once the files were on a Zip cartridge it was easy enough to move them onto something a great deal more permanent, and I've now archived them to the Fujitsu.
Incidentally, I'm not trying to start a panic. Files on a Zip cartridge will fade away, but it's not going to happen overnight. However, do understand that no magnetic media is permanent: over time, the 1s and 0s will average out to one-halfs. Magneto-optical and straight optical disks store data in an entirely different way from floppies and Zip cartridges, and while they're not
likely to be eternal, they will last for decades.
Anyway, the parallel Zip was clearly indicated here. Mine normally resides on Joizy, Mrs. Pournelle's Gateway 2000 P5-200XL. It was easy enough to detach it and bring it up to the storeroom where I was prepping the Zenith 386 prior to donating it to a school.
Installing a parallel Zip is simple: you attach it to the parallel port, boot up the system in DOS, and run a program called 'GUEST.EXE.' There are also versions of Guest for Windows 3.1 and Win 95.
Alas, when I did that, nothing happened.
I fussed around with cables, spent time finding newer versions of Guest, and wasted time in other ways, but nothing helped. Finally I wondered if it could be the DOS version.
The Zenith was running Zenith DOS 3.3. I dug out my DOS 6.22 disks and booted with that; ran Guest; and voila! Although Iomega likes to boast that Guest works with all flavors of DOS, Zenith DOS 3.3 can't handle Guest.
I've also installed the parallel Zip on Old
Cow, the Gateway 2000 486DX2 upstairs in my monkish cell, otherwise known as Alex's old room, the place I hide away to write fiction. It took about 5 minutes to install the Zip, and that makes it much easier for me to move utility stuff like Franklin Ascend and Info Select files back and forth. Old Cow isn't on a network and while it would be simple enough to run a net cable up there, that would be a disaster: the whole value of having Old Cow in Alex's old room is that there are no games, no modem, and no Internet connections. When I go up there, I write fiction, because there's nothing else to do.
However, I do keep my diary on Franklin Ascend, and character names and other notes in Info Select. Add dictionary updates and the novel I am working on in Microsoft Word, and it's crowding a floppy disk. Much simpler to use a Zip cartridge as my sneakernet, especially now that Niven has a Zip drive.
Iomega recently sent me a neat little carrying case for the Zip, and a Zip Unleashed battery pack. I h
aven't used either yet, but we're due for a bunch of trips this month, and I expect to.
As a final word on storage systems: I have for about a year had the Fujitsu DynaMO 230 magneto-optical system installed on an ancient Cheetah 386/25. I access it through the Ethernet. Lately I began to have problems: if an operation required erasures, as in overwriting a file, there would be stalls, and sometimes the whole process would just stop. Resetting the Cheetah would fix the problem.
I got weary of that, and I also wanted to know if the problem was the drive or the slow system it was attached to, so I brought the DynaMO over to Cyrus, which already had both a Seagate Barracuda 4.2 GB hard drive and an Iomega SCSI Zip drive working off the Adaptec SCSI controller.
Installation was incredibly simple: I attached the DynaMO to the Zip, turned off the termination switch on the Zip, and turned it on for the Fujitsu, and turned on the system. No drivers or installation needed: when the system booted, it
was there in My Computer. As expected it came up as the F: drive, displacing the CD-ROM (the SCSI Zip is nailed to E: and stays there), but Device Manager let me tell the DynaMO to be G:. That worked. Now the CD-ROM is F: and the DynaMO is G:, and it doesn't seem to matter whether there's a cartridge in the drive on bootup or not. Once attached directly to Cyrus all the glitches vanished, which means it is time to retire the Cheetah 386; he'll make a good word processor for a school or church.
The DynaMO 230 is comparable in speed to the Zip. The cartridges hold 225 MB for the same price as the Zip 100 MB cartridges, and while they aren't quite as mechanically rugged as Zip cartridges, they're archival quality and smaller, so easier to store. The big advantage of the Zip is that the parallel Zip can read cartridges made by the SCSI, and installing the parallel is trivially simple (as long as you're not running Zenith DOS 3.3). Otherwise the advantage is all with the Fujitsu, and if you have one of those
parallel-to-SCSI devices, you can use the Fujitsu as a sneakernet. I'm becoming increasingly fond of that DynaMO 230. Recommended.
Incidentally, you may have a hard time finding the drive I have; it's been replaced by the DynaMO 640, which Fujitsu introduced at Comdex. The new drive boosts storage capacity to 640 MB, though it will accept the old, smaller-capacity media as well. As to media life, Fujitsu swears that your data will be intact 30 years from now. There is still a DynaMO 230, but that name now refers to a 230 MB Portable PC Card drive, which runs on AA batteries.
In cleaning up my office I found an elderly DOS game called Nomad.
It installed on Cyrus all right, but when I went to run it, I was told that I needed 593K of RAM, and I didn't have that. It happens that Quarterdeck's QEMM 8 was one of the packages I cleared off the table. I used to be a big fan of QEMM, but there were some problems with Win 95 and QEMM 7.x, so I dumped it and never thought about it again. O
n the other hand, it would be interesting to see what QEMM could do in this case, so I installed it.
Installation was routine up to a point: when QEMM had transferred all its files and began to run its setup program, I got a General Protection Fault. This didn't seem like a great way to start.
However, all the files seemed to be installed properly. The disk drives and network were working. I'd made a Norton Rescue copy of all the registry information, so the worst that could happen was I'd have to do some restoration. So, more out of curiosity than anything else, I ran QEMM's Optimize.
It ran fine. No problems at all. And when it was done, I had more than 600 MB of RAM available to DOS programs. Nomad started up and ran, complete with sound. I've loaded Word, and some DOS games that play over the net, and done all the other things I can think of that might crash the system, but so far as I can see, it works at least as well as it ever did, and I have the impression that things actually load
faster now.
On the other hand, Optimize inserted several useless files into CONFIG.SYS -- you don't really need to run IFSHLP.SYS and SETVAR.EXE with Win 95 -- and if you comment them out and run Optimize again, you get them again.
I have a dozen books on setting up Win 95, and not one of them tells me how to fix things so that I have a DOS mouse. If you're running a program under a DOS session in Win 95, the Win 95 mouse driver is already loaded, and you've got your mouse; but if you exit Win 95 to restart in DOS, that driver doesn't load.
One solution is to find a copy of MOUSE.COM, copy that to your computer, and invoke it in AUTOEXEC.BAT. The problem here is that MOUSE.COM will load when Win 95 loads, and it won't load high, so you end up with DOS Windows not a lot larger than you started with.
There are two possible solutions. One is to let Optimize do its thing, then comment out the needless IFSHLP.SYS and SETVER.EXE drivers it loads. Mouse.com still won't load high, but you'll h
ave the mouse whenever Win 95 runs a program in DOS-only mode. The problem here is that you may not be able to run big DOS games (like Nomad) in a DOS window because MOUSE.COM is eating memory space.
The other solution is to run Optimize, comment out the needless drivers, and don't add a mouse driver at all. Now you will have large DOS windows with the standard Windows mouse driver. You won't have a mouse when Win 95 invokes DOS only. However, you can manually exit Win 95 to boot up in DOS mode, run MOUSE.COM, and then run the program. Since the only program I regularly run in DOS-only mode that wants a mouse is Norton Disk Editor, and that runs fine with the manually loaded MOUSE.COM, it's what I do. The result is I have over 600K DOS Windows.
There's probably a simpler solution to the mouse problem, but at least this works.
As to QEMM, I'm not sure it's doing much that I couldn't manage with the memory management tools that come with Win 95, but Quarterdeck QuickBoot does make the system r
eboot faster. I'm running Cyrus with Norton System Doctor and First Aid 95 Deluxe, and QEMM does no harm despite my efforts to crash it. Of course you really want QEMM with DOS and Windows 3.1.
Incidentally, once I ran Optimize I could run QEMM Setup without General Protection Faults. The QEMM 8 box proclaims that it also contains MagnaRAM. There's a tiny reference to MagnaRAM in the manual. I probably wouldn't have noticed if I hadn't previously installed MagnaRAM as a standalone on Old Cow. MagnaRAM is supposed to make optimum use of RAM through various compression and virtual memory techniques, and the box says that programs will load and run faster if you're using it.
That may be true. The effect isn't particularly noticeable on Old Cow. I run First Aid 95 Deluxe, Norton Commander for DOS, Info Select, and Word for Windows 6.0c on that machine. They're all open at once, and I seldom run anything else. I tend to stay in Word, with occasional trips out to Info Select to make and find notes. None
of that strains the system, so I'm not surprised that MagnaRAM doesn't seem to make much difference. It does pop up on startup to tell you it's running, but it doesn't seem to take long to load.
I've also turned it on in Cyrus. It hasn't done any harm that I can tell, but neither has it made a noticeable difference. A couple of months ago I mentioned the blinking cursor when I ran Norton System Doctor on Cyrus with the Matrox MGA Millennium video board. System Doctor displays a bunch of meters, and it has to periodically update the information it displays; and when it did, the cursor would blink. I find that ugly.
Then, quite by accident, I found that the cursor only blinks if it is above or to the left of the System Doctor display; meaning that if I put System Doctor in the upper left corner of the screen, the cursor will never blink. Even more curiously, with the Orchid Fahrenheit Video 3D board, the cursor doesn't seem to blink no matter where it is in relation to the Norton System Doctor disp
lay.
None of this is particularly important. The cursor didn't blink when in an applications window, only on the desktop, and it didn't seem to annoy anyone but me. I suppose there's a reasonable explanation for all this. Anyway, the bottom line is that I have Norton System Doctor running again.
I recently got a new version of Golden Bow Systems' VOPT.
Among other features, it can find and remove empty files. VOPT is still the best as well as safest disk defragmenter I know, and unlike some, it can get inside compression programs and defragment individual files: the other day I managed to improve disk access on a friend's system by about 20 percent by running VOPT. That disk was so fragmented that it took almost 15 minutes to optimize. VOPT 5.11 is good stuff. Highly recommended.
Globalink Power Translator 6.0 does languages.
It knows Spanish, French, German, and Italian. It does full-sentence translation, with some attention to grammar and idioms.
One
classic test of a translation program is to feed in a sentence, get the translation, then feed that in to see what comes back out. The classic case of this was an early CIA program to translate Russian: the input was "The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak." The output in that case was "The vodka is good, but the meat is rotten."
I fed that into the German/English window of Power Translator, then cut and pasted that into an English/German window. The result was "The spirit wants, but the meat is weak." Not bad for a literal translation.
It might be amusing to take that around the ring through Italian and Spanish, but Power Translator doesn't work that way: it only translates to or from English. You can't do German/Spanish unless you go by way of English.
There's an Internet browser capability as well as a document translator. It's all very fast, the vocabulary is quite extensive, and you can add your own items to the dictionaries. The whole thing with all four dictionaries and the Web
capability takes up 60 MB. That would have been wretchedly large a couple of years ago, but it's manageable now. You can also put it on a server; Power Translator works nicely over a network.
No translation program will ever generate literature or even good idiomatic translations, and if you don't know the foreign language at all you need to be very careful; on the other hand, this is a great deal better than trying to puzzle out meaning by looking up words in a dictionary. If you deal with foreign languages, and increasingly we all do, this is about as good as you're going to get; the next step is to hire a translator.
Globalink Power Translator 6.0 is easy to use, simple to install, and as complete as anything I've seen. If you need this, you need it bad. Recommended.
I like U.S. Robotics modems, and I regularly use an external Courier;
in my experience, U.S. Robotics modems will lock on a noisy line better than any other modem.
However, we recently discovered somet
hing silly about the current top-of-the-line U.S. Robotics Sportsters (Couriers are still fine). The current Sportster modem has a known problem, sometimes pausing in the middle of communications. The easiest solution is to get the new firmware update. Unfortunately, the newest Sportsters, including the ones you buy in stores, don't have a socketed EPROM. It's soldered. Thus the only way to get the update is to send your NEW modem in to be upgraded. This takes 2 weeks unless you pay $25 for advanced replacement. Hmmm.
Product Information
DynaMO 640............................$659.00
DynaMO 230Portable PC Card Drive .... $499.00
Fujitsu Computer Products of America, Inc.
San Jose, CA
Phone: (800) 626-4686 or (408) 432-6333
Fax: (408) 894-1706
Internet:
http://www.fcpa.com
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