ive-matrix display, and a lot of other features. It sounded interesting.
It came without fancy packaging; the box had a blue stripe and the words laptop computer on it, rather like those generic grocery brands. It's the fastest laptop I've ever had, so naturally when I chose a name, it became Blue Streak. We got it on a Wednesday. The
next day, I had to go to the San Diego beach house, and since one of our boys was getting married in San Diego--Phillip is a Navy officer, and his ship is stationed there--things were more hectic than usual. I had little time to pack and none to carry a great heavy desktop, and there wasn't time to get Blue Streak attached to the network.
I took care of that by filling a couple of Iomega Zip drive cartridges with programs and data. Then I grabbed the CD holder that I keep the most important CD-ROMs in, packed Blue Streak in the handsome and functional case that came with it, and ran for it. For about a week, that was my only computer.
I don't regret it. While I prefer working with a big screen--I love my ViewSonic Professional Series PT-810 21-inch monitor--the bright active-matrix screen on the Orion 64 is good enough to work with, even with my regular bifocals. I also prefer big keyboards, but the Nimantics keyboard is good and solid, like my old Zenith keyboard, with plenty of keys. Some portables
have too many keys with dual and even triple functions, but the Orion 64 has a full-size keyboard, including "Windows 95" keys. The space bar looks to be too short, but in fact it's not.
There's a price for all this: the Orion 64 can't remotely be called light. My Brookstone bathroom scale calls it 8 pounds. The battery life is pretty low. I've yet to get a full hour of operation with the normal batteries; it really needs to be connected to the power converter. Think of the battery as a particularly good uninterruptible power supply (UPS).
In other words, the Nimantics Orion 64 is closer to being a portable desktop than a true laptop. Nimantics makes another model, the Quanta, with the usual compromises such as CD-ROM or floppy drive, but not both at once, that's better suited to be a laptop.
On the other hand, the Orion 64 really is good enough to be your desktop. Its built-in speakers are acceptable, and there's an external speaker port if you want better sound quality. There's a built-in micro
phone. The screen is 800 by 600 pixels and 12.1 inches. It's said to have more viewing area than a 14-inch monitor; and, of course, you sit close to it. The pointing device is a trackpad. While that takes a little getting used to, it's a great deal easier to use than the eraserhead devices you find on a lot of machines. I haven't had any trouble with it.
There are other features: a full joystick and game control buttons, a MIDI port, fast serial and parallel ports, an IrDA infrared port, and two PC Card slots. The six-speed CD-ROM drive is fast enough for any games I know of.
Moreover, if you need battery life, as on an airplane, a big external battery fits across the back of the unit. By big, I mean about 2 more pounds. You can attach and remove it without turning the system off. I'm running with it now, and with several programs in the background and Word 7 set to save every 5 minutes, it has run for 2 1/2 hours with no problems.
On an international flight, you'd probably want two of those batte
ries, and you'd certainly want to carry them in one of those roll-on bags, but then the machine is heavy enough that you probably want wheels to carry it far anyway. With that kind of bag, what do you care how heavy the system is, so long as you don't leave ruts in the tarmac? You'll also want to use the airline tray, and some airlines pack the seats so close together that you may not be able to use this machine in tourist class.
I have yet to find any machine other than the old Gateway HandBook that I can use in tourist class with any comfort. I sure wish someone would bring out an updated version of it. The keyboard was large enough to write with, I could see the screen, and the whole machine was small enough to pack into a shoulder bag. Just talking about it makes me wonder why I don't get it away from Alex and use it again. With the Nimantics Orion 64 set up in a hotel room, I could carry the HandBook to meetings, letting Blue Streak do all the networking and heavy calculation.
More when I've had
more experience with it, but from a month of use, I'd say the Nimantics Orion 64 is more than good enough, either as a portable desktop or as your only computer. My son Richard has for years done all his work with a full-feature Zenith laptop and no desktop machine at all. If you're looking at high-end, full-featured laptops, be sure to check out the Nimantics Orion 64 line. I'm sure I'll have more to say about them in the future.
Like a lot of high-end portables, the Nimantics Orion 64 comes with
PCI Plug and Play. Even so, we had a bit of trouble getting it connected to the Ethernet, because our first attempt was with a combination Ethernet and modem card. That didn't work. The Nimantics people tell me there's some kind of BIOS conflict, and they're working with the combo-card manufacturers to fix it. My own view is that it's no great loss, since in the real world I don't use combination cards due to the heat generated. I prefer separate cards.
However, we didn't know that the Orion
had such a conflict, so when we couldn't get the combo card to work, we installed SystemSoft's CardWizard Pro for Windows 95. That didn't work, either.
Then we got generic Ethernet and 28.8-Kbps fax modem cards; and when we installed them, Win 95 couldn't find them. We knew that some part of the machine could see the cards, because we could hear the beep when we installed or removed a card; but nothing we could do would get them running.
I thought the problem might be CardWizard. It doesn't come with an uninstaller, so we got out Quarterdeck's CleanSweep 95 and told it to remove CardWizard. It said it had done so; but the Orion 64 still couldn't see the PC Cards. At this point, I called Nimantics' technical support. All Nimantics machines come with a year's technical support as well as parts and labor warranty, and as far as I can tell, I didn't get any advice you wouldn't get. Investigation of Network in the Control Panel led us to look in the CONFIG.SYS file--and lo!, there were still parts of Card
Wizard being loaded. We nuked all references to CardWizard, uninstalled all network and modem drivers in the Win 95 System Resources utility, and restarted the machine.
It instantly found the Ethernet and modem cards and automatically installed the software drivers; and we have had no problems with modems and networks since. Windows does the rest: if I turn on Blue Streak with the Ethernet card installed, it logs on to the network when it comes up. If that card isn't there, it doesn't look for the network. This is precisely the way you want your portable to view your network.
The moral of the story is that you should be very careful about using CardWizard Pro for Windows 95. If you can make things work without it, you're far better off; and sometimes, it's what keeps things from working at all.
Alex and I drove up to San Francisco for the Microsoft Internet Explorer 3.0
(IE3) launch. We went up during a heat wave, a couple of days after the Great Western Power Failure. The power f
ailure did no damage at Chaos Manor; the first I knew of it was silence from my radio and the chirping of about a dozen UPSes. I keep two brands of UPSes, American Power Conversion and Clary, and both worked just fine. Moreover, the APC PowerChute Plus software on the Microsoft NT 3.51 server broadcast the time of the power failure through the network. The OS/2 and Windows NT workstations saw those network messages fine, but, alas, the Win 95 machines didn't see them.
Now, however, thanks to information from readers, I find that Win 95 can receive messages from the power unit. Go into the Windows subdirectory and execute the program WINPOPUP.EXE (if you like, you can put it in your start-up file). On the toolbar for WINPOPUP, pull down messages, click on options, and set it to pop up if there are new messages. Minimize it, and BobUs your uncle. System messages to the workgroup will now appear.
It's a long, hot drive from Los Angeles to San Francisco, but it did give me some time to think. This is just
as well, because while the product launch itself was interesting, it probably was not worth the trip just to see Bill Gates tell us how wonderful IE3 is. He mentioned all the special deals he's made with outfits who will give you free access to their products until the end of the year if you log in with IE3 as your Net browser.
Some of the deals were interesting. You can have an electronic subscription to the Wall Street Journal until 1997; all you have to do is log in using IE3. There's also the same deal with Starwave ESPN. That one actually sounds interesting. I suppose some people prefer to read their Wall Street Journal on-screen, but I like it on paper at the breakfast table. For sports fanatics, though, there are features you just can't get in magazines: instant scattergrams of just where individual batters hit singles, doubles, homers, etc., against left- and right-handed pitchers; updated statistics; and, of course, real-time scores.
Gates spoke at 8 p.m. IE3 would be available for free down
loading at midnight; as Gates put it, it was priced to sell. As he was telling us of all the things you could get for free provided you accessed them with IE3, Alex said, "By 2 a.m. there will be a Netscape plug-in that will tell the host that it's IE3." He was probably wrong, because it turns out that the only thing you'd have to hack is the agent identification string, and that doesn't require anything as complex as a plug-in. What the plug-in will probably do is determine on which sites it should identify itself as IE3, and where it can give its true name.
One interesting bit of news from the IE3 launch was from Sky Dayton of EarthLink Network: EarthLink is the number 2 Internet service provider (ISP) in size now, up from four employees two years ago. Sky didn't say it, but my sources inside EarthLink tell me that Netscape executives are actually being nice to EarthLink people and even return Sky's calls. They used to treat him with arrogant indifference.
As far as I know, though, Netscape executiv
es still treat everyone else with arrogant indifference. I've yet to get any acknowledgment that I actually paid to register my copy of Netscape Navigator or to meet anyone who has had a pleasant experience dealing with Netscape people. Perhaps competition is forcing some changes. Gates made it clear that he's going to continue to develop Internet Explorer and give it away. Incidentally, EarthLink Total Access will have IE3 and Netscape Navigator on its distribution CDs in the future.
Since the download is 5 MB, there's no ZMODEM or resumable download, and the power situation is still a bit flaky. I have not downloaded IE3. I am told that CDs will be mailed to us Real Soon Now. I am also told that IE3 has the ability to support resumable downloads if yours gets interrupted. Unfortunately, no servers know how to do that in FTP yet. Many of us have had the experience of waiting hours to get on a busy site and then watching as we get 90 percent of a huge file, only to have to start over when there's a glitch
.
There is a way around that. Many places support BBSes as well as Web sites, and often they're not busy at all. If you're willing to pay for the call to the BBS, you can use ZMODEM to transfer the files; and ZMODEM knows how to resume from where it left off if there's an interruption. If you're paying a consultant to update your system, you'll save money by paying for long-distance calls. Think about it.
The oddest thing I saw was Bill Gates looking with every evidence of fascination at a "real-time on-line" game, featuring Snake (Kurt Russell) surfing down Wilshire Boulevard. The real-time on-line game was provided by an Internet outfit from Hollywood. The game wasn't quite up to the quality of an Atari game cartridge of a few years ago. I wasn't popular when I asked if next they'd have real-time on-line Pong. When I asked all these content providers what support they would have for the largest source of "network computers" I know of, I got blank stares. I explained that Sega and Sony and the other
game-box companies will undoubtedly be the biggest Internet computer outfits, and they will support Java but probably not the ActiveX stuff from Microsoft, and they'll all have their own browsers.
Astoundingly, I met no one from these with-it companies who had even thought about the rush to get game boxes on-line. They'll learn soon enough.
All told, it was a good party. Microsoft is consistently a great host. There was good food, great coffee, and an absolutely content-free video whizbang show that came with Bill Gates's talk. The funniest part of that was a squib of Gates enrolling in a 12-step program run by Net Addicts Anonymous. Because of my son's wedding, I missed the IE3 reviewer's workshop I'd intended to go to, and the IE3 launch did give me a chance for half an hour with the IE3 team leader.
I went up with one question. ActiveX, Microsoft's rival to Java, is native code; so how can it keep up with a higher-level language like Java? Won't it use more bandwidth?
It turns out that whil
e ActiveX is native code (and thus there is no Mac or Unix version yet, but there will be Real Soon Now), it really ties together stuff from local libraries and local code. You can write ActiveX controls in Visual Basic, which is good--anything that gets us away from C and C++ is good--and there will be a compiler. Whether ActiveX will be a serious rival to Java as a network development tool isn't clear yet.
It was a long drive on a very hot day.
Speaking of upgrades, Corel has bought WordPerfect and has brought it out
with a wonderful suite of programs and tools. For sheer value for money, the Corel WordPerfect Suite 7 for Windows 95 is hard to beat. You get WordPerfect; Quattro Pro; Corel Presentations; Corel Flow, which is a graphics program; Starfish Software's Sidekick 95 and Dashboard 95; fonts; clip art; and a partridge in a pear tree. There are also tools for Internet connections, including Netscape Navigator.
Moreover, Corel hasn't abandoned the DOS WordPerfect user; you
can find DOS updates on the Corel BBS and Web site.
I was never a fan of WordPerfect, but I was a big fan of Grammatik, which has been incorporated into WordPerfect. I was once astonished to see Grammatik coupled with determination and hard work make a good writer out of someone who couldn't write well at all; and do that in under a year.
Choosing a word processor is a very personal thing. It took me years to get away from Q&A Write, and in fact, although I use Word for my novels now, I still use Q&A Write for these columns. That's partly habit. For a long time, all the fancy-font WYSIWYG editors were slow and jerky. I greatly preferred a character-based text program. Eventually, Word got fast enough to be useful. Meanwhile, Larry Niven and I were drafting novels in Q&A Write but converting them to Word because Q&A Write holds only about 35,000 words. We wanted a way to do global search and replacements, spelling checks, and so forth, on a whole novel. Word did that well, and at the time, I disliked s
ome of WordPerfect's oddities.
Since then, WordPerfect has shed some of its weirdnesses. Corel has a reputation for doing things right, and I have no doubt that they'll continue to improve WordPerfect Suite. I'll very probably continue with Word, largely because I hate the thought of teaching Niven a new word processor; but if something compelled me to switch to Corel WordPerfect Suite 7 for Windows 95, it wouldn't be a tragedy.
The real effect of Corel WordPerfect Suite 7 for Windows 95 will be improvements in both Corel and Microsoft products. Competition: it's wonderful.
Product Information
Corel WordPerfect Suite 7..................US$695
Corel Corp.
Ottawa, Ontario, Canada
Phone: (800) 772-6735 or (613) 728-3733
Fax: (613) 761-9176
Internet:
http://www.corel.com
WEB EXCLUSIVE: Of Laptops and Long Drives
