Windows 95 Pastiche

Jerry divides his time between Windows 95 installations and the Electronic Entertainment Exposition

Jerry Pournelle

You probably know that BYTE editors choose the awards given at Comdex. This past spring, we gave the Best of Show award to Microsoft Windows 95.

To win Best of Show, a product must first win in its own category, which this year was "Best Operating System That Will Ship Someday." The nominees were Windows 95 (W95), Windows NT 3.51, and OS/2 Warp Connect. Because of eligibility requirements, this was the first time OS/2, W95, and NT have been head-to-head at one of these shows.

I find the awards discussion with the BYTE editors at Comdex the best educational experience I get all year. This year's debate was lively but not heated.

We all agreed that OS/2 Warp Connec t had some technical advantages over W95, and, had it shipped a year ago, it would have made serious inroads into Microsoft's market share. OS/2 Warp Connect is neat, combining OS/2's generally solid 32-bit multitasking performance with real connectivity capabilities. It's not as versatile or secure as OS/2 plus OS/2 LAN Server, but it's a lot less expensive, and, as a peer-to-peer network, it beats Windows for Workgroups and, for that matter, W95.

W95 has pretty good connectivity and works well with Windows NT; but where it really shines is ease of installation. The clincher, though, was third-party applications. Spring Comdex was loaded with W95 applications ready to ship when the OS does. Some of those will be ported to OS/2 Warp. Some won't. But we didn't see any killer applications in development for OS/2 and OS/2 Warp. The developers are betting heavily on W95, and that makes it a cinch that it will have far more impact on the industry than OS/2. They haven't told me anything about it, but I pres ume IBM is planning a version of Warp to be compatible with W95.

That was a few weeks ago. Today I went down to the Electronic Entertainment Exposition (E3). The Los Angeles Convention Center was filled with every conceivable form of electronic game, from classic revivals--you can get the original Asteroids on a game cartridge--to highly complex games that come on multiple CD-ROMs and have live action with movie stars. It's a big show, with lots of hype and glitter, and lots of live entertainment. It's the sort of thing we used to expect from Hollywood, and, I have to confess, I'm glad to see some of the Hollywood glitter return.

There was glitter enough for all--huge screens and giant speakers, live music in the corridors, parties galore, people in weird costumes, starlets and hunks as booth bait, and the best pressroom lunch I've seen in years. Although the biggest displays were for SEGA, Nintendo, and other dedicated games machines, there was plenty of software for "real compu ters" of both the PC and Mac persuasions. While most of the entertainment was bash 'em and shoot 'em games, there were also a lot of educational products. The show was big and exhausting, and I'm glad I went.

IBM was located right up front in the main hall, and there was quite a lot of IBM entertainment and educational software, including what looks to be an excellent hospital emergency room game. Some of this was under in-house development, but more was in cooperative development with third-party programming shops.

Microsoft was at the far end of the hall. They're aggressively going after the home market. As you'd expect from the outfit that released Bookshelf nearly 10 years ago, they've got a lot of published titles, with more coming. Everything from new entries in their excellent composer series to word games to integrations of science and history. You can't afford to be without a current Microsoft Home Products catalog--they're adding really good titles every few weeks.

Microsoft also had a display devoted to W95--and in addition to in-house titles, they gave display space to third-party companies writing W95 applications.

Meanwhile, back at the IBM booth, there was no OS/2 display and no OS/2 applications. All the software I saw was being developed for DOS or Windows and will be available on W95 before there's an OS/2 version. Think on that for a moment. Moreover, a couple of weeks ago, Microsoft, to great cheers from programmers, told a convention of games developers about new software tools that will allow them direct access to the video and sound hardware.

In a word: it's not just the third-party developers who think W95 will dominate the home and education markets. IBM's in-house software developers do, too; and if IBM has any corporate strategy for supporting applications development on OS/2, it hasn't been very successful even among those that IBM showed at E3. You may draw your own conclusions, but it's certain that you will be seeing a lot of W95 in the next few years.

I've been running W95 on Pentafluge, my main machine, for over a month, and although there are some minor annoyances, it's easier to use, and it works better than Windows. I like W95, and I'm installing it on most of the systems I use.

Alert readers will note that I said Pentafluge, not Big Cheetah, is now my main machine. It's a long story. The short form is that although Big Cheetah, with an Intel 66-MHz 486DX2 processor, and Windows 3.1 work together, that combination won't work with W95. The problem has to do with timing and the A20 line handler; I've written about this before, and I won't take up more time with it.

The bottom line is that Big Cheetah is temporarily out of service. When he returns, it will be as a W4WG workstation. Meanwhile, I've become sufficiently fond of W95 and the Pentium's speed that I'm keeping Pentafluge as my main machine. It's a real fire-breathing system (see my September 1994 column), and it has been stable for several months. I love it.

Part of my efforts to install W95 on Big Cheetah involved reformatting the hard drive. Shortly after that, Big Cheetah was simply out of service with hardware problems not due to W95, and I had no choice but to set up a new main system. Of course, the easy way to change main systems would have been to use the W4WG network to copy everything from Big Cheetah onto a couple of Maxoptix T3-1300 optical disks before I started mucking things up. Alas, I didn't do that. Instead, I relied on Palindrome's Network Archivist DAT (digital audiotape) system.

That would have worked fine if I had got the DAT drive working on Pentafluge. I could then install Network Archivist and let it go to work. Unfortunately, when I connected the external tape drive to the SCSI string, nothing happened. The rest of the SCSI system worked fine, but the tape drive was invisible. Worse, I had deadlines and needed files that existed only on Network Archivist tapes.

Pentafluge was conne cted to the network; W95 can talk to OS/2 Advanced Server, Windows NT Server, and W4WG with no trouble at all. I installed the Future Domain SCSI board that used to be in Big Cheetah into SuperCow, the Gateway 2000 486DX2/66 running W4WG. That worked, but what I couldn't do was make Network Archivist restore any files anywhere but to the logical drive it thought they came from. There's doubtless a way to accomplish this, but I sure couldn't manage it. Thus, I could write all my Q&A Write BYTE files to SuperCow's C drive, but not directly to Pentafluge's C drive, which SuperCow sees as the R drive.

I found myself transferring files from SuperCow to the Maxoptix optical disk to make room on SuperCow's C drive, restoring files from tape to that C drive, and then using the network to move those files over to Pentafluge's C drive. It was tedious, but it worked.

About then, Alex wanted to install Windows NT on Little Cheetah, the 50-MHz 486DX2 system. This time, we backed up all its fi les onto optical disks before he started.

Little Cheetah is an old system, and neither its hard drive controller nor its CD-ROM drive were recognized by Windows NT. We solved the CD-ROM problem by installing a new Creative Labs Sound Blaster AWE32 sound card with the Blaster CD 4X CD-ROM drive kit. The installation was simple, the CD-ROM drive is faster than blazes, and the sound is great. The whole process took under an hour. If you need sound and CD-ROM in a hurry, Creative Labs is the way to go. Nearly everything supports it, their instructions are well written, and things tend to go smoothly.

Changing controllers was nearly as simple with the AdvanSys PCI (Peripheral Component Interconnect) Bus Master Silver Kit. We put the AdvanSys SCSI controller in a VL-Bus slot, popped in the setup disk, and followed instructions. Since we didn't have to swap disk drives or do much fooling with hardware, the whole thing took under half an hour.

The AdvanSys SCSI controller is fast, the setup is ea sy, and the instructions are simple. It will run your SCSI CD-ROM drives and other SCSI peripherals. Like the Distributed Processing Technology controller, it has a 50-pin miniconnector on the back, so you can have internal and external SCSI devices. It also senses whether or not there's an external device and adjusts termination accordingly.

The AdvanSys software is well thought out. The company furnishes a boot floppy disk, which you use to check out the SCSI bus and devices; once that's done, you boot up normally. The instructions are clear, and, assuming your hardware works properly, you won't have any problems installing DOS/Windows, W95, or NT. I've been running the AdvanSys SCSI controller for two weeks with heavy use, and I've had no problems.

I haven't been running NT very long. I can say it's harder to install than W95. Among other things, NT wants you to know a lot about I/O port addresses, interrupts, and such, which W95 automatically goes out and finds. Indeed, one M icrosoft techie told me that when he's got to install NT, he first gets W95 up and running and uses it to investigate all the pertinent facts about the system. He records those and then installs NT and feeds it the information he learned from W95.

Once we had Little Cheetah running, I wanted to test the external drive port on the AdvanSys controller. We connected it up and had the same results we had with Big Cheetah: the SCSI bus worked fine, but the machine couldn't find the tape drive.

We know the tape drive works; but it normally works with one of those SCSI cables that has what looks like an RS-232 connector on one end and a big 50-pin SCSI connector on the other. Both the AdvanSys and Distributed Processing Technology controllers have small 50-pin connectors. I had only one small-50-pin-to-big-50-pin SCSI cable, so I used it in both places; it was brand new, but it sure looked like that cable was the problem.

There was one way to find out: I called Granite Digital and asked them to send me a small-50-to-big-50 SCSIVue Gold Diagnostic Cable. I presume you can find other reliable sources of SCSI cables, but I am darned sure about Granite Digital. Their cables work, and the diagnostic flashing lights will tell you what's going on with your SCSI system.

That took care of the problem. As soon as we connected the tape drive with the Granite Digital cable, the AdvanSys controller recognized it. When we used a Granite Digital SCSIVue Gold Diagnostic Cable to connect the unit to the Distributed Processing Technology controller in Big Cheetah, that worked, too.

The moral of this story is simple: if you have a SCSI problem, first check termination. The easy way to do that is with one of the little Granite Digital SCSIVue Diagnostic Terminators. If termination is all right, try a cable known to be good, preferably one of the SCSIVue Gold Diagnostic Cables. So far I haven't had to do anything else. All my SCSI problems have been either termination or cables.

If you work with SC SI much, keep a Granite Digital SCSIVue Diagnostic Terminator and a few of its diagnostic cables around. They'll sure save you time and trouble. Highly recommended.

Before we fired up NT on Little Cheetah, we installed the Intel Pentium OverDrive chip. Little Cheetah began life as a 486/25 and then was upgraded to a 486DX2/50; now it's a sort-of Pentium. Installation was utterly simple: remove old chip, insert new. The system fired up without problems, and there was no difficulty installing NT. They're not yet shipping a Pentium OverDrive chip for 486/33 systems, but if you have a 486/25, such as one of the old Tandy Sensation systems, you can give it new life with a Pentium OverDrive chip. Performance improvements are said to average about 90 percent over a 486DX2 and about 150 percent over a straight 486/25. While I haven't done extensive tests, that seems about right.

The only drawback we've found to the Pentium OverDrive chip is that it has a fan mounted on it. The fan is pow ered off the motherboard, so that's not a problem; but the chip plus fan are more than an inch thick, so if your motherboard has the CPU in the board-installation area--ours does--you'll have to arrange things so that the slot opposite the OverDrive chip is occupied by a short board.

Little Cheetah is noticeably speedier since we installed the Pentium OverDrive. The upgrade price is a bit steep, and I doubt I'd buy one for a system that already has a 486DX2/50, but the improvement over the standard 486/25 is dramatic. Recommended.

Apple had a fairly small booth at E3. That's a bit odd, because they had graphic games when S-100 computers were stuck with character-based games like Rogue; and the Mac pretty well introduced the modern era of computer games. Even more interesting, if you ask games programmers about the easiest system to write for, they'll say it's the Power Mac. David Joyner of Dreamer's Guild said, "Putting up Doom is an afternoon's work on a Power Mac," and while he 's exaggerating a bit, he has a point. With the PowerPC processor, you can do all your calculations in floating-point math, and it will be as fast as integer arithmetic on Intel chips--and the PowerPC does floating-point math in parallel with other processes. Expect great things for Power Mac (and PowerPC systems in general).

We recently got a new Power Mac 8100/100 AV, but I haven't had much time to play with it. Like all Macs, it sets up easily. One of the first things we did was install all the new Mac speaking voices, including some we have from the product developer. I found some oddities. For instance, the keyboard says that the function of the Delete key depends on the OS and application, and that's sure true. In the Simple Text editor, that key, instead of deleting characters, inserts an invisible character that causes the voice to pause when it reads it. That capability can be useful, but if this feature is documented, I haven't found it.

The first application installed on the Power Mac was Roberta's reading-instruction program. The shipping version works like a charm, although some of the displays whizzed past a bit faster than we'd intended--the Power Mac really is fast. We're testing the development version that has the machine do the instruction; her currently shipping version needs someone who can read to serve as an instructor. The problem is that getting a good speaking voice that can read scripts takes a lot of memory and CPU power. If everyone had a Power Mac, it would be a simple job to get her program going, but, alas, the people likely to need it most are those least likely to have a Power Mac.

Once I had the Power Mac going, I looked around for programs to run. One of the first was a CD-ROM called Lost Treasures. Unfortunately, this is the kind of CD-ROM that makes you regret that CD-ROMs were ever invented. It has a wealth of information that you'd like to get at, but the interface makes you go around Red Robin's barn to find anything. It doesn't let you use a command l ine to look for something; instead, you have to work through endless screens.

When I was younger, I was quite a fan of lost treasures, partly because my great-grandfather MacKinnie was involved in recovering some of Laffite's gold in a Louisiana bayou. The story has been published a couple of times, but I'm dashed if I can find anything about it on this CD-ROM. It may be there, but that interface has defeated me.

When I was in high school, I recall reading about the Oak Island treasure (Oak Island is off the coast of Nova Scotia), so I looked for that, too, and found about a paragraph with less information than I can recall from a book I read 50 years ago.

I presume there's some useful information in the Lost Treasures CD-ROM, but you'll get more from good library books.

The last time I wrote about WizRule, I had the program but no clue as to how to buy a copy. Now there's a new version for Windows from a company called WizSoft. WizRule will examine your databases-- dBase, Clipper, Foxbase, or Paradox--and look for rules. An example of a rule might be, "If Customer is Franklin or Penn or Balboa, then City is Philadelphia; probability 0.98. The rule exists in 202 records." It will then list the exceptions.

Some of those exceptions may be database errors. WizRule is quite good at finding such things. Some rules will be trivial; but some of them may be extremely helpful in gaining insight into the way your company works. You may find, for example, that one salesperson consistently offers higher discounts than the others, or that one is far more productive in midweek than on Mondays or Fridays.

If you've got large databases, you probably have a wealth of information in there that you don't know about, and you need WizRule to get the most out of that data. It's pretty nifty.

David Mitchell describes Scanfx as something like a minivan: it doesn't do anything spectacularly well, but it does a lot of things more than adequately.

Scanf x is a combination color scanner, fax modem, and fax receiver. It connects to a phone line, and to both your computer and your printer, so that you can use it as a copier--just scan something and then print the copy; a plain-paper fax receiver; a normal fax machine; and a modem for sending faxes composed with a program such as WinFax. It comes with Calera's Optical Character Reader, meaning that it can translate typescript and some printed documents into machine-readable files.

Scanfx has the virtues and the limits of all sheet-feeder systems. It can feed itself a stack of paper, but you can't copy a book page or something oversize.Scanfx installs quite easily. You do have to install a board; the good news is that the board doesn't require an IRQ (interrupt request). The installation software is simple, and the system comes with a test color photograph; you can get it installed and tested in under 10 minutes. After that, it's pretty routine.

You wouldn't want to use Scanfx as the only copier in a busy office, but that's not its primary purpose. For copying an occasional page, it's pretty nifty; and, of course, you can use Optical Character Reader to scan the document into a machine-readable file and then reformat it in Word and print as many copies as you like.

If, like me, you hate curly faxes, but every time you look at the cost of a plain-paper fax you decide that curls aren't so bad after all, look into Scanfx. It may be just what you need.

The CD-ROM of the Month is Microsoft Encarta '95. Microsoft went to an awful lot of trouble to make this multimedia encyclopedia both informative and enjoyable, and that planning paid off. If you're planning on publishing a CD-ROM, look at this one to get some ideas on how it ought to be done.

The game of the month is Discworld from Psygnosis. For those who, like me, are addicted to English novelist Terry Pratchett's Discworld fantasies--set on a world that is, in fact, a disk carried by four elephants sta nding on the back of a giant turtle swimming through space, a world in which there can be intelligent if homicidal luggage, as well as wizards who study at the Unseen University--the Discworld game is a hoot. If you've never heard of Pratchett, and thus don't understand the rather obscure logic he uses, I suspect the game will drive you mad.

The book of the month is The Death of Common Sense: How Law Is Suffocating America by Philip K. Howard (Random House, 1994). If you suspect litigation and regulation have gotten out of hand, you'll be certain of it once you read this book. Some of the examples he gives are hilarious--until you realize it's all deadly serious, and people are fined, jailed, and driven out of business for transgressing absolutely senseless rules.

Next month, more on the Power Mac, including some educational software; a lot more on W95; and quite a lot of math and simulation software.

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FOR MORE INFORMATION

For those who, like me, are addicted to Terry Pratchett's Discworld fantasies, the Discworld ($39.99) game is a hoot. Contact Psygnosis, Ltd., Cambridge, MA, (800) 438-7794 or (617) 497-5457; http://www.sony.com.

Microsoft went to a lot of trouble to make Microsoft Encarta '95 ($99.95) both informative and enjoyable. Contact Microsoft Corp., Redmond, WA, (800) 429-9400 or (206) 882-8080; http://www.microsoft.com.

OS/2 Warp Connect (full-pack edition with Win-OS/2 code, $299) is neat, combining OS/2's mostly solid 32-bit multitasking performance with real connectivity capabilities. Contact IBM Corp., Austin, TX, (800) 342-6672 or call your local IBM dealer; http://www.ibm.com.

The PCI Bus Master Silver Kit's ($379) SCSI controller is fast, and the setup is easy. Contact AdvanSys, San Jose, CA, (800) 525-7443 or (408) 383-9400; http://www.advansys.com.

Little Cheetah is noticeably speedier sin ce we installed the Pentium OverDrive chip ($449). Contact Intel Corp., Santa Clara, CA, (800) 548-4725 or (408) 765-8080; http://www.intel.com.

Scanfx ($599) is a combination color scanner, fax modem, and fax receiver. Contact Plustek U.S.A., Inc., Sunnyvale, CA, (800) 685-8088 or (408) 745-7111.

If you work with SCSI much, keep a SCSIVue Active Diagnostic Terminator (50-pin Centronics, $59) and a couple of SCSIVue Gold Diagnostic Cables ($39 to $169) around. Contact Granite Digital, Union City, CA, (510) 471-6442.

If you need sound and CD-ROM in a hurry, the Sound Blaster AWE32 sound card (street price about $299) and the Blaster CD 4X CD-ROM drive kit (street price about $219) are the way to go. Contact Creative Labs, Inc., Milpitas, CA, (800) 998-1000 or (408) 428-6600; goblaster@compuserve.com.

If you've got large databases, you probably have a wealth of information in there that you don't know about, and you need WizRule (single license, $495) to get the most out of that data. Contact WizSoft, Inc., Framingham, MA, (508) 620-4554; http://www.wizsoft.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 .