Orchids and Onions Are Blooming

Jerry surveys the chaos and presents the year's User's Choice Awards.

Jerry Pournelle

I'm writing this in mid-January. The issue will be dated April, but most of you will get it in March. What this means is that since I stubbornly insist that a year ends in December rather than in time for the January issue, it's time for the 1996 Chaos Manor User's Choice Awards and the annual Orchid and Onion parade. As usual, I will write more than my long-suffering editor will be able to squeeze into the magazine, so those who want it all will have to go to BYTE's Web site. I'll present the awards here; some of the discussion will have to go on the Web site.

The ground rules for my awards are simple: these are products I use and recommend. There's ju st too much going on in the computer world for me to pretend I know what is best in any absolute sense, but I do know what's good enough and more. In most cases, I give my awards to products that have been the most useful to me in the past year. That said, let's launch right in.

A large Orchid to Cyrix (Richardson, TX, http://www.cyrix.com ) for their 6x86-P166 system. I've been using this mini-tower system as my main machine for a couple of months now, and Cyrus has been a little jewel. At the moment, Cyrix is no longer selling machines to end users. Their problems appear to be marketing, not technical. Certainly I've had a lot of success with Cyrus.

Having said that, I must add that if I could get the Gateway 2000 P5-200XL system away from Mrs. Pournelle, I'd probably use it as my main machine. She does more graphics and Web crawling than I do. Besides, for years she's had the slower hand-me-downs, so it's only fair that this year she has the fastest single-processor machine in the house.

Everyone has horror stories about computer companies. Any company doing a lot of business will inevitably have the bad luck to have their most stupid and arrogant employee handle an unusual problem involving a customer who does not understand anything beyond the fact that an expensive new system does not work. That's happened to Gateway 2000, and I think every time it has I've gotten a letter. Fortunately, I get much more mail from satisfied customers; and Gateway 2000 (North Sioux City, SD, http://www.gw2k.com ) gets a big Chaos Manor Orchid for producing systems that are consistently cutting-edge useful.

The Chaos Manor Onion of the Year goes to the new trend in do-it-yourself technical support. Companies like Symantec, Diamond Multimedia, and Iomega are hiring what can charitably be described as unaware people to take calls. In theory, they're supposed to screen out the callers who haven't plugged in their computer or who use the CD-ROM drive platform as a cup-holder. In practice, those are the only problems many of them can deal with, but they don't know that.

Sometimes, you can convince them you know more about the problem than they do and get transferred to a person who can actually help. All these companies have some excellent people, but often, before you get to an intelligent person, you'll hang up in disgust. Particularly abysmal is the regular support for DOS and Windows versions of Symantec's Norton Utilities; but in fact, DOS and Windows 3.11 technical support is fast becoming nonexistent for all programs.

Meanwhile, technical support and technical knowle dge in most electronics stores have vanished without a trace. Worse, many clerks pretend they know what they're doing, when in reality they don't know a motherboard from a school board.

In fairness, I have to say that this is as much the fault of customers as publishers and storekeepers. The competition has become fierce, and stores that hire knowledgeable clerks find that customers come in, use up lots of clerical time, and then buy the recommended system down the street for 2 percent less.

This has made life easier for gurus. My son Alex reports a great increase in his consulting business, as small-office professionals find that they've wasted half a day buying a system, two more days trying to get it to work without support, and another day exchanging the incompatible equipment and software. This is Pournelle's law at work: if you don't know what you're doing, deal with people who do. In this rapidly changing computer world, it's difficult to know what you're doing and also have time for your r egular business. BYTE readers are better off than most people, of course, but most small businesses would be well advised to hire a good consultant for part-time MIS help, preferably someone who's willing to be on call evenings and weekends.

A Chaos Manor Orchid for Novell (Orem, UT, http://www.novell.com ). They have excellent and well-organized information on their Web site, with support questions and answers available on-line. Their telephone technical support has improved, too. Novell is a good example of the wise use of the Web for technical support. A few other companies have made good use of the Web for dispensing technical support and information, but it's astonishing how bad some of the Web sites are.

A small Onion with a little Orchid attachment for Symantec. As many of you know, I have used Syman tec's Norton Commander for years. It's an excellent DOS file management utility, and each revision was an improvement. One of its outstanding features was a battery of file viewers. With one or another of those you could look at any files, including command and executable files. The viewers understood many file formats, and when they didn't, they'd still show you something . If anyone's wondering why you'd want to look at an executable file, remember that many files have embedded ASCII strings that will show up as plain text; if you're looking at a file made up of lost chains, viewing it can help you decide which file became an orphan. Moreover, Commander 4.0 could look into ZIP and compressed files, and even show some graphics files. It also had a neat little editor that was very handy for working with CONFIG.SYS and WIN.INI.

Then came Windows 95 (Win 95). Commander still worked fine, but it is a DOS program, so the only way it can handle long filenames is by truncating them and puttin g the tilde in, after which you've lost the real filename, as well as any extended attributes.

For the first year or so after Win 95 came out this was no big problem, but lately it has become one, so I was overjoyed to find out there's a Win 95 Commander. Norton Commander 95 is a stealth product: it was sort of announced in Europe, but Symantec's PR representatives in the U.S. claim it is not available. I managed to get a copy through Symantec's order line, but be prepared: there's an abysmal menu tree followed by a long wait. What I got was an upgrade edition: it says it won't install unless it finds either an older DOS or Windows version on your hard disk.

Alas, what you get isn't the old Commander. Some of the "improvements" aren't, and some of the viewers are gone. So, I've kept Commander 4.0 for the viewers, and I use this for long filenames.

I suppose part of my problem is frustration. I liked the old Commander so much that if they'd simply put it out with the ability to handle long fi lenames, it would have got the User's Choice Award as the Utility of the Year. Sigh.

We're just getting started with graphics. In a week or so, we'll have a new high-end graphics test-bed from Compaq, the first Compaq system ever at Chaos Manor. With the assistance of my graphic artist associate David Em, I'll be doing a lot of graphics work this year. Meanwhile, here are the 1996 User's Choice Awards for graphics.

The User's Choice Award for graphics OS goes to Microsoft Windows NT 4.0, and the User's Choice Award for graphics CPU goes to Intel's (Santa Clara, CA, http://www.intel.com ) Pentium Pro. I hadn't expected that. Apple has long dominated the high-end graphics game, but at present, NT is better able to make use of multiple processors. It's also cheaper and easier to build up a supe r system with 256 MB of RAM, several gigabytes of hard disk space, and 32 MB of video memory. You don't need all that to do good graphics, but the more and finer graphics work you do, the more you'll wish you had that much, and NT can handle it.

It is time to comment on Apple's dwindling pool of exclusives. At one time, you had no choice: if you wanted to do serious work in high-end graphics, you paid six figures for a Silicon Graphics system, or you bought the best Mac you could afford. Programs like Equilibrium Technologies' DeBabelizer and Adobe Photoshop were essential, and they were available only for the Mac. That's no longer true. Apple still dominates in text-to-speech software. The Mac is better for video capture. If you want really high-end printed output, Apple has a decided edge.

Most service bureaus that do printing prefer to work with Macs, but again, that's changing. Many places, including some Kinko's, have NT systems now. In short, where Apple used to be the only system f or graphics (and at one time for desktop publishing), it has lost that exclusivity, and in many areas isn't even the leading system.

Now Apple needs a new competitive edge; they may have that with the NextStep OS. I've just spent the last couple of days with the Apple and Next Software (Redwood City, CA, http://www.next.com ) people, and their enthusiasm is catching.

NextStep has long been one of the richest and easiest-to-use software-development systems in existence, and almost everyone who has used it has hated to go back to any flavor of Mac or Windows systems. I recall Bruce Webster's enthusiasm when he showed me what he was doing with it. While one might dispute Steve Jobs's statement that with NextStep two guys in a garage can quickly create programs with a finished quality that would take far longer f or a much larger team of experts working in Windows, there's some truth there. NextStep makes it fairly easy to build applications out of objects; certainly much easier than fighting through most Windows applications builders. Assuming Apple brings this off, they may well attract outside developers.

Apple was saved the first time by VisiCalc. Later, the Mac was saved by desktop publishing systems and then by high-end graphics. In every case, the savior was an outside developer. At MacWorld (San Francisco, January 6 to 10), Apple tried to make it clear that they have learned this lesson. They're trying hard to encourage third-party developers. The purchase of Jobs's Next Software was also a part of Apple's developer-friendly strategy. They even threw a big party for developers at MacWorld.

Anyway, a Chaos Manor Orchid for Apple (Cupertino, CA, http://www.apple.com ). They're trying hard, and they've at least made some good moves. I wish them well.

Meanwhile, there's been great improvement in graphics software for NT systems. Adobe Photoshop 4.0 is the indispensable image-manipulation program. It wins a User's Choice Award, although it hardly needs one. Photoshop used to be a Mac-only program, and earlier versions of Photoshop were used in making a number of well-known movies. It's still in use in most studios, only now there are as many NT systems as Macs.

Animation programs: 3D Studio Max for NT from Kinetix, a subsidiary of Autodesk, wins a User's Choice Award for sheer bang for the buck. This has tremendous capability in an economical package, and it's easier to use than some of its rivals. The interface is an enormous improvement over previous versions.

For creating new images, Fractal Design's Expression gets this year's User's Choice Award. This is a program like FreeHand, but we like the interface better. It has many brushes and good palette construction. Recommended.

The User's Choice Award for graphics shareware goes to Thumbs Plus, which does thumbnail sketches of pictures and sounds, making filing and retrieving a great deal easier. It's available on better shareware sites, and if you store a lot of multimedia files, you will need this.

Matrox Graphics' (Dorval, Quebec, Canada, http://www.matrox.com/mga ) video product line gets the 1996 Chaos Manor User's Choice Award for video boards. It was a close race -- see the Web Exclusive for the competition -- but they are the boards to beat.

I also like the $500 Alps MD-2010 Photo-Realistic Color Printer. It gets a User's Choice Award for 1996. Like all color printers of this class it's slow, a minute a page for text and at least tw ice as long for graphics; but the output is surprisingly good, and it will save you many expensive trips to the print house.

Meanwhile, there are a host of products that merit User's Choice Awards, but I just don't have space here to discuss them at the length they deserve. Many of them I've written about recently, and you'll find more detail in the Web Exclusive part of this month's column on the BYTE Web site.

One reason Web sites will get better is Microsoft Frontpage 97, which gets the User's Choice Award for Web-page design tools. This thing is a little miracle: just sit down and use it. It's very Word-like (no surprise there), and if you can do word processing, you can create Web pages with this. Try it. You'll like it.

Cybermedia earns two User's Choice Awards: one for Oil Change, which can automatically find and retrieve application updates, and another for First Aid 95 Deluxe. I've come to rely on both products this past year.

Microsoft Word 7, a big improvement over Word 6.0c , receives the User's Choice Award for word processors, and Dr. Solomon's Anti-Virus Toolkit retains the User's Choice Award in its category.

Traveling Software's LapLink 95 works fine. It will let you remotely access and control your computer over any network, including a modem. It will also transfer files and do all the other things you expect of LapLink. The only real problem with LapLink 95 is that it's hard to set up. It works with the TCP/IP protocol, and that's not what Win 95 (and Windows for Workgroups) sets up by default. Installing TCP/IP with valid addresses for each station can be a chore. If you can get past that, you'll love LapLink 95. I'm giving it a User's Choice Award, but I wish I didn't have to include this warning.

On the hardware side, the User's Choice Award for monitors goes to the ViewSonic PT-810, and the User's Choice Award for high-end modems goes to the U.S. Robotics Courier V.Everything Modem. Unfortunately, U.S. Robotics also gets a Chaos Manor Onio n for the absolutely worst important Web site of 1996. The information you want is there , but it takes genius, much swearing, and evil and potent magic to extract anything useful from that place.

The Nimantics Orion 8X is heavy, but it's packed with features I like. It has a gorgeous display and a keyboard I can type on, and I use it hard. It certainly deserves the User's Choice Award for portables. A Chaos Manor User's Choice Award goes to Visioneer's PaperPort Vx, an incredibly useful combination of a compact document scanner and OCR software. PaperPort also comes built into a keyboard, called the PaperPort ix.

My favorite -- and the recipient of a User's Choice Award -- among digital cameras is the Olympus D-300L. It has good optics, very high resolution, and an on-camera view screen that allows me to instantly review what I've just shot; it takes only a second to erase a picture that's not what I expected.

I love the Delorme Tripmate. I wrote about this last month, and there's m ore on the BYTE Web site. It gets the User's Choice Award as Gadget of the Year.

Text-to-speech programs have become important, as companies try to automate voice mail and information programs. Even more important is speech recognition. Sometimes, I think that at any given time half the people in the nation are stuck with a telephone in their ear as they listen to interminable sets of choices and punch in numbers to navigate a menu tree. Whether it's to order movie tickets, buy software, or report that you'll be late for work, there's a telephone menu in your future.

Or perhaps not. Dragon Systems has come up with a combination speech-recognition program and database that lets you tell the program what you're after. I can't comment on just how good the database part of it is, because I haven't used it; but the speech-recognition engine is superb. I watched the Dragon people test DragonDictate 2.5 for Windows on the floor at Comdex in an extremely noisy environment, and I tried it myself. It works surprisingly well.

I wrote at greater length on the program and its implications in the March Web Exclusive, so it's sufficient here to say that DragonDictate 2.5 for Windows gets a Chaos Manor User's Choice Award.

Nintendo of America gets a User's Choice Award for their Nintendo 64 game- box system, which was also discussed in last month's Web Exclusive. Actually, this is a shared award: NEC Electronics makes the 64-bit RISC processor, Reality coprocessor, and RAMbus memory that make this thing possible. It's a small game box that attaches to your TV. It has stunning graphics, but what's important is that it can accept memory modules, software as well as game cartridges, and an Iomega Zip drive to serve as mass storage. The result is a system that would be capable of Internet surfing via cable modem. The Nintendo 64 may well be the prototype of the "Internet TV computer" of the future. I'd be surprised if there's not something like this attached to every TV set in the country bef ore the end of the century.

The Game of the Year is MicroProse Software's This Means War, a real-time strategy/tactical war game. I'm usually not fond of real-time games, but this one lets you pause the action while giving orders to all your units, so it's not so much like whack-a-mole as Mindscape's (Novato, CA, http://www.mindscape.com ) War Hammer: Shadow of the Horned Rat.

Choosing the game of the year is by no means easy. Very close seconds would be two games from Strategic Simulations (Sunnyvale, CA, http://www.ssionline.com ), Fantasy General and Star General, both turn-based strategy co mbat games. Not far behind them are the same company's Steel Panthers I and II. There's also MicroProse Software's Master of Orion II, which is highly enjoyable. Blizzard Entertainment's (Irvine, CA, http://www.blizzard.com ) WarCraft II: Tides of Darkness is excellent. Interplay Productions' (Irvine, CA, http://www.interplay.com ) Conquest of the New World (once you download the bug fixes) can enjoyably consume a lot of your time. All in all, it has been a great year for the kind of games I like.

The book of the month is Not Out of Africa by Mary Lefkowitz (Basic Books, ISBN 0-465-09837-1). This is a detailed refutation of the "all knowledge comes from Africa, and the Greeks ripped off the Egyptians and then claimed to have invented philosophy, and it's all a big plot" school of modern history. Lefkowitz is a classical scholar, and she politely but firmly takes the Afro-centered histories apart. She also explains why this is important and we all ought to care. I'm nowhere near the classical scholar Lefkowitz is, but where our expertises cross, she's certainly got her facts right; and her logic is impeccable.

The most useful books this year have been Lenny Bailes's Optimizing Windows 95 Windows 95 Is Driving Me Crazy (Peachpit Press, ISBN 0-201-88626-X). I find myself using them again and again. Both get User's Choice Awards.

In the learning/reference book categories, I find Que (Indianapolis, IN, http://www.quecorp.com ) has computer books on everything from Java to Office 97. The books in their Special Edition Using series are not light reading, but they tend to be fairly complete and well indexed.

As usual, there's more at Chaos Manor than I have time or space to write about, and I may have to announce a few more awards next month. All told, it was a very good year, for me and for the industry.

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Product Information

Adobe Photoshop 4.0........................$895.00

Adobe Systems, Inc.
San Jose, CA
Phone:    (800) 492-3623
Phone:    (415) 536-6000
Fax:      (408) 644-2004
Internet: 
htt
p://www.adobe.com

Circle 979 on Inquiry Card.

Courier V.Everything Modem.................$275.00 external (approximate)


...........................................$245.00 internal (approximate)

U.S. Robotics Corp.
Skokie, IL
Phone:    (800) 550-7800
Phone:    (847) 982-5010
Fax:      (847) 982-0823
Internet: 
http://www.usr.com

Circle 980 on Inquiry Card.

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


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


.........................................$1,695.00 Power

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

Circle 981 on Inquiry Card.

Dr. Solomon's Anti-Virus Toolkit.......$85 to $125

Dr. Solomon's Software, Inc.
Burlington, MA
Phone:    (888) 377-6566
Phone:    (617) 273-7400
Fax:      (617) 273-7474
Internet: 
http://www.us.drsolomon.com

Circle 982 on Inquiry Card.

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

Olympus America, Inc.
Melville, NY
Phone:    (800) 347-4027
Phone:    (516) 844-5000
Fax:      (516) 844-5339
Internet: 
http://www.olympusamerica.com

Circle 983 on Inquiry Card.

Expression.................................$449.00

Fractal Design Corp.
Scotts Valley, CA
Phone:    (800) 846-0111
Phone:    (408) 430-4100
Fax:      (408) 438-9670
Internet: 
http://www.fractal.com

Circle 984 on Inquiry Card.
First Aid 95 Deluxe $59.95

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

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

Circle 985 on Inquiry Card.

Frontpage 97 with Bonus P
ack...............$149.00


Windows NT 4.0 workstation version.........$319.00


server version........................from $809.00 for five clients

Word 7.0 $339
Microsoft Corp.
Redmond, WA
Phone:    (800) 429-9400
Phone:    (206) 882-8080
Fax:      (206) 883-8101
Internet: 
http://www.microsoft.com

Circle 986 on Inquiry Card.

LapLink for Windows 95.....................$149.00 (approximate)

Traveling Software, Inc.
Bothell, WA
Phone:    (800) 343-8080
Phone:    (206) 483-8088
Fax:      (206) 487-1284
Internet: 
http://www.travsoft.com

Circle 987 on I
nquiry Card.

MD-2010 Photo-Realistic Color Printer......$499.00 (approximate)

Alps Electric (USA), Inc.
San Jose, CA
Phone:    (800) 825-2577
Phone:    (408) 432-6000
Fax:      (408) 432-8337
Internet: 
http://www.alpsusa.com

Circle 988 on Inquiry Card.

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

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

Circle 989 on Inquiry Card.

Orion 8X.................................$3,899.00

Nimantics, Inc.
Tustin, CA
Phone:    (800) 646-5005
Pho
ne:    (714) 573-4030
Fax:      (714) 573-4025
Internet: 
http://www.nimantics.com

Circle 990 on Inquiry Card.

PaperPort ix...............................$249.00


PaperPort Vx...............................$249.00

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

Circle 991 on Inquiry Card.

Professional Series PT-810...............$1,795.00

ViewSonic Corp.
Walnut, CA
Phone:    (800) 999-8583
Phone:    (909) 444-8843
Fax:      (909) 869-7958
Internet: 
http://www.viewsonic.com

Circle 993 on Inquiry Card.

This Means War..............................$19.99

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

Circle 994 on Inquiry Card.

3D Studio Max 1.2........................$3,495.00

Kinetix
San Francisco, CA
Phone:    (800) 879-4233
Phone:    (415) 547-2000
Fax:      (415) 547-2222
Internet: 
http://www.ktx.com

Circle 995 on Inquiry Card.

Tripmate...................................$149.00

DeLorme
Freeport, ME
Phone:    (800) 452-5931
Phone:    (207) 865-1234
Fax:      (207) 865-9291
Internet: 
http://www.delorme.com

Circle 996 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, 24 Hartwell Avenue, 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 .