The PCI bus was supposed to solve all our compatibility problems,
but instead it has created more. It's the same with Plug and Play, and the reason is the same in both cases: there's a lot of "legacy" hardware out there, and making provision for that to work involves compromises that can cripple modern stuff. The result, however, looks like just another part of the general scheme to make us feel stupid.
Example: last night we fired-up the dual-Pentium 120 we built up from a Micronics motherboard and a PC Power & Cooling power supply and case. It had been idle because of problems with the Digital Equipment 3-GB SCSI hard drive. Recently, that was fixed under warranty.
We added a Distributed Processing Technology 3 caching drive controller and brought up the system as a Windows NT server. NT recognized the dual Pentium processors without difficulty. We also added a Micropolis external 4-GB hard drive, giving us 7 GB of uncompressed server storage; enough, surely?
The system is named S
pirit because its drive controller and some of the memory came from Big Cheetah. Since it's a server, it will need only VGA. We happened to have an older Diamond Viper PCI video card, more than good enough, so in it went. We also tried the Applied Creative Technology Ultimate PCI-3000 Ethernet card.
NT worked fine. The network didn't. It would come up for a minute or two and then vanish. This turns out to be a hardware bug in a beta version of the Ultimate PCI-3000 Ethernet card. That was surprising: I've used ACT equipment for years -- they made that wonderful little box of memory that was my print server from DOS 2 right through Windows 3.0 -- and I've found their stuff to be solid and reliable, which is one reason I agreed to work with beta-test cards. Of course, companies send out beta-test equipment so that people like me find the bugs and you don't have to.
I wanted to use the Ultimate PCI-3000 Ethernet card because it has two Ethernet ports: a regular 10Base-T and a 10Base-T EZ. Regular 10B
ase-T must be connected from your machine to a concentrator or hub, such as the Garrett Magnum H80-B Personal Hub, which bridges between coax and 10Base-T lines here at Chaos Manor. The 10Base-T EZ system, by contrast, can be daisy chained, so that if you have only two or three machines, you can connect them directly one to another without any additional equipment. ACT likes to advertise that setting up their 10Base-T Ethernet is as easy as setting up an Apple network, and that's pretty close to true. Moreover, if one of the machines in the 10Base-T EZ network is then connected into an existing Ethernet system, they all will be. In our case, we want to run a single line downstairs and connect several machines to it, so the 10Base-T EZ system is nearly ideal. More on that another time.
As it happens, ACT had already found out about the hardware problem (it showed up only on fast machines) and had sent me a replacement that works just fine, but, as usual, we were working late at night, so we didn't know t
hat. Back in the cable room's hardware archives, we found an ancient ISA-bus Artisoft Ethernet card with both 10Base-T and thin-wire Ethernet on it. That worked first crack. Then it was time to put in the seating screws for the cards.
Have you noticed that motherboards get smaller while the chips and their fans get bigger? In our case, the video card wouldn't seat because the edge hit the chip fan. Fortunately, the Ethernet card is a bit shorter, so it could go in that slot, while the video card went where the Ethernet card used to be.
Of course, the Ethernet would no longer work. Back in ISA days, we learned that a slot is a slot, but that's not true for PCI. The system expected to find that Ethernet card in slot 3, not slot 1. Once again, the solution is to nuke the installed Ethernet driver, turn the machine off, and start over. With the driver gone, NT will examine the physical devices and install drivers for them. This worked just fine, and we now have a big dual-Pentium NT server. Its client
s include two Windows 95 machines, two Windows 3.11 machines, an OS/2 Warp system that is also the network's print server, and a 10Base-T hub into which we plug laptops and visiting systems. That all works just fine.
Once up, NT looks to the rest of the network like a Windows machine, even though we set up Spirit with the NT File System (NTFS) -- which is NT's equivalent of the OS/2 High Performance File System (HPFS) -- rather than DOS/file allocation table (FAT). The disadvantage of NTFS is that we'll never be able to dual-boot that machine to DOS. That's no loss. The advantage is that using NTFS will let us add our Power Mac to the network. We haven't quite done that yet: Alex says one miracle at a time.
The miracle is that despite the problems with the PCI bus and Ethernet cards, we got a dual-Pentium NT server with two physical hard drives up and running from scratch in about 3 hours without serious problems. If you have some familiarity with Windows but no experience with NT, it will probabl
y take you longer, possibly a whole day -- but you should be able to do it. That's news. A year ago, Alex and I between us couldn't get an NT system up and running in under two full days.
Our next step will be to install a big Exabyte tape drive and backup software and use the server to back up the whole network. Unfortunately, there's no NT version of Palindrome's Network Archivist, so we'll have to use some other backup software. That's unfortunate, because Palindrome backup software protects against the most common backup problem, namely, operator error. With Network Archivist, you're far less likely to overwrite the last copy of a vital file.
I like Network Archivist writing to digital audiotape (DAT) enough that I will probably let it continue to run on a networked Windows 3.11 system as an alternate to whatever backup we put on the NT server.
Every now and then, I wonder if my mania for keeping backup copies might be wretched excess; but then I hear stories. Joyce Maynard, a New Hampsh
ire novelist, is trying to get back her stolen PC "no questions asked." It seems the only copies of a 100,000-word manuscript are on it. Given that alternative, I'll remain a maniac.
As usual, our taxes were pretty complex,
what with my writing and public speaking, and Roberta's reading software and education consulting; and as usual, Intuit's TurboTax managed them quite nicely. I gave the keynote address to the Technical Support Consortium on April 16, which meant I had to get my taxes done by April 14, and that was no problem either.
Tax software consists of a series of linked spreadsheets plus a forms generator. The first one that worked well was MacInTax. I used it from the first year it was published, and it was good enough that if I'd had no other reason, I'd have kept a Mac just for that. Eventually, TurboTax bought out MacInTax and published a Windows version, and I switched to that. Then TurboTax was sold to Intuit and linked in with Quicken.
Over the years, they've
added more forms, depreciation calculations, tax-saving tips, and a fancy interface. TurboTax Deluxe has QuickTime movies of Marshall Loeb and Mary Sprouse giving advice. They've added the full text of a couple of books, including Jeff Schnepper's
How to Pay Zero Taxes
(a goal I've never achieved). You get Netscape Navigator and advice on cruising the Internet for tax tips. I suppose all that could be useful, but for me, the important thing is it's still a linked spreadsheet with forms generation that makes it possible to get my taxes done in a day or so.
Most of my friends get professional help with their taxes. I've found that by the time I get all the records together and explain things to an accountant, I've used more time than it takes to get the job done with TurboTax. Counting my years using MacInTax, this is about the fifteenth year I've relied on TurboTax and its predecessors, and I've never had any reason to regret it. I'd really hate to go back to doing these things by hand.
I
f you subscribe early, you can get a preliminary tax tips edition with final updates at year-end. It's a bargain.
I don't use Quicken QuickBooks because I long ago devised an accounting program, which I have over the years tailored to my rather odd chart of accounts. By long ago, I mean that my original version was written in Structured Systems Group C-BASIC for CP/M machines. Structured Systems Group was Gordon Eubanks before he built up Symantec. If I had been a bit more industrious back in the early days, I might have cleaned up the interface and written a good manual for my program so that I could market it and get rich. I never did, and that's probably just as well, since I seriously doubt I would ever have developed anything as efficient and as easy to use as Quicken.
I continue to use my accounting program because I'm used to it, but one of these days, I'm going to change to Quicken if for no other reason than I'm tired of stuffing envelopes and mailing checks every month. Quicken can pay m
ost bills electronically. There was a time when electronic payments were dangerous because there was no paper trail proving payment, but that seems to have been fixed; at least I no longer hear horror stories. I keep telling myself it's time to make the change, but then every month I find I'm still using my old system. It's pure inertia coupled with sloth, and one of these days, I'll bite the bullet. Meanwhile, if you're going into business, get Quicken and use it. You're not likely to regret it. It works, and they keep improving it.
Mindlink Problem Solver Corporate Edition is an odd program. Looked at one way, it's plain silly, but there are people who like it a lot. Clearly, it's a program that generates strong views.
Mindlink Problem Solver tries to add structure to brainstorming while stimulating you to look at problems in new ways. Now clearly, how well it accomplishes either of those goals is going to depend as much on you as on the software. No program will be better at solving your proble
ms than you are.
On the other hand, Mindlink Problem Solver makes it fairly easy to record all your ideas, including side steps and random thoughts; it includes an outline generator and a database. Use those systematically, and you will build up what they call a Thought Warehouse that you can tap at will. That may not sound too useful for young people, but when you reach my age, you tend to forget things.
Mindlink Problem Solver comes with a little black velvet bag of desk toys -- my copy came with a cork, a plastic helicopter, the bell off a cat's collar (the toys vary) -- which are supposed to stimulate new ways of thinking. It also asks goofy questions, like "Imagine how you would see this problem if you were down at the beach sitting in the sand?" Having tried to throw you outside your usual thought patterns with odd stuff like that, it then wants you to be systematic in recording the ideas that come to you.
As I said, just how much good all this does will depend to a great deal on you.
I really hated this thing the first time I tried it, but you know, it does grow on you. I don't so much want to use it as I wish I had used it for the last 10 years. My memory really isn't as good as it once was, and it might be pretty neat to have a database of ideas, strategies, and ways I have looked at problems. Whether I want to have used it badly enough that I will use it in the future isn't so certain. I probably won't, and I'll probably regret that.
If you suspect your thinking is going stale and you're looking for some new tools, look into Mindlink Problem Solver Corporate Edition. You'll either love it or hate it.
CompuServe and America Online have been constant,
but there are big changes in the smaller on-line service utilities. GEnie and Delphi/BIX have been sold, and Prodigy probably will have been by the time this is out.
There used to be a big difference between the on-line service utilities and the Internet service providers (ISPs), like Netcom, UUNet, and Ea
rthlink. However, the differences are vanishing as service utilities provide Internet access, while ISPs add databases and other "value-added" features.
I find that I use three of these things: MCI Mail, which I access with an off-line utility called MailRoom; the Internet itself, which I access through Earthlink Total Access using Netscape Navigator, Eudora Pro, and a new utility called Agent, which is available for downloading from Earthlink; and BIX, which I access with an off-line utility called Galahad. Galahad is an "enforced shareware" program. You can download it from BIX, but after you've used it awhile, it will cease to work unless you've registered by paying $60. It's worth the money.
Of the three services, I find BIX the most useful. BIX (
http://www.bix.com/
) is probably the smallest of the on-
line service utilities, but it also has the highest information density of the lot. It's seldom I have a question, no matter how technical, that I can't get answered in a day or so (often in hours) -- and I don't get a lot of flame wars and spam with the answer. If someone questions the information, it's generally done politely with genuine information, not simply as reflexive name-calling.
WEB EXCLUSIVE: A New Server, Taxes, and Better Thinking...Maybe
