Death Swoops and Upgrades

From a spacecraft to hardware and software upgrades, Dr. Pournelle's explorations into the unknown continue on all frontiers

Jerry Pournelle

I'm just back from watching the DC/X do a perfect death swoop, and maybe I'd better explain that. The DC/X is a one-third scale model of a single-stage-to-orbit (SSTO) spacecraft. Back in 1989, Max Hunter, General Daniel Graham, and I convinced the National Space Council to investigate the SSTO concept, and the DC/X was one result. If you see it fly, it's unforgettable: it goes straight up, hovers, and lands on a tail of fire.

One design for a full-size SSTO spacecraft reenters nose first, meaning that somewhere in the flight it must rotate to tail down. That's a dangerous maneuver that's become known as the death swoop, but yes terday's flight went so well it was almost dull.

There was one glitch. The radar altimeter gave a false reading, and the flight-control software, which thinks this is a very odd F-15 flying an even odder flight profile, believed the reading. Thus, the ship came down fast and landed harder than she was supposed to, crushing some nonresilient shock-absorbing material. That's what's supposed to happen in a hard landing, and the crushables are designed to be field-replaceable, so you can count this another successful test.

Meanwhile, we've been upgrading both hardware and software at Chaos Manor. As usual, things didn't go quite as planned, so we learned a lot.

The first upgrade was installing OS/2 Warp Connect on Valiant, the ValuePoint Pentium. Installing OS/2 has been so difficult that I expected more trouble with Warp Connect than I had. Still, I had enough problems that I kept IBM technical experts Sam Detweiler and Charlie Brown on the phone for 3 hours.

IBM has been listening: OS/2 Warp Connect's installation program is a lot better than previous OS/2 installation programs. Installing it on Percy, the IBM PS/2 Model 77, went without a hitch. Percy had been running Blue Label Warp, meaning that it has Win-OS/2 built in. Alas, Valiant was running Red Label Warp -- which requires your own DOS and Windows -- and OS/2 Warp Connect is Blue Label. An additional problem was that I was using OS/2 LAN Server with the older Warp. You can't install Warp Connect over that. Fortunately, it uninstalls itself easily.

Before it was over, I learned more about editing an OS/2 CONFIG.SYS file than I wanted. Although I was talking to system programmers, standard IBM technical support is quite good. If you're determined to get Warp Connect installed, they'll work with you until you manage it. One detail is significant: when you do get it installed, turn off your computer before you bring it up for the last time.

When you get OS/2 Warp Connect running, you'll like it. It retains o ne major design defect. Whereas Windows and Windows 95 (W95) trap Ctrl-Alt-Del and let you use that to shut down a nonresponding window, all flavors of OS/2 commit suicide when receiving Ctrl-Alt-Del. While it's rare to get an application so fouled up that Ctrl-Escape won't return to the OS/2 desktop, it can happen with both DOS and Windows programs running in an OS/2 environment. It's most likely when testing new software. It's extremely likely if you run a DOS game inside Windows inside OS/2. Also, I can reliably crash OS/2 by being careless with the reply editor in Norton Commander's MCI Mail Manager.

With that exception, I've found OS/2 Warp Connect as solid as a rock. It's fast. It networks to itself, Windows for Workgroups, and W95 with no problems. It does reliable multitasking. It prints so well that I've connected the Hewlett-Packard LaserJet III to Valiant and do all my printing across the network. The package includes an astonishing amount of useful and solid software, including communication s software that makes Internet surfing almost trivially simple.

OS/2 is neat. Why not try it? A year ago, that would have been an insane suggestion: changing OSes was a big deal. Now it's fairly simple. First, storage space is no longer a major problem. You can buy enormous hard drives -- a 1-GB IDE drive is under $300, and we got a 3-GB SCSI drive for under $800. Second, and more important, V Communications' System Commander lets you change OSes more easily than you used to be able to change CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT.

System Commander is a blooming miracle. It's simple to install, and once installed, it's easy to add OSes. The instructions are complete, and the documents are a decent guide to configuring OSes.

You install System Commander under DOS. If you're putting it on an OS/2 machine, you dual-boot back to DOS and install it there, after which System Commander will operate exactly as OS/2 Boot Manager, whether you installed Boot Manager or not. Once you have System C ommander installed, you can add OSes to your heart's content. I'm seriously thinking of setting up a machine with Blue and Red Label Warp; DOS 3.x, 5.x, and 6.x; Novell DOS 7; NT; W95; Linux; and SCO Unix. That may be going a bit far, but it's possible.

Some installations can be a bit tricky, and you'll want to read the documents carefully. For instance, if you already have W95 installed, you must save some files in a temporary place, boot up with a DOS disk, install System Commander, reboot W95, reboot from a DOS disk, SYS the hard disk with DOS, and reboot one more time. At this point, you'll have your choice of booting with DOS or W95. You can then add other OSes.

Highly recommended for anyone who likes to experiment.

PowerQuest's PartitionMagic works with System Commander, and it's recommended in the System Commander manual. While System Commander lets you change OSes without reformatting and losing your data, PartitionMagic lets you decide how much of your hard drive yo u want to devote to each OS. You can change those allocations on the fly. If you want to experiment with OS/2's High Performance File System (HPFS), this is a painless way to try it.

The version I have says "For OS/2," but in fact it includes a version that runs just fine under DOS. You can use DOS PartitionMagic to create a new logical drive for OS/2 and other OSes. You can then use System Commander to choose among those systems when you boot up and finally use PartitionMagic to reallocate space to them after you've done your experiments -- all without losing data. Of course, you should back up everything before trying this.

Installing and using PartitionMagic is easy, and the instructions are clear and complete. If you get System Commander, you'll almost certainly want this, too. Highly recommended.

Before you upgrade, you must back up your system. You should know about SnapBack, which may be the ultimate in backup programs.

My regular backup system remains Palindrom e's Network Archivist with a digital audiotape (DAT) drive. I have used it for years both locally and over a network, and I have never lost a byte of data protected by it.

Network Archivist is great for recovering lost files, and its library management guards against operator errors. I wouldn't want to be without it; but using it to restore whole volumes can be complicated, and it doesn't do anything to restore the boot sectors of an OS.

For that you need SnapBack, which builds up a "below-the-OS" low-level image of any drive or drive partition. That image can contain as much of the original data as you like and can be stored on nearly any SCSI device, including tape. SnapBack itself can be run from a hard drive or a floppy disk on any machine that will boot DOS. Once SnapBack is running, it doesn't care what OS it's installing on the target disk, nor does that target disk have to be formatted.

Novell system administrators will love the newest version of SnapBack, which lets you back up a ha rd drive and transfer everything to a new and larger drive with a larger Novell partition.

If you need this, you need it bad.

Our next upgrade was to replace the Pentium chip in Pentafluge. Intel makes it very easy to replace your math-defective Pentium chip. It took me longer than it will take you, because I happen to know a senior Intel vice president, and I called him. My friend handed the job to another executive, who passed it along to a third; eventually I got connected to the people who do this routinely, which is where I should have started. They asked a number of intelligent questions to establish the speed of my current Pentium chip and the kind of socket it sits in. Then they got my address and a credit-card number.

The credit-card number is required so that you'll have an incentive to return your old chip: Intel really wants that chip back, and if you don't send it in, they'll charge you about $500. However, they send self-addressed prepaid packaging, so returnin g your old chip is both simple and free.

The new chip comes with complete instructions. It took me less than 5 minutes to power down Pentafluge, open him up, replace his Pentium chip with the new one, connect the chip fan to the power supply, button up the machine, and restart it. It took another 5 minutes to box up the old chip and get it out.

I hoped my next hardware upgrade would be as easy as upgrading the Pentium, but it didn't work out that way.

It started with a Western Digital Caviar AC31000 1.1-GB hard drive, which I used to upgrade SuperCow, the Gateway 2000 486DX2/66. I was in a hurry, so I figured that rather than transferring all the files from the 500-MB hard drive SuperCow came with, I'd install the Caviar as a second physical drive. Western Digital's instructions are clear and complete.

Alas, when I tried to partition the new drive, SuperCow could see only about 25 MB of the 1.1 GB. The instructions warned that might happen; the remedy is to get a new B IOS. That costs $80, and you get it from Micro Firmware (Norman, OK, (405) 573-5501; http://www.firmware.com ). Ordering the BIOS took less than 5 minutes, including rebooting SuperCow to get the current BIOS version number.

SuperCow uses flash ROM, so the new BIOS came on a floppy disk. The documentation is excellent. About 10 minutes later, I had installed the BIOS and used FDISK to partition the Caviar AC31000. Formatting took another 10 minutes or so.

For most of you, that will be the end of the story, but apparently nothing is simple at Chaos Manor. My hard drive worked just fine, Windows for Workgroups came up, and I could share the new drive across the network -- but for reasons we still don't understand, the Future Domain 8-bit SCSI card that runs Network Archivist and its DAT drive simply would not work.

I have two versions of that SCSI card, an ancient one that has no ROM and is thus ideal for using a DAT since it takes up no memory unless the tape is actually operating, and a later version with ROM that will run an 8-bit SCSI device string, including the Maximum Storage Duette read/write optical drive. Both worked fine before I upgraded the BIOS; neither works now. On boot-up, they report "Internal Self Check Failure."

I reported this to Micro Firmware and shortly after got E-mail from Robert Braver, president of the company. He made several suggestions, all sensible. None worked. Finally he asked me to send him the SCSI cards, which I did. Of course, they worked perfectly when he tried them on some of his Gateway 2000 486DX2/66 systems.

The next step will be to swap motherboards. Micro Firmware has offered to send me one; they're far more curious about what has caused this than I am.

The bottom line here is that the Western Digital Caviar AC31000 is easy to install and works splendidly. If you need to install a new BIOS -- and you probably will if you have a machine more than a few ye ars old -- that won't be difficult. If you have problems, Micro Firmware has excellent technical support.

About a month ago, I got a strange offer, which I presume was made to a lot of journalists: Fujitsu would be pleased to send me one of its DynaMO 230 magneto-optical (MO) drives if I'd sign a pledge not to sell it for a year. Clearly, they're trying to break the lock SyQuest and Iomega established in much the same way.

This was no problem for me. I never sell anything I get for review. Some equipment goes back to the manufacturer, some gets destroyed, and quite a lot just gets used until it's obsolete, after which it goes to a local school; but I sure don't sell any of it. Anyway, I signed the agreement and specified the external model.

It's neat. The external drive is 5 by 8 by 1.5 inches thick, considerably smaller than the DAT unit. It comes with a little stand that will hold its slot vertical, but I laid it on its back. Unfortunately, I wasn't paying attention. I put it on the tower case of the Cheetah 386 and put the DAT unit on top of it. Over a week later, I discovered that I'd laid it upside down, completely covering the ventilation holes. I don't recommend that as standard practice, but it doesn't seem to have done any harm.

The DynaMO 230 came with an Adaptec 16-bit EZ-SCSI card. Installation was simple. Adaptec's documents are complete, and their installation software took care of it all. I had the DynaMO 230 running in 10 minutes. Then, just for luck, I put Network Archivist and the DAT drive on the same SCSI string. This is the drive that normally runs off the Future Domain card I'd sent to Micro Firmware for testing. When I booted up, the Adaptec card announced that it had found both the optical and tape drives, and when I brought up Network Archivist, that ran fine. Both the DAT drive and the DynaMO 230 are now sharable network resources.

The DynaMO 230 came with an order form for more optical disks: a five-pack of 230-MB MO disks costs $185. A 230 -MB optical disk actually formats to 217 MB, so your medium cost is about 17 cents a megabyte. The optical disks are smaller (about the size of a 3-1/2-inch floppy disk), and the drive is light and easy to carry around. The medium cost with DAT is about 1 cent a megabyte, but tape is a lot slower and less convenient.

The Fujitsu DynaMO 230 seems reliable. I've beat the living daylights out of it by setting up a batch file that writes and overwrites it for hours at a time. I did get a write-protect error when it was upside down, but standing it up to get some ventilation fixed the problem. It's fast. Though not as fast as the current generation of hard drives, it's faster than those we had five years ago. It takes a lot less time to write a backup copy to an optical drive than to a tape drive. Speed is important to backup systems: unless they're fast, you won't use them often. Every hour or so, I write a copy of my current work to a different machine; it would be as easy to write to an optical disk.

Everyone needs more disk space. If you are thinking of expanding, optical drives like Fujitsu's DynaMO 230 are well worth considering.

Continuing with upgrades, there's W95; I've had five builds in the last month. Each one cures another bug or two.

We went through builds 464, 480, 495, 501, and suddenly jumped to 950, which is probably a symbolic number. Build 950 installed easily -- all the upgrades have -- or so I thought until I tried to access the network.

There wasn't any network. Pentafluge couldn't see any other machines out there. I nearly panicked. Then I remembered I'd had a similar problem with OS/2 Warp Connect, so I tried the same remedy: I turned the machine off, counted to 10, and turned it back on.

That did it. When W95 came up, I looked into the Network Neighborhood folder, and voila!, there were all my network resources.

There are still some problems. For example, while I use Microsoft Word for complex editing, I prefer to create text with a c haracter-based editor. For years, I used the stand-alone version of Q&A Write, but my experience with Word has got me accustomed -- addicted might be a better word -- to using a mouse for moving and deleting blocks of text. Stand-alone Q&A Write doesn't have mouse support, but the Write built into Q&A 4.0 does, and I decided to write this column using that.

Anyway, all went well until I needed to transfer an address from a previous column. What I usually do is open a DOS window running Microlytics' GOfer, send it out to search my old columns until it finds the company name, and use the Windows editing facility to mark and copy the text from the GOfer window and then paste it into the Q&A Write window. This works fine with stand-alone Q&A Write; but when I tried it with Write inside Q&A itself, I got an error message inviting me to recover with "escape." That "recovered" in the sense that I was back at the command level of Q&A, but all my text was gone.

Fortunately, I save early and often, particularly before doing anything odd; I don't leave an editing window without saving my text first. Still, it's annoying, because text transfer through copy and paste is a convenient Windows feature. By mucking around, I find that I can paste into stand-alone Q&A Write, save the file, and read that saved file into Q&A. That's not a very convenient kludge.

I suppose I'll just have to bite the bullet and start using Word for text creation. On the other hand, finding bugs is fun....

W95 has multimedia support and a ton of features, so it's a natural for a multimedia tutorial program on CD-ROM. Alas, EasyTutor from CRT Multimedia isn't the right one for me. It has some slick multimedia, but while the introductory level is surely that, the detailed level doesn't go anywhere near far enough.

For instance, at the Microsoft W95 dog and pony show, they showed a lot of tricks using the registry and registry editor. W95 help on using the registry is skimpy to nonexistent, so I'd ho ped this tutorial would tell me more. Alas, the Power User topic is no more useful on the subject than Microsoft's Help file.

It's worse than that. If you leave EasyTutor open and go do something else, it not only puts itself on top of your toolbar, where it prominently displaces the Programs item, but it somehow bollixes up the Alt-Tab task-switching feature. Closing EasyTutor fixes both problems.

I sure wish I had a good tutorial to explain the W95 registry, though.

I continue to work on Roberta's reading-instruction program. The Mac version has produced some astonishing results in beta tests. I'm upgrading the QuickBasic DOS version preparatory to putting it on Windows with Visual Basic.

In both cases, I'm using Crescent Tools from Progress Software. Visual Basic plus Crescent Tools gives you some truly awesome programming capabilities. The programs may not be as fast and compact as programs written in C++, but I really don't care. With Visual Basic, I can get thing s running in days, not months.

I'm also looking at 3D Choreographer from AniCom. It produces stand-alone animated sequences you can call with programs like PowerPoint -- and, of course, Visual Basic. I've only just started with it, but it seems easy to use and solid.

The book of the month is Independent Birth Of Organisms by Periannan Senapathy (Genome International, 1994). Fair warning: this book is heavy reading, being nothing less than a new theory of evolution; or, rather, a critique of why current theories based on Darwin can't be correct. If nothing else, this is a readable (with difficulty) introduction to modern molecular biology. I found it fascinating, but then I like complicated scientific detective stories.

There are two computer books of the month from The Waite Group: Visual Basic 4 How-to for Windows and QB Primer Plus . These are excellent as both introductions and reference works.

There are about a zillion Int ernet books. One that's sort of fun is by Rawn Shah and James Romine, Playing MUDs on the Internet (Wiley, 1995). A MUD is a Multiuser Dungeon, and this will tell you what they are, how they work, and which ones to look into. That's worth knowing, because I suspect MUD technology will become important for business and education in the future.

The game of the month is Terror from the Deep, MicroProse Software's follow-on to XCOM: UFO Defense. The aliens are back, and they're really angry. Warning: as with many MicroProse games, this was released with bugs. Log on to GEnie or another on-line service and download the upgrade patch. Also available on GEnie is a great little "cryogenics" program that will let you transfer your XCOM troopers into this game.

One final note: they fly the DC/X with a mouse. When the Air Force turned the DC/X over to NASA after the flight, the presentation plaque sported a model of the ship and a Macintosh mouse.

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PRODUCT INFORMATION

The Caviar AC31000 (1 GB, $349) is easy to install and works splendidly. Contact Western Digital, Irvine, CA, (800) 832-4778 or (714) 932-5000; http://www.wdc.com .

If you're thinking of expanding, optical drives like the DynaMO 230 (external, $749; internal, $649) are well worth considering. Contact Fujitsu Computer Products of America, San Jose, CA, (800) 626-4686 or (408) 432-6333.

Installing and using PartitionMagic (for OS/2 and DOS, $69; for DOS and Windows, $49) is easy. Contact PowerQuest Corp., Orem, UT, (800) 379-2566 or (801) 226-8977; http://www.powerquest.com .

Novell system administrators will love SnapBack 3.06 (per server, $995), which lets you back up a hard drive and transfer everything to a new and larger drive with a larger Novell partition. Contact Columbia Data Products, Altamonte Springs, FL, (407) 869-6700; http://www.cdpi.com .

System Commander ($99.95) lets you change OSes more easily than you used to be able to change CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT. Contact V Communications, Inc., San Jose, CA, (800) 648-8266 or (408) 296-4224.

The game of the month is Terror from the Deep (about $49.95). Contact MicroProse Software, Hunt Valley, MD, (800) 879-7529 or (410) 771-1151; http://www.microprose.com .

3D Choreographer ($149) seems easy to use and solid. Contact AniCom, Inc., Chapel Hill, NC, (800) 949-4559 or (919) 967-2890; http://www.spadion.com/anicom .

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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 .