SuperCow on the Beach

Carrying monitors is an odd way to get exercise, but Jerry does get a gorgeous display

Jerry Pournelle

Once a month, I go to the beach house to write fiction. Chaos Manor is a comfortable place, but there are distractions. The telephone is the worst, but there are also piles of review stuff that I really want to look at. You'd think I'd get over feeling guilty about unreviewed items, but I haven't, especially if I asked for it in the first place. If people go to the trouble and expense of sending me things, the least I can do is look at them. Realistically, I know that most items are "yet another," with little to recommend them over what I'm using, but that's not always true.

Incidentally, when I began writing about the computer revolution, I really could keep track of everything and still have time to write science fiction. I knew all the significant players, too. I still get flashes of the old evangel istic spirit: I want to look at everything so I can recommend the best and point out why it's still not good enough.

Because of our treks to the beach house, I've had to learn about portability and environments. The simplest solution would be to do what my son Richard does: don't have a desktop. He has an IBM ThinkPad 755CX Pentium running Windows 95 (W95) and uses it for everything from sending and receiving E-mail and faxes to Excel business models.

Richard grew up in Chaos Manor, but unlike Alex, he never had much interest in computers except as tools. When he got out of UCLA, he was in the right time and place and became in effect the MIS person for the majority in the House of Representatives. Now he's the director of marketing for an Internet service company.

Richard is on the road a lot and also works out of his house much of the time. The top-of-the-line ThinkPad 755CX wasn't much more expensive than a desktop and portable would have been, and he can use his Internet connection for backup capability and additional disk storage.

The ThinkPad came with OS/2, but after trying it for a few days, he changed to W95. He likes the built-in W95 TCP/IP dialer, which is troublesome to set up but works for him much better than most competing Winsock software. He also uses the built-in W95 fax software. I prefer Delrina WinFax, but Microsoft Windows Fax is good enough.

For E-mail, he likes Eudora. I agree. Exchange is huge and clunkier to set up, and when you fire it up, the lights dim. We all wish Eudora could be integrated with software like Excel and Word, which is Exchange's main virtue.

Richard also uses Visioneer's PaperPort VX scanner, which I like a lot. This small 400-dot-per-inch unit connects to a serial port and sits there until you need it. It's easy to install, and like the Citizen PN60 printer, you can carry it in a briefcase or, more likely, throw it into checked luggage. The reader is free -- download it from http://www.visioneer.com -- and you can send fax documents by E-mail to anyone who has the reader (or send the reader by E-mail, for that matter). This little gadget makes life easier without adding complications. Recommended.

Getting rid of the desktop machines wouldn't work at Chaos Manor, although it's not easy to say why. First there's screen size, but most laptops have a port for an external monitor; I could keep one monitor at the beach and one here. It's the same with keyboards. Given how much writing I do, I want a better one than I've found on any laptop -- but most laptops provide for an external keyboard, and some have a mouse port.

Laptops have wa ys to attach CD-ROM drives, and the best laptops come with PC Card slots for modem and Ethernet connections. It is getting harder to think of things you can do with desktops that you can't do with a good laptop. One of these days, I may change over and be done with it. Meanwhile, I have the transportation problem.

Chuck Peddle at Tandon once had a line of hard disk cartridges; the notion was to take your desktop environment with you -- but not many people had systems to accept the Tandon cartridge. Then came Ergo's Brick, which was no larger than a disk cartridge and contained your whole computer. Plug in a keyboard and monitor, or plug the Brick into a docking station, and you were set.

That worked well, and I used to carry it to the beach; but the Brick I had contained a built-in VGA video board. When VGA came out it was great, but like everyone else, I've gotten used to better. In particular, for editing text in Word, you want 1024- by 768-pixel resolution for the text to look decent on-scree n; and Larry Niven and I do a good bit of editing at the beach.

It's surprising how many people don't know that documents look a lot better when you install higher screen resolutions. I find systems with good video boards (e.g., those from ATI Technologies and Diamond Multimedia Systems) still running off the original Windows VGA driver. Friends are amazed at how much their systems improve with a change to better video drivers and higher resolutions.

Anyway, I've been carrying SuperCow, the Gateway 2000 486DX2/66. Actually, SuperCow isn't all that heavy. What's tough to get down the stairs is the NEC MultiSync 5FGp monitor or the ViewSonic 17GA with built-in speakers. Carrying monitors is an odd way to get exercise, but I do get a gorgeous display.

Last time I was at the beach, the mouse died. It was an old mouse, one of the first of the Microsoft "Dove soap bar" Home Mouse models, and it just quit working.

Fortunately, I had brought Logitech's MouseMan Cordless: a small box you pl ug into the mouse port and a cunningly shaped feeley that's a delight to hold, with a small trackball and three mouse buttons. Installation was simple: turn off the computer, plug in the Logitech device, and start up, still using the software that came with the old Microsoft mouse.

It not only worked, it was a pleasure to use for all point-and-click operations. There's only one problem: the buttons aren't placed properly for drag-and-drop operations. You can do it by holding down the button with the side of your finger while using your thumb on the trackball, but it's pretty awkward. If you mostly use a mouse to control presentations, or just to point and click, the MouseMan Cordless is wonderful and highly recommended. But because a lot of my mouse activity is to mark and drag text, despite the great feel of the MouseMan Cordless, it just wouldn't do.

Thus, next morning I went off to Staples and bought a Microsoft "Big Teardrop" Mouse 2.0. It too installed with no change of software, a nd it's what I use at home on my main machine, where I have lots of table room. On the OS/2 machine, where space is at a premium, we're using a Logitech TrackMan, which is the only upside-down mouse I know that you can use for drag and drop over long periods of time without wrist exhaustion.

That afternoon I picked Niven up at the train station so we could work on The Burning City , our new novel. Niven and I have very different tastes in keyboards. I like my old Northgate OmniKey Plus, with the function keys on the left side and the oversize Backspace key just to the right of the P key and above the quotes key. He, on the other hand, is used to having the function keys across the top and the Backspace key next to the numbers row. I always keep a "Niven" keyboard at the beach, and we swap when it's his turn to work.

Of course, no sooner did he get there than his keyboard died -- it was about five years old -- so we were off to Staples again, this time to buy a Micr osoft Ergonomic (née Natural) Keyboard. That's the hump-shaped thing that won't fit in a keyboard drawer. I don't like it much, but Niven bought one the day he saw the evaluation copy at Chaos Manor. The new mouse and keyboard stay at the beach, and with luck, I won't have to worry about them for another five years. Keyboards and mice are very personal things, and if you spend much time at a computer, it's well worth it to buy just what you like.

I like Delrina's WinFax Pro 4.0, but I had a job installing it in W95. It would sort of install, but it didn't automatically attach itself to Word for Windows as it had in Windows 3.11. Whenever I ran the macro script to attach WinFax to Word, I got the message that it couldn't find the file NORMAL.DOT. There was no opportunity to tell WinFax where to find that file, nor any indication of where it expected to see it.

In desperation, I tried copying NORMAL.DOT into every subdirectory I could possibly think of, including the root, Win dows, Winword, and Winword\Templates subdirectories. None of this helped, so I therefore got on-line and fired off some bitter complaints.

The next day I hadn't heard from Delrina, but someone at Microsoft explained the situation. Have you noticed that Microsoft technical support is much better for products like Word, where they have competition?

They told me that WinFax expects to find NORMAL.DOT in the Winword\Templates subdirectory and no other, and you must go into Word's Tools menu, Options item, choose the File Locations tab, and tell Word to look for User Templates in \Templates. Since Word created the \Templates subdirectory in the first place, you'd think it would default to looking there for NORMAL.DOT -- especially since I'm using the exact same copy of Word 6 that worked with WinFax under Windows 3.11 and got broken only when I installed W95.

Getting WinFax Pro 4.0 installed with W95 is largely a matter of persistence. You will get a lot of warning messages. Ignore them, bull through, and you'll win. Once you get WinFax Pro 4.0 and Word set up properly, WinFax works like a charm. Recommended.

That's not the only default problem I've had with Word 6. Long ago, when Niven and I would work independently on a novel, we'd each pick chapters that would belong to one or the other exclusively until we got together again. That was awkward.

Now we each work on anything we like, and when we get together, I use Word's document-comparison feature to build a merged document that has each change marked. We can see where our two versions differ, admire each other's work, and decide which version to keep or agree on something else. Obviously, this technique would work anywhere people collaborate on documents, and it's one of the most powerful and important features of Word.

Alas, this time it didn't work: Word wouldn't compare our two versions. Eventually, I figured out what to do.

First, while the Options item in Tools has many tabs, the one it doesn't ha ve is Language. That's a separate menu item, and the default is No Proofing. If you want to compare documents, or just check your spelling, both versions have to be set to the same language, which in our case is, unsurprisingly, U.S. English.

The second problem was more serious: I kept getting "out of memory" errors, along with the suggestion that I close down some windows. Since the only window open was Word 6, this wasn't useful advice. SuperCow has 16 MB of memory, surely enough. Now what was wrong?

Eventually I figured out what was happening. Larry was working on SuperCow, while I was working on the same story with SpaceCalf, which is a Gateway 2000 Liberty laptop. SpaceCalf (the name comes from the wallpaper: a space-suited cow standing on the moon) does a great job with 640- by 480-pixel VGA, but that's the best it can do. SuperCow with the NEC MultiSync 5FGp is set to 1024 by 768 pixels.

When I took Niven's copy over to SpaceCalf, I had to reset the document margins to get the whol e line on the screen. The result was that Word thought that each changed line was a revision, and when it tried to compare the documents, it really did run out of memory. If this ever happens to you, the remedy is simple: make sure that each version of the document is formatted in exactly the same way. After that, Word for Windows performed fine.

I just came back from the annual Hackers' Conference. This is an invitational event featuring hackers in the old sense: creators of clever things to do with computers. Attendees included Allan Alcom (who designed the original Pong), Nancy Blackmun, Stewart Brand, Lee Felsenstein, Richard Garfield (who created the game known as Magic: The Gathering), Mike Godwin of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), and Donald Knuth.

Also there were Amory Lovins, Matthew McClure (who founded The Well), Chuck McManis (who used to be an intern here at Chaos Manor), Ted Nelson, Don Norman (now a VP at Apple), Clifford Stoll, Vernor Vinge, Bruce Webster, and 180 others of that ilk. These are many of the people who invented the computer revolution, and others who now think about how we can improve it. Sessions tend to be serious, but the main value of going is to get together and compare notes.

It does have its lighter moments. After lunch on Saturday, I noticed that everyone was out on the patio. Picture over 150 people, the least experienced of whom could command a consulting fee of $75 an hour, all working on a problem, to wit: Edward Haas had built a scale-model trebuchet, a medieval device that uses gravity power and a long lever to fling objects, and the problem at hand was to make it launch a potato as far as possible. We did pretty well, too.

Years ago, Poul Anderson had a trebuchet in his wonderful science fiction book The High Crusade , but I questioned the range he gave it and tried to do a mathematical model. Those things are complicated! If you can do a good computer simulation of a trebuchet, please send me E-mail. I'll thi nk of a suitable reward for the most elegant simulation.

When I was getting ready to go to the Hackers' Conference, I found to my great horror that SpaceCalf wouldn't run Windows. It booted up into DOS all right, but when I invoked Windows, it gave the error message that the required file PAGEFILE was corrupt. A quick search with Norton FileFind confirmed what I suspected: there is no such file.

Since DOS was working all right, the next thing was to take a look in SYSTEM.INI, where, sure enough, it was loading *PAGEFILE on start-up. That initial * means this is not a real file but a virtual file created when Windows starts up; and there's no real way to know what elements go into that file's creation.

The first thing to do was to use BOOTCON to make a copy of my system files: AUTOEXEC.BAT, CONFIG.SYS, WIN.INI, and SYSTEM.INI. BOOTCON lets you keep many combinations of those files, so you can work on the copy and still get back to where you started. BOOTCON doesn't work with W95 yet; but if you still use DOS/Windows, you definitely need BOOTCON.

I tried commenting out the line that brought in *PAGEFILE. That merely locked the system more thoroughly. There was nothing for it: I'd need to reinstall Windows, and since SpaceCalf has some special routines for power and PC Card slot management, I'd need the floppy disks that came with it. This was the first real problem I've had with the Liberty in a year, and I hadn't a notion of where I had put the documents and floppy disks.

Finding them took longer than solving the problem. Once I found them, I connected the floppy drive. On the Liberty it's external, attaching to the parallel port.

I ran Windows Setup from the floppy disk, and at disk two was dropped back to DOS. I should have known why, but in fact I called Gateway technical support. I realized what the problem was as I was describing it. Before you can reinstall Windows over an older version, you must run Windows Setup and change the screen resoluti on to standard VGA. That done, the reinstallation went just fine, and when I invoked Windows, that worked, too. Of course, SpaceCalf was in VGA mode, which isn't all that pretty, and I had forgotten what video mode I usually used.

Experimenting isn't hard, just tedious; but for luck I told BOOTCON to select my original WIN.INI and SYSTEM.INI rather than the copies I had been working on. It worked, and SpaceCalf is his old self.

I have no idea what happened, and neither does Gateway. Every now and then, Windows does something odd. Lest OS/2 people get too complacent, we recently had a similar experience with the OS/2 machine. In fairness, I have to say I have not had to reinstall W95 since the "termination with extreme prejudice" I reported on in December.

One important discussion at the Hackers' Conference was about intellectual property rights ve been broadcasting those "confidential" documents on the Internet. To make matters even worse, someone then hacked the Scientology BBS so that the confidential documents were available from the open area of the church's BBS. This allowed third parties to innocently obtain copies of material the Scientologists don't want anyone but their officials to see.

The Scientologists are claiming that the same laws allow seizure of electronic copies, which means hard and floppy disks. The problem with that theory is that the seizure is not precisely preventative -- a document that has been put out on the Internet exists in multiple copies -- but in effect punitive , and this without trial or defense, or any real determination that the documents exist on the seized equipment.

We have a conflict of values. Clearly, I favor the protection of intellectual property. I also favor the free exchange of ideas. I am enormously uncomfortable about federal officers raiding private houses to seize computer equipment, just as I am very much opposed to the President's draft legislation that makes it easy and convenient for federal officers to tap telephones by the hundred s of thousands.

I'll be continuing this discussion in the future. There will also be a session about this at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science late this month in Baltimore. The problem isn't going away.

We have an embarrassment of riches in removable storage media. Looking around Chaos Manor, I see magneto-optical (MO) disks -- the Fujitsu DynaMo 230 I wrote about in October continues to work well -- several formats of optical drives, digital audiotape (DAT) controlled by Palindrome's Network Archivist, a huge 8-mm Exabyte Mammoth tape drive, and the newest additions, two HP Colorado Memory Systems drives that use Travan 400-MB cartridges.

Travan is much cheaper per megabyte than the old 40-, 80-, 120-, and 250-MB Jumbo tape drives. It's also quieter and a lot cooler. The old 40-MB tapes could get too hot to touch after a full backup. The Travan cartridges are larger and provide less storage than DAT or 8-mm, which is why they're cheaper; larger tapes mean looser tolerances.

The drive we have is the HP T1000, a make-over of the Colorado Memory Systems 1000. The software that comes with it will back up an entire Windows network. Like Network Archivist, Colorado Backup for Windows and Colorado Backup for Windows 95 will copy any drive they can see, and you can set them to do an incremental backup (i.e., copy only files that have changed) at night if you like.

We have both the external and internal versions. The HP T1000e external drive is a 9- by 7-inch box -- it's 12 by 7 inches with the cables attached -- and 1-1/2 inches thick. It can lie on its side or stand on edge; either way, it gets plenty of ventilation. Installation couldn't be simpler: plug the power cable into the wall (in my case, into the little Clary OnGuard uninterruptible power supply [UPS] that runs SuperCow) and connect the parallel cable. Install the software, insert a tape cartridge, and let fly.

Be warned: while 6 MB a minute sounds pre tty fast, it takes over an hour to back up a 225-MB hard drive, thanks to things like verification. Incremental backups are faster, but still slower than you might think due to the time required to write tape headers.

The HP T1000 internal version runs off the floppy cable string. Because the limiting factor in both cases is tape drive speeds, there's no particular speed advantage to the internal drive, and you can use the external drive for file transfer.

The HP T1000 is solid, easy to use, and reliable. The external version will work with any computer with a parallel port, including laptops, and is smaller than many laptops. The medium is rugged, isn't expensive, and holds between 400 and 800 MB a tape depending on the kind of file.

The disadvantage is speed, and if you do backups at night of a lot of data, you may need to be present to change tapes. Withal, it's a lot better than no backup at all, and anyone can afford it.

If you have kids, employees, or students, look into World's Easiest Certificates. This is a kit that makes great-looking certificates, ranging from suitable for framing with gold seals down to a coupon exchangeable for a hug or a big favor. World's Easiest is a branch of T/Maker, and they also make kits for invitations, resumes, stationery, and announcements. It's solid, well thought out, and lives up to the name "World's Easiest." There's nothing here you couldn't manage to put together on your own with Word, Microsoft Publisher, and stuff from a stationery supply house, but you'll likely use this kit.

The game of the month is Mission Code: Millennium, from Virtual Entertainment. Try to see a demonstration: it's a bit like Broderbund's Carmen Sandiego games, in that it's educational and oddly fascinating. It kept my interest for hours longer than I'd ever intended to put into it. It's a fascinating exhibition of what you are able to program nowadays with Macromedia and QuickTime.

The Hot Flash of the month is that MicroProse Software is releasing Sid Meier's Civ Net, a multiplayer version of Civilization, with provision for playing by modem or over the Internet. I expect this to take off.

The book of the month is Ivars Peterson's Fatal Defect (Times Books, 1995, ISBN 0-8129-2023-6), which is about computer bugs that have been fatal in more than one sense. Well written and a bit frightening.

The CD-ROM of the month is the 1996 Grolier Multimedia Encyclopedia. It includes linkages through CompuServe if you have a modem, but it's plenty good stand-alone.

We're putting together a hot dual-Pentium system; lots about it and cutting-edge stuff like six-speed CD-ROM drives and Micropolis 9-GB drives next month.

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PRODUCT INFORMATION

BOOTCON 2.5 ($49) lets you keep many combinations of your system files, so you can work on the copy and still get back to where you started. Contact Modular Software Systems , Kent, WA, (800) 438-3930 or (360) 886-8882; fax (360) 886-8883; on CompuServe, go modsoft.

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The HP T1000 ($218) and HP T1000e ($255) are solid, easy to use, and reliable. Contact HP Colorado Memory Systems , Loveland, CO, (800) 845-7905 or (303) 669-8000; fax (303) 667-0997; colorado_support@hp-loveland-om10.om.hp.com.

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Mission Code: Millennium ($49.95) kept my interest for hours longer than I'd intended to put into it. Contact Virtual Entertainment, Inc. , Needham, MA, (800) 301-9545 or (617) 449-7567; fax (617) 449-4887; http://www.virtent.com .

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Th e MouseMan Cordless ($79.95) not only worked, it was a pleasure to use for all point-and-click operations. Contact Logitech, Inc. , Fremont, CA, (800) 231-7717 or (510) 795-8500; fax (800) 245-0000; on CompuServe, go logitech.

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The CD-ROM of the month is the 1996 Grolier Multimedia Encyclopedia (Mac and Windows, $49.95 each), which includes linkages through CompuServe. Contact Grolier Electronic Publishing, Inc. , Danbury, CT, (800) 285-4534 or (203) 797-3530; fax (203) 797-3835; http://www.grolier.com .

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PaperPort VX ($369) is a little scanner that makes life easier without adding complications. Contact Visioneer Com munications, Inc. , Palo Alto, CA, (800) 787-7007 or (415) 812-6400; fax (415) 855-9750.

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Once you get WinFax Pro 4.0 (disk, $129; CD-ROM, $149) set up properly, it works like a charm. Contact The Delrina Group -- Symantec Corp. , Toronto, Ontario, Canada, (800) 268-6082 or (416) 441-3676; fax (416) 441-0333; http://www.delrina.com .

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The World's Easiest Certificates ($14.95) is solid, well thought out, and lives up to the name "World's Easiest." Contact T/Maker Co. , Mountain View, CA, (800) 730-3279 or (415) 962-0195; fax (415) 962-0201.

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HotBYTEs - information on products covered or advertised in BYTE

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Jerry Pournelle holds a doctorate in psychology and is a science fiction writer who also earns a comfortable living writing about computers present and future. Jerry welcomes readers' comments and opinions. Send a self-addressed, stamped envelope to Jerry Pournelle, c/o BYTE, One Phoenix Mill Lane, Peterborough, NH 03458. Please put your address on the letter as well as on the envelope. Due to the high volume of letters, he cannot guarantee a personal reply. You can also contact him on the Internet or BIX at jerryp@bix.com .