arger market in the PC world, and she needs to stay familiar with it, although she uses the DOS system mostly for communications.
She operates a big network of home-schoolin
g teachers, as well as other educational conferences, and much of that uses automated software that runs only in DOS. Still, as Richard observes, she may be the last person in the U.S. running Desqview. Moreover, while she's been able to connect to the Internet through BIX, it's time for her to get on the World Wide Web itself, and for that she wants Windows. Clearly, it was time to upgrade.
Incidentally, BYTE founded BIX, and although BYTE no longer has any ownership--BIX is part of the Delphi conferencing system--the BYTE editors have BIX accounts, and we use it for a lot of our official conferencing work. BIX doesn't have the fancy graphical interfaces of other information utilities, but it does have the largest signal-to-noise ratio of any system I know.
Anyway, we have two elderly--anything three years old is elderly--Gateway 2000 486DX2/66 systems. One, SuperCow, which has VL-Bus video, has been our experimental system and test-bed for a long time. The other is even older, being essentiall
y the same machine without VL-Bus video. It has a Diamond Stealth video card, which is a lot faster than whatever VGA/EGA card is in Roberta's present system. For some years, that machine served as a NetWare network server, and it worked fine.
Recently, we took down the NetWare network because we weren't using it. For my purposes, OS/2 Warp Connect, Microsoft Windows for Workgroups, and Microsoft Windows 95 (W95) network nicely and provide all the network I need. That left the Gateway machine for Roberta; another hand-me-down, but it's a darned good one, and a lot faster than what she was using.
My first decision was what to put on it.
I had three realistic choices: OS/2 Warp Connect, Windows for Workgroups 3.11, and W95. I went on-line and asked for advice. A major advantage of BIX is that I get useful information rather than Spam. I had a lively discussion with many knowledgeable people.
First, because Roberta uses many DOS programs and does communications, OS/2 Warp Conne
ct looked good: it is, after all, what I use for most of my communications, including Web crawling. OS/2 is a better DOS than DOS by a lot, and it's very reliable for multitasking communications.
The problem was multimedia. OS/2 can't run Microsoft Audio Video Interleave (AVI) files--Microsoft won't license it to IBM--and while there's a shareware version of QuickTime that runs with OS/2, there's no supported version. Since one of the reasons Roberta wants an upgrade is to be able to work with Windows education software--there's a lot, and most of it is multimedia--OS/2 just isn't going to do it. That's a bit sad, but there it is.
The next consensus was that W95 is preferable to Windows for Workgroups 3.11. It's easier to learn, you can do more with it, and, in my experience, it works with DOS multimedia a lot better than Windows.
That decided, I dug out my DOS 6.22 disks and started removing NetWare by deleting its partition. I used FDISK. Version 2.0 of Partition Magic gets rid of FDISK
, and I should have used that, but I was in a hurry, and after all, I was creating only one bootable partition. An hour later, I had the disk formatted and DOS 6.22 installed. Next we needed a CD-ROM drive.
Last week, Ron Sartore, president of the late and, by me, much lamented Cheetah International,
came for a visit, and I let him take Big Cheetah away. It was a sad moment, but for some reason, Big Cheetah had been experiencing mysterious errors. Since there's a lot of pressure for me to test and use machines from companies still in business, it seemed pointless to spend much time troubleshooting what would never be more than a very fast 486DX2/66; so Ron took him away. Before he did, I removed the two-year-old Creative Labs Sound Blaster 16 card and its double-speed CD-ROM drive.
It took about 10 minutes to get that installed in Roberta's machine. Then the trouble started. It all worked "breadboarded," but now I had to find mounting hardware for both the CD-ROM drive and a big ne
w hard drive.
When I was entering college, I must have done well on spatial-relations test questions. I recall a number of items where I had to choose what a figure would look like if rotated 60 degrees, and I got decent scores on my college entrance exams. Since then, I must have lost that ability: getting those silly rails on in the right place took four times as long as I had expected.
Then I found that the 5 1/4-inch floppy drive wasn't working properly. These things do wear out. Since I had to get a new drive anyway, I took out both floppy drives and installed a Teac FD-505 combination 3 1/2-/5 1/4-inch drive. It's a half-height drive, so it takes no more room than a single drive, and it costs little more than a single floppy drive. You don't need a 5 1/4-inch floppy drive very often, but it's handy to have one. I can recommend the Teac FD-505; we've got one on about half the machines here.
The trick is connecting the cable: on a flat floppy cable, one of the connectors has a section
of the cable twisted. On the other connector, the cable remains flat. If you connect the one with the twist, the 3 1/2-inch drive will be A. If you want A to be the 5 1/4-inch drive, connect the one without the twist.
Installing the drive took no time at all except for those pesky mounting rails. We've really simplified the electronics in these machines, but the mechanical stuff leaves a lot to be desired. Eventually, I got it done while removing the skin from three knuckles.
Testing the 3 1/2-inch drive was no problem, since that's what I booted from.
I then looked around for a 5 1/4-inch floppy disk, and what came up was Alien Names, a shareware program written years ago by science fiction author and publisher Ralph Roberts. It efficiently generates a random assortment of alien-sounding names according to vowel/consonant schemes you input. It also generates insults.
I'd forgotten just how good this program is, and I'm glad I rediscovered it. Some programs are nearly perfe
ct at what they do, and this is one of them. You can find a copy in my BIX conference.
The floppy drive worked fine. Now for W95. I had four choices.
First, I could install Windows for Workgroups, get that running, test that the machine worked on the network, and finally install an upgrade version of W95 from a CD-ROM.
Second, I could skip W95 and install the upgrade CD-ROM version directly. As many readers have pointed out since my December column, the upgrade versions of W95 don't require that Windows be previously installed; they merely demand that you insert disk one of the Windows installation set at the proper time. I'd vaguely known that, but the December column was about tracking bugs, and I generally try to do that systematically. I wanted Windows for Workgroups 3.11 running so I could test things, including the network, before installing W95.
My third choice would have been a bit illegal. I have acquired an OEM CD-ROM copy of W95 to be installed on new machines. M
icrosoft doesn't sell original-installation CD-ROM versions of W95 except for OEM installations, probably because of the problem of supporting CD-ROM drives.
My fourth choice was to install W95 from floppy disks. Alas, that's what I did, largely to see what it would be like; and I learned that it's worth almost
anything
not to install W95 from floppy disks. It would have been easier to install Windows for Workgroups 3.11, get that running, and upgrade to W95 from a CD-ROM.
It takes forever--4 1/2 hours--just to get W95 running directly from floppy disks, and when you think you are done and try to configure, or install W95 Plus, you find yourself feeding from one to seven floppy disks into the system again. And again. It is bad enough, in fact, that I am going to reinstall W95 from an upgrade CD-ROM so that in the future when the system wants something, it will ask for that rather than the floppy disks.
Aside from the near-terminal tedium, though, everything went swimmingly. W95 r
ecognized the Diamond Stealth video card, the ViewSonic 17-inch monitor, the Creative Labs Sound Blaster 16 card, the CD-ROM drive, and the Intel EtherExpress network card. For reasons I don't understand, when I upgraded Pentafluge from Windows for Workgroups 3.11, I had to manually tell W95 that the EtherExpress card was set at interrupt request (IRQ) 10. Not this time.
The bottom line is that Roberta has W95 and is connected to the Chaos Manor internal network; and I can say that it's possible to install W95 from floppy disks, although you really don't want to do it.
It was worth the work. For years, I have used an old Hewlett-Packard LaserJet III printer. It isn't fast or fancy, but for my limited printing, it has been good enough. Roberta, on the other hand, has a gorgeous 600-dot-per-inch Lexmark printer, which is faster and fancier. So now that she's connected to the Chaos Manor network, I can use her printer when I have a big or fancy job.
Once I had her system running, I got
a nasty surprise.
I had installed W95 with the Microsoft "Dove soap bar" Home Mouse plugged into serial port 1. Her older machine had a mouse port and PS/2 mouse, with the modem connected to COM1, so her software expected the modem to be on COM1. No problem, I figured. Just plug the mouse into COM2.
That didn't work. W95 said it could find no mouse. Since COM2 on Gateway machines is a 25-pin port, and the mouse uses a nine-pin plug, I thought I had a bad 25-to-nine-pin adapter, but that turned out not to be the case. Moreover, when I took that rig upstairs and tried it on SuperCow, which has an identical serial-port arrangement, I got the same result: the mouse wasn't found on COM2, this time by the Microsoft Mouse DOS software. I know I have had systems and software able to find a mouse on either COM1 or COM2 without problems, but not this time.
I had several choices. First, I could find the documents. Perhaps there's a configuration file created when you install mouse software, and on
ce it expects to find that mouse on COM1, you must reinstall to change ports. I could find out and take care of it that way.
The simpler way was to put the mouse in COM1 and use COM2 for communications; which is what I did. I then discovered that Procomm 1 must be the dumbest program on earth. If you invoke it and it expects to find a modem on COM1 but none is present there, it will sit there blinking "Initializing" until doomsday. Moreover, the only way to tell it to look on COM2 is to get into the program, only of course it won't load.
I solved that by booting up with the mouse in COM1, invoking Procomm, unplugging the mouse from COM1, and plugging in the modem. Then when Procomm came up, I told it to look in future at COM2 and plugged the modem in there. That worked. I replaced Procomm 1 with Procomm 2, which has much the same interface as Procomm 1 but doesn't have that stupid trick.
On mice: I like the Microsoft "Big Teardrop" Mouse 2.0, but
Logitech's newest TrackMan M
arble trackball is terrific: the pointing is precise, the software is compatible with all flavors of Windows and OS/2, and the feel is excellent.
If you do a lot of mousing, a trackball is kinder to your wrist because you can rest your hand on it; and Logitech's TrackMan Marble stays cleaner than most upside-down mice. Recommended.
I installed Procomm 2 on Roberta's machine because she was used to Procomm 1,
but it won't be permanent. I've recently converted to HyperAccess 2.1 for Windows. For years, my colleagues Wayne Rash and Hugh Kenner have recommended it.
I limped along with Procomm 2 until W95, when I made an awful discovery: while I can upload with ZMODEM in Procomm 2 and W95, I can't download with ZMODEM from BIX. Any attempts to download produce the message that the download was canceled at user request. Apparently, the Procomm 2/W95 combination sends some spurious character that BIX interprets as an abort order.
There's also HyperAccess 6.0 for OS/2; it's n
ot a converted Windows version but a real OS/2 program. A "lite" version comes with one of the OS/2 Warp Connect upgrade packages, but get the "full" pack if you're going to use it much.
HyperAccess comes with log-in scripts for a number of services, including BIX, and it's easy to generate others. You can mark, cut, and paste without difficulty, making it easy to transfer stuff on-line to other files. The capture system is intuitive. It sends files easily. I like HyperAccess 2.1 for Windows a lot. Recommended.
The newest gadget at Chaos Manor is a 4-GB Micropolis MicroDisk 3243.
This is an external model. It has its own power supply and can be carried from one machine to another.
The MicroDisk 3243 comes with an ingenious case system that lets you stack several drives into a tower. The base unit contains the power supply and the SCSI connection to the external world; if you add drives, they'll be connected internally. You can use a stack of these to build a RAID system or s
imply to add several new drives to your system.
Installation was a snap. It took a few minutes to unpack the drives and accessories--Micropolis believes in secure packaging--and another 15 or 20 minutes to be sure we understood the instructions for assembling the external housing. Once that was done, we connected the drive to the external SCSI connection of the Advansys SCSI controller on the Windows NT machine and rebooted. NT saw the drive at once and offered to format it. Half an hour later, we had a perfectly good 4-GB drive that's visible all over the network. Over the next few days, I let a batch file write a zillion little files and a couple of big ones, erase some of the files, run an optimization program, erase the disk, and start over. This is a good stress test.
I didn't expect any problems, and there weren't any. The MicroDisk 3243 is fast and rugged. This particular model is said to be optimized for audiovisual data transfer, meaning that it's better at delivering a high sustained r
ate over time than really fast short bursts. I'm not sure what any of that means; there comes a point when things are fast enough, and this drive certainly is that. It's quiet, and it runs cool.
I recall vividly when a 10-MB hard drive was about the size of a small washing machine. Now we have 4 GB, complete with a power supply, in something smaller than a shoe box. Micropolis makes good drives. Recommended.
Upgrading the wife--as Roberta puts it--delayed completing the setup of our new dual-Pentium system.
This fire-eater is built up from a PC Power & Cooling case and power supply, a Micronix motherboard, a Peripheral Component Interconnect (PCI) fast SCSI controller, Century Micro memory, a Digital Equipment hard drive, and a Matrox video board.
We'll probably substitute a Micropolis 9-GB hard drive for the 4-GB Digital hard drive before we're done, if for no other reason than that the Micropolis drive is quieter; there's a mildly annoying hum from the Digital drive. If th
e system were closed up, I doubt we'd notice the sound, but one reason for this system is to use it as a test-bed, which means it's lying on a workbench with the case open much of the time.
We intend to use V Communications' System Commander 2.2 and PowerQuest's Partition Magic 2.0 to install a whole bunch of OSes on this machine: both MS-DOS and PC-DOS, W95, Windows NT, OS/2, and Linux. System Commander lets you boot up with whichever OS you like; Partition Magic lets you change the disk partition allocated to each OS without reformatting the disk. The programs together are a godsend.
The only OS that takes real advantage of the dual processors is NT, and that hasn't been installed yet because I had some problems with the CD-ROM drive. We recently got a new six-speed Plextor 6PleX CD-ROM drive, and I first fired up the new machine with a QLogic SCSI controller that didn't have the right drivers. Then I took the Qlogic controller out and installed the Adaptec PCI fast SCSI controller that ships
with the 6PleX drive.
I expected some trouble, but there was none: the system fired up, recognized the hard drive, recognized the 6PleX CD-ROM drive, and waited for instructions. Alas, I'm out of time, so I didn't get NT installed yet. Next month for sure. Meanwhile, that 6PleX drive sure is fast.
The CD-ROM revolution continues.
Writable CD-ROM drives now cost less than read-only units did just a couple of years ago, meaning that nearly anyone can get into the CD-ROM business now--and a great many people have. I get new CD-ROMs almost every day.
The trend is toward interactive multimedia. Some are educational. Others are a bit different. I suppose when CD-ROMs first came out, I should have been able to predict that there would be hundreds of discs with titles like Samurai Pervert Interactive, but I didn't.
I did foresee that the CD-ROM would be a major boon to scholarship. Logos Research Systems' Bible software is a great example. Their Logos CD Word Library 2.0, Lev
el Four CD-ROM contains seven English Bible translations, including King James, American Standard, Revised Standard, and New Revised Standard; the Old Testament in Hebrew and Greek; the New Testament in Greek, with Byzantine and Alexandrian versions; the Latin Vulgate; translation tools, including several dictionaries and grammar expositions; major Bible commentaries; maps; and a lot of other scholarly and devotional tools.
It's all searchable, left to right for English and Latin, right to left for Hebrew. You can set up split screens with the original text and several translations side by side. There's an editor for attaching notes. You can extract and print texts. It comes with a short instructional video. They've even preserved the original fonts and text formats of works such as Jerome's and Matthew Henry's commentaries. In a word, they've done this right.
They've set the standard for scholarly works on CD-ROM. If you have any interest in Bible studies, you need it. Highly recommended.
I long resisted 21-inch monitors, and now I wonder why I did.
Yesterday, I installed a ViewSonic Professional Series PT810 at my main station. It took about 10 minutes, most of that devoted to carrying this 80-pound beauty up the stairs. W95 recognized it instantly. Changing to 1280 by 1024 pixels took a few minutes.
Then I sat down to it. John Carr, my long-suffering assistant, was raving about how great the color was and how sharp the icons looked. I put up some text. "It's maybe a little fuzzy?," I said. Then I realized: I was still wearing my street glasses. Of course it looked fuzzy. I changed to my computer glasses with 28-inch focal length, and you'll have to fight me to get this monitor away from me.
I'll bet that 5 minutes after Larry Niven sees it, he will order one. I am literally sitting here wondering how I got along without this all these years. I can read this comfortably from any position. When I switch to the desktop, I can have all kinds of stuff lying around on
-screen, and I don't have to lean forward to see the icons.
Modern video boards and W95 can take advantage of a big screen. If you spend a good part of your time staring at a computer monitor, get a good one. Why go blind? I love this ViewSonic Professional Series PT810. Highly recommended.
The
game of the month
, and probably the year, is Legend Entertainment's Mission Critical.
It starts fast: you are alone aboard a U.S. battle cruiser in a war zone in space. Your captain and all the crew are dead, but the skipper and his executive officer arranged for you to survive to carry out the crucial mission of the ship. No one but the skipper and the executive officer knew what that mission was. Meanwhile, the ship has been damaged and needs repair.
When you get the repairs made, your real trouble starts: the enemy is coming, and you have to fight this ship with no crew. That's barely possible, because the combat system is pretty realistic: you give orders to drones, and t
hey do the fighting.
The graphics and sound effects are great, there are lots of movie action sequences with good human actors saying intelligent things, and, in general, they did this right. It has a realistic feel. I had no trouble installing and running this on Pentafluge under W95. Highly recommended.
The
CD-ROM of the month
is Microsoft Windows 95 Plus.
You don't have to have this, but you'll like it. Be sure to install the pinball game: it's the most realistic computer pinball simulation I have seen.
The
book of the month
is John December's
Presenting Java
(Sam's Net, ISBN 1-57521-039-8). Java is Sun Microsystems' animation programming language for the Web. Since Microsoft has licensed Java, it has become the de facto standard Web language. Hot Java is a Web browser written in Java and available from
http://www.java.sun.com/
. They're described in clear language in this book. Recommended.
An Upgrade for Mrs. Pournelle
