New Syne rgies for Computing

The combination of writable CD-ROMs and new image technologies may usher in a new age for computer users.

Jerry Pournelle

I was at an opera association lunch the other day when I found I was seated at the table next to Mr. Blackwell, who annually compiles the Worst-Dressed List. Figuring that any publicity is better than none, I quickly took my "We BE Geeks" pocket protector out of my shirt pocket, where it probably wouldn't be noticed, and put it in my outside jacket pocket. I don't know if he saw it.

While that incident wasn't important, another was. I had my Olympus D-300L digital camera with me and took pictures of the stars, including Richard Bernstein, ou r home-developed Figaro, and Inva Mula, the Albanian Susanna. Everyone was fascinated. Most had never seen a digital camera before. Whe n I showed them the pictures I had just taken, they thought it was wonderful, and I suspect I sold several of those cameras with that demonstration.

That was probably a mistake.

The D-300L is wonderful technology, and I don't mind recommending it to BYTE readers. However, the software that comes with it is miserable at best, and I suspect it will prove impossible for consumer-market buyers. It's not so much that Adobe PhotoDeluxe isn't pretty good once you get it installed; it's that installation is between extremely difficult and impossible.

Here, I have to make a confession. Usually I do everything myself, but my son Alex and our intern Eric were fascinated by the D-300L when we got it a couple of months ago, and it came at a time when I had books due. Alas, I let them do the software installation, and they took care of dow nloading the pictures. The result was my enthusiastic report about the D-300L. While I don't withdraw a word of that, I do have to give fair warning: the software is both ill-conceived in design and horrible in execution.

First, installation: you must install Adobe PhotoDeluxe from a CD-ROM before you install the Olympus Digital Vision software from floppy disks. You do both in the blind faith that your system will find the camera; there's no way to tell the software what port your camera is on.

When you run Adobe PhotoDeluxe, it isn't at all clear that this isn't really an Olympus program; what happens is that Digital Vision installs as a plug-in to PhotoDeluxe. It's easy enough to find the big Digital Camera icon, but when you click on that, you get a menu of plug-in options. You then have to figure out which plug-in goes with the D-300L; that happens to be TWAIN32, there being no mention of the D-300L whatever in the menu you're offered.

If you select the wrong one, the program goes off t o never-never land, and you have to do Ctrl-Alt-Del to shut down PhotoDeluxe. If you choose the right one but the serial port isn't properly selected, if you're lucky, you'll get a message that says your camera isn't connected or not turned on and please try again. Only after that do you get a menu that lets you configure the system to select the serial port.

If you get that far, Bob's your uncle. Sort of. That is, there's an "automatic" configuration button that probably will do the job. If it won't, you can manually select the port and serial rate, and while you may have to do Ctrl-Alt-Del to turn off that task, eventually you'll be connected to your camera. The software now gets thumbnail sketches of all the photos on the camera and lets you select one -- one -- and download it. It then shuts down the plug-in, having given you just enough time to delete that photo from the camera. You'll want to do this, because after you save your photo, you have to go through all that, including downloading all the thumbnails, each time you want another picture. The more pictures in the camera, the longer that takes.

In other words, you can't just tell the system to download and save all the pictures on the camera and put them in a holding folder for dealing with later. You have to deal with them one at a time. This is fun at first, but it soon becomes tedious.

It gets worse. I never did get this stuff to install on my new Compaq Armada laptop, because I never got to the configuration menu; and if PhotoDeluxe once tries to find your camera and can't, it doesn't even bring up the Olympus screen again until you reinstall.

Finally, if you want to uninstall PhotoDeluxe, the best of British luck to you. It doesn't uninstall everything and leaves behind both font and DLL files that you can delete only by shutting down to DOS and deleting them from there. For the final insult, if you uninstall PhotoDeluxe and then try to reinstall, when it gets to those undeletable files, it doesn't tell you they are undelet able. It merely says they are read only; but you'd better not tell it to overwrite them because it can't, and when it fails to overwrite, the silly installation program blows up.

There are a few morals to this story. First, my apology for not doing all this nonsense myself before reporting about the camera. Second, even after I learned just how stupid this software is, I probably wouldn't have noticed if I hadn't been thinking about how the opera stars will react when they encounter this madness. We computer enthusiasts will put up with a lot; too much, I think.

Bottom line: the D-300L is a technical marvel, but I sure don't recommend you buy one for an unsophisticated friend.

Flash: I have e-mail saying there is available at the Olympus Web site a routine that will let you batch-file transfer your pictures to your hard drive in one unattended operation. It's not easy to find -- you have to go to http://www.olympusamerica.com/digital/download/download.html , and there's no direct link from the Olympus home page.

Once you get the software, it does install properly, although the instructions talk about "inserting your CD," and there's some oddball confusion about dates; but it does let you download all the pictures in one batch. So far as I can tell, if you do batch the downloads, you can grab the pictures only in JPEG format; if you want the full resolution, you still have to get them one by one. Bottom line now: you can get this for Aunt Minnie if you're willing to spend some time showing her how to get and use the upgrade software. But stay tuned.

Everyone is advertising faster systems. I've been wondering about speed: why do we need more? I suppose it depends on what we're doing. I have lately been using the U.S. Robotics 56-Kbps external mo dem for my Internet connections through Earthlink, and I have to say it's easy to get used to the resulting 48- to 52-Kbps effective speeds and to feel deprived at a mere 28.8 Kbps. The U.S. Robotics 56-Kbps system really works. So does Diamond's Rockwell chip-set 56-Kbps modem, but of course the Diamond and U.S. Robotics modems are not compatible; that is, each will send to another system just like it, but not to each other. At the moment, I can access more U.S. Robotics systems than the other kind, and since I've always been partial to them anyway, that's what I'm using.

When I began writing with computers, it would take many seconds to save a text file to disk. Now it's nearly instantaneous, and I'd hate to go back. On the other hand, some operations, such as saving even very large text files, are very fast on my slowest systems, and I doubt I would notice improvements.

One place I would like more speed is in transfer operations. Universal serial bus (USB) promises to speed up operations such a s downloading photos from a digital camera. It's also supposed to make Plug and Play much easier, so there won't be problems like not being able to find the D-300L. I suspect that will be true only for newer systems, though, and I'll still get my monthly ration of horror stories.

We all want more speed for graphics. We have several new high-end systems at Chaos Manor, and artist associate David Em has been putting them through their paces with enormous graphics files. The result so far is that the Compaq Workstation 5000 with dual 200-MHz Pentium Pro processors is very fast, the Carrera Computers Cobra EV56 with a 500-MHz Digital Equipment Alpha is even faster, and the Intergraph Dual Pentium II 266 system is awesome.

Any one of these would be impressive. However, it also shows the ratcheting- expectations effect: once you have used the Intergraph system with Softimage, and watched shadows move in real time as you move the lights around the screen, you wonder how you ever lived without that speed. David has a full report in the Web Exclusive section.

Bottom line: you can now have on your desktop image-processing capabilities that no one had a few years ago.

There's more. Play, the people who brought you the Snappy image-capture device, have been showing Trinity, a real-time, broadcast-quality, full-motion image processor that will let you merge image input sources. You can animate 3-D objects with programs such as Softimage 3D Extreme or 3D Studio Max and then mix in live actors. If your dinosaur object has shiny eyes, you'll see the actor's image reflected in them. Real time. In addition to real-time reflections, Trinity does wipes and fades and all kinds of mixes that you associate with studio equipment.

With the $5000 Trinity box and a decent Pentium system, you can have your own TV studio and produce professional-quality video. Add the new digital camcorders and writable digital videodiscs (DVDs), and the result will be a spate of innovative TV documentaries, dramas, and oddball entertainments. Most of those will be silly or useless, but not all. I expect some real revolutions in television entertainment over the next few years, and the cost to get in on it is about the same as a year's tuition at a major university. Graphic arts is one of the fastest-growing fronts in the computer revolution.

Affordable digital camcorders, Play's Trinity, and DVDs form one synergy. Others are beginning to emerge.

The idea of the paperless office has been around since the earliest days of microcomputers. The goal, we are told, is that some day all documents will be electronic and filed in databases, retrievable by subject, keywords, or black magic, and we won't need paper files at all.

We haven't got there yet. Visioneer's PaperPort ix did move us a bit closer. For those who tuned in late, this is a small gadget that sleeps on a serial port. (There's also the PaperPort Vx, which is built into a keyboard; that works, too.) When you feed it a sheet of paper, it wakes up an d reads it. Then it stores that as a bit-map image. It can also feed it to an optical character reader to turn it into a machine-readable, editable, electronic document. This works pretty smoothly, and a number of businesses use the PaperPort, which is small enough to carry in a briefcase and can be used on trips.

There are several problems. First, the PaperPort, while small, still requires a power source, and it was black and white only. Second, even in this era of cheap disk drives, storing all the documents in an office can use up a lot of storage and create a nightmare of files and folders.

Solutions to both problems are at hand. Visioneer recently introduced a color version, the PaperPort Strobe. This one hangs off the parallel port (with a pass-through to the printer). It can do both black-and-white and color documents, but also photographs and business cards. I'll get back to photographs in a moment, because there's another important synergy there.

Adaptec, with Easy CD Creator Deluxe 3.0, has made the write-once CD-ROM drive a practical device that's easy to use. It will read regular CD-ROMs and write on $4 blanks. Mass storage ceases to be a problem. Scan your documents, put them through an optical character reader -- Caere's OmniPage Pro for Visioneer PaperPort is a good one that works with the Visioneer scanner -- or don't, as you choose. Store them on a CD-ROM blank. Periodically compile your archives to another CD-ROM that you store off-site.

For that matter, at 600 MB on a $4 blank, I can afford to make monthly or even weekly backups of everything in the office. I'll store a copy at Niven's place, so even if my house burns down, I can recover what I'm working on and everything else.

The final synergy involves the Visioneer PaperPort Strobe, writable CD-ROMs, and Kai's Photo Soap from MetaCreations (née HSC, née MetaTools).

Kai's Photo Soap is a $50 program that takes photo images and lets you clean them up, increase the contrast, touch up colors, and generally do anything you can do with Adobe PhotoDeluxe and a lot of what you can do only with Photoshop. There's some mild morphing or "goo" capability (increase the smile on the Mona Lisa or make your boss into an egghead).

The program accepts most graphics input formats and outputs nearly everything but GIF. If you want GIF, you'll have to get something else -- PhotoDeluxe, one of the Corel image manipulators, or Debabelizer -- because MetaCreations declined to pay the GIF-format licensing fees for a $50 program.

With a Visioneer PaperPort and Photo Soap, you can scan in all those old photographs, including the boxes of them Grandma has stored away, sharpen the contrast if they've faded, arrange them in electronic albums, and store them on cheap CD-ROM blanks. When Visioneer came here to show me the PaperPort Strobe, I fed it my photograph of Jeremy Bentham (see the August Web Exclusive section). It worked just fine, and the Visioneer people kept a copy as well. I've been playing with it with the goo features of Photo Soap.

No one knows how long CD-ROM files will be stable, but it's certainly many decades, so once you have scanned your pictures, you'll have really permanent family archive albums. You can also send copies to anyone with a PC and CD-ROM drive, which nowadays is probably everyone you want to send copies to. You could also print them on the Alps MD-2010 Photo-Realistic Color Printer I've mentioned before.

The key to this is ease of use: anyone can scan photos with the PaperPort, anyone can clean up those photos with Photo Soap, and with the new Adaptec software and interface, anyone can store both pictures and documents on CD-ROM. Unlike PhotoDeluxe and the D-300L, they did this right for the consumer market.

Eventually there will be standards and easy-to-use digital CDs, and we'll move all our paperless-office and photo-file archives to that medium; but that's going to be a while. CD-ROMs will be with us for years to come.

With Easy CD Creator Deluxe 3.0, it's as easy (but nowhere near as fast) to write files onto a CD-ROM blank as it is to write to an Iomega Zip drive or a floppy disk. Just put your blank disk into the drive (a Philips CDD 2600 with 2* write and 6* read capabilities in my case), invoke Adaptec's easily installed software, and follow the instructions. You can write files or whole directories, from local drives or across the network.

None of this is fast, and my first write seemed to take forever. I had selected a large directory, Q&A, which contains many subdirectories (everything I wrote on Q&A Write, which is effectively everything I wrote for about 10 years), with the notion of making an archive. The program went into "test" mode and trundled for a long time without doing anything. Eventually I interrupted it and wrote something shorter, noticing as I did that the formerly blank CD now had a serial number. I selected a shorter directory and wrote that. This went quickly, so I returned to the Q&A file. That worked fine, and to test it, I ran the Q&A program from the CD-ROM and used it to examine a dozen or so files.

This was a good test because Q&A uses a complex file-storage format, and if there's anything corrupt in the formatting notes, you'll find out when you read in the program. I had no problems at all; thus, in less than an hour, I made an archive of everything I wrote from 1983 to 1993. It comes to about 14 MB.

The Adaptec software will also let you write audio CDs with a CD Recordable (CD-R) drive. Alex calls this the "Arrrh!" feature, as in "pirate's special," because you can play all or part of your audio CD in one drive and record onto another. You can even assemble albums of different stars performing the same work. You can also play old 33- or 45- or even 78-rpmrecords, pipe the resulting audio into the Adaptec software, automatically clean up hisses and pops and scratchy noises, and make a CD. I have some very old Paul Robeson 78- rpm records and a badly scratched 33-rpm record of Hig hlander songs I intend to salvage this way. I love that.

Fair warning: as I write this, I've found some glitches in the writable CD system, particularly if your regular CD-ROM is IDE and you then add a SCSI writable. Most of those problems are sloppy application software. Example: I installed the external Philips CD-R driveon Cyrus, the Cyrix 6x86P-166. Cyrus has an internal Matsushita IDE CD-ROM drive. New World Computing's Chaos Overlords was the first CD I found in the Games book (I use Case Logic CD "books" to store CD-ROMs), so I tested compatibilities with it.

The Philips CD-R drive displaced the Matsushita IDE CD-ROM drive, taking over the G slot and moving the IDE drive to H. This was more or less as expected; at least the Philips CD-R drive didn't displace the Fujitsu DynaMO or the Iomega Zip, which both live on the Cyrix SCSI string. I was once told that the SCSI ID device number is important in determining drive-letter assignments, but it's not.

Then I put Chaos Overlords into the IDE H drive. It auto-started and offered to play the game. I clicked on play. The system trundled and then demanded that I insert the CD-ROM -- from which it had just read the EXE file in the first place. Nothing I could do would change this.

I used Device Manager to assign the IDE CD-ROM to R, so it would stay there regardless of whether the Philips drive was present. Reset the system, booted up with the Philips drive in the string but turned off. That left me with drive letters G and H free, the IDE CD-ROM at R, and Chaos Overlords played just fine. Reboot, with the Philips CD-R drive turned on. Philips seized G as expected. Chaos Overlords in R would auto-play and demand the CD-ROM.

Could this, I wondered, be a problem because I have both IDE and SCSI CD-ROM drives? I tried it on Pentafluge, which is a pure SCSI system with a Sony internal SCSI CD-ROM drive. Exactly the same results obtained. Then I tried the experiment with MicroProse Software's This Means War, and that played perfectly; and I realized what was happening. Chaos Overlords looks for its CD-ROM in the lowest-lettered CD-ROM drive, and if it doesn't find it there, it looks no further. This Means War keeps searching.

At the moment, the drive-displacement problem isn't fixable: your writable CD drive is probably going to take over a lower drive letter than your regular CD-ROM drive, and software such as Chaos Overlords will be too stupid to survive that. It's particularly dumb when it auto-plays but then can't find the CD-ROM to finish loading. Fortunately, some software is better designed. Incidentally, if auto-play drives you nuts, you can turn it off: click your way through Control Panel, System, Device Manager, CD-ROM, your particular CD-ROM, Settings, and then check the "auto-inform" box. Then restart. Naturally none of this is in the Windows Help system.

Of course, you can make the writable CD drive your only CD-ROM drive. They are, after all, falling in price, they read all CD-ROMs, and you can connect them to your speaker system; why not? The only drawback here is that the fastest writable CD drives I know read at 6*, and while that's fast enough for most things, some games already demand a faster drive. (The "rewritable" CD-ROM drives called CD-RW have all the above problems, are even slower, can't make audio disks, and aren't totally compatible with other drives; if you replace your usual CD-ROM drive, you're better off using CD-R in my opinion.)

The other remedy is to use an external writable drive and leave it turned off; turn it on and reboot to write CDs.

This is likely to be a temporary problem only: I don't think it will be all that long before they make 10* and faster CD-ROM drives that can also write. The writing speed will be slower than the read speed, but it is now.

One thing that may not be fixed soon is the ability of DVD drives to read "gold" writable CD blanks. As of now, DVD drives can read ordinary CD-ROMs just fine, so you could replace your CD-ROM drive with a (read only) DVD driv e; but that drive won't read CDs you have written yourself. Most everyone says this is fixable and will be fixed, but there are a few skeptics who think it will never happen. That ought to be clearer by the time you read this. Given the low cost of writable CD media and the falling cost of the CD-R drives, it may not matter. There's no single standard for DVD formats, and writable DVD drives are expensive anyway; it will be a few years before those are popular on desktops.

DVD has a lot of neat features. DVD movies look spectacularly great on a TV screen, when they're encoded intelligently. (Many of the early DVD titles look like a bad VHS copy from a UHF station up the coast 200 miles.) They're all right on your monitor, but the translation from NTSC to VGA is only good, not great. Games and other DVD visual stuff written to be shown on a computer screen are also wonderful; the visuals are stunning.

Most of us will have a DVD in our future. However, whatever happens with DVD, I'm sure that at lea st one of my networked computers is going to have a writable CD-ROM drive as well. The combination of ease of use and cheap media is just too useful. I said long ago that CD-ROM would change the world. It did, and in conjunction with cheap scanners, it's about to do it again.

The book of the month is by Clive Maxfield and Alvin Brown, BEBOP Bytes Back, An Unconventional Guide to Computers (Doone Publications, ISBN 0-9651934-0-3). While this looks like a book with a CD-ROM, it's actually an entire course in practical computer application, but presented in an irreverent and amusing way. You "build" your computer on-screen, endow it with many properties, and set it tasks, all the while learning about what goes on inside a computer. Build text editors, hardware simulators, logic engines, and anything else a computer can do. If you work through this book, you will understand your computer a lot better.

The game of the month is Strategic Simulations' Age of Rifles with the foll ow-on Campaign Disk. British-Indian Colonial Wars, the Austro-Prussian War, the Franco-Prussian War, and many battles of the American Civil War; they're all here and all very playable, hours of game fun and military history.

I'm out of space, and the place is still stacked to the ceiling with good stuff. I'll get to more of it next month. Stay well.

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Where to Find

Age of Rifles Campaign Disk.....................$  9.99

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

Enter 1013 on Inquiry Card.

D-300L..........................................$899.00

Olympus America, Inc.
Melville, NY
Phone:    800-347-4027
Phone:    516-844-50
00
Fax:      516-844-5339
Internet: 
http://www.olympusamerica.com

Enter 1014 on Inquiry Card.

Easy CD Creator Deluxe 3.0......................$ 99.00

Adaptec, Inc. 
Milpitas, CA 
Phone:    800-442-7274
Phone:    408-957-4535
Fax:      408-957-7150
Internet: 
http://www.adaptec.com/

Enter 1015 on Inquiry Card.

Kai's Photo Soap.................................$49.95

MetaCreations Corp.
Carpinteria, CA 
Phone:    800-472-9025
Phone:    805-566-6200
Fax:      Fax: 805-566-6385
Internet: 
http://www.metacreations.com
.
Enter 1016 on Inquiry Card.

PaperPort Strobe Windows 95.....................$299.00; Mac, $329

Visioneer, Inc.
Fremont, CA
Phone:    800-787-7007
Phone:    510-608-0300
Fax:      800-505-0175
Internet: 
http://www.visioneer.com

Enter 1017 on Inquiry Card.

Trinity...................................from $4995.00

Play, Inc.
Rancho Cordova , CA 
Phone:    800-306-7529
Phone:    916-851-0800
Fax:      916-851-0801
Internet: 
http://www.play.com/

Enter 1018 on Inquiry Card.

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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, 29 Hartwell Ave., Lexington, MA 02173. 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 .