itself, but it sometimes can't. Thus, HIMEM.SYS can be in voked with command-line switches ( /M:n , where n is a number between 1 and 20). This is explained in great detail in New Riders Publishing's Inside MS-DOS 6.22 , and in adequate detail in Que Development Group's Using MS-DOS 6.21 . If you ever have an A20 handler message, I suggest you get one of those books and read up on it.

I tried a couple of the HIMEM.SYS switches, and I was able to get HIMEM to believe I had an A20 handler; but it gave other and even stranger errors, including memory errors. I tried other M: switches. Some locked the machine up; none worked well. I thought about this for a bit and had a sudden flash of insight.

The Cheetah 486/33 was designed in the 1980s, before there were any DX2 chips. When I replaced the CPU with the new Intel 486DX2/66 chip, I thought there might be a problem. There was: about once every six or eight times I'd reboot the machine, it would start up DOS, give the QEMM sign-on--and hang. Turning it off and back o n again would fix the problem. Once the machine came up all the way, everything was fine, so I never worried about it. It was still one of the fastest machines around, more than good enough. I just figured it was getting old and cranky. Perhaps one of the "glue" chips was going bad.

HIMEM's problems with the A20 handler made me think again. Why should a hardware problem let the machine start to boot up and then die when QEMM 6.03 began to install itself? Moreover, once before when I tried to upgrade to QEMM 7, I never got it past that opening QEMM message, which is why I went back to QEMM 6.03. All of that sounds more like a software problem, not a failing chip.

The Cheetah was designed by Ron Sartore. Cheetah International is, alas, no more. The company was brought down by money, not technical, problems. Ron lives in Southern California, where he is the chief architect of PCI products for Applied Micro Circuits. I called him, and when I described the situation, he knew at once what the problem was.

The Cheetah's BIOS was written before there were any DX2 chips. "The CPU is telling the keyboard chip to close the A20 gate, and then it impatiently doesn't wait long enough for it to do it."

That sounded serious. "So we need new BIOS ROMs?," I asked. "Or a faster keyboard encoder?"

"Well, it would help if you had a DX2 keyboard encoder, but maybe there's a simpler way. You can jumper the Cheetah motherboard to speed up the keyboard encoder, and that might be good enough. I'll look up just where those jumpers are and fax you."

At this point, it was time to go down to the beach house to do some fiction writing. I was still curious about W95. Therefore, in addition to the laptops, which would have been more than enough for the work I'd assigned myself, I lugged along SuperCow, the desktop Gateway 2000 486DX2/66. I also brought the W95 installation disks.

SuperCow came with 8 MB of memory. Microsoft swears W95 will run in 8 MB, but I have 16 MB on the OS/2 machine. I decided to put another 8 MB in SuperCow before trying to install W95. I took the precaution of examining the SIMMs and writing down all relevant numbers before I went looking, but finding the right memory at a nearby chain store was no problem. It cost about $60 a megabyte; if I hadn't been in a hurry, I could have found it for less.

I tested the new memory by putting it in banks 0 and 1, where the original memory had been. SuperCow came up fine. I added the other 8 MB. SuperCow couldn't find that memory at all. Worse, I couldn't figure out how to get into setup mode. Needless to say, I'd left the manuals back in Los Angeles; and try as I might, I could not get SuperCow to believe there was more than 8 MB of memory installed.

When you're a long way from your manuals, it's time to use the network. I logged on to BIX and described my problem. Within hours I got my first answer: the way to access SuperCow's setup is to wait until it boots and then do Ctrl-Alt-Esc. Unfortunately, that did n't work, and I said so on-line. A couple of minutes later a user sent me E-mail: QEMM interferes with the Setup program. Try it without QEMM. I did, and Lo!, there I was.

I told Setup we had 640 KB of main memory and 15,744 KB of extended memory. SuperCow grumbled that my CMOS settings were wrong and reset the number to 7552 KB; it still couldn't see the memory I'd installed. Back to the network. Next day, two people told me: there's a switch block on the motherboard. The first four switches need to be set off-off-on-on. With that done, everything was simple, and SuperCow had 16 MB of memory. It was also Sunday evening, and I no longer had time to install W95 before I went back to Los Angeles.

Note: most new machines find the memory automatically, but it's always a good idea to keep your PC's manual handy. If it's small enough, put it inside the computer--you won't lose it there.

When I got back home, Ron's instructions were waiting on my fax machine. Two jumpers control keyboard-controller chip-access speed for the Cheetah. They should both be set on. He included a diagram showing where those jumpers are, because the manuals and paperwork for the Cheetah long ago sank in the Chaos Manor paper storm.

It took about a minute to open up Big Cheetah and change the jumpers. When I turned him on, I got an error message: "Missing keyboard." But then that message went away, and boot-up proceeded without interruption. I shut down and began again. Same thing. A message complaining about a missing keyboard; then a smooth and fast boot-up. HIMEM.SYS didn't complain a bit, so I tried it with QEMM. Still no problem. The upshot is that I rebooted the system about 20 times, and I never got a glitch beyond the easily ignored "Missing keyboard" message. Clearly I'd had a software timing problem, and that was now fixed; neither HIMEM nor QEMM had a problem with the A20 line handler.

It seemed likely that the A20 line-handler problem was what had crashed W95, so I tried that instal lation again. Microsoft's W95 product manager, Brent Ethington, was coming to Chaos Manor the next morning, and I thought it would be neat to have W95 working on Big Cheetah when he got here. Alas, after 12 disks, the installation program got to the same place as before and hung up.

Enter Brent Ethington, who'd come down to show me things about W95. First thing was to try a reinstallation on Big Cheetah, this time using the CD-ROM; the program is indeed on there. The installation went a lot x faster, but unfortunately with the same result. Brent got hold of some people in Redmond. They talked a while and then connected Big Cheetah up to Redmond via modem and a debug program. (You probably won't get this level of support.)

While he was tearing his hair out trying to determine what was wrong with Big Cheetah, I took the CD-ROM, put it into Pentafluge, and ran the W95 Setup program. In about 10 minutes, I had W95 running. There was only one real problem. A thing called Watch -it, which seems to have come in along with a program called Remove-it, kept popping up on start-up no matter how hard Brent and I tried to eliminate it.

With Watch-it running, you can reliably crash W95 by running Procomm Plus, the DOS communications program, and trying to get into the Procomm setup menu. The machine locks to hardware reset. Removing Watch-it cured this problem. It's not easy to remove. Not only is it in WIN.INI, but it loads in AUTOEXEC.BAT.

I also found I had to reset the Sound Blaster 16 board. I had Windows set so that when it came up, an announcer would tell you to "stay tuned while Beavis and Butt-head burn things and blow stuff up." W95 retained that. XCOM: UFO Defense ran properly with sound under W95. I brought over Master of Orion (MOO for short), discovered it was configured wrong, and had problems changing the configurations; and, of course, the Sound Blaster configuration program wants you to reboot when you're done changing settings.

You don't just turn W95 off. Like OS/2, you invoke a shutdown program, which gives you several options. One is to reboot in DOS, so I tried that. It worked just fine. Once in DOS, if you do VER to get the version number, you are told that it's W95; but it's a perfectly good DOS, similar to MS-DOS 6.22. If you reset while in W95's "DOS," the machine automatically comes back up in W95.

The great thing is that once Sound Blaster is set properly, W95 will not only play games like XCOM and MOO--it will even keep both of them open and let you switch from one to the other, and there's sound in both games. I can't do that with OS/2, which will play either of those games, but not both at once. Windows won't even play them, at least not well enough that you'd want to.

I spent another hour fooling around with W95. I loaded up Norton Commander and Q&A Write. I loaded up Microsoft Word. I loaded up Doom. I connected a modem to the system and looked out on the Internet. I made sure the local network was working properly and that I could access not only W4WG machines, but the OS/2 Warp machines running OS/2 LAN Server. All that worked. It wasn't always easy to make things happen--W95 does things a bit differently from Windows--but there was no real problem.

Clearly I haven't worked with W95 long enough to warrant a real opinion, but so far I like what I've seen. I'm particularly impressed with the Help Wizards, which tell you how to make things happen. It's easier to set up than either Windows or OS/2. W95 is certainly a better DOS than Windows, it may be a better DOS than DOS, and if you like Windows, you'll love W95.

Stay tuned, though. There are mysteries. Some, such as my constantly losing programs from the groups I put them in, are due to my ignorance of the system. Others, such as an intermittent inability in Microsoft Word to turn off the "show nonprinting characters `feature,"' are both mysterious and annoying.

Overall, assuming that it works and I can overcome the initial annoyances, I like W95 better than Windows; but we'll see what happens.

Now back to Brent and Big Cheetah. After using the debug program through a modem, the technicians in Redmond concluded that the problem is the Perceptive Solutions SCSI hard drive controller that's running in block mode. For some reason, W95 expects some information it's not getting.

There are several possible remedies. One is to change the mode of the controller from block mode to Western Digital mode. Of course, that betrays the age of the controller. What we called Western Digital mode five years ago is now known as IDE, and what I would be doing is slowing the SCSI controller down to IDE speeds.

I could also change controllers. Meanwhile, all this is a good indication of the problems Microsoft faces in getting W95 to work with the hardware out there. My Cheetah with the Perceptive Solutions controller was an advance in the state of the art of its time--indeed, the Cheetah, with its 35-nanosecond zero-wait-state memory, is in some wa ys more advanced than a number of more "modern" systems. Now imagine what will happen when everyone updates their 486s with DX4 chips with Pentium features! We do live in interesting times.

Big Cheetah is my main writing machine, and since he wasn't going to run under W95, I had to get him going with DOS and Windows again. Now that I'd moved the keyboard jumpers, I didn't have to stay with DOS 5 and QEMM 6.03, so I booted with an MS-DOS 6.22 floppy disk, did the SYS command, and copied version 6.22 into the DOS subdirectory. Then I erased the Windows directory and let Network Archivist restore that from tape.

I was using HIMEM.SYS and EMM386.EXE for memory management. If I turned off XMS memory, I had DOS windows of 615 KB, but DOS games like MOO wouldn't work in Windows because they need expanded memory. I exited Windows and added "AUTO" to the EMM386.EXE device line; that got me XMS memory, but my DOS windows were only 501 KB, too small for many of my DOS programs, including MO O.

My next step was to try the Microsoft memory-optimizer program called Memmaker. That brought my DOS windows up to 538 KB. Inside MS-DOS 6.22 has a whole chapter on tricks you can use to increase your usable memory, and I suppose I should have tried some of them. However, I was running out of time, and there's an even better remedy. Installing QEMM 7.5 took about 10 minutes, with another 5 minutes to run its Optimizer program. That's all I did, and I now have 624-KB DOS windows, plenty good enough.

W95 has its own memory management (it automatically allocates XMS memory), but as long as you stay with DOS and Windows, you really need QEMM. One warning: QEMM by default turns on Quarterdeck Fast Boot, and while that really speeds up rebooting when it works, it reliably hangs about half the machines I've tried it with, including Big Cheetah. If Fast Boot hangs your machine, the hard-won remedy is to put "BE:N" on the QEMM386.SYS device line.

With that caution, QEMM 7.5 is highly re commended.

One last point. One of the alterations W95 made to my AUTOEXEC.BAT file was to remove the "Last drive" command. When I restored DOS and W4WG, I couldn't make network connections. "Error 15," it told me. I couldn't find that in any W4WG reference work I have. Eventually I went back out to DOS and tried to start up the network; I got the same message, but this time there was a reference to "Last drive." When I replaced the Lastdrive = Z in the AUTOEXEC.BAT file, Error 15 went away.

We went to NetWorld+Interop in Las Vegas last week. It was an impressive show. Smaller than Comdex, but at least as interesting. One of the most amazing things is that the entire show is connected to itself: there's a network connecting every booth that wants to participate. I learned a lot about routers, networks, network tools, and the Internet in general; but for me, the big hit of the show was OS/2 Warp Connect.

I don't normally review products I don't have and haven't used . In this case, IBM had OS/2 Warp Connect set up on 50 interconnected workstations and let us play with it awhile. So, I do have a little experience with it; but keep in mind that I don't own a copy of it yet.

OS/2 Warp Connect, which should be available about the time you read this, is everything OS/2 Warp and W4WG ought to have been; indeed, if OS/2 Warp Connect had come out last year, I believe it would have put a serious hole in W4WG sales. It's a peer-to-peer LAN, but it's also a lot more. It contains Lotus Notes Express (a light version of Lotus Notes); that in itself makes OS/2 Warp Connect valuable, because Lotus Notes Express has RSA (Rivest-Shamir-Adleman) public-key encryption.

OS/2 Warp Connect is more secure than W4WG. It's got all kinds of little features I wished I had more time to play with. More on OS/2 Warp Connect when I have it, but I was impressed by what I saw.

One of the neat gadgets that I saw at Interop was Garrett Communications' Magnum H80-B Pers onal Hub. This is a box about the size of a small book. You plug one end into an Ethernet coaxial T connector, and you've got eight 10Base-T slots. Unlike the Ethernet concentrators we've had in the past, this one is small enough to sit on a table or attach to a wall, and it has its own power supply. You can carry it around and use it where it's needed. Connecting it up is simple, and there's no software to install.

We have thin-net coaxial cable running all over the place here--Roberta opines that networks are not decorator-friendly--but often enough we need to connect in a system that's got a 10Base-T connector; for instance, an Ethernet adapter on a PCMCIA card.

You can daisy chain the Magnum H80-B Personal Hubs, up to the Ethernet limit of five hops. Ethernet works at 10 Mbps, independent of the wire, so you don't lose anything by using a mix of network types. The hubs are small, and it's hard to connect one up wrong. We're going to get a lot of use out of this.

Until recently, I have connected Big Cheetah through the parallel port to a Hewlett-Packard LaserJet III (one of the first ever made, and still working like a champ). Actually, it wasn't a direct connection: I had a 20-foot parallel cable from Big Cheetah to a box full of memory. The box is called a Printer Optimizer, and I've used it for years; but it's dying. Its latest trick is to print Q&A Write files just fine, but print garbage when I send a Word for Windows file.

The obvious remedy would be to remove the box and connect the printer directly to the computer; but, alas, that requires an additional 3 feet of cable, and when I did that, the computer couldn't find the printer. When they tell you 20 feet is the maximum distance for a parallel connection to a printer, believe them.

Valiant, which is an IBM ValuePoint Pentium machine that runs OS/2 Warp and OS/2 LAN Server 4.0, is only about 10 feet from the printer. In the past, when I had a really big print job--the last one was printing Beowulf' s Children --I would send the file over to Valiant, connect him to the printer, and print from there, because printing from Windows takes ages. Why not, I thought, connect Valiant up permanently to the printer and use OS/2 LAN Server to make that printer available to all the other machines?

It took about an hour. Telling OS/2 LAN Server to share a printer is fairly easy, provided you remember that you use a template by dragging it out to the work surface, not by double-clicking on it.

Networking is a mysterious thing. I now have all my machines connected up so they print through Valiant, and I can't think why I didn't do it before. Printing over a network is lightning fast compared to letting Windows do it with Print Manager. W95 is said to have solved that problem, but I haven't had enough experience with it to know.

As of today, Pentafluge sends print jobs onto the network just like the other machines. One of these days I'll connect a printer directly to it to see if W95 has sped th ings up.

Anyway, I can print through the OS/2 machine to the LaserJet III, and it's all exceedingly fast--and doesn't tie up the OS/2 machine at all.

That's when things are working.

A few minutes ago, I tried to connect a portable to the network using Xircom's Performance Series CreditCard Ethernet Adapter IIps. I didn't manage to do it; but whatever I did crashed two machines on the network. The OS/2 system didn't have any problems, and neither did Big Cheetah, but Little Cheetah and SuperCow were locked up to hardware reset. I have no idea why, because I didn't touch either machine. The notion that you can use the network to crash machines at a distance is a bit frightening.

Later, another bit of mucking about with the Ethernet connections convinced Little Cheetah that he wasn't on the network any longer. The machine worked fine, but the network couldn't find him, and vice versa. We had to exit Windows, reset, and bring Windows up again. That worked fine. Who knows why?

Wh at I have found is that OS/2 LAN Server works nicely with W4WG and W95, although, again, there are mysteries. W4WG saw the network printer by browsing. That was fortunate, because although I had told OS/2 LAN Server that I wanted the printer there to be called VAL, it named it hplaserj. I've no idea why, but I don't care, because I was able to connect Big Cheetah to it, and it prints 10 times as fast as I could print by directly attaching the same printer to Big Cheetah's parallel port.

W95 didn't find the network printer by browsing. On the other hand, W95 has a very nice wizard to walk you through the installation process, and because I knew what the printer's name was, I could type in \\valiant\hplaserj . Everything connected fine, and I can print like crazy.

Provided, of course, that the network doesn't crash.

My network problems were caused by my doing something weird with the cable connections, not by the Xircom adapter. It is a painless way to add a laptop t o your network. Most laptops come with W4WG 3.11 installed, so all you have to do is install the network card and turn the networking features on.

That works fine on the Liberty. Alas, we haven't yet managed to get the Zenith Z-Noteflex to use it; Zenith's PCMCIA card-handling software seems to clash with the Xircom drivers. We know we have the latest Xircom drivers, because we downloaded both drivers and a flash-RAM update for the card just a few minutes ago from their BBS. [ Editor's note: Jerry did not have time to test them for this column, but he plans to report on them in a future column. ]

You can always connect your portable to your network through LapLink, but Ethernet is much faster; and the Xircom Performance Series CreditCard Ethernet Adapter IIps works. Recommended.

I've had a Citizen PN-60 printer for months now, and somehow I never have room in this column to do it justice. This printer is the size of a typewriter roller. It has a rec hargeable battery. It's slow, but it will do letter-quality printing, a sheet at a time, and you can fit it into your briefcase. I don't see how anyone can make a smaller printer. Or would want to.

The CD-ROM of the month is Return to the Moon from Lunar Eclipse Software. Pictures, games, atlas, moon-flight simulator, and LunaCorp. rovers; if you have any interest in the moon, this is for you.

The gadget of the month , and maybe the year, is the Timex Data Link. This is a perfectly good digital alarm watch that will also store appointments, phone numbers, to-do lists, and suchlike. The interesting part is that you put in the data on your PC and then hold the watch up to the screen; a tiny electric eye in the watch downloads everything. Richard, our son who's a congressional staffer, snaffled off our copy, and he won't let go. He says it's one of the most useful things he's had. I suppose I'll have to get one for myself.

The computer book of the mon th is by Joshua Quittner and Michelle Slatalla: Masters of Deception . I have the British edition (Vintage, 1994), given to me by Dr. Alan Solomon of antivirus fame; the U.S. edition is published by Harper-Collins. This is the story of the network war between two hacker gangs, the Masters of Deception and the Legion of Doom, and it's fascinating. Read it along with Steven Levy's Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution (Dell, 1985) and you'll have a lot of insight into where the computer revolution is going.

The book of the month is Donald Kagan's On the Origins of War and The Preservation of Peace (Doubleday, 1995). This is one of those rare books I call important. By comparing the outbreak of war in ancient and modern times, Kagan gives you some insight into why wars happen and what you might do about them.

Dr. Solomon visited Chaos Manor this week; next month, that story, more on Windows 95, and a catch-up column about a lot of neat stuff that's piling up. I sure do like little computers.

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FOR MORE INFORMATION

The Citizen PN-60 printer ($399) will do letter-quality printing, a sheet at a time, and you can fit it into your briefcase. Contact Citizen America Corp., Santa Monica, CA, (310) 453-0614.

The Magnum H80-B Personal Hub ($349) was one of the neat gadgets at Interop. Contact Garrett Communications, Inc., Fremont, CA, (510) 438-9071; garrett@mediacity.com.

Xircom's Performance Series CreditCard Ethernet Adapter IIps (for 10Base-T, $199; for 10Base-T/10Base-2, $259) is a painless way to add a laptop to your network. Contact Xircom, Inc., Thousand Oaks, CA, (800) 438-4526 or (805) 376-9300; http://www.xircom.com.

If you have any interest in the moon, you need the Return to the Moon ($39.95) CD-ROM. Contact LunaCorp./Lunar Eclipse Software, Arlington, VA, (800) 467-7223 or (703) 8 41-9500; 71147.3603@compuserve.com.

The Timex Data Link ($130) is the gadget of the month, and maybe the year. Contact Timex Corp., Middlebury, CT, (800) 367-8463 or (203) 573-5000; data.link@timex.com.

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Jerry Pournelle holds a doctorate in psychology and is a science fiction writer who also earns a comfortable living writing about computers present and future. Jerry welcomes readers' comments and opinions. Send a self-addressed, stamped envelope to Jerry Pournelle, c/o BYTE, One Phoenix Mill Lane, Peterborough, NH 03458. Please put your address on the 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 .