WEB EXCLUSIVE: Of Big Floppy Disks, Modems, and Talking to Computers

There were more than a few things to get excited about at Comdex--but, as always, some come with fair warnings. For the full report, see "It Was a Great Comdex" in the March issue of BYTE.

Jerry Pournelle

I never saw what may be the best new technology product shown at Comdex. Fortunately, my son Alex did.

The DataWave 14 from Inwave Technologies puts 14 MB on a standard floppy disk, using your standard floppy drive, while still retaining the ability to read and write normal 1.44-MB floppy disks. The DataWave system consists of an ISA 8-/16-bit controlle r card that you connect to your floppy drive with a standard 34-pin ribbon cable. It doesn't use an interrupt request (IRQ). Install some software and that's it: 14 MB on standard floppy disks. Moreover, DataWave's encoding technology can be applied to other magnetic media, so that future products will multiply the capacity of cartridge drives (e.g., Zip and Jaz) by a factor of 10. This is potentially a very significant product.

The system uses pulse-position modulation, which has been proven in the satellite industry. The disks are not "formatted" in the conventional sense. The demonstration system at Comdex kept the floppy disk as drive A and adjusted itself according to the kind of disk it was. It uses updatable chips--and could sell for around $100, possibly less. This means adding enormous mass-storage capability at low cost not only to new machines, but to some of the oldest.

If you're packing that much information onto magnetic media, you'd think that the s tability isn't going to be good. That is: floppy disks become unreadable over the years as the 1s and 0s tend to average out to one-halves. There are techniques for recovering most of the information on a deteriorated floppy disk, but you shouldn't consider storage on them as good for more than a couple of years. However, if you have that much room on a disk, you can put error-correction code (ECC) on as you write your data.

The DataWave 14 does that, using the Reed-Solomon system that's a proven technology. The result is a great increase in the storage life of data on cheap media.

One caution: I didn't see this, and I don't have one yet. But I'll be getting one, and I'll test the devil out of it. More on this when I know more, but the DataWave 14 system looks like it may have been the most significant technology at Comdex.

I did get to see Dragon Systems' new speech-recognition system, DragonDictate 2.5 for Windows, and it's cool.

I have mixed emotions about speech reco gnition. On the one hand, some of the greatest works of literature were dictated to scribes. St. Paul dictated nearly all his epistles (when he wrote with his own hand, it was unusual enough that he said so). Cicero dictated all his works, as did Caesar.

It's only fairly recently that writers began doing the physical recording of their thoughts. Of course, some could write only by hand, and many had bizarre techniques. Tom Wolfe used to write while pacing around a table, scribbling a few sentences a page in soft pencil on yellow pads. Then he'd tear the sheets off and throw them on the floor. His editors often went nuts trying to figure out the page-number sequences. Somerset Maugham used to recline on a couch on a verandah overlooking the sea and write with a fountain pen on a lapboard. When he couldn't think of anything to write, he wrote "W. Somerset Maugham" over and over until he was so bored that he thought of a story to distract him.

Most writers now use word processors. That's partly my fa ult, in that so far as anyone can tell, I was the first person to use a computer to write a published novel. I recall taking an old Osborne to a meeting of the National Association of Science Writers and causing a sensation. Now, word processors are universal. Still, a few writers dictate to tape machines; a couple use stenographers.

No one I know of dictates novels to a computer yet; but DragonDictate 2.5 for Windows is more than good enough to do that. Actually, the IBM VoiceType Dictation 3.0 for Windows 95 voice-recognition system was good enough; but DragonDictate is better. If you want to control your computer by talking to it--perhaps the only option for some disabled people--then DragonDictate is in my judgment the right system to do that with.

I doubt I'll use it much myself. I'm fairly set in my ways, and I can type pretty fast. On the other hand, if I ever do take to dictation, I will certainly use a computer system rather than a stenographer. I very much want to be able to see what I h ave just written while I'm creating text. My writing methods involve a lot of going back and mucking about with paragraphs, pushing the old stuff down as I rewrite but keeping it around so that I can incorporate phrases as needed. Dragon's dictation system lets me do that.

The real drawback to computer dictation is that you have to pause between words. The pauses needn't be long, but they have to be there; and talking with full stops between words is both difficult and habit-forming, so that when you leave the dictation and talk to people, you sound weird. I can type about as fast as I can speak with pauses between words, so there's no great timesaving in computer dictation for me. However, your mileage may vary, and for some research work involving lots of fiddling around with sources and notes and copying text, dictation is much faster.

If you're at all interested in speech to text, check out DragonDictate 2.5 for Windows. It really works.

The most spectacular Comdex product launch I went to was Microsoft Windows CE OS. CE stands for Consumer Electronics and is a scaled-down Win 95 for hand-held machines. Microsoft bought out the entire showing of Mystere at Cirque de Soleil at Treasure Island and filled it with dealers, friends, and the press. Afterward, they held a combination press conference and reception.

There were a number of hand-held machines introduced with Windows CE. Each has a different set of features. The one most commonly seen at Comdex was the Casio Cassiopeia; Casio had a loaner deal for the press. I got the NEC MobilePro 200. After examining them all, the BYTE editors opted to give an award to the Philips (Sunnyvale, CA, http://www.velo1.com ) Velo 1, with finalist status to Hewlett-Packard's (Palo Alto, CA, http://www.hp.com/handheld ) Palmtop PC for Windows CE.

All these hand-held machines have their strong and weak points. They all have small screens and tiny keyboards, requiring you to learn new typing techniques if you want to use them properly. They all have touchscreens, which work. The Velo 1 has a built-in modem; most of the others need a PC Card modem. All have arrangements whereby you can attach a radio-mail antenna and get your e-mail on your palmtop.

None of these is a substitute for a computer. They're designed to work with a desktop or laptop, and they all have ingenious methods for transferring and synchronizing data between a computer and the hand-held machine.

They also all have a potentially dangerous feature. In the convention of Microsoft's Windows applications, Ctrl-A selects all text in a document. The next keystroke replaces all the selected text. Thus, it's possible to write a long document, accidentally hit Ctrl-A, and continue with another key, whereupon every bit of your work vanishes. With Word this isn't a big deal since a major feature is a really good Undo capability. There's also an Undo in Word CE in the Edit menu (it's not there unless there's something to undo). I've found myself having to use it more than I like, but that could be a function of the tiny keyboard.

This may not be a problem with people who grew up with Microsoft's Windows applications. Those of us touch-typists who learned writing with computers on WordStar or one of WordStar's children know Ctrl-a as "move back a word,S and we used it a lot. Ctrl-arrow is much harder to reach, requiring you to take your fingers off the home keys. I still use Q&A to write these columns and most first drafts, in part because Q&A incorporates all the old WordStar Diamond control strokes.

The CE hand-held machines are just about small enough to carry in a pocket, certainly small enough for my Italian leather shoulder bag. They're pretty good for alarms, calendars, appointments, phone numbers, and the like. It remains to be seen if they are good enough for serious note taking. It's hard to type on that tiny keyboard. Alas, I didn't discover the Undo for a couple of weeks, so I haven't tried as seriously as I might. More in a couple of months as I get used to this.

I am convinced that there's a PDA in my future. I am not sure this iteration is it, but I'll try all the CE machines and let you know.

The modem scene is interesting. There are now schemes for using ordinary copper wire and phone lines to transmit 56 Kbps down and half that up from your computer to the Internet. There are two incompatible schemes, from U.S. Robotics and Rockwell. U.S. Robotics will let users--consumers and Internet service providers (ISPs)--convert to 56 Kbps with a software upgrade. Rockwell is releasing high-speed modem chips. If you're an ISP, betting on the wro ng scheme might be expensive.

Meanwhile, I have the latest internal Supra modems and an elderly external U.S. Robotics Courier. New firmware for the Courier exists, but I haven't done an update in a year. Cyrus came with an internal SupraExpress modem, so when I adopted Cyrus as my main machine, I brought over all my communications software as well. That worked splendidly for my EarthLink Internet connection. Alas, that's not the case with my BIX connection.

I communicate to BIX through Tymnet using Galahad, a Windows-based (it's written in Visual Basic) automatic mail- and conference-handling system. Galahad grabs all my mail and conference messages. I read and reply to them off-line, after which Galahad squirts them back up to BIX. It saves me a great deal of time and effort.

This week, the winter rains came to Los Angeles, and the phone lines got noisy. That didn't affect my Internet connection, but it did something horrible to the local Tymnet access, with the result that Galahad would t ry to upload my mail and get stuck. I don't know if it was getting too many retries or receiving spurious commands generated by line noise; I just know that Galahad wasn't working.

In desperation, I transferred everything back over to Pentafluge, which has an external U.S. Robotics Courier V.Everything Modem. I invoked Galahad, and Bob's your uncle: everything went through just fine.

This is of a piece with my observations over the years: Supra modems are really good, but when it comes to reliable communications over noisy lines, U.S. Robotics' modems are unbeatable.

The bottom line here is that I'll swap: Pentafluge, which is now over at Larry Niven's station where it will be used mostly for word processing and games and won't need much in the way of communications, can have the Supra, and I'll bring the U.S. Robotics Courier over to Cyrus. When you absolutely positively must have communications, my experience is that U.S. Robotics is the way to go.

We've installed Windows NT Se rver 4.0 on Spirit, our dual Pentium 120 server, and it works like a charm. One caution: when NT Server first comes up, it doesn't see your local peer-to-peer network. Give it time. What happens is that the server first looks to see who is the peer-to-peer "master," decides that a server takes precedence and kicks the old master back to slave status, and then calls all PCs to come serve the new master. Eventually, they all respond and the network is established. This can take several minutes.

Clearly, that's a fanciful way of describing what happens, but it's close enough.

We did have some problems with SCSI. We tried to daisy chain a Pioneer DRM-624X Six-Disc CD-ROM Changer, a Micropolis AV external hard drive, an Exabyte tape drive, and a digital audiotape (DAT) drive onto the external port of the Adaptec SCSI-2 controller. That didn't work. The SCSI-2 controller would see the devices, but NT wouldn't boot properly. When we cut back to the Pioneer DRM-624X and the Micropolis hard drive, everything worked just fine.

It's not the quality of the cables. We were using Granite Digital SCSIVue Gold Diagnostic Cables, about the best there are. The problem is the length of the external SCSI string, and the solution is either to install a couple of the devices internal to Spirit or to install a second SCSI-2 controller. We haven't done either of those yet, so we have to make do with only two external devices on our network server.

Note that this is SCSI-2, Fast but not Wide. Fast and Wide SCSI has even greater problems with cable length. It also requires more expensive cables. Even so, the world is moving to Fast and Wide SCSI: the other day we went to Fry's for a hard drive, and the only ones available were Fast and Wide. Fortunately, the drives come with a little adapter that lets them run on a SCSI-2 string. One of these days we'll have to upgrade to Fast and Wide, but for the moment, SCSI-2 is good enough.

Ultra SCSI has real cabling problems. We have seen seven-disk RAID syste ms that won't work with more than four drives in the chain. That's internal; for external devices, you may be lucky to get one SCSI device working.

Fortunately, Granite Digital has a solution for all that. I have seen, and by the time you read this they will be shipping, the SCSI Repeater Box, a small box that goes in the SCSI cable line and enables you to extend the cables. There are models for everything from SCSI-1 to Ultra SCSI. I'll have one by the time you read this. I generally won't recommend anything before I use it, but I have never had the slightest problem with any Granite Digital SCSI product not doing more than it claims to do. If you have SCSI problems, talk to Granite Digital. If they can't solve your problem, you're really in trouble.

CyberMedia's Oil Change is well worth having. Oil Change is an Internet tool for automatically updating your software. When you first install it, Oil Change goes out and updates itself. Then it looks at what software you use, and if th e Oil Change database says there are later versions than what you're using, it will find and download them. After that, it will either automatically install the updates or save them for you to manually install at a later time.

Some of those downloads can take an hour or more, but Oil Change runs unattended, so that's no big problem. In my case, it found updates to Norton System Doctor (it was the updated version that seemed to conflict with Superfassst). It also found updates to Win 95 (Win 95 itself, a whole bunch of Microsoft Win 95 desk toys, new Creative Labs Sound Blaster drivers, and an update to CyberMedia's First Aid program).

The only one of these that gave me any installation problems was the First Aid update package. The setup program for that upgrade has a complex and nearly unreadable readme file, fills the screen so that you can't get at the Win 95 toolbar, and then gives you advertisements while the upgrade proceeds. It also takes nearly forever. Then it wants to register the upgrad e. However, it won't ask you which port your modem is on: it checks each port starting with COM1, taking a full minute to determine there's no modem at that port. Then it moves to COM2. Eventually it got to COM3, where my internal Supra resides, went out to register me--and showed me more advertisements while it was doing it. I found this so infuriating that I very nearly reset the system and threw the upgrade away, but at the last minute, I went for coffee instead.

Oil Change works and is useful; it's a pity they have done all they can to make using it painful. Recommended with reservations.

We have a Nintendo 64 home video-game system attached to the TV in the back room. Nintendo used to dominate the game-box scene. This may let them do it again.

What we have is nothing less than a small Silicon Graphics workstation in a game box. It has 3-D graphics you couldn't have gotten for under $10,000 a year ago. At the moment there aren't many games for it, but that will change. Mea nwhile, Mario runs around in real 3-D, moving smoothly and seamlessly with a visual quality you have to see to believe.

NEC Electronics manufactures the processor, which is based on their 64-bit VR4300 Mips RISC processor; the Reality coprocessor; and the RAMbus memory used in the device. The Nintendo 64 has slots for more memory; input ports for four game controllers, so that four people can play simultaneously; cartridges; and an interface that allows connection to a Zip drive, meaning that you'll be able to download and store massive games as well as save very complex game positions. Clearly, if you can download and store games, you can also download and store educational trips and tours, virtual-reality setups, and anything else that you might want to interact with on your TV.

I've said it before: if there's going to be an Internet computer, there's a very good chance that it will come out of the game-box industry rather than from the PC side of the house. Certainly the Nintendo 64 packs a tre mendous amount of computing power in a simple plastic game box that's sold at consumer prices.

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Product Information

DataWave 14.............................about $99.00

Inwave Technologies, Inc.
Janesville, WI
Phone:    (800) 304-1000
Phone:    (608) 752-8181
Fax:      (608) 752-8981
Internet: 
http://www.inwave.com/datawave


DragonDictate 2.5 for Windows................$395.00 Personal


.............................................$695.00 Classic


............................................$1695.00 Power

Dragon Systems
Newton, MA
Phone:    (800) 825-5897
Phone:    (617) 965-5200
Fax:      (617) 527-0372
Internet: 
http://www.dragonsys.com


Nintendo 64..................................$199.95

Nintendo of America, Inc.
Redmond, WA
Phone:    (800) 255-3700
Phone:    (206) 882-2040
Internet: 
http://www.nintendo.com


Oil Change....................................$39.95


First Aid 95 Deluxee..........................$59.95

CyberMedia, Inc.
Santa Monica, CA
Phone:    (800) 721-7824
Phone:    (310) 581-4700
Fax:      (310) 581-4720
Internet: 
http://www.cybermedia.com


SCSI Repeater Box..................$69.00 to $199.00

Granite Digital
Union City, CA
Phone:    (510) 471-6442
Fax:      (510) 471-6267
Internet: 
http://www.scsipro.com


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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 .