Dr. Dobb's Journal July, 2005
My first computer was Ezekiel, a Cromemco Z-80 on the S-100 bus. He later got folded into an upgrade from Bill Godbout's CompuPro. You can see what he became in the Smithsonian: Go to the Museum of American History, and in the exhibits on the history of communications and computing, there's old Zeke, sitting on a pedestal made of old issues of BYTE magazine potted in some kind of transparent Bondo. When I first got Zeke, an early edition of BYTE contained a database program by Gupta. It was written in BASIC, and I think I had to type it in. I translated that into Gordon Eubanks's compiled CBASIC. Then I got the textbooks used in Accounting 101 at UCLA and modified the program to produce books that looked just like the books accounting students were accustomed to. This provided grist for several articles, as well as column material.
I did all that because no other author used computer programs to keep books, nor did other small businesses, so my goal was to present the IRS with books that looked—and were—like the ledgers and journals they were used to. This worked just fine. My books got me past a number of audits. In those days, computers were not considered essential tools for writers, and depreciation schedules for such equipment tended to be odd. There were special rules for employment of the minor children of sole proprietorships. All of this was easy to show in my accounting program, and made audits a breeze since it was very clear to everyone just what I had done and why I had done it.
And of course, being a creature of habit, I kept on using my accounting program long after better ones were written and published. I am ashamed to say I use it to this day. I probably should have switched over to Quicken long ago, but my program works. I'm used to it and it keeps track of just how much each of my works has earned, and where my money goes.
Unfortunately, Windows XP no longer understands the print commands from CBASIC. I might be able to get it working under XP, but I don't bother: I keep an ancient Windows 98 machine that doesn't do much else but keep my books. That has one major advantage—the system isn't connected to the Internet, and only connects to my internal network when it's about to print. It's an odd way to insure privacy and security, but it works. If you haven't thought about security for your financial records lately, this might be a good time to do it.
Peter Glaskowsky suggests that given my proclivity for keeping old machines for special purposes, I should just have a shelf of laptops stood on end like books. One might be labeled "Taxes and Accounting." Others might be "Chaos Overlord," "Q&A," "Railroad Tycoon," "This Means War," "Privateer," and so on. That almost sounds tempting.
A better idea would be to set up a fast modern XP system running Microsoft Virtual PC, and take the trouble to get it tuned up properly with all the drivers working. Virtual PC works very well, and it wouldn't be any great trick to get a Virtual copy of Windows 98 running with proper print drivers for my HP LaserJet; I still have the CD with all the print drivers.
I could then use Virtual PC to set up another virtual machine, a virtual DOS box complete with Quarterdeck QEMM memory management and various tricks to allow games such as Privateer to run. The big trick with Virtual PC running older operating systems is setting up the sound properly and getting the joystick working. Most older DOS and early Windows games expect to see SoundBlaster sound cards, and want to know the IRQ and channel numbers and other hardware arcana. Windows XP can emulate most of those old cards, and Virtual PC can furnish all that information if you dig hard enough. It's possible to set up config.sys and autoexec.bat files that run when you invoke a Virtual PC session. The result is that many of the old orphan games and programs run just fine, although with some games you may have to use various tricks to waste CPU cycles and otherwise slow down the action.
I know all this is possible because I've done it a couple of times; but it's a lot of work, and I find it easy to get discouraged and just say to heck with it. The astonishing thing is that we used to do all that routinely when setting up new systems. I can remember being a connoisseur of Quarterdeck QEMM versions and switches, and knowing which games expected an AdLib rather than a Brown and Waugh (later Creative Labs) SoundBlaster sound card.
Nowadays, all that makes my head explode.
The machine that runs my accounting software is an AMD Windows 98 system that resides up in the Monk's Cell. The Monk's Cell used to be Alex's bedroom. It's now partly a guest room and partly a room I can retire to for writing—no telephone, no Internet connection (Ethernet or wireless), and no computer games. The only books not connected with current writing projects are Alex's old high-school textbooks. In other words, when I'm up there, I'm not tempted to do anything but write fiction. (And yes, it's all true. Most writers hate to write, and will grasp any excuse to do something else.)
There are exceptions. Isaac Asimov actually enjoyed writing. Marty Winston tells us, "In 1981, when I was Director of Publicity at Radio Shack, I was dispatched to New York to do a photo session with Isaac Asimov. We had just sent him a TRS-80 Model II that he was now using to do his manuscripts. He liked it, but with major reservations. 'This thing makes it too damned easy to change what you're writing,' he complained, 'which makes it awfully damned hard to keep moving forward.'" Isaac and Janet both told me that Isaac was never happier than sitting at a keyboard—first, his old typewriter; then, the TRS-80; and later, a more conventional PC. But then, Isaac was unusual, and his experience with writer's block was the worst 10 minutes of his life.
Of course, all writers love to write when things are rushing along and you can just go with the flow, but alas, that doesn't happen anywhere near as often as we like. That's why I have the rather drastic conditions of the Monk's Cell.
The present computer occupant of the Monk's Cell is also an AMD system, built on an ASUS motherboard. It has a Matrox video board. For a very long time, 2D Matrox boards had the best character displays of any video boards on the market. Matrox is still around. They do high-end professional graphics cards, and according to the Web, they offer consumer products, although it has been years since I've seen one displayed for sale anywhere. The consumer and gamer graphics market is now entirely dominated by the keen competition between ATI and nVidia. At the moment nVidia seems to be ahead, and of course, they make the chipset for modern AMD motherboards, which gives them a big boost, but ATI is still very much in the game.
I always thought ATI had dramatically better on-screen text than nVidia, but that's no longer true: I'm writing this on an Intel Prescott system that uses an nVidia 6800 board, and the text looks just fine. Anastasia, my communications system, has an ATI Radeon 9800 Pro board. The text looks a little better on Anastasia, but then Anastasia has the LaCie photon20visionII LCD monitor, while this machine, Wendy, has to make do with an NEC MultiSync XP21 CRT. I always thought the NEC was more than good enough until I got the LaCie. One of these days, I will probably replace this NEC bottle with another LaCie, but I haven't so far because this is also the games machine, and games do generally look a little better on a CRT than on a flat screen.
There are more than a billion Windows-capable PCs in active use in the world. It's anyone's guess, but I'd estimate that, with the significant exceptions of games and video editing, 90 percent of those machines are already good enough to do anything they will ever be asked to do. They don't need upgrading. That's bad news for the computer industry. Worse news: Again, with the exceptions of games and video editing, the users probably wouldn't notice any difference if they magically received upgraded systems.
Sure, I am probably stretching here. Of those billion PCs, some will have old, small, and clunky hard drives, and awful video cards. Many of them could profit from component upgrades, but since they're running older versions of Windows, that's not so easily done, and the expense of component upgrade is a significant fraction of simply replacing the system with a new one. On the other hand, one significant expense of upgrading to a new machine is the cost of Windows XP itself, so component upgrades to older Windows systems may be attractive after all.
In that score, Microsoft would do well to drastically lower the price of upgrading to XP from older versions of Windows. It would save everyone a lot of time and effort, and Microsoft a lot of complaints. XP really does make component upgrading a lot simpler and less painful.
But my main point is that many of us have machines more than good enough for just about everything we can do with small computers. Upgrades are a luxury, not a necessity. For example, Regina is a Dual Xeon 750 Compaq Professional Workstation. She served as my main communications machine for years. Now she's sitting forlorn on the other side of the room. She was replaced by Anastasia, a 3.2-GHz machine with 400-MHz FSB, HyperThreading, vastly larger hard drives, a DVD burner, and a partridge in a pear tree, and yes, when Outlook 2003 is downloading mail and filtering out spam and applying my complicated rules for sorting out press releases, personal mail, and important messages, I definitely appreciate the increased speed. However, Regina could still do just about everything else as fast as any machine in the house. She can run Word and FrontPage and Excel and do taxes, and if I were willing to give up Outlook, she could do all the mail. The only thing wrong with Regina is a bad bearing in a fan, which makes horrid noises. It would take me about an hour to replace that fan and she'd be as fit as a fiddle.
For that matter, I wrote my last two books on the elderly AMD ASUS system up in the Monk's Cell. I'm not even tempted to upgrade that machine; the only thing an upgraded system would do better is play games, and that's the one thing the Monk's Cell machine will never do.
Both my main machines—Anastasia for communications, and Wendy, the one I'm writing this on—are 3-GHz-plus machines with 300 GB of hard drive, and there is absolutely no reason to upgrade either of them. If there's significant new software requiring faster machines with more memory, I haven't heard about it.
As I said, bad news for computer vendors. Our hardware is so much better than our software that not even bloatware writers have been able to soak up all the spare cycles we have; and there's no radical new software on the horizon. Most of the productivity software we have is already good enough. Our word processors have a dictionary and thesaurus, check spelling on the fly, and remind us when our sentences are too long or subject and predicate don't agree. Excel and PowerPoint work better than most of us will ever need. True, piggy old Outlook slows the system down so much that I use two machines, one for mail and communications and the other for nearly everything else. This is because I can't stand it when Outlook begins to process mail and Word slows to a crawl; but we all know there's a simple remedy to that, namely tell Outlook to work off-line until I'm ready for a break. I do that when I'm on the road with my TabletPC, and it works just fine.
So is there an upgrade in your future? Maybe, but you probably don't need it.
There are exceptions to the "Our systems are Good Enough" rule. One is professional video editing, but if you're doing that, you don't need me to tell you about it.
Another exception is games. Indeed, development of an affordable system with more image-processing speed is driven almost entirely by the needs of gamers, there not being enough professional video editors to support affordable development. Of course, this has had a big effect on the former kings of video processing. The result is that you can today buy video editing gear capable of producing professional results for less money than I spent on my first PC. It runs on machines sold as high-end games systems—and the competition is stiff enough that prices continue to fall. Voodoo, Alienware, and CyberPower are not names we traditionally associate with high-end video editing machines, but they're delivering performance that Silicon Graphics would have killed to get not very long ago—and doing it at prices at the high end of consumer computing systems. Games drive the industry, and gamer demands help us all. Last year's extreme gaming system is this year's recommended midrange SOHO system. And so it goes.
The game of the month is Everquest II, which remains fun. Sony has done a great job of adding quests and adventures to the game to keep it interesting. It eats time I don't have, and I suppose I'll have to give it up one day, but I do enjoy it.
The book of the month is Gene Riehl's Sleeper, an FBI thriller. Riehl is a former FBI agent. One of the cover blurbs for this book says, "Gene Riehl has taken his experiences and turned them into a thriller that is good 'till the last page." Precisely.
The computer book of the month is Roderick W. Smith's Linux in a Windows World (O'Reilly & Associates, 2005). If you have an office full of Windows 2000 and NT 4 systems, you have a problem: Microsoft isn't going to be supporting them any more. It's expensive to upgrade to Windows XP, even assuming you don't need any hardware upgrades. You can hope that there won't be any more security hole exploits in 2000 and NT 4—that Microsoft found and plugged them all before abandoning these operating systems—but that's a pretty daring assumption with an enormous downside if you're wrong. Another alternative is to upgrade through Linux. Because you'll undoubtedly have Windows XP systems as well, you'll need to know what to do next. This book is a good introduction to the subject.
DDJ