A Little Taste of Crow

Jerry discovers the real explanation for the Cyrix system crashes -- in an unlikely place.

Jerry Pournelle

The world has gone Internet-mad. Every business from General Motors to Mom's Cookies has an Internet home page, and at Spring Comdex, it was hard to find a product that wasn't labeled as "Internet-ready." There were Internet-ready modems -- how could one not be? -- Internet-ready keyboards, and even Internet-ready mouse pads.

There was also a lot of cool stuff at Comdex. The thing that impressed me most was a Texas Instruments chip at the heart of a projecting monitor. The chip has thousands of tiny mirrors inside. Each one can move -- actual movement, not ju st electronics -- to control what is projected. It's not nanotechnology, but it's one heck of a step in that direction.

BYTE gives the Best of Comdex and Best of PC Expo awards, which means I spend the first two days running around trying to see everything significant. Before the show begins, companies send in forms nominating the new products they're proud of, and we look at all those; but we also look for all the other good stuff that wasn't nominated in advance. We try to pinpoint what's innovative and will have an impact on the industry. I find those long sessions with the BYTE editors about as interesting as anything I do, and I sure learn a lot.

I've been nattering about Comdex because I'm trying to avoid this dish of steamed crow I'm having for lunch, but there's no avoiding it. I had things wrong last month.

I've been testing a Cyrix 6x86-P166, a Pentium-compatible machine that uses Cyrix rather than Intel chips. I had some problems, which I ascribed to Norton System Doctor. Unfortunately, although removing System Doctor cut down on the numbe r of crashes, it didn't eliminate them. There were several kinds of errors, but the most typical was that I'd leave the system running for a couple of hours and come back to find a blue screen with an exception error. Hitting return would make the error go away, and I never had an error that cost data or lost work, but it was worrisome all the same. The Cyrix people were worried, too, because they couldn't duplicate the problem. Cyrix sent units to Symantec and to Larry Aldridge, who does a lot of system testing for me, but neither could duplicate my problems.

I was about to swap my system for the one they'd sent Larry when I realized there was one difference: I was using a smart Ethernet card to connect the Cyrix to my Windows 95/Windows for Workgroups network. Cyrix sent a 3Com EtherLink III Busmaster PCI Ethernet adapter, but since the smart card worked fine -- I never had any problems with networking -- I never thought my problems could be network-related.

Still, since Larry couldn't duplicate the problem, and it would be a pain to swap systems, I thought I'd swap network cards. The swap was easy. I removed the smart card and brought the system up so that it would know the card was missing. Then I shut down, installed the 3Com adapter, and booted up. There was a minor start-up glitch, so I had to restart once more, but then Plug and Play worked just fine. The 3Com drivers got installed, the network came up -- and my system crashes stopped. After 3 hours, it was clear that there weren't going to be any crashes, so I reinstalled Norton System Doctor. That works fine, too.

I've since exercised this Cyrix in tortuous ways, moving and copying huge blocks of files over to the NT server and back, running QuickTime movies (which used to run jerkily), editing sound files -- using Sound Recorder to concatenate several wave files used to be a reliable way to crash the system -- and it all works perfectly. I even put in the game This Means War , and while it can crash the Cyrix as it does everyt hing else, it doesn't crash nearly so often as it did on a vanilla Pentium 60. In a word, the Cyrix 6x86-P166 with a standard Ethernet board is fast, reliable, and safe. I like it a lot.

You will note that I haven't named the smart Ethernet card that caused the problems. This is because we want to test it in a PCI slot on Pentafluge, our standard Intel P-60, and then on RacingCow, the Gateway 2000 P5-133XL. I haven't heard any reports of problems with that Ethernet card on Intel systems, so I don't expect any difficulties; but, of course, now I have to see for myself.

Meanwhile, the moral of this story is that the errors you see may not tell you a lot about their cause. We never had a single Ethernet glitch, nor did the system ever crash while doing Ethernet operations, and the error messages we got never said anything about network difficulties.

We have two Intergraph computers: the TDZ-400 and the TD-300. Both systems come in 150- and 200-MHz versions. The TDZ-400 I tested c ame with dual Pentium Pro 150 chips, and the TD-300 had a single Pentium Pro 200 chip. Our TDZ-400 has "blue wire" on the motherboard, because this machine was built in August 1995 while the Pentium Pro chips weren't released until November 1. Yours won't have blue wire.

The TDZ-400 has the Intergraph GLZ1 3-D video card, which features OpenGL hardware support. All Windows NT systems have the capability of working with OpenGL, which is the standard API (the way programs talk to hardware) developed by Silicon Graphics for 3-D video applications. The GLZ1 is a fast video card for specific applications -- such as engineering modeling and visualization -- that use OpenGL and 3-D. Software without OpenGL support works but can't take advantage of the card. The TD-300 has Matrox 2-D video with 2 MB of memory built into the motherboard, and that's more than good enough for most work.

The first thing you will notice about Intergraph machines is that they're solid . Whether you have a desktop or a s mall tower, they're built like battleships. Bill Godbout didn't build machines any better than this back when his CompuPro owned the development-system market in CP/M days. These Intergraphs remind me of Godbout's machines, and those who have been reading this column long enough know that from me that's high praise.

What you get with the Intergraph TDZ-400 and TD-300 is reliable blazing speed, coupled with superb technical support. The machines come with one-year on-site service and a three-year warranty. You also get software support. We had a problem with Premiere 4.0 and called Intergraph. Half an hour later, Intergraph called back to say they'd checked with Adobe: Premiere 4.0 doesn't work with NT. Upgrade to 4.2 and the problem is fixed. You will get the same level of support if you need it.

The system comes with NT in file-allocation-table (FAT) format, so you can install Win 95 as a dual boot if you like; but if you want dual-processor support, you must run it under NT. Disk and CD-ROM driv es are fast SCSI-2. There's built-in Ethernet and a dual-height PC Card slot. The sound board is built in and standard, and both speakers and microphone are built into the keyboard. They call it "business audio," but it will play Doom right out of the box.

Clearly, Intergraph's main customer base is people who need engineering workstations and don't want to pay six figures to get them; but there's another market. David Em was one of the earliest fine artists to use a computer -- I recommended The Art of David Em as the book of the month over a dozen years ago -- and quite literally wrote specifications for some of the first programs for generating art displays. We let him play with the TDZ-400. One thing he did was to lay out a compilation of many of his old works. The individual files in the resulting poster were multiple megabytes; the complete image was tens of megabytes. It's beautiful.

What David likes is the blazing speed; he says that the TDZ-400 allows a whole new level of concept ual experimentation. Instead of wondering how something would look, you just try it; you get almost instantaneous response. Many computer-using artists are Mac enthusiasts. For those willing to consider something else, the Intergraph line offers speed, quality, and peace of mind. At a price, of course.

By the end of the summer, Intergraph should have released their new TDZ-310, TDZ-410, and TDZ-610 workstations. Among other things, these machines will have new graphics cards, the fastest of which, Intergraph says, is 2.5 times faster than their best GLZ card.

As I mentioned, BYTE gives out awards at several computer shows. We always make a point of looking at what Intergraph is up to. They're setting new standards for price/performance, not only in computing, but video hardware and software. I haven't seen anything of theirs I don't like.

It used to be that the Mac not only had the best video hardware, but nearly all the fun software like Kai's Power Tools. That's no longer tr ue. Not only are Windows paint programs getting better and easier to use, but MetaTools is porting much of Kai Krause's fun stuff. At Spring Comdex, there were posters extolling Kai's Power Goo, tools for playing with photos taken by Eastman Kodak's newest digital cameras, such as the Kodak Digital Science DC20. For the half dozen people left in the U.S. who did not notice, Eastman Kodak now has digital cameras priced under $350. While they don't have the resolution that more expensive models do, they'll produce quite acceptable 3- by 4-inch photos printed on a color ink-jet printer on Kodak Snapshot Inkjet Paper.

Eastman Kodak also announced a line of higher-resolution digital cameras, including the Kodak Digital Science DC40 and the DC50 Zoom Camera. Better yet, Eastman Kodak, Microsoft, Hewlett-Packard, and Live Picture have developed FlashPix, a new imaging architecture and universal image file format to make it easier for casual users to work with high-resolution pictures on home PCs. BYTE gave Fla shPix the Best Technology award at Comdex. It won't be long before you can integrate Albert Einstein into your wedding photos and then smear everything around with Kai's Power Goo. The Mac's monopoly over video is gone, and about the time you read this, you'll be able to use browsers like Netscape Navigator to download new image-processing programs; see http://www.kodak.com for details.

There's another way to get pictures into your machine: get Snappy. This is a small box -- they say it's the size of a Star Trek tricorder -- that attaches to the parallel port of your computer. Feed it video images from a VCR, your video camera, or off cable; invoke the program; and when you want to capture a screen image, do a "snap," and you will have a video image file. You can save the file in BMP, JPEG, TIFF, PCX, and other standard formats. The program generates a true color image and lets you scale it from there. There are three resolutions: 320 by 240, 640 by 480, and 1500 by 1125 pixels; the latter comes with scroll bars since it's larger than most monitors can handle.

Installation takes about 2 minutes. We found that attaching Snappy to the parallel port of RacingCow was a bit of a tight squeeze, so we used a standard 3-foot parallel cable between Snappy and the PC. That turns out to be a convenient way to install it. The unit has its own power supply -- a 9-V battery. They think that's good for about 1000 snapshots.

You also get some image software: Gryphon's Morph 2.5, so you can morph yourself into Albert Einstein or Al Gore, and Fauve Matisse Snappy Edition, a lite version of the paint program (a full upgrade is $39). There's TWAIN (scanner) support, which means you can use Photoshop and other image-processing programs. Since Kodak can read nearly any video file format, you could video yourself, do some morphing or change things with programs like Kai's Power Tools, save the image, and get a Photo CD made of the result. I can envision some interesting slide shows.

Snappy was made by the breakaway members of the old Video Toaster team. They're all mad as hatters; read the manual for details. Like the Video Toaster, Snappy brings something new to the computer world. It's easy to use, interesting, fun, inexpensive, and reliable.

If you can't think of uses for Snappy, I don't think I want to know you. Highly recommended.

A sort of companion to Snappy is JE Software's PrintScreen. This thing installs in seconds. It gives you the opportunity to save screen images to a file or print them. You can run it as a TSR program so that it works almost anytime, or you can simply invoke it when you need it.

I can't guarantee its compatibility with everything; these TSRs can be tricky. Still, it seems well behaved. Mostly, PrintScreen works.

We've installed it on the Gateway 2000 P5-133XL a nd the Cyrix 6x86-P166. Both print across the Ethernet. PrintScreen doesn't seem to mind.

Some programs just do what they say they'll do without any fuss. PrintScreen is one of them. Recommended.

Real programmers have always had a degree of contempt for programs written in BASIC. If you ask why, they'll mutter something about memory use, program size, and program speed. BASIC programmers would then point out that at least their programs were up and running during their lifetimes, and the battle would be joined.

Now, BASIC advocates like me can say that with today's new hardware, we don't need to worry about program size and speed. Memory is below $10 a megabyte. Disk storage is fast approaching $100 a gigabyte. High-end Pentium and Pentium Pro chips run at blinding speeds. What do we care if our BASIC program takes three times as long to run as it would in C++ when we're talking about seconds rather than minutes?

Visual Basic is changing the way we program. It has also spa wned a whole new industry of add-on tools. One of the earliest BASIC toolkits was Crescent QuickPak Professional. Crescent was acquired by Progress Software a year ago, and they've continued tool development.

If you're going to learn Visual Basic programming, in my judgment, you should start by getting Visual Basic and then Crescent PowerPak Professional Edition or Enterprise Edition. This gives you a number of assembly language tools you can call directly into your application; it also gives some source code for complex programs, and that's worth study all by itself. With Visual Basic and Crescent PowerPak, you can build some astonishingly good programs.

The ability to write programs is like the ability to write: knowing how to program doesn't guarantee you'll write good programs any more than knowing how to write assures that you'll write publishable novels. On the other hand, the best way to become a professional writer is to write a lot. I generally tell students they should be prepared to thr ow away the first million words they write. I suspect it's just as true for programming: the best way to learn is to do a lot of it. BASIC and the Crescent toolkits make it fairly easy to do.

EndNote has long been my favorite bibliography program for scholarly writing. Now, EndNote Plus 2 can be installed as an add-in for Microsoft Word. For those totally addicted to the Web, this is like a Netscape Navigator plug-in.

With the program installed, you can do full bibliographic processing from within your Word document. EndNote Plus 2 does it all: nearly any standard format, including all scholarly citation conventions. Hanging indents, discovery of duplicated citations, and a whole raft of other tools are included.

EndNote Plus 2 is also a database. You can use it to make and keep libraries of annotated references, so that you will never have to retype title and author for frequently cited works. Formats include APA, Science, ASCE, IEEE, MLA, Chicago A and B, PNAS, Nature, and Turabian. The ge neral database isn't formatted, so you can haul in references from that and then format the document to fit the journal you're submitting to.

If you use Word and you do scholarly publishing, you need EndNote Plus 2. Recommended.

T/Maker is well known for its ClickArt: small, mostly simple, drawings that you can chop and paste into documents and slide presentations as illustrations and a change of pace. The ClickArt Incredible Image Pak 65,000 has illustrations appropriate for holidays, business themes, travel, amusements; you name it.

They also have ClickArt Handwritten Fonts, a CD-ROM of 300 handwritten fonts. No matter what your writing style, neat and proper or fat and sloppy, there's probably a font that looks something like yours. If there isn't, don't despair: with Personal Font, they'll make you a TrueType font and include your signature. Being TrueType, it will be recognized by word processors, so you can even check the spelling. It won't quite be cursive script, becau se computers need some way to recognize when one letter ends and another starts, but you can make it very close. I haven't sent in my order yet, but I'm tempted. On the other hand, one of their fonts is pretty close, not to what my handwriting looks like, but to what I wish it looked like. Chances are you'll find one like that, too.

They also sell ClickArt Fonts, a CD-ROM of 2500 regular fonts.

With that many fonts, you'll need a real font manager. We saw one at Comdex: Adobe Type Manager Deluxe 4.0 won a BYTE Best of Comdex award. I don't have it yet, but I sure liked what I saw.

With Adobe Type Manager Deluxe 4.0 and the ClickArt discs, you can have all the fonts you ever wanted.

The CD-ROM of the month is My First Amazing World Explorer. Roberta has been having the neighborhood kids test her reading-instruction software. As a reward, we gave one of them this CD-ROM. Here is Roberta's report:

"Thomas, one of our youngest and brightest pals, finishes third grade this year. I insta lled My First Amazing World Explorer on his home machine about an hour before dinner. This was probably a mistake, because his dad reports that for 45 minutes after that, he never came up for air except to whoop his approval of the product and didn't stop until his mom insisted he come to dinner.

"I happen to know that this is a fairly analytical kid. He is into insects and crawly critters, so I thought he might like the World Explorer CD. It has lots of critters. Now it's his favorite CD, and his sister and parents hardly get to touch the family Mac while he explores.

"First, he signed up for a passport, where he gets to register with a moniker. He chose Stupid Pee (remember he just turned nine, and their favorite genre runs along these lines) and a suitable picture from the Passport Office. Stupid Pee's face is out of whack, and he has one working eye. Well, you get the idea.

"The home page is Your Bedroom. On the wall is a world map. Click on the map, and you move into a view of the world in beautiful graphics and pictures. At least that is the way Thomas describes them. He really liked the sound effects. For instance, if you click on the top of the map, the CPU says ÔNorth' and makes a whooshing sound. In North America, you can click on a cougar sitting on the crest of the Rockies; his tail straightens out, and his jaws open to let out a mighty roar. Click on a skier, and he slaloms down the peak, makes a jump, and lands back on top of the run.

"When you first click on a new country on a continent, typical music from its history is heard, such as a banjo in the southwest of Texas. Click on a cowboy, and he lassos cattle. Then it moves to text with a couple of sentences about cattlemen. Two hot keys are presented in red, and the text is read to you. Click on the hot key, and a smaller page appears and is read to you in a child's voice.

"This age group is bonkers over stickers, and Thomas is no exception. After reading a selection about a critter, you can select the Sticker icon on that page and the picture replaces an outline in the Sticker book. We clicked on Mexico. It zoomed in closer to the peninsula, where a stone statue appeared. Click on the stone statue holding a stone spear, and the statue launches the spear. ÔThe spear goes around the world and hits him in the back,' according to Thomas's scenario. When the spear strikes the stone statue, it cracks into pebbles. One of the world's best jokes according to Thomas.

Actually, Roberta had more on My First Amazing World Explorer. I haven't seen such enthusiasm for a kids' CD-ROM in a long time. Clearly recommended.

The book of the month is Hidden Order: The Economics of Everyday Life by David Friedman (Harper Business, 1996). One doesn't normally think of an economics book as light and pleasant reading, but David makes it seem so. He also explains most of the assumptions underlying economic theory. If you have any interest in economics at all, you'll find this book both readable and fascinatin g; and I guarantee you'll learn something from it. David analyzes such things as the length of supermarket checkout lines, whether to change lanes on a freeway, and incidentally something about money and unemployment. He's a former King of the East in the Society for Creative Anachronism, and one of the most interesting people I know.

The computer book of the month is Ed Yourdon's Rise and Resurrection of the American Programmer (Prentice-Hall, 1996). Yourdon, you may recall, is one of the pioneers of the computer industry, one of the few consultant gurus to move successfully from mainframes and minicomputers to the microcomputer world. In 1992 he wrote Decline and Fall of the American Programmer , which painted a pretty gloomy picture of how offshore companies would eat our lunch. It was particularly depressing for the large number of programmers stuck maintaining COBOL and specialized assembly language programs. His book has been a text in more than a hundred courses.

But now Yourdon writes "all of that was four years ago, and things do change...some of the trends that worried me four years ago have become even more pronounced, but I've been pleasantly surprised to see that in other areas the U.S. software industry has demonstrated a substantial competitive advantage." Ed is too modest to say that his previous book may have helped change some of the trends, but I think it's true.

His views are not always mine, but if you're a programmer or hire programmers, you will be well advised to read this book. [Editor's note: Edward Yourdon has a State of the Art article in this issue, "When Good Enough Is Best".]

We're building a Micronix motherboard system, probably a 200-MHz Pentium. I'm not sure what accessories we'll collect for it. Also next month, I'll look at accumulated accessories and software. Stay tuned. I love these little machines.

As usual, you can find more of this column on the BYTE Web site. You might also want to check out http://www.earthlink.net/discontinuity , where John C. Dvorak and I argue critical issues.

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Product Information

Adobe Type Manager Deluxe 4.0.............$99.95

Adobe Systems, Inc.
Mountain View, CA
Phone:    (800) 833-6687 or (415) 961-4400
Fax:      (415) 961-3769
Internet: 
http://www.adobe.com/type/typeprod.html

Circle 1034 on Inquiry Card.

ClickArt Fonts............................$39.95
ClickArt Handwritten Fonts................$39.95
ClickArt Incredible Image Pak 65,000......$59.95
Person
al Font.............................$99.95

T/Maker Co.
Mountain View, CA
Phone:    (800) 986-2537 or (415) 962-0195
Fax:      (415) 962-0201
Internet: 
http://www.clickart.com

Circle 1035 on Inquiry Card.

Crescent PowerPak Enterprise Edition.....$499
Crescent PowerPak Professional Edition...$699

Crescent Division of Progress Software
Bedford, MA
Phone:    (800) 352-2742 or (617) 280-3000
Fax:      (617) 280-4025
Internet: 
http://www.crescent.progress.com

Circle 1036 on Inquiry Card.

EndNote Plus 2...........................$299

Niles and Associates, Inc
.
Berkeley, CA
Phone:    (800) 554-3049 or (510) 559-8592
Fax:      (510) 559-8683
Internet: 
http://www.niles.com

Circle 1037 on Inquiry Card.

Kai's Power Goo...........................$49.95
Kai's Power Tools........................$199

MetaTools, Inc.
Carpinteria, CA
Phone:    (800) 972-4025 or (805) 566-6200
Fax:      (805) 566-6385
Internet: 
http://www.metatools.com

Circle 1038 on Inquiry Card.

Kodak Digital Science DC20 Camera..under $350

Eastman Kodak Co.
Rochester, NY
Phone:    (800) 235-6325 or (716) 726-7260
Fax:      (716) 726-0818
Internet: 
http://www.kodak.com

Circle 1039 on Inquiry Card.

My First Amazing World Explorer...........$29.95 (estimated)

DK Multimedia
New York, NY
Phone:    (800) 206-5713 or (212) 213-4800
Fax:      (212) 213-5240
Internet: 
http://www.dk.com

Circle 1040 on Inquiry Card.

PrintScreen...............................$29.95

JE Software, Inc.
Mount Vernon, NY
Phone:    (800) 431-1348 or (914) 699-6710
Fax:      (914) 699-6969
E-Mail:   
janesway@ix.netcom.com

Circle 1041 on Inquiry Card.

Snappy...................................$199.95 (estimated)

Pl
ay, Inc.
Rancho Cordova, CA
Phone:    (800) 306-7529 or (916) 851-0800
Fax:      (916) 851-0801
Internet: 
http://www.play.com

Circle 1042 on Inquiry Card.

TD-300..................................$5995 base price
TDZ-400...............................$18,700 base price

Intergraph Corp.
Huntsville, AL
Phone:    (800) 763-0242 or (205) 730-2000
Fax:      (205) 730-6188
Internet: 
http://www.intergraph.com/ics

Circle 1043 on Inquiry Card.

HotBYTEs
 - information on products covered or advertised in BYTE

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Jerry Pournelle is a science fiction writer and BYTE's senior contributing editor. You can write to Jerry c/o BYTE, One Phoenix Mill Lane, Peterborough, NH 03458. Please include a self-addressed, stamped envelope and 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.