It Was a Great Comdex

Here are a few of the things that impressed Jerry this year -- and a few caveats.

Jerry Pournelle

Three things happened this month, all related. First, the biggest and busiest Comdex ever took place. Over 200,000 people, thousands of exhibits, tens of thousands of products; and the BYTE editors have to look at every one of them, because we decide the winners of BYTE's Best of Comdex awards. You can find out about the winners on BYTE's Web site.

Of course, we can't possibly see everything, but we do try, and it's astonishing how much we get to. It remains true that the session in which we pick the awards is the most information-rich meeting I regularly attend, rivaled only by meetings of the Citizens Ad visory Council on National Space Policy. It also la sts all night after three days of rushing around trying to look at everything.

This brings us to the second event: I got a severe case of bronchitis and strep throat. I was coming down with it when I gave out the Best of Show Award. Although I think my speech was OK, the bugs I was carrying left me confused enough that I almost forgot to introduce the Show Director of Comdex, who actually presents the Best of Show Award. Shortly after the ceremony, I was near collapse. If Roberta hadn't been in Las Vegas with me, I'd never have gotten home.

That links with the third event. Before going to Comdex, I'd started a fire-and-sword purge, throwing out (actually donating to the University of California Institute for Global Cooperation) about 20 boxes of accumulated stuff and boxing up a lot more, thus getting it out of the way for later sorting; but when I got back, I wasn't able to deal with the boxed material.

The result is more chaos than usual at Chaos Manor, but it was a great Comdex .

In my judgment, the most significant thing at Comdex was Play, Inc.'s (Rancho Cordova, CA, http://www.play.com/ ) Trinity. The technical team at Play includes many of the Amiga developers. Trinity is the Video Toaster on steroids: it's a $10,000 box that does video mixing and editing effects you couldn't have done a year ago without a million dollars' worth of equipment. Trinity will revolutionize the video-editing business. Almost anyone can create video effects that only big studios could do not long ago. The deservedly popular science fiction series Babylon 5 was made possible by software developed by NewTek, which also designed the Video Toaster. It will be fascinating to see what new shows we get from Trinity.

More good news: Play's Snappy image grabber now has drivers that let you use it with Wi ndows NT systems.

Trinity didn't win BYTE's Best of Show award. That went to Microsoft's (Redmond, WA, http://www.microsoft.com/office ) Office 97 Suite. Our award criteria are innovation, impact on the industry, and "way cool." Office 97 Suite meets all three requirements. It is a significant improvement over its predecessor. The document-summarization feature in the Word upgrade is awesome. It produces an intelligent précis of a document, and while you can write documents that will fool the summary engine, for the most part, it does at least as good a job as a college freshman.

Of course, Corel WordPerfect Suite 7 for Windows 95 is good enough, as was the Microsoft Word 7 Suite. For that matter, on my "monk's cell" 486 where I write fiction, I'm still using Word 6.0c, although one of these da ys I'll upgrade. The neat thing is not only do we have choices, but almost all the rational choices are better than anything we ever expected a few years ago.

The neatest category was peripherals, with three solid finalists. Seagate's (Scotts Valley, CA, http://www.seagate.com ) Cheetah 10,000-rpm hard drive won because we think it's the first of a revolutionary series of ultrafast hard drives. If you haven't noticed, hard drive space is down to $100 a gigabyte and falling while drives are getting faster and faster.

The other two finalists weren't far behind: ViewSonic's (Walnut, CA, http://www.viewsonic.com ) PV140 ViewPanel, a 14-inch flat-panel color display you have to see to believe, and DeLorme's (Freeport, ME, http://www.delorme.com ) Tripmate Global Positioning System (GPS) receiver and software bundle.

ViewSonic was displaying the PV140 ViewPanel on their upper deck close to really bright overhead lights, just to show off how it performed in glare conditions, and it was just wonderful. It's a bit expensive now, but it's already good enough to be the monitor for a small office/home office (SOHO) main system desktop; and prices always fall.

I now believe that in a couple of years, most of us will be able to get rid of huge monitors in favor of light flat-panel displays that can hang on walls or sit on desktops, and I can hardly wait. Incidentally, I'm still using ViewSonic monitors at several workstations, and for what I do, they're near perfect. ViewSonic emphasizes sharpness and resolution rather than color fidelity, which isn't to say the colors are not very good; and the sharpness and definition make it easy to stare at them all day. For price/performance, it's hard to beat ViewSonic monitors.

The final peripheral, DeLorme's Tripmate GPS receiver, is a cigarette-pack-size box that connects to your laptop. You insert the DeLorme Street Atlas USA CD-ROM, and, lo!, your computer will not only know where you are, but show you on a map as you travel. I'm due to get one of these shortly; a full report then, but if you do a lot of traveling in odd places, you may want one of these right now.

The potentially most useful thing I found at Comdex is Acceleration Software International's Superfassst. Despite the ridiculous name, this thing really works; but read the rest of this before you buy it.

I never saw Superfassst on display. As we were going through the Hilton on the way to the meeting to choose the awards, someone thrust a CD-ROM into my hand and told me to try it. "It will make your programs load faster and speed up all your disk operations," he said. I took it to the meeting, and before we discussed the Best Utility category, I installed it on my Nimantics Orion 6* laptop. Installation was simple, and when the setup was finished, there was a gaudy Christmas tree ornament on my desktop. The instructions say to drag a program to that to open it.

I chose Microsoft Word 7, and my jaw dropped. "Holy moley!" said I, and all the BYTE editors came over to see. I closed Word and did it again. It loaded in about 20 percent of the time it usually takes. I loaded a big document -- the full text of my new novel Starswarm . It came up instantaneously.

About 1 minute later, the program was a Best Utility finalist. A data-protection program from Octopus Technologies (Yardley, PA, http://www.octopustech.com ), Octopus for Windows NT, won the category, but my vote stayed with Acceleration's speedup utility.

I've since installed Superfassst on Cyrus, the Cyrix 6x86-P166. It seemed to work just fine, but next morning I found an odd error message on the screen. When I tried to shut down, I couldn't. I then spent about 2 hours installing and uninstalling the program.

Superfassst comes with an uninstallation batch file on the CD-ROM. Alas, that didn't work properly either: it leaves a DOS prompt window unclosed and unclosable without Ctrl-Alt-Del.

My normal inclination at this point would be to use the CD-ROM as a Frisbee, but I have to confess that I really got fond of the faster disk operations; so I spent a couple of hours fooling around with it. I haven't located all the problems, but I know about some.

Before you install Superfassst, go into your Start-up folder and drag everything to a new folder named Starsave or some such. Use the right mouse button to drag and tell it to move the programs. In particular, be sure that System Agent and Norton System Doctor are not going to run on start-up, and it won't hurt to get rid of First Aid, too. Now shut down the system. Bring it up again, and install Superfassst on this clean system.

The acid test will be if you can now shut down the system in a normal manner. If you can, Bob's your uncle. If not -- if the system hangs -- you'll have to uninstall Superfassst and try again. Once it's installed and you have shut down properly, you can restart First Aid, System Agent, and all your other start-up programs with one exception: Norton System Doctor and Superfassst just don't get along. I don't know why.

Eventually I got the program running properly, and it now seems stable, although I have had some minor glitches. None have lost me any work. When you get it running, the results are impressive. Programs load and save much faster. Moreover, I have had no problems with any program once it's loaded with Superfassst. The problems are with Superfassst itself, which keeps dying in odd ways.

I don't know how this thing works, but it speeds up everything it touches. In particular, it works with Word 7; Q&A and Q&A Write (which reside on a network server, not locally, and which usually take forever to load because when I load them, I also load the memory-resident DefPlus dictionary and Word Finder thesaurus); DOS programs, spreadsheets, simulation programs, games. They all load much faster, and so far I haven't had any interferences at all; and shutting down Norton System Doctor seems to have fixed one major glitch. However, I have restarted System Agent and First Aid, and while I can't trace problems to them, Superfassst is giving itself fits again.

The company has part of the story on how the program works in the brochure that comes with the CD-ROM, but I don't really understand what's happening. All I know is that it speeds things up something wond erful, and when it's working properly, it's the most useful software I found at Comdex. Acceleration promises that a new version that fixes some known problems will be out before you read this. I've uninstalled the present version because it's more trouble than it's worth, but I'll try the new one when it comes out.

I really have to put Superfassst in the experimental software category. I want to like it, but be warned, I've had problems, and you may also. With luck, the new version will be more stable.

I recently changed my main system from Pentafluge to Cyrus. My other choice was Racing Cow, a Gateway 2000 P5-133. (I suppose that in theory I could have reclaimed Joizy, the Gateway 2000 P5-200XL that Mrs. Pournelle uses, but the consequences of doing that were too gruesome to contemplate; Roberta likes that machine.)

The decision factor for me was that I need a fast Pentium system to be a test-bed for new hardware and software. You want a good standard system for that, a nd Racing Cow is as standard as they come. I do not use my main machine as a test-bed, so Cyrus became my personal workstation.

As soon as I got Cyrus set up and networked, the hesitations started. That is, every few minutes I can be typing away and what I type doesn't appear on-screen for about half a second. This condition lasts a couple of seconds and comes in patterns of three hesitations separated by 2-second intervals. Most of you will recall that I had this problem with Pentafluge. I thought that going to a faster machine like Cyrus would cure it.

Well, enough is enough. I am pleased to report that we now understand the hesitation problem and have found a complete cure.

First: if you're using an Intel EtherExpress 16-bit Ethernet board in a Win 95 system, you should get the latest drivers from Intel; but that will not cure the hesitations. Cyrus doesn't have an Intel EtherExpress board. We are using an Applied Creative Technology Ultimate PCI-3000. The hesitations aren't the board' s problem.

You must go to Control Panel, Network, and look for the TCP/IP PCNET Ethernet adapter. Double-click on that, and you'll see its properties. If you're having the kind of hesitations that plagued me, you will see that it is set to "Obtain an IP address automatically." Change that to "Specify an IP address." Now, hand-enter the primary address as 192.168.0.1, check OK, and let the system reset. That will end the hesitations. That address is bogus -- actually it's reserved for private nets and will never be used. What it does is prevent the software from going out to find an address it doesn't use but thinks it wants.

It didn't quite end there for me. For reasons not at all clear to me, I have two copies of the TCP/IP PCNET Ethernet adapter binding. I set the first to a bogus address as described above and eliminated the second; but when the system came back up, Win 95 said it found new hardware and installed the second copy again -- and I still had hesitations. Then I went into the second copy of TCP/IP and gave it the phony IP address as above, and that did it: Cyrus no longer hesitates. One day, I may eliminate both those bindings, remove the card, bring the system up so that it thinks there is no Ethernet, and reinstall the Ethernet from scratch. That should get rid of the second copy of the TCP/IP binding. For the moment, though, everything works, and I don't have much incentive to "fix" it. In particular, the Ethernet works fine, and the hesitations are gone, gone, gone.

Of course, if you don't use TCP/IP for your internal connections, you can get rid of all the TCP/IP bindings to your local Ethernet card (but not to Dialup Networking). You may use it and not know it. Traveling Software's LapLink for Windows can use TCP/IP. It also requires a real knowledge of TCP/IP addresses; my bogus ones may not work. In general, you're safe enough deleting the TCP/IP binding to your local Ethernet card (but not from Dialup Networking) right now; but it's also safe to say that within a couple of years, you're going to have to understand IP addresses or find software that does. You have been warned.

I wish I could say I figured all this out myself, but in fact a reader, Theodore A. Jump of SPGS, Inc., discovered the cure and sent it to me by e-mail. He has my eternal thanks for curing one of the most persistently vexing problems I've had in the past few years.

Changing to Cyrus has done a world of good for my Internet connections. When I was using Pentafluge to connect to EarthLink, I would often get retries and hesitations, problems accessing e-mail, and other difficulties, sometimes requiring help from the EarthLink technical-support people. With Cyrus, I simply inserted the EarthLink Total Access Win 95 installation CD-ROM, let it trundle, told it I already had an account, gave my user name and password -- and voilà!, all is well, and I get connected to EarthLink every time I try.

I have no real explanation. However, Pentafluge was a very early Pentium 60 and one of the first to have Win 95 (the Microsoft product manager came with a beta copy to experiment with Pentafluge long before Win 95 was released). I thought I had eliminated all traces of beta code, but now I wonder. Alternatively, there may be some BIOS problems. Whatever the explanation, switching to Cyrus has cured my Internet-access difficulties.

The Internet is still far too slow, and I have yet to find any newsgroups worth the time required to wade through the spam. I don't have time for chats, and if I want a serious discussion of computers, society, or the impact of computers on society, I have all that and more in my conferences on BIX, where nearly everything said is relevant and interesting. I still keep a couple of magazines handy when I want anything from the Internet, because I still spend a lot of time waiting for something to happen; but with the Cyrix, it's so much better now that I'm beginning to understand why some people can become fascinated with the Internet. I didn't think changing to a much faster machine would make that much difference, but it has.

If you're going to surf the Internet, you'll find it's worth it to have a fast surfing machine.

I've been trying to avoid it, but there's nothing for it: I've got to eat a healthy helping of steamed crow.

David Kaminer is an old friend. Once upon a time, he used to introduce me at my annual lecture at the West Coast Computer Faire, and we've kept in touch over the years. At Comdex, he invited me to meet Dr. Roger Billings.

Some years ago, I heard that Dr. Billings was suing Novell on the grounds that he had invented the notion of client/server systems. This seemed ridiculous on the face of it, and I said so in print. In my defense, I took my account of the case from two sources, both usually reliable, and I showed that column to several editors and colleagues. Nobody objected to what I'd said.

Alas, that's not much of a defense. I should have spoken to Dr. Billings before I shot my mouth off. Now I have, and I owe him an apology.

He doesn't claim to have invented the notion of client/server systems. He does claim to have invented and patented some methods for making client/server systems work, and that Novell used his patented technology in designing NetWare.

I haven't the competence to determine the truth of his claims. I can say that Billings' (Independence, MO, http://www.wband.com ) WideBand Gigabit Networking System as shown at Comdex is amazingly fast over standard 10Base-T twisted-pair wiring. The system consists of concentrator boxes, which can be daisy chained, and boards for PCI- and ISA-bus systems. Put them together, and you get 333 Mbps going out of your desktop PC to your LAN and 666 Mbps coming in the other way. The system is easy to set up and has enough bandwidth for anything you'd care to do: video , data, voice, telemetry, several channels of each, and all at once. Data warehouses and video service houses take notice: if you need really fast and wide communications between servers and workstations, look into WideBand. There is nothing like it.

This isn't a review of the WideBand Gigabit Networking System; my point is that clearly Dr. Billings, who began in CP/M days just as I did, has great technical expertise in data networking.

I'll have more about WideBand in the future. For the moment, herewith my public apology to Dr. Billings for making fun of his lawsuit. Whether or not his claim is sustained, it very clearly is not frivolous, and I shouldn't have said it was.

The game situation is wonderful. First, I'm pleased to report that the downloadable patch for Interplay's Conquest of the New World fixes nearly all of the outright bugs. The naval battle situation is still ridiculous: you can attack a single enemy with an entire fleet of ships of the highest quality, and not o nly not sink the enemy, but lose one of your galleons. Otherwise, it's an excellent strategy game. It drags a bit in the middle as you try to build up your forces before you can accomplish anything, and it's possible to win so decisively that the end game is dull, but before that happens, you will have had plenty to do.

The game of the month is SSI's Steel Panthers II: Modern Battles. This is a wonderful simulation of modern armored war, turn-based rather than real-time so you're not playing whack-a-mole, and with quite realistic capabilities of the units. The graphics are excellent. My copy has numerous bugs, none fatal, but some are very annoying. The "music" can get stuck with a gunfire passage, and the cursor often "sticks" rather than scrolling properly. I suspect that by the time you read this, there will be at least one bug patch. Problems and all, it's as good a game of modern warfare as I know of. I could use this to design and write battle scenes for novels, and by this time nex t year, I probably will have.

There's a patch for SSI's Age of Rifles that makes it a lot more playable, fixing the campaign scenario bug that made you change sides in the middle of a campaign. However, the real secret of playing Age of Rifles is to invoke it with the command line "Rifles reaction+." This turns on some better AI code that for some reason isn't activated by default. The result is a great deal more realistic battles.

Fantasy General, also from SSI, remains on my list of best games of the year. It's medieval armies, with magic playing an important but not overdominant role. I sure like it. It's also one of the toughest games to win, and the computer doesn't cheat at all. If you get it, you should also get the Prima Publishing book Secrets by Terry Coleman. The discussion is excellent, and the tips help without spoiling the game.

The real news here, though, is that MicroProse Software's Master of Orion II is finally out. Master of Orion, better known as MOO, was the all-time best space war game ever done, still playable years after its release. I've had a copy on every machine I use -- except the one in the monk's cell where I write fiction -- since it came out. MOO fans have been waiting for MOO II for years.

It appears to have been worth waiting for. I say appears: we got it yesterday, and last night Alex snaffled it off. I drove him out of the house at 2:30 a.m. He hadn't paused long enough to tell me much about the game, which means I'll have to try it myself; but I'll be astonished if I don't find it a black hole for my time. Certainly MOO was. More on this one next month, assuming I can stop playing it long enough to write next month's column. I haven't seen a strategy book, but I'm sure there will be one; there's already a lively Internet discussion of MOO II.

There is already a bug patch that you'll need. By the time this is out, there will be more. With modern complex games, it's a safe bet that you ought to check the publisher's Web site for patches before you e ven begin to play them.

The book of the month is Higher Education by Charles Sheffield and Jerry Pournelle, now out in paperback from Tor Books (ISBN 0-812-53890-0). This book was inspired by nonfiction essays about the future, which Dr. Sheffield and I wrote for a meeting of the International Conference on the Unity of the Sciences in 1992. It's a novel about the failure of the U.S. education system and one approach to doing something about it.

The computer book of the month is Peter Norton's Guide to Windows 95/NT 4 Programming with MFC by Rob McGregor (Sams Publishing, ISBN 0-672-30900-9). MFC, Microsoft Foundation Classes, is an object-oriented programming language that grew out of the Microsoft AFX. It's much like C++, of course, and it's becoming important for those who want to understand things such as ActiveX. Like all Norton books, this has numerous examples, which are given both in print and on a CD-ROM. The book begins assuming that you kn ow little about MFC but is complete enough to serve as a reference handbook.

Next month: the Chaos Manor User's Choice Awards and the annual Chaos Manor Orchid and Onion parade. Don't miss it.

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Product Information

Conquest of the New World.....................$49.99

Interplay Productions, Inc.
Irvine, CA
Phone:    (800) 468-3775
Phone:    (714) 553-6678
Fax:      (714) 252-2820
Internet: 
http://www.interplay.com

Circle 1013 on Inquiry Card.

Master of Orion II............................$48.99

MicroProse Software
San Diego, CA
Phone:    (800) 879-7529
Phone:    (510) 522-1164
Fax:      (510) 522-9357
Internet: 
http://www.microprose.com

Circle 1014 on Inquiry Card.

Steel Panthers II: Modern Battles.......about $40.00
Age of Rifles...........................about $30.00
Fantasy General.........................about $30.00

Strategic Simulations, Inc.
Sunnyvale, CA
Phone:    (800) 234-3088
Phone:    (408) 737-6800
Fax:      (408) 737-6814
Internet: 
http://www.ssionline.com

Circle 1015 on Inquiry Card.

Superfassst...................................$50.00

Acceleration Software International Corp.
Seattle, WA
Phone:    (800) 754-1128
Phone:    (360) 697-9260
Fax:      (360) 598-2450
Internet: 
http://www.accelerationsw.com

Circle 1016 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 .