Inside: SPECIAL ALL-MACINTOSH SUPPLEMENT REVIEWS Apple A/UX PC Input Devices Three 20-MHz 80386s VersaCADforthe Mac AUGUST 1988 A McGRAW-HILL PUBLICATION PRODUCT FOCUS Script-Driven Communications The First of the 25-MHz Machines: Computing moves up another notch IN DEPTH The C Language with Kernighan and Ritchie, Stroustrup, and others ■' I V iMsi-T. Fastest and most approachable implementation of that language” —Darryl Rubin, Al Expert, on Turbo Prolog version of Basic ever” —Ethan Winer, PC Magazine, on Turbo Basic onto “new ground in the price/performance arena” —John H. Mayer, Computer Design, on Turbo C See the technological excellence of Turbo C, Turbo Pascal and Turbo Basic! . Hpi Meet Turbo Prolog 2.0: Artificial Intelligence like you’ve never seen it! The Critics Agree: Borland’s T^Tpops^ ^ SCI&OTinc d-ASO^^^^ oF DJ p p rsPPffi f Tf)K€ <3coD cook- Afr we stpste of -me flL KjOoi YOO CAk) j . af^LCY C J VOOVO “Turbo C ... will stun you with in-RAM compilations that operate at warp speed.” Turbo C’s® sleek compiler is so fast and powerful, we used it to write our equation solver, Eureka.™ Even better, all that muscle is wrapped in a smooth, integrated environment with every¬ thing you need to make writing, editing and compiling your programs a snap: • Compiles 10,000 lines per minute* • Online, context-sensitive help • ANSI compatible • Six memory models—tiny to huge • 450 library functions • Utilities: Librarian, Make, GREP • Source code for MicroCalc spreadsheet • Command-line version of the compiler • Inline assembly that lets you mix C and assembler —Richard Hale Shaw , PC Magazine • Professional-quality graphics library supporting VGA, CGA, EGA, Hercules, and IBM 8514 • Interfaces with Turbo Pascal 4.0 and Turbo Prolog Just $99.95 A lightning fast, fully featured C compiler suitable for almost every¬ thing ... Borland’s Turbo C compiler is flexible, fast and friendly. —Peter Feldman , PC Week Heap Sort Turbo C 1.5 Microsoft C 5.0 Compile time 4.7 sec. 16.3 sec. Compile & link time 7.4 sec. 19.5 sec. Execute time 10.5 sec. 15.5 sec. Object code size 1119 1313 Execution size 6392 7891 Sort benchmark run on an 8 MHz IBM AT using Turbo C version 1.5 and the Turbo Linker version 1.): Microsoft C version 5.0 and the MS overlay linker version 3.61. “Turbo Pascal 4.0 flies 4.0 is ballistic!” —Tom Swan, dable. And t gives you full control. Compile more than 27,000 lines of code per minute* *. And work in a complete, integrated programming environment with pull-down menus and a full-featured editor. You don’t have to swap code in and out to beat the 64K barrier; it’s designed for large programs. Break your code into convenient modules and work with them swiftly and separately. If there’s an error in one, you can see it and fix it. System Requirements For the IBM PS/2" 1 and the IBM® family of personal computers and all 100% compatibles. PC-DOS (MS-DOS) 2.0 or later. 384K RAM. t Customer satisfaction is our main concern; if within 60 days of purchase this product does not perform in accordance with our claims, call our customer service department, and we will arrange a refund. System Requirements For the IBM PS/2™ and the IBM® family of personal computers and all 100% compatibles. PC-DOS (MS-DOS) 2.0 or later. 384K RAM. All Borland products are trademarks or registered trademarks of Borland Inter¬ national, Inc. Other brand and product names are trademarks of their respective holders. Copyright ® 1988 Borland International. Inc. Bl 1230A : Turbo Languages are Super! cod / ATf ft. 2L — / Pf< °' ooa pao6^ Y”S£&*£»Sf/ X. pao6>^ M ^ ^ Y f \ v>J X orOU Doi/OC V r'W T 0 .^ > (V rv)A M > like a rocket... “Turbo Basic compiles faster than anything I have seen.” —Ethan Winer, PC Magazine 1987 Programmers Journal Powerful features include: • Producing EXE files • Separate compilation • Built-in project management • Graph unit including support for IBM CGA, EGA, VGA, and 3270, Hercules and ATT 6300 • Online, context-sensitive help *Run on an 8 MHz IBM PC AT. Add expertise: The Turbo Pascal Toolboxes Start with Turbo Pascal Tutor for just $69.95 and add the others as your interests and expertise grow: • Database Toolbox • Editor Toolbox • Graphix Toolbox • Numerical Methods Toolbox • GameWorks Toolboxes require Turbo Pascal 4.0 Just $99.95 each (( Each new Turbo Pascal 4.0 Tool¬ box is a virtual treasure of program¬ ming methods and tips. —Giovanni Perrone, PC Week Circle 26 on Reader Service Card (DEALERS: 27) TURBO BASIC Turbo Basic® is the lightning-fast Basic compiler with a total devel¬ opment environ¬ ment that puts you in full control. Even novices can write professional programs with Turbo Basic’s full-screen windowed editor, pull-down menus, and trace debugging system. You also get a long list of innovative Borland features like binary disk files, true recursion, and increased compilation control. Plus the ability to create programs as large as your system’s memory can hold—not just a cramped 64K. The choice is basic: Turbo Basic! Just $99.95! « Turbo Basic, simply put, is an incredibly good product... Not only is this the most advanced BASIC ever, but Borland has lived up to its Turbo tradition. — William Zachmann, Computersorld Add another Basic advantage: The Turbo Basic Toolboxes • The Database Toolbox • The Editor Toolbox Toolboxes require Turbo Basic 1.1 Just $99.95 each. System Requirements For the IBM PS/2 1 " and the IBM® family of personal computers and all 100% compatibles. PC-DOS (MS-DOS) 2.0 or later. 384K RAM. 640K to compile toolboxes. Compare the BASIC differences Turbo liasic 1.1 QuickBASIC 4.0 Compiler QuickBASIC 4.0 Interpreter Compile & Link to stand-alone EXE 3 sec. 7 sec. — Size of .EXE 28387 25980 — Execution time w/80287 0.16 sec. 16.5 sec. 21.5 sec. Execution time w/o 80287 0.16 sec. 286.3 sec. 292.3 sec. The Elkins Optimization Benchmark program from March 1988 issue of Computer Language was used. The Program was run on an IBM PS/2 Model 60 with 80287. The benchmark tests compiler's ability to optimize loop-invariant code, unused code, expression and condi¬ tional evaluation. wSsssi* ron. Deva ruivBo Prolog ) 2.0 _ I T S 9RT7F IClf)L 4 f»r6LLU>6*)C£^ .00*1 LL- 7>lf HARD MoflX . FrV? VlOllI rTORSO^^ ^ TftViMt. TO OCSi&M () MAPPING s VSTfM hOTO . oo& rtGwcMS^AMD L vat pc sroFK !y Turbo Prolog 2.0: Powerful Artificial Intelligence for your real-world applications! Just $149.95! 60-Day Money-back Guarantee t For the dealer nearest you Call (800) 543-7543 Turbo Prolog Toolbox is 6 toolboxes in one! More than 80 tools and 8,000 lines of source code help you build your own Turbo Prolog applications. Includes toolboxes for menus, screen and report layouts, business graphics, communications, file- transfer capabilities, parser generators, and more! Toolbox requires Turbo Prolog 2.0 Just $99.95 « If) had to pick one single recommendation for people who want to try to keep up with the computer revolution. I’d say, ‘Get and learn Turbo Prolog.’ —Jerry Pournelle, Byte 1/88 An affordable, fast, and easy-to-use language. —Darryl Rubin, AI Expert 55 BORLAND INTERNA T I 0 N A L -Silicon) rooroR!>,sit-ico^ System Requirements For the IBM PS^” and the IBM® family of personal computers and all 100% compatibles. PC-DOS (MS-DOS) 2 0 or later. 384K RAM. New Turbo Prolog® 2.0 lets you harness powerful AI techniques. And you don’t have to be an expert programmer or artificial intelli¬ gence genius! You get an all-new Prolog compiler that’s been optimized to produce smaller and more efficient programs than ever before. An improved full-screen, completely customizable editor with easy pull¬ down menus. All-new documenta¬ tion, including a tutorial rich with examples and instructions to take you all the way from basic program¬ ming to advanced techniques. Even online help! More new features! • An external database system for developing large databases. Supports B+ trees and EMS • Source code for a fully-featured Prolog interpreter written entirely in Turbo Prolog. Plus step-by-step instructions to adapt it or include it as is in your own applications! • Support for the Borland Graphics Interface, the same professional-quality graphics in Turbo Pascal, Turbo C, and Quattro • Improved windowing • Powerful exception handling and error trapping features • Full compatibility with Turbo C so the two languages can call each other freely • Supports multiple internal databases • High-resolution video support Circle 28 on Reader Service Card (Dealers: 29) EVTE AUGUST 1988 VOLUME 13 NUMBER 8 PRODUCTS IN PERSPECTIVE 67 What’s New 89 Short Takes Dell System 220, a small but powerful desktop system T-DebugPLUS 4.0, symbolic debugging for Turbo Pascal 4.0 Cambridge Computer Z88, small is beautiful Grammatik III, comprehensive grammar checking Watcom C 6.0, a class act Paradox OS/2, a solid entree into OS/2 applications EXPERT ADVICE 101 Computing at Chaos Manor: A Fond Farewell by Jerry Pournelle Is Jerry’s old friend Zeke II retiring to greener pastures? 115 Applications Plus: New Directions by Ezra Shapiro The column’s horizons are expanded, and GrandView defines a new class of software. 121 Down to Business: Staking Out the Territory by Wayne Rash Jr. What trends are most important to business users? This new column starts with some thoughts on networking and database servers. 125 Macinations: What’s Up with Apple? by Don Crabb New columnist Don Crabb discusses Macintosh products and issues. 131 OS/2 and You: Why OS/2? by Mark Minasi The debut of this column covers some of OS/2’s attractive features. Cover Story: 25-MHz 80386 Machines/140 Communications Packages/148 VersaCAD/195 135 COM1: The Wired Society by Brock N. Meeks Noted telecommunicator Brock N. Meeks surveys the communications landscape. FIRST IMPRESSIONS 140 25-MHz Computing Buzzsaws by Rick Grehan From Compaq, Everex, Intel, and SimpleNet, here they come: the first of the 25-MHz 80386-based AT clones. REVIEWS 148 Product Focus: Communications According to Script by Steve Apiki and Stan Diehl Stand-alone communications packages that can handle a communications session unattended. 162 Variations on the 20-MHz Theme by Ed McNierney The Tatung TCS-8000, Proteus 386A, and Everex Step 386/20 offer a range of performance and capabilities. 173 Four Surrogate Mice by JeffHoltzman PC-Trac, FastTRAP, Trackball Plus, and Felix offer the functionality of a mouse without the hassle. 185 Unix for the Mac II by David Betz and Eva M. White Transform the Mac II into a Unix workstation with A/UX. 195 VersaCAD on a Mac by Paul Tuten The MS-DOS-based drafting tool is now available in a Macintosh edition. 200 Review Update 2 BYTE* AUGUST 1988 COVER PHOTOGRAPHY: PAUL AVIS © 1988 PC-Trac/173 IN DEPTH 202 Introduction: The C Language 205 The State of C by Brian W. Kernighan and Dennis M. Ritchie Originally designed for systems programming, C has become one of the most widely used languages in the world. DEPARTMENTS 6 Editorial: Touching All the Bases 11 Microbytes 22 Letters 33 Chaos Manor Mail 38 Ask BYTE 51 Book Reviews 291 Coming Up in BYTE 215 A Better C? by Bjame Stroustrup The C + + language is a superset of C that supports data abstraction and object-oriented programming. 219 It’s an Attitude by Jonathan S. Linowes A mechanism for doing object-oriented programming in conventional C. 226 Resource Guide FEATURES 229 Making the Move to OS/2 by Robert E. Shostak, John Socha , Linda Dudinyak, and David P. Reed Top programmers from Borland, Norton, and Lotus talk about what it took to port their programs to OS/2. HANDS ON 239 Ciarcia’s Circuit Cellar: Why Microcontrollers?, Part 1 by Steve Ciarcia A tutorial perspective of the Intel 8031/8051 microcontroller family. 249 Some Assembly Required: The Pitfalls of Porting, Part 2 by Rick Grehan Porting an MS-DOS application to the Mac is discussed. The C Language/202 Circuit Cellar/239 READER SERVICE 290 Editorial Index by Company 292 Alphabetical Index to Advertisers 294 Index to Advertisers by Product Category Inquiry Reply Cards: after 296 PROGRAM LISTINGS From BIX: see 182 From BYTEnet: call (617) 861-9764 On disk or in print: see card after 248 BYTE (ISSN 0360-5280) is published monthly with an additional issue in October by McGraw-Hill Inc. Founder: James H. McGraw (1860-1948). Executive, editorial, circulation, and advertising offices: One Phoenix Mill Lane. Peterborough, NH 03458, phone (603) 924-9281. Office hours: Monday through Thursday 8:30 AM-4:30 PM, Friday 8:30 AM-L00 PM. Eastern Time. Address subscriptions to BYTE Subscriptions, P.O. Box 7643, Tcaneck, NJ 07666-9866. Postmaster: Send address changes, USPS Form 3579, undeliverable copies, and fulfillment questions to BYTE Subscriptions, P.O. Box 7643, Teaneck, NJ 07666-9866. Second-class postage paid at Peterborough, NH 03458 and additional mailing offices. 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PR, London WC1R4EJ, England. Subscription questions or problems should be addressed to: BYTE Subscriber Service, P.O. Box 7643, Teaneck, NJ 07666-9866. AUGUST 1988 • BYTE 3 EVTE EDITOR IN CHIEF PUBLISHER/GROUP VICE PRESIDENT Frederic S. Langa J - Burt Totaro OPERATIONS Glenn Hartwig Associate Managing Editor REVIEWS (Hardware, Software, Product Focua) Cathryn Baskin Associate Managing Editor, Dennis Allen Senior Technical Editor, Software, Curtis Franklin Jr. Senior Testing Editor, BYTE Lab, Stephen Apiki Testing Editor, BYTE Lab, Stanford Diehl Testing Editor, BYTE Lab NEWS AND TECHNOLOGY (Microbytes, What’a New, Short Takea) Rich Malloy Associate Managing Editor, D. 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SUBSCRIPTION CUSTOMER SERVICE: Non-U.S. (201) 837-1315; inside U.S. (outside NJ) 1-800-423-8272; (inside NJ) 1-800-367-0218. m r Officers of McGraw-Hill Information Systems Company: President: Richard B. Miller. Executive Vice el IT* Presidents: Frederick P. Jannott, Construction Information Group; Russell C. White, Computers and la nit Communications Information Group; J. Thomas Ryan, Marketing and International. Senior Vice Presidents-Publishers: Laurence Altman, Data Communications; David J. McGrath, Engineering News-Record. Group Vice Presidents: J. Burt Totaro, BYTE; Frank A. Shinal, Dodge; Vice Presidents: Robert D. Daleo, Controller; Fred O. Jensen, Planning and Development; Michael J. Koeller, Human Resources; Julia Lenard, Systems Planning and Technology. Officers of McGraw-Hill Inc.: Joseph L. Dionne. Chairman and Chief Executive Officer; Robert N. Landes, Executive Vice President, General Counsel, and Secretary; Walter D. Serwatka, Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer; Shel F. Asen, Senior Vice President, Manufacturing; Robert J. Bahash, Senior Vice President, Finance and Manufacturing; Frank D. Penglase, Senior Vice President, Treasury Operations; Ralph R. Schulz, Senior Vice President, Editorial. BYTE and BVTE are registered trademarks of McGraw-Hill Inc. 4 BYTE* AUGUST 1988 Integrated] Software for Schematics & IPO Artwork Introducing HiWIRE-Plus Wintek’s smARTWORK® pioneered low-cost printed- circuit-board CAD. Then HiWIRE set the standard for productivity and ease-of-use in schematic capture. Now Wintek introduces HiWIRE-Plus, integrating HiWIRE’s schematic features with a powerful printed-circuit- design facility. Creating Schematics With HiWIRE-Plus, simply connect library symbols with wires and buses. Creating and changing symbols is fast and painless. Produce your drawing using a dot-matrix printer, laser printer, or pen plotter. Circuit-Board Design HiWIRE-Plus gives you all the design freedom you want: you choose the grid size, trace widths, and pad shapes. The board size and number of layers are vir¬ tually unlimited. HiWIRE-Plus is perfect for surface-mount, micro¬ strip, and ECL applications. CURRENT VERSIONS HiWIRE, V1.1r4; smARTWORK, V1.4r1 HiWIRE-Plus Advantages □ One tool for schematics and printed-circuit artwork □ Easy-to-learn menu-driven operation; complete docu¬ mentation and tutorial □ Schematic libraries with TTL, CMOS, ECL, ladder, micro¬ processor, and discrete components □ Netlist and bill-of-materials utilities included □ Circuit boards up to 60x60 inches and 256 layers □ Variable grid size, trace width, and pad size (.001" resolution) □ PCB library with DIPs, SIPs, SMDs, PGAs, TOs, and edge and D connectors □ Schematic-to-layout cross¬ checking □ Design-rule checker □ 800 number for free support | ; HU NNMM "HiWIRE”, "smARTWORK", "Wintek", and the Wintek logo are registered trademarks of Wintek Corporation. System Requirements □ IBM PC, XT, AT, or PS/2 with 512K RAM, printer port, color monitor, and CGA, EGA, or VGA graphics card □ Microsoft Mouse □ IBM ProPrinter or Epson dot-matrix printer, and/or □ Houston Instrument or Hewlett-Packard pen plotter Higher Performance Better Value Still only $895, HiWIRE-Plus delivers quality schematics and PCB artwork. You don’t need to guess if HiWIRE-Plus is right for you-we guarantee it! Try it for 30 days at absolutely no risk. Call toll free today and put HiWIRE-Plus to work for you. Wintek Corporation 1801 South Street Lafayette, Indiana 47904-2993 (800) 742-6809 or (317) 742-8428 FAX: (317) 448-4823 Telex: 70-9079 Europe: RIVA Ltd., England, Phone: 0420 22666, FAX: 0420 23700 Australia: Entertainment Audio Pty, Ltd., Phone: (08) 363-0454 AUGUST 1988 • BYTE 5 Circle 249 on Reader Service Card EDITORIAL ■ Fred Langa Hybrid speed demons, a new 80386 chip, four new monthly columns, and an In Depth section on the C language J ust 90 days ago, a handful of rela¬ tively new 20-MHz 80386-based machines sat comfortably at the top of the heap: the fastest desktop computers. Today, they have been rele¬ gated to second-tier status by a veritable explosion of 25-MHz computers. Their reign, in turn, also may be brief: We know of at least one manufacturer who is preparing 30-MHz motherboards using “goosed” 25-MHz chips. (If it turns into a working product, you’ll read about it in a future BYTE.) But, at least for now, 25 MHz is as fast as it gets for real, desktop machines using more-or-less conventional archi¬ tectures. The enhancements usually in¬ clude fast RAM accessed by a propri¬ etary 32-bit-wide memory bus and built- in disk caching. The rest of such a machine tends to be built from stock IBM PC AT-class parts. Our cover story gives you an early look at preproduction models of four examples of this new wave of hybrid speed demons. Speaking of hybrids, the cover story also discusses the Compaq 386S, a very- small-footprint machine that uses a new kind of 16-MHz 80386 chip: It’s 32 bits wide internally, but it communicates with the outside world through an IBM PC AT-style 16-bit bus. (No, at this time, you can’t use the chip as a plug- and-play replacement for an 80286. To date, the only such replacement we know of is the Cheetah Adapter/386, which we covered in April 1987.) This new chip, which is called the 80386SX, may produce a whole new Touching All the Bases kind of IBM PC AT-class machine based on the 80386. (The 80286 could be pushed downward into entry-level ma¬ chines.) In theory, this would simplify things, because everyone above the entry level could standardize on 80386-spe¬ cific software and thus circumvent some of the current hoop jumping required to cope with the limitations of the 80286. (An entry-level user isn’t likely to bump up against the 80286’s shortcomings.) It’s a development that bears close watching. While enhancements abound on the IBM PC side, the machines based on the 68000 family haven’t exactly been dead in the water, either—witness the steady stream of new products for the Mac¬ intosh. In fact, there’s so much interesting Macintosh material, that we’ve placed a special Macintosh supplement between this month’s Products in Perspective and In Depth sections. Be sure to take a look. With all this activity, it’s getting more difficult to stay abreast of all the impor¬ tant developments in microcomputing— harder to touch all the bases. That’s why we’ve added four new monthly columns starting with this issue. They’ll help en¬ sure that you get the information you need—when you need it—in these criti¬ cal areas: OS/2: You’ve read about the theory, you’ve seen some sample code, and you may have seen an actual OS/2 application in action. But chances are, you don’t own a copy of OS/2 yet. Noted OS/2 consul¬ tant Mark Minasi’s “OS/2 and You” col¬ umn offers some welcome perspective on making the move to OS/2 by combining technical insights, practical tips, and plain old common sense. Communications: Brock Meeks, an award-winning author, writes about his passion: telecommunications. Each month, Brock’s “COM1:” column will offer a mix of “hard” and “soft” tele¬ communications topics, examining the technology and issues relating to point- to-point and area computer communi¬ cations. Business: Wayne Rash’s name is familiar to longtime BYTE readers: He’s a regu¬ lar and popular contributor. When he isn’t writing for BYTE, Wayne makes his living as a computer consultant to gov¬ ernment and business. His specialty is solving the distinctive problems encoun¬ tered by those who deal with large instal¬ lations of microcomputers—networking, security, operational issues.. .the list of possible bottlenecks is almost infinite. Proven solutions to those myriad prob¬ lems are the focus of his “Down to Busi¬ ness” column. Macintosh: Don Crabb is another famil¬ iar name. Don has been a regular re¬ viewer of Mac products for us. He’s a participant in Apple’s educational con¬ sortium and a frequent beta tester of new Mac products. The “Macinations” col¬ umn is Don’s forum to share his experi¬ ences with us. This month’s In Depth section also de¬ serves special attention: It focuses on the top language for serious software devel¬ opment today. Virtually every major software package available today was coded in C: The C language is quite liter¬ ally the foundation of today’s software industry. For our In Depth, we went to the folks who literally wrote the book: We have excellent articles by Kernighan and Rit¬ chie, Bjarne Stroustrup, and others. (Dennis Ritchie is the designer of the C language; he and Brian Kernighan are the authors of the standard “K&R” refer¬ ence on C. Bjarne Stroustrup is the cre¬ ator of the general-purpose, object- oriented superset of C called C+ + .) This In Depth also features an unusually rich two-page Resource Guide. It’s defi¬ nitely a keeper. —Fred Langa Editor in Chief (BIXname “flanga”) 6 BYTE* AUGUST 1988 and dirt. iways meant maximum it means even more. THE GOLD STANDARD iopcs ' Ll ij Maxell Corporation of America, “The ALR 20MHz FlexCache 20386 proves that you don't have to be based in Texas to build the world's fastest PCs March 29, 1988 Welcome to Califomia,the zero wait state. In July of '86 —2> Advanced Logic Research was the world's first manufacturer to release an 80386 based PC, adding to a long list of California firsts. Today at ALR, we manufacture the world's fastest PCs. Industry peers have recognized the FlexCache 386 series as the ultimate tool for the most demanding business applications in net¬ work, multi-user and CAD/CAM environments. "The ALR FlexCache 20386 will make a name for itself as a heavy-duty file server. ...the FlexCache is destined for success." excerpts from Editors Choice June 28,1988 The ALR FlexCache 20386 Model 150 achieved a rating of 19.7 in Byte Lab. "Tops in price and jte June, 1988 achieve sets a new standard for PCs." FCResource June, 1988 performance" The performance they annual growth [ since 1984 "ALR has come out of nowhere over the last two years to earn a spot in the sun among important PC-compatible makers." - Jim Seymour January 12,1988 " Well, for once the answer isn't to run right out and get your hands on a Compaq Deskpro 386/20.™ Rather, it's to get your hands on an ALR FlexCache 20386." First Looks March 15,1988 " ... the FlexCache 20386 yields the highest number of MIPS (million instructions per second) per dollar. 1 TE(SH 1 June, 1988 8 BYTE* AUGUST 1988 ALR Flexcache 25386 and 20386 are trademarks of Advanced Logic Research. Inc. Compaq Deskpro 386/20 is a trademark of Compt '’’-raSaS mm mmm ALR FlexCache ALR IBM PS/ FlexCache 70 386 ALR IBM PS/ FlexCache 70 386 Models 25386-150 8570-A21 Although we can't go any further west, ALR is claiming new frontiers in PC performance and processing speeds. Now, fast is even faster. The ALR FlexCache 25386 breaks every current speed record. Our proprietary 64Kbyte Extended Emulation Optional Math Coprocessor 80387 20MHz 80387 20MHz 80387 20MHz 80387 25MHz 80387 25MHz Memory cram) 1 MB (80ns) 2MB (80ns) 2MB (85ns) 2MB (60ns) 2MB (80ns) Storage 1.2MB, 5 1/4’ FD 1 l " Not Available 1.44MB. 3 1/2' FD Optional ($225.00) Optional ($225.00) 1 Fixed Disk std. 66MB (28ms) 150MB (18ms) 120MB (23ms) Opt. Internal Full Height Fixed Disk 66MB or 100MB 150MB or 300MB No Support 1 Not Available Optional ($225.00) 1 150MB (18ms) 120MB (23ms) 150MB or 300MB No Support Video Optional 16 bit VGA ($339.00) Optional 16 bit VGA ($339.00) VGA 16 bit VGA VGA Price $4590.00* $7490.00* $7995.00* $9499.00* $11,295.00* • Prices and configurations as of June 1988 and subject to change. Microprocessor Desktop 20386DT-R66 80386 20MHz 32KB. 82385 Memory Cache (35ns) 20386-150 80386 20MHz 32KB, 82385 Memory Cache (35ns) Redefining PC Speed Bench Mark Data Base Power Meter Ver. 1.2 4.71 Mips 4.71 Mips 3.53 Mips 6.09 Mips 5.74 Mips 80386 20MHz 0-2 wait- 80386 25MHz 64KB Extended Emulation 82385 Memory Cache (25ns) 80386 25MHz 64KB Memory Cache (30ns) 82385 ™is the key to 25386 Cache speed. PC performance is redefined. Computer Corp. IBM. IBM PS/2 are trade marks of International Now that things are get'n kind'a slow in Texas... ...go West young man. Call ALR for the world's fastest PCs, under the California Sun. 1-800-444-4ALR Machines Corp.©Copyright 1988 Advanced Logic Research. Advanced Logic Research, Inc. 9401 Jeronimo, Irvine, CA 92718 Phone: 714-581-6770 FAX: 714-581-9240 Telex: 510-601-4525 Answer back Advanced Logic Circle 6 on Reader Service Card (DEALERS: 7) OPERATING SYSTEM Speed without compromise. QNX*DELIVERS QNX delivers the speed of a dedicated real-time executive as well as multi-tasking, integrated net¬ working and a multi-user development environment as rich and powerful as UNIX. SPEED The tightly coded QNX kernel performs 3200 task switches/second on an AT, with full pre-emptive prioritized scheduling. TASK COMMUNICATION QNX is based on a message-passing archi¬ tecture, radically more innovative than PC-DOS, UNIX, or OS/2. User tasks and system tasks use the same messaging interface. This results in a single unified environment. INTEGRATED NETWORKING On the QNX network, any task can send messages to any other task anywhere on the network. This direct communi¬ cation is not available on other net¬ works. The resultant “feel” of the QNX network is that of a homogeneous, tightly connected array of computers, rather than a collection of computing islands strung together on a network with comparatively limited functionality. DEVELOPMENT ENVIRONMENT QNX comes with a rich set of utilities including a powerful full-screen editor, C compiler, symbolic debugger and multiple full-screen windows. RUNTIME ENVIRONMENT QNX archi¬ tecture is modular not monolithic. The system consists of a set of tasks that provide services. Software developers can easily write tasks that add services to suit their specific application needs. It is straightforward to write tasks that interface to hardware through interrupts, I/O ports, DMA and dual-ported memory. TECHNICAL SUPPORT Technical support is provided free of charge, and updates can be downloaded 24 hours/ day from our online BBS. QNX is now installed at over 60,000 sites in North America and Europe for manufacturing, process control, process monitoring, point-of-sale and many other applications. Eliminate compromises in your real¬ time applications. Call for details today. THE ONLY MULTI-USER, MULTI-TASKING, NETWORKING, REAL-TIME OPERATING SYSTEM FOR THE IBM PC, AT, PS/2, THE HP VECTRA, AND COMPATIBLES. 1 Multi-User 10 (32) serial terminals per PC (AT). C Compiler Standard Kernighan and Ritchie. L Multi-Tasking 64 (150) tasks per PC (AT). I Networking 2.5 Megabit token passing. 255 PC’s and/or AT’s per network. 10,000 tasks per network. Thousands of users per network. Flexibility Single PC, networked PC’s, ; single PC with terminals, networked PC’s with terminals. No central servers. Full sharing of disks, devices and CPU’s. 1 Real Time 3,200 task switches/sec (AT). PC-DOS PC-DOS runs as a QNX task. i Message Passing Fast intertask communication between tasks on any machine. Cost From US $450. Runtime pricing available. For further information ora free demonstration diskette, please telephone (613) 591-0931. Quantum Software Systems Ltd. • Kanata South Business Park *175 Terrence Matthews Crescent • Kanata, Ontario, Canada • K2M1W8 QNX is a registered trademark ol Quantum Software Systems Ltd. Circle 196 On Reader Service Card UNIX is a registered trademark of AT & T Bell Labs. IBM. PC. AT. XT and PS/2, PC-DOS and OS/2 are trademarks of International Business Machines. HP and Vectra are registered trademarks of Hewlett-Packard Company. Microbytes Staff-written highlights of developments in technology and the microcomputer industry Experimental Adder Circuit Could Speed Up Clock Cycles P robably the most fun¬ damental operation in computing is the use of logic gates to add two register values. The speed of regis- ter-to-register addition plays a large role in determining a computer’s clock cycle speed. A typical 16-MHz machine would have an add time of 62 nanoseconds (this figure does not include register-to-register times, which would increase the number somewhat); high- A lthough BYTE devoted almost an entire issue to Smalltalk in August 1981, the object-oriented program¬ ming environment has re¬ mained relegated to academic and research institutions. In that issue 7 years ago, Dr. Adele Goldberg wrote that the “Smalltalk system is tak¬ ing flight into the main¬ stream of the computer pro¬ gramming community.” As president of ParcPlace Sys¬ tems (Palo Alto, CA), a new company dedicated to promoting and enhancing Smalltalk, Goldberg hopes to make good on that claim, although somewhat belatedly. ParcPlace is working on new features for the environ¬ ment, including expanded libraries of “reusable parts” and “reusable frameworks” (a series of interacting re¬ usable parts). These librar¬ ies will enable designers of user interfaces to select graphical objects or a se¬ quence of activities involv¬ ing objects for use in their designs, similar to how a performance machines like the VAX typically have an add time of 45 ns. Researchers at Stanford University have developed a new adder circuit that they hope will speed up addition times to about 1 ns for full 32-bit addition. The “sub¬ nanosecond arithmetic project,” directed by profes¬ sor Michael Flynn, is spon¬ sored by the Center for Inte¬ grated Systems, a very large scale integration (VLSI) conventional programmer might call an existing func¬ tion from a library for use in a program. “We’re trying to provide tools for develop¬ ment of new interfaces, but we’re dedicated to the stan¬ dards of the vendors,” Goldberg said. Objects con¬ sistent with AT&T’s new Open Look version of Unix, for example, would be in¬ cluded in the Smalltalk reus¬ able-parts libraries. “Our objective is to provide a mal¬ leable information environ¬ ment where you can specify the user interface you want and find parts in libraries. Not everyone is a graphic artist or human factors ex¬ pert,” Goldberg said. Other projects that Parc¬ Place is working on include graphical interfaces for Structured Query Language (SQL) database systems, and interfaces to object-ori¬ ented databases with exten¬ sible data types and “active objects” stored in the data¬ base. An active object can actually interact with the continued research center funded by several major electronics companies. The adder circuit is based on a new addition algo¬ rithm that combines the best features of three com¬ monly used addition algo¬ rithms: Ling’s algorithm, the carry look-ahead algo¬ rithm, and the conditional sum algorithm. The adder circuit requires only three gate delays (the time span between the input and the output of the final sum), while current adder circuits generally require about eight gate delays. “Ultimately,” Flynn said, “we’re trying to create a technology to achieve 1- ns cycle times.” He sees the adder circuit as the first step in that direction. How¬ ever, the speed of the new circuit won’t have much im¬ pact until other major pro¬ cessing bottlenecks, such as memory and cache access speeds, are also accelerated. The entire design of micro¬ processors will have to change in order to realize 1-ns processing speeds, Flynn said. The first prototype is currently being fabricated using emitter coupled logic (ECL) gates. Flynn said he hopes the first chip will yield an addition speed of about 1.5 ns. The research group is also working on a CMOS version. The next phase of the project will in¬ clude the development of a bipolar ECL floating-point multiplier circuit. The “subnanosecond” project is futuristic, but Flynn sees more immediate potential for application of the adder and multiplier circuits in floating-point coprocessors. Nanobytes • The current shortage of 1-megabit single in¬ line memory modules (SIMMs)—chips that are widely used in Apple Computer’s Macintosh and LaserWriter—is likely to continue for an¬ other year, an Apple ex¬ ecutive says. Apple chief operating officer Del Yocam said it will take until the “middle of next year” for supply of the chips to reach acceptable levels for manufacturers. This could mean, sources said, that Apple will have to delay intro¬ duction of new machines, such as an enhanced Mac SE. Yocam said the scarcity of 1-megabit chips is due to Japanese failure to foresee the growth in demand for 1- megabit chips and the Reagan administration’s trade embargoes. The memory chips Apple al¬ ready has under contract will have to be used in units already in produc¬ tion. You can go into cer¬ tain computer shops and buy the SIMMs, but you’ll pay a pretty price for them. • Only 2 percent of the computer software sold in the Arab Middle East is legitimate, according to Oliver Smoot, executive vice president of the Com¬ puter and Business Equipment Manufacturers Association. Smoot said the 98 percent piracy rate is largely among users working for govern¬ ments and state-owned companies. • Many users didn’t like continued ParcPlace Hopes Smalltalk Makes It Big AUGUST 1988 • BYTE 11 MICROBYTES NANOBYTES it, but one software indus¬ try executive thinks it’s time to bring back copy protection for certain types of programs. “I think copy protection for business software went away prematurely,” said Ken Wasch, executive di¬ rector of the Software Publishers Association. Wasch told a group of Amiga developers in Washington, DC that software companies gave in to user demands too easily. “All we have to protect ourselves is moral persuasion,” he said. Wasch added that the SPA uses litigation as a second line of defense. • In the future, laser printer engines with very high resolution may not be required, says presi¬ dent Luis Villalobos of Conographic (Irvine, CA), which makes Post¬ Script-compatible printer controller cards that go in IBM PCs and compat¬ ibles. Villalobos said he has seen 300- to 600-dot- per-inch monochrome and color print engines, beyond the prototyping stage, that can vary dot size and/or intensity to produce apparent resolu¬ tions of 1000 to 3000 dpi. Color images pro¬ duced on these systems can rival conventional op¬ tical-based printing techniques, Villalobos said. • Meanwhile, CSS Labs (Irvine, CA) is coming out with a laser printer controller card that has its own INMOS Trans¬ puter and could, the com¬ pany says, crank out 45 pages per minute. The GRIP board for IBM PCs and compatibles will work with several laser engines, the company said. When not working on printing tasks, the continued user when selected. For ex¬ ample, active objects could be used to monitor the data¬ base system to keep track of who’s using it and for what purposes, or for more mun¬ dane tasks such as automati¬ cally sending electronic mail to other users of the database network. Parc- Place is also working on de¬ velopment tools for C + + (an object-oriented language based on C), which Gold¬ berg said “complements Smalltalk-80 and gives C programmers the chance to look at extensible data types.” In the last year, Parc- Place has made available a version of Smalltalk-80 for the Macintosh, and the com¬ pany expects to have an MS-DOS version in beta test¬ ing this summer. Priced be¬ tween $695 and $1295, the Smalltalk versions for the Macintosh and MS-DOS are fully compatible with the versions of Smalltalk run¬ ning on Sun, Apollo, and Hewlett-Packard work¬ stations. In any case, Goldberg has high hopes for Smalltalk. She points to software de¬ velopers, such as Borland’s Philippe Kahn, talking about incorporating “Small¬ talk-like features” in their products. And she sees the move in the microcomputer world toward graphical inter¬ faces and the need for por¬ tability across operating sys¬ tems as golden oppor¬ tunities for Smalltalk. Seen as Coming Standard Synchronous SCSI for Peripherals A s CPU performance keeps increasing, the I/O speed of disks and other peripherals is becom¬ ing the major bottleneck in system performance. The best solution to the I/O bottleneck is the synchronous small computer system in¬ terface (SCSI), according to some product designers. Adaptec (Milpitas, CA), a major manufacturer of disk controllers, sees increasing use of embedded SCSI con¬ nections in hard disk and tape drives, as well as in other peripherals such as printers, said product manager Danial Faizullabhoy. “In a year or so,” he said, “SCSI will be the de facto periph¬ eral interface. ” Synchronous SCSI is at¬ tractive because it is about 40 percent faster than asyn¬ chronous SCSI and also out¬ performs “native bus inter¬ faces” such as the IBM PC AT bus and IBM’s Micro Channel, proponents say. While the standard AT bus has a maximum data transfer rate of 1 megabyte per sec¬ ond and the Micro Channel transfers at about 3 mega¬ bytes per second,synchro¬ nous SCSI clocks in at about 5 megabytes per sec¬ ond. Although Faizullab¬ hoy does not see SCSI replac¬ ing native bus interfaces, he said that Adaptec expects most major computer manufacturers, including IBM, to have built-in syn¬ chronous SCSI ports in the next product cycle, if they don’t have them already. Adaptec will soon be an¬ nouncing new controller products using synchronous SCSI. According to Faizul¬ labhoy, the next phase in the development of SCSI will be moving up to 16-bit bandwidths. In the 1990s, he said, we’ll see 32-bit-band- width SCSI interfaces. Mean¬ while, ESDI will drop off, leaving primarily SCSI and native bus interfaces domi¬ nating the market, he said. AMD’s Database Manager Chip Replaces Software Routines A new microprocessor peripheral that could speed up database manage¬ ment tasks by replacing soft¬ ware with hardware has been developed by Advanced Micro Devices (Sunnyvale, CA). The Am95C85 Content Addressable Data Manager (CADM) coprocessor is de¬ signed to take over from the CPU such data-manipulation tasks as sorting, searching, inserting, and deleting records. It could be used in networking and communica¬ tions, file serving, high¬ speed graphics systems, and other areas that require fast data manipulation. The Am95C85 uses 1.6- micron CMOS technology and contains IK byte of RAM and a control unit. The control unit enables a single command to access the CADM’s memory without having to provide physical addresses. According to the company, the chip can pro¬ vide content-addressable searches for 8-byte fields in less than 10 microseconds. The chip’s architecture en¬ ables cascading up to 16 of the devices for large database systems. AMD has been working on the processor for 4 years, said Dave Horton, a devel¬ opment manager for the chip. continued 12 BYTE* AUGUST 1988 The CAE tool with fully interactive analog simulation for your PC Spectrum Software’s MICRO-CAP II® is fast, powerful, and feature rich. This fully interactive, advanced electronic circuit analysis program helps engineers speed through analog problems right at their own PCs. MICRO-CAP II, which is based on our origi¬ nal MICRO-CAP software, is a field-proven, second-generation program. But it’s dra¬ matically improved. Schematic Editor MICRO-CAP II has faster analysis routines. Better resolution and color. Larger librar¬ ies. All add up to a powerful, cost-effective CAE tool for your PC. The program has a sophisticated inte¬ grated schematic editor with a pan capa¬ bility. Just sketch and analyze. You can step Transient Analysis component values, and run worst-case scenarios—all interactively. And a 500-type* library of standard parts is at your finger¬ tips for added flexibhty. MICRO-CAP II is available for IBM® PCs and Macintosh.™ The IBM version is CGA, EGA, and Hercules® compatible and costs only $895 complete. An evaluation version is available for $100. Call or write today for our free brochure and demo disk. We’d like to tell you more about analog solutions in the fast lane. ■ Integrated schematic editor ■ Fast analysis routines ■ High-resolution graphic output ■ Standard parts library of 500* types *IBM versions only. ■ Transient, AC, DC, and FFT routines ■ Op-amp and switch models ■ Spec-sheet-to model converter* ■ Printer and plotter* hard copy AC Analysis 1021 S. Wolfe Road, Dept. E Sunnyvale, CA 94087 (408) 738-4387 MICRO-CAP II is a registered trademark of Spectrum Software. Macintosh is a trademark of McIntosh Laboratory, Inc. and is being used with express permission of its owner. Hercules is a registered trademark of Hercules Computer Technology IBM is a registered trademark of International Business Machines, Inc. Circle 225 on Reader Service Card AUGUST 1988 • BYTE 13 MICROBYTES NANOBYTES on printing tasks, the board could be used as a high-speed coprocessor. • In a move seen as a crucial step in U.S. ef¬ forts to overtake Japan’s leadership in the semicon¬ ductor industry, the De¬ partment of Defense will boost its funding of Sematech (Austin, TX), the chip-research con¬ sortium, by $100 million a year through 1992. Sematech chairman Sandy Kane responded to criticism that the Penta¬ gon will pull the group’s research into defense- oriented projects. “Our work is not going to be de¬ fense-related,” he said. According to Kane, the Pentagon recognizes that “a healthy U.S. semicon¬ ductor industry will ulti¬ mately be good for the national defense. ” • “If you ask me what the future of the micro¬ computer is, it is in multitasking and parallel processing,” says Henri Rubin, chief operating of¬ ficer of Commodore In¬ ternational (West Chester, PA). In an interview with BYTE, Rubin said that Commodore’s use of coprocessor communi¬ cations is an indication of where the company is going technologically. The Amiga maker has been a leader in support¬ ing both Motorola and Intel processors within the same computer, he said. “Some people say we just have two com¬ puters in a box,” he said, “but that’s not true. It’s more than that.” • Our trend signaler isn’t blinking brightly yet, but we could be seeing a drop in prices of galli¬ um-arsenide chips. GigaBit Logic (Newbury Park, CA) has cut prices of its high-speed GaAs continued “We saw the need to off¬ load some tasks from the sys¬ tem CPU,” he said. “One of the problems we faced, though, was like the chick¬ en and the egg: The hardware people didn’t want to build boards when there was no software to access the chip, and the software folks didn’t want to port their code when there was no hardware to use it.” The chip uses a new memory cell that’s “sort of a cross between RAM and T wo doctors at Stanford Medical Center have de¬ veloped an electronic text¬ book for anatomy students that clearly demonstrates the potential power of hyper¬ text and multimedia con¬ cepts in electronic publish¬ ing. The Electric Cadaver was developed by Dr. Robert Chase, a specialist in anat¬ omy, and Dr. Steven Freed¬ man, a physician with a long-standing interest in elec¬ tronic publications for med¬ ical practice and training. Built on a Macintosh II with Apple’s HyperCard, the Electric Cadaver is a dy¬ namic cross-referencing sys¬ tem that describes the structure and function of each part of the human anatomy. (Freedman built the first version 4 years ago on an IBM PC AT using Ash¬ tonTate’s Framework). Images are displayed in digi¬ tized form on the computer screen and simultaneously in analog form on a videodisk player. The user can click on any part of the human body and then select from an index of topics on the screen. Most parts of the anat¬ omy are presented both in x-ray and bone structure form; many parts are shown from different angles and magnifications. In addition, results of physical injuries can be visually described. For example, clicking on FIFO,” Horton said. “The cells enable us to split memory at a certain point, holding all memory above the split constant while let¬ ting us shift the remaining memory up or down, adding or deleting records. ” Hor¬ ton theorized that the first PC application board prob¬ ably would have one or two chips on-board, with sock¬ ets for a total of up to 16. Currently, AMD has a demonstration board and software available. The the facial nervous system dis¬ plays a normal human face on the screen. By then click¬ ing on indicated “injury zones” on the map of facial nerves, you can see the re¬ sulting types of paralysis in the face on the screen. The HyperCard applica¬ tion includes an indexing sys¬ tem that can select any image on the videodisk play¬ er via serial communica¬ tion. The Electric Cadaver has a “Frame Editor” that lets users customize the elec¬ tronic textbook by adding or editing frames, adding text, and creating animated sequences. The system dem¬ onstrated to Microbytes in¬ cluded video movies, devel¬ oped by Chase, of various anatomical functions, as well as still-frame images. The still-frame images are derived primarily from a database of 1600 anatomi¬ cal images (which was devel¬ oped with the help of the man who invented the View- Master). The images were converted in two-dimensional format to a videodisk by photographing each frame on a high-quality video cam¬ era, adding captions with a character generator, and converting the videotape to videodisk. According to Chase and Freedman, the Electric Cadaver is a tremendous timesaver as a teaching and The Electric Cadaver first commercial product that will use the chips will be a network bridge, from a Euro¬ pean company, that will de¬ tect packet-address informa¬ tion in real time and direct it along the correct path in the network. In such an ap¬ plication, there is no time for the conventional lookup table approach. CADM prices are $49.20 for the 12-MHz version and $66.50 for the 16-MHz ver¬ sion in quantities of 100. The chips are available now. reference tool for medical students. “Traditionally,” Freedman said, “students develop their own ‘meta¬ books’ by excerpting, com¬ piling, and cross-referencing source material from multi¬ ple text books and other ref¬ erences. This is an incredi¬ ble waste of time.” The electronic textbook eliminates the need for this kind of tedium and provides a much more visual and in¬ structive presentation of the information to be learned, Freedman said. The system is also useful as a reference for physicians and sur¬ geons; for example, a doctor could use the system to compare a CAT scan or x-ray of an unhealthy patient with a corresponding image of a normal anatomy in the Electric Cadaver. Chase and Freedman hope to digitize the Cadaver’s images in three dimensions, using a system like Digital Video Interac¬ tive, which would allow the graphics to be dynamic and adjustable so that students could change parameters (such as bone density). The doctors plan to add images from microscopic anatomy and are also exploring the use of bar code readers and other pointing mechanisms so that the system could be connected to a real cadaver. continued 14 BYTE* AUGUST 1988 Insist ona Sysgen 5 !4" drive for vourPS/2. Here’s why. A Sysgen™ Bridge-File™ gives a PS/2™ full access to your current data and software, with unparalleled 5!4" disk drive performance and reliability. You get: A larger capacity drive. Two modes — a 360Kb and a powerful 1.2 Mb — assure you comprehensive transfer cap¬ abilities and convenience for total office needs. Others, like IBM®’s, offer only 360Kb. Proven reliability. In fact, Sysgen is the choice of over 100,000 satisfied Bridge- File and tape back-up users. No slot loss. The Sysgen 5!4" drive adapter card doesn’t take any additional slot space. IBM’s does. Built- in flexibility of an external connector. You can add another Bridge-File drive or Sysgen’s high-performance tape back-up system, Bridge-Tape.™ (As a Bridge-File owner, you receive a total savings of $135 on Bridge-Tape!) What’s more. Sysgen’s footprint is smaller. A full 50% smaller than IBM’s. For the best PS/2 access to 5!4" disks, and the best value at only $325, insist on Sysgen Bridge-File. Sysgen offers the only complete family of data transfer products: Including the V/i” Bridge-File floppy disk drive, for transferring information from any PS/2 to any PC. And the Bridge-Tape subsystem that’s PC and PS/2 com¬ patible, giving you total tape back-up and data transfer flexibility. Call for Sysgen literature or for the location of the Sysgen dealer nearest you. INFO HOTLINE1-800-821-2151 SYSGEN I NCOR PORATED Circle 229 on Reader Service Card Sysgen Incorporated, 556 Gibraltar Drive, Milpitas, CA 95035, (408) 263-4411. © Copyright Sysgen, Inc., 1988. Trademarks: PS/2 — IBM Corporation, Sysgen, Bridge-Tape, Bridge-File — Sysgen, Inc. Registered trademarks: IBM — IBM Corporation. MICROBYTES YARC Claims 50-MHz Operation for Mac II Booster Board NANOBYTES percent. GBL cut its 16G040 2-gigabit-per- second Clock and Data Recovery chip from $180 to $75, and its 12G014 lK-byte static RAM chip (2.5-ns cycle time) from $92.80 to $45. • MIDI Expo West is set for September 10-11 at the Anaheim (CA) Marriott Convention Cen¬ ter. Last year’s New York version attracted 3500 musicians, com¬ posers, software writers, and equipment design¬ ers. This year, the pro¬ gram’s educational track will cover such topics as MIDI basics, computer music, and sampling tech¬ niques. For more infor¬ mation, contact Tc.iy continued Y ARC Systems (West- lake Village, CA) has developed a coprocessor board for the Mac II that the company says can cause ap¬ plications to run about 10 times faster than on a stan¬ dard Mac II. The McCray board is based on Advanced Micro Devices’ 32-bit Am29000 processor and Am 29027 floating-point pro¬ cessor. YARC claims that a Mac II equipped with one of the $4295 boards can out¬ perform many expensive workstations. The McCray takes ad¬ vantage of the NuBus multi¬ ple-master capability that enables boards to access the bus directly, put addresses on the bus, and communicate with other boards to facili¬ tate parallel processing, said YARC president Trevor Marshall. The standard Mac¬ intosh interface remains in¬ tact, he said. Marshall noted that the McCray’s 50-MHz operation is beginning to strain the current printed-circuit-board technology. “While the board is only about 12 inches long, propagation delays at 50 MHz along the signal paths had to be accounted for when we were adjusting timing,” said Marshall. When asked about potential radio-frequency interfer¬ ence from the McCray, Mar¬ shall said that because the board has no link to the out¬ side, such as a serial con¬ nector, radiation would not be a problem. The McCray has 2 mega¬ bytes of instruction RAM in a “mostly zero-wait-state” configuration and 512K bytes of one-wait-state data memory; a daughterboard slated to be available soon will increase data memory to 2.5 megabytes. The McCray requires a Mac II with 1 megabyte of memory, a hard disk drive, a color or monochrome display, the Apple 32-bit ROM upgrade (for early ma¬ chines), and an average of 10 watts of power. The stan¬ dard operating system is the Macintosh Finder. An as¬ sembler, linker, and debug¬ ger are also available. You can load up all the available slots in the Mac II and expansion chassis with McCray boards and let the Mac’s MultiFinder and 68020 assign parallel pro¬ cessing tasks. YARC, which spells Cray backward, stands for Yet Another Ruddy Copro¬ cessor, the firm says. continued Receiving Report Transmitted Invoice Price, Qty, Part# Matched 0 vM' c T^ads- ea s' et <#S • w SlOVtf 16 BYTE* AUGUST 1988 Circle 170 on Reader Service Card )nte%cofvipil ER The Intelligent Tool for Intelligent Application Development: So Powerful, Yet so Easy to Use. An Ounce of Innovation is Worth a Pound of Code. As well as being an expert system tool, Intelligence/Compiler is a very high level language. Programs written in it are 20 to 50 times shorter than typical database or programming languages, and a lot more intelligent. * * product. Its unique and advancu. SE ES3K3&-” eff m terry Glasglow, Vice President and SSsssaMt we chose the Intelligence/Compiler. ^ Off-Shore Technology Corporation. c £The Inteffigence/Compiler’s 6 4 combination of rule-based editing and debugging facilities } 7 1 are a R S’in A1 Expert Magazine, February 1988. [SSL of »«•*«“" ” Expert Systems as High Level Programming Tools. Intelligence/Compiler gives you unprecedented power, flexibility and ease of use for building intelligent applications. It is the first and only intelligent database system to uniformly combine logic programming, object oriented programming and intelligent interfaces. • Intelligent Interface • Dynamic Menus • Pop-up Screens • Logical Reasoning • Links to Microsoft C • Fortran and Pascal Built-in Relational Database • Frames and Objects • Multiple Inheritance • Attached Procedures • Direct Link to dBASE™ • Lotus DIF™ and Ascii Files • SQL Queries 1 ° n d Sw?n 8 Computcr tenguage Magazine, March 1987. expeRj The underlying technology of Intelligence/Compiler is so outstanding, we have written a book about it. It is being used in many leading universities as the standard text book. Ask for the book “Expert Systems for Experts” by K. Parsaye and M. Chignell, published by John Wiley, at your local book store. An Open Architecture for Open Minds [ETYES! I WANT TO J DEVELOP INTELLIGENT APPLICATIONS FAST. I Rush me_copies of I Intelligence/Compiler at $490 each. | Name:_ I Company:_ I Address:_ Telephone:_ I □ Check or Money order is enclosed. □ Visa □ Mastercard □ AMX Number: | Expiration Date: Painless Application Development Don’t look any further. Intelligence/Compiler is the tool you need to build royalty free applications. Find out how easy and painless it is to build intelligent applications, now! Intelligence Ware, Inc. Leading in Artificial Intelligence Applications™ Shipping and handling; US: $9.00, Canada/ Hawaii Air: $20.00, Overseas Air: $50.00. I California residents please add 6.5% tax. System Requirements: IBM PC, PC/XT, PC/AT or PS2 with 640K memory. | Please send coupon to: Intelligence Ware, Inc. 19800 S. Sepulveda Blvd. Suite 730, | Los Angeles, CA 90045. I FAX: (213) 417-8897. | Telephone: (213) 417-8896. Circle 108 on Reader Service Card AUGUST 1988 • BYTE 17 MICROBYTES Mac II Operating System Will Interface with NuBus NANOBYTES mation, contact Tony Scalisi at Expocon, 3695 Post Rd., Southport, CT 06490, (203) 259-5734. • Discovery Systems (Dublin, OH) has cut the price of mastering CD- ROM disks to $1500 and the cost of duplication to $2 per platter. The optical disk manufacturer says the CD-ROM business is gaining momentum, what with Apple’s CD- ROM drive and Tandy’s decision to sell such drives in its retail stores. • Understanding Neural Networks: A Primer is now available from Graeme Publishing (Am¬ herst, NH). The publish¬ er says the $95 report is an “easy-to-read over¬ view of scientific and commercial develop- A pple Computer (Cu¬ pertino, CA) is readying a new operating system for the Mac II. Multitasking Realtime DOS (MR DOS) is a message-based operating system that can interface with the NuBus used in the Mac II. Apple is trying to avoid unnecessary NuBus in¬ terface work on the part of card makers by giving them a standard set of communica¬ tion services to applications. Apple first used MR DOS internally on the Mac- APPC card, which per¬ forms LU 6.2 gateways to IBM machines. Diagnostics such as code downloaded and dumpers are included, as are the schematics for the board’s hardware (which has its own 68000 processor and local memory). The card has 24 square inches of prototyping surface. “We’ve taken the hard part of making a NuBus mas¬ ter and encapsulated it, pro¬ viding an area where devel¬ opers can add their value,” said an Apple representative. “The more mundane things are done, so you now have a standardized platform. The operating system was re¬ leased to help this standard¬ ization. It also allows us to move various products across different types of [Apple] cards. Communica¬ tions stacks for different pro¬ tocols can be ported easily now. We are committed to having intelligent cards. That may not be the only way to go, but that’s the way we are going in the communica¬ tions and networking envi¬ ronment at Apple. ” Since source code to the operating system will not be released, developers will have to depend on Apple to maintain the operating system for them as the Mac hardware platform changes. TECHNOLOGY NEWS WANTED. The news staff at BYTE is always interested in hearing about new technological and scientific developments that might have an impact on micro¬ computers and the people who use them. We also want to keep track of innovative uses of that technology. If you know of ad¬ vances or projects relevant to microcomputing and want to share that information, please contact the Microbytes staff at (603) 924-9281, send mail on BIX to Microbytes, or write to us at One Phoenix Mill Lane, Peterborough, NH 03458. Computers For The Blind Talking computers give blind and visually impaired people access to electronic information. The question is how and how much? The answers can be found in “The Second Beginner’s Guide to Personal Computers for the Blind and Visually Impaired” published by the National Braille Press. This comprehensive book contains a Buyer’s Guide to talking microcomputers and large print display processors. More importantly it includes reviews, written by blind users, of software that works with speech. This invaluable resource book offers details on training programs in computer applications for the blind, and other useful information on how to buy and use special equipment. Send orders to: National Braille Press Inc. 88 St. Stephen Street Boston, MA 02115 (617) 266-6160 $12.95 for braille or cassette, $14-95 for print. ($3 extra for UPS shipping) NBP is a nonprofit braille printing and publishing house. 18 BYTE* AUGUST 1988 WINDOWS FOR DATA® QUANTITY PRICE AMOUNT Subtotal Invoices: Create Review Print Exit *tr I N U 0 I C E —- Invoice No.: 088784 Date Search for customer record? (Y/N): Enter customer information? (Y/N): Enter billing address? (Y/N): Enter marketing information? (Y/N): 12/03/87 i—Customer- 16:43:15 No. PRODUCT DESCRIPTION I William Jones Innovative Software 351 Bulletin Avenue Needham, MA 82194 (617) 394-5512 5 URNS Windows for Data Microsoft 6 WDLA Windows for Data Lattice 7 UftTf Windows for Data Turbo C Windows for Data XENIX Mi Windows for Data - XENIX UD3B2 Windows for Data - 3B2 Unix UDSU2 Windows for Data - Sun Unix UDUM3 Windows for Data - MicroUax UDUM4 Windows for Data - Wax 780 295.08 2950.88 295.88 1475.00 295.08 1475.08 795.88 1590.80 8,00 0.00 Cursor kegs scroll, ENTER selects and ESC exits choice menu Ilf you program in C, take a few moments to learn how Windows for Data can help you build a state-of-the- art user interface. Ivf Create and manage menus, data-entry forms, context- sensitive help, and text displays — all within windows. Sf Develop window-based OS/2 programs right now, without the headaches of learning OS/2 screen manage¬ ment. Run the same source code in PCDOS and OS/2 protected mode. Sf Build a better front end for any DBMS that has a C- language interface (most popular ones do). FROM END TO BEGINNING Windows for Data begins where other screen packages end, with special features like nested pop-up forms and menus, field en¬ try from lists of choices, scrollable regions for the entry of variable numbers of line items, and an ex¬ clusive built-in debugging system. NO WALLS If you’ve been frustrated by the limitations of other screen utilities, don’t be discouraged. You won’t run into walls with Windows for Data. Our customers repeated¬ ly tell us how they’ve used our system in ways we never imagined — but which we anticipated by designing Win¬ dows for Data for unprecedented adapatability. You will be amazed at what you can do with Windows for Data. YOU ARE ALWAYS IN CHARGE Control functions that you write and attach to fields and/or keys can read, compare, validate, and change the data values in all fields of the form. Upon entry or exit from any field, control functions can call up subsidiary forms and menus, change the active field, exit or abort the form, perform almost any task you can imagine OUR WINDOWS WILL OPEN DOORS Our windows will open doors to new markets for your software High-performance, source-code- compatible versions of Windows for Data are now available for PCDOS, OS/2, XENIX, UNIX, and VMS. PCDOS versions are fully compatible with Microsoft Windows. No royalties. MONEY BACK GUARANTEE You owe it to yourself and your programs to try Windows for Data. If not satisfied, you can return it for a full refund. Prices: PCDOS $295, Source $295. OS/2 $495 XENIX $795. UNIX, VMS, please call. Call: (802) 848-7731 Telex: 510-601-4160 VCSOFT ext. 51 FAX 802-848-3502 Vermont Creative Software 21 Elm Ave. Richford, VT 05476 If you’re the type of person who’s too busy to read an ad, read this ad. Because you’ll learn about a new tool that will help you manage people, ideas, Dump any random, unrelated thoughts or ideas into Agenda, and it’ll help you turn that information into a stream of structured, actionable knowledge. projects, and information with incredible efficiency. A tool that will help you avoid slumping into your chair, shaking your head, and asking, “How on earth will I ever get this done?” We call it Lotus* Agenda, the personal information manager. Agenda allows you to dump random facts, thoughts, and ideas into your PC without having to structure the information in advance. Agenda’s filing system is a more sophisticated version of this filing system. You can put items anywhere you want. View them any way you want. And have access to them anytime you want. File View Item Category Print Utility System Quit New, Remove, Position, Assign, Discard, Undiscard Scratchpad • Forward product comparison articles to Joan. ? Can we gel the cost of goods sold under $ 12 ? • Bob will present ten-point incentives program at sales conference. • Tom will have his report in by a week from Friday: make sure it covers pricing, strategy, distribution, and implications of using outside vendor for typesetting and printing. • Decision needed on research budget by end of this week—discuss options with Jim and Joan. Who Issues •Joan • Competitive Tracking • Bob • Bonus Dollars • Distribution Vendors Pricing •Jim Joan Items. Dump information in manually, import it or use our pop-up capability while in another program. You can record the thousands of tasks you need to address to put together a new prod¬ uct line. Or the thousands of factors you need to put together a new bottom line. Agenda will not only file these random items of information for you, it’ll help you arrange them any way you want. So you can understand them better, formulate new ideas better and extract all the answers you need better. Which means, now you can concentrate eryone whos aiiv work done. Rle View Item Category print Utility System Quit Column, Section, Management, Info Issues • Packaging • Distribution Vendors Pricing Product Ideas Department • Accept packaging bids until the end of October. •Liz • Operations J* Make sure synthetic materials are reliable. • Sue • Operations • Have Tom break down market research results into best case/worst case scenarios. •Tom • Marketing • Tom will have his report in by a week from Friday: make sure it covers pricing, strategy, distribution, and implications of using outside vendor for typesetting and printing. • Tom • Marketing J* Do Tom and Bob think we need to adjust distribution mix? •Tom Bob • Marketing Sales File: C: \ AGENDA \ FILES s ISSUES View: Issues by Person issues ■ Research Joan • Decision needed on research budget by end of this week— discuss options with Jim and Joan. Priority • High • Competitive Tracking • Forward product comparison • Low articles to Joan. ! Issues • Distribution • Bonus Dollars • Do Tom and Bob think we need to adjust distribution mix? • Bob will present ten-point incentives program at sales conference. Priority When • High ■ 06/22/. ■ Medium ■ 06/29/88 Categories. Agenda files items in all relevant categories so you can always find the information you need. Views. Looking at the same information through different views gives you a more informed perspective. different ways so you can pinpoint informa¬ tion that’s important to you. Or discover new relationships you hadn’t considered before. And anytime you change an item in a view, Agenda will more on using and acting on your infor- automatically update all other categories mation. And less on processing it. where the item has been assigned. How does Agenda work? In fact, you could say that Agenda recal- First, enter your items of information culates your text the way a spreadsheet “V. V program recalculates numbers. All of which means, from now on you’ll be able to come in every morning, check your Agenda, and get right to work. Because you’ll immediately know what work needs getting to. For $15, we’ll send you an Agenda demo into your PC and assign them to catego- kit or videotape. Call 1-800-345-1043 and ries that you create. ask for demo kit Then Agenda will do all of your filing AGS-3058 for automatically. And thanks to Agenda’s the 3.5" version multiple filing capabilities, if the infor- or AGS-3053 mation is relevant in more than one for the 5.25" place, Agenda will take it and put it in version. Or ask several categories at once. for videotape This makes it easy to view your data in AGS-3063. Introducing Lotus Agenda Agenda and Agenda Demo Kit require an IBM® PC or compatible, with 640K and a hard disk, DOS 2.0 or higher. Lotus and Agenda are registered trademarks of Lotus Development Corporation. IBM is a registered trademark of IBM Corporation. X. The whole idea behind Agenda is to get them all in a row. I i Lotus Agenda Letters Efficient Recursion In his article on benchmarks (“Problems and Pitfalls,” June 1988, page 217), Al¬ fred Aburto Jr. remarks on the signifi¬ cant performance difference between a simple loop to compute Fibonacci num¬ bers and the recursive algorithm used in the benchmark. The inference he draws from this, that “Apparently, recursive function calls are highly inefficient,” is a common misapprehension of such data. Instead, it is recursive algorithms that are often laughably inefficient and non¬ linear. A loop for the 24th number re¬ quires only 24 iterations, whereas a re¬ cursive algorithm for the same number involves 92,735 procedure calls, typi¬ cally extravagant for recursive state¬ ments of simple problems. (Why are Lisp programs slow?) It seems that his func¬ tion calls are in fact quite efficient if something done nearly 3900 times as often takes only 4500 times as long. Greg Bailey Santa Barbara, CA Bit-Map Assistance I have found “Better Bit-Mapped Lines” (March) very helpful in implementing an extremely fast line-drawing routine. While coding the Pascal into assembly language, however, I noticed that the dx_diag and dy_diag increments in oc¬ tant 4 should be interchanged (see figure 4 on page 253). This could have introduced a subtle bug, and I thought maybe others could avoid problems, especially when coding in assembly language, where it is tempt¬ ing to turn these dx and dy increments into INCs and DECs. David Miller Cedar Falls, IA Test Facilities I was delighted to hear about your new testing facilities (Editorial, April). Benchmark comparisons and manufac¬ turers’ statements of Mean Time Be¬ tween Failures are fine for choosing among a group of similar machines, but what an ever-increasing number of peo¬ ple in science and industry really need to know about their potential purchase is, “Just how much abuse can this machine take?” Computers originally intended for home and the office are turning up in ever more exotic environments, with ever-decreasing margins between opera¬ tion and failure. The big concern then be¬ comes what kind of safety margin is left to work with. WE WANT TO HEAR FROM YOU. Please double-space your letter on one side of the paper and include your name and address. We can print listings and tables along with a letter if they are short and legible. Address correspondence to Letters Editor, BYTE, One Phoenix Mill Lane, Peterborough, NH 03458. Because of space limitations, we reserve the right to edit letters. Generally, it takes four months from the time we receive a letter until we publish it. A lab of the type you describe could supply people with some much-needed information. The thought of running ex¬ pensive computer equipment into the ground may seem a little drastic, but the savings in time, money, and equipment might well be worth it. I hope you aren’t reluctant to push your tests to the limit. It could be of value to many of us. Eric J. Pilger Honolulu, HI Clearly Fuzzy The idea of “fuzzifying” Prolog as pre¬ sented in “When Facts Get Fuzzy” by Bradley L. Richards (April) is certainly appealing. Unfortunately, the author’s Prolog code lacks clarity and precision; rather than adding separate predicates such as fuzzyy (TruthValue) and threshold (ThresholdValue) , it is sim¬ pler to add an extra argument to each fuzzy fact. For instance, rather than scary(king_kong) :-fuzzy(0.5) it is simpler to write scary(king_kong,0.5) and then pass the truth value as an argu¬ ment, rather than performing obscure manipulations of the database with “as¬ sert” and “retract.” Stewart Rosenberg Trouy, France Corrected Attribution In Pete Wilson’s otherwise interesting comparison of processor architectures (“The CPU Wars,” May), there is an error. The 6502 was not “originally de¬ signed by Mostek. ” It was designed by M.O.S. Technology, which did not later contract its name or otherwise become Mostek. As early as 1977, M.O.S. Tech¬ nology had already been purchased by Commodore (copyright page and intro¬ duction to The First Book of KIM.) Mos¬ tek is still a separate company. The 6502 has been made by several companies, in¬ cluding Rockwell. It is my understanding that the 6502 and M.O.S. Technology were created by a team that broke off from Motorola, I as¬ sume after losing some design arguments over the 6800. The team created a ma¬ chine with one accumulator rather than two, but—far more important in the real world—two index registers, including one with the powerful capability of in¬ dexing indirectly from page zero for rapid (if not automatic) movement of gstrings and blocks. The first model (6500) was plug-compatible with the 6800 but priced at about one-fifth the 6800. The second model, the 6502, was much better because it had a built-in clock, reducing the chip count. Perhaps most important, while Motor¬ ola was uptight and bureaucratic about samples of its $90 chips, M.O.S. Tech¬ nology gave away samples of the 6502 ($20 each, list), including to two guys named Steve who put it in the Apple. It was also put in a lot of video games and controllers. (So maybe the comment on page 239 about 6502s being in closets is correct. I’m writing this letter on an continued 22 BYTE* AUGUST 1988 Who Says FoxBASE+ is Better than dBASE? FOX BASE + / M EH GAMES 6— Pinball, Othello, Dragons, Sopwith (fly a Sopwith Camel) and more. Color required. [|] INFO la,b —(2 disks) Cooking recipes database with keyword/ingredient retrieval. Add your own. [2] MUSIC 2a,b —(2 disks) PianoMan 3.0 polyphonic music recording and playback program. EH ORGANIZER 1— DeskTeam, a Sidekick clone, and the Judy personal calendar program. EH PRINTER 1— Resident print control and font utility, intelligent spooler, banner maker, and more. EH SIMULATION 1— Maze making program, MIT’s Life simulation, starfields, etc. Color graphics req. EH UTILITIES 1 —A collection of invaluable general purpose DOS utilities. An absolute must for all. EH UTILITIES 2—More invaluable DOS utilities in¬ cluding screen burnout, ram disk, and more. EH UTILITIES 3—A comprehensive set of debugging and diagnostic utilities for monitoring your computer. NEW RELEASES/UPDA TES EH BUSINESS 2— Expressgraph business graphics. Chart your data and find trends. Color graphics req. [ 2 ] CAD 1a,b—(2 disks) Fingerpaint 1.2 advanced painting and Altamira object oriented design. Color. ® GAD 2a,b— (2 disks) DanCad3d, an advanced 2D/3D drafting program w/animation. 640K, color. [ 2 ] COMM 2a,b— (2 disks) Procomm 2.42, an excel¬ lent modem program with terminal emulation. EH EDUCATION 3—PC-Fastype 1.20 typing tutor, ideal for beginners and advanced students alike. [ 2 ] FINANCES 3a,b— (2 disks) Express Calc 3.12, a powerful and user friendly spreadsheet program. EH GAMES 8 —Striker helicopter attack and Risk, the game of world domination. Color required. EH GAMES 12— Backgammon (play the computer) and Wheel of Fortune based on the gameshow. EH GRAPHICS 1— Record and play back screen im¬ ages! Excellent for demo, etc. Color required. [ 3 ] GRAPHICS 2a,b,0— (3 disks) An excellent 3-D surface modelling and shading program. Color. [2~l INFO 2a,b —(2 disks) Zip-Phone, national areacode/prefix to zip-code cross reference. [2] LANGUAGE 3a,b— (2 disks) The A86 3.09 macro assembler and debugger for 8088/86/286s. [2~l SHELL 4a,b —(2 disks) Automenu and HDM II 4.04 hard disk prog, for custom full-screen menus. EH UTILITIES 5—Hard disk utilities for verifying, for¬ matting, parking and optimizing your disk drives. EH UTILITIES 6 —Advanced utilities including Mark/Release (remove resident progs w/o reboot!) j | UTILITIES 7— More advanced utilities including Masterkey (undeletes files from hard disks). [ 2 ] WORD 1a,b —(2 disks) PC Write 2.71, a powerful word processing system w/spell checker, laser supt. Most software listed is shareware or user-supported. 3.5" format add $1/disk. 125 page directory, add $2. MicroCom Systems Cost of items_ 3673 Enochs Street Shipping_ $ 3.00 Santa Clara, CA CA res tax_ 95051 Total end._ (408) 737-9000 Mon-Fri 7am-9pm, Sat-Sun 8am-5pm 26 B YTE • AUGUST 1988 LETTERS function (cosine* + sine*) should give rise to some suspicion: It is no more than a “colorized” sine function, with 45 de¬ grees added to the angle and an ampli¬ tude equal to the square root of 2. The plain sine function would serve just as well. The Fourier transform uses cos * + j sin *, which preserves all the original signal information in two orthogonal functions—but which the Hartley simply lumps together. Consequently, any at¬ tempt to take the inverse transform is fraught with hazard—the original infor¬ mation has been lost. (The sum of two numbers is 7—what are the numbers?) Anyone considering using this trans¬ form should be aware of its limitations. John C. Polasek Orlando, FL Bigram vs. N-Gram I read Roy E. Kimbrell’s “Searching for Text? Send an N-Gram!” (May) with interest. I wonder whether the developers con¬ sidered using a “least-common bigram” (LCB) approach similar to that described by E. Onderisin (. Proceedings of the ACM Annual Meeting , 1971) and implemented at IITRI (LARC Reports, 7 (1), 1974). The LCB method yielded improvements over traditional methods. Perhaps an LCB or a “least-common trigram” ap¬ proach would be simpler and less re- source-intensive here, too. Peter Halpin Great Falls, VA You Call That Fast? Mark O’Neill (“Faster Than Fast Fou¬ rier,” April) claims that the fast Hartley transform (FHT) is twice as fast as the fast Fourier transform (FFT). The tim¬ ings in table 1 compare O’Neill’s algo¬ rithm with a simple (complex number) FFT for one forward and one reverse transform. These timings show that there’s more to speed than a smaller number of arith¬ metic operations. In particular, speed of array access is often crucial in “real” nu¬ merical applications. In a comment on Bracewell’s work, Bold (j Proceedings of the IEEE , 73 (12), 1863-4) points out that a real FFT can be performed by a complex FFT on n/2 points, considerably faster than the times above. If speed really is crucial, FFT al¬ gorithms can be tuned to the architecture of the machine in use. B. D. Ripley Glasgow, Scotland Elusive Shareware I have been given a copy of a very good backup program called Hardsave 1.0a. It has a message saying “Shareware from Andrew P. Wimple, Donations $20 please.” I would like to send Mr. Wimple a do¬ nation, but he has not left his address anywhere in the software. Do you or any of your readers know where he can be contacted? Jeremy Brown Leichhardt, Australia Data Liberation I am writing this letter to request a new Freedom of Information Act. I am refer¬ ring to the availability of data structures for software. continued Table 1: Timings comparing O’Neill’s algorithm with a simple (complex number) FFT for one forward and one reverse transform. n = 256 n = 1024 FHT FFT FHT FFT IBM PS/2 60 Turbo Pascal 4.0 5.16 3.62 23.51 19.56 + 80287 0.88 1.09 4.02 5.54 RM Nimbus VX 16-MHz 80386 2.47 1.76 10.98 9.28 + 80387 0.33 0.33 1.54 1.81 Atari ST Prospero Pascal 2.12 5.36 4.01 24.75 21.03 Sun 3/160 + 68881 0.32 0.38 1.55 1.90 + 1164/5 0.25 0.18 1.17 0.83 VAX 8650 0.085 0.050 0.420 I s - CVJ d The change to a pure language Now ; Cprogrammers can move over to C++ with Zortech C++ - the world's first ‘true' C++ compiler for MS-DOS machines. Zortech C++ is a ‘true' compiler and fully conforms to Bjarne Stroustrup's specification as outlined in his book ‘The C++ Programming Language'. Previous implementations of C++ were actually ‘translators'- only able to translate C++ source code into C. Of course, this was unacceptable due to the long trans¬ lating and compiling times. Now, C+ + comes of age with the introduction of the world's first true C++ compiler— from Zortech! ■ C++ is to C whatModula 2 is to Pascal. C++ brings ‘classes' to C, so you can create separate modules that contain their own data and data-related operations. These ‘classes' then become new types that can in turn be used to create further modules - this allows you to practically create your own language. ■ ANSI C Superset You don't have to throw away your existing Cprograms - C++ is a superset of ANSI C. Now ; you can take your Microsoft C or Turbo C compatible programs and easily migrate to C++ to take full advan¬ tage of the new C++ features. ■ Zortech C++ is compatible with ‘Codeview'- Microsoft's industry standard source code debugger. ■ Improved Program Structure As stated in ‘The C++ Programming Language', by using C++ “It would not be unreason¬ able for a single person to cope with 25,000 lines of code'.' ■ Here's just a few: Operator overloading, overloading function names, default arguments to functions and better type checking. ESSENTIAL READING! ** YES! Rush me C++ as shown below: ZORTECH ROSTON LONDON FRANKFURT GENCV/ Circle 258 on Reader Service Card Z f Address . □ Zortech C++ $99.95 $29.95 VISA/MC/COD/CHECK ACCEPTED This 325 page book The C++ Programming Language 9 by Bjarne Stroustrup contains the original definition of C++. All the examples shown in this book have been suc¬ cessfully compiled and executed with the Zortech C++ Compiler. f . Phone VISA orMC . Exp. Date To: ZORTECH INC. 361 Massachusetts Ave., Arlington, MA 02174, 4? Tel: 617-646-6703. Fax: 617-648-0603. / CALL THE ORDER HOTLINE 1-800-848-8408 A Number of Reasons A Number 1 Designed t for the 80386 There’s a revolution taking place in desktop computing. A revolution that’s been launched by a square wafer of silicon known as the 80386 microprocessor chip. It puts minicomputer potential at PC users’ fingertips. It’s a fact that virtually every leading PC manufacturer has built a “box” around this chip. And it’s a fact that the “New Operating System” will, supposedly, even run on it. But, it’s also a fact that their system wasn’t designed for called PC-MOS/386™ 4 Thousands of DOS Programs PC-MOS/386™ § gives you the best of the past, and the best for your future. Which means that while PC-MOS/386™ totally replaces your old DOS, you won’t have to replace the programs you’ve spent a lot of time learning. And it all happens so effortlessly. You’ll continue to reap the benefits of your favorite DOS programs, while entering a new arena of power. Think of it! Programs like dBASE III, WordPerfect, Lotus 1-2-3 and Sym¬ phony, WordStar, MultiMate...literally thousands of DOS programs-all com¬ patible and multi-user available. compatible with the millions of PC-compatibles. Power without 2 PC and PS/2 t Compatible In designing PC-MOS, we knew our first priority was to exploit the minicomputer capabilities of80386-based PCs & PS/2s. But we went further, and developed a system which would be fully existing PCs, PC ATs, and sacrifice. You’d expect 5 Familiar • Commands Like DIR and COPY Just as you don’t have to learn a whole new array of nothing less from the new standard bearer. software to take advantage of PC-MOS/386™ neither do you have to learn an entirely new set of commands. Instead, the system builds on the knowledge you already have. “COPY” still copies files, and “DIR” still gives you a directory listing. As you might expect, we didn’t stop there. There’s a wealth of features that have strengthened the com¬ mands you know, making them more powerful and easier to use. You can choose from a variety of work¬ stations. Mix and match dumb terminals costing under $500 each with PCs and PS/2s running our terminal emulation software. All of the host’s resources can be shared. Programs, data, hard disks, tape backup units & printers (including high speed laser printers) are suddenly available to all users. An 80386-PC has minicomputer potential. With PC-MOS/386™ you can “mini” your micro. 3 One, Five, Up to Twenty-five Users • From the beginning, PC-MOS/386™ was designed as a versatile operating system which could support twenty-five users as easily as it supports one. The system comes in single, five, and 25-user modules, so you’re able to start with what you need and expand when you’re ready. In a multi-user setting, PC-MOS/386™ uses the computing power of the host PC to drive workstations linked to standard RS-232 ports. 28 BYTE* AUGUST 1988 of Users Will Choose PC-MOS/386 TM Concurrently Supports Virtual 8086 and • 80386 32-Bit Mode 80386-based PCs & PS/2s are dual-personality computers. To run DOS programs, they act as PCs with a 640K memory limit. But to take advantage of their minicomputer capacity, they operate in true 80386 mode which lets them address up to four gigabytes of memory. PC-MOS enables the 80386-host and its workstations to independently switch between these modes-making DOS compatibility and 80386 power simultaneously possible. Multi-Tasking !• While it’s true you could look else¬ where for multi-tasking, why would you want to? The other multi-tasking operating system is not now, nor is it planned to be, multi-user It won’t even run multiple DOS appli¬ cations in multi-tasking mode. Now consider PC-MOS/386™ At the touch of a key, you can switch between up to 25 different tasks. And if you have workstations connected to a host, they get multi-tasking, too. Finally...a system that won’t hold you back. 8 , File/Record Locking and U Security When you decide to implement either a network or a multi¬ user system, there’s a two-fold problem which must be solved: protecting your work from accidental misuse and securing it from intentional theft. PC-MOS/386™ solves both aspects of this problem. Password protected security allows you to assign file, directory, and task access to each user. Plus, files and records are locked using either PC-MOS’ proprietary system or NETBIOS emulation. 9 Remote • Access It’s been said that information is power...which makes PC-MOS/386™ a deadly weapon to your competition. Imagine on-the-road salespeople being able to file call reports and access your latest inventory data. Picture execu¬ tives being able to access your corporate database from across the country, or around the world-giving them the information they need, when they need it. Visualize branch offices tapping time-critical data with nothing more than a modem and a workstation. Working at a home office in the evening or over the weekend suddenly gets awfully productive. And that makes good business sense. The kind of sense you can’t afford to be without. The Price... As you 1$ evaluate operating systems, ask yourself if it’s reasons you’re consider¬ ing...or rhyme. Ask if you’re getting a system for tomorrow, or one that was made for yesterday See if you’re being forced to buy new hardware because of their software, consider this. Only one operating system in the world can give you the raw power, features, and functionality that you demand. Its name is PC-MOS/386™ And it’s immediately available in one, five and 25-user versions starting at $195. PC-MOS/386™ is a trademark of The Software Link, Inc. PS/2, PC AT, NETBIOS, dBASE III, ~ MultiMate, WordPerfect, Lotus 1-2-3 & Symphony, & WordStar are trademarks of IBM Corp., AshtonTate, WordPerfect Corp., Lotus Development Corp., & MicroPro, respectively. Prices and technical specifications subject to change. Copyright ©1987. All Rights Reserved. For the dealer nearest you, In Georgia: International/OEM Sales: Resellers/VARs: CALL: 800/451-LINK 404/441-2580 404/263-1006 404/448-5465 3577 Parkway Lane, Atlanta, GA 30092 Telex 4996147 SWLINK FAX 404/263-6474 The Software Link/Canada CALL: 800/387-0453 "dealer inquiries invited MODULAR OPERATING SYSTEM ■■■ THE SOFTWARE LINK Circle 222 on Reader Service Card (DEALERS: 223) AUGUST 1988 'BYTE 29 LETTERS As a software developer and consul¬ tant, I am often called upon to aid indi¬ viduals converting from one software package to another. The only problem is, very often it’s difficult or impossible to obtain the data structure of the existing software package. Recently I was asked to help a physi¬ cian convert from one medical billing and insurance program, sold by one of the largest companies in the U.S., to a different package from a different ven¬ dor. This physician had used the original program for several years and had accu¬ mulated several thousand patient ac¬ counts in the system. Both a colleague and I contacted the vendor and requested a map of the pro¬ gram’s data structure. We did not re¬ quest source code or any proprietary in¬ formation, and we were willing to pay any necessary costs. Our request was firmly refused, and no amount of plead¬ ing, cajoling, or threatening could pry the data structure from this prestigious vendor. Needless to say, the resulting data conversion was difficult and expen¬ sive, and it involved a great deal of man¬ ually reentering data. I honestly do not know why this com¬ pany refused our request, but I have run across this response countless times with numerous software houses. Could it be that paranoia has become so widespread that it totally obscures the judgment of major software developers, or are they simply so petty that they will hold their existing users as unwilling captives so they can continue to milk them for up¬ grade and maintenance fees? Whatever the reason is, it has no justi¬ fication. It is inconceivable to me that any software vendor could refuse to fur¬ nish a data map, particularly when the data is as vitally important as accounts receivable. Furnishing the data structure of a pro¬ gram is not at all comparable to furnish¬ ing source code. The data structure tells little, if anything, about how the pro¬ gram works—it merely shows the owner of the data just where and how it is stored. Furthermore, a map of the data structure is useful only to individuals who already own the program. In no way could furnishing data structures ad¬ versely affect the sales or proprietary rights of any software vendor. Quite the contrary: In my opinion, the failure to furnish data structures should serve as a strong deterrent to buying the program in the first place. I think the time has come for all soft¬ ware vendors to furnish data structures with their programs. As more and more people become increasingly dependent upon computers for storing their vital data, they should have free access to that data. Even the most wonderful program might be obsolete next year, and even the largest vendor may be in Chapter 11 next week. I strongly advise individuals consider¬ ing the purchase of any software that may have a major impact on their lives to de¬ mand that the data structure of the pro¬ gram be furnished at the time of pur¬ chase. Whether they are programmers or not, if they need to convert to a different program in the future, they’ll have to pay a programmer far less if the data struc¬ ture is already available. Evan P. Provisor Sharon , CT Quattro and Benchmarks Your comparison review of Quattro and Surpass (“Double Threats to Lotus continued If youthink you canbuy a better C compiler, don’t. Well buy it for you. Buy Let’s C® with csd" for just $75. If you’re not satisfied, get Turbo C or QuickC. Free.* Why are we making this incredible offer? Because were absolutely cer¬ tain Lets C and csd C Source Debugger are the best C programming tools you can own. Rest assured that, like its competition, Lets C features incredibly fast in-memoiy compilation and produces extremely tight, high quality code. The differences lie in how much faster you can perform other programming chores. Our debugger, for example, can cut development time in half. But thats not all: “csd is close to the ideal debugging environment...a definite aid to learning C and an indispensable tool for program development .” -William G. Wong, BYTE And comparatively speaking: “No debugger is included in the Turbo C package... a serious shortcoming .” —Michael Abrash, Programmer’s Journal Unlike our competition. Let’s C includes its own full-featured assembler, features documentation with complete examples and technical support with complete answers—the first time you call. LET’S C: LET’S C AND csd FEATURES csd: • Now compiles twice as fast • Integrated edit-compile cycle: editor • Full UNIX compatibility and complete • Debug in C source code, not assembler libraries • Provides separate source, evaluation, automatically points to errors • Includes both small and large memory • Many powerful utilities including make, program and history windows assembler, archiver • Ability to set trace points and monitor model • MicroEMACS full screen editor with variables • Integrated environment or command source code included • Can interactively evaluate any C expression line interface • Supported by dozens of third party • Can execute any C function in your program • 8087 sensing and support libraries • Trace back function So if you’re thinking about buying any other C compiler, think again. But this offer is only available for a limited time. So think fast. And see your software dealer or call 1-800-MWC-1700 soon. (1-312-472-6659 in Illinois.) Tb exchange Let’s C and csd for Tlirbo C or QuickC, return registration card within 15 days of purchase date, notify Mark Williams Company that you are returning products and receive a return authorization number. Products must be returned within 30 days of purchase date or within 30 days of shipping date on telephone orders. ■ Mark Williams Company 1430 West Wright wood, Chicago, Illinois 60614,312-472-6659 ) 1988 Mark Williams Company 30 BYTE* AUGUST 1988 Circle 137 on Reader Service Card Circle 14 on Reader Service Card Rguest frit Bksize RXMOdPH nmon Cro RyMOdCH fai-jdti: Rbatch XBatch Rkemi t Xkemi \ Gkemit Remit receive file using SnartcoH II protocol send file using SwartcoH II protocol Tms 11> ntm t> ttmia Hi mm, 5*”l! » get file iron MIRROR or Crosstalk using Cro« transHit file to MIRROR or Crosstalk system specify Block size used By fait ■ receive file using XHODtH (Koden 7) protocol transHit file using XMODEM protocol if on, use CRC error detection in XMODEM receive file using XMODEM protocol transit file using XMODEM protocol receive files using XMODEM kuI ti-file protocol transHit files using XMODEM huI ti-file protocol receive file using Remit protocol transHit file using Remit protocol get a file fron a Remit server specify Remit defaults ■ FAST . . The ATI internal 2400 Baud PC modem uses data compress¬ ion techniques providing data throughput speeds in excess of 4800bps. ■ ERROR FREE . . Uses high level MNP5 hardware error correction procedures to guaranty 100 % error-free data. ■ DEPENDABLE . . Built by the manufacturer of the world famous EGAWONDER graphics cards, the 2400etc has full compatibility with popular communication software. ■ SMART . . Every modem includes a FREE copy of Mirror //communications software which allows users background tasking for receiving Electronic Mail or Data transfers concurrently with screen applications. $239 /Ti List Price Smart price to pay for Smart technology AVAILABLE FROM LEADING COMPUTER DEALERS. Technology you can Trust. ATI "technologies Inc., 3761 Victoria Park Ave. Scarborough. Ontario. Canada M1W 3S2 tel: (416) 756 0711. Tlx: 06-966640 (ATI TOR) Fax: (416) 756-0720 ATI is a registered trademark ol ATI Technologies Inc. MNP is a trademark of Microcom Corporation. Mirror II is a trademark of Softklone Distribution Corporation. Crosstalk - Digital Communications Associates Inc. Smartcom II - Hayes Micro Computer Products Inc. ffi2400etc I The Next Generation in Modems LETTERS 1-2-3” by Diana Gabaldon, June) re¬ quires some amplification. First, you didn’t mention the two add¬ ins that are bundled with Quattro at no extra charge: Menu Builder and Tran¬ script. Menu Builder lets users create menu trees that are customized to their specific needs. Quattro is shipped with both its own menu tree and one that emu¬ lates Lotus 1-2-3. If your readers have ever lost valuable data, they’ll appreciate Transcript. It provides a log file of keystrokes and com¬ mands selected throughout the spread¬ sheet session. Errors can be handled eas¬ ily with the undo command. Transcript also protects against power failure or sys¬ tem crashes and audits changes made to a spreadsheet. Second, Quattro provides a macro record and debugging environment. The macro record is an excellent way to create macros quickly and easily. It sim¬ ply records the user’s actions as they are performed. With the Quattro debugger, users can execute macros in slow motion (step by step), pausing as they go along, and set breakpoints that “freeze” a macro when it reaches a cell or satisfies a given condition. Users can execute a macro at full speed until it reaches a breakpoint, then continue either in slow motion or at full speed until the next breakpoint. Your benchmark appears to be a his¬ torical “all cells dependent on one cell” model and is not representative of a real- world spreadsheet. Lastly, your review summed up Quat¬ tro as being the first-time user’s choice. On the contrary, our research shows that more than 50 percent of cur¬ rent Quattro users are previous Lotus 1-2-3 users. Becky Jones Product Manager Borland International Scotts Valley, CA We We glad you mentioned the bench¬ marks: Our traditional spreadsheet benchmarks are deliberately not opti¬ mized for any one kind of operation— historically, we've made no assump¬ tions about how a spreadsheet will be used. While this approach has the ad¬ vantage of being open-ended and allows head-to-head comparisons of spread¬ sheets over time, these benchmarks cer¬ tainly aren ’tperfect. For one thing, they lack fine detail that might allow readers to, for example, differentiate between performance in routine business mat¬ ters versus performance in statistical number crunching. We're changing our benchmarks: In our June issue, we rolled out BYTE's new system benchmarks for hardware. These, the first second-generation micro¬ computer benchmarks, produce results (from the most general to the most de¬ tailed levels) that are valid indicators of real-world performance in a variety of applications. We're now in the process of doing the same thing for our suite of software benchmarks. Watch for our new, second- generation software benchmarks later this year.— Eds. FIXES Sorry, Wrong Number In the June What’s New on page 88, we printed the wrong telephone number for Plu*Perfect Systems. The correct num¬ ber is (213) 395-4584. ONLY F0RTR0N COMES WITH ONE FULL YEAR OF SERVICE. FREE. ON-SITE. When you buy any Fortran 286 and 386-based IBM-compatible, one full year of service at your site is part of the package. Just call the service hotline, and we’ll take care of you from a network of 300 service locations throughout the country. Because we design and build our systems right here, ourselves, you always know exactly who to call for any kind of support you need. And you’ll get it. Fast. Call toll-free for more information, and for the name of your nearest Fortran dealer: 800-821-9771. In California, (408) 432-1191. Small Footprint 80286 80386,16 MHz or 20 MHz 80286 12, 16, or 20 MHz i : oirri?CN 2380 Qume Drive, Ste. F San Jose, CA 95131 32 BYTE* AUGUST 1988 Circle 90 on Reader Service Card Compaq presents high-performance computing for everyone. Introducing the COMPAQ DESKPRO 386S. New technology delivers affordable 80386 performance for anyone considering 80286 PCs. Now, breakthrough technology from Compaq brings the power and potential of 80386-based personal computing to millions of business PC users. Introducing the COMPAQ DESKPRO 386 S. It's the first personal computer powered by the revolutionary new Intel® 386SX* microprocessor. It's also the first designed specifically as an affordable, high-performance alternative to 80286-based PC's. The COMPAQ DESKPRO 386 S will run the software you have today—such as MS-DOS® and Microsoft® Oper¬ ating System/2 from Compaq—up to 60% faster than most 10-MHz 80286 PC's. It will also run the 32-bit software that 80286 PC's won't run at all. Microsoft Windows/386, for example. You can tailor the COMPAQ DESKPRO 386 S to your exact needs. Choose high-performance storage options such as 20-, 40-, or 110-Megabyte Fixed Disk Drives. Tape backup options. Even diskette drives in 5V4-inch and 3 V 2 -inch sizes. VGA graphics are built in. So is one megabyte of high¬ speed memory, expandable to 13 megabytes without using a single expansion slot. You can also add a mouse, printers and more without using additional slots. All these features and more are packed into a sleek new design that fits places the competition can’t. So get into the PC passing lane, and head for all the 80386 power and performance you really want, with the revolutionary new COMPAQ DESKPRO 386 S. Introducing the COMPAQ DESKPRO 386/25. The most powerful PC available. Never look back. Once again, Compaq introduces a PC that leaves every other in the dust. With its new Intel 25-MHz 386* micropro¬ cessor and exclusive 32-bit COMPAQ Flexible Advanced Systems Architecture, the new COMPAQ DESKPRO 386/25 runs up to 60% faster than most 20-MHz 80386 PC's. FLEX Architecture uses separate memory and peripheral buses operating in concert to maximize system performance, while maintaining compatibility with industry-standard hardware and software. The 25-MHz cache memory controller keeps data instantly accessible, so the processor works at 0 wait states 95% of the time. With the addition of a 25-MHz Intel 387* or Weitek™ coprocessor, you can match the numeric processing of a dedicated workstation, at a fraction of the cost. You can go from one standard megabyte of high-speed RAM to 16 megabytes. And, for storage-hungry applica¬ tions such as most networks and multiuser systems, you can get up to a massive 1.2 gigabytes of storage! Internal tape backup options are also available. For CAD/CAE, as a file server and for multiuser systems, the new COMPAQ DESKPRO 386/25 is the ulti¬ mate solution. And, for intense PC users who don't have a millisecond to spare, nothing less will do! _ comma It simply works better. Now there's roan for everyone on the fast track. When Compaq pioneered high- performance personal computing and introduced the industry's first 80386- based PC's, we gave performance-hungry busi¬ ness users, engineers, analysts and software developers the tools they needed to perform intense applications faster and better. Now, with the new COMPAQ DESKPRO 386s and COMPAQ DESKPRO 386/25, we're not just pushing 80386 technology forward; we're widening it. So that PC users at every level can take advantage of the industry's highest performance—Compaq 80386 performance. The new COMPAQ DESKPRO 386S lets anyone considering 80286 PC's head straight for 80386 per¬ formance. The original COMPAQ DESKPRO 386 and COMPAQ DESKPRO 386/20 deliver even higher per¬ formance for more de¬ manding applications. And now, at the top of our line is the new COMPAQ DESKPRO 386/25. The most powerful personal computer available. Together, they create the highest-performing PC line available. In each one, our exclusive design lets every component run at optimum speed. This pro¬ vides a substantial per¬ formance edge, while maintaining compatibility and connectivity with your current hardware and software. Now, you'll run your current MS-DOS® applica¬ tions at top speed. Plus new 80386 software, such as Microsoft Windows/386. With MS® OS/2, UNIX® or XENIX! you'll simultane¬ ously run multiple programs, switching between them instantly. And, with a COMPAQ 80386 PC, you'll do it all faster. Now, with legendary Compaq performance and quality available to every¬ one, the fast track is wider than ever. So accelerate. Call 1-800-231-0900, Operator 64. In Canada, call 1-800- 263-5868, Operator 64. We'll give you the location of your nearest Authorized COMPAQ Computer Dealer and a free brochure for any COMPAQ 80386-based computer. COMPAQ" and COMPAQ DESKPRO 386* are trademarks of Compaq Computer Corporation. Microsoft? MS-DOS? XENIX® and MS* are trademarks of Microsoft Corporation. MS® OS/2 and MS® Windows/386 are products of Microsoft Corporation. Product names mentioned herein may be trademarks and/or registered trademarks of their respective companies. “Registered U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. COMPAQ DESKPRO 386/25 graphics ©1988 Accent Soft¬ ware, Inc. ©1988 Compaq Computer Corpora¬ tion. All rights reserved. ‘Hereafter referred to as 80386SX, 80386 and 80387 respectively. fUsing two optional COMPAQ 300-/600- Megabyte Fixed Disk Drive Expansion Units. comma It simply works better. Chaos Manor Mail Jerry Pournelle answers questions about his column and related computer topics BIX in Europe? Dear Jerry, I’m a student of economics and com¬ puter science, studying at the University of Karlsruhe. There are three reasons why I’m writ¬ ing to you. First, I really enjoy reading BYTE, because it’s one of the best (if not the best) available computer magazines. My second reason for writing is be¬ cause I’d love to take part on BIX, but as you know, the German Bundespost (“post” is the “abbreviation” for Public Organization for the Suppression of Technology) is very restrictive concern¬ ing computer communications and, of course, is charging fairly high fees for any long-distance call. Perhaps BYTE or McGraw-Hill could encourage activities to bring BIX to Eu¬ rope. I’m thinking of a BIX bulletin board somewhere in Europe, whose con¬ tents would be sent to America once or twice a day and vice versa. This would already be a big leap forward, although it would not be as interactive as the original BIX. Perhaps—and now I might just be day¬ dreaming—BIX could advance to be¬ come IBIX (International BYTE Infor¬ mation Exchange), bringing together computer users from all over the world. My third reason to write to you is that I’ve recently bought an inexpensive add¬ on board for my IBM PC AT. To find out what kind of board I’d bought, I went through all my issues of BYTE to locate any reference to Definicon Systems, the name on the board. I was lucky to find a pointer to an older BYTE in which the DSI-32 coprocessor board had been re¬ viewed. I was very glad to realize that I now own a “tiny VAX” to plug into my computer (a DSI-32 board running at 10 MHz, complete with memory manage¬ ment unit and 2 megabytes of RAM). I’ve already written to Def inicon Sys¬ tems for further information and soft¬ ware, and I hope to get enough to help get the board running. Since BYTE tried to encourage buying this board by having arranged special prices for Green Hills software, I believe there still may be many people who use the DSI-32 board. Perhaps some of them would be willing to exchange information or programs with me. Readers can get in contact with me at the address below. Axel Mock Dahlienweg 8E 7513 Stutensee 1 Federal Republic of Germany Thanks for the suggestions. I find De- finicon stuff blazingly fast. I passed your comments on to George Bond, executive editor of BIX, who had this to say: “We 're interested in worldwide partic¬ ipation in BIX, too. Already BIX has members from North and South America, Europe, Africa, Asia, and Australia. We do recognize the high costs of BIXing from outside the U. S., and we are contin¬ ually looking for ways to help users re¬ duce them. “ Incidentally, although BIX is not available directly in Europe, another BYTE service—BYTEnet Listings — is. BYTEnet Listings is a BBS with code de¬ scribed in BYTE articles in its download areas. There currently are BYTEnet List¬ ings boards in more than 30 nations worldwide. ”—Jerry Solving Problems with ASK Dear Jerry, Last year, you wrote about having troubles with your resident software and gave an example of a batch file that re¬ writes the AUTOEXEC.BAT file. That’s one solution, but I think I’ve got a better one. The advanced edition of the Norton Utilities includes the program ASK, which is very useful for solving such problems in a tidy way. With ASK, you can build menus in a batch file, input into the batch file, and set the errorlevel continued Jerry Pournelle holds a doctorate in psy¬ chology and is a science fiction writer who also earns a comfortable living writ¬ ing about computers present and future. He can be reached c/o BYTE, One Phoe¬ nix Mill Lane, Peterborough, NH 03458. Circle 25 on Reader Service Card Four ways to build better Cprograms ... Power ^ Screen $129 Screen I/O manager. Features: screen painter virtual screens data validation context sensitive help unlimited screens definable keys & much more! C Tools Plus $129 Full featured function library. For Microsoft C 5.0 and QuickC. Features: TSR support direct video access VGA and EGA support windows and menus DOS memory allocation interrupt service routines & much more! CAsynch Manager $175 Asynchronous communication manager. Features: speeds to 19.2K baud XON/XOFF protocol hardware handshaking XModem file transfer I/O buffers up to 64K & much more! TurboC Tools $129 Full featured function library. For Borland’s Turbo C. Features: TSR support direct video access VGA and EGA support windows and menus DOS memory allocation interrupt service routines & much more! We’re Blaise Computing, manufacturers of high quality function libraries designed to reduce the time and technical expertise required for serious applications development. All of our packages include a comprehensive user refer¬ ence manual with extensive examples, and sample programs. Satisfaction guaranteed or return within 30 days for a full refund. We have a full line of products for C and Pascal. For a free brochure or to order call 800-333-8087! BLAISE COMPUTING INC. 2560 Ninth Street, Suite 316 Berkeley, CA 94710 (415) 540-5441 AUGUST 1988 •BYTE 33 CHAOS MANOR MAIL according to your input. (For a better ex¬ planation, just look it up in the Norton Integrator.) A better solution to your problem could look like this: ECHO 1. Ready!, SuperKey, SideKick ECHO 2. Lightning, SideKick ECHO 3* DESQview ECHO 4. Windows ASK "What shall I load, "1234 if errorlevel 1 then goto. if errorlevel 2 then goto. If you want to stick to your method, you could write a little program that re¬ boots the system via interrupt 25. When you’re using DOS 3.3, you can write better code using call instead of goto. This way your code will be much more readable. Now to your discussion about word processors. I do almost all my editing with the Norton Editor (yes, I’m a Peter Norton fan), which can do all I need and is very small. It also supports a mouse if V'YobCP i ’Sr.*, »*• V ... y^Z v««° iA . ‘3S * V 'V ****>?& , >&Vs < '° S „ ^"s*. ■£•**, %*. V BV^tV'°cv V?* ^ C \U rS ^ •SbSw rwNcnoN l^l Vferbalim Si&SkS commodore OWDWA xona 6l l9 rtfcfl S iV K ’ **’ SV - ^°>C c ^a' Q ^C- cO^,A\e aV of* ALL MERCHANDISE SHIPPED IN FACTORY SEALED CARTONS. 100% GUARANTEED connected. Just press the left mouse but¬ ton, and you can move the cursor around; press the mouse button again, and you drop the cursor at the new location. I find that very useful. When it comes to out¬ put, I use TgX. My second-choice editor is MicroStar from the Turbo Editor Toolbox because it cooperates with Lightning so nicely. P.S. Just in case you are interested, I am 14 years old. Konrad Neuwirth Vienna, Austria Actually, I find that DESQview does pretty well on an 80386for nearly every normal operation; when I want to run without DESQview, I generally want to change the CONFIG.SYS file as well, and ASK won't do that. Em a Peter Norton fan also. — Jerry XyWrite’s the One Dear Jerry, With rising frustration, I have read all the columns in your series on your search for a word processor that is transparent to you as a writer and yet has all the features that you as a hacker might want. I am a practicing attorney, and as such I need to create nonstandard documents from scratch with reasonable regularity. I also lecture and have to prepare appro¬ priate outlines in varying detail, tailored to the particular course. Six or so years ago, I was introduced to XyWrite by the head of our word-pro- cessing department, in which we ran Atex at the time. I switched over from my then-beloved WordStar, and I’ve stuck with it ever since. The key to XyWrite, which I don’t be¬ lieve you have yet had an opportunity to appreciate, is the ability to configure the program in just about any way you choose. Do you want a keyboard that gives you all the editing functions without remov¬ ing your hands from the keyboard? That’s what I have. The keyboard driver for XyWrite is an ASCII file that loads when the program boots and can be re¬ written to put all the editing functions under whatever mnemonic or ergonomic design you choose. Suffice it to say that I have assigned to the Control key (or, in a few cases, Con¬ trol-Alt or Alt-Shift) combinations of my choice all the following functions: • Cursor movement: one space up, down, forward, or back; one word for¬ ward or back; one sentence forward or back; one paragraph forward or back; top continued on page 201 34 BYTE* AUGUST 1988 Circle 218 on Reader Service Card 11 Important Reasons C Programmers Use Our File Manager 1. It’s written in C. Clearly the growing language of choice for applications that are fast, portable and efficient. All of db_VISTA’s source code is written in C. 2. It’s fast - almost 3 times faster than a leading competitor. Fast access that comes from the unique combination of the B-tree indexing method and the “network” or direct “set” relationships between records. A winning combination for fast performance. 3. It’s flexible. Because of db_VISTA’s combination of access methods, you can program to your application needs with ultimate design flexibility. Use db_VISTA as an ISAM file manager or to design database applications. You decide how to optimize run-time performance. No other tool gives you this flexibility without sacrificing performance. db_VISTA is also well behaved to work with most any other C libraries! 4. It’s portable. db_VISTA operates on most popular computers and operating systems like UNIX, MS-DOS and VMS. You can write applications for micros, minis, or even mainframes. 5. Complete Source Code available. We make our entire C Source Code available so you can optimize performance or port to new environments yourself. 6. It uses space efficiently. db_VISTA lets you precisely define relationships to minimize redundant data. It is non-RAM resident; only those functions necessary for opera¬ tion become part of the run-time program. 7. Royalty free run-time. Whether you’re developing applications for yourself or for thousands, you pay for db_VISTA or db_QUERY only once. If you currently pay royalties to someone else for your hard work, isn’t it time you switched to royalty-free db_VISTA? db_ Vista Features ♦ Multi-user support allows flexibility to run on local area networks ♦ File structure is based on the B-tree indexing method ♦ Transaction processing assures multi-user consistency ♦ File locking support provides read and write ♦ SQL-based db_QUERY is linkable ♦ File transfer utilities included for ASCII, dBASE optional ♦ Royalty-free run-time distribution ♦ Source Code available ♦ Data Definition Language for specifying the content and organization of your files ♦ Interactive database access utility ♦ Database consistency check utility File Management Record and File Sizes ♦ Maximum record length limited only by acces¬ sible RAM ♦ Maximum records per file is 16,777,215 ♦ Maximum file size limited only by available disk storage ♦ Maximum of 256 index and data files ♦ Key length maximum 246 bytes ♦ No limit on number of key fields per record ♦ No limit on maximum number of fields per record Operating System & Compiler Support ♦Operating systems: MS-DOS, UNIX, XENIX, ULTRIX, Microport, VMS, Macintosh ♦ C compilers: Lattice, Microsoft, IBM, Aztec. Turbo C, XENIX, UNIX and LightspeedC 8. SQL-based db_QUERY is the query and report writing program that provides a relational view of db_VISTA databases. Use ad hoc or link into your C applications. Royalty-free. Source code available. 9. Free tech support. 60 days of free technical and application development support for every Raima product. Of course, extended support and training classes are also available at your place or ours. 10. Upward database compatibility Start out with file management in a single-user PC environment—then move up to a multi-user LAN or a VAX database application with millions of records. You’ll still be using db_VISTA. That’s why so many C programmers are choosing db_VISTA. 11. WKS LIBRARY The WKS LIBRARY PROVIDES THE MOST EFFICIENT WAY FOR C and BASIC programmers to interface with 1-2-3, Symphony and dBASE. ♦ Reads & Writes WKS & WK1 Files ♦ Reads & Writes DBF Files ♦ 1-2-3, Symphony & dBASE compatible ♦ Source Included ♦ No Royalties 30-day Money Back Guarantee! Price Schedule db_visTA dt>_QUERY □ Single user $ 195 $ 195 □ Single user w/Source $ 495 $ 495 □ Multi-user $ 495 $ 495 □ Multi-user w/Source $ 990 $ 990 NEW: □ WKS LIBRARY for Lotus 1-2-3 $ 195 Call Today! Ordering is easy — simply call toll-free. We’ll answer your technical questions and get you started. 1 (800) db.RAIMA (800) 327-2462 or (206) 828-4636 For international orders: VISA In the U.K. call Systemstar Ltd.: FAX: (0992)500919 (0992)554261 In Switzerland call Comptronix AG: FAX: 01 725 04 10 01 725 87 77 In France call ISE-CEGOS: FAX: (1) 46 09 2828 (1) 46 09 2800 In Belgium call Lemnie S.A.: FAX: (02) 720.96.57 (02) 721.12.00 In Germany call ESM GmbH: 07127/5244 RAIMA LA ^CORPORATION 3055 - 112th NE, Bellevue, WA 98004 USA FAX: (206) 828-3131 Telex: 6503018237 MCIUW © 1988 Raima Corporation BY88 When you want to talk computers. ATARI COMPUTERS 65XE 64K Computer.109.99 130XE 132K Computer.149.00 520ST-FM Monochrome Syst. .699.00 1040ST Color System.Call SF124 Monochrome Monitor . .169.00 SF1224 Color Monitor .329.00 Atari 520 Color System $799 Includes: 520ST-FM, 512K RAM with 3Vz u Drive Built-In, Basic, RF-MOD, Atari Mouse, and SF-1224 Color Monitor. ATARI ST SOFTWARE Access Leaderboard Golf.24.99 Antic CAD 3D.29.99 Avant Garde PC Ditto (IBM Emulation).64.99 Batteries Included Degas Elite.39.99 Soft Logik Corp. Publishing Partner.64.99 Timeworks Swiftcalc/Wordwriter.47.99 VIP Professional Gem.139.00 Word Perfect Corp. Word Perfect.189.00 ■ Absoft AC Basic.139.00 Aegis Development Animator/Images.89.99 Draw Plus.149.00 Sonix.49.99 Discovery Software Marander II.31.99 Electronic Arts Deluxe Video 1.2.89.99 Gold Disk Software Pagesetter w/Text ed.89.99 Micro Illusions Dynamic Cad .349.00 AMIGA SOFTWARE AMIGA SOFTWARE Mimetics Amigen Gen Lock.159.00 New Tek Inc. Digi-View 2.0.149.00 Digi-Paint.44.99 Sub-Logic Corp. Flight Simulator II.39.99 Word Perfect Corp. Word Perfect.199.00 MACINTOSH PRODUCTS EVEREX 60MB Tape Backup *899 Hard Drives CMS MacStack 60 .899.00 Everex 40MB SCSI.999.00 PCPC MacBottom HD45 .1149.00 Floppy Drives Central Point Magnum 800k.209.00 Mirror Technologies 800K Floppy External.199.00 Monitors Network Specialties High Top FPD.1199.00 Radius Full Page Display.995.00 Two Page Display.1595.00 Sigma Designs Laser View Display for II. . . .1,749.00 Memory Upgrades Dove Computer Mac Snap 2SE.359.00 Scanners AST Turboscan .1,349.00 Datacopy 730 Flatbed Scanner.1,199.00 Ast Premium 286 & 386 .Call Compaq Deskpro and Portbls. . . . Call IBM PS/2 25, 30, 50, 60, 80.Call Leading Edge.899.00 MS/DOS SYSTEMS NEC APC-IV Powermate_2,399.00 PC-TOO 80286 1.2MB, 512K. .899.00 Toshiba T-1000 Laptop .799.00 Zenith Laptops.Call NEC Multispeed- hd $2489 MULTIFUNCTION CARDS AST 6-Pak Plus 576 Board . .149.00 Hot Shot 286 Accelerator .349.00 Hercules Color Card. .169.00 Graphics Card Plus. .199.00 Intel Inboard 386 Board. .799.00 5th Generation Logical Connection 256K .339.00 Quadram Quad386XT 80386 PC-Upgr. . .799.00 Video 7 Vega V.G.A. Adapter. .299.00 Zuckerboard Color Card w/Parallel Port . . . . .89.99 MS/DOS SOFTWARE Ashton-Tate d-Base III +. .389.00 Borland Quattro . .129.00 5th Generation Fastback Plus. . . .84.99 Fox Software Fox Base & Development . . . .219.00 IMSI Optimouse w/dr. Halo.89.99 Logitec Hi-Res Buss Mouse.99.00 Lotus Lotus 1.2.3 .299.00 Software Publishing First Choice.99.99 Word Perfect Corp. Word Perfect 5.0.NEW COMPUTER MAIL ORDER 36 BYTE* AUGUST 1988 When you want to talk price. MONITORS Amdek Video 21OA 12” Amber.89.00 Video 410 12”A/G/W . . . .(ea.) 139.00 Magnavox 7BM623 12” TTL Amber.99.00 CM8505 14” RGB/Composite .189.00 CM8515 14” RGB/Composite .269.00 9CM053 14” EGA.379.00 9CM082 14” VGA Display. . . .459.00 NEC GS-1400 14” Monochr. TTL . .219.00 JC-1402 Multisync-ll.599.00 Packard Bell PB-1418F 14” Flat TTL A/G/W. .(ea.) 119.00 PB-1420CG 14” Mid-Res CGA 269.00 PB-1422EG 14” Hi-Res EGA. .369.00 PB-8426-MJ Uniscan Monitor .399.00 Princeton Graphics Max-12 12” TTL Amber.149.00 Seiko CM-1430 14”VGA Display_649.00 Magnavox CM 8762 14” RGB/Comp. $269 DRIVES Atari AA314 DS/DD ST Disk.219.00 SHD204 20MB ST Hard Drive .619.00 C.LTD (For Amiga) C.LTD 20MB (A2000).769.00 C.LTD 33MB (A2000).879.00 C.LTD 44MB (A2000).1099.00 C.LTD 50MB (A2000).1139.00 C.LTD A500 SCSI Controller . .179.00 Indus GT Disk Drive Atari XL/XE . . . .199.00 GTS-100 ST Drive .219.00 Racore Jr. Expansion Chassis.299.00 Seagate Technologies ST-225 20MB Drive .249.00 Supra Atari ST 20MB Hard Drive_589.00 Amiga 2000 20MB Hard/Drive .629.00 MODEMS Anchor 6480 C64/128 1200 Baud .99.99 520 ST520/1040 1200 Baud . .129.00 1200E 1200 Baud External . . .129.00 Atari XMM301 XL/XE 300 Baud.44.99 SX-212 St Modem .99.99 Avatex 1200 He External.99.99 2400 External.189.00 Best Products 2400 Baud V 2 Card w/software 149.00 Everex Evercom 2400 Baud External .209.00 Practical Peripherals^ ^ 2400 Stand Alone Hayes Smartmodem 300 Ext. . .159.00 Smartmodem 1200 Int. . .279.00 Packard Bell 1200 External. . . .89.99 2400 External. . .169.00 Practical Peripherals 1200 Baud External. . .119.00 1200 Baud Internal. . . .79.99 Supra 2400AT 2400 Baud Atari . . . . .169.00 U.S. Robotics Direct 1200 Baud External. . . .109.00 Direct 2400 Baud External. . . .199.00 DISKETTES Maxwell MD1-M SS/DD 5V4”. . . . .8.49 MD2-DM DS/DD 574”. . . . .9.49 MF1-DDM SS/DD 3V 2 ”. . . .12.49 MF2-DDM DS/DD 3V 2 ” . . .18.49 MC-6000 DC-600 Tape. . . .23.99 Sony MD1D SS/DD 5V 2 ”. . . . .6.99 MD2D DS/DD 5V 2 ”. . . . .7.99 MFD-1DD SS/DD 3V 2 ”. .. .11.99 MFD-2DD DS/DD 3V 2 ”. . . .16.99 PRINTERS Atari XDM-121 Letter Quality XL-XE 209.00 XM-M801 XL-XE Dot Matrix . . .199.00 XM-M804 ST Dot Matrix.199.00 Brother M-1109 lOOcps Dot Matrix. . . .169.00 M-1509 180cps 132col.389.00 HR-20 22cps Daisywheel.379.00 Citizen 120D 120cps Dot Matrix.159.00 Premier-35 35cps Daisywheel .479.00 Epson LX-800 150cps, 80 col.179.00 FX-86e 240cps, 80 col.Call FX-286E 240 cps, 132 col .Call LQ-500 180 cps, 24-wire.Call LQ-850 330 cps, 80 col.Call LQ-1050 330 cps, 24-wire.Call FX-850, FX-1050.New Hewlett-Packard 2225A Thinkjet.369.00 NEC P2200 Pinwriter 24-wire.379.00 P660 Pinwriter 24-wire.459.00 P760 Pinwriter 132 col.679.00 Okidata Okimate 20 color printer .129.00 ML-182 180 cps, 80 col.249.00 ML-320 300 cps, 80 col.379.00 ML-390 24 wire, 270 cps.519.00 Panasonic KX-P1080i 144 cps, 80 col. SI 69 Panasonic KX-P1091i 194 cps, 80 col_199.00 KX-P1092i 240 cps, 80 col. . . .339.00 KX-P1595 200 cps, 132 col.. .479.00 Star Micronics NX-1000 140 cps, 80 col.179.00 NX-1000C C64/128 Interface . .179.00 NX-15 120 cps, 132 col.329.00 Toshiba P321-SL 216 cps, 24-wire_499.00 P351-SX 300 cps, 24-wire_999.00 In the U.S.A. and in Canada Call toll-free: 1-800-233-8950 Outside the U.S.A. call 717-327-9575, Fax 717-327-1217 Educational, Governmental and Corporate Organizations call toll-free 1-800-221-4283 _CMO, 101 Reighard Ave., Dept. A1, Williamsport, PA 17701 OVER 350,000 SATISFIED CUSTOMERS » ALL MAJOR CREDIT CARDS ACCEPTED « CREDIT CARDS ARE NOT CHARGED UNTIL WE SHIP POLICY: Add 3% (minimum $7.00) shipping and handling. Larger shipments may require additional charges. Personal and company checks require 3 weeks to clear. For faster delivery, use your credit card or send cashier’s check or bank money order. Credit cards are not charged until we ship. Pennsylvania residents add 6% sales tax. All prices are U.S.A. prices and are subject to change, and all items are subject to availability. Defective software will be replaced with the same item only. Hardware will be replaced or repaired at our discretion within the terms and limits of the manufacturer’s warranty. We cannot guarantee com¬ patibility. All sales are final and returned shipments are subject to a restocking fee. We are not responsible for typographic or photographic errors. A108 Circle 55 on Reader Service Card AUGUST 1988 -BYTE 37 A sk Byt e Circuit Cellar’s Steve Ciarcia answers your questions on microcomputing A Drive for All Seasons Dear Steve, I’m looking for a 3 Vi-inch floppy disk drive capable of coping with the IBM 1.44-megabyte format as well as the Apple 800K-byte format. I have asked most of the major brand representatives in Europe about this, but so far I’ve been without luck. I think there must be quite a market for such a device, so I don’t understand why it should not exist. H. Anjou Gothenburg, Sweden There’s an old saying in this country that there’s an oddball in every crowd. In the computer crowd, the oddball is Apple Computer. Apple’s disk system for all its computers uses an unusual data encoding method called group coding, whereas modified frequency modulation (MFM) encoding is the basis for the dominant in¬ dustry standard dictated by IBM. Apple y s method is very software-intensive, using a variable-speed 80-track drive to obtain its 800K-byte-per-disk capacity. The IBM 1.44-megabyte disk drive uses industry-standard controllers. The differences between the systems make de¬ signing a single drive to work with both a bit adventurous. At least two companies have attempted to market controllers that permit industry-standard 40-track dou¬ ble-sided drives to be used with the Apple II series; both failed. It seems highly un¬ likely that anyone will design and market a disk drive that works with both kinds of controllers with acceptable reliability. Tm not saying it can y t be done—just that no one is likely to do it. —Steve Alive and Kicking Dear Steve, Do you know where I can get software to let me use my Osborne 1 with a hook¬ up to an IBM PC XT? I’ve tried several sources without success. Steven Takle Fridley, MN I don y t know of any specific software package that links Osborne or other CP/M machines to IBM PCs. Maybe you can find something on CP/M bulletin board systems (BBSes), CompuServe, or The Source. You can find a large list of user groups and BBSes in Computer Shopper magazine. You can operate a PC from a remote computer of almost any type with some communications programs. Procomm, for example, has a host mode that provides many of the features of BBS control pro¬ grams, and it has a shell-to-DOS func¬ tion that allows the remote user full ac¬ cess to the PC. All I/O is redirected to the COM port. This would allow you to use Modem7 or some other program on your Osborne to run the PC remotely. Pro¬ comm is available on most local BBSes, or you can order it from Datastorm Tech¬ nologies, Inc., 1621 TowneDr., Suite G, Columbia, MO 65205. One advantage of downloading from a local BBS is that you can try it before you buy it. —Steve IN ASK BYTE, Steve Ciarcia, a computer con¬ sultant and electronics engineer, answers questions on any area of microcomputing and his Circuit Cellar projects. The most repre¬ sentative questions will be answered and pub¬ lished. Send your inquiry to Ask BYTE One Phoenix Mill Lane Peterborough, NH 03458 Due to the high volume of inquiries, we cannot guarantee a personal reply. All letters and photographs become the property of Steve Ciarcia and cannot be returned. The Ask BYTE staff includes manager Harv Weiner and researchers Eric Albert, Tom Cantrell, Bill Curlew, Ken Davidson, Jeannette Dojan, Jon Elson, Frank Kuech- mann, Tim McDonough, Edward Nisley, Dick Sawyer, Robert Stek, and Mark Voorhees. Protocol Problems Dear Steve, My computer is a Hewlett-Packard IPC, a machine that is apparently a poor stepchild. My problem concerns connecting an external disk drive. According to the manuals, any drive that uses the Amigo or SS-80 protocol can be directly con¬ nected (via the HP-IB or IEEE-488) and operated using drivers in the operating system. Since I don’t want to pay HP’s price for its drives, I’ve been looking for another source. Unfortunately, no one has heard of the required protocols. Do you know of a source of informa¬ tion? I’ve already tried HP and local dealers. I’ve also written to drive manu¬ facturers, to no avail. James A. Hazel Bremerton, WA A field that is evolving as rapidly as microcomputers creates its inevitable or¬ phans and unsupported, expensive, and hard-to-find products. For a number of reasons (but mostly by accident), the Seagate ST506 and ST412 hard disk drive interfaces have largely dominated, with a strong showing by the Shugart Associates system interface (SASI) and small computer system inter¬ face (SCSI). The HP-IB/IEEE-488 inter¬ face, though usable with hard disk drives, was developed to connect labora¬ tory instruments to minicomputers; it is therefore less than optimal for hard disk drive applications. The newer, simpler Seagate and SCSI drives have dominated, with run length limited (RLL) coming on fast as a variant. With this in mind, it should be no sur¬ prise to you that I haven y t been able to lo¬ cate any third-party drives that would be compatible with your system. Your choices would seem to be as follows: Go without a hard disk drive, buy HP's ver¬ sion, or get a different computer—such as a PC or PC compatible—for which bargain-priced drives are offered by dozens of suppliers. —Steve Identical Printers Dear Steve, What is the difference between Epson- and IBM-compatible printers with regard to the Centronics interface? Is this differ¬ ence a hardware- or software-dependent feature? Also, is it possible to interface an continued 38 BYTE* AUGUST 1988 ORDERING INFORMATION KNOWLEDGE g POWER We’re Programmer’s Connection, the leading independent dealer of quality programmer’s development tools for IBM personal com¬ puters and compatibles. We can give you the knowledge to help you make the best software buying decisions possible. Informative Buyers Guide. The CONNECTION, our comprehensive buyers guide and catalog, contains prices and up-to-date descriptions of over 750 programmer's development tools by over 250 manufacturers. Each description covers major product features as well as special requirements, ver¬ sion numbers, diskette sizes, guarantees, and more. In addition, the CONNECTION features interesting ar¬ ticles by leaders in the programming industry. How to Get Your FREE Copy: 1) Use the reader ser¬ vice card provided by this journal; 2) Mail us a card or letter with your name and address; or 3) Call one of our convenient toll free telephone numbers. If you haven’t yet received your copy of the Programmer’s Connection Buyer’s Guide, act now. Increasing your knowledge about these products could be one of the most powerful things you’ll ever do. USA.800-336-1166 Canada.800-225-1166 Ohio & Alaska (Collect).216-494-3781 International.216-494-3781 TELEX.9102406879 FAX. 216-494-5260 Business Hours: 8:30 AM to 8:00 PM EST Monday through Friday Prices. Terms and Conditions are subject to change. Copyright 1988 Programmer's Connection Incorporated 386 products 386 ASM/386 LINK by Phar Lap Software . 386 DEBUGGER byPtiar Lap Software . NDP C-386 byMicmWay . NDP ForTran-386 by MicroWay . PC-MOS/386 Single-User by Tbe Software lank . PC-MOS/386 5-User by Tbe Software Link . PC-MOS/386 25-User by Tbe Software Link . V M/386 bylGC . New blaise products ASYNCH MANAGER Specify C or Pascal . C TOOLS PLUS/5.0. PASCAL TOOLS/TOOLS 2. Turbo ASYNCH PLUS/4.0. Turbo C TOOLS. Turbo POWER SCREEN. Turbo POWER TOOLS PLUS/4.0. VIEW MANAGER Specify C or Pascal . borland products EUREKA Equation Solver . Paradox 2.0 by Ansa/Borland . Paradox 386 by Ansa/Borland . Paradox Network Pack by Ansa/Borland . Quattro: The Professional Spreadsheet. Sidekick Plus. Turbo Basic Compiler. Turbo Basic Support Products All Varieties . Turbo C Compiler. Turbo Pascal Compiler. Turbo Pascal Database Toolbox. Turbo Pascal Developer’s Toolkit. Turbo Pascal Editor Toolbox. Turbo Pascal Gameworks Toolbox. Turbo Pascal Graphix Toolbox. Turbo Pascal Numerical Methods Toolbox. Turbo Pascal Tutor. Turbo Prolog Compiler. New Version Turbo Prolog Toolbox. Other Borland products. c language Ctalk byCNS . Eco-C88 Modeling Compiler by Ecosoft . Lattice C Compiler from Lattice . Mark Williams Let’s C with FREE csd . Uniware 68000 C Cross Compiler bySDS . Uniware Z-80 C Cross Compiler by SDS . WATCOM C6.0 by WATCOM Group . database management Clipper by Nantucket . dBASE III Plus by Ashton-Tate . dBFast dBASE III Plus Comp by dBFast . New Vers FoxBASE+ by Fox Software . FoxBASE+/386 by Fox Software . List Ours 495 389 195 145 595 529 595 529 195 179 595 539 995 869 245 219 175 135 129 99 175 135 129 99 129 99 129 99 129 99 275 219 167 115 725 525 895 639 995 725 247 179 200 125 100 68 100 68 100 68 100 68 100 68 395 285 100 68 100 68 100 68 100 68 70 49 150 115 100 68 CALL CALL 150 129 100 69 450 289 75 54 995 899 995 899 295 269 695 379 695 439 99 89 395 249 595 399 FrontRunner by Ashton-Tate . New 195 CALL Genifer bybytel . 395 249 Tom Rettig’s Library by Tom Rettig & Assoc . 100 89 digitalk products Smalltalk/V. ioo 84 Smalltalk/V 286. 200 175 Smalltalk/V Support Utilities All Varieties . CALL CALL golden bow products Vcache. 60 55 Vfeature Hard Disk Utility . 80 74 Vfeature Deluxe Hard Disk Utility . 120 111 Vopt Hard Disk Optimization Utility . 60 55 komputerwerk products Finally BASIC routines . 99 85 Finally Modules. 99 85 Finally XGraf. 99 85 lahey computer products F77L-EM/16. 695 639 F77L-EM/32. 895 799 F77L-FORTRAN Compiler. 477 429 Lahey Personal Fortran 77. 95 85 with Toolkit . 119 99 logitech products Logitech HI REZ Mouse. New 149 119 Logitech Mouse with Plus Software. 119 98 WithLOGICADD . 189 153 With LOGICADD and LDGIPAINT . 219 179 With LOGIPAIffT . 149 119 Logitech Series 2 Mouse with Plus Software. 99 79 Other Logitech Products. CALL CALL microsoft products Microsoft BASIC Compiler. New Version 295 219 Microsoft C Compiler 5 w/CodeView . 450 299 Microsoft COBOL Compiler with COBOL Tools . 700 465 Microsoft FORTRAN Optimizing Comp . 450 299 Microsoft Macro Assembler. 150 105 Microsoft Mouse AJI Varieties . CALL CALL Microsoft OS/2 Programmer's Toolkit. 350 239 Microsoft Pascal Compiler. 300 199 Microsoft QuickBASIC 4. 99 69 Microsoft QuickC. 99 69 Microsoft Windows. 99 69 Microsoft Windows 386. 195 129 Microsoft Windows Development Kit. 500 329 Other Microsoft products. CALL CALL persoft products SmariMOVE. New 149 135 SmarTERM 220. New 195 179 SmarTERM 240. New 345 309 CALL for Products Not Listed Here FREE SHIPPING. Orders within the USA (including Alaska & Hawaii) are shipped FREE via UPS. Call for APO, FPO, PAL, and express shipping rates. NO CREDIT CARD CHARGE. VISA, MasterCard and Discover Card are accepted at no extra cost. Your card is charged when your order is shipped. Mail orders please include expiration date and authorized signature. NO COD OR PO FEE. 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International orders (except Canada), please include an additional $20 for export preparation. All payments must be made with US funds drawn on a US bank. Please include your telephone num¬ ber when ordering by mail. Due to government regulations, we cannot ship to all countries. MAIL ORDERS. Please include your telephone number on all mail orders. Be sure to specify com¬ puter, operating system, diskette size, and any ap¬ plicable compiler or hardware interface(s). Send mail orders to: Programmer’s Connection Order Processing Department 7249 Whipple Ave NW North Canton, OH 44720 periscope products Periscope I with Board . 455 369 Periscope 11 with NMI Breakout Switch . 175 139 Periscope ll-X Software only . 145 105 Periscope III 10 MHz version . 1395 1119 peter norton products Advanced Norton Utilities. 150 89 Norton Commander. 75 55 Norton Editor. 75 59 Norton Guides Specify Language . 100 65 For OS/2 . 150 109 Norton Utilities. ICO 59 txm products DATABACK. New 70 67 MACK DOS. New 60 58 Turbo G GRAPHICS Development Library. New 80 75 with Source Code . New 150 135 other products Actor by The Whitewater Group . 495 439 APL*PLUS PC bySTSC . 695 529 Brief by Solution Systems . 195 CALL Dan Bricklin’s Demo II by Software Garden . 195 179 Desqview fmm Quarterdeck . 130 115 Desqview API Products All Varieties . New CALL CALL EXTEND FORT 77 Extens by Design Decisions . New 149 129 Flow Charting 11+ by Patton & Patton . 229 189 G RASP by Paul Mace Software . 99 85 HALO M by Media Cybernetics . 325 CALL Instant Replay III by Nostradamus . 150 129 Mace Utilities by Paul Mace Software . 99 85 MathCAD byMathSoft . 349 319 Microcompatibles Products All Varieties . CALL CALL Microport Products All Varieties . CALL CALL MICROSTAT-II Statistics Pack by Ecosoft . New 395 359 Opt-Tech Sort/;/ Opl-TechDataProc . 149 99 Peabody by Copia Inti, Specify Language . 100 89 PC Tools Deluxe by CenteralPoint Soft . New 79 69 PMI Products All Varieties . CALL CALL Quinn-Curtis Products All Vaneties . CALL CALL STATGRAPHICS bySTSC . 895 699 TLIB Version Control by Burton Systems Software . 100 89 5 Station LAN . New 300 269 TurboGeometry Library by Disk Software . 100 89 XENIX System V All Varieties by SCO . CALL CALL Circle 182 on Reader Service Card AUGUST 1988 -BYTE 39 Circle 107 on Reader Service Card Integrand’s new Chassis/System is not another IBM mechanical and electrical clone. An entirely fresh packaging design approach has been taken using modular construction. At present, over 40 optional stock modules allow you to customize our standard chassis to nearly any requirement. Integrand offers high quality, advanced design hardware along with applications and technical support all at prices competitive with imports. Why settle for less? Rack & Desk PC/AT Chassis F Rack & Desk Models Accepts PC, XT, A T Motherboards and Passive Backplanes _ Doesn V Look Like IBM _ Rugged, Modular Construction _ Excellent Air Flow & Cooling _ Optional Card Cage Fan _ Designed to meet FCC _ 204 Watt Supply, UL Recognized 145 W & 85W also available Reasonably Priced Call or write for descriptive brochure and prices: 8620 Roosevelt Ave. • Visalia, CA 93291 209/651-1203 TELEX 5106012830 (INTEGRAND UD) EZLINK 62926572 We accept BankAmericard/VISA and MasterCard IBM, PC. XT. AT trademarks of International Business Machines. Drives and computer boards not included. 40 BYTE* AUGUST 1988 ASK BYTE Epson-compatible printer with an IBM PC? If so, how is this done? Finally, I’d like to know the intrica¬ cies involved if you use a serial interface (RS-232C) for the printer. V. Shyamasunder Bangalore, India The hardware for an Epson interface is identical to an IBM-compatible printer interface. This interface was originated by Centronics. The commonly used sig¬ nals include 8 data bits, an active-low data-available strobe, an active-low ac¬ knowledge strobe, an active-high level busy signal, and ground signals. The dif¬ ference between the two types of printers lies in the graphics mode each supports; the graphics mode is controlled by the computer via the high bit of data sent to the printer. In graphics mode—high bit set—an IBM-compatible printer will reproduce the high-ASCII screen graphics character of the IBM PC family; a non-IBM-com- patible Epson will produce different characters. In text mode, high bit clear, the two printers will produce the same output. You can use an Epson-compatible printer with an IBM-type computer, if the IBM graphics characters are not re¬ quired, simply by connecting the com¬ puter and printer with a cable that has suitable connectors at the ends, typically either a 36-pin Amphenol-type connector or a DB-25 connector. You can use a serial printer with an IBM-type computer via a COM port and a suitable cable—usually with a DB-25 connector on the printer end and a DB-9 or DB-25 connector at the computer end. Since many serial printers follow DTE (data terminal equipment) protocol rather than DCE (data communications equipment), you'll need a null modem adapter or cable for successful opera¬ tion. These adapters interchange the data and handshaking lines. While it's easy for experienced users to construct cables and adapters for serial interfacing, it is frequently frustrating and time-consum¬ ing for novices. Sources such as Jameco Electronics and JDR Microdevices (both advertise in BYTE) carry ready-made cables and adapters that will prevent or eliminate most problems. —Steve Polylingual Clone Dear Steve, I’m interested in buying an IBM AT clone. However, I need the system to op¬ erate in English and Japanese (my key¬ board has four character types: English, kanji, katakana, and hiragana). In Japa¬ nese mode, I need to be able to select the character I need from a shift/function key and have this character displayed on the CRT or printer. Many printers can print in different languages (e.g., the Epson can print in German and French), but Epson USA couldn’t help me. I need this system to operate as a regular computer or word processor. M. J. Cavanaugh Steger, IL A PC clone that writes in English and three different Japanese character sets sounds like a tough item to find in the U.S. market. The old Epson MX-80 printers sold in the U.S. a few years ago did include a katakana character set, but I haven V seen any other printers with this feature. You may be able to use Microsoft Win¬ dows if you can get a copy of the Japanese version. Microsoft Systems Journal (March 1988) contains an article on im¬ plementing Windows for Japanese com¬ puters. The article vaguely implies that a Japanese version of the PC AT or clone is required. It is not necessary for the printer to have the Japanese characters, however, because Windows uses its own fonts and prints in graphics mode when you use a dot-matrix printer. You may be able to find out if this ap¬ proach is feasible by calling Microsoft at (800) 426-9400. -Steve Computerized Slide Show Dear Steve, I am attempting to store some docu¬ ments that are four to eight pages long on my IBM PC. The documents contain mostly text, but some have line drawings, graphs, and maps. I’d like to retrieve these documents and display them on the screen with as little extraneous display as possible. Most word processors and desktop publishing software display more than the document on the screen. What options do I have for storing and displaying documents in this manner? I’m using an IBM PC AT with an EGA card. Doyle L. Jones Clinton, MS If I understand correctly, you want to display documents page by page on your PC, but not necessarily for editing. In other words, you want a slide show. There are a few programs that are de¬ signed especially for this kind of task. Two are Show Partner and Show Partner Professional by Brightbill-Roberts & Co., 120 East Washington St., Suite 421, continued Circle 185 on Reader Service Card —► And so can'you The National Aeronautics and Space Administration is a regular Proteus buyer. So are thousands of profession¬ als/ as well as small and large businesses nationwide. Including Xerox, GE, Dupont, the U.S. Government, MIT and Harvard. And with good reason: Nationally Acclaimed Performance And Support. "The Proteus is one of the fastest desk¬ top computers we tested. Quality has not been compromised , yet this perfonnance sys¬ tem par excellence ms info priced so low." Dec., 1987 worLd "The Proteus 386116MHz is markedly faster than any other PC we've worked with-including the Compaq _, Deskpro 386/20!" jan., i9ss Compatibility Guaranteed! The Most Extraordinary Supp ort In The I ndustry. We don't leave you out in orbit after we make the sale, either. Proteus has a contract with a nation¬ wide computer maintenance company. If something should go wrong with your Proteus system during the first 15 months, we'll send a qualified techni¬ cian to your site to fix it. Free! Just call our toll-free technical support hotline any time you have a question or need help. We'll take care of the rest. Proteus 386A opt. 20MHz "A 16MHz, zero wait state hot rod'!" "Among the top 100 products of the year!' MONOCHROME SYSTEM WITH A 40MB, 28MS HARD DISK ‘2908 EGA COLOR SYSTEM WITH A 40MB, 28MS HARD DISK VGA SYSTEM (800x600) WITH A 40MB, 28MS HARD DISK ‘3329 Proteus Every Proteus is American made from the ground up. And guaranteed compatible with all IBM PC/AT software and add-on prod¬ ucts. As well as with DOS, OS/2, UNIX, XENIX, NOVELL and all major CAD sys¬ tems. None is alien to Proteus! Satisfaction Guaranteed. If you're not fully satisfied with your Proteus purchase, re¬ turn it during the first 30 days for a full refund. Standard Features\ 386A y CACHE \\ \ 386 \ 286 \\ GTX \ \ 286E INTEL CPU 80386 80386 80286 80286 SPEED MHZ 20/16/6 20/16/6 12/0 8/6 WAIT STATE ZERO ZERO ZERO | SYSTEM MEMORY 1024Ktol6MB ~ l024Kto!6MB 640Kto 16MB 640K to 16MB CACHE MEMORY SIZE 64KB 64KB 32KB _ KBD. SELECTABLE SPEEDS YES YES YES YES COPROCESSORSUPPORT 80287/387 80387 80287 80287 32-BITSLOTS | 1 - _ 16-BITSLOTS 6 4 6 6 8BITSLOT5 2 1 2 2 SERIAL PORTS 2 2 2 2 PARALLEL PORT 1 1 1 1 HARD DISK/FD. CTLR. YES | YES YES YES 1.2MB 5'A” OR 1.44MB 3.5” FD. YES YES YES YES ROM BASED SETUP/DIAGNOSTICS YES YES YES YES POWERSUPPLY 200W 200W 200W 200W ENHANCED 101-KEY KBD. YES YES YES YES > lm can keep its PC/AT and PS/2 com¬ puters; I'll take the Proteus 286GTX before those any time. I never want to be without it „ again!" Ernest Mau, Editor "Fastest machine in the comparison. A superb value" ON LINE TODAY INFO WORLD SEAGATE, MINISCRJBE, MAXTOR HARD DISKS FROM $279. VGA/EGA ADAPTORS: VIDEO 7, SIGMA, ATI, EVEREX FROM $149. MEMORY UPGRADES, COPROCESSORS, MODEMS AT LOW PRICES. Custom Configured With Tom orrow s Tec hnology. Proteus computers were custom con¬ figured to meet NASA's specs. And whether you need only one system or a hundred, we'll custom config¬ ure to your exact specifications, too. From a long list of third party, brand name components. Including 3.5' microfloppy drives, high-speed 1:1 interleave controllers with ESDI and SCSI hard disks and 800x600/640x480 resolution VGA graphics. IN N|: 201 288-8629 Fortech support I -800-541 -8933 MONOCHROME SYSTEM WITH A 40MB HARD DISK. ‘1995 EGA COLOR SYSTEM WITH A 40MB HARD DISK. ‘2495 VGA SYSTEM (800x600) WITH A 40MB HARD DISK. ‘2795 Proteus 286E "The Proteus 286E is the clear winner. We recommend it." world MONOCHROME SYSTEM WITH A 20MB HARD DISK. ‘1612 EGA COLOR SYSTEM WITH A 20MB HARD DISK. ‘2095 Order By Phone. Its Easy. You don't even have to leave your desk to order a Proteus system. Or systems. Just call us direct. The exact configuration you want will quickly land on your doorstep. All you nave to do is plug it in, turn it on and blast off into tne wild, blue yonder! 1 - 800 - 782-8387 The INTCLUGENT CONCLUSION! 377 Rt. 17 So, Airport 17 Ctr, Hasbrouck Hts, NJ 07604 • Telex 510-610-0960 • FAX 201-288-9518 Electronic catalog and 24-hour tech support: set your modem to 1200B/1/8/N dial 201-288-8577 VAR/Reseller/volume discounts available. Payment methods: credit card, COD, company POs SOFTWARE DATA BASE MANAGEMENT Clipper.$ 368 dBase III Plus. 369 dBase III LAN. 599 DB-XL Diamond . 105 Eureka . 88 Genifer. 188 Nutshell. 72 Paradox 2.0. 415 PFS: Professional File. 119 Q & A. 185 Quickcode Plus. 129 Rapid File. 179 Revelation. 459 Revelation Bump Disk. 239 R:Base Clout (New Ver.). 175 R:Base For DOS. 425 Reflex. 78 VP Expert.Call VP Info. 56 PROJECT MANAGEMENT Harvard Total Project Mgr. II . . $ 309 Microsoft Project 4.0 Timeline 2.0. WORD PROCESSORS Easy Extra.$ Word (Microsoft). Multimate Advantage II . . , PFS: Professional Write . , Volkswriter 3.. Volkswriter Deluxe Plus . Webster New World Writer Webster Spell Checker. . Webster Thesaurus.... Word Perfect. Word Perfect Executive. . Word Perfect Library . . . Wordstar Pro Pack 4.0 . . Wordstar 2000 Plus Personal DESKTOP PUBLISHING Newsmaster II .$ 39 Pagemaker. Call PFS: First Publisher. 65 Ventura Publishing. 475 GRAPHICS Energraphics.$186 Freelance Plus. 309 Generic CAD w/Dot Plot 3.0 .. . 72 Harvard Graphics 2.1. 239 In-A-Vision Microsoft Chart 3.0. 229 News Room. 30 News Room Professional. 42 Printmaster Plus. 29 PrintShop. 32 Turbo Graphix Tool Box. 58 VPGraphix. 56 Windows Draw!! w/Clip Art ... . 159 MICE PC Mouse w/Paint (Buss or Serial). 85 PC Mouse w/Autosketch (Buss or Serial) Microsoft Buss Mouse 1.0 . Microsoft Serial Mouse 1.0 . MS Buss Mouse w/CADD . MS Serial Mouse w/CADD . MS Buss Mouse w/Windows MS Serial Mouse w/Windows Optimouse (PC Mouse) w/Dr. Halo III . . . 78 INTEGRATIVE SOFTWARE $ 137 . 352 . 349 . 113 . 76 Best Price 435 Ability Plus . . . Enable 2.0 . . . Framework II . . MS Works.... PFS: 1st Choice Smart Software System Symphony . ACCOUNTING ACCPAC . Computer Associates. . . DAC Easy Accounting . . DAC Easy Payroll .... In-House Accountant . . One Write Plus 2.0 ... One Write A/R, A/P, Payroll Time Slips III MONEY MANAGEMENT Dollars & Sense w/Forcast .... $ 92 Tobias Managing Your Money 4.0. 114 UTILITIES 1 DIR Plus.$ 46 Bookmark. 56 Brooklyn Bridge. 69 Carousel 2.0. 38 Copy II PC. 18 Copywrite. 39 Corefast. 89 Cruise Control . 29 Cubit. Call Disk Optimizer 2.0.Call Disk Technician. 56 Double DOS 4.0.Call DS Back-Up Plus. 46 Fastback. 75 Fastback Plus. 86 Keyworks Mace Utilities Microsoft Windows 2.03 Norton Commander. Norton Editor Norton Utilities 4.0 Note It Plus PC Tools Deluxe. 36 Printworks for Lasers. 67 Referee . . . Sidekick Plus Sideways . . Smart Notes SQZ Plus . . Superkey . . Take Two MGR. Turbo Editor Tool Box. Unlock AT. Unlock D Plus . XTree Professional. COMMUNICATIONS Carbon Copy Plus. $ 105 CompuServe Subscription Kit . . 19 Crosstalk XVI. . 87 Crosstalk Mark IV. . 109 Mirror II. . 33 Remote. . 87 Smartcom III. . 136 ACCESSORIES Copy II Option Board Deluxe . . . $ 99 Masterpiece . . 79 Masterpiece Plus . . 92 Masterpiece Remote. . 107 $ 175 259 415 259 209 86 175 57 57 VISA MEMBER MMC MICROCOMPUTER MARKETING COUNCIL of the Direct Marketing Association Inc. No Charge for VISA and Mastercard We Do Not Charge Your Card Until Your Order is Shipped You Pay the Ground Shipping $6.00 (except Alaksa and Hawaii) We Pay the Air Difference Free Air applies ONLY to orders up to 10 lbs. & Over $50. Add 5% for C.O.D. Orders LANGUAGES Basic Compiler (Microsoft) . . C Complier (Microsoft) .... Cobol Compiler (Microsoft) . . Fortran Compiler (Microsoft) 4.0 Lattice C Compiler. Macro Assembler (Microsoft). Pascal Compiler (Microsoft) . Quick Basic 4.0. QuickC. Ryan McFarlan Fortran. 379 Ryan McFarlan Cobol . 609 Turbo Basic. 58 Turbo C. 58 Turbo Pascal 4.0. 58 Turbo Prolog. 58 Turbo Prolog Toolbox . . , TRAINING Chuck Yeager Adv. Flight Simulator Lets C Mastertype Mavis Beacon Typing MS Learning DOS MS Flight Simulator PC Logo . Turbo Tutor 4.0 . . Typing Instructor II Typing Tutor IV . . SPREADSHEETS Cambridge Analyst . 4 Word. HAL. Lotus 1-2-3 Ver. 2.01 Lotus Manuscript . . Lotus Report Writer. MS Excel. Multiplan 3.0 (Microsoft) PFS Professional Plan Quattro. Supercalc 4 . . . Twin Classic . . VP Planner . . . VP Planner Plus All products carry only manufacturer’s warranties. We do not honor guarantees, rebates, trial period priviledges or promotional programs offered by manuafactures. No APO, FPO, or international orders, please. Call before submitting P.O.’s Ask for National Accounts Personal and Company Checks Will Delay Shipping 3 weeks Prices, Terms & Availability Subject to Change Without Notice HARDWARE DISK DRIVES Bernoulli Box 10 Meg.$ 889 20 Meg. 1015 40 Meg. 1559 Beta Ext. 1015 Beta Int. 775 PC2 Card. 139 Seagate 20 MG w/WD Controller .... 275 251-1 . 469 AT 40 MEG Full Height ... 550 Other Models.Call Teac 1.2 MEG AT. 89 Floppy F55 BR. 79 Toshiba 3.5 Dr 720K . 95 3.5 Dr 1.4MB. 115 DISKETTES Maxell MD-2 Qty. 100.Call Maxell MD-2HD Qty. 100.Call Sony 5V4 Qty 100.$ 65 Sony 3 V 2 Qty. 100. 159 MODEMS Hayes 1200 .$ 280 1200B . 245 2400B . 385 Prometheus 1200B w/Software. 75 2400B w/Software. 119 Other Models.Call US Robotics Password 1200 . 175 Courier 2400 . 289 Courier 2400E. 335 KEYBOARDS Keytronics KB5151.$ 119 KB5153 . 149 KB101 . 79 To Place an Order: 1-800-528-1054 • Order Processing (602) 944-1037 To Follow Up on an Order: (602) 944-2552 1 0:00 a.m-3:00 p.m. Mon.-Fri. Order Line Hours: Monday-Friday 7:00 a.m.-6:00 p.m. Saturday 9:00 a.m.-1:00 p.m • We Do Not Guarantee Machine Compatibility Mailing Address: 8804 N. 23rd Avenue / Phoenix, Arizona 85021 ATI EGA Wonder. 175 VIP Plus. 265 Hercules Color Card. 145 Graphics Card Plus. 175 Incolor. 209 Intel Inboard 386 PC . 719 Inboard 386 w/cable. 979 4020 . 375 80287-6 . 175 Orchid Designer EGA. 299 VGA . 220 Paradise Autoswitch 350 . 130 VGA +. 239 VGA Professional . 355 Video-7 VGA . . . . . 269 Vega Deluxe. . . . . 180 V-RAM. . 475 TERMINALS Wyse 30 . 285 50 . 369 85 . 439 HARD CARDS Plus 20 MG.$ 525 Plus 40 MG. 659 COMPUTERS AST Model 80.$1695 Model 140X . 2609 Model 140 . 2815 Model 340 . 4205 Model 390 . 5839 Other Models. Call f ivfi i ORDER LINE 1 - 800 - 528-1054 Citizen Printers 120D .... 180D MSP 40 MSP 45 MSP 50 MSP 55 Premier 35 . Diconix 150 . 300 . Epson Printers. . . Hewlett-Packard Disk Jet . Lazer Jet Series II NEC P2200 . 850 Silent Writer Other Models. Okidata. 182+. 192+. 292 . 294 . Panasonic 1080 I M2 . 1091 I M2 . 1092 I. 1524 . 1592 . 1595 . 3131 . 3151 . Lazer 4450 . . . Star Micronics . . Toshiba 321 SL. 341 SL ‘ 351 SX . . Page Lazer . Call $4310 . Call 139 189 319 465 399 529 509 309 480 . Call 779 1775 329 1539 Call Call 209 325 355 715 165 199 325 560 409 469 305 475 1635 Call 489 655 945 2415 BOARDS AST HotShot. Six Pack Plus (256K) . . Xformer . . 3G+ .... Other Models $ 355 195 . 560 , 219 . Call NEC Multispeed EL II Powermate . . . 1495 Call Toshiba T-1000 . T-1200F T-1200FH 1200FB . T-3120 . T-3200 . T-5100 . 749 . 1565 . 2285 . 2415 . 3068 . . 3789 Wyse 386 . MONITORS Amdek Monitors. NEC Multisync II. Monographic System Other Models.... $ 589 1299 . Call Princeton Ultrasync . Samsung. Sony Multiscan (1303) Mitsubishi Diamond Scan . . . Zenith 1490. mmm PRINTERS Alps All models. AST Turbo Lazer. C.ITOH. ASK BYTE Syracuse, NY 13202, (315)474-3400. Another is EGA Paint with EGA Slide by RIX Softworks, Inc., 18552 MacAr¬ thur Blvd., Suite 375, Irvine, CA 92715, (714) 476-8266. These products are widely available from mail-order suppliers or in computer stores.— Steve Communication Problems Dear Steve, I recently purchased a Macintosh SE, and I was under the assumption that such a sophisticated machine would hook up to my printer, a Toshiba P1340.1 also as¬ sumed that any software—such as Micro¬ soft Works and Lotus’s Jazz—would also operate with the printer. No such luck. Although I have just begun searching, I have had equally poor luck in unearthing any information that will help me solve the problem. My Toshiba is a good product, and I’d like to continue to use it with the Mac. I have an Apple lie and have had no prob¬ lems with any of the printers I have used with it. I can’t understand why a superior machine would present such a frustrating limitation. I do have an Orange Micro C/Mac/GS linked between my Panasonic 1091 and the Mac. However, printing is so slow that I could write the documents by hand faster. I don’t consider this a realistic solution. I’d appreciate any suggestions. David T. Bar rat Acton, MA The success of the Macintosh com¬ puter, after an under-powered beginning, has been one of the more interesting phe¬ nomena of the post-1985 computer scene (parallel with, and quite distinct from, the overwhelming continued dominance of the IBM line and its clones). Perhaps the most distinctive characteristic of the Mac is its penchant for doing nearly everything in a non-IBM way. What works with IBM won’t work with the Mac, and vice versa. The individuality, though perhaps somewhat interesting, creates problems that aren't easily solved. Attempting to use the Mac with other than its own spe¬ cially designed printers graphically illus¬ trates some of those problems. Your desire to use your Toshiba printer with the Macintosh is understandable, but it may not be possible. The Macintosh uses software drivers to communicate with devices like printers; these drivers can be found in the system folder. Apple Computer supplies drivers only for its Imagewriter and LaserWriter printers. To use a different printer, the appropriate driver must be installed in the system folder of the Macintosh. So far as I can determine, there is no driver available for your Toshiba printer. Unless you create your own driver (a nontrivial task), or one becomes available from another source, your Mac and Toshiba won’t sing the same song or speak the same lan¬ guage. —Steve Joyless Joystick Dear Steve, I’m trying to interface an external de¬ vice to my Amiga 500 through the second joystick port. I have experimented and read a few books on the Amiga, but I can’t find any way of doing output through the port. I’ve experimented with pokes and peeks, and I’ve found that I can input information through the port with the following code: LOOP: PRINTPEEKW( 14614540) POKEW 14614582,0 GOTO LOOP Could you show me how to do output through the port or refer me to some source? Virender Dayal Hoboken, NJ 1 understand your desire to use an un¬ used joystick port on your Amiga for out¬ put. Tinkering with hardware and explor¬ ing new applications is one of the true joys of computing. Your desire to get out¬ put, however, isn’t practical. There are essentially two kinds of con¬ nections to electronic circuits: inputs and outputs. Except in the case of specialized devices, like transceivers and analog switches, the two functions aren V inter¬ changeable. The Amiga 500's joystick port is for input only, and there is no way—short of redesigning, cutting, sol¬ dering, and praying—that you can change this. —Steve Do-It-Yourself CAD/CAM Dear Steve, I am an amateur engineer and designer with some professional experience in FORTRAN programming. I’m inter¬ ested in knowing if I could construct a 1- megabyte computer that would have the capability for CAD/CAM operations and FORTRAN programming. I don’t think I would need BASIC for my application. My goal is to use CAD/CAM software to construct an item on the monitor, then cut the item in selected locations and use FORTRAN to make an engineering strength analysis. I could then redesign as necessary without removing the item from memory or even from the screen. I see various companies that sell com¬ puter components. Can I buy a keyboard, motherboard, monitor, and other com¬ ponents to put together a system to help me with my engineering? I don’t need the extra space and chips that I guess are needed for BASIC or, say, Symphony—I would use those resources for CAD/ CAM and FORTRAN. Joseph Weiss Jr. South Hutchinson, KS While I think you could construct a computer along the lines that you de¬ scribe, I think it would be far more prac¬ tical to purchase a standard one. There are a few things you haven't considered that make the decision fairly simple. It turns out that all computers are pretty much the same under the hood, so any machine that can run FORTRAN or CAD/CAM programs will also run BASIC and other languages. You don't need additional hardware gizmos for those other programs; as far as the com¬ puter is concerned, they're all just programs. By the same token, Symphony and all the other programs will run on the same IBM PC clone that will handle FOR¬ TRAN or AutoCAD, simply because they're programs written to use that hardware. In fact, you 'll find that the CAD programs tend to have more strin¬ gent hardware requirements, because they need high-resolution displays, plot¬ ters, printers, digitizing tablets, and mice to handle complex graphic I/O. If you 're interested in CAD work, plan to buy at least an IBM PC AT clone with a 40-megabyte hard disk drive, a VGA- compatible monitor, and a mouse. That's the minimum hardware for reasonable performance. Hard copy output can go to either a laser printer or a plotter; the for¬ mer can handle word processing with ease. But the tab will run about $5000for all that hardware, and you won't realize significant savings by assembling parts from several vendors. —Steve Sounds in the Silence Dear Steve, I want to communicate by telephone with my cousin, who is hearing im¬ paired. I’d like to be able to use my com¬ puter and a modem, but my cousin has only teletypewriter (TTY) equipment, and I understand that there is no modem that can connect to a TTY. The president of the Maryland State Society for the Hearing Impaired tells continued 44 BYTE* AUGUST 1988 Tallgrass makes internal and external tape backup systems for the IBM PC/XT/AT, PS/2 or compatibles, and an external unit for your Mac gggggssgg gnifi ' ’ VT Plus, SE or II. We’ve got a whole new family of tape backup systems. Whether you’ve got an IBM, a compat¬ ible, or a Macintosh, you can count on Thllgrass. We back you with all the storage capacity you could ask for, plus all the features, all the support, and all the speed you’ll ever need. And we make it easy to protect your valuable data. Since all operations are automatic and unattended, you can just set it, and forget it. Best of all, we stand behind our products with the industry's only 3-year warranty. But there’s one other reason why so many more people are asking for Thllgrass. It’s because the competition is asking so much more for their products. Let Tallgrass start backing you up. Call 1-800-TAL-GRAS. Or write to: Tbllgrass Technologies, Inc. 11100 West 82nd St. Overland Park, KS 66214 ■ TALLGRASS TECHNOLOGIES When it's worth saving, it's worth Tallgrass AUGUST 1988 ‘BYTE 45 1986 Tallgrass Technologies. Inc ’IBM’’ is a registered trademark ol International Business Machines, Inc. "Macintosh’' and "Mac Plus” are trademarks ol Apple Computer, Inc. Circle 234 on Reader Service Card (DEALERS: 235) ASK BYTE Save Hundreds of Dollars When You Re-Ink Costly Printer Ribbons Now you can re-ink fabric ribbons again and again—for just pennies each time! So, don’t throw away expensive ribbons—re-ink them and save, save, save. Bede Tech Ribbon Inker comes with FREE 4-oz. bottle of black ink (lasts 50-100 re-inkings), FREE ink roller and FREE roller cover. 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EZ GLIDER MOUSE PAD $11.95 STANDARD MOUSE PAD (royal blue) $5.95 FREE Illustrated Catalog With Many More Items • 24 Hour Shipment • 30 Day Money-Back Guarantee • We Don’t Bill You Until We Ship To You CALL 24 © HOURS TO ' ORDER r _ i __ IN OHIO 216-631-4214 • FAX 216-631-1452 Division, Bede Industries, Inc. • Established 1976 • 8327 Clinton Rd. . Cleveland, OH 44144 ImageWriter is a trademark of Apple Computers, Inc. _ BY8 800 - 772-4536 me that the Bell Telephone System has a very expensive converter that will allow modems and TTYs to connect. He tells me further that the deaf community uses machines that are based on the TTY code because (a) such machines are readily and economically available, and (b) most of the members of the deaf community cannot afford the Bell System converter. I think you can make an enormous contribution to the many people who are hearing impaired and to the microcom¬ puter community as well. If such a con¬ verter exists, surely you can design equipment that will serve the same func¬ tion and that can be made from economi¬ cal and readily available parts. George Allison Essex, MD Eve received many useful suggestions for Circuit Cellar projects from readers such as yourself I will seriously consider your suggestions concerning modem/TTY compatibility. There are definitely some possibilities that deserve consideration and explora¬ tion. The microcomputer world is fre¬ quently afflicted with incompatibilities, and the differences between current microcomputer modems and the older TTY-based equipment illustrate the situ¬ ation nicely. While there are viable markets for var¬ ious computer modems and TTY equip¬ ment, there is a much smaller market for protocol converters for the two communi¬ cations methods. The small size of the market limits the amount of development you can accomplish without going broke. As you said, there seems to be no gen¬ eral-purpose equipment on the market, other than the expensive converters sold by the phone company, that permits com¬ munication between a typical microcom¬ puter and a TTY unit used by hearing- impaired individuals. Modifying existing commercial equipment is usually imprac¬ tical unless the TTY capability has been designed into it from the beginning. At one time Novation made an internal modem called the Apple Cat for Apple II series computers. After a simple factory hardware modification, you could use it with special software (available on disk from Novation) to work with the 45.5- bit-per-second, Baudot-coded (5-bit) protocol used by TTY. However, Nova¬ tion no longer makes it. Texas Instru¬ ments also has a software package avail¬ able for the TI Professional that lets that computer emulate a TTY terminal, but it works in conjunction with unique TI hardware and thus has little generality. —Steve ■ 46 BYTE* AUGUST 1988 Circle 24 on Reader Service Card COMPLETE 12 MHz ZERO-WAIT 286 SYSTEM WITH 32MB HARD DRIVE! Can you believe it? Yes you can! 32 MB hard drive. 12 MHz ZERO Wait State. Fully AT compatible. Our complete ’286 system ready to plug in and fly right out of the box! At the amazing price of only $1,295! How is it possible? By buying direct from the manufac¬ turer that’s how. ZEOS International offers you the finest, best-backed fully AT compatible systems available... at factory direct prices. We think you’ll agree, this is the very best value you’ll find anywhere. ZEOS® Customer Assurance Program Compare not only our features but the ZEOS® Customer Assurance Pro¬ gram as well: 1. 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COD ORDER NOW TOLL FREE 800 - 423-5891 INTERNATIONAL, LTD 530 5th Avenue NW, Suite 1000 St. Paul, MN 55112 AUGUST 1988 -BYTE 47 Circle 256 on Reader Service Card ¥>u Can Never Be Too Powerful OrTooThin. As portable PCs go, ours may look a bit on the skinny side. But they’re by no means undernourished. After all, each 286 and 386 powered Toshiba portable has an easy-to-read gas plasma screen. Each is IBM-compatible. And each gives you a wide range of features you’d expect only from a desktop PC. The T3100/20, for example, weighs a scant 15 pounds, yet has an abundance of power. It comes with an 80286 micro¬ processor and 640KB of RAM that’s ex¬ tendable to 2.6MB. Plus, there’s a built-in 20MB hard disk. OurT3200 has the advantages of a 12MHz 80286 microprocessor, an EGA display system, a 40MB hard disk and 1MB of RAM expandable to 4MB. Also, its two IBM-compatible internal expansion slots let you connect your PC to mainframes, LANs and more. But what’s even more im¬ pressive is how we managed to fit all this into a slim, 19-pound package. Then there’s our T5100. As amazing as it seems, we managed to squeeze a 16MHz 80386 microprocessor into a slim package that weighs less than 15 pounds. To that we added an EGA display system and a 29 msec 40MB hard disk. As your thirst for power grows, its 2MB RAM can be up¬ graded to 4MB. And for a limited time, your T5100 purchase entitles you to buy the powerful Paradox 386® database software for only $299 (nearly $600 off the retail price). For more information on Toshiba com¬ puters and printers, call 1-800-457-7777. And rest assured that whichever Toshiba PC you choose, you’ll be getting the kind of power once reserved for cumbersome desktop computers. All of which proves you can maintain a position of great power without having to throw a lot of weight around. Toshiba PCs are backed by the Exceptional Care program (no-cost enrollment required). See your dealer for details. IBM is a registered trademark of International Business Machines Corp. Paradox is a registered trademark of Borland Corp. In Touch with Tomorrow TOSHIBA Toshiba America Inc., Information Systems Division Circle 240 on Reader Service Card (DEALERS: 241) AUGUST 1988 • BYTE 49 ComputerExpo TEXAS # 1 IBM® COMPATIBLE COMPUTER CENTER EXPO 286 40 MB SYSTEM *1497 10 MHZ 0 WAIT • 80286 CPU FCC 12 MHZ THRUPUT APPROVED . 512K (640K—Add $75.00) • 1.2 MB FLOPPY DRIVE • 40 MB SEAGATE HARD DRIVE . 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Printout • Support Desktop Publishing NOVELL NETWORK WE SERVICE/REPAIR GUARANTEED QUALITY SERVICE SS' rsmcD/nom # at&t IRWIN TAPE BACK UP Circle 54 on Reader Service Card WD STARCARIj ARCNET, PC SLAVE On Site Installation Available. 4 user 8 user 12 user AUTHORIZED DEALER. Come See Our Demo 10 MB XT/86 Model 110D. 40 MB/286/386 Model 1450 . 60 MB 286/386 Model 165D. INQUIRY LINE 713 784-0990 TECH-SERVICE 784-7817 HRS: M-F 8-6 SAT. 10-3 SUNDAY CLOSED TOLL FREE ORDER ONLY 1-800-622-EXPO Book Reviews The Armchair Universe by A. K. Dewdney W. H. Freeman & Co., New York: 1988, 330pages, $19.95 cloth, $13.95paper Reviewed by Hugh Kenner F or nearly two years, a Turbo Pascal program I play with on my Zenith Z-100 has been accumulating short¬ cuts and speedups. It exam¬ ines areas near the border of the famous Mandelbrot set and represents their detail with colored patterns. It began as a direct translation into Pascal of a program that, being in in¬ terpreted BASIC, was far too slow. The author of the BASIC program had been guided by a short algorithm in the August 1985 Scientific American. My copy of that issue was long ago swiped by someone, and the li¬ brary copy I recently con¬ sulted had lost the article to a vandal’s scissors. I was pleased to find it reprinted in this first collection of A. K. Dewdney ’ s Computer Recrea¬ tions columns. I suspect that’s not an un¬ common scenario. Dewdney is very likely responsible for more filched and mutilated copies of Scientific American than any other current author. He has also prompted, world¬ wide, uncountable hours of coding time. That’s because he doesn’t list programs; he states some interesting theme and shows you how to think about implementing it. At the back of The Armchair Uni¬ verse is a list of suppliers, and Dewdney’s tone dissuades you from even thinking about buy¬ ing such canned software—an altruistic act, given that Dewdney himself might be one of the suppliers. He’d like us all to get our feet wet and our minds stretched by learn¬ ing to program (i.e., think se¬ quentially). He wants us to shed the chains of “software slavery,” a state “inadvertent¬ ly encouraged” by packagers. This collection has some¬ thing for almost everyone. If, like me, you’re challenged by graphics, there are chapters entitled “The Mandelbrot Set” and “Wallpaper for the Mind.” Higher Math? Try “Golomb Rulers” or “Hyper¬ cubes.” Artificial Intelli¬ gence? Try “RACTER,” “Facebender,” “Checkers,” more. Life? Puzzles? Simula¬ tions? They’re all here. And if your fantasies run to aliens snuffing out benign systems, three pieces on “Core Wars” deal with plagues that propa¬ gate through memory, zap¬ ping anything they find except themselves. Good Medicine for Pros The great merit of Dewdney’s approach is his patient, genial concentration on how to define a project and relax and think about it. His book might even be good medicine for pros who scorn the very idea of recre¬ ational computing. Thus he cites the solution of Jon L. Bentley (Programming Pearls columnist for Communica¬ tions of the ACM) to the prob¬ lem of finding anagrams. As¬ sume the computer has access to a dictionary (as it must, to know if what it has found is a word). The obvious way is to exhaust the permutations, checking each in the dictio¬ nary. At 120 permutations for just 5 different letters, that’s slow. But here’s Bentley’s “Aha! ” way: Sort the letters of each dictionary word in as¬ cending order; sort the result¬ ing list; and pair its entries with the parent words, like this: aecrs acres aecrs cares aecrs races aecrs scare aecrt cater aecrt crate That big but uncomplicated job once done, any anagram problem is reduced to a single¬ letter sort and a quick lookup. You want anagrams for acresl The sort is aecrs. The lookup finds cares , races , and scare. And that is all, so far as this dictionary knows. One pleasure in The Arm¬ chair Universe problems is en¬ joying them in themselves (every day, in countless news- continued ALSO REVIEWED In the Age of the Smart Machine: The Future of Work and Power Programmer's Guide to the Hercules Graphics Cards Manufacturing Intelligence HyperCard Power ILLUSTRATION: KATHERINE MAHONEY © 1988 AUGUST 1988 -BYTE 51 BOOK REVIEWS NOTHING BEATS MADE IN THE U.S.A. AND GTEK®, INC. MAKES IT THE BEST! ROMX-2XL EPROM EMULATOR GTEK’s® New ROMX-2XL Eprom Emulator surpasses any other product of its kind on the market today! The ROMX* ^ 2XL emulates 2716-27010 eproms and comes with communications soft¬ ware for PC/XT/AT type computers, plus supports 16 and 32 bit systems. So, if you want to save unnecessary pro¬ gramming hours and frustration, GTEK’s® ROMX-2XL Eprom Emulator is just what you’ve been waiting for! MODEL 9000 EPROM PROGRAMMER If speed is what you want, GTEK’s® Model 9000 Eprom Programmer will never let you down. This product has been pro- « claimed the fastest programmer on the market. What’s more, its quick pulse and intelligent programming algorithms give you SUPER FAST speed, and you can program the chip of your choice, including MPUs and megabit parts. PCSS-8X MULTIPORT SERIAL BOARD The PCSS-8X Multiport Serial Board, brought to you by GTEK®, Inc., is def¬ initely a programmer’s dream come true! This _ — -=3-i board has 100% DOS compatibility on all 1 I 8 Ports and an en¬ hanced interrupt driven device driver. The PCSS-8X is available in RS232, RS422 8 port and 4 port versions. GTEK® Inc. manufactures other programming devices and has a full line of development tools available. The line includes eprom erasers, cross assemblers, logic programmers, emulators and simulators. So, if you want “MADE IN THE U.S.A.” give us a call today and let us put these products to work for YOU! G — Development Hardware & Software y p if • P.O.Box 2310 I t R NC Bay St. Louis, MS 39521-2310 Order Toll Free 1-800-255GTEK(4835) Fax: 1-601-467-0935 Telex 315814 (GTEK UD) MS & Technical Support 1-601-467-8048 PC/XT/AT is a Registered Trademark of IBM Corp. papers, anagrams entrance the players of a game called Jumbles), and another is the light they can throw on deeper problems. A story I especially enjoy has Dewdney in a quarry marveling at a fossil trilobite, when a man named Smith, a professor of paleontology, happens by. Why, Dewdney asks him, did the trilobites be¬ come extinct? Why, Smith re¬ joins, is the name Smith so common? Those turn out to be the forms of the same ques¬ tion, and they prompt two re¬ lated algorithms—PALEO- TREE, in which genera and species survive, mutate, or die out; and NEOTREE, in which families (and their names) be¬ come extinct, leaving space for Smiths to flourish in. The chief difference is that NEO¬ TREE has no parallel for new species evolving. (Though what about Smythe from Smith? In fine-tuning that program, I’d insert a Vanity Factor.) Start with 1000 family names, and, by NEOTREE’s showing, in about 23 genera¬ tions three-quarters of them will be extinct. That’s because it’s the males who carry on the name, and the empirical prob¬ ability is 0.317 that a family will produce no males des¬ tined to marry. Half the fam¬ ilies are gone in some 3 gener¬ ations, two-thirds in about 10. Thereafter, attrition slows down. Will the number ever shrink to 1? Perhaps in Goo- golplex years (that’s 10 to the 10th to the 100th). Or more likely not. If Smiths are a tena¬ cious tribe, so are Joneses. Then there’s the Voting Simulation dreamed up by two Britons. We start with a grid of randomly colored squares— say, blue for Republican, red for Democrat. We next as¬ sume that opinions follow those of forceful neighbors. Select a voter at random; select one of his eight neigh¬ bors at random; change his persuasion to that of the neigh¬ bor. Silently and rapidly, this simulates a lot of argument, a lot of malleability, and strange things happen. (Voters near an edge of the grid still have eight neighbors because left wraps to join right, top to join bot¬ tom. Yes, that does make the country toroidal. I have a feel¬ ing this game could be imple¬ mented on a spreadsheet.) “First, large blocks of votes develop within the grid. The blocks are geographic areas where everyone has the same opinion.” (Recall FDR’s old Solid South.) “Then the blocks migrate around the grid, and for a while two blocks struggle for domi¬ nance. Finally, the two-party system collapses as everyone ends up voting the same way. The smaller block vanishes as democracy votes itself out of existence—or does it? This is a neat philosophical question. ” Dewdney hastens to remark that as a model of the political process, this is “admittedly simpleminded.” He also re¬ ports that even so simple a model leaves democracy look¬ ing pretty tough. Some readers reported that after an over¬ night run, considerable differ¬ ence of opinion lingered. In Dewdney’s own experience, achieving unanimity takes “the better part of a day”: many million acts of random persuasion. (And what hap¬ pens, he asks, if each beset voter crank ily adopts an opin¬ ion the opposite of that random neighbor’s? He doesn’t tell, and I haven’t tried it.) Simulation vs. Reality Many of Dewdney’s chapters conjure up the besetting devil of Computer Simulations: Do I really gain insight into real- world events, or am I just amusing myself with a model so neat I can see how to pro¬ gram it? The chapter entitled “Sharks and Fish on the Plan¬ et Wa-Tor” is a good example. Fish die of being eaten by sharks; sharks die if they haven’t eaten recently enough. Both have single offspring at fixed intervals (it works best when the sharks breed more slowly). Both move at random, point to point, north, south, east, west, with this complica- continued 52 BYTE* AUGUST 1988 Circle 97 on Reader Service Card (DEALERS: 98) W ith industry-standard SCO” XENIX® System V and SCO FoxBASE+,'“ you’ll enjoy a real multiuser system that runs your existing dBASE III PLUS® code faster, easier, more reliably—and at half the cost! Greater Performance. With only a single PC and none of the traffic overhead required by a LAN server, The SCO Solution is lean and fast. Users share SCO FoxBASE+, applications, and data files via inexpensive terminals—all with greater performance. Greater Profitability. The SCO Solution gives you more for your money for greater profit¬ ability. An 8-user SCO XENIX system costs about half as much as an 8-user LAN—and adding each new user costs two-thirds less! Greater Reliability. Because an SCO XENIX system is more reliable than a LAN, you’ll spend less time solving LAN problems and more time creating SCO XENIX-based solutions. Easier to Administer. SCO XENIX systems can be easily adminis¬ tered by end users. LANs are much more complicated—multiple PCs, multiple PC configurations, and multiple sources of failure. w i > r Enhanced dBASE III PLUS Functionality. SCO FoxBASE+ works just like dBASE III PLUS, only better. It reads and writes the same data files, and runs your source code at compiled speed— without having to compile—for a shorter development cycle. Future Compatibility. An SCO XENIX system protects your investment because future compatibility is built in. By migrating your dBASE III PLUS applica¬ tions to The SCO Solution, you can cut your costs and increase your profits—both today and tomorrow. So cut loose from LANs and relax with a real mulituser solution — The SCO Solution—SCO XENIX and SCO FoxBASE+! Relax with The SCO Solution SCO FoxBASE+ is also available for larger UNIX® systems, and FoxBASE+ is available for DOS systems. THE SANTA CRUZ OPERATION (800) 626-UNIX (626-8649) (408) 425-7222 FAX: (408) 458-4227 TOX: 910-598-4510 SCO SACZ uucp: ...decvaxlmicrosoft!sco!info Circle 211 on Reader Service Card SCO XENIX System V and the SCO XENIX family of software solutions are availablefor all industry-standard80286- and 80386-based computers, and the IBM® Personal System^ Models 50, 60and80. SCO and the SCO logo are trademarks of TlieSanta Cmz Operation, Inc. IBM is a registered trademark and Personal System/2 is a trademark of International Business Machines Corporation. dBASE U1 PLUS is a registered trademark of AshtonTate. XENIX is a registered trademark of Microsoft Corporation. FoxBASE* is a trademark of <3f Fox Software, Inc. UNIX is a registered trademark of AT&T. g/gg ®1988 The Santa Cruz Operation, Inc., 400 Encinal Street, P.O. Box 1900, Santa Cruz, CA U.S.A 95061 The Santa Cruz Operation Ltd., P.O. Box 4YN, 18 Noel Street, London W1A 4YN United Kingdom, +44 1 439 2911, (FAX): +44 1 637 9381, TELEX: 917372 SCO LON BOOK REVIEWS How to get through traps with Quaid Analyzer Quaid Analyzer is a powerful diagnostic tool that shows what is going on inside your com¬ puter. Since we developed Quaid Analyzer to unravel copy-protection, we had to include ways of tracing in spite of the countermeasures used to block us. Some common ones are: Overwrite the vector for interrupt 3, so you can't use breakpoints. Quaid Analyzer can use any of the other 255 vectors for break¬ points instead. Overwrite the vector for interrupt 1, so you can’t single step. Quaid Analyzer scrupu¬ lously saves and restores interrupt cells when changing them. You won’t notice changes to vector 1 except at the one in¬ struction doing the change. Step over it with another command. Checksum the program to detect breakpoints. Quaid Analyzer can report ev¬ ery interrupt call. Since DOS programs have to call interrupts for all system services, you get control frequently, and at revealing places. Single stepping is unaffected by checksums. Manipulate the t flag to stop single stepping. Just avoid the single step key for one in¬ struction. Quaid Analyzer has two ways to step over a few instructions. Point the stack over the interrupt vectors. Just ask Quaid Analyzer to catch the next system service call interrupt. The program will have to fix everything first. Of course, your own program probably doesn’t have any tricks to block tracing. With a tool as powerful as Quaid Analyzer, it should be a sim¬ ple matter to diagnose it. Quaid Analyzer comes with a manual, and software on a 3 inch and a 5 inch diskette, if you are not satisfied with Quaid Analyzer, you can return it within 30 days for a re¬ fund. Quaid Analyzer is not sold by dealers in the United States or Canada. It is not copy-protected. To order Quaid Analyzer, call us with your credit card, or send us a check for $200 US funds. We ship within a day at our expense. Quaid Software Limited Third Floor Dept B630 45 Charles Street East Toronto Ontario Canada M4Y 1S2 (416) 961-8243 Warning I For advanced programmers only. tion: A shark will always move to (and eat) an adjacent fish when there is one. I haven’t tried this one, either, though the program¬ ming looks simple. What Dewdney reports is scenarios sensitive to geometry. Neither the initial distribution nor the actual movement seems im¬ portant, but when a tight school of fish forms, then the sharks discover and destroy it, then die themselves for lack of food. Result: zero population of any kind. (Though some¬ times a smaller school of fish, elsewhere on the screen, would go unnoticed until the sharks were extinct. Result: an ocean crammed with fish.) An evident simplifying as¬ sumption is that nothing ever happens to fish, save getting eaten by sharks. Still, the game exhibits cyclic ups and downs that resemble the fluc¬ tuating numbers of predators and prey in situations that have been tabulated, as when Hud¬ son’s Bay Company counted a whole half-century’s lynxes and hares. A lot of hares fed a lot of lynxes; then as hares drew near extinction lynxes died off, too, permitting a re¬ surgent hare population. . . You see the pattern. A graph of some very smooth things called the Lotke-Volterra equations looks rather similar, and they’ve been invoked to model predator-prey fluctuations. But by Dewdney’s report, graphs derived from the Wa- Tor game look more like the Hudson’s Bay data than Lotke-Volterra curves do. He’s puzzled, though, by cer¬ tain long-term instabilities. I’ll leave it at that. Computer modeling still awaits its Leibniz. BRIEFLY NOTED In the Age of the Smart Ma¬ chine: The Future of Work and Power by Shoshana Zuboff, Basic Books, New York: 1988, 468 pages, $19.95. The television intro¬ duced to entertain may end up shaping the very schedule of our days. The microwave bought for convenience may change the type of meals we eat. Thus, examining a tech¬ nology only in light of its origi¬ nal intentions may obscure the actual effects. Such is the case with computers: They are in¬ stalled in order to increase productivity, but, in fact, they fundamentally alter the work environment. Shoshana Zu¬ boff takes a long, careful look at what happens to the work¬ place when computers are introduced. Zuboff has two basic ways of looking. First, she uses her eight in-depth studies (1981 to 1986) of companies that had recently made the transition to computerization. Second, she puts observations about the current work environment in light of a history of work in¬ formed by her wide readings in philosophy, psychology, and sociology. Zuboff takes the body as the focal point of her history of work. At first, work was phys¬ ical labor that required bodily effort and bodily skills. As work has developed—or at least changed—throughout the centuries, it has been distrib¬ uted, and the types of knowl¬ edge necessary have changed. (Zuboff s analysis of knowl¬ edge develops from her de¬ scription of the different ways one’s body inhabits one’s en¬ vironment, rather than begin¬ ning from an assumption that mind and body are fundamen¬ tally apart. This approach proves fruitful, in line with the work of the French phe- nomenologist Maurice Mer- leauPonty.) Zuboff looks to her case studies to find the state of work today. Her findings are not surprising. For example, at a pulp mill where workers went from checking on the pulping process by sticking their hands into the vats to checking a digi¬ tal readout on a computer con¬ sole, the workers have traded bodily involvement and skill¬ ful knowledge for a more ab¬ stract relationship with their continued 54 BYTE* AUGUST 1988 Order Status, Technical & Other Info. (602) 246-2222 FAX #(602) 246-7805 Call for programs not listed MICROSOFT PC Excel SPECIAL $279 TOLL-FREE ORDER LINE 1-800-421-3135 NOW AVAILABLE MICROSOFT MACH 20.$309 MICROSOFT WINDOWS 386.$110 FREE SOFTWARE! Purchase over $100 and receive one of these disks absolutely FREE! Purchases over $250 get two free disks, over $400 get three, or get all four disks when your purchase is over $500! 1) MIXED BAG. 2) PC-WRITE. FONT-SET. 4) ABC-LIST. -SOFTWARE- Accounting L Dac Easy Acct.$54 Dac Easy Light.39 Dac Easy Payroll .39 Dollars &$ense .94 In House Acct.112 Managing Your Money 4.0.117 Communication Programs Brooklyn Bridge Universal .$75 Carbon Copy Plus.108 Crosstalk XVI.89 Crosstalk MK4.110 Flying Dutchman .64 PC Anywhere III.96 Languages Microsoft Pascal .$176 Microsoft Quick Basic 4.0.59 Microsoft Quick C.59 Ryan McFarlan Fortran.390 Ryan McFarlan Cobol.612 Turbo Basic.59 Turbo C 1.5 .59 Turbo Pascal.59 Turbo Prolog.59 Multi-User Software Fox Base + .$299 Microsoft Word.195 Word Perfect.310 Word Perfect Modules . ea 75 Data Base Managers Clipper .$370 Condor 3.325 DataPerfect. Low Price DBase III Plus.375 DB-XL Diamond.115 Fox Base Plus.189 Genifer .189 Paradox 2.0 Premium .435 PFS: Pro File.139 Powerbase.169 Q&A3.0.189 Quicksilver Diamond.329 Revelation Advanced .485 R Base For DOS.425 Reflex .90 Relate & Report.112 VP Info.65 Desktop Publishing Pagemaker Ver. 3.0.$549 PFS: First Publisher.55 Ventura Publisher .493 Graphics Boeing Graphics .$200 Chartmaster.199 Design Cad 2D & 3D.148 Diagram Master.199 Easy Cad .109 Generic Cad.49 In-A-Vision .270 Microsoft Chart3.0 .243 Newsroom Pro.65 Printshop.33 Integrated Ability Plus. .$145 Enable. .352 Microsoft Works. .116 PFS 1st Choice. .79 Smart System . .429 Symphony . .465 Languages Lattice C Compiler.$220 Microsoft C Compiler Ver. 5.0.260 Microsoft Fortran Ver. 4.1.260 Microsoft Macro Assembler 5.1.88 Project Manager Microsoft Project.$305 Super Project Plus.255 Timeline 2.0 .265 Total Havard Man. 2.355 Spreadsheet Lotus 1-2-3.$295 Microsoft PC Excel .279 Quattro .143 Surpass.329 Twin.35 VP Planner Plus.88 Utilities Core Fast.Low Prices Copy II PC.$19 Copywrite.39 Cubit .39 Deskview 2.01 .72 Direct Access.49 Eureka.99 Fastback Plus.89 Formtools.56 Graph in the Box 2.55 Mace .55 Microsoft Windows 2.03 .59 Norton Advanced.75 Norton Utilities .48 PC Tools Deluxe.37 Prokey 4.0.70 Q DOS II .49 Righwriter.75 Sidekick Plus.115 Sideways.39 Sqz Plus.55 Superkey.55 Lightening.79 XTree.35 Word Processing Microsoft Word 4.0.$185 Multimate Advantage II.259 Qand AWrite.110 Webster Spellcheck.37 Word Perfect Ver. 5.0.204 Word Perfect Executive.106 Word Perfect Library 2.0.65 Wordstar Pro.233 Wordstar 2000 + Personal Ed.194 -HARDWARE- Accessories L Copy II PC Deluxe.$101 Curtis Ruby.59 Logical Connection.379 Mach III Joystick.36 Masterpiece.85 Masterpiece + .95 150 Watt Power Supply.69 Boards AST Advantage Premium.$319 Rampage 286.379 Sixpac Plus w/64K.129 EVEREX 2MB Above PC/XT w/o Mem .79 3MB Above AT w/o Mem.89 HERCULES Graphics Plus.179 INTEL Above PC 64K .225 Above 286 W/512K.379 Orchid Tiny Turbo.289 COMPUTERS AZ 386 80386-16 Micro Processor, 1 MB of Ram, Teac 1.2 MB disk drive, 220 watt power supply, 6 layer mother board, RT keyboard . $2595 AZ Turbo 286 512K, 6& 10 MHZ, keyboard, 200 watt power supply, one 1.2 teac drive, Phoenix Bios . $999 AZ Turbo 8088-2 135 watt power supply, One 360K drive, 640K, keyboard . $569 AZ 10 150 watt power supply, dual 360K drive, 10 MHZ mother board, 640K, keyboard . $589 AST 286 Premium or 386 Premium Computers 512K, RAM, RT enhanced style keyboard, parallel, serial and clock, 1.2MB floppy disk drive, 7 expansion slots, DOS 3.3 & Basic Available Now . Best Prices EGA Boards ATI Ega Wonders.$175 Genoa Hi-Res .186 Orchid Designer.259 Paradise Auto 480 .148 Paradise VGA Plus .269 Paradise VGA Proff.399 Vega VGA.275 EGA Monitors Casper .$410 Princeton Ultra Scan.539 Mitsubishi Diamond Scan.499 NEC-Multisync II.609 Zenith 14" Flat Screen.650 Hard Cards Plus 20 MB.$529 Plus 40 MB.659 Hard Drives Seagate 20 MB w/cont .$265 Seagate 30 MB w/cont .295 Seagate 40 MB AT 251-2.399 Seagate 80 MB AT.659 Seagate ST-125 w/cont.329 Seagate ST-138 w/cont.399 Modems AZ 300/1200 w/o Soft .$69 Everex 300/1200 w/ Soft.69 Everex24001 NT .199 Hayes 1200 EXT w/o soft .299 Hayes 1200B INTw/Soft .289 Hayes 2400 EXT w/o Soft.435 Novation Parrot 1200 w/Soft.99 U.S. Robotics 2400 w/o Soft.335 Mice Genius.$49 Logitech .68 Microsoft Bus w/Paintbrush .92 Microsoft Serial .92 Optimouse w/Dr Halo .89 Optimouse w/DPE.185 Monitors AMDEK 410 Amber.$145 MAGNAVOX RGB.255 NEC GS Amber.190 SAMSUNG Flat Amber.82 TTL Amber w/ti It.76 Color w/tilt.249 Printers CITIZEN MSP 40.$285 120 D.146 MSP 50 .385 EPSON LQ 500.349 LQ 850.559 NEC P5XLP.869 P5200 .539 P2200 .339 LASSERS NEC 890.3300 AST TURBO PS.3199 OKIDATA LASSERLINE 6 .1299 OKIDATA OKI 390.499 OKI 391 .679 STAR MICRONICS NX 1000.180 NX 1000 Color .238 TERMS: Shipping on most software is $5.00. AZ orders + 6.7% sales tax. Personal check/company check - allow fourteen (14) days to clear. We accept purchase orders from authorized institutions for 3.5% more than cash price. All returns are subject to our approval. There will be a 20% restock fee. Minimum phone order $50. All prices are subject to change. Due to copyright laws we cannot take back any open software. TOLL-FREE ORDER LINE 1-800-421-3135 WAREHOUSE DATA PRODUCTS 2701 West Glendale Ave. • Phoenix, AZ 85051 We do not guarantee compatibility Servicing our PC buyers with Phone Hours: low pricing and technical Monday thru Friday 7am-9pm. experience since 1979. Saturday 9am-5pm MST. Circle 248 on Reader Service Card AUGUST 1988 -BYTE 55 -SlOfcffJX A *nes*on >•» | - -P|' • &QUBBP si*kur,' a. [L. securus]: The ability to keep your confidential data and your whole personal computing environment away from prying eyes and meddling associates. Securing your personal computer files has, until now, been a com¬ plicated and mostly unreliable matter. Not any more. The Tandon Personal Data Pac is the world's first truly removable, self-contained Winchester hard disk drive that pops in and out of its receptacle with the stroke of a key. You just lock the Personal Data Pac with your entire computing environ¬ ment in your desk or your safe. And when your business keeps you on the move, the Tandon Personal Data Pac lets you take your office with you. It fits easily in your brief¬ case or your garment bag. If the airlines lose it, don’t fret. Backing up a full Personal Data Pac onto another takes only a few minutes. So you can take one and keep a copy secure in your safe. The Personal Data Pac protects your data well. It’s a hearty little traveller that can take a lot of abuse. It can cope with the rough and tumble world of the postal system, as well as take an occasional knock off your desk. Your precious programs and data remain cradled inside. Safe, secure, and ready to use. The Tandon Personal Data Pac shatters the storage limitations of your personal computer. When your first high-capacity Data Pac is full, pop in a fresh one and you’re ready to go on. Infinitely. If you need to share your PC, software and data, the Tandon Personal Data Pac offers the saf¬ est, cheapest and most reliable “network” ri¬ sible for - transferring ^ high- capacity files quickly and easily. And, you can make any computer your personal dedicated workstation, simply inserting your own Data Let your Tandon Dealer you how the Personal Data Pac can make living with your PC more economical and productive. See him today, or call us at 1 - 800 - 556 - 1234 , Ext. 171 (in California 1 - 800 - 441 - 2345 , Ext. 171). Security for a small price. Pac. show Circle 236 on Reader Service Card (DEALERS: 237) We’re redefining personal computing. AUGUST 1988 -BYTE 57 Circle 145 on Reader Service Card Finally! A Keyboard Protector That: • PROTECTS CONTINUOUSLY - 24 HOURS A DAY - Against computer downtime due to liquid spills, dust, ashes, staples, paper clips and other environmental hazards. • REMAINS IN PLACE during the operation of your keyboard. SafeSkin is precision molded to fit each key - like a “second skin.” • EXCELLENT FEEL - The unique design eliminates any in¬ terference between adjacent keys, allowing smooth natural operation of your keyboard. • SafeSkin IS VIRTUALLY TRANSPARENT - Keytops and side markings are clearly visible. In fact, SafeSkin is so clear, sometimes you may not know it’s there! • DURABLE - LONG LASTING - SafeSkin is not a “throw¬ away” item. Many of our protectors have lasted over 3 years under continuous daily use, without failure. SafeSkin is available for most popular PC’s and portables including: IBM, APPLE, AT&T, COMPAQ, DEC, EPSON, KEY- TRONICS, NEC, TANDY, TOSHIBA, WANG, WYSE, ZENITH. Specify computer make and model. Send $29.95, Check or M.O., VISA & MC include exp. date. Dealer inquiries invited. Free brochure available. Merritt Computer Products, Inc. 4561 S. Westmoreland / Dallas, Texas 75237 / 214/339-0753 ^jssfegftini Keyboard Protector MAXIT increases your DOS addressable conventional memory beyond 640K ■ Add up to 256K above 640K for pro¬ grams like FOXBASE f and PC/FOCUS. ■ Short card works in the IBM PC, XT, AT, and compatibles. ■ Top off a 512 IBM AT's memory to 640K i and add another 128K beyond that. ■ Run resident programs like Sidekick above 640K. ■ Compatible with EGA, Network, and other memory cards. ■ Add up to 96K above 640K to all programs. Break through the 640 barrier. MAXIT increases your PC's available memory by making use of the vacant unused address space between 640K and 1 megabyte. (See illustrations) Extend the productive life of your, IBM PC, XT, AT or compatible. The MAXIT 256K memory card and software works automatically. If you have questions, our customer support people will answer them, fast. Order toll free 1-800-227-0900. MAXIT is just $245 plus $4 shipping, and applicable state sales tax. Buy MAXIT today and solve your PC's memory crisis. Outside the U S.A. call 1-415-548-2085. We accept VISA, MC, American Express MAXIT is a trademark of Osborne McGraw-Hill IBM is a registered trademark of International Business Machines Corporation; Sidekick is a registered trademark of Borland International, Inc; FOXBASE r is a trademark of Fox Software; Hercules is a trademark of Hercules Computer Technology, Inc; XT and AT are registered trademarks of International Business Machines Corpo¬ ration; Compaq is a registered trademark of Compaq Computer Corporation. BOOK REVIEWS work. Zuboff discovers that this has resulted in a certain amount of alienation. More in¬ teresting, she describes what happens to social relationships and work flow when employ¬ ees are moved into cubicles to go one-on-one with a CRT. Even when the results are not surprising, and even when the case study accounts go on too long, Zuboff keeps it inter¬ esting by putting the results into a larger historical and philosophical context. (She does, however, tend to suffer from the Academic Syn¬ drome: She uses lots of jar¬ gon— “textualization” and “automaticity”—and dis¬ cusses many marginally rele¬ vant authors.) The second part of the book moves from the question of knowledge to that of power. Zuboff maintains that com¬ puterization changes the type and justification of manage¬ rial authority. Originally, a boss got the right to lord it over people because he or she was the owner. Then bosses re¬ ceived their legitimacy by vir¬ tue of having worked their way up the ladder. Now, bosses (or managers) have authority by dint of their mastery of the Sci¬ ence of Management. Part Three discusses the techniques that “can shape and control behavior and so can be harnessed to the inter¬ ests of those who employ them”—the techniques by which authority maintains it¬ self in the computer-laden workplace. Frequently, com¬ puterization leads to increas¬ ingly centralized control, usually accomplished by cen¬ tralizing knowledge (i.e., managers become informa¬ tion hogs). Yet Zuboff reports that several years after the transition, some companies were recognizing “the need for critical judgment at the in¬ formation interface” and the value of “intellective skills” in analyzing and responding to digital information. But the chief technique of control is “the information panopticon”—the omniscient, objective computerized record of all that occurs in the workplace or plant. Zuboff is particularly good at disclosing what life under that unceasing eye is like for both workers and managers. At the end, Zuboff offers a brief view of a nonhierarchical organization that more uni¬ formly distributes knowledge and skill. She also includes a section entitled “Dissent from Wholeness,” which describes the disadvantages of this seem¬ ingly more egalitarian envi¬ ronment: a loss of sense of def¬ inition, rights, and autonomy. At times tendentious, at times based on too few exam¬ ples, at times too long, In the Age of the Smart Machine re¬ mains an important work. —David Weinberger Programmer’s Guide to the Hercules Graphics Cards by David B. Doty, Addison-Wes- ley, Reading, MA: 1988, 370 pages, $24.95. This book de¬ livers a comprehensive treat¬ ment of Hercules graphics cards. It is occasionally marred by a bit of hype and homage to Hercules Computer Technology, but it overcomes this with clear explanations of the architecture of each card, many solid programming ex¬ amples, and some knowing advice on the design of graph¬ ics software. David B. Doty describes the original Her¬ cules graphics card, the later RamFont card, and the latest InColor card in detail. Because the Hercules cards are programmed without using the PC ROM BIOS, writ¬ ing programs for them is de¬ cidedly different than pro¬ gramming for other IBM graphics adapters. Doty wrote his programming examples in Microsoft Assembler and Microsoft C, but the assembly language functions can be readily changed to work with the stack frame conventions of another compiler. The func¬ tions include detecting a Her¬ cules adapter and its type, writing a dot, reading a dot, drawing a line, displaying text, drawing circles, filling a continued 58 BYTE* AUGUST 1988 Circle 164 on Reader Service Card Circle 232 on Reader Service Card mCSyste MS 1 - 800 - 669-9933 Serving Computer Buyers For Para Asistirle En Espanol Eight Years Llame Al Tel 1-800-8^2-1777 InComm 1200B Int Modem $62 w/Software Samsung Color’ 14" RGB Monitor Graphics Card $215 $44 640 x 230 Parallel Printer Port .51 Dot Pitch HARDWARE SOFTWARE ACCESSORIES MODEMS CopyllPC Brd Deluxe.$ 99 Masterpiece + . 95 NEC Multispeed. $1429 Multispeed EL II . 1525 Toshiba T-l 100 S/Twist. 1455 T-3100/20. 3140 BOARDS AST Adv Prem lmb. $ 419 AST 6Pac Prem lmb . . 525 AST Sixpac. . 115 Hercules Grph +. .. 182 Intel Above 286. . Call EGA BOARDS ATI EGA Wonder . .$ 175 Genoa SuperHiRes+. .. 195 Orchid Designer. .. 272 Paradise 480. .. 155 Paradise VGA +XT. .. 259 Paradise VGA Prof. .. 385 Vega VGA. . 269 EGA MONITORS Princeton U/Sync. $ 519 NEC Multisync 2. . 599 Samsung. . 359 HARD DRIVES Seagate 125 w/cont. $ 321 Seagate 138 w/cont. . 411 Seagate 30MB w/cont. . 294 Seagate 20MB w/cont. . 269 KEYBOARDS Keytronics 5151. $ 127' Keytronics 5153 . 161 MICE Logitech. $ 68 MS Bus Mouse . . 99 Optimouse w/DrHalo . . 92 Hayes 1200 . Hayes 1200B. Incomm RPC1200. Incomm RPC2400. Incomm T1200 Incomm T2400 .... Incomm T2400EC. . $ Call ... Call .. 62 .. 147 .. 76 .. 167 .. 224 IGNITORS Amdek410. ..$ 145 Princeton MAX15. ... Call Samsung RGB. ... 215 Samsung Amber. ... 82 3COM 3C501 ELink. . .$ 356 3C503 ELink II. ... 345 3C523 ELink/MC . ... 432 PRINTERS Citizen 120D. .. $ Call 180D. ... 199 MSP-15E. ... 319 MSP-40. ... 285 C.Itoh ProWriter C715. ... 925 ProWriter Jr.+. ... 255 StarWriter D10. ... 754 NEC P5XLP. ... 819 P2200. ... 335 Okidata Gall on all models. Panasonic 1080I/M2. ... 179 1091I/M2. ... 199 10921 . ... Call Star NX-1000. ... 179 NX-1000 Color. ... Call NX-15. ... Call Toshiba 321SL . ... 500 DacEasy. .$ 54 Dollars & Sense . .. 95 Managing Your $. .. 119 COMMUNICATION Carbon Copy Plus. .$ 106 CrossTalk XVI . .. 89 CrossTalk 4. .. 115 PC Anywhere ...-. .. 57 SmartCom II. .. 82 Clipper.$ 370 Data Perfect. 255 DBase III. 379 DBXL Diamond. 109 Fox Base +. 190 Paradox 2.0. Call Q and A. 188 Relate & Report. 100 Pagemaker. .$ Call PFS First Pub . . 55 Ventura. . 495 GRAPHICS Chartmaster.$ 199 Generic Cad 3.0. 51 Printshop. 33 Signmaster. Call Ability Plus. $ 139 First Choice. . 79 LANGUAGES MS QuickBasic. . $ 60 MS Quick C . ...60 Turbo Basic . ...59 Turbo C. ...59 Turbo Prolog. ... 59 SPREADSHEETS Lotus 123. $ Call Plan Perfect. . 192 Quattro. . 150 Surpass. . 329 UTILITIES CopyllPC. $ 18 Desqview. . 71 Duet. . 48 Fastback Plus. . 88 Formtool. . 52 Mace. . 48 Norton Advanced . . 72 PC Tools Deluxe. . 36 Sidekick Plus. . 119 Sideways Print. ... 39 No Charge for Mastercard or Visa Call For Items Not Listed SC Systems 341SL 351SX . 674 . 1005 Word Perfect 5.0 .$ 219 Wordstar ProPack . Call 3000 Mariposa Hwy. Ste. B, Nogales, AZ 85621 Order Line 800-669-9933 Espanol 800-842-1777 Status Line 602-275-1395 FAX No. 602-273-0043 Order Line for Europe & Mexico 602-287-5347 TERMS: No charge for Visa or Mastercard. We do not charge your card UNTIL WE SHIP your order. Manufacturers warranty applies in all cases, all warranties are handled by the manufacturers. We accept Purchase Orders from authorized companies only, for 3.5% above cash price. No COD orders. No refund on opened software. All prices are subject to change Allow 14 days for personal/company checks. Arizona orders add 6.7% tax. We do not guarantee Compatibility. Circle 105 on Reader Service Card MODULA 2 FOR MOTOROLA 68K FAMILY INTEGRATED DEVELOPMENT AND SYSTEM-SOFTWARE MODULA2-CROSS-DEVELOPMENT-SYSTEM Compiler/Linker $ Interactive Real-TIme-Cross-Debugger M2-compatlble Cross-Assembler # Host Systems ► IBM PC + Compatibles ► Macintosh ► soon ► UNIX ► VAX VMS PIPS REAL-TIME-DISTRIBUTED-SYSTEMKERNEL Interprocess Communication: local and Internode 0 Messages and Mailbox Time- and Event-Handling 0 Device-Driver Features U D F HIERARCHICAL-FILE-SYSTEM Easy adaptable to your hardware RTDS-Interface Development- and System- Software Prozess-lnformatlk Development In MODULA2 ADA C H I W A R E AG Gundeldingerstr. 432 CH-4053 Basel Tel. 061/50 71 51 BRD:004161 C_talk ™ Object-oriented Extensions For C C_ talk, A SERIOUS TOOL FOR SERIOUS SOFTWARE ENGINEERS: □ Adds encapsulation, inheritance and dynamic messaging to your C compiler. □ Smalltalk-like Browser for building objects. □ Semi-automatic Make for building applications. □ Preprocessor for converting objects to standard C source code. □ Foundation classes to help you get started. □ Professional telephone support from our engineering staff. Start building software components into your next application. Join the leading edge today. Order Now: CNS, Inc. Software Products Dept. 7090 Shady Oak Road Eden Prairie, MN 55344 Tel: (612) 944-0170 Fax: (612) 944-0923 30 day money back guarantee MasterCard, Visa Shipping: $ 5 - U.S. $ 25 - mn. C_talk is designed for an IBM* PC (or compatible) with : Microsoft® C, Lattice C, Turbo C, or C86. A system with a hard drive and mouse is highly recommended. IBM is a registered trademark of IBM Corp MICROSOFT is a registered trademark of MICROSOFT CORP CJalk is a trademark of CNS. Inc. BOOK REVIEWS closed shape, printing a screen, and saving and restor¬ ing an image to and from a file. The source code contained in the book is available directly from the author for $30. Today, Microsoft’s C 5.0 and Borland’s Turbo Pascal 4.0 provide comprehensive support for the original Her¬ cules card, but Doty’s book provides thorough back¬ ground information, even for users of these languages. Whether the RamFont and In- Color cards will succeed in the market as well as the original is still unclear, but for some¬ one who needs to program for either, the book is essential. —Ben Myers Manufacturing Intelligence by Paul Kenneth Wright and David Alan Bourne, Addison- Wesley, Reading, MA: 1988, 352 pages, $40.95. This book is not only an excellent text for the engineer learning about factory automation, but it also serves as a good basis for an engineer about to specify an automation project. The au¬ thors ask all the necessary questions to determine what an automation project should accomplish. Written for the manufacturing engineer as well as the software engineer, Manufacturing Intelligence provides enough knowledge so that each can understand the mechanical and computation¬ al tasks required in factory automation. The book is divided into four sections. The first de¬ scribes the present and imme¬ diate future state of the ma¬ chine tool industry. It also highlights one of the author’s developments, Cell Manage¬ ment Language (CML), a software environment offer¬ ing a high-level solution for controlling a number of in¬ compatible machine tools and robots. The second section goes over the different parts needed for intelligent machines to function. These include vi¬ sion, machine control, and manipulators. The third sec¬ tion looks at how the knowl¬ edge and talent of a skilled craftsman can be transferred to an intelligent machine. In¬ cluded here are examinations of artificial intelligence, flex¬ ible fixtures, and sensor tech¬ nology. The last section of the book speculates on the future of manufacturing technology. The book offers both a glos¬ sary and a good bibliography. The chapters are well cited, so readers can pursue any issue that is presented. —Keith H. Erskine HyperCard Power by Carol Kaehler, Addison-Wesley, Reading, MA: 1988, 435 pages, $17.96. This book is a review of the widely ac¬ claimed Macintosh program for the novice and entry-level HyperCardarian. Copiously illustrated, it has great breadth of subject matter, but little depth. Carol Kaehler devotes only paragraphs to concepts such as passing messages to the next handler, yet she sup¬ plies practical and indexed hints. For instance, she ex¬ plains how to make sure a card inherits the correct back¬ ground—not a trivial task in some situations. She provides utility scripts in one chapter, but leaves the reader to extend them. The book covers some of the HyperTalk language at the in¬ troductory level in one brief appendix. HyperCard Power is at its best when it shows sim¬ ply and step by step how to ac¬ complish unified HyperCard tasks .—Larry Loeb ■ CONTRIBUTORS Critic and author Hugh Ken¬ ner lives in Baltimore, Mary¬ land. David Weinberger works for Interleaf and lives in Brookline, Massachusetts. Ben Myers designs and writes IBM PC graphics applications and lives in Harvard, Massa¬ chusetts. Keith H. Erskine is a program coordinator for Sun Microsystems in Billerica, Massachusetts. Larry Loeb is a dental surgeon in Walling¬ ford, Connecticut. 60 BYTE • AUGUST 1988 Circle 43 on Reader Service Card (DEALERS: 44) WHEN YOUR pP CODE DEMANDS THIS KIND OF PERFORMANCE, SPEED IS OF THE ESSENCE. AVMAC™ assemblers can make your high-performance design a winner, too. In Formula 1 racing, performance is everything. And the sport’s pP-based instrumentation is no exception. That’s why SRD Co., Inc. chose the AVMAC 8096 assembler to develop their state-of-the-art racing dynamometer — a device sophisticated enough to simul¬ taneously calculate every parameter of Formula 1 performance — all before the vehicle has moved 4 inches! In the critical assembly language phase of development, AVMAC “was a must.” The race is on: in personal pP development tools, Avocet sets the standards. AVMAC’s standard-setting speed and sophistication were needed to write the complex multi-tasking operating sys¬ tem at the heart of SRD’s dynamometer (patent pending). When you need a macro assembler that really performs, AVMAC can give you the same advantage. AVMAC supports all the most popular chip families and offers you en¬ hanced compatibility with Intel, Motorola, Hitachi, and other chip makers. What’s more, every package comes complete with our AVLINK™ linker, AVLIB™ librarian, AVREF™ cross-refer¬ ence generator, HEXFORM™ object file utility, plus a 250+ page user’s guide. The last lap: Compatible simulation/debugging. When it’s time to test your target code, choose our unique AVSIM™ simu¬ lator/debugger. It offers detailed, full¬ screen CPU simulation that eliminates the need for additional hardware. Best of all, AVSIM is designed for compatibility with AVMAC and our new Avocet C Compilers—the ideal combina¬ tion for cost-effective code development —from start to finish. AVOCET Our Racy New Catalog FREE! Call Toll-Free 1-800-448-8500* For your free catalog, to order, or for more information about AVMAC and other Avocet products. Getting to the finish line: try before you buy. When you order AVMAC or AVSIM, well include a special demo kit that you can try for 30 days. If you’re not satisfied for any reason, return the unopened software for a full refund—less the $35 demo/documenta¬ tion which is yours to keep. Discover the power of AVMAC and the entire line of Avocet pP/pC develop¬ ment tools. Affordably priced. With comprehensive technical phone support. And delivery in 48 hours, even overnight. If you’re in the development race, well get you to the checkered flag in record time. Avocet Systems, Inc., 120 Union Street P.O. Box 490AT, Rockport, Maine 04856 *In Maine, or outside U.S., call (207) 236-9055 TLX: 467210 Avocet Cl • FAX: (207) 236-6713 SW88 Avocet Systems. Inc All rights reserved. Avocet logo and name. AVMAC. AVSIM. AVLINK. AVLIB. AVREF and HEXFORM are registered trademarks of Avocet Systems, Inc SYSTEMS, INC* THE SOURCE FOR QUALITY PERSONAL fiP DEVELOPMENT TOOLS. Circle 16 on Reader Service Card AUGUST 1988 • BYTE 61 A / dJ/j REGATTA Af/iWS Arnold Opium CYC Top Honor? Now X.wl.ind I.ih) 1\ Tn The Future The new NEC desktop publishing monitors For those getting started. And for those who can’t stop MultiSync GS The ideal way to break into desktop publishing. For systems from PC/XT/AT/386 to PS/2. MonoGraph System 1024 x 1024 resolution and 1:1 aspect ratio for the dedicated desktop publisher. NEC has the perfect monitor for any desktop. For starters, there's our MultiSync® GS. It offers up to 64 gray scales for supe¬ rior monochrome text and graphics, a flat 14" diagonal screen for minimal glare, and compatibility with just about any system you may be using, including PC/XT/AT/386 and PS/2. Then there’s our MonoGraph™ System, for the ultimate in desktop publishing. It includes a graphics board that works with PC/XT/AT/386 (or 100% compatibles) and runs software like Microsoft Windows, Ventura Publisher and PageMaker. Its square 16" screen offers 1024 x 1024 resolution and the best of both por¬ trait and landscape-style displays; there’s room for a whole page of material, with space alongside for menus, icons and scrap. The GS graphic screen was created using Dr HALO, which is a registered trademark, and is used courtesy ol Media Cybernetics Best of all, with either monitor you get a feature no one else can The MonoGraph System newsletter screen was created by PageMaker® which is a registered trademark, and is used courtesy ol Aldus Corporation give you at any price: NEC. For literature or a dealer call PC/XT/AT and PS/2 are registered trademarks o( the International Business Machines Corporation 1-800-447-4700. For technical details call NEC Home Electronics Ventura Publisher is a trademark ot Ventura Software (USA) Inc. 1-800-NEC-SOFT. NEC is a registered trademark ot NEC Corporation c&c Computers and Communications Circle 157 on Reader Service Card NEC AUGUST 1988 • B Y T E 63 Double Your Productivity With Carbon Copy Plus L-arbon Copy Plus™ - the industry standard in remote control software-easily lets two PCs share the same application program over ordinary phone lines. So now you can share the same keyboard, screen and disk with a remote user thousands of miles away, allow¬ ing you to give effective product demonstrations, sup¬ port remote customers or train new users-without ever having to leave your office! Remote control and much more! Of course, Carbon Copy Plus offers other advanced remote communications features, including remote printing, remote access to a local area network and remote ses¬ sion capture and playback. But Carbon Copy Plus also offers many of the same features found in “standard” communications programs, such as file transfer, terminal emulation and complete scripting macros. And much more! Introducing Version 5.0 If you thought Carbon Copy Plus was powerful before¬ wait until you see the new Version 5.0. Carbon Copy Plus has always been able to transmit text or graphics, but A separate Carbon Copy Plus is required for each PC location. Carbon Copy Plus is a trademark of Meridian Technology. All other products referenced are trademarks of their respective companies now our new universal graphics translator merges incom¬ patible graphics formats. So you can jointly update a CAD diagram using your CGA, EGA, VGA or MCGA system with an associate who is using the Hercules™ standard. just as important is our new background file transfer capability. This lets you easily send or receive files, at any time, without exiting your current application. Now you can double your productivity by working on one spreadsheet file while an associate sends you another! Twice as easy Find out why Carbon Copy Plus has become the industry standard in remote communications and is fast becom¬ ing one of the most popular communications programs overall. Call us today. We'll show you how easily you can increase your productivity. Cartian Cam/L Fully translated foreign versions now available! MERIDIAN TECHNOLOGY INCIIIIIIIIII A SUBSIDIARY OF MICROCOM 7 Corporate Park Suite 100 Irvine, CA 92714 (714) 261-1199 64 BYTE* AUGUST 1988 Circle 144 on Reader Service Card BVTE Products in Perspective 67 What’s New 89 Short Takes Dell System 220 T-DebugPLUS 4.0 Cambridge Computer Z88 Grammatik III Watcom C 6.0 Paradox OS/2 Expert Advice: 101 Computing at Chaos Manor by Jerry Pournelie 115 Applications Plus by Ezra Shapiro 121 Down to Business by Wayne Rash Jr. 125 Macinations by Don Crabb 131 OS/2 and You by Mark Minasi 135 COM1: by Brock N. Meeks First Impressions 140 Compaq Deskpro 3 86/25, Everex Step 386/25, Intel SYP302, and SimpleNet’s Netpro 386/25 Reviews 148 Stand-alone communications packages 162 Tatung TCS-8000, Proteus 386A, and Everex Step 386/20 173 PC-Trac, FastTRAP, Trackball Plus, and Felix 185 Unix for the Mac II 195 VersaCAD on a Mac 200 Review Update AUGUST 1988 -BYTE 65 IT'S TIME TO DO SOME SERIOUS 386 BUGBUSTING! Search Uie« Watch Options Calls 60 Meaory TfflfTBBmn ival >x=eeee 5P=reee IsitlBllw 1 0 Mtr bound, upper bound, end t| ,^=eEAb| IfTTITTTfTTTttlTtTT' Compute ceUius tcwper«t«p|. Inact Clear Set pass counter I Loplc lines enable! PROBE y s menu • bar and pull¬ down menus set a new standard for debugger interfaces. PROBE has —— source-level debugging to let you “C” your program. POP registers up and down with a single key. This is an out-of-range memory-overwrite bug. Since it is interrupt related, it only appears in real time. W elcome to your nightmare. Your company has bet the farm on your product. Your demonstration wowed the operating committee, and beta ship¬ ments were out on time. Then wham! All your beta customers seemed to call on the same day. “Your software is doing some really bizarre things’,’they say. Your credibility is at stake. Your profits are at stake. Your sanity is at stake. THIS BUG’S FOR YOU You rack your brain, trying to figure something out. Is it a random memory overwrite? Or worse, an overwrite to a stack- based local variable? Is it sequence dependent? Or worse, randomly caused by interrupts? Overwritten code? Undocu¬ mented “features” in the software you’re linking to? And to top it off, your program is too big. The software debugger, your program and it’s symbol table can’t fit into memory at the same time. Opening a bicycle shop suddenly isn’t such a bad idea. THIS DEBUGGER’S FOR YOU Announcing the 386 PROBE™ Bugbuster,*from Atron. Nine of the top-ten software developers sleep better at night because of Atron hardware-assisted debuggers. Because they can set real-time breakpoints which instantly detect memory reads and writes. Now, with the 386 PROBE, you have the capability to set a qualified breakpoint, so the breakpoint triggers only if the events are coming from the wrong procedures. So you don’t have to be halted by breakpoints from legitimate areas. You can even detect obscure, sequence-dependent problems by stopping a breakpoint only after a specific chain of events has occurred in a specific order. Then, so you can look at the cause of the problem, the 386 PROBE automatically stores the last 2K cycles of program execution. Although other debuggers may try to do the same thing, Atron is the only company in the world to dequeue the pipelined trace data so you can easily understand it. Finally, 386 PROBE’s megabyte of hidden, write-protected memory stores your symbol table and debugger. So your bug can’t roach the debugger. And so you have room enough to debug a really big program. COULD A GOOD NIGHT’S SLEEP PUT YOU IN THE TOP TEN? Look at it this way. Nine of the top-ten software products in any given category were created by Atron customers. Maybe their edge is - a good night’s sleep. Call and get your free, 56-page bugbusting bible today. And if you’re in the middle^ of a nightmare right now, give us a purchase order number. We’ll FEDEX you a sweet dream. auvM'' BUGBUSTERS A division of Northwest Instrument Systems, Inc. Saratoga Office Center • 12950 Saratoga Avenue Saratoga, CA 95070 • Call 408/253-5933 today. * Versions for COMPAQ. PS/2-80s and compatibles. Copyright ©, 1987 by Atron. 386 PROBE is a trademark of Atron. Call 44-2-855-888 in the UK and 49-8-985-8020 in West Germany. Circle 15 on Reader Service Card TRBA What’S New SYSTEMS The Incredible Shrinking System Unit C laimed to be the “world’s smallest,” Ad¬ vanced Logic Research’s lat¬ est systems are the FlexNode 286 and the FlexNode 386. Both occupy 4 V 2 by 15 inches of desktop real estate and perform at 20 MHz with zero wait states by using paged interleaved cache memory. The systems have 1.44- megabyte PS/2-compatible 3 Vi -inch floppy disk drives and industry-standard 101-key keyboards. Both have four full-length 16-bit expansion slots, as well as an optional expansion unit that provides an additional four slots and sup¬ port for a second hard and floppy disk drive. Within those additional slots, you can place ALR-designed ARC- net, Ethernet, or token-ring adapter cards. The FlexNode 286 comes standard with 512K bytes of RAM, expandable to 5 mega¬ bytes with add-in cards. The 386 comes standard with 1 megabyte of RAM and can be expanded to 13 megabytes with an optional ALR RAM- Pak. There is also room for an optional math coprocessor. Both machines include a four-slot backplane with a sin¬ gle RS-232C serial port, a parallel port, and a floppy disk controller. Price: $1990 for basic 286; $2549 with 30-megabyte hard disk drive and controller; $2990 with 50-megabyte hard drive and controller; $3490 for basic 386; $3990 with 30- megabyte hard drive and con¬ troller; $4449 with 50-mega- byte hard drive and controller. Contact: Advanced Logic Research, Inc., 10 Chrysler Ave., Irvine, CA 92718, (714)581-6770. Inquiry 751. Laptop Makers Shed Light on Their Screens M itsubishi’s mp286L lap¬ top features a fluores¬ cent backlit liquid crystal display (LCD) and four slots for add-in capabilities. The 12-/8-MHz, one-/zero-wait- state machine comes stan¬ dard with a 6 V 2 - by 9 1 4-inch display and 640- by 400-pixel resolution. Features include dual 1.44-megabyte 3 Vi-inch floppy disk drives and 640K bytes of RAM that you can expand to 2.6 megabytes. The CGA controller is in one slot, additional memory is in a second, and a built-in Hayes-compatible 2400-/ 1200-/300-bit-per-second modem is in the third. The fourth slot could be used for a local-area-networking card Weight is 16 pounds, not including the optional 7-pound battery pack. Price: $3195; OS/2, $325. Contact: Mitsubishi Elec¬ tronics America, Inc., Com¬ puter Systems Division, 991 Knox St., Torrance, CA 90502,(800)556-1234;in California, (800) 441-2345. Inquiry 752. SEND US YOUR NEW PRODUCT RELEASE We'd like to consider your product for publication. Send us full information, including its price, ship date, and an address and telephone number where readers can get further information. Send to New Products Editor, BYTE, One Phoenix Mill Lane, Peter¬ borough, NH 03458. Information contained in these items is based on manufacturers ’ written statements and/or telephone interviews with BYTE reporters. BYTE has not formally reviewed each product mentioned. These items, along with additional new product announcements, are posted regularly on BIX in the microbytes, sw and microbytes, hw conferences. Multiuser 386 Power in an 11-inch Cube H oused in an 11-cubic- inch box, the Unix-based QB2 386 from Cubix has the advantage of being MS-DOS- compatible while acting as a file server for up to eight pro¬ cessors or terminals. It runs with zero- or one- wait-state performance be¬ cause of an alternative bank¬ ing scheme. When configured with 4 megabytes of memory, it runs with zero wait states. When configured with 8 megabytes, it runs with one wait state. The standard package includes an 80387 co¬ processor and an Ethernet controller. The QB2 386, as the name implies, is based on Intel’s 80386 processor. It runs Unix version 3.0 and comes standard with 2 megabytes of RAM, expandable to 8 mega¬ bytes. In a standard config¬ uration, it includes an 80- megabyte hard disk drive, a 60-megabyte tape drive for backup, and a 1.44-megabyte 514-inch floppy disk drive. The built-in power-fail system involves nickel-cad¬ mium batteries for 10-minute on-line protection. If the power stays off for longer than 10 minutes, another battery sub¬ system kicks in for up to an hour. Software that automati¬ cally shuts the system down is activated next, but not before the system tells you it’s time to quit because it’s operating on batteries. Price: $8995. Contact: Cubix Corp., 2800 Lockheed Way, Carson City, NV 89706, (702) 883-7611. Inquiry 753. continued AUGUST 1988 -BYTE 67 WHAT’S NEW PERIPHERALS Compact Keyboard Conserves Desktop Real Estate B y compressing row spacing, Mechanical En¬ terprises has designed an IBM PC AT- and XT-compat- ible 100-key keyboard that’s 60 percent smaller than tradi¬ tional AT-enhanced keyboards. The microtype keyboard measures only 11 by 6 inches and weighs less than 2 pounds. Mechanical Enter¬ prises says its studies show that touch typists achieve nor¬ mal typing speed after a short familiarization period. Price: $150. Contact: Mechanical Enter¬ prises, Inc., 461 Carlisle Dr., Herndon, VA 22070, (703) 435-9496. Inquiry 754. End Those Scrolling Blues A dual-page landscape monitor from Nutmeg Systems lets Macintosh desk¬ top publishing aficionados view two complete pages when they write, edit, and pre¬ pare layouts. The Nutmeg 19, available for the Mac Plus, SE, and II, has a 79-dpi resolution in a 1024- by 768-pixel paper- white phosphor display. The horizontal refresh rate is 63.65 kHz, and the vertical scan rate is 63.73 kHz. The monitor measures 17 by 19 by 18 inches and weighs 42 pounds. Nutmeg also uses a proprietary video interface that lets you easily upgrade your monitor if you move up to a Mac II. Price: $1899 for use with the Mac II; $1699 for use with either the Plus or SE. Contact: Nutmeg Systems, Inc., 25 South Ave., New Canaan, CT 06840, (203) 966-3226. Inquiry 755. A Passport to Portable Data P lus Development’s latest technological innovation is called the Plus Passport. It’s a removable hard disk sys¬ tem that lets you insert 1 l A- inch thick, 3 ‘/ 2 -inch 20- or 40- megabyte hard disks into the company’s custom chassis like you insert video cassettes into a VCR. You then have an MS- DOS- and OS/2-compatible hard disk subsystem that works on all the IBM ma¬ chines and compatibles, in¬ cluding systems with Micro Channel architecture. The drives use 1 -to-1 in¬ terleave for efficient data throughput and are rated for Put Up to 8.4 Gigabytes in the Palm of Your Hand W hile the battle over digital audio tape (DAT) for recording music rages in both Congress and the music industry, a Cali¬ fornia company has adopted DAT technology for storing truly massive amounts of computer data. Gigatape’s Giga 1200 DAT subsystem writes from 1.2 to 8.4 gigabytes on a standard 4-millimeter digi¬ tal tape cartridge. The com¬ pany claims that the unit is compatible with all the IBM machines and compat¬ ibles, including the PS/2s, as well as with the Macintosh, MicroVAX, and other workstations. The Giga 1200 uses heli¬ cal scan technology, origi¬ nally developed for the VCR industry, and the latest digi¬ tal recording techniques. Helical scan technology in¬ volves using two read/write heads on a drum that rotates at 2000 rotations per minute. The tape speed is 0.32 inches per second, and the data transfer rate averages 192K bytes per second. But read/write is sustained even through 1.5-megabyte-per- second bursts. That means an entire tape can be loaded with information in less than 2 hours. Error correction is handled with a proprietary code that the company claims keeps bit and burst errors to less than one in 10 15 . Price: $6500. Contact: Gigatape, Inc., 5266 Hollister Ave., Santa Barbara, CA 93111,(805) 964-8990. Inquiry 788. shocks of up to 150 g’s. If you use the Passport for booting up other drives, you can back up as much as 40 megabytes of data in less than 5 minutes, says Plus Development. The drive cartridges fit into a drive subsystem that fits into a standard 5 % -inch half¬ height bay. Price: 20-megabyte PC ver¬ sion, $1250; 40-megabyte PC version, $1450; 20-megabyte Micro Channel version, $1350; 40-megabyte Micro Channel version, $1550. Contact: Plus Development Corp., 1778 McCarthy Blvd., Milpitas, CA 95035, (408) 434-6900. Inquiry 756. Yes, We Have No DataDesk Keyboards D ataDesk International keyboards were incor¬ rectly associated with EECO keyboards in the June What’s New section on page 70 (“123-Key Keyboard Remem¬ bers Macros”). DataDesk is an indepen¬ dent designer and manufac¬ turer of two popular key¬ boards: the Turbo-101 for IBM PC compatibles, and the Mac-101 for Macintosh computers. The two keyboards togeth¬ er are compatible with just about everything on the mar¬ ket, including the Tandy 1000, AT&T PC 6300, and IBM PCjr. The two keyboards are 101-key units with firm keys that produce a definite “bounce feeling” that many users prefer over PC-clone and Macintosh keyboards. Price: Turbo-101, $149.95; Mac-101, $169.95. Contact: DataDesk Interna¬ tional, 7651 Haskell Ave., Van Nuys,CA 91406, (818) 780-1673. Inquiry 757. continued 68 BYTE* AUGUST 1988 V/V J - -'.C' <• 72 ££ 4i/ fi- t / • '•=> If you perform calculations, the answer is obvious. MathCAD 2.0. It’s everything you appreciate about working on a scratch¬ pad-simple, free-form math-and more. More speed. More accuracy. More flexibility. Just define your variables and enter your formulas anywhere on the screen. MathCAD formats your equations as they’re typed. Instantly calculates the results. And displays them exactly as you’re used to seeing them- in real math notation, as numbers, tables or graphs. MathCAD is more than an equation solver. Like a scratchpad, it allows you to add text anywhere to support your work, and see and record every step. You can try an unlimited number of what-ifs. And print your entire calculation as an integrated docu¬ ment that anyone can understand. Plus, MathCAD s loaded with powerful built-in features. In addition to the usual trig¬ onometric and exponential functions, it includes built-in statistical functions, cubic splines, Fourier transforms, and more. It also handles complex numbers and unit conver¬ sions in a completely transparent way. Yet, MathCAD is so easy to learn, you’ll be using its full power an hour after you begin. What more could you ask for? How about the exciting new features we’ve just added to MathCAD 2.0... • Built-in equation solver • Full matrix operations • Two to four times increase in calculating speed • Easier full-page text processing • Auto-scaled plots • Memory enhancements • Additional printer and plotter support • And more. If you’re tired of doing calculations by hand or writing and debugging programs, come on over to our pad. MathCAD. The Electronic Scratchpad. Call for a detailed spec sheet and the name of a MathCAD dealer near you. 1-800-MathCAD (In MA: 617-577-1017). v(t) := stn(nt) Solve linear systen Ax=k: u(t) := cos(B t) Given c Boot nean square e = a ♦ 2 r := Find(a) r = 1.146 Requires IBM PC® or compatible, 512KB RAM, graphics card. IBM PC® International Business Machines Corporation. MathCAD® MathSoft, Inc. MathCAD' MathSoft, Inc., One Kendall Sq., Cambridge, MA 02139 © 1987 MathSoft. Inc. Circle 138 on Reader Service Card AUGUST 1988 • BYTE 69 WHAT’S NEW ADD-INS Manipulate Video on Your Mac II N ow you can use your Mac II to display video captured from standard video sources, then manipulate that image and add graphics with the ColorCapture board by Data Translation. The board allows real-time video that’s been captured on video cameras, VCRs, and still-video equipment to be dis¬ played on the Mac II. Two versions are available—one for the National Television Sys¬ tem Committeee (NTSC) stan¬ dard in North America and Japan, and one for the Phase Alternate Line (PAL) stan¬ dard in western Europe. Once you capture the image, you can crop the pic¬ ture, add text or graphics, ex¬ port color images to other ap¬ plications, sharpen and soften edges, adjust brightness and contrast, add or subtract images, print hard copies, animate, and output to a videotape. Resolution is 640 by 480 pixels, and images can be dis¬ played from a palette of 32,768 colors. The board fits into a single Mac expansion slot with a cable that extends from the board to plug into video cameras, VCRs, or elec¬ tronic still-video equipment. For live display, you can attach composite or RGB monitors directly to the board. Additional specialized functions include a zoom/pan/ scroll controller, which allows instantaneous magnifi¬ cation and close-up examina¬ tion of image regions. There’s also a graphics memory plane for merging text and drawing lines, arcs, curves, boxes, icons, and so on. Price: $2995. Contact: Data Translation, Inc., 100 Locke Dr., Marl¬ borough, MA 01752, (617) 481-3700. Inquiry 758. Low-Cost, High- Speed Modem T he ATI Technologies 2400etc is a 2400-bit-per- second internal modem that allows for the equivalent of 4800-bps data transmission with its data-compression techniques. Only modems with MNP Class 5 error correction will communicate with this modem at maximum speed, however. MNP Class 5 pro¬ vides for what the company calls “100 percent error-free data transfer.” This IBM PC-compatible unit fits into a standard half slot and also operates at 1200 and 300 bps. Price: $239. Contact: ATI Technologies, Inc., 3761 Victoria Park Ave., Scarborough, Ontario, Canada M1W3S2, (416) 756-0711. Inquiry 759. Serial Mice Can Now Take the Bus T he Pointing Device Adapter (PDA) lets you convert your serial mouse to work on a standard PC bus, freeing up that serial port for other things. This MicroSpeed product, a l A -length card with software for Microsoft, Logitech, Mouse Systems, and compat¬ ible rodents, is compatible with the IBM AT, XT, PS/2 Model 30, and compatibles. The PDA’s features are many. They include an I/O ad¬ dress that’s the same as that for bus mice, and interrupt se¬ lection for IRQ 2, 3, 4, 5, or 7. MicroSpeed’s MAP (multi¬ axis pointer) driver with bal¬ listic gain support is included, allowing you to better control the pointer on the screen with the mouse. While the ballis¬ tic gain feature has been avail¬ able on the Macintosh mice for some time, MicroSpeed says this is the first time you can buy a mouse for PC com¬ patibles with variable speed control. Finally, there’s a device driver for Windows applica¬ tions, an AutoDesk device in¬ terface driver for AutoCAD, and MicroSpeed’s KeyMAP keyboard emulator software. Price: $69. Contact: MicroSpeed, Inc., 5307 Randall Place, Fremont, CA 94538, (800) 232-7888; in California, (415) 490-1403. Inquiry 760. continued Add PostScript to Your Laser Printer T he ConoDesk 6000, a PostScript-compatible printer controller, outputs PostScript code 10 times faster than competing units, the manufacturer claims. Scalable fonts for Ventura Publisher, PageMaker, and Windows let you scale every typeface to all standard Post¬ Script point sizes and rotate them to any angle. The controller uses a pro¬ prietary 32-bit microproces¬ sor and 2.5 megabytes of RAM and works with the IBM XT, AT, Compaq 386, and compatibles. It supports Hewlett-Packard LaserJet and Canon-engine printers. There are 13 typefaces with PostScript-compatible metrics and a 228-character set for Ventura Publisher and PageMaker. Optional soft¬ ware includes ConoScript, the interpreter that allows the printer to print Post¬ Script files. Optional hard¬ ware includes HP LaserJet Series II and Canon LBP-8II video interface boards. Price: $2995 for the base system with interpreters for Windows and PageMaker; $695 for the ConoScript in¬ terpreter; $100 to $700 for a floating-point processor. Contact: Conographic Corp., 16802 Aston, Irvine, CA 92714, (714) 474-1188. Inquiry 789. 70 BYTE* AUGUST 1988 Get Sprint and you'll never be afraid of the dark! Nothing holds a candle to Sprint! Features • = Yes O = No Sprint 1.0 WordPerfect 4.2 MS Word 4.0 WordStar 4.0 MultiMate Adv. 1.0 Maximum file size Disk Disk Disk 4MB 128K Thesaurus (integrated) • • • • • Windows Open (maximum) 6 2 8 1 1 Files Open (maximum) 24 2 8 1 1 Cross-Reference (dynamic) • O 0 O 0 Indexing Options 7 1 3 3 0 Columns: Parallel • • • • • Snaking (chg. # same page) • • Not same pg. O • H-P LaserJet Support Full Partial Full Partial Full PostScript Support Full Text Full O Text Mouse Support (integrated) • O • O O Dynamic Shortcuts • O O O O Alternative User Interfaces • O 0 O O Verify Spelling as you type • O O O O Programmable Macro lang. • O O O O Save File 1 5.9 41.1 9.7 4.4 1.0 Top to Bottom 2 7.5 7.5 49.4 8.1 21.0 Search and Replace 3 1.6 6.6 4.6 17.1 13.4 Find Unique Word 3.3 6.2 7.0 13.8 20.6 Suggested List Price $199.95 $495.00 $450.00 $495.00 $565.00 Time tests were performed on an Acer 286 (8 MHz). 640K RAM. 1 File size 103K. 2 1636 lines. 3 14 occurrences. Times shown are in seconds. (Benchmark details available upon request.) Prices and specifications subject to change without notice. •Customer satisfaction is our main concern: if within 60 days of purchase this product does not perform in accordance with our claims, call our customer service department, and we will arrange a refund. All Borland products are trademarks or registered trademarks of Borland International. Inc. Other brand and product names are trademarks of their respective holders. Copyright ©1988 Borland International. Inc. Bl 1237 Circle 30 on Reader Service Card (Dealers: 31) Forgetting to “Save” is a fact of life as are power outages, and it used to be that a power outage could wipe out everything you’ve done. Not any more. Your work is always safe when you Sprint.® Sprint’s “Auto-Save” auto¬ matically saves your words as you type, so if the lights do go out, you may be in deep dark¬ ness but not deep trouble. Sprint’s Auto-Save is more than “insurance,” it’s also invisible. You know it’s there, but it does its job without interrupting yours. Sprint: It’s the word processor with everything! You name it, Sprint’s got it. Incredible speed, Auto-Save, a customizable user interface, and professional output. Sprint even includes a bonus pack of alter¬ native user interfaces that make it act like WordStar,® MultiMate,® WordPerfect,® Microsoft® Word, or other familiar word proces¬ sors—a $99 value free! Sprint has all this and does all this for only $199.95 instead of the up to $600 that some companies demand. Sprint auto¬ matically saves your words; it also automatically saves your money. Sprint—The fast track to performance word processing. 60-Day Money-back Guarantee* For the dealer nearest you Call (800) 543-7543 BORLAND i N r [ r n a r i a n a i AUGUST 1988 • B Y T E 71 WHAT’S NEW HARDWARE • CONNECTIVITY An Affordable and Expandable Fiber- Optic Network E ight XT- or AT-compat- ible computers, eight printed circuit boards, one networking hub, and fiber¬ optic cabling constitutes the simplest form of the new Ethernet local-area net¬ work (LAN) from lONet Communications. But you can expand that with more fiber-optic cabling, more boards, and more hubs. Each hub supports eight com¬ puters. To form a 392-com¬ puter, 10-megabit-per-second (mbps) LAN with as much as 6 kilometers between any two nodes, you’ll need 54 hubs, 392 boards, and lots of cabling. To expand the network even further, you can add a re¬ generative repeater and link two 392-computer networks. A second repeater allows you to link more than 1000 com¬ puters. The boards use Intel’s 82586 Ethernet controller chip and have Hewlett-Packard LED sources and positive- intrinsic-negative (PIN) photodiode receivers to trans¬ mit and receive 850-nano¬ meter light pulses through 62.5-micron multimode fi¬ ber-optic cabling with recom¬ mended SMA or ST connec¬ tors. Total delay between two hubs on 392-computer clus¬ ters is 25 nanoseconds. Repeaters, which restore amplitude (like the hubs) and retime the signals, add 750 ns to transmissions. Repeaters also allow connection of fi¬ ber-optic to coaxial or cheaper- net (thin coaxial) cabling. If you add two more full- length cards to one of the com¬ puters, you have a bridge that will link clusters of lONet 1-mbps LANs with several types of networks, including Ethernet, Token Ring, and ArcNet. The networking soft¬ ware is lONet’s existing package, lONet 4.0, which in¬ cludes an electronic mail package called Network Cou¬ rier from Consumers Software. Price: PC board with soft¬ ware, $1295; hub, $2995; re¬ peater, $1395. (Fiber cabling and installation not included.) Contact: lONet Communica¬ tions, 7016 Corporate Way, Dayton, OH 45459, (513) 433-2238. Inquiry 765. Ethernet Stalks the Twisted Pair! I f you’re considering in¬ stalling Ethernet but the hassle of running coaxial cable through the walls and floors is giving you pause, Hewlett-Packard has a simple solution. Its newest product, HP StarLAN 10 PC Link, uses the already-installed tele¬ phone wiring in your building to network your PC or com¬ patibles at 10 mbps. PC Link includes a half- length PC card and software called OfficeShare, which provide the transport mecha¬ nism between MS-DOS- or Unix-based systems, as well as the twisted-pair Ethernet net¬ work that HP introduced last year. With PC Link, you can locate as many as 12 PCs up to 100 meters from the network¬ ing hub. And those capabilities will increase when repeaters and bridges become available, since StarLAN 10 can sup¬ port a total of 1024 PCs or Unix devices. You can also connect your PCs using existing coaxial Ethernet networks with a de¬ vice called the Twisted-Pair Media Access Unit. Accord¬ ing to HP, before its all- twisted-pair products became available, such coaxial-to- twisted-pair devices were the only way to connect PCs to Ethernet. Price: PC Link, $695; hub, $2995; Twisted-Pair Media Access Unit, $295. Contact: Hewlett-Packard Co., Customer Information Center, Inquiry Fulfillment Dept., 19310 Pruneridge Ave., Cupertino, CA 95014, or call the HP sales office listed in your telephone directory white pages. Inquiry 766. Your PC or PS/2 Can Now Talk AppleTalk T he first IBM PC- and PS/2-based AppleTalk file server supports up to 30 machines at 230 kilobits per second (kbps). It consists of a board and software for the host and the clients. The Tangent Technologies card, dubbed the Tangent- Share, eliminates the need for a dedicated Macintosh file server or for individual hard disk drives at each work¬ station. As a nondedicated file server, it allows you to store files and applications from any IBM PC, PS/2, or Macintosh on the AppleTalk network host, to use the host as a local disk drive, or to trans¬ fer files between incompatible systems. TangentShare provides both “administrator” and “super user” privileges from any IBM or Apple machine on the network. Administrator machines can perform such management functions as adding users to the network and changing passwords. The super user machines, desig¬ nated by the administrator machines, have complete ac¬ cess privileges to all directo¬ ries in the network. There can be multiple administrators and multiple super users on each network. Price: $700 for board and file server software; $325 for board and IBM PC client software; $400 for board and PS/2 client software. Contact: Tangent Technol¬ ogies, 5990-K Unity Dr., Norcross, GA 30071, (404) 662-0366. Inquiry 767. continued 72 BYTE* AUGUST 1988 Buy MICRO CADAM CORNERSTONE “ R.1.3, send us your obsolete PC CAD software, and get a $1,000* check from CADAM! If you’ve always wanted real mainframe-based CAD power for your IBM® PS/2;' PC/AT® or compatible system, here’s a sharp new offer from CADAM® Buy new MICRO CADAM CORNERSTONE R. 1.3 now. Compare its productivity, ease of use, and mainframe- based features with your conventional PC CAD system. (You can go right to work with your existing CAD files, thanks to MICRO CADAM CORNERSTONE’S new DXF data translator.) Then cut up your obsolete software and send us the half with the label, along with your completed rebate coupon and proof of purchase for MICRO CADAM CORNERSTONE R. 1.3. We’ll cut you a check for $1,000. CADAM’s rebate offer is the ultimate deal on the “ultimate PC CAD production tool.” But act fast. Rebate expires October 31,1988. See your dealer today for qualification details and rebate coupon. For the location of your nearest dealer, phone CADAM toll-free today: 800-255-5710. MICRO CADAM CORNERSTONE ... The Ultimate PC CAD Production Tool mom mo A LOCKHEED COMPANY ‘This rebate may not be combined with any other special CADAM INC promotion or discounts and is available only in the United States to end users. Certain restrictions apply-see rebate coupon available from your MICRO CADAM CORNERSTONE dealer for details and restrictions. All sales will be verified with dealer of record. CADAM is a registered trademark and MICRO CADAM CORNERSTONE is a trademark of CADAM INC. AutoCAD is a registered trademark of Autodesk, Inc. IBM and PC/AT are registered trademarks and PS/2 is a trademark of International Business Machines Corporation. ©1988 CADAM INC Circle 35 on Reader Service Card (Dealers: 36) AUGUST 1988 • BYTE 73 and running in minutes. Ml W A JllllilllftSH \ tA BV^r d" iaJl^u |p (ys-g^'^nu&h ONCE IN BLUE M 00 N, SCAN MAN™ *%P \g|F Pop any image up to 4"x 11" straight into your IBM PC, XT AT PS/2 or 100% compatible system. Clip it, crop it, resize and rotate it, color it. Merge it. Save it. Store it. Choose between high contrast or high detail. Import images into any best-selling DTP application(PageMaheCVenturaTetc). Use it in any major publishing program. All you need is $299, a spare card slot, and five minutes to set up. HOW ON EARTH IS THIS POSSIBLE FOR $299? - 'sJuzJ&ddQY- inv/tt'tehldwo C KYWAtCHE P HKs'OocenA8ne?»V»a tJSARtroPfymnenofi J! bVUn-In \14 jl- H. ks.\K. A Feature: dBASE ORACLE SQL Promises, no dates IBM DB2 Compatible Mainframes NoWay IBM MVS &VM/CMS Minis Nope DEC, HP, Sun, etc. PCs All, PC Jr. too 286 & 386 PCs MS/DOS <640K >640K programs programs OS/2 Still waiting Shipping Multiuser Primitive Mainframe quality Networking PC Nets only PC, mini & mainframe Fault Tolerant You must be kidding CPU & Disk Recovery O racle Corporation, the world’s fastest growing software company, 1 has just climbed past AshtonTate to become the world’s largest supplier of database man¬ agement software and services. 2 Why? • Because ORACLE® runs on PCs, plus mainframes and minicom¬ puters from IBM, DEC, DG, HP, Prime, Wang, Apollo, Sun, etc. — virtually every computer you have now or ever will have. AshtonTates dBASE runs only on PCs. • Because ORACLE is a true dis¬ tributed DBMS that connects all your computers — PCs, minicom¬ puters and mainframes — into a single, unified computing and infor¬ mation resource. dBASE supports only primitive PC networking. • Because Oracle has supported the industry standard SQL language since 1979. Ashton-Tate promises to put SQL into dBASE sometime in the indefinite future. • Because ORACLE takes advan¬ tage of modern 286/386 PCs by letting you build larger-than-640K PC applications on MS/DOS that run unchanged on OS/2. dBASE treats today’s 286/386 PCs and PS/2s like the now obsolete, original PC. Don’t go down in flames. Bail out from dBASE. Call 1-800-ORACLE1 and order your S199-PC copy of ORACLE 3 today. Or just ask and we 11 send you information on ORACLE, the number one selling DBMS on minicomputers and mainframes. COMPATIBILITY • PORTABILITY • CONNECTABILITY Call 1-800-0RACLE1, ext. 149 today. {Dear Oracle, PC ORDER PROCESSING Oracle Corporation 20 Davis Drive • Belmont, CA 94002 1 want ORACLE to be THE LAST DBMS for my 286/386 PC. Enclosed is my □ Check or □ VISA □ MC □ AMEX credit card authorization for $199 (California residents add 7% sales tax). I understand this copy is for PC develop¬ ment only. Offer valid only in the US and Canada. AUGUST 1988 • BYTE 77 WHAT’S NEW SOFTWARE • PROGRAMMING Dell Releases OS/2 D ell Computer reports that its version of Microsoft’s OS/2 is a single- user multitasking operating system for 80286 and 80386 systems. It supports VGA video adapters based on Chips & Technologies, Video Seven, and Cirrus Logic VGA controllers. Dell’s OS/2 lets you in¬ stall Microsoft OS/2, MS- DOS, and Xenix on the same hard disk. Utility pro¬ grams such as Etree and Speed are included. Etree displays a visual tree of the disk directory, and Speed lets you change the process¬ ing speed and keyboard re¬ peat rate. Price: $324.95. Contact: Dell Computer Corp., 9505 Arboretum Blvd., Austin, TX 78759, (512)338-4400. Inquiry 770. 80386 C Compiler Creates Protected- Mode Code he NDP C-386 C com¬ piler from Micro Way is a globally optimizing compiler that was designed for the Intel 80386. It generates native 80386 protected-mode 32-bit code that runs under DOS or Unix V. The compiler is capable of running with arrays larger than 64K bytes and can run pro¬ grams as large as 4 gigabytes. NDP C-386 is a full imple¬ mentation of PCC, Bell Lab’s Portable C Compiler, whose syntax is a superset of Ker- nighan and Ritchie C. The compiler includes all standard PCC extensions along with supersets of ANSI C and Microsoft C extensions. The new extensions include a set of graphics and BASIC-like screen handling functions, in addition to hooks to the oper¬ ating system. Coprocessors supported include the Micro Way/Weitek mW1167 and the Intel 80387 and 80287 coprocessors. MicroWay’s C compiler runs on any 80386-based com¬ puter or AT compatible with an Intel Inboard or other 80386 add-on board. A float¬ ing-point coprocessor is re¬ quired, as well as 2 mega¬ bytes of extended memory. You’ll also need a hard disk drive with at least 2 megabytes of free memory. DOS 3.2 or higher or Unix 386 System V Release 3 is also required. Price: $595. Contact: Micro Way, P.O. Box 79, Kingston, MA 02364, (508) 746-7341. Inquiry 768. Document It! T o simplify the process of documenting C programs, Software Blacksmiths de¬ signed C-DOC, a set of docu¬ mentation tools for C pro¬ grammers. The tools also modify your programs and can insert documentation as a part of each individual mod¬ ule header. C-Call documents the caller/called hierarchy of a group of programs. It creates graphic tree diagrams that show the flow structure. It also produces a table of con¬ tents of files versus modules, processes functions and macros with parameters, and generates cross-references of function definitions and usages. C-Ref analyzes and docu¬ ments the use of local/global parameter identifiers. It also produces summaries for indi¬ vidual modules for use in headers, and it produces a module- or system-level cross-reference of all identifi¬ ers, definitions, and usages. C-List analyzes and dis¬ plays the flow structure within modules. It will reformat a source program and produce structure outlines of the flow structure. C-Hdr uses outputs from C-List to generate and update module headers. The program runs on the IBM PC, XT, AT, and compat¬ ibles with DOS 2.0 or higher and 256K bytes of RAM. Price: $89. Contact: Software Black¬ smiths, Inc., 6064 St. Ives Way, Mississauga, Ontario, Canada L5N4M 1,(416) 858-4466. Inquiry 769. A Rascal for Pascal A Pascal compiler for $19.67? Rascal (rhymes with Pascal) supports a 64K- byte code and a 64K-byte data segment, performs floating¬ point arithmetic with an 8087, and produces a .COM file in two passes. The company re¬ ports that the compiler is ca¬ pable of compiling about 1000 lines per minute on an IBM PC and compares the object code produced to that of Turbo Pascal 4.0. Rascal features 30 opera¬ tors and 6 distinct classes. It also includes 156 standard procedures. The compiler rec¬ ognizes explicit register ref¬ erences through standard iden¬ tifiers, the company reports. It also recognizes explicit branches to labels, proce¬ dures, and functions. Source code for the code generator and library is in¬ cluded. You can compile the code generator with either Turbo Pascal 4.0 or Rascal. The Rascal-generated code is about 50 percent faster, ac¬ cording to the manufacturer. Price: $19.67. Contact: Eugene Nelson, 1009 Vilas, Suite 3, Madison, WI 53715,(608) 257-7588. Inquiry 771. Facelt Builds Menus I nstead of drawing a win¬ dow, typing in the text, and positioning it on-screen, Facelt automatically builds single windows and multi¬ menu systems from your data¬ base and ASCII files. It de¬ termines the window size based on the amount of text to be displayed. It also auto¬ matically positions the win¬ dow on-screen, configures the spacing between choices, and determines the correct number of columns. Virtual windowing and built-in scrolling are other fea¬ tures of Facelt. The program is compatible with dBASE III Plus, FoxBASE + , DBXL, Clipper, Quicksilver, and Bor¬ land and Microsoft lan¬ guages. Language-specific modules are contained within Facelt. It runs on PS/2s and compatibles. Price: $99. Contact: Black and White International, Inc., 23 West 88th Street, New York, NY 10024, (212) 787-6633. Inquiry 772. continued 78 BYTE* AUGUST 1988 Take a peek at Genoa’s new PCgra You've known Genoa as a developer of high performance graphics chips, and a leading manufacturer of graphics boards and tape backup. Soon you’ll be able to depend on us for all your PC graphics add-on hardware. Over the next year, we’ll be unwrap¬ ping a series of graphics products. Each is designed to give you the most reliable, yet innovative engineering features. And above all, the highest performance possible. Our SuperVGA HiRes family, featured here, is the first in our new product series. SuperVGA HiRes offers breathtaking color and resolution. From 16 colors in 1024x768. Up to 256 colors in 800x600. You’ll see more of your spreadsheets at once with SuperVGA HiRes. 132 columns and 60 rows. You’ll do Windows or OS/2. In fact, every SuperVGA HiRes feature is designed to turn your IBM PC/XT/AT and PS/2 models 25 and 30 into real graphics engines. Delivering SuperVGA HiRes™ now! ■ 100% IBM VGA compatible ■ Advanced features -1024x768 in 16 colors and 800x600 in 256 colors/Model 5200 -512x512 in 256 colors/Model 5100 ■ 132 columns text ■ For both analog and TTL displays If you’re looking for PC graphics add-ons, take a look at Genoa first. Our new line of products is starting delivery now! For the Genoa dealer nearest you or to add your name to our mailing list contact: Genoa Systems Corporation, 75 E. Trimble Road, San Jose, CA 95131 Fax: 408/434-0997. Telex: 172319. Or phone: 408/432-9090. In the UK, contact Genoa Systems Limited, phone 01-225-3247. In the Far East contact Genoa/Taiwan, phone: 2-776-3933. Circle 94 on Reader Service Card rags! Genoa SYSTEMS CORPORATION Delivering PC Graphics 408/432-9090 ® 1988 Genoa Systems Corporation. SuperVGA HiRes is a trademark ol Genoa Systems Corporation.Windows is a trademark of Microsoft, Inc. IBM PC/XT/AT, PS/2, and OS/2 are trademarks of International Business Machines. WHAT’S NEW SOFTWARE • SCIENTIFIC AND ENGINEERING Data Analysis All Over Your Screen D SP Development Corp. says the most difficult thing about DADiSP is pro¬ nouncing its name. It’s pro¬ nounced “Day-Disp,” and it stands for data analysis and digital signal processing. You use the program after you’ve acquired data from a variety of instruments. DADiSP 2.0 is a package that lets you import ASCII and binary single or multichannel data files into the database as a data set. The program has a menu-driven interface and lets you analyze your data graphically and numerically. The waveforms are represented in windows that are treated as cells in a spreadsheet. When you make a change to a wave¬ form in one window, the pro¬ gram makes the necessary alterations to others. The worksheet can hold up to 64 windows, with each of¬ fering graphics operations such as scrolling, zooming, expansion, compression, and cursor movement. The program has over 160 analysis routines, including signal arithmetic, signal cal¬ culus, waveform generation, Fourier analysis, frequency domain analysis, correlations, and trigonometric and statis¬ tical routines. DSP reports that the size of waveforms is un¬ limited, as the program pages large waveforms to and from your disk during calculations. DADiSP runs on the IBM PC, XT, AT, and compatibles as well as on Sun and other workstations. It runs under DOS, Unix, and OS/2, ac¬ cording to DSP. Price: DOS version, $795; Unix version, $2495. Contact: DSP Development Corp., One Kendall Sq., Cambridge, MA 02139, (617) 577-1133. Inquiry 773. Go Solo! S olo 101 is a statistical program that features fill- in-the-blank-type panels that give you your statistical- analysis options. If you need help knowing what to put into a panel, you move the cursor to the field and a help message pops up. With Solo you can calcu¬ late the mean, standard devi¬ ation, and percentiles, and you can generate frequency tables and cross-tabulations. The program also performs multiple regression with re¬ sidual analysis, stepwise re¬ gression, robust regression, weighted regression, and cor¬ relation analysis. You can store residuals, predicted values, confidence intervals, and other observation-type sta¬ tistics in Solo’s database. Forecasting techniques include trend analysis, single and double exponential smoothing, and seasonal adjustment. Analysis of variance proce¬ dures include general linear models, unweighted means, and repeated measures. Solo includes a data-entry spreadsheet, database utilities, data import, report writing, and transformation capabili¬ ties. With the spreadsheet editor, you can cut and paste sections of the database, ap¬ pend data to existing informa¬ tion, and reorder columns for easier data entry and viewing. The data-import facility lets you read and write ASCII files. You can also sort, merge, transpose, or make subsets of databases. A re¬ port writer also lets you output to a printer or ASCII file. The program runs on the IBM PC, XT, AT, and compat¬ ibles with DOS 2.1 or higher, 512K bytes of RAM, and a VGA, EGA, CGA, or Her¬ cules graphics card. Price: $149. Contact: BMDP Statistical Software, Inc., 1440 Sepul¬ veda Blvd., Los Angeles, CA 90025, (213) 479-7799. Inquiry 774. Preview AutoCAD Drawings W hether you’re using AutoCAD or not, you can pop out of whatever pro¬ gram you’re in and take a look at an AutoCAD (DWG) draw¬ ing with SoftWest Quick-See. Because it is a stand-alone program, you don’t need Auto¬ CAD to run it. The manufac¬ turer reports that it displays a drawing at close to AutoCAD Redraw speeds. SoftWest Quick-See runs on the IBM PC and compat¬ ibles with DOS 2.1 or higher, 256K bytes of RAM, and a Hercules monochrome display adapter, EGA, CGA, or VGA. A math coprocessor and a hard disk drive are not required. Price: $99. Contact: The Great SoftWestern Company, Inc., 207 West Hickory St., Suite 202, Denton, TX 76201, (800) 231-6880; in Texas, (817) 383-4434. Inquiry 775. continued AutoCAD on the Mac II A utoCAD Release 10 runs on the Mac II and adds three-dimensional wireframe construction and surface modeling capabili¬ ties, along with new drawing and editing features. These include user-defined coordi¬ nate systems, dynamic real¬ time zoom and three-dimen¬ sional rotation, and multiple view ports. Release 10 is data-file- compatible with MS-DOS and Unix versions of the pro¬ gram, so you can read and write drawing files inter¬ changeably between two dif¬ ferent machines. Price: $3000. Contact: Autodesk, 2320 Marinship Way, Sausalito, CA 94965, (415) 332-2344. Inquiry 776. 80 BYTE • AUGUST 1988 aHK NO OTHER DESKTOP PUBLISHING SYSTEM OFFERS THIS FEATURE With the new Mannes- mann Tally® Universal™ Publishing System, you can practically fly. Thanks to a Raster Image Processor board that plugs directly into your PC or compatible, you’ll process your pages at a speed lim¬ ited only by the speed of your computer. Not—as is typical—at the speed of the printer. And you’ll transfer ready-to-print data directly to the printer through a video interface at an incredible 3-million bits per second. So when you’re using the PostScript® compatible interpreter, you’ll produce a printed page almost twice as fast as most other systems. But that’s just ground speed. If you use Aldus® Page - Maker or Ventura Publisher,’“you’ll ■ Systems: 1. Universal Publishing System (includes a PostScript compatible interpreter and Docu¬ ment Description Language (DDL)) 2. DDL Publishing System (DDL only). ■ Resolution: 300 x 300 dpi. ■ Emulations: Both systems include HP® LaserJet. ■ Memory: 2 Mg. ■ Typefaces: UPS includes 35 typefaces, DDL System includes 22 typefaces. ■ Speed: 10 pages-per-minute. ■ Dual paper cassettes standard, 250 sheets each. ■ Dual output bins standard, 250 sheets each. ■ Manual feed handles single sheets, enve¬ lopes, transparencies, and labels. ■ Workload: 10,000 pages-per-month. really take off. Because when you select DDL instead of the PostScript compatible interpreter, you’ll double that speed again. And with full page bitmap graphics, you can get print¬ ed output up to 17 times as fast. So call the number below for the name of your nearest dealer and log in your time on the New Mannesmann Tally Universal Publishing System. A pilot’s license is not required. MANNESMANN r TA T TV 1 - 800 - 843-1347 Ext. 130 In Washington state, call: 206-251-5524 Ext. 130 Test results available upon request. PostScript is a registered trade¬ mark of Adobe Systems, Inc. DDL is a registered trademark of lmagen Corp. Ventura Publisher is a registered trademark of Ven¬ tura Corp. Pagemaker is a registered trademark of Aldus Corp. AUGUST 1988 -BYTE 81 Circle 135 on Reader Service Card (DEALERS: 136) Wm&. Introducing our newest family of 9-wire dot-matrix printers.The re-engineered MSP series ; featuring the latest advances in print technology. To begin with ; they’re 50% faster. In the draft printing mode ; the MSP-40 and 45 top out at 240 cps. And the MSP-50 and 55 have a maximum cruising speed of 300 cps. Each model features a new ; bidirectional print mechanism, that can generate brilliant graphics resolution. And the new MSP-50 and 55 can produce crisp, near-letter-quality print with even better throughput. We also made it easier to load the MSP series. The paper bale has been replaced with a built-in convert ible push or pull paper tractor. And the sleek new redesign 82 BYTE* AUGUST 1988 ■ . . OEI.UXIL DELUXE mm CITIZEN; now incorporates a rear or bottom feed. Real handy if you're printing labels, forms ; cards or stationery As for convenience, you’ll also appreciate the front panel controls ; the outstanding compatibility and the wide selection of typestyles via available font cards.There’s even color capa¬ bility on the deluxe MSP- 50 and 55. All in all, the MSP series, with an 18-month warranty represents an excellent value in precision-built printers.Which, considering Citizen's tradition, isn't all that new. For the dealer nearest you, call l-800-556-1234 ; Ext. 34. In California, call 1-800- » ^^iTT’iTryTPiivT ” 441-2345, Ext. 34. ^tl 1 1 ZlJ\ Citizen logo are trademarks o? Citizen Watch Co., Ltd. Printers that run like clockwork. Circle 266 on Reader Service Card AUGUST 1988 • BYTE 83 WHAT’S NEW Slideshow on the Desktop N ow you can create slides with access to 16.8 mil¬ lion colors on a Mac II to use in your desktop presentations. Microsoft has enhanced PowerPoint 2.0 with templates that have built-in color schemes, background effects, and fonts. Other added fea¬ tures include a spelling checker and a find-and- replace command. To take advantage of the preselected color schemes, you select a background color, and the program suggests con¬ trasting colors. If you merge slides into other presentations, you can choose different color schemes, with all ele¬ ments of the slide converting to the new color scheme. The spelling checker comes with a main dictionary that you can supplement with your own words. Word-pro¬ cessing features of the pro¬ gram include tabs and decimal tabs, variable line and para¬ graph spacing, and five out¬ line-like levels for bulleted copy points. The program also lets you import graphics from Mac- Point, PICT, and EPSE file formats. Using the Macintosh Clipboard, you can incorpo¬ rate graphics in any format, according to Microsoft. You can also incorporate black- and-white graphics and then color them. PowerPoint 2.0 runs on the Mac Plus, SE, or II running System 4.1 or higher with 1 megabyte of RAM and two 800K-byte floppy disk drives or a hard disk drive. The soft¬ ware is compatible with Ap¬ pleShare and MultiFinder. Price: $395. Contact: Microsoft Corp., 16011 Northeast 36th Way, P.O. Box 97017, Redmond, WA 98073, (206) 882-8080. Inquiry 777. SOFTWARE • BUSINESS Fleet Organization Christopher ii) Cohm'bm S/LN1A MARIA C. Columbus Captain -J. de laCosa Mas tar -P.Nino Pilot — (A crew of 38) - March H. f-t9t v 'KINA 5g V.Y. Pinzdn Captain " J. Nino Master — S.R. deGama Pitot mm. MA crew of 21) *— § ; B /V??*' Worki Exti'&diticn, piNta M.A. Pinz6n Captain F.M. Pinzdn Master C.G. Xalmiento Pitot (A crew of 24) Sample desktop presentation slide from PowerPoint 2. 0. Make Your Commodore 64/128 a Desktop Publisher C reate multiple-column page layouts on the Com¬ modore 64 and 128 (in 64 emulation) with PaperClip Publisher from Electronic Arts. You can create documents of up to 50 pages in length; manipulate text and graphics with ruler, margin, and col¬ umn guides; enlarge pages with the magnify mode; and resize boxes and have text flow between them. A text editor is included, and the font converter utility lets you convert fonts from popular word processors. You can also import text files from PaperClip II and other word processors. The built-in graphics edi¬ tor lets you import and edit graphics from other pro¬ grams. You can also choose from a variety of box back¬ grounds and outlines, and you can work on pages from 3 by 3 inches to 8 by 14 inches with as many columns as you want. PaperClip Publisher also supports a wide variety of printers. The program runs on the Commodore 64 and 128 with 64K bytes of RAM, a 1541 or 1571 floppy diskdrive, and a mouse or joystick. Price: $49.95. Contact: Electronic Arts, 1820 Gateway Dr., San Mateo, CA 94404, (415) 571-7171. Inquiry 778. 1-2-C Compiler C ompile 1-2-C converts your worksheets into C source code instead of BASIC. It also handles more than just Lotus files and will compile any .WKS files. Once your worksheets are compiled, you don’t need the original spreadsheet pro¬ gram, as the worksheets be¬ come stand-alone .EXE files. Compile 1-2-C, formerly known as LTS2C, runs on the IBM PC, XT, AT, and com¬ patibles with 640K bytes of RAM and a 1.5-megabyte hard disk drive. The program works with Lotus 1-2-3 re¬ leases 1A and 2.01 and works with all 1-2-3 commands ex¬ cept Graph and Window. The program is not copy¬ protected. Price: $299. Contact: Resource Analysis International Corp., 12581 Venice Blvd., Los Angeles, CA 90066, (213) 390-7661. Inquiry 779. A Helping Hand from Handi T he makers of Handi call it “information integra¬ tion software.” It’s one pro¬ gram that combines a database manager, word processor, calendar, scheduler with alarms, and report generator. You can run it as either a stand-alone or a memory-res¬ ident program. HandiBase is the database manager. Each database holds a maximum of 65,500 B-tree indexed records. Each record can contain up to 4090 bytes of structured and free-form data. Each database can sup¬ port up to 20 structured fields. HandiWord is a word pro¬ cessor that performs word wrap, text block manipula¬ tion, find/replace, cut/paste, import, export, and other test manipulation functions. It han¬ dles large documents of up to 60,000 characters. The program’s calendar module is called Handi- Scheduler, and it features an alarm that you can set to re¬ mind you of appointments or other events. When the alarm goes off, a small window pops up on the screen when you’re in other programs, and some text reminds you of why the alarm has gone off. HandiReport is the report generator, and it lets you print form letters, labels, business reports, invoices, and more. Handi runs on the IBM PC, XT, AT, and compatibles with DOS 2.1 or higher and 74K bytes of free RAM. Price: $49. Contact: HandiCorp, Inc., 17080 142nd Place NE, P.O. Box 1263, Woodinville, WA 98072,(800) 451-3496; in Washington, (206) 481-7026. Inquiry 780. continued 84 BYTE* AUGUST 1988 EmulateThe Best WithThe Brightest There’s no denying the availability of some outstanding dedicated terminals to access Digitalf Hewlett-Packard, and Data General® host systems. Which makes the task of precisely emulating the performance of those dedicated terminals on an IBM® PC or compatible a rather significant challenge. Based on the feedback we’ve received from Smarlerm® users, our family of terminal emulation software has met the challenge, passed every test, and surpassed, in the opinion of a host of enthusiastic users, the performance of the host system terminals being emulated. The reasons why we shine are fundamental. Every Smarlerm emulation is precise. So precise, in fact, that a dedicated terminal’s Smarlerm counterpart fully emulates not only advanced performance features but also unique terminal quirks and bugs. Every Smarlerm emulation is easy to use. It’s one thing to make software do what hardware does. It’s another challenge to minimize software’s human wear. The people designing our products understand the nature of the people using them. Every Smarlerm emulation is easy to learn. These days, training costs are a hot topic. Software intended to boost overall system efficiency must recognize the value of learning speed. We have. It’s also easy to learn more about how Smarlerm emulations can help you shine, lour software dealer can supply all the details. Or you can contact us at (608) 273-6000 to request complete specifications and a demonstration disk of the Smarlerm emulation that precisely matches your requirements. © 1988 Persoft, Inc., 465 Science Drive, Madison, Wisconsin 53711 U.S.A. Persoft and Smarlerm are registered trademarks of Persoft, Inc. All Rights Reserved. IBM is a registered trademark of International Business Machines Corporation. Digital is a registered trademark of Digital Equipment Corporation. Data General is a registered trademark of Data General Corporation. Circle 173 on Reader Service Card AUGUST 1988 -BYTE 85 WHAT’S NEW SOFTWARE •CONNECTIVITY 10-Net Software Offers OS/2 Support and More N etBIOS compatibility, electronic mail, en¬ hanced network software, and support for OS/2 are added to 10-Net Plus local- area-network (LAN) soft¬ ware. The E-mail package added is Network Courier from Consumers Software. It supports large mail net¬ works and has the ability to link various mail servers to¬ gether. It also features net¬ work-monitoring tools and a chat utility. lONet recently unbundled the software, making it available for IBM Token Ring and Ethernet systems. Applications written for pre¬ vious versions of 10-Net will run on 10-Net Plus, accord¬ ing to lONet Communica¬ tions. Price: $395 per node for IBM Token Ring version (unbundled). Contact: lONet Communi¬ cations, 7016 Corporate Way, Dayton, OH 45459, (513) 433-2238. Inquiry 782. Make Connections with Reunion R eunion software lets you access and process infor¬ mation between an IBM PC, an asynchronous host main¬ frame, and minicomputers. It provides two-way communica¬ tion between host computers and PC applications, terminal emulation, file transfer, multitasking, and program de¬ velopment. The program’s multitasking ability lets you run it in the background of other application programs, transferring files, sending mail, or retrieving host infor¬ mation, while you continue to use the application program in the foreground. The program is menu- driven and contains a dialing directory and help. To fur¬ ther simplify use of the pro¬ gram, you can redefine or re¬ map any key on your PC keyboard. You can also create macros with Reunion, automating repetitive tasks so that one keystroke can perform a series of commands. A Writer facility lets you create, modify, compile, and test scripts. It also imports any ASCII editor for use with¬ in Reunion. A Learn facility lets you automate communica¬ tions sessions, allowing you to alter scripts. The Connect facility offers a modular structure for connecting to host computers and informa¬ tion services. It also includes a dialing directory. Reunion’s application lan¬ guage, Resource, contains about 75 commands that let you read and write to PC files, initiate and control other PC applications, call other scripts as subroutines, and let the host computer initiate PC applications. Terminals emulated in¬ clude the IBM 3101 Character Mode; DEC VT-220, VT- 100, and VT-52; generic TTY; and PC7171 for protocol con¬ verters. Methods of file trans¬ fer include XMODEM and YMODEM, Kermit, Link- ware, and nonprotocol ASCII. To run Reunion you’ll need an IBM PC or PS/2 with DOS 2.0 or higher and at least 384K bytes of RAM, with at least 512K bytes needed for Link ware file transfers. You also need an asynchro¬ nous COM1 port, a COM2 port, or a Net/One network adapter, and a CGA, EGA, VGA, or IBM monochrome adapter. Price: $175. Contact: Westford Harbor Co., 288 Littleton Rd., POB 240, Westford, MA 01886, (617) 692-9440. Inquiry 781. Networking with DataEase D ataEase, a database management program, is now available in a network version. Applications you’ve developed with single-user DataEase can run on DataEase LAN with a single keystroke, the company reports. The LAN version provides three record-locking and two file-locking strategies for viewing and editing shared data. It also has a MultiView feature, which shows you multiple related files with one keystroke. With DataEase LAN 1.1, you can have 26 databases per directory, up to 255 files per database, and up to 255 reports per database. It also provides B-tree indexing, wild-card searches, and 99 predefined choice fields. You can import DataEase, Lotus, dBASE II and III, DIF, ASCII, and mail- merge files, and you can ex¬ port to Lotus, DIF, Multi- Mate, ASCII, mail-merge, and GrafTalk file formats. DataEase LAN 1.1 runs on the IBM PC, XT, AT, 3270 PC, PS/2s, and compatibles with at least 640K bytes of RAM. You also need an in¬ terface card supported by the DOS 3.1 network interface or Novell Netware 86 or 286 ver¬ sion 2.0a or higher. The database management program runs with Banyan VINES 2.1, 3Com EtherSeries and 3 + 1.2, IBM PC LAN 1.1, No¬ vell Netware 86/286 2.0a or higher, and the AT&T StarLAN. Price: $700; $900 for the Workstation pack, which pro¬ vides access for three addi¬ tional PCs. Contact: DataEase Interna¬ tional, Inc., 7 Cambridge Dr., Trumbull, CT 06611,(800) 243-5123; in Connecticut, (203) 374-8000. Inquiry 783. Macintosh E-Mail System M acintosh users can add the ability to communi¬ cate electronically over AppleTalk networks with QuickMail. This desk acces¬ sory offers an automatic log-in option, log-in/log-out, and password security. With QuickMail you can have real-time private or public conferences; you can also generate a transcript of the conferences. A public bulle¬ tin board is included, and you can invoke a privacy feature for a specified length of time. You can forward messages to other users, print them out, or save them to disk. You can also attach up to 16 files or clipboards per message and reply to or edit sent messages. The program works on networks with the Macintosh 512KE systems and higher with at least one hard disk drive. It is compatible with AppleShare, TOPS, and Mac- Serve networks. Price: $300 per 10 users. Contact: CE Software, 1854 Fuller Rd., West Des Moines, IA 50265, (515) 224-1995. Inquiry 784. continued 86 BYTE* AUGUST 1988 MORE AND MORE PEOPLE ARE SWITCHING TO MODULA-2 The successor of Pascal: JPI TopSpeed Modula-2 produces better code than Microsoft C, Turbo C, Logitech Modula-2, and Turbo Pascal 4.0. ‘JPI Modula-2 looks like another classic in the making. It gener¬ ates code as good as or better than leading C compilers and the programming environment is a genuine pleasure to use. At the price it’s a tremendous bargain, and with luck it just might do for Modula what Turbo has done for Pascal. ” Dick Pountain Byte Information Exchange short.takes conference 7 liked all of the hard-disk space that was recovered after I deleted my BORLAND, MICROSOFT i and LOGITECH compilers, because with TopSpeed Mod¬ ula-2 all the rest are obsolete. " Robert D. Randall Donnelley Marketing JPI TopSpeed Modula-2 is a professional Modula-2 development system with full support of memory models, multi-tasking, long data types, structured constants, long and short pointers, 80X87 inline code and emulator, sepa¬ rate compilation, direct BIOS/DOS calls, etc. The com¬ prehensive library includes CGA, EGA and VGA graphics support, math functions, sorting, file handling, window management, a time-sliced process scheduler and more. The Compiler Kit includes: High-speed optimizing compiler, integrated menu-driven environment with multi-window/multi-file editor, auto¬ matic make, fast smart linker. All Modula-2 sources to libraries included. BONUS: Complete high-speed window management module included with source. 258-page User’s Manual and 190-page Language Tutorial. The TechKit includes: Assembler source for start-up code and run-time library, JPI TopSpeed Assembler (30,000 lines/min), TSR module, communications driver, PROM locator, dynamic overlays, and tech¬ nical information. 72-page manual. System Requirements: IBM PC or compatible, 384K RAM, two floppy drives (hard disk recommended). Circle 115 on Reader Service Card TopSpeed's seamlessly integrated environment. TopSpeed's seamlessly integrated environment. VID, the Visual Interface Debugger, coming soon. Sieve benchmark measured by the British Standards Institution (BSI)—25 iterations on an 8MHz AT. Compiler Kit $99.95. TechKit $59.95. To Order: In the US & Canada, call: 1-800-443-0100 Ext 255,24 Hours. Or mail us your order with a check, money order, or VISA/MC information. 30-day unconditional money-back guarantee. Shipping & handling charges: In North America: Add $5.00 ship¬ ping & handling, plus $2.00 for each additional product. Overseas: Add $20.00 shipping & handling, plus $8.00 for each additional product. Jensen & Partners International 1101 San Antonio Rd, Suite 301 Mountain View CA 94043 Phone:(415)967-3200 In England and Europe contact: Jensen & Partners UK Ltd., 63 Clerkenwell Rd., London EC1M 5NP. Phone: (01) 253-4333. Compiler Kit £59.95, (add £4.69 for VAT & handling in the UK; £4.00 handling in Europe). Tech¬ Kit £34.95 (add £4.03 for VAT & handling in the UK; £4.00 hand¬ ling in Europe). TopSpeed is a trademark of Jensen & Partners International. Other brand and product names are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective holders. WHAT’S NEW SOFTWARE • OTHER r u An illustration created with Flamingo’s Logo Editor. "A- PRIG INl B-POINT C-POINT X-POINT Y-POINT 2-POINT QUIT Set ORIGIN from keyboard MAP COORDINATE VALUES (Insert from keyboard) A. ORIGIN: , POINT B: 0.000 EAST C, POINT C: I 3.000 _11_ 4.000 | TABLET COORDINATES (Digitize these values) X, ORIGIN: I 5565.000 NORTH 11 14425.000 EAST | ' POINT Y: 6690.000 POINT 2: 10710.000 HotDij matches digitizer data to other programs. Design Your Own Logo U sing an IBM PC with a Truevision TARGA or VISTA graphics board and Flamingo’s Logo Editor, you can create logos and illustrations. The object-oriented draw¬ ing program lets you trace or create illustrations with smooth antialiased edges. The Logo Editor comes with ob¬ ject types such as curves, ovals, arcs, circles, lines, rectangles, irregular polygons, and text. You can choose ob¬ jects from pop-up menus and manipulate them with a mouse or graphics tablet. You can also group, ungroup, ro¬ tate, flip, move, copy, scale, stretch, delete, and undelete objects. You can edit the text that comes with the cubic spline outline definitions and incor¬ porate the text into your logos. Eight outline fonts are provided. Layout tools include flat, gradient, or TARGA image background styles; and grids, resident color palettes, and color creation models. You can render your work on¬ screen through an antialias¬ ing process that smooths the curves and lines. You can also store your designs as logos or as fonts. Logo files are read back into the Logo Editor and printed onto any TARGA image file. Font files are com¬ patible with Flamingo Graphics’ RIO. Logo Editor runs on the IBM PC AT and compatibles with at least 640K bytes of RAM and a 10-megabyte hard disk drive. You also need a TARGA frame buffer and an analog RGB or composite monitor. The company also recommends Expanded Memory Specification mem¬ ory and a math coprocessor. Price: $895. Contact: Flamingo Graphics, 875 Main St., Cambridge, MA 02139, (617) 661-1001. Inquiry 785. Digitize Me P lace data from a digi¬ tizer tablet directly into your word processor, spread¬ sheet, or other programs with HotDij, a memory-resident utility. HotDij contains prepro¬ grammed control characters to match the digitizer data to your other programs. You can also define up to four addi¬ tional sets of control charac¬ ters. The program adds con¬ trol characters to enter the data into columns on the monitor. It adjusts for drawing scale and corrects for drawing place¬ ment errors. HotDij keeps track of changes in scale or drawing location, as well as the application in use. Whenever you reboot, HotDij remembers your previous application and sets up for it. The program allows for keyboard input and accepts ASCII input to the digitizer. HotDij is menu-driven. It also offers you a selection of 34 predefined digitizer inter¬ faces. When you install the program, you must match the report format of the digitizer tablet to your computer. Designed to run on the IBM PC and compatibles, you’ll need at least 64K bytes of free RAM and an asynchro¬ nous communications port. The program comes with a wiring adapter to connect your system with a digitizer. Geocomp reports that the program works with any digi¬ tizer that sends ASCII. Price: $335. Contact: Geocomp Ltd., 749 Van Gordon Court, Golden, CO 80401, (303) 233-1250. Inquiry 786. Perk Up Your Output i f your standard 9-pin dot¬ matrix printer produces dull-looking output, The Image Printing Utilities may be able to help. The program achieves higher-quality output by making three print passes over each line, with a different pattern of dots each time. The dot density is 216 dots per inch vertically by 240 dpi horizontally. The program includes 16 fonts, and all except the Graphics font include the en¬ tire character set of an IBM Graphics Printer. The program takes up 35K bytes of RAM for each font loaded. It runs on the IBM PC and compatibles with DOS 2.0 or higher and at least 128K bytes of RAM. Price: $89.95. Contact: Image Computer Systems, P.O. Box 647, Avon, CT 06001, (203) 678-8771. Inquiry 787. 88 BYTE* AUGUST 1988 RIX Sof 1 Works,lnc l*J: hlr (tfit lir*j I*** lr*i' Vr^fcic *t aiipishm r-iia*. >w * Xj.i«V» hvwilk PS II Model 25 Mono/Color.. $969/1195 PS II M.25 Mono/Color + 20MB$1395/1650 PS II Model 30 2DR. + 20MB **$1595** PS II Model 30-002/021 .... $1195/1645 PS II Model 50-021 . **$2395 PS II Model 60-44MB/70MB. 1 *$3195/3595* **PS II Model 80-115 20MHZ $6095** PS II Model 80-44MB/70MB. 1 **$3995/4695 AT 339 (8MHZ, 512K, 30MB) In Stock AT 068 (6MHZ, 256K). .$2395 PC/XT 2DR. 256K. $995/1195 Mono. Disp. 8503/XT Style .. $189/225 Color Display 8512 . $439 EGA Disp. 8513/XT Style .... $495/595 Ext. Drive F/PS2 (5V 4 ) . $285 Pro Printer ll/XL. $349/505* Pro Printer X24/XL24. *$519/675 Quit Writer ll/lll. $865/1095* IBM DOS 3.3 (min. 5). .$85 NEW IBM 50 & 70 s IN STOCK. *Quantity Discount Available* ($? Seagate SEAGATE HARD DRIVES 20MB/30MB W/Controller.... $259/289 30MB/40MB (4038/4051) .... $385/450 40MB (ST251)/40MB (4053).. *$349/449 80MB (4096)/80MB (277R) .. *$649/445 MINISCRIBE 40MB (3650)/40MB (3053) .. . . *319/535 40MB (6053) Full Height. .495 80MB Full Height (6085). .679 HARD CARDS 20MB/30MB for XT . 345/399 40MB Card F/XT 40MSC. .499 20MB/30MB For PS/2. 399/435 MISCELLANEOUS COMPAQ 300MB HD. 2995 COMPAQ Portable 20MB. .495 COMPAQ 40/60MB F/DP386.. . 745/895 10/20MB IBM Hard Disk. 145/195 130MB Compaq Hard Disk ... 1695 comma.® DESKPRO MODELS 386/20 MHZ 60 MB HD. 4995** 386/20 MHZ 130 MB HD. 6395** **386/20 MHZ 300 MB HD .... 7995** 386 40MB 16MHZ Factory .... .3895 386 130MB 16MHZ Factory ... 5495 286 Model 1 . 1595 286 640K, 20MB/40MB HD ... 2095/2295 286 Model 40 (Factory) . 2695 Deskpro 2DR. 256K/20MB .... 1095/1395 PORTABLES **New Portable 386/40MB .... *5395 **New Portable 386/100MB ... 6699 II Model 4 (Factory/Upgrade).. 2595/2395 II Model 2 2DR., 256K (80286) .1895 ***111 Model 40MB**. 3895 ***111 Model 20MB**. .3375 Compaq Amber/Green Monitor. 195 Compaq Color/VGA Monitor... 525/555 Compaq EGA/VGA Adapter ... 325/399 C. DOS 3.3/3.2/3.1. 89/79/59 Call on Memory and Other Compaq Products **Quantity Discounts Available** Dealers & Consultants Only Corporate & Retail Customers Call For Quotes i NTEL ■ IRWIN TAPE BACK UP 8087-3 XT/80287-6 AT.**$99/160 8087-2 XT/80287-8 AT.$145/249 80287-10 AT 10MHZ .$289 80387-16 for 80386 .$455 80387-20 Base Systems .$725 OKIDATA 182/182S 120CPS, 30nlq ... .$239/279 192 + /193 + 200CPS, 40nlq .$329/419 292E/293E 200cps, lOOnlq . .$359/489 393/393 Color 450 cps ... .$945/1029 ML294/ML2410.$737/1695 Lazer Line 6.$1299 10 MB. Inter./External.$255/379 20 MB. Inter./External .$299/399 40 MB. Inter./External.$379/535 Call for PS/2 Tape Back Up Units Call for Archive, Tecmar, Sysgen TOSHIBA 321SL/341SL (216CPS).$465/645 351-SX/351-2 Color.$995/1019 Toshiba T1000/T1100.$749/1450 T1200/T3120.$2295/2950 T3200/T5100.$3595/4495 Toshiba Modem/Compatible .. $279/249 HEWLETT PACKARD Laser Series II .Very Low *Desk Jet New 250 CPS.$669 1MB F/HP II Compat/HP ... $329/369 2MB F/HP II Compat/HP ... $629/669 HP Plotter 7475A.$1395 HP Scanjet Scanner w/lnt.*$1195 Multispeed EL/HD.$1455/2299 Multisync ll/Plus+.$579/875 Multisync XL 20+.$1995 LC860 + /LC890 .$1899/3195 P760/P2200.$599/333 *** "LOTUS 1-2-3 - $289 D-DATA *** *** 4742 Woodman Avenue Sherman Oaks, CA. 91423 (818) 905-0994, (213) 859-3410 FAX ft (818) 905-8869 American l.xprcss Visa MasterCard LOTUS SYMPHONY Vk" - $259 One stop shopping for dealers & consultants STB MULT/F CARD (OK).$49 MODEM 1200/2400 BAUD. .$69/95 DC 1000 TAPES.$7 IBM MONO/CLR/EGA .$79/145/325 INTEL 8087-3 .$79 INTERDYNE T.B.U. 10/20MB $75/95 THERE WILL BE A CHARGE ON ALL CREDIT CARD PURCHASES. UP TO 2% DISCOUNT ON PREPAYMENT. 88PC-14 BYTE* AUGUST 1988 Circle 413 on Reader Service Card UPS SYSTEMS HEADQUARTERS 800 - 941-8126 DATA TRANSFER SWITCHES 41 AB SERIAL AB PARALLEL ABCD SERIAL ABCD PARALLEL AB CROSSOVER ABCD DB9 TYPE $27.50 $28.50 $39.50 $42.50 $39.50 $43.50 ISOLATING LINE STRIPS SURGE & RF NOISE SUPPRESION BAR 6- 6 OUTLETS ,7^... . W/ 6' FT. CORD ( 12 @ 14.50 24 @12.25 1 $19.95 ua'l THE PERFECT UPS by f f mnr'n $999. RETAIL $060. DEALER VIP EXECUTIVE 4QQ SUPPORTS 2 AT or 3 XT SYSTEMS Tiue On-Line UPS designed for micro and mini power supplies. SINEWAVE output. Fits between CPU and CRT Only 20 Lbs. Size 1.9"H.x 15.8 M Wx15” NEW KNAP CO UPS SYSTEMS Ez UPS THIN-LINE - Ex-I/PS nm tINI iBBB [HER B 2.2" IIIGH 24-28 LBS. RS-232 PORT FOR NOVELL 200% Hi.INRUSH CAPACITY - SURGE. RIT. EMI. PROTECTION. TOUE ON-LINE SINEWAVE *1% 525 / lOOOVa. LIST DEALER UPSC 525 $995. $645. UPSC1001 $1595. $1045. TOSHIBA TOSNIC TRUE MICRO-1100 ON-LINE UPS SYSTEMS SELF CONTAINED GELL - CELL BATTERIES NEW SMALL PROFILE LIST DEALER 500 VA. 750 VA. 1 K VA. K VA. K VA. K VA. 2 3 5 $1499. $1899. $2299. $3999. $6599. $9379. $1199. $1425. $1724. $3199. $5279. $7499. AND LARGER MODELS CALL TOLL FREE 1-800-541-8126 OR 813-449-0019 FAX 813-449-0701 :imapco Knapco UPS Systems RELIABLE COMPUTER BACKUP FOR 40 YEARS factor* °i B 0 H CT UNINTERRUPTIBLE IT WORKS.. POUJtR SOURCE UPSC 200+ 200 WATT $249. RETAIL $499. UPSC 350 350 WATT $279. RETAIL $799. UPSC 550 550 WATT $379. RETAIL $899. UPSC 800 800 WATT $599. RETAIL $999. UPSC 1000 WATT $699. RETAIL $ 1250 . « EUROPEAN DESIGNED UPS ** U 'f' A "OPTION 220v. 50Hz. UPSE 200 $ 359 . Modified Wave Form output 220V. sohz. upse 350 $399. 2 Ms. Transfer Time oriisv.mhz. upse sso $499. RFI And Spike Protection upseiooo $799. All Models w/ Internal Gell Cells, Unconditional 1 Year Warranty 4 Outlets, Brown-Out, Black-Out Protection © SHAPE LINE TAMER FERRO POWER CONDITIONER / , Surge suppressors / IEEE Standard 587 Rejection 120/60dB. I 4 Outlets,6ft. Cord / Regulation *3% Dealer 150 Va. 300 Va. 450 Va. 600 Va. lOOOVa. 1200 Va. jgu Retail $139. $199. $259. $299. $489. $549. $ 99. $149. $197. $225. $349. $439. r PERM A POWER for computers^ ond STANDBY POWER SYSTEM peripherals UPS-equivalent protection at a fraction of the cost Guard data and equipment from errors and damage caused by power line problems Responds in under 1 millisecond to blackout, over¬ voltages, undervoltages, power fluctuations, to provide stable 120V power Built-m surge suppressor easily handles the abuse of repetitive surges Filters out RFI/EMI noise • UL listed Automatic overload sensor Phase-synchronized transfer and automatic reset IMPORT VOLTAGE REGULATORS TVR500 TVR1000 TVR2000 TVR3000 $129. $199. $295. $395. INPUT RANGE 85-135V. EMI-RFI + SURGE EURO-TRANSFORMERS STEP UP/DOWN 110v.-220v. 300 WATT $ 39 500 WATT $ 59 1300 WATT $ 85 *2000 WATT $125 *3000 WATT $215 ‘Select Voltage 100/110/120v. ^^^^/Down^^OO/BBOy^O^ SPS-500 LIST $799 DEALER $549. ODEM SPIKE PROTECTORS msp-i$ 12.25 ^11;°% QUANTITY PRICING AVAILABLE UPS SYSTEMS ADD $15. MINIMUM FOR PACKING & SHIPPING AMERICAN POWER CONVERSION RETAIL DEALER 330 XT $399. $259. LOW COST UPS PROTECTION FOR NETWORK STATIONS 450 AT $599. $389. AT TYPE SERVERS, 3 COMSERVERS, AND CAD STATIONS 520 ES $699. $449. FOR SFT LEVEL 2 AND VINES FILE SERVERS RS 232 PORT 800 RT $1099. $709. LARGE FILE SERVERS WITH MULTIPLE HARD DRIVES 1200 VX $1399. $905. I A M'c Roof fi-ipnrl FOR MULTIPLE PC’S OR VERY LONG BACKUP TIME LAIN S Debl men a 1t0 2 Ms. transfer time, compact, quality engineered, . runs diagnostics, RS232 port, prevents surges, sags, spikes, noise & interference © H.J. KNAPP of FLORIDA, INC. 1201 HAMLET AYE. CLEARWATER, FLORIDA 34616 Circle 415 on Reader Service Card AUGUST 1988 -BYTE 88PC-15 ARCHITECTURE FOR THE 90'S SHAPE OF THE FUTURE THE SYSTEM 386/20 3 wait states. (16 Features • Fully compatible with the IBM" PC/AT™ • Intel-' 80386 microprocessor, running at speeds ol 20, 10, 6.7 MHz with and 8 MHz on the 386/16) • Speed-selectable by keyboard, software or front-panel switch • The bus operates at 10 or 6.7 MHz • The machine uses write back cache memory (64K, 128K or 256K of 25 ns static RAM) • Socket for an 80387 math coprocessor option, running synchronously at 20, 10 or 6.7 MHz. (16 and 8 MHz on the 386/16) • 1 Megabyte DRAM expandable to 8 Megabytes on the system board (120 ns DRAMs, 256 Kb or 1 Mb) • Front panel LEDs for power-on, disk access and speed indication • Alpha-numeric realtime diagnostic display (8-digit) • 1.2 MB floppy diskette drive • Six 16-bit and two 8-bit bus expansion slots • One 32-bit memory expansion slot • Special Everex very high performance (1:1 interleave) hard disk/floppy combination controller • Front access to up 6 to 5 half-height mass storage devices • Enhanced 101-key keyboard • System clock/calendar/configuration data in CMOS RAM with battery backup • Everex enhanced BIOS • Easy-to-use SETUP utility in ROM, supports over 45 drive types • BIOS supports 3.5" 7270K diskette drives • Front panel keylock to disable keyboard • Front access reset switch • Speaker enable/disable switch • Complete, easy to follow user manual • UL listed power supply; switchable 120240 VAC • 13 months on-site warranty • 1 serial and 1 parallel port COMPATIBILITY TESTING RESULTS The Everex System 386 has been evaluated by XXCAL, an independent third-party testing house. The test objective, as stated in XXCALs report of February 16. 1988. was "to reveal any problems or inconsistencies relative to a selected group of ofi-the-shelf commercial software, networks, and peripheral product^" on the Everex System 386. XXCAL's technicians "installed each application per documentation...[then| tested all functions, commands, and options directly related to a successful and thorough test of the product." ,y COMPETITIVE BENCHMARK TESTING RESULTS Based on in house testing. Everex Compute! has compiled the lollowing benchmark test i ■ Systems Division results: Computer System MIPS Landmarc S. Aa-.-ar.cea Ev.ru St.p 386- 20 4.81 35.0 24.3 Compaq Dcskpro 166 20 4.59 345 242 Ev.ru St.p 388/16 3.93 27.3 19.5 Ev.ru St.p 288/16 3.27 21.4 18.4 AST Premium 386 20 3-04 20.0 2.0 Wyse 386-16 2.98 20.6 176 Acer 38616 299 20 6 16 2 Compaq Dcskpro 386 16 2.90 20.0 ::.£ IBM PS 2 Model 80. 16MHz 287 200 Ev.ru St.p 286/12 2.45 15.9 13.7 AST Premium 286 10 Compaq Dcskpro 286 12 769 IBM PS 2 Models 5C. 60 ..56 96 38 IBM PC AT BMHz 0.93 8.0 77 b* USA With a 3F 286 or 386 computer, you can do desktop publishing, word processing, process control, networking, database applications, accounting spreadsheets, inventory control, circuit design, computer aided design engineering and manufac¬ turing, and architectural design —the list goes on! These computers will also run with OS/2, MS OS/2, Lotus 123. Dbase III, Unix. Xenix, Informix, AutoCAD. Smarttalk, Q&A, Sidekick, Gem, Turbo Pascal, Multimate, Word, WordPerfect, Wordstar, Ventura, Novell Netware 286, IRMA board. Modems, Bernoulli boxes. Network Cards OTHER EVEREX COMPUTERS 3F 286 System • 80286 CPU • 6/8/10 Keyboard • 1.2MB Floppy Selectable • 512K Memory • 195 Watt Power Supply • 101 Keyboard • Optional 80287 Socket • FL/HD Controller • FCC UL Approved 8MHz T Wait State 80286 Mono System.$990 10MHz T Wait State 80286 Mono System.$1239 10MHz *0' Wait State 80286 Mono System.$1339 12MHz ’O' Wait State 80286 Mono System.$1575 For an EGA System.add $350 3F 386 System • 80386 CPU • FL/HD Controller • 1.2MB Floppy • 64K Cache • 1MB Memory • 16MHz CPU '0' Wait State • 101 Keyboard • 195 Watt Power Supply 16MHz '0' Wait Stale 80386 Mono System.$1975 For an EGA System.$2299 Hard Disk add on for above Systems: 20MB 65ms .$249 40MB 39ms.$399 80MB 28ms.$710 144MB 16.5ms.$1995 PRICES AND AVAILABILITY SUBJECT TO CHANGE WITHOUT NOTICE. Coll Us For Full Line of EVEREX Peripheral Products. We Also Cany Hard/Floppy Drives, Monitors, Printers, Motherboards and All Major Software. 3F 3F Associates, Inc. 44100 Old Warm Springs Fremont, CA 94538 (415) 659-0403 FAX (415) 651-9190 88PC-16 BYTE* AUGUST 1988 Circle 409 on Reader Service Card Short Takes BYTE editors offer hands-on views of new products Dell System 220 T-DebugPLUS4.0 Z88 Portable Grammatik III Watcom C 6.0 Paradox OS/2 Dell Machine Sets 80286 Speed Records THE FACTS Y ou can sum up the new Dell System 220 in three words: small, powerful, and affordable. The new unit is one of the smallest desktop systems around, as well as the fastest 80286-based system available. And at $1799, including a video graphics array (VGA) monochrome monitor, it is easily the best million-instructions-per-sec- ond-per-dollar value on the market. The new system owes its prowess to a new 20-MHz CMOS 80286 processor, cur¬ rently available only from Harris, and a high-speed chip- set from Chips & Technol¬ ogies that saves plenty of board space. The System 220’s small size—it takes up about as much space as a briefcase- can be misleading. Inside, there are three IBM PC AT- -compatible expansion slots, laid horizontally front to back. There are also sockets for up to 8 megabytes of fast 80-nano¬ second memory, a socket for an 80287 math coprocessor, two serial ports and a printer port, and space for a number Dell System 220 $1799 with one floppy disk drive and VGA monochrome monitor; $1999 with color monitor; $2699 with 40-megabyte hard disk drive and color VGA monitor Options: MS-DOS 3.3 with cache and disk utilities, $119.95. 1 megabyte of RAM, $500. 100-megabyte drive, $1700. Dell Computer Corp. 9505 Arboretum Blvd. Austin, TX 78759 (512)338-4400 Inquiry 851. begin if (c in UpperCaso) then LoCase : = Chr(0rdtc)*32) else LoCase •= cl end; {LoCase) 36 LoCase := cl 37 end; {LoCase} 38 39 begin 40 for 1 := 1 to Lcngth(line) do begin 41 newuord (linelPred(i)l in UordDelie) {or (i = 1)>: 42 if newuord then A:\EXAHPLE.PAS 1 $S8FF:$3DEE newuord False 2 $58FF:$3DEF i $01 08000001 'A* 3 $S8C4:$014H nunberoftines $8806 0880H880 08< Watch Break at : EXAMPLE.PASS40 $5791:$806B • e line $58TF:$3DF8 'byte nagaxine' • g 42 Break at ; EXAMPLE. PASN42 $S79l:$88BC • w newuord • w i « u nunberoftines J of hard disk options. My preproduction unit came with a lively 29-milli¬ second 40-megabyte hard disk drive and two 1.44-megabyte floppy disk drives. Inside was an 80287 and a megabyte of memory. The system also came with a Mitsubishi color VGA monitor. In normal use, the Dell System 220 seemed immensely faster than my usual 6-MHz AT clone with a 20-megabyte drive. Also, both the floppy and the hard disk drives on the 220 were surprisingly quiet. My im¬ pression of the 220’s speed was backed up by our bench¬ marks, which rated the 220 at about 1 percent faster than an IBM Model 80. With all its features, the only thing the 220 might pos¬ sibly lack is an 80386 proces¬ sor. This could become a fac¬ tor in the future, when an 80386 with a 32-bit memory bus might be required for cer¬ tain high-performance soft¬ ware. But the 220 also lacks an 80386 machine’s high price tag. And for the foreseeable future, the 220 will probably be the best number-crunching bargain on the market. —Rich Malloy Squash Those Bugs W henever you write a pro- gram that does more than print “Hello World” on the screen, you’re likely to run into bugs. When you have to squash those bugs, a good symbolic debugger like T-DebugPLUS 4.0 for Turbo Pascal 4.0 can make your life much easier. Add-on programs for the Turbo Pascal environment have always found themselves continued AUGUST 1988 -BYTE 89 SHORT TAKES in something of a quandary, since one of the main strengths of Turbo Pascal is its in¬ tegrated set of editing, de¬ velopment, and debugging tools. To convince users to turn away from one of the Turbo tools, a product has to be pretty impressive. I think this debugger could turn a few heads. T-DebugPLUS begins by offering features found in most symbolic debuggers. You can examine and alter variables using the names you gave them (instead of ad¬ dresses), set permanent and conditional breakpoints, set watchpoints, and single- or multiple-step through a pro¬ gram. In addition, T-Debug¬ PLUS lets you open watch win¬ dows on up to 8 variables at a time (12 at a time with EGA or VGA graphics), switch be¬ tween debug and output screens, switch between source code and assembly code views, and make use of expanded memory specifica¬ tion or extended memory to debug larger programs. The instruction set in T- DebugPLUS is mnemonic to a good extent, and commands can be chained together in macros. Both when I worked through the example code pro¬ vided with the package and when I used it on larger pro¬ grams, I found that the fea¬ tures of the package were easy to learn and use, so that I was able to really use the software after a short time. T-DebugPLUS comes with an installation program that patches TPC.EXE, TPMAP.EXE, and TURB0.EXE so that all will support local symbols. The patched versions of the pro¬ grams create TPU and TPM files that are twice as large as those created by unpatched versions, but are otherwise compatible with normal Turbo Pascal files. Using T-DebugPLUS is a simple matter. You compile your code to an. EXE file, using the /$T+ command-line option of TPC.EXE or by setting the “Turbo Pascal map file” op¬ tion to On in TURB0.EXE. After compilation, you must exit to DOS and run T- DebugPLUS as a separate pro¬ gram to debug your code. This marks a change from earlier versions of T-Debug, which ran as a part of the integrated Turbo Pascal environment. According to TurboPower Software, the change was made because of the increased memory requirements of Turbo Pascal 4.0. Though the new version of T-DebugPLUS does not fit into the Turbo environment as seamlessly as older versions, 1 found it to be a valuable, easy- to-use tool in debugging pro¬ grams. Given the price and utility of the package, the slight increase in inconve¬ nience is most forgivable. —Curtis Franklin Jr. THE FACTS T-DebugPLUS 4.0 $45; with source code, $90. Requirements: IBM PC, XT, AT, PS/2, or compatible with at least 256K bytes of RAM. TurboPower Software P.O. Box 66747 Scotts Valley, CA 95066 (415) 322-3417 Inquiry 852. A Z88 Portable to Go T he Cambridge Com¬ puter Z88 is a laptop por¬ table that weighs less than 2 pounds and is scarcely larger than a copy of BYTE. Achiev¬ ing this compact size involved compromises: the Z88 has no disk drives but uses RAM for mass storage; it has only an 8- line liquid crystal display rather than a 25-line one; and it’s not IBM PC-compatible but comes with a complete suite of applications software in ROM, like the Tandy Model 100 . The processor is a CMOS Z80 with 32K bytes of internal RAM and 128K bytes of ROM. The 9-pin serial port works at speeds up to 38,400 bps. Power is supplied by four Walkman-size disposable dry cells that last about 20 hours. There are three slots at the front for memory cartridges. My test machine came with 128K bytes of extra RAM and 128K bytes of EPROM. A built-in PROM programmer lets you use the EPROM as Cambridge Computer Z88 Portable Computer $549.00 SSI Computer System Inc. 424 Cumberland Ave. Portland, ME 04101 (207)761-3700 Inquiry 853. Options: 32K-byte EPROM cartridge, $45; 128K-byte RAM or EPROM cartridge, $110; PC Link software and cable, $75; serial printer cable, $14; parallel printer cable, $65; modem, $225. nonvolatile, write-once mem¬ ory for semipermanent data like address lists; an optional ultraviolet eraser lets you re¬ use EPROM packs. 512K-byte RAM cartridges will be ship¬ ping soon, allowing up to 1.5 megabytes of RAM. The com¬ pany is also promising 1- megabyte cartridges soon. The keyboard is molded from a single sheet of black rubber and looks like a choco¬ late bar. Recent history has given rubber keyboards a bad name, but this one is different. It has a surprisingly positive action, and you can quickly begin to touch-type on it. The 64-key layout is of standard typewriter pitch, with a full- size space bar and four cursor keys. The display is a supertwist LCD with dark blue charac¬ ters on pale yellow. It shows 8 lines of 100 characters; the middle 80 are used for text, and each side is reserved for menus and indicators. It’s deeply recessed to avoid dam¬ age, and the top edge throws a shadow that hinders viewing in some lightings. continued 90 BYTE- AUGUST 1988 STATGRAPHICS INCOME VS SAVINGS ANALYSIS VIA INTERACTIVE OUTLIER REGRESSION JAPAN r. 1 7 gZAMBIA q DENMARK - d d c£ d ° " d GERMANY _— ; ° n CANADA -U.S.A. □ D " j. % a u a D CHILE SWEDEN BO: 8.304 SE: 1.1173 T: 7.4321 Bl: 1.0655E-3 SE: 7.4902E-4 T: 1.4225 CORR: 0.24036 MSE: 20.691 DF: 33 POINTS DELETED: "Hr V4 INCOME VS SAVINGS ANALYSIS VIA INTERACTIVE OUTLIER REGRESSION 0 1000 2000 3000 4000 DISPOSABLE INCOME BO: 7.1962 SE: 1.1736 T: 6.1319 Bl: 2.7801E-3 SE: 1.0234E-3 T: 2.7166 CORR: 0.44433 MSE: 19.147 DF: 30 POINTS DELETED: CANADA, SWEDEN, U.S.A Select the points you want to remove from your ... Then press F6 to refit the model and regression model... recalculate the statistics. Because “Statistical Graphics” Is Better Than Just Statistics and Graphics Most of today’s PC statistical packages give you all the statistics you’ll ever need. Some even give you a few graphics. But only STATGRAPHICS from STSC gives you integrated statistical graphics in an environment you control. Unique “What If” Interactivity STATGRAPHICS lets you explore data relationships fully, producing higher quality, more timely solutions. Define your data and assumptions, run the procedure and review the results, modify data and assumptions repeatedly and take another look—and another. All without leaving the procedure or making permanent changes to your data. Integrated Statistical Graphics Coupled with STATGRAPHICS’ interactive environment are over 50 types of graphs—traditional pie and bar charts, histograms, 3-D line and surface plots, quality control charts, and more. All are integrated with the procedures so that they can be displayed instantly and modified repeatedly. Query data points, do on-screen forecasting and model fitting, overlay graphs, or zoom-in on any area for a closer look. With flexibility like that, you can spot and investigate visual trends in your data—trends you may have missed if you looked only at the numbers. A wide variety of graphs supported on over 100 displays, printers and plotters, including the new IBM PS/2™ Series. Over 250 Statistical Procedures • Direct Lotus® and dBASE® interfaces • ANOVA and regression analysis • Experimental design • Quality control procedures • Multivariate techniques • Nonparametric methods • Exploratory data analysis • Forecasting, time series analysis, and more. STATGRAPHICS— The Best Way to Do Statistics! Put the power of STATGRAPHICS to work for you today—all for only $895*. For our free convincer kit or the name of a dealer near you, call (800) 592-0050 ext. 400 In Maryland, (301) 984-5123; Internationally, (301) 984-5412. Telex 898085 STSC ROVE STSC, Inc. 2115 East Jefferson Street Rockville, Maryland 20852 •Suggested retail price in U.S. and Canada. International prices vary. Available through dealers and distributors worldwide. STATGRAPHICS, Lotus, and dBASE are registered trademarks of Statistical Graphics Corporation, Lotus Development Corporation, and AshtonTate, respectively. Circle 226 on Reader Service Card AUGUST 1988 -BYTE 91 SHORT TAKES All the software, alignment diskettes, parallel/serial wrap-around plugs, ROM POSTs and extensive, professional documentation to provide the most comprehensive testing available for IBM PCs, XTs.ATs and all compatibles under DOS or Stand Alone. No other diagnostics offers such in-depth testing on as many different types of equipment by isolating problems to the board and chip level. NEW: SuperSoft’s ROM POST performs the most advanced Power-on-Self-Test available for system boards that are compatible with the IBM ROM BIOS. It works even in circumstances when the Service Diagnostics diskette cannot be loaded. NEW: 386 diagnostics for hybrids and PS/2s! For over nine years, major manufacturers have been relying on SuperSoft’s diagnostics software to help them and their customers repair microcomputers. End users have been relying on SuperSoft’s Diagnostics II for the most thorough hardware error isolation available. Now versions of Service Diagnostics are available to save everyone (including every serious repair technician) time, money, and headaches in fixing their computers, even non-IBM equipment. All CPUs & Numeric Co-processors System Expansion & Extended Memory Floppy, Fixed & Non-standard Disk Drives Standard & Non-standard Printers System Board: DMA, Timers, Interrupt, Real-time Clock & CMOS config. RAM All Color Graphics & Monochrome Monitors Parallels Serial Ports Mono, CGA, Hercules & EGA Adapters All Keyboards & the 8042 Controller The ROM software is powerful and cleverly inte¬ grated. A combined word processor/spreadsheet called PipeDream works like Lotus 1-2-3, using spreadsheet cells to hold document text, and acts as a simple database. PipeDream is easy to use and permits quite sophisti¬ cated layouts. It supports un¬ derline, italic, and boldface, which are visible on the WYSIWYG bit-mapped dis¬ play. To the right of the text area is a window that shows a 1-pixel-per-character page preview; as well as verifying layout, this helps you find your place in long documents. You can interrupt any pro¬ gram and pop up another, and you may run as many copies of PipeDream, working on dif¬ ferent files, as memory per¬ mits. The other programs in¬ clude a good appointment diary/calendar, a calculator (with built-in unit conver¬ sions), a clock/ alarm, a termi¬ nal program, and BASIC. There are also pop-up system services, including a file man¬ ager, setup options, and An Analyst for Your Writing G rammatik III is a new version of Reference Software’s IBM PC-compati¬ ble program for analyzing documents for grammatical and stylistic errors. Unlike Grammatik II, which checked documents against a fixed phrase dictionary, Gramma¬ tik III uses parts of speech and suffix analysis to provide more comprehensive gram¬ mar checking. Not only does Grammatik III find possible errors, but it also offers suggestions for im¬ provement. Grammatik III scans your document and finds basic errors like double words, unbalanced punctua¬ tion, or improper capitaliza¬ tion, as well as more subjective problems like use of the pas¬ sive voice, pretentious expres¬ Join the ranks of XEROX, NCR, CDC, SONY, PRIME,... who have bundled SuperSoft’s diagnostics with their microcomputers at no risk because of our 30 day money back guarantee. Service Diagnostics for PC, PC/XT, and compatibles only.$169 Alignment Diskette for PC, PC/XT and compatibles (48 tpi drives).$ 50 Wrap-around Plug for PC, PC/XT and compatibles (parallel and serial).$ 30 Service Diagnostics for AT and compatibles only.$169 Alignment Diskette for AT and compatibles (96 tpi drives).$50 Wrap-around Plug for AT (serial).$ 15 ROM POST for PC, PC/XT, and compatibles only.$245 ROM POST for AT and compatibles only.$245 Service Diagnostics: The KIT (includes all of the above—save $502).$495 Service Diagnostics for all other CPUs (386, V20.V30, Harris, etc.).$195 Diagnostics II is the solution to the service problems of users of all CP/M-80, CP/M-86 and MS-DOS computers.$125 ROM POST for PS/2 and compatibles only.$245 Alignment Diskette for PS/2 and compatibles (3.5 inch).$ 50 To order, call 800-678-3600 or 217-359-2112, FAX 217-359-7225, or write SuperSoft. SuperSft FIRST IN SOFTWARE TECHNOLOGY P.O.Box 1628 Champaign, IL61820 (217)359-2112 Telex 270365 SUPERSOFT is a registered trademark of SuperSoft. Inc.; CDC of Control Data Corp.; IBM PC, AT & XT of International Business Machines Corp.; MS-DOS of Microsoft Corp.; NEC of NEC Information Systems, Inc., PRIME of PRIME INC.; Sony of Sony Corp. 92 BYTE* AUGUST 1988 Printer options. When you switch off the Z88, it saves the whole environment and starts back up where you left off. The operating system sup¬ ports hierarchical directories, I/O redirection, and proper batch files with an auto¬ execute option. RAM car¬ tridges are treated as separate devices, like disk drives. You can print files directly to serial or parallel printers, but the best way to use the Z88 is to upload files to a desktop PC at your office or home. The PC Link package consists of a plug-in ROM, a cable, and a disk of PC software; upload¬ ing is controlled entirely from the PC screen via menus. The communications package con¬ sists of a 1200-bps matchbox- style modem plus a communi¬ cations program in ROM. Don’t disdain the Z88 just because it lacks an 80386 or a hard disk drive; the clever software makes it a match for many a larger machine. And when you have to carry it around all day, small really is beautiful. —Dick Pountain sions and cliches, wordiness, and split infinitives. In addi¬ tion, Grammatik III checks for subject-verb disagree¬ ment, double negatives, in¬ complete sentences, and other incorrect usages. Since writ¬ ing “errors” are often subjec¬ tive, you can customize Gram¬ matik III to ignore certain types of phrases. While Grammatik II worked best with ASCII files (it had problems with word¬ processing control codes), Grammatik III is designed to work with most major PC- compatible word-processing programs. When you first in¬ stall the program, you select from a menu of word proces¬ sors and text formats. You then run your document through Grammatik III, either interac¬ tively or in batch mode. When in interactive mode, it flags suspected problems on the continued Circle 228 on Reader Service Card You can spend thousands of dollars for three dimensional CAD software and still not get the power and capability that DesignCAD 3-D offers for a remarkable $299! DesignCAD 3-D is proof positive that you don’t have to spend a fortune for quality. DesignCAD 3-D allows you to develop and advance any design in 3 dimensional space, while providing you with features such as shading, hidden line removal, printer and plotter support. DesignCAD 3-D’s extensive file transfer utilities allow you to: transfer documents to and from IGES, DXF HPGL, transfer to GEM and Post Script and to read ASCII text files and X, Y, Z coordinate files. It allows up to 4 simultaneous views (any angle or perspective) on the screen. Complex extrusions, extensive 3-D text capabilities, auto dimensioning and a host of other features are all included with DesignCAD 3-D, all at no extra charge. The compatibility that DesignCAD 3-D offers you means that it can be used with almost any PC compatible system. It supports more than 200 dot matrix printers, more than 80 plotters and most digitizers and graphic adapters. DesignCAD 3-D can read drawings from most other CAD systems. The best reason to buy DesignCAD 3-D is not the low price, the performance or the compatibility. The best reason is the amazing ease of use. DesignCAD 3-D’s powerful commands mean that you can produce professional 3-D drawings in less time than you thought possible. In fact, we think you’ll agree that DesignCAD 3-D is easier to learn and easier to use than any 3-D CAD system for IBM PC, at any price! See your local computer dealer for DesignCAD 3-D, or contact: v/American Small Business Computers, Inc. 327 S. Mill St., Pryor, OK 74361 (918)825-4844 FAX 918-825-6359 Telex 9102400302 DESIGNCAD 3 D PC Resource Magazine has listed DesignCAD 3-D as one of the six new computer products worth watching in 1988. Circle 13 on Reader Service Card AUGUST 1988 -BYTE 93 Circle 69 on Reader Service Card SHORT New, Expandable Diskette Duplicator Model 4D delivers 240 copies per hour, using any IBM PC/XT/AT or compatible. Multiple Formats, Including PS/2 On-Screen Production Statistics Expandable Up to 8 Drives Multi-tasking * 1.995 New Desktop and high-volume Production Autoloaders also available, for unattended operation. For more information or to order, call 415-651-5580. Datapath_ Precision Media Duplication Products © 1988, Datapath Technologies, Inc., 46710 Fremont Blvd., Fremont, CA 94538. Compact Disk Products, Inc. CD ROM/WORM . ALL PRODUCTS, LOWEST PRICES, EXPERT ADVICE INTRODUCTORY OFFERS Hitachi 15035 or 3500S CD-HDM Drive _| with yoir choice of: - McGraw Hill Science and Technical Reference Set .... $895 - Grolier Electronic Encyclopedia. $B95 - Microsoft Bookshelf. $B95 - PC-5G Library [Disks 1 - 1000]. $B95 CD -ROM SOFTWARE Oxford English Dictionary. PBjj • $945 Comstock Stock Photography On CD . . . E3!3 . . . $445 Grolier or McGraw hi or Bookshelf or PGSG.$269 The Bble Lbrary. $495 Kirk-Othmer Encyclopedia of Chemical Technology.$045 Registry of Mass Spectral Data.$2655 Geovision US. Atlas and Mapmaker. $795 |tOLL FREE ORDER LINE • 800-MEGABYTe (634-2298)1 CD -ROM and WORM DR/VES Hitachi 1503S External CD-ROM Drive with Audio. $729 1503S with Digital Audio Output.$1229 Hitachi 3500S Internal 1/2 Height CD-RDM Drive w/Audio . . $719 Maxtor BOO MB WORM Drive. $3799 Optotech Laserbank 400 MB WORM Drive. $2799 Portable 2B6 with CD-ROM Drive. $3795 CD-CaptUPe ($1491 Capture Digital Audio information from any CD to HAM or Disk, r-u-, n , Also allows playback of music from RAM. UJ-rlay ($89) Pop-tp utity that permits leer to play al audio CDs on Htachi and compatble drives Output to headphones or amplf'er. CE-Play€>ampler C$149] Same features as CD-Play plus the abity to name two paints on an audio CD and bop between them Cu-AudloFlle (®14g] Automatically creates database records of al your audio CDs 1 /—\J 11 - 1 Alows you to store a preferred play sequence for each disk. L f\_j p* Automate recogrition of COs Creates DBase compatble records 217 E. B5th St Suite 2E New York, NY 10020 TeL 212996-6999 Fax 212-439-9X39 CompuServe 75530214 I Free 3 Month Subscription to CD-ROM Review with orders over $300 INTERNATIONAL ORDERS A SPECIALTY Australian Agent: KEWTEL 145 Cotham Hd. Kew, Victoria 3101 Tel. (03] 817-5933 screen. You can edit the prob¬ lem phrase or sentence, ignore it, or instruct Grammatik III not to flag this type of problem in the future. After you’ve fin¬ ished checking the document, Grammatik III saves the edited version and makes a backup of the original. Grammatik III also pro¬ vides a statistical summary of the document (number and type of errors found, a “read¬ ability index,” and other statistics). In batch mode, Grammatik III marks your document without your intervention, saves the marked file, and creates a backup of the origi¬ nal. You can then work with the marked document using your word processor. Gram¬ matik III includes an optional spelling checker, but spelling checking more than doubles the grammar-checking time. If your word processor has a separate spelling checker, it’s probably better to use it. I tested a beta version of Grammatik III using an IBM PC XT with an Orchid 286 ac¬ celerator card (TurboEGA). In batch mode, a 10,000-word document took about 4 min¬ utes to check. I tried the pro¬ cess using both a hard disk and a RAM disk and got about the same results (the CPU is the Can You Stand Another C Compiler? S tart with your basic C compiler: ANSI C sup¬ port, Make feature, symbolic debugger, editor, integrated development environment, overlay linker. Also give it support for the usual confus¬ ing array of memory models (small, medium, compact, large, and huge), and the abil¬ ity to generate instructions compatible with the 80x86 processors, up to but not in¬ cluding the 80386. Plus sup¬ port for the 8087, 80287, and 80387 math coprocessors. TAKES bottleneck rather than the disk access speed). In my tests, Grammatik III found a lot of errors but also missed some blatant ones. For example, it missed “many friends of mine lives in New York” and the incomplete sen¬ tence, “So should be fun.” It did find “their going to have a party, ” and gave the message: [the context of “their” indi¬ cates you may have meant “there” or “they’re.”] Al¬ though it missed some errors and also flagged some correct grammatical phrases, the pro¬ gram is helpful in identifying possible stylistic or grammati¬ cal problems. —Nick Baran THE FACTS Grammatik III $99.00 Requirements: IBM PC, XT, AT, or compatible, 128K bytes ofRAM, DOS 3.0 or higher, one floppy disk drive. Reference Software 330 Townsend St. Suite 123 San Francisco, CA 94107 (415) 541-0222 Inquiry 854. You now have all the under¬ pinnings of Watcom C 6.0. And most of the other C com¬ pilers that have hit the ground in the last year. Now give it a price: $495. A little steep? Not for what amounts to two compilers. Here’s where Watcom C be¬ gins to part company with the crowd. It actually consists of WCC, which operates with a 64K-byte data area; and WCGL, which makes use of all available memory (up to 640K bytes). The idea is that, though WCGL is slower than WCC, it can compile all the monstrous programs that would overflow WCC’s mem¬ ory allotment. continued 94 BYTE* AUGUST 1988 Circle 49 on Reader Service Card Software Breakthrough: the RANDOM information processor New Concept With all the software tools available, it is surprising that an important need has been overlooked—a way to deal with the countless bits of RANDOM information you spend hours with every day. Tornado will not only give you instant access to this important information ... it will help you make better decisions and even think more clearly. Try Tornado risk-free and discover the productivity software package for your PC that works wonders. Limited Time Offer ONLY (Mini version) 30-DAY MONEY-BACK GUARANTEE (When ordered direct) ■ RANDOM Information Did you ever realize that over half the information you deal with every day is the RANDOM type? Not databases not spreadsheets not long documents but the information scattered around your workplace and in your head. Yet amazingly, until now there was no great software to help you the tools were either too structured or without organization. But now, at last, there is a quick and easy solution Tornado acclaimed by . rave reviews and accepted by corporations nationwide. Whether you are a business executive, consultant, engineer, or in any other profession, you need Tornado it will save you endless time and effort every day guaranteed -or your money back. Here is how it works: ■ Information Windows With Tornado, you process information in stacks of superfast “intelligent” windows several on your screen at once. You type into the windows; interconnect and prioritize them; and scan through them in remarkable ways. ■ Free Form Tornado is FREE-FORM. It works the way you think. To start a new window you just press N, and enter information. No file names. No extra keystrokes. To retrieve information you just press G (for Get), with any word or phrase you’ll watch Tornado zip through your windows like lightning linking and opening those requested. You can even flip through your windows with the arrow keys and watch them instantly pile up and lift away. These are just three of 18 easy but powerful features. ■ Countless Uses There are thousands of uses for Tornado. When Harry calls you on the phone, in two seconds flat you’ll display the six windows on Harry before he finishes his first sentence! No more embarrassing pauses or scrambling for information. Tornado is so versatile you can: write and print a letter faster than ever; track things to do; edit electronic mail; and plan a project or event quickly and easily. You can even build a sophisticated “knowledge” base or an unstructured data base without programming. And that’s not all. Track phone conversations, numbers, customers, and all your other RANDOM information. On a portable. Tornado is your ideal moving office. Best of all, you tailor Tornado to your own needs easily! ■ 25,000 Windows Instead of one window or ten, imagine up to 25,000! It’s like extra memory...for your brain! The uses are endless. If you can “type” it you can “Tornado” it. And because it’s memory resident (if you choose) you can quickly jump in from other programs -even move information between them. All this power, yet reviewers agree you can start “Tornado-ing” in 15 minutes—not 15 days. ■ Three Versions Choose the Tornado that’s right for you: Mini Tornado—$49.95—NEW! Lowest cost version limited capacity (up to 600 windows and 60,000 characters); does not have: cut & paste, window join, screen grab & put, time & date & sequence stamp, multiple forms, compound searches. “Excellent Excellent Excellent Excellent” PC World , Patrick Marshall “one of the niftiest ... programs I’ve ever seen.” BYTE, Jerry Pournelle “Excellent value” InfoWorld , Review Board “Editor’s Choice” PC Magazine Regular Tornado—$99.95 —Full version with all commands and full information capacity (up to 25,000 windows and 2,500,000 characters). Library Tornado—$149.95— All commands, full capacity, plus “Library” of windows containing: free-form year logger, simple project planner, grid maker, city/state/area code/time zone translator, and more templates and references. ■ Productivity Tool To reach your goals, you need tools that maximize your productivity and help you make your best decisions. Tornado fits the bill perfectly. In fact user surveys show you may well use Tornado more than any other software package! Order today risk-free. To order call: (800) 342-5930 Technical questions & NJ: (201) 342-6518 24 hr. modem: (201) 342-8101 FEATURES: free-form & predefined windows, scrolling within window, import & export to files & screens, cut & paste, auto word wrap, time & date stamp, move & join & dup windows, mono or selectable color, definable Hot-key or non-resident, unloadable, LAN support, context help, extended ASCII, smart fully adjustable windows, parallel text processing, progressive resolution and “and-or-not” like searching without keywords, and more. COMPATIBILITY: 1BM-PC XT, AT/PS2 and compatibles; mono, CGA, 80 col EGA, and Hercules displays; 60K minimum RAM CAPACITY: Up to 500 windows and 50K per pile - 50 piles. Not copy protected. $49.95 $99.95 $149.95 □ YES, send me _Mini Tornado _Regular Tornado _Library Tornado Please add $3.50 to help cover shipping costs ($10 outside USA & Canada). NJ residents add 6% tax. No purchase orders. To order, mail coupon or call (800) 342-5930. Payment: VISA MC CHECK Credit Card Expiration _ Card # _ i Not Copy Protected 30-Day Money-Back Guarantee Name: _ Address: _ City: _ State: _ Zip: Telephone:- □ 5-1.4" □ 3-1/2" disk me MICROS LOGICS Dept T-160, 100 2nd St., POB 70 Hackensack, New Jersey 07602 © 1988 Micro Logic. European marketing by Atlantex Inc. (203) 655-6980. Trademarks: IBM-PC, XT, AT, PS2-IBM Circle 163 on Reader Service Card Fast Microprocessor Development New Unilab 8620 analyzer-emulator — SAVE TIME, CUT COSTS Don’t waste days single-stepping through suspect code. Isolate trouble fast. Use our highspeed analyzer-emulator to trigger on symptoms—by data sequence, cycle type, address, data range. See program traces before and after trigger points as you record and display traces on the fly. Mop up via traditional breakpointing. • Real time 8/16 bit universal emulator • Advanced 48-channel bus state analyzer • In-Place Emulation for 150 different fxPs • 1 (xsec program time measurements • Fast parallel interface: load 64K in 5 sec • Stimulus generator included • Continuous real time viewing of registers, ports • Built-in EPROM programmer • 2730 bus-cycle trace buffer • Complete integrated toolkit Call Toll Free 800/245-8500 or (in CA) 415/361-8883 INSTRUMENTS 702 Marshall Street, Redwood City, CA 94063 SERIES 32000 MODULA-2 COMPILER SHORT TAKES ALL Software Floating Point Debug Compile CtrlF4-Check Syntax Ctrl-F6—Compile CtrlF7-Blnd Execute Withed Specs Library Manager CREATE Ada Structure- CREATE Ada Type. SEARCH/REPLACE TBD’i Ada SPECIFICATIONS- PASTE BUFFER- IntegrAda ...the first completely integrated Ada Program¬ ming Support Environment priced for the individual programmer on a PC. Designed for the novice as well as the software engineer. with TEXTJO; use TEXTJO; procedure TEST is task CONTROLLER is entry TBD(_ :in out end CONTROLLER; task body CONTROLLER is Change Keys Screen & Cursor Search & Replace Marking Lines & Blocks Ada Syntax Generation Ada Compiler & Tools Save 0 & Quit Controls Comm Interfaces • Validated Production Compiler • Use on 8086,80186,80286,80386. • Full 640KB .EXE Programs • No Extra Memory Required • No Math Coprocessor required. • On-Line Library Management • Math, Text, Console Packages included • Multiple File Code Retrieval • Full-Color, Full Featured Editing • Selectable Function Keys • Ada Subprogram and Package Generation • Ada Type Generation • Ada Sensitive Cursor • Interactive Cursor Error Correction • Interface to Ada Design Language (ADADL) • Ada Standard Pretty Printer • DoD 2167 Documentation Features 9 Optional On-Line Ada Training Course • No Run-Time Royalties Aetech. Inc.. 380 Stevens Ave. Solana Beach. CA 92075. (619) 755-1277 Name Company/Title Address 4 , Phone flCTCCH Introductory Offer $495 benchmark with a smaller array size), I found that Turbo C chalked up a compile-and- execute time of 9 seconds against Express C’s 28 sec¬ onds. I thought I could attrib¬ ute Express C’s poor showing to the fact that it performed array- and pointer-bounds checking unless told other¬ wise. But even when I told it otherwise, it still hit the wire at about 27 seconds. Watcom delivers a high bang-for-the-buck ratio when compared to Microsoft C 5.0. Watcom C is a class act, and the source-code debuggers for both the high-end C 6.0 and the integrated Express C make the whole package a real possi¬ bility for doing heavy-duty de¬ velopment work. —Rick Grehan Paradox Takes on OS/2 I f you’ve used the MS-DOS version of Paradox, Para¬ dox OS/2 will be immediately familiar. Except for the OS/2 line on the opening screen, the actual user interface is identi¬ cal, and it works exactly the same; it is compatible with files, scripts, and reports from earlier versions. The differences showed up when I started doing some ac¬ tual work. Because Paradox OS/2 runs in 80286 protected mode, it directly addresses all your system memory. That eliminates the time-consum¬ ing disk reads and memory swapping that take place under the MS-DOS version. This immediately trans¬ lates into speed. Database ac¬ cess, moving around tables, and doing usual work like sorting and generating reports is noticeably faster, though your mileage will vary de¬ pending on the type of data¬ base you’re using and what you’re doing with it. You can run multiple Para¬ dox OS/2 sessions at the same time, and even share data and utilities among them. This is heady stuff for those of us used to the one-task-at-a-time limi¬ tation of MS-DOS. Paradox OS/2 uses the same concurrency controls to coor¬ dinate multiple sessions that Paradox 2 uses to coordinate multiple users on a network. There are, of course, some limitations. You can’t physi¬ cally make changes to two ses¬ sions concurrently, so Para- vsemuzoot . ... dox OS/2 has the same abilities as its MS-DOS broth¬ er to lock tables and set what the program calls “private directories.” If you’re new to OS/2, you’ll soon find that there’s a boundary to the apparent magic, especially if you have limited memory. Each session you start exacts its cost in pro¬ cessing time and RAM. While Paradox OS/2 can use up to 16 megabytes of RAM, my PC AT clone had only 3 mega¬ bytes, the minimum you need to run the program. Things started to slow down apprecia¬ bly by the time I started the third Paradox session. Paradox OS/2 is far from the ultimate OS/2 application. It’s really just a sophisticated port from the MS-DOS ver¬ sion, which already had its own multiple-session hooks in its network support. But it’s a tantalizing glimpse of the pos¬ sibilities that OS/2 will offer. —Stan Miastkowski wmamm Paradox OS/2 $725 Requirements: IBM AT, PS/2 or compatible, 3 megabytes of RAM, OS/2 Standard Edition 1.0 or higher, and a hard disk drive. Borland International 4585 Scotts Valley Dr. Scotts Valley, CA 95066 (408) 438-8400 (800) 543-7543 Inquiry 856. 98 BYTE* AUGUST 1988 Circle 267 on Reader Service Card (DEALERS: 268) Lepreeard Leprecards feature components utilizing the latest technology from Seagate & Western Digital. You get a 1 year warranty, & illustrated user's guide. Low power drives mean less strain on the power supply, lower operating temperatures, and longer component life. FREE SOFTWARE Including TakeTwo, the backup utility. PC MAGAZINE Editor's Choice in 1986 & 1987, & PC-KWIK disk cache software from Multisoft. 21MB 30MB 30MB 40MB 49MB 65MB 85ms 85ms 40ms 70ms* 28ms* 16ms* $299 $339 $389 $449 $549 $649 •Average access speed per partition TANDY 1000/A/SX/TX Leprecards add $20 PC/XT Dish Hits •Pretested & formatted •Western Digital short controller • 30 page installation' guide & reference manual •Cables, mounting screws, full & half-height face plates • TakeTwo backup software, PC MAGAGINE "Editor’s Choice" • PC-KWIK disk cache software by Multisoft •1 year Warranty, 30 day Money Back Guarantee • Optional.-150 watt, UL/FCC approved power supply for IBM PCs $69 TANDY 1000 kits add $20 20MB kit $289 Seagate ST225 21,4MB/65ms/Ha If-Height/14.8 watts 30MB kit $309 Seagate ST238 32.7MB/65ms/Half-Height/14.8 watts 40MB kit $459 Seagate ST251 42.8MB/Half-Height/11 watts pre-formatted into a pair of 2lMB/28ms partitions 65MB kit $549 Seagate ST277R 65.5MB/Half-Height/il watts pre-formatted into a pair of 32MB/28ms partitions 1 j 11 / ■■ j | I 3.5"Floppy Hits Instant Laptop & PS/2 compatibility. All kits include bracket to mount in 5W drive bay, black & grey face plates, and AT rails. Now included: TakeTwo, the backup utility PC MAGAZINE named as their Editor's Choice. $109 720K Internal for PC/XT/AT Requires DOS 3.2 or optional $19 driver software. $139 1.44 MB internal for AT only. Includes driver software. $199 1.44MB Internal for PC/XT. Includes high speed floppy Controller & cables. Supports two drives. 286 10 Computer uiecft $895 80286 processor at running at 6/10 Mhz with 0 wait states provides a Norton SI rating of 11.5. 8 slots - Room for 1 full height and 3 half - height drives - 200 watt power supply - Clock calendar - Choice of 1.2 or 1.44MB floppy drive - Combination Hard Disk/Floppy drive controller - Maxiswitch 84 or 101 key Keyboard - 512K RAM standard expandable to 1 MB - Award BIOS -1 year warranty - 30 day money back guarantee. Complete Systems with Serlal/Parallel/Game Ports: Monographics Card & Monitor $ 1095 Orchid 512K VGA 8, Multisync II $ 199 5 with 20MB/65ms Seagate $1289 with 20MB/65ms Seagate $2189 with 40MB/40ms Seagate $1429 with 40MB/40ms Seagate $2329 with 65MB/40ms Seagate $1549 with 65MB/40ms Seagate $2449 _ AT Hard Disk Hits • includes IBM AT rails & cables • SpeedStor or OnTrack large drive software •Formatted, Partitioned & Tested Size Model Speed Capacity Price HH Seagate ST251 40ms 42.8MB $399 HH Seagate ST251-1 30ms 42.8MB $489 FH Seagate ST4096 28ms 80.2MB $669 FH Micropolis 1333 30ms 44MB $555 FH Micropolis 1335 28ms 71MB $699 FH Maxtor 1140 27ms 117MB $1669 _ 1.5 MB Laser Printer "One of the LaserJet's strongest competitors." INFOWORLD October 5, 1987 1.5MB RAM $1595 512K RAM $1295 •100% HP Laserjet, & Laserjet + compatible •1.5MB RAM Gives Full Page 300dpi graphics •Vector graphics capability improves speed on programs like Autocad up to 93% •9 resident & 5 downloadable soft fonts standard • Printer utility software •Serial & Parallel Interfaces •120 day TRW on site maintenance • 1 year Warranty •Options: All HP style font cartridges Toner Cartridge $29 _ Orchid 512K $299 256K $249 Tiny Turbo 286 $289 Twin Turbo $409 2400 MHP Modems $239/$229 • Hayes Compatible, 300/1200/2400 •MNP level 4 error correction • FREE MIRROR II Software, a $69 value • Internal model $229, fits in short slot internal with MIRROR II (non MNP) $119 1200 Modem $69 • 300 or 1200 bps speed •Hayes v Smartcom ll ▼ compatible • Une-busy detect, auto redial •FREE MIRROR ll software • Made in USA, 1 year warranty 2524B Townsgate Rd, Dept. B / Westlake Village, CA 91361 To order, or get our free catalog, call: Toll Free 800-722-AT-XT MMC California 805-373-7847 ! IN( , ( .< II INC .11 ★ No extra for Visa/Mastercard (AMEX add 3%). ★ Prices include UPS surface shipping. ★ Federal Express shipping just $1.50 per pound. ★ 30 Day Money Back Guarantee. ★ Corporate & institutional PO's accepted. AUGUST 1988 • BYTE 99 Circle 216 on Reader Service Card Train Your PC to Read, • • .the Same Things You Read { S'*, I I . °rr*j- " ~ JSN ^£m r c £*Ps: ... • " c,, ^'?:'5o /v ///-&%<• " :S 2?~£i s o .- 4fl^r| ../V* Flagstaff Engineering’s optical character recognition software reads almost any printed or typewritten text. SPOT,* our trainable OCR program, allows you to compile information from books, magazines, typewritten records, genealogical data, directories, catalogs, and public documents, including foreign- language material. 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For details, call us at (602)779-3341. *Syntactic Pattern Optical Translator FLAGSTAFF ENGINEERING 1120 Kaibab Lane * Flagstaff, AZ 86001 (602)779-3341 . Telex 705609 . FAX (602)779-5998 Circle 88 on Reader Service Card (DEALERS: 89) EXPERT ADVICE Is Jerry’s old friend Zeke II retiring to greener pastures? T his is a shameless commer¬ cial. As I write this, Legacy of Heorot by Larry Niven, Jerry Pournelle, and Steve Barnes is on the best-seller list in England. About the time you read this, the paperback ver¬ sion will be out from Pocket Books. If every BYTE reader goes out and buys one, it will hit the best-seller list here. If you all buy another for a friend— Well, anyway, it’s a good book about the first interstellar colony (sent out by the National Geographic Society), it has a nice computer in it, and you can buy the book at your favorite bookstore. Mean¬ while, there’s a lot happening at Chaos Manor. Writers are superstitious about all kinds of things. Goethe had to have a drawer full of rotten apples. Schiller wanted cats in the room. Some need a particular brand of coffee or a favorite coffee mug. Not all writers worry about furniture, but many do. I confess I’m one of them. Of course, I don’t think of it as supersti¬ tion, just good organization. What I want is a big desk, the bigger the better, that I can get right up close to, and high enough for drafting work. For years, I used a 4- by 8-foot piece of half¬ inch mahogany plywood screwed to the top of an ancient student desk that stood on little feet to raise it; the result was overhangs on all four sides deep enough that I could scoot a chair right up to the desk. It was a little odd getting to the drawers, but the system worked. Of course, I didn’t do my writing on that structure, because it was too high to set a typewriter on. Instead, I set my Selectric on a regular typing table, one COMPUTING AT CHAOS MANOR ■ Jerry Pournelle A Fond Farewell large enough to hold not only the type¬ writer, but pages to be retyped or a few books. The typing table was at right angles to the desk, so I had only to swivel around to get at it. That way, I could lay out notes and research work on the big desk, turn left to the Selectric when I was writing, and turn back to the desk to re¬ view notes. When I got Ezekial, my old friend who happened to be a Cromemco Z80, I set things up the same way, with Zeke tak¬ ing the place of the Selectric. Of course, an S-100 system with 8-inch disk drives wouldn’t fit on a normal typing table, and I ended up building a furniture sys¬ tem that had the computer itself near the floor, the disk drives on a counter, and the 15-inch monochrome Hitachi moni¬ tor on top of the disk drives. The keyboard first went on the Selec¬ tric’s old typing table; later, I got a larger table that would hold the keyboard and a bunch of notebooks and stuff. The moni¬ tor was at eye level and 30 inches away, just far enough that I didn’t need the reading element of my bifocals to read the large text put up by the Processor Technology VDM board. There were only 16 lines of 64 characters, but that was enough. I wrote on that system for years. Eze¬ kial himself evolved into Zeke II: a CompuPro S-100 “boat-anchor” box and CompuPro 8-inch disk drives, but the same Hitachi 15-inch monitor driven by the same VDM memory-mapped video board. Larry Niven bought an exact du¬ plicate of Zeke II. We wrote a number of books on those two machines. I also wrote these columns and everything else I did, a total of several million words. I tried the IBM PC when it first came out. I even bought one, but for research only. I had no temptation to use it to write books. PC text editors weren’t good enough. Their only advantage was that a PC would put up 24 lines of text as op¬ posed to Zeke’s 16, but against that the PC was very slow compared to Zeke. In particular, it scrolled slower. With Zeke I could instantaneously flip back and forth by pages, which more than made up for the 16-line limitation. Also, it took a lot longer to read and write IBM 514-inch disks than 1.2-megabyte CompuPro 8- inch disks. For the first 5 or 6 years after the PC came out, there was just no incen¬ tive to change over from Zeke. Slowly, though, PCompatibles got faster and better. EGA video put up read¬ able text in color. New PCompatible the¬ saurus and spelling programs came out—although Oasis Systems’ The Word Plus was for a very long time the best spelling program around (it’s still the basis for the spelling checker in many well-known word processors). Writing utilities like Grammatik II (and now III) and the Readability program would work only with PCompatibles. Editor pro¬ grams sprouted features not available for my old CP/M system. I found I was using the PC more and more. Eventually, the only things I was writ¬ ing on Zeke II were books in collabora¬ tion with Larry Niven. When we brought in Steve Barnes to work on Legacy of Heorot , we had another problem: Steve was using WordStar on a Kaypro PCom¬ patible, and his files had to be translated from PC-DOS to CP/M. Fortunately, we had the means to do it: the Golem, my big CompuPro Dual Processor (80286 master, Z80 slave board), can read and write 360K-byte 514-inch DOS disks, and it also sports a pair of 8-inch floppy disk drives (as well as a 40-megabyte Priam hard disk drive). We could feed Steve’s disks into the Golem, run his files through a filter, and write them out on 8-inch disks that Zeke II could read into our CP/M text editor. When we finished Legacy of Heorot, I decided enough was enough. Niven was working on a new book with David Drake, and Drake uses a Toshiba T1000 PCompatible with 3 Vi -inch disks. Get¬ ting Drake’s stuff onto the CP/M system continued AUGUST 1988 • BYTE 101 CHAOS MANOR and Larry’s onto Drake’s Toshiba was no easy job. It was time for a change. Niven was persuaded to go buy a PCompatible: a Zenith Z-386 with a hard disk drive, a 19-inch Electrohome moni¬ tor, and both 514- and 3-inch floppy disk drives. That took care of the Drake collaboration. I converted our latest stuff over to PCompatible format. Now I was doing all my writing on PCompatibles. I had long since set up a PCompatible on the opposite side of my desk from Zeke; swivel left to the PCompatible, swivel right to Zeke (and also to a termi¬ nal that controls the Golem). Which PCompatible it was changed from time to time: first Big Kat the Kaypro 286, then Fast Kat the Kaypro 386, and now Zanna Lee the Zenith Z-386. Zeke II sat there watching in silence. He had nothing to do, and we turned him on only when a visitor wanted to see him. Then BYTE wanted a column for the special Macintosh edition. Apple sent a Mac II. About then, Cheetah put to¬ gether the Big Cheetah, a 20-MHz 80386 with a Priam 330-megabyte internal hard disk drive and a Maximum Storage APX- 3200 WORM (write once, read many) drive. Commodore sent the Amiga 2000. Atari sent a Mega ST. Every one of those machines had to be set up on test stands far away from my desk, making it very inconvenient to use them—and after all, the point of this column is to write about stuff I’ve used for practical work. Something had to be done, and I did it. Three weeks ago, Zeke II retired. We had a little ceremony and wheeled him out. At the moment, the poor old fellow is sitting in the storeroom. All his parts are there—disk drives, Hitachi monitor, key¬ board, and all the cables—but they aren’t assembled. I haven’t really had the heart to do it. As far as Zeke knows, he was turned off one day and hasn’t been awak¬ ened again. Suppose I connect him up and he sees where he is? Unthinkable. I confess I don’t really know what to do with him. What I’d like is to find him a good home. Oh, sure, there are some mad hobbyists who’d like to have all his parts, but I can’t allow that. What I want is someone who will use him—but who? Who, after all, is likely to want an an¬ cient Z80 machine that’s physically larger than a two-drawer file cabinet, has 8-inch disk drives that spin all the time, and has a 16-line by 64-character display driven by the world’s last operating Pro¬ cessor Technology VDM board? He’s a wonderful old guy, but he’s also a mu¬ seum piece. I know from my mail that I have very clever readers, and some seem as devoted to old Zeke as I am. I’ve decided to have a contest: I’m soliciting the best sugges¬ tion as to what to do with Zeke, the Com- puPro S-100 Z80. I’m not sure what the prizes will be. Something appropriate, like dinner at a COMDEX or West Coast Computer Faire for the best half dozen letters, and something a bit more special for the winner. The rules are simple: I’ll consider any suggestion provided that Zeke will be kept intact and there’s some chance of S he Mac has a well-deserved reputation for being easy for utter beginners to use. implementing it. If you want to tell me why Zeke ought to be given to you, or your family, or some favorite institution, feel free. If you think he belongs in the Smithsonian, you’ll have to show me some evidence that the Smithsonian would be interested. If you think he ought to be sent to the center of the gal¬ axy, you’ll have to explain how that could be accomplished. The decision of the judge—me—is final, all entries become part of the gen¬ eral chaos in Chaos Manor, and some will be returned but others won’t be be¬ cause they’re lost or the dog ate them. Contest closes on Thanksgiving Day. The Furniture Dilemma When I first got Zeke, there wasn’t any commercial computer furniture. In those days, you either made do with typing tables or designed and built your own “workstation.” In the early 1980s there was a flood of the stuff, most badly de¬ signed. Gradually, evolution and the market took care of the situation, so that now you can get quite a bit of computer furniture designed for PCompatibles. There’s also some for the Macintosh. Alas, there is absolutely nothing satis¬ factory for the Mac II; and what has evolved for PCompatibles isn’t going to be useful much longer. The problem is mice. Until recently, PCompatible users didn’t need mice. You couldn’t operate a Mac without one, but many considered a mouse for the PC to be a pretentious bit of luxury. Slowly, though, PC users began to change their minds. Some programs require mice—it’s possible to use Micro¬ soft Word without one, but you won’t like it much. Others weren’t designed for mice but work better if you have them: WordPerfect with either Mouse Perfect or a properly written script for Logi¬ tech’s Menu mouse support package is a good case in point, being much easier to use with a mouse. Also, the Mac has a phenomenal (and well-deserved) reputation for being easy for utter beginners to use, and much of the Mac’s design philosophy is drifting over into PCompatible software designs. The upshot, in my judgment, is that mice are taking over the computer world, and pretty soon none of us will feel at home without them. That’s where the furniture problem comes in. With the exception of a few special items jiggered for the Mac and dependent on the old Mac’s small foot¬ print and weird keyboard, there isn’t any computer furniture designed for mouse users. One of the best kinds of computer desk starts with a more mundane item—office desk or credenza or even a solid counter- top—and puts a keyboard drawer under¬ neath. There are a number of keyboard drawers, and while many of them are overpriced, all the ones I’ve seen work quite well and are easy enough to install. All the keyboards I’ve used fit well in the drawer tray, and the system is solidly built so things don’t wobble when I type. However, every one of those keyboard drawers, without exception, is too nar¬ row to hold both a keyboard and a mouse. I suppose it’s only a matter of time until someone gets smart and makes a computer desk with a keyboard area large enough for both keyboard and mouse, but that hadn’t happened by Spring COM¬ DEX; I looked at every computer furni¬ ture display in Atlanta, and except for one desklike system that’s a full 4 feet wide, there wasn’t a thing. Sigh. Amiga Progress One of my high points of COMDEX was a demonstration of new developments for the Amiga given by Dr. Harry Rubin, chief operating officer of Commodore America. Rubin’s enthusiasm for the Amiga is unmatched; he reminds me of some of the company executives back in the early days of microcomputers. One thing they showed me was Unix continued 102 BYTE* AUGUST 1988 nili; PROGRAMME It’s SIR IP helps save time, money, and cut frustrations. Compare, evaluate, and find products. Real-time Programmers: Build multitasking into your applications, add com¬ munications and interfaces easily, write blazing code with a C-like assembler. Choose a real-time multitasking O/S. work with a classic real-time toolbox. Call a Tech Rep TODAY! Order before August 31,1988 and mention ‘‘BY888" for these special prices above. List Normal SPECIAL C Sharp Real-time Toolkit — includes graphics DESQview API Tools - $495 $479 $399 multitasking, interfaces Greenleaf Comm Library — $550 $449 $419 complete, for C $185 $129 $105 QNX - real-time multitasking O/S $650 $629 $599 RisC - high level ASM C-like $ 80 $ 75 $ 59 Timeslicer —multitasking $295 $265 $239 386 Development Tools 386 Assembler/Linker PC $ 389 386 Debug - by Phar Lap PC $ 129 386/DOS Extender PC $ 919 DESQview PS/2 PC $ 109 F77L-EM - by Lahey MS Call FOXBASE + /386 PC $ 419 High C - by MetaWare PC Call OS/286 & 386 by AI Architects PC Call Paradox 386 MS Call C Language-Compilers AZTEC C86 - Commercial PC $ 499 C86 PLUS - by Cl MS $ 359 High C Optimizing Compiler PC Call lnstant-C/16M PC Call Lattice C - V3.3 MS $ 259 Microsoft C 5.1 - with CodeView MS $ 299 Microsoft Quick C MS $ 69 NDP C-386 by MicroWay MS $ 529 Turbo C by Borland PC $ 67 Watcom C6.0 MS $ 259 C Language-Interpreters j C-terp by Gimpel - full K & R MS $ 219 C Trainer - by Catalytix PC $ 89 Interactive C by 1MPACC Associates PC $ 189 Run/C Professional MS $ 145 Run/C MS $ 79 Turbo C-terp PC $ 119 C Libraries-Files | BTree/ISAM - Single user MS $ 99 CBTREE - Source, no royalties MS $ 109 c-tree by Faircom - no royalties MS $ 309 r-tree - report generation PC $ 239 dB2C Toolkit V2.0 MS $ 259 db_VISTA - Source MS Call C Libraries-General Blackstar C Function Library PC $ 99 C Tools Plus - V5.0 PC $ 99 C Utilities by Essential PC $ 119 Greenleaf C Sampler PC $ 69 Greenleaf Functions PC $ 129 LIGHT TOOLS by Blaise PC $ 69 Turbo C Tools by Blaise PC $ 99 C-Screens, Windows, Graphics C Display Manager PC $ 109 C-Worthy Interface Library PC $ 249 dBASE Graphics for C PC $ 69 ESSENTIAL GRAPHICS - fast PC $ 235 GraphiC - new color version PC $ 279 Greenleaf Data Windows PC $ 155 w/source PC $ 259 Quick Window/C PC $ 75 Terminal Mapping System PC $ 279 TurboWINDOW/C - for Turbo C PC $ 75 VC Screen PC $ 119 View Manager by Blaise PC $ 199 Vitamin C - source, menus PC $ 159 Windows for C - fast PC Call Windows for Data - validation PC Call RECENT DISCOVERY dB ASEIV - features new user interface * ‘Control Center,” Multiuser file/record locking, “ANSI + ” SQL, Query By Example. 255 field records, 99 files open. 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PC $ 499 1 DataBase & File Management 1 Advanced Revelation PC $ 779 CLARION - complete environment PC Call DataFlex by Data Access PC $ 595 DataFlex multiuser PC $1049 Magic PC - visual database PC $ 169 Paradox V2.0 List: $725 PC $ 499 Paradox Network Pack PC $ 719 XDB-SQL Database MS $ 449 Dbase Language 1 Clipper compiler PC $ 389 dBASE III Plus PC $ 399 dBASE III LANPack PC $ 649 DBXL Interpreter by Word Tech PC $ 99 FoxBASE + V2.0 MS $ 259 Quicksilver Diamond PC $ 369 Dbase Support dBRIEF with BRIEF PC Call dBC III by Lattice MS $ 169 Documentor - dFlow superset MS $ 229 Genifer by Bytel - code generator MS $ 249 Integrated Development Library MS $ 129 Networker Plus MS $ 229 QuickCode III Plus MS $ 189 R&R Report Writer MS $ 139 Seek-It - Query-by-example PC $ 79 Silver Comm Library MS $ 139 Tom Rettig’s Library PC $ 79 Ui Programmer - user interfaces PC $ 249 Other Products ASML1B - 170+ routines PC $ 125 Back-It by Gazelle MS $ 119 Baler PC $ 459 CO/SESSION - remote access PC $ 229 Dan Bricklin’s Demo II PC $ 169 Disk Technician - smart upkeep PC $ 89 Fast Back Plus PC $ 149 Flash-Up PC $ 69 Easy Row V5.0 PC $ 125 Link & Locate MS $ 309 Mace Utilities MS $ 85 MKS RCS MS $ 155 PCATools Deluxe-by Custom PC $ 69 Plink 86 PLUS - overlays MS $ 275 PVCS Corporate - by Polytron PC $ 339 PVCS Personal PC $ 135 R-DOC/X MS $ 135 Show Partner F/X PC $ 328 Seidl Version Manager Ms $ 269 Source Print - V3.0 PC $ 75 TLIB PC $ 89 Tree Diagrammer PC $ 65 Visible Computer: 8088 PC $ 65 WKS Library by Raima PC $ 179 | Fortran-C Translator Note: All prices subject to change without notice. Mention this ad. Some prices are specials. Ask about COD and POs. Formats: 3’ laptop now available, plus 200 others. UPS surface shipping add $3 per nor¬ mal item. For_C by Cobalt Blue - complete F77 to C opti¬ mizing translator. 99% efficiency, MIL-STD-1753 and common F77 extension support. Runtime libraries with complete C source. MS $ 659 THE PROGRAMMER’S SHOP Your complete source for software, services, and answers. 5-B Pond Park Road, Hingham, MA 02043 Mass: 800-442-8070 or 617-740-2510 6/88 Call for a catalog, literature, and solid value 800 - 421-8006 BRIEF Users: Now yon can have fast compilation AND an integrated, productive environment. O ver 5,000 of you were forced to make sacrifices to use BRIEF, The Programmer’s Editor. Advanced com¬ pilers and new programming environ¬ ments, like Turbo C and QuickBASIC, took up so much RAM that BRIEF could not fit in the same 640k. If you wanted to retain BRIEF’s uniquely powerful features 1 while working with larger programs, you had to sacrifice speed and continuity. Instead of a tight Edit-Compile-Edit loop, you had to slog through an obso¬ lete Edit-Exit-Compile-Exit-Edit loop. Now you no longer have to make that sacrifice. You can enjoy the features 1 that have made BRIEF the best-selling and the best regarded 2 programmer’s editor without sacrificing environ¬ ment integration. Version 2.1 of BRIEF can be swapped in and out with a single keystroke — allowing immediate compilation with even the largest compilers: Microsoft C5.0, QuickC, Turbo C, Lattice C, dBXL, FoxBASE+ v2.0, Clipper, etc. 1 For example: real multi-level Undo (not simply Undelete), flexible windowing, unlimited file size, unlimited number of simultaneous files, automatic language sensitive indentation. 2 For example: ‘‘The quintessential programmer’s editor.” — Dr. Dobb's Journal “Right out of the box, it’s a versatile, extremely powerful editor that handles most any programming task with aplomb.” — Computer Language “Simple to learn and use and extremely sophisticated. 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Fair warn¬ ing: this is a show report. I’ll have more on it when it’s running here at Chaos Manor and I can turn Alex loose on it. I can only say that what I saw at COMDEX impressed the heck out of me. Meanwhile, at the Amiga developers’ conference held just before COMDEX, they distributed new ROM chips for the 2000. Joanne Dow was given a copy for installation in my machine, and about an hour ago she came over and did the job. ROM installation in the Amiga is sim¬ ple but tedious. You have to remove about eight screws so that you can move the hard disk drive, floppy disk drive, and power supply. The good news is that they’re all mounted on a rigid frame that moves as a unit, so once the screws are removed, the whole assembly lifts off to RESIDENT EXPERT POP-UP REFERENCE GUIDES. • Update pointer* and counter* uhsletnode X fir*t->next) if ( CTS!T? arq.f lrst->*r$) ten? = flr*t->»rg: first->*rj = node->*rg; node->*r$ = tw*p; index! ^ count*incri; Jndex2 * count»l«er2; —Resident Expert — HS-Qutck C Version 1.8 9 -► SYNOPSIS I include tstring.h) int strcnp(strl,*tr2); const char "stri: const char »str2; cycles s <(indexl«index2)«cycles): Proqraw List: Context: and . | _The function returns a wale* indicating the relationship between j STARTING AT $19.95! Need help with your favorite pro¬ gramming language or business ap¬ plication but don’t want to interrupt your work to fumble through a bulky user’s manual? Consult RESIDENT EXPERT...our pop-up “super-help” utility containing all the reference material normally found in pro¬ gramming language reference guides and user’s manuals. Start with our lightning fast shell program (including our free PC- DOS/MS-DOS reference guides) and select your own custom library from our extensive list of titles. The shell program uses only 58K of memory, supports auto look-up, keyword string searches, and full cross indexing. Our optional com¬ piler lets you develop your own reference guides (or context sensitive help systems). Summer ’88 Pricing... 1 Resident Expert Shell. $19.95 Resident Expert Compiler .. . 39.95 Reference Guides for.. dBase III Plus (new) . $39.95 Microsoft C (5.0). . 39.95 Microsoft Quick C (1.0) . 19.95 Lattice C (3.2). . 39.95 Lotus 1-2-3 Rel 2 (new) .... . 39.95 Turbo Pascal (3.2/4.0) . 19.95 Turbo C (1.5). . 19.95 PC Prgrmr’s Reference .... . 39.95 | (BlOS/DOS/80286/MA SM Guide) \ j 1-214-727-9217 | Santa Rita Software 1000 E. 14th Si, Suite 365 Plano, Texas 75074 expose the ROM chip. After that, things are simple. AmigaDOS is not simple. I watched Joanne do her magic for a while, but I soon lost track. What I can say is that after about half an hour of work she had set up the Amiga 2000 so that on power- up you must boot it with a floppy disk—it still won’t entirely boot from the hard disk drive—but that process is considera¬ bly faster than it used to be. The good news is that once that’s done, the Amiga can be reset and rebooted from a RAM disk. That takes only a few seconds. I don’t know of any other computer that can boot from its own RAM disk. There are other developments. There’s a new version of the Amiga operating system, which is said to speed up disk op¬ erations. There were certainly plenty of software developers at the COMDEX Amiga booth. A number of “standard” PC programs, including WordPerfect, have been ported over to the Amiga and work fine there. All in all, the Amiga seems to be im¬ proving steadily. More when I learn more. I’m supposed to have Unix for the Amiga coming in the next week or so. Scanners Live in Vain Spring COMDEX wasn’t very exciting if you were looking for something new. There were almost no new products, and not much more new technology. There was, however, considerable excitement among dealers, a general feeling that the doldrums are over and the computer in¬ dustry is ready to take off again. The most exciting new hardware prod¬ uct I saw was the Logitech ScanMan. This is a small hand scanner that inter¬ faces with a Logitech printed circuit board. You run the scanner over text or pictures or whatever, and it makes a bit¬ mapped image similar to a PC Paint file. Meanwhile, over in the Apparel Cen¬ ter—where all the newcomers to COM¬ DEX are sent—Flagstaff Engineering was exhibiting a program that takes scanned text images and turns them into machine-readable files. I suppose I’d better explain that. Computers can store text in two differ¬ ent ways. The most familiar way is as ac¬ tual text files, in which the machine “knows” what’s there. Each letter, num¬ ber, and punctuation mark is stored as a uniquely recognizable binary number, so that the machine can not only reproduce the text, but also manipulate it in orderly ways. It can make alphabetic sorts, look at words and compare them to dictio¬ naries, and in general act as though it continued 104 BYTE* AUGUST 1988 Circle 212 on Reader Service Card COMPUTER DISCOUNT WAREHOUSE NEC NEC Multispeed.S1348.64 NEC Multispeed EL.1499.76 NEC Multispeed HD w/20 Meg .. .2365.77 NEC Powermate 2, 40 Meg.NEW NEC Powermate 2, 66 Meg.LOWER NEC Powermate 386, 66 Meg .NEC NEC Powermate 386, 130 Meg .. PRICES LASER TURBO XT Turbo, 512K, 1 floppy, P/S/G, Enhanced keyboard, EMS mem.$699. XT Turbo, 1 floppy, 20 Meg . .989. XT Turbo, 1 floppy, 40 Meg .1194. XT Turbo, 1 floppy, 70 Meg .1345. WHY PAY RETAIL? Nobody Sells for less TOSHIBA 1100 PIUS .$1484.10 3100 w/20 Meg ....2998,50 1000 .759.41 1200 .2237.55 3200 .SPECIAL BUY 5100 .NEW MODEL Excellence ^ CALL FOR LOWEST CUSTOM QUOTES SAMSUNG S-300 4/8 MHz, 512K, 6 Slots S/P/C, Monographics board, DOS, Keyboard S-300, 1 Floppy.$749.50 S-300, 20 Meg.989.95 S-300, 40 Meg.1117.82 S-500 AT Compatible 8/10 MHz, 8 Slots, S/P/C, Monographics Board, DOS, Keyboard S-500, 1.2M Floppy.$1095.45 ^S-500, 20 Meg.1469.80 S-500, 40 Meg.1624.45 HARDWARE, SOFTWARE & PERIPHERALS AT DISCOUNT PRICES Txmmm AS€ MDL 70 .S1312.20 MDL 170.$2988.36 MDL 80.1619.70 MDL 300 .3490.40 MDL 90.1916.15 MDL 340 .3945.65 MDL 120 .2260.05 MDL 390 .5589.40 MDL 140 .2629.55 1 Jr-M PS2 MDL 30. 2 dr . .$1272.20 MDL 50Z, 30 Meg. .NEW MDL 30. 20 Meg .1725.17 MDL 50Z, 60 Meg . .IBM MDL 60. 40 Meg .3340.15 MDL 70. All Mdls. .. PS2s MDL 60, 70 Meg .3469.60 MDL 80, 40 Meg .4497.67 MDL 80. Ill Meg 5995.80 MDL 80. 70 Meg .5330.30 comma ™ 286. Model 1...$2095.55 386, Model 300.$9168.20 286, 40 Meg ... .2580.19 Port. II, Mdl 2 .. .1896.10 286, 70 Meg ... .2895.20 Port. II, Mdl 4. 2797.00 386, Model 60...5579.30 Port. Ill, Mdl 20 .3577.85 386, Model 130..7059.92 Port. Ill, Mdl 40 4159.33 AT&T 6300 WGS.$1099.42 6312 WGS.1692.12 6386 WGS.3187.78 TOSHIBA 11100 Plus ...$1484.10 T1000 .$749.41 •3100. 20 Meg 2998.50 T1200 . $2237.55 T3200 .. .SPECIAL BUY T5100. .. .NEW MODEL PMJ^RDJIUA PB88 (XT Turbo) .S645.64 PB88 w/1 floppy. 20 Meg.956.80 VT286 . 1299.36 VT286 w/20 Meg.1573.50 VT286 w/40 Meg.1724.10 VT386 .NEW MODEL WYSE MDL 2108 $1082.50 MDL 2214... S1868.30 MDL 2112.1568.20 MDL 3216.2658.05 TTeM/rn data ^ -systems Supersport Model 2 . ALL ZENITH Supersport Model 20.MODELS IN Supersport 286 Model 20.STOCK CALL Z-183, 20 Meg.FOR PRICE Other Computers Available Upon Request FLOPPIES, DRIVES & TAPES 1/2 height floppy drive.$99.00 MINISCRIBE 20 Meg 1/2 height w/cont. .329.14 MINISCRIBE 30 Meg 1/2 height w/RLL . .345.95 SEAGATE 20 Meg 1/2 height hard drive 289.69 SEAGATE 30 Meg 1/2 height w/RLL.309.72 SEAGATE 40 Meg 1/2 height.399.50 GENOA 60 Meg int. tape /ext. tape . . 734.60 ^95.10 GENOA 125 Meg int. tape .995.85 IOMEGA 20 + 20 External 5V4 .1795.73 IRWIN 20 M/40 M Internal Tape .. .399.10/539.20 MINISCRIBE 40 Meg 28ms .609.40 MINISCRIBE 80 Meg 28ms . 795.45 MOUNTAIN 4440 int. /ext . 368.80/547.75 PRIAM 40 Meg /60 Meg . 669.55/777.95 PRIAM 130 Meg hard disk . 1967.68 SEAGATE 30 Meg /40 Meg . 479.80/558.98 SEAGATE 4096 80 Meg hard disk.645.10 HARDCARDS PLUS DEVELOPMENT 20 Meg . $555.55 PLUS DEVELOPMENT 40 Meg.765.80 WESTERN DIGITAL 30 Meg .416.30 PRINTERS EPSON EX800. . CALL LX800. ..ALL FX86e. .CDW™ LQ500 . EPSON FX286e ... .FOR LQ850.1 MODELS FX850. . BEST LQ1050. ..IN FX1050. PRICE LQ-2500 . STOCK by Kodak 150P / 300 .. . $319.17/479.17 ISM Pro Printer II. .$429.95 Quietwriter III . .$1295.62 NEC P560XL . . S914.75 5200 . ..S532.25 P2200 . .369.65 5300 . ...696.47 3550. ...744.12 8850 . ..1080.75 P960XL .... ..1067.70 CALL FOR ACCESSORIES OKtOOA ML 182S ..., .. S279.76 ML 320.... ..$336.63 ML 182P .... ..232 50 ML 321.... ...472.28 LASERLINE 6 . 1286.69 ML 390 .... ...469.96 ML 292 Plus. -.377.44 ML 391.... ...638.48 ML 293 Plus , ...516.55 ML 393. .. .. 949.55 ML 294 .... ...737.10 ML 393 Color .1057.60 PANASONIC 1080i . .S179.60 1091i . ..$219.85 1092i. ..334.28 1592 . ...433.44 1595 . ..459.45 3131 . ...274.32 3151. ..409.52 1524. ...579.10 ©CITIZEN 120D . . S139.55 MSP55. ..$489.66 MSP50. ...385.64 Premiere 35 . 477.17 TOSHIBA P321SL . .$494.85 P351-2 Color .$1199.95 P341SL .... ...634.17 P351SX ... . .1019.45 SANTA CLARA Diskless Workstation ... .S640.40 SOFTWARE & STARTER KITS WESTERN DIGITAL 3 Node LAN kit w/Western Digital software. .$720.34 Entry-level 286 Starter Kit, 4 Users_ ..489.90 Entry-level 286 Starter Kit, 8 Users_ ...SAVE NOVELL 286 Software w/Keycard. . 1569.09 NOVELL SFT Netware Level 1. .2148.66 NOVELL SFT Netware Level II V2.1_ .2757.60 Nondedicated Netware Software 286 w/Keycard. . 1495.09 INTERFACE CARDS ARCNET PC110 LANBoard . .$199.27 ARCNET PC210 LANBoard. ..249.50 ETHERNET Interface Connector. .329.80 ETHERNET Plus Board (for 286). ..709.74 G-NET Interface Card w/cable. ..299.52 WESTERN DIGITAL Ethernet Cards. .269.10 ACCESSORIES ARCNET Passive Hub. ..$85.00 ARCNET Active Hub. ..499.98 Ethernet Terminators. .. .37.50 Novell trained and authorized sales and support. Call CDW for all new Software versions. LASER PRINTERS H-P Laser Jet Model 2.$1699.40 AST Turbolaser P/S.IN STOCK H-P Deskjet . 689.00 NtU LC86U/LC890 . 1902.44/3295.60 PANASONIC Laser.1605.35 TOSHIBA PaoeLaser.SAVE 8087-2/8087-3 . $159.33/122.50 80287-6 /-8 / -10.174.30 /299.55 / 339.25 80387-16/80387-20 . 497 68/777 44 1200B . 1200 External 1200 Int. . 1200 Plus. PLOTTERS, DIGITIZERS & SCANNERS 1023.. . 1042.. . CALCOMP ..$3838.38 1043 .$6535.15 ...7539.95 1044 .10,305.06 DXY-885 DXY-990 ROLAND ..$1149.79 DPX-2000. $3464.12 ...1457.82 DPX-3300.. 4689.52 12x12 .. SUMMASKETCH ...$376.30 12x18 .$632.50 HEWLETT PACKARD HP7440A ... .$968.30 HP7475A ....1417.44 HP7550 .2926.56 HP7570 ..LOWEST PRICE HP SCANJET...SAVE HOUSTON INSTRUMENTS HI DMP-42 HI DMP-52/52MP HI DMP-56A HI DMP-61 / 62 SHARP FO-300S1220.10 SHARP FO-420.1399.95 SHARP FO-500.1599.95 TOSHIBA 3010.$1314.44 GBC-1656 .1459.80 GBC-1236S.915.44 MOST ORDERS SHIPPED WITHIN 48 HOURS. AST 5251-11 Plus.$619.04 EVEREX 1200B/2400B . 109.90/199.50 IRMA 3278/79 . 695.17 PACKARD BELL 2400 lnt/2400 Ext. .169.95/199.22 Hayes HAYES 1200...$289.60 2400 .$424.68 1200B .269.20 2400B.379.65 QMtobotics $108.45 2400B.$199.70 .129.10 9600 HST . 665.20 WtbTel $194.50 2400 Int . S299.10 .228.88 2400 Ext . 389.44 PERMA POWER 6 Outlet Surge Supp.$29.40 TRIPPLITE BC-450 .$419.78 LC-1200 .$136.85 BC-1200 .748.55 LC-1800 .189.75 4 outlet.44.25 DATASHIELD 500 Watt.$560.05 1200 Watt ... .$994.75 800 Watt.638.50 6 Outlet Surge .. .27.85 ■■ ii i 111111111 ii 11 A-B Switching Box (par. or serial) . $39.95 BASF 5 Pack of 10 DS/DD w/case .49.00 KENSINGTON Masterpiece.99.99 KENSINGTON Masterpiece Plus .118.40 KEYTRONICS 5151 IBM or AT&T.149.95 KEYTRONICS 101.104.65 Printer Cable (IBM to Centronics) 6 ft.19.99 XT Power Supply 150 Watt . 69.95 MONITOR INTERFACE CARDS CDW™ color card.$ 99.00 CDW™ monographics card w/p. 99.00 GENOA Spectrum (color monographic w/p)168.75 HERCULES color card w/p . 146.16 HERCULES monographics plus w/p.179.84 TAXAN MONOGRAPHIC w/p . 99.00 ■ .'.H.’l.HlI.l.'.li.'.HlIU.hM AT&T Monochrome Monitor.$189.40 AMDEK 310A/410A . 119.99/149.99 AMDEK 1280 . 679.78 COMPAQ monochrome monitor.188.46 COMPAQ VGA Mono.193.10 IBM PS2 8503 .187.90 NEC Multisync GS.184.52 NEC Monograph.1297.25 PGS MAX 12E amber color . 139.40 PACKARD BELL Green or Amber.86.95 TAXAN 123 Green/ 124 Amber .. .119.50/124.05 AMDEK color 600T/722 . $349.24/444.49 IBM PS2 8512 Color.428.40 IBM PS2 8513 Enhanced Color.498.20 SAMSUNG RGB Comp . 238 60 PGS HX-12 Plus. .417.15 TAXAN 650/720 . 469.90/299.80 MAGNAVOX 8762.259.05 VGA & EGA MONITORS COMPAQ VGA monitor.$548.68 MAGNAVOX 943EGA.387.40 MITSUBISHI Diamond Scan.522.20 NEC Multisync II /PLUS . 609J6/888.10 NEC Multisync XL 19 inch .1974.46 PACKARD BELL VGA Monitor.389.95 PGS Ultrasync.515.33 SONY Multiscan 1303/1302 . 599.45/649.25 TAXAN 770 PLUS.499.40 ZENITH Z-1490 .768.31 VGA DISPLAY CARDS ATI VGA VIP.$307.24 GENOA VGA.289.70 PARADISE VGA.297.68 ORCHID VGA.278.14 VIDEO-7 VGA.299.15 EGA DISPLAY CARDS ATI Wonder Card . $199.95 GENOA Super EGA Hi-Res 800 x 600 . 234.40 NEC MVA 1024 .960.50 NEC GB-1 640x480 .239.43 PARADISE Auto Switch EGA 480 .169.65 VIDEO 7 Vega Deluxe . 249.74 CAD MONITORS & CARDS MITSUBISHI 6905, 19 inch.S2295.96 MITSUBISHI 6922, 19 inch.1974.60 HITACHI 4119, 19 Inch.2310.65 CONTROL SYSTEMS ARTIST 1016.1582.20 VERMONT Cobra.1977.75 METHEUS 1104 .....948.65 LOGITECH HIRez._$99.95 LOGITECH C7/Bus . 89.95/109.06 LOGITECH Logimouse C7 w/publisher .. .124.85 MICROSOFT Mouse (Bus Version).119.34 MICROSOFT Mouse (Serial Version .131.26 MOUSE SYSTEMS (Serial Version).99.55 MOUSE SYSTEMS [Bus Version).108.77 MOUSE SYSTEMS Omnimouse .59.70 HIGH VOLUME BIDS IHVITED 730 Anthony Trail, Northbrook, IL 60062 FAX-A-BID (312) 291-1737 If you find a better price call us before you buy. WHY WAIT ? CALL COMPUTER DISCOUNT WAREHOUSE™ NOW! Open terms available to approved credit charter member (800) 233-4426 MMC Credit Card charges are not submitted until time ot shipment Shipping and handling addi- ■ ■ ■ ■ • • _ _ . , _ , —^ 1 MARKETING COUNCIL tionai On all hard drive orders ano orders under S2O0 00 please add $500 handling tee |n Illinois FAX I Credit earn chamec I of the Direct Marketing AssocaDon. Inc. Non-detective returns subiect to restocking tee An prices retied discount tor cash A,- WIPJPPW I I//CA I I BSmUBBL .1 _ iw 10 business days tor shipping when paying oy personal check Software ch os and other / O H O \ >100 H /IOC / 0 - 40 \ OOH A ° i m. „. I I Mf^|ss Card J MEMBER i-n-ars 49o-142b (J12) 291-1737 1 SU ‘ I mmm 11—^ E818 WORDPERFECT 5.0 5V4/3y4.$219.90/228.90 dBase 111+ 51 / 4 / 3 %.399.00/424 00 LOTUS 1-2-3 51 / 4 / 3 %.305.00/327.00 Paradox Version 2.0 . 399 00 Ventura Software Version 1.1 .499.00 MICROSOFT Word V.4/Excell.243.50/319.30 Circle 66 on Reader Service Card (DEALERS: 67) standby uninterruptible power supply, and protect your microcomputer against costly data loss and hardware damage. • Constant AC line protection against power disturbances and interruptions. • Built-in spike/transient suppression and EMI noise filtering. • Powerful sizes to protect any system from the earliest Apples to the latest PS/2’s. International models, also. For more information, call: TOLL-FREE 800/332-3440. In California, call 805/541-4160. Or write to us at the address below. GSA No. GS 00K-87-AGS5393 PS01 Dealer/VAR inquiries invited Cuesta Systems Corporation 3440 Roberto Court San Luis Obispo, CA 93401 Use it or Use DataSaver CHAOS MANOR “knows” what the files contain. The other way machines can store text images is as bit-mapped images. In this case, the computer doesn’t know that what it has stored is text; as far as the ma¬ chine is concerned, this may be a picture of the planet Jupiter, a random drawing made with a paint program by a 3-year- old, a line drawing of the Washington Monument, a Gary Larson cartoon, or anything else. The machine isn’t ex¬ pected to know anything about the image: its only obligation is to faithfully reproduce it when called upon. The fact that this particular image happens to be a picture of a page of text is completely irrelevant. As an example: Mrs. Roberta Isdell Pournelle’s father, the late Frank Isdell, was one of the early union organizers in the copper mines in Idaho. Those were rough times: his house was dynamited by the Pinkertons in retaliation for his union activities. Frank Isdell kept a journal, handwritten on yellow lined paper. It makes fascinating reading. Mr. Isdell died long enough ago that most of his grandchildren don’t remember him well, and Mrs. Pournelle and I have decided to use our considerable computer resources to publish that diary so the kids will know just what their grandfather was like. The first part of that job is easy. We simply use an image scanner to make copies of his manuscript pages. Once we have those, we can reproduce them in any way we like, on paper with a laser printer or even as page images to be stored on a CD-ROM. What we’ll have is the elec¬ tronic equivalent of photocopying or photographing those pages. The problem with that is, you can’t do anything with the images other than re¬ produce them. Since the machine can’t read those notes, it can’t do spelling cor¬ rection. It can’t index. We can’t search for key words. Like a camera, it can only produce a new image copy; and that’s not quite what we had in mind. Our intent is to produce an annotated work embedding Frank Isdell in his times, with notes and maps. To properly do what we want, we’ll need true text files. The only way to get those is to have someone type them in. No computer is smart enough to take handwritten text and turn it into ma¬ chine-readable text. The Trouble with Kerning If Frank Isdell had typed his notes, we wouldn’t have such a problem. There are hardware scanners with programs that recognize typescript letters, one letter at a time. If they encounter a typeface they haven’t seen before, they can be taught that one, too. These machines are called optical character readers (OCRs). When an OCR sees the symbol ’;’, it is clever enough to recognize that as a semicolon and store it in memory as the binary equivalent of number 59. Simi¬ larly, an A is assigned the number 65, a is stored as 97, and so forth. The num¬ bers are ASCII. ASCII is an arbitrary scheme that assigns a unique number to every letter, number (from 0 to 9), and punctuation mark. ASCII isn’t the only such scheme—IBM sometimes uses a system called extended binary-coded decimal interchange code (EBCDIC), which assigns quite different numbers to each letter and punctuation mark—but it’s the one used by all microcomputers. OCRs have been with us for a long time, and they’re quite good for what they’re intended for, which is typescript. The trouble arises with printed text. Whereas typescripts (with exceptions like the IBM Executive, but let’s not complicate matters) allow the same width to each letter—the i takes up just as much room as the m —printed text doesn’t work that way. Not only is the space allocated to the i less than that given the m, but some letters actually overlap, as for example when they type¬ set the letter combination WA. This pro¬ cess is known as kerning, and it has been around for centuries, because kerned text is more readable and just plain looks bet¬ ter than typescript. The trouble is that kerning confuses the computer. For years, we’ve heard announce¬ ments of OCR scanners that could read kerned text, and every now and then one comes out; but none of them has been worth much. At COMDEX, Flagstaff Engineering was demonstrating the Spot program that can take image-scanned text from either the Hewlett-Packard or the Panasonic scanner and turn that into machine-readable ASCII files. The program isn’t perfect. It has to be taught each typeface, and every time it runs into a kerned pair it has never seen before, it complains until you teach it what it means. You have to tell it that the symbol WA is to be interpreted as two ASCII characters rather than one. Once it learns that, it remembers. Eventually, it will know all the kerning pairs in that particular book, after which it can read the book. I have a bunch of books I wrote on a typewriter before I got old Zeke. I either don’t have the typescripts of those books, or they were so marked up in editing as to be unscannable; in any event, I have no continued 106 BYTE- AUGUST 1988 Personal Service and Unbeatable Prices! Welcome to Paradise. The microcomputer software source that caters to your programming needs. Discover the Many Advantages of Paradise... Lowest price guaranteed # Huge inventory, latest versions ° Technical support Immediate shipment • 30-day money-back guarantee* o Knowledgeable sales staff Over 500 brand-name products in stock—if you don’t see it, call! We’ll Match Any Nationally Advertised Price. 75 66 3655 3399 LIST OURS 386 SOFTWARE 386-TO-THE-MAX ALSYS 386 ADA DESQVIEW 130 FOXBASE + /386 595 HIGH C-386 895 MICROPORT DOS MERGE (2-USERS) 399 MICROPORT SYS V/386 (COMPLETE) 899 MS WINDOWS/386 195 NDP C OR FORTRAN-386 595 PC-M0S/3860-USER) 195 PHARLAP 386IASM/LINK 495 SCO VP/IX (2-USERS) 495 SCO XENIX SYS V 386 (COMPLETE) 1595 VM/386 245 115 399 839 359 799 130 535 181 422 399 1199 182 ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE MULISP-87 INTERPRETER 300 199 PC SCHEME 95 86 T.I. PROCEDURE CONSULTANT 495 435 TURBO PROLOG V. 2.0 150 109 TURBO PROLOG TOOLBOX 100 69 ASSEMBLERS/LINKERS ADVANTAGE DISASSEMBLER 295 279 MS MACRO ASSEMBLER 150 105 OPTASM 195 179 PLINK86PLUS 495 279 BASIC DB/LIB 139 121 FINALLY! 99 90 FLASH-UP 89 80 MACH 2 79 60 MS BASIC COMPILER 6.0 295 229 MS QUICKBASIC 99 69 QUICKPAK 69 60 QUICKWINDOWS W/SOURCE 99 90 TRUE BASIC 100 90 TURBO BASIC 100 69 TURBO BASIC TOOLBOXES 100 69 DBASE TOOLS CLIPPER 695 399 D’ACTION 80 70 D’ANALYST 229 209 DBASE IN PLUS 695 399 DBUG 195 149 EAGLE NEW 495 395 FOXBASE + 395 219 FOX TOOL BOX 295 CALL GENIFER 395 269 Hl-SCREEN XL 149 129 R&R 150 129 SAY WHAT?! 50 40 SCANALYZER 50 45 TOM RETTIG'S LIBRARY 100 79 UI PROGRAMMER 295 229 OVER 100 DATABASE PRODUCTS INSTOCK C LIBRARIES CASYNCH MANAGER 175 137 C TOOLS PLUS/5.0 129 101 C UTILITY LIBRARY 185 125 CXPERT 395 335 DEVELOPER'S TOOLKIT FOR C 495 395 DESQVIEW API C LIBRARY 200 CALL ESSENTIAL COMMUNICATIONS 185 125 COMMUNICATIONS PLUS 250 199 GREENLEAF TURBO FUNCTIONS 109 79 GREENLEAF COMM LIBRARY 229 155 GREENLEAF FUNCTIONS 209 115 PFORCE 395 215 RESIDENT CW/SOURCE 198 169 TIMESLICER 295 279 TURBO C TOOLS 129 101 CCOMPILERS/INTEtfPRETERS C-TERP 298 232 INSTANT C 495 384 LATTICE C 450 289 MICROSOFT C 450 299 QUICK C 99 69 RUN/C PROFESSIONAL 250 159 TURBOC 100 69 MICROFOCUS COBOL/2 900 733 W/COBOL/2 TOOLSET 1800 1465 PERSONALCOBOL 149 121 MICROSOFT COBOL 700 165 OPT-TECH SORT 149 105 REALIA COBOL 995 799 W/REALMENU 1145 929 REALCICS 995 799 RM/COBOL 950 763 RM/SCREENS 395 339 SCREENIO 400 382 DEBUGGERS ADVANCED TRACE-86 175 121 BREAKOUT 125 89 PERISCOPE 1 455 373 PERISCOPE II 175 141 PERISCOPE III 10 MHZ 1395 1143 PFIX 86 PLUS 395 215 DISK/DOS/KEYBOARI) UTILITIES COMMAND PLUS V. 2.0 80 70 DISK OPTIMIZER 60 55 FASTBACK + 189 142 MACE UTILITIES 99 90 NORTON COMMANDER 75 56 NORTON UTILITIES ADVANCED 150 99 PC TOOLS DELUXE 80 70 VFEATURE 80 75 XTREE PRO 129 111 EDITORS BRIEF 195 CALL W/DBRIEF 275 CALL EDIX 195 169 EMACS 295 268 EPSILON 195 151 KEDIT 150 129 MKS Vi 75 66 MULTI-EDIT 99 90 NORTON EDITOR 75 69 PC/EDT + 295 269 Pi EDITOR 195 165 SPF/PC 245 185 VEDIT PLUS 185 131 FILE MANAGEMENT BTRIEVE 245 185 XTRIEVE 245 189 REPORT OPTION 145 109 BTRIEVE/N LIST OURS 595 455 XTRIEVE/N 595 159 REPORT OPTION/N 345 279 CBTREE 159 141 C-TREE 395 318 D-TREE 495 418 R-TREE 295 241 COMBINATIONS AVAILABLE CALL CALL DBC III 250 172 DBC III PLUS 750 599 DB-VISTA OR DB.QUERY 195 CALL INFORMIX PRODUCTS CALL CALL XQL 795 599 FORTRAN LAHEY FORTRAN F77L-EM/32 895 799 LAHEY PERSONAL FORTRAN 77 95 86 MS FORTRAN 450 299 RM/FORTRAN 595 479 DIAGRAM'ER OR DOCUMENT’ER 129 115 GRAFMATIC OR PLOTMATIC 135 119 MAGUS NUMERICAL ANALYST 295 252 SPINDRIFT LIBRARY 149 135 GRAPHICS ADVANTAGE GRAPHICS (C) 250 229 ESSENTIAL GRAPHICS 299 229 GSS GRAPHIC DEV. TOOLKIT 495 399 HALO ’88 325 229 HALO ’88 (5 MICROSOFT LANG.) 595 399 METAWINDOW PLUS 275 232 METAWINDOW/PREMIUM 495 119 TURBOWINDOW/C 95 80 TURBO HALO (FOR TURBO C) 99 80 MODULA-2 LOGITECH MODULA-2 COMPILER PACK 99 81 DEVELOPMENT SYSTEM 249 199 TOOLKIT 169 111 SOLID B+ TOOLBOX 100 89 STONYBROOK MODULA-2 195 179 MOUSE PRODUCTS LOGITECH HIREZ OR SERIES 2 CALL CALL MICROSOFT MOUSE BUS 150 99 OTHER VARIETIES CALL CALL SUMMAMOUSE 119 99 O B J ECT-0 RIE NT E D I’ ROG R A M M1N G ACTOR 495 439 ADVANTAGE C+ + 495 479 PFORCE+ + 395 215 SMALLTALK/V 100 85 APPLICATION PACKS 50 45 SMALLTALK/V286 200 175 OPERATING SYSTEMS MICROPORT 286 DOS MERGE 249 219 MICROPORT SYS V/AT 649 579 SCO XENIX SYSTEM V (COMP.) 1295 979 WENDIN-DOS 99 80 OTHER MICROPORT,SCO, WENDIN PRODUCTS CALL CALL PASCA L COM PILE RS MICROSOFT PASCAL 300 199 PASCAL-2 229 199 TURBO PASCAL 100 69 TURBO PASCAL DEV. LIB. 395 289 TURBO PASCAL ADD-ONS LIST 0URS ASCII TURBO PROG. (COMPLETE) 289 259 DOS/BIOS & MOUSE TOOLS 75 70 METRABYTE DATA ACQ. TOOLS 100 90 OVERLAY MANAGER 4.0 45 40 SCREEN SCULPTOR 125 96 OBJECT-ORIENTED LANGUAGES ACTOR — Powerful new language built around object-oriented programming, with windows being defined as objects. Actor makes it easier to include and control windows in application programs. List: $495 Ours:$439 SMALLTALK/V NEW V.2.0 — New version is a high-performance, production quality, object- oriented programming environment. Includes: • Advanced user interface featuring windows, pop-up —menus and optional mouse. • A set of tools for organizing and browsing the Smalltalk —source code. • An incremental program development capability. • Bitmap graphics with optional color support. List:$100 Ours:$85 PFORCE++ —This C + + library provides everything necessary to build complete applications. Includes high-level classes for windows, databases, B-trees, fields, menus, rings, lists, communication tasks, time/date stamps, BIOS and DOS access, etc. Complete source code included. List: $395 Ours:$215 ADVANTAGE C + + — ADVANTAGE C + + now has MS Window’s Support and gives you the speed support and reliability you need to develop large complex programs with fewer bugs. Latest version supports MS C 4.0/5.0 and QuickC faster. List: $495 Ours:$479 T-DEBUG PLUS 45 41 W/SOURCE 90 79 TURBO ANALYST 75 69 TURBO ASYNCH PLUS 129 101 TURBO GEOMETRY LIBRARY 150 135 TURBO HALO 95 80 TURBO MAGIC 99 90 TURBO PASCAL TOOLBOXES 100 69 TURBO POWER TOOLS PLUS 129 101 TURBO PROFESSIONAL 4.0 99 89 TURBO WINDOW/PASCAL 95 80 SCREENS/WINDOWS C-SCAPE V 3.0 CALL CALL C-CELL CALL CALL CURSES W/SOURCE 250 172 GREENLEAF DATA WINDOWS 295 229 HI-SCREEN XL 149 129 JYACC JAM 750 684 MICROSOFT WINDOWS 99 69 MS WINDOWS DEVELOPMENT KIT 500 329 PANEL PLUS 495 395 PANEL/QC OR /TC 129 99 SCREENSTAR W/SOURCE 198 169 TURBO POWER SCREEN 129 101 VIEW MANAGER 275 219 VITAMIN C 225 162 VC SCREEN 149 119 WINDOWS FOR DATA 295 CALL W/SOURCE 590 CALL ADDITIONAL PRODUCTS BABY/36 (RPG II) 3000 2699 CARBON COPY PLUS 195 142 CO-SESSION 195 179 DAN BRICKLIN'S DEMO PROGRAM 75 60 DEMO PROGRAM 11 195 179 DB2C 299 272 EUREKA 167 119 FLOWCHARTING II 229 207 INTERACTIVE EASY FLOW 150 125 OS/2 DEVELOPMENT TOOLS BTRIEVE FOR OS/2 595 455 CALIFORNIA TEN PACK 99 79 EPSILON FOR OS/2 195 151 GREENLEAF DATA WINDOWS OS/2 395 279 GSS DEV TOOLKIT FOR OS/2 695 559 HELPME 99 75 KEDIT V. 4.0 175 139 MICROFOCUS COBOL/2 900 733 MICROSOFTLANGUAGES CALL CALL PANEL PLUS FOR OS/2 495 395 RBASE FOR OS/2 895 CALL VITAMIN C FOR OS/2 345 285 WINDOWS FOR DATA FOR OS/2 495 CALL JANUS ADA JET SET 170 160 MAGIC PC 195 179 MATHCAD 395 279 MKSRCS 189 169 MKS TOOLKIT 169 139 MS OS/2 PROG. TOOLKIT 350 239 MUMATH 300 189 NORTON GUIDES 100 69 PC-LINT 139 101 POLYMAKE 149 135 POLYTRON PVCS CALL CALL PRE-C 295 159 PROTEUS 99 89 SEIDL VERSION MANAGER 300 269 SOURCE PRINT 97 80 TREE D1AGRAMMER 77 70 Full Line of MS-DOS, OS/2, Xenix, Macintosh Products Available. Call or Write for Latest Free Catalog! Terms and Policies • We honor MC, VISA, AMERICAN EXPRESS No surcharge on credit card or C.O.D. Prepayment by check. New York Stale residents add applicable sales tax. Shipping and handling $3.95 per item within the U.S., sent UPS ground. Rush and international service available. Call for prevailing rates. • Programmer's Paradise will match any current nationally advertised pnee with equivalent terms for the products listed in this ad. • Prices and Policies subject to change without notice. •Hours 9AM EST-7PM EST • Mail Order a include your phone number •Ask for details. Some manufacturers will not allow returns once disk seals are broken. Dealers and Corporate Buyers—Call for special discounts and benefits! 1 - 800 - 445-7899 In NY: 914-332-4548 Customer Service: 914-332-0869 International Orders: 914-332-4548 Telex: 510-601-7602 Programmer’s rcJmJu A Division of Hudson Technologies, Inc. 42 River Street, Tarrytown, NY 10591 AUGUST 1988 -BYTE 107 Circle 183 on Reader Service Card CHAOS MANOR Items Discussed APX-3200 .$2675 Maximum Storage 5025 Centennial Blvd. Colorado Springs, CO 80919 (719)531-6888 Inquiry 937. Battery Watch.$39.95 Traveling Software 18702 North Creek Pkwy. Bothell, WA 98011 (206) 483-8088 Inquiry 938. Cheetah 386 Motherboard.$1195 Cheetah International 107 Community Blvd., Suite 5 Longview, TX 75602 (800) 243-3824 Inquiry 939. ForComment:.$995 Print Shop.$34.95 Broderbund Software 17 Paul Dr. San Rafael, CA 94903 (415) 492-3200 Inquiry 940. Grammatik II .$89 Grammatik III .$99 Reference Software 330 Townsend, Suite 123 San Francisco, CA 94107 (415) 541-0222 Inquiry 941. Readability .$59.95 Scandinavian PC Systems 51 Monroe St., Suite 707A Rockville, MD 20850 (800) 628-2828 ext. 982 (301) 738-8826 Inquiry 942. SideKick Plus.$199.95 Borland International, Inc. 4585 Scotts Valley Dr. Scotts Valley, CA 95066 (408) 438-8400 Inquiry 943. Spot.$9.95 Flagstaff Engineering 1120 Kaibab Lane Flagstaff, AZ 86001 (602) 779-3341 Inquiry 944. machine-readable copies of my early works, and no easy way of making any. That’s all changing. Flagstaff Engi¬ neering has enough confidence in their programs that they’re arranging to get me the loan of a Hewlett-Packard scan¬ ner, which they say will work with their software so that when we put printed copies of my old books in, we’ll get ma¬ chine-readable language out. I can’t wait to try that. Traveling Strikes Again Mark Eppley of Traveling Software doesn’t seem to know the rules: he held a press conference (his first ever) at COM¬ DEX to announce a product they’re actu¬ ally shipping. I understand that seven different PR agencies were so horrified they tried to straighten him out: you hold press conferences to announce stuff that you’re going to ship Real Soon Now, not something that you’ve actually got out the door. Anyway, Traveling has a small mem¬ ory-resident program for laptops that keeps track of battery use. By doing Shift-Alt-B, you get a “fuel gauge” display that estimates the time remaining before the batteries in your particular laptop (you tell it which one you have during setup) go dead. This is one of those utilities Traveling developed largely for their own use, then partway through decided it was a salable product. You can live without it—I have for several years—but it’s certainly a convenience if, like me, you have a faulty memory. I have several times got on an airplane with a partially charged Z-183 and run out of juice before the flight was over. My fault, but very annoying. Trav¬ eling’s Battery Watch program would have prevented that. I can’t testify to its accuracy for all laptops, but I did test a prerelease version on my Z-183, and it’s pretty good on that: it reported I had 2 hours left when in fact the machine ran for 2 hours and 10 minutes. An hour later it reported 1.1 hours remaining, so it was in fact updat¬ ing its prediction by watching my use pattern. Battery Watch has a “deep discharge” option designed to really run down your nickel-cadmium battery. Running it down until it’s complete discharged and then recharging it maintains the capacity and increases the life span of the battery. Otherwise, the battery develops a “mem¬ ory”; if not completely discharged, it only partially recharges. The deep dis¬ charge option may be useful for some laptops, but it certainly isn’t needed for the Z-183. When I tried the program, it did continuous reads on both the hard disk and floppy disk drives. Moreover, after I’d been running the deep discharge option and listening to it grind my hard disk and floppy disk drives for a while, the backlit screen turned itself off. The prerelease version of Battery Watch didn’t know how to take control of that, which is odd, because you set the time-out constant (how long the screen will stay lit between keystrokes) in software, meaning that number has to be stored somewhere in the machine’s memory. The backlit screen uses plenty of power, and if you can keep it on, that surely would be the most harmless way to deep discharge your battery. As it hap¬ pens, Norman Spinrad discovered a way to do just that on the Z-183: simply give the machine the SHIP command. SHIP is supposed to park the hard disk drive head in a landing zone, after which you turn off the computer. If you don’t turn it off after issuing SHIP, the Z-183’s screen backlighting stays on until the bat¬ tery is gone, which is surely a more be¬ nign way than grinding the disk drives. Mark Eppley says that the production version of Battery Watch does keep the backlight on during a deep discharge. And, although using SHIP is a gentler method to discharge the batteries, using the deep discharge option speeds up the entire discharge/recharge operation. The fuel-gauge part of Battery Watch works fine, and anyone who does a lot of traveling with a portable will be better off for it. Peep Shows One reason COMDEX wasn’t very excit¬ ing was that about half the new stuff on display has been vaporware for a very long time: products announced but not yet demonstrated, much less shipping. No matter how exciting a product is, after you hear about it long enough you lose interest. Some companies know this, and they have a policy of not making public an¬ nouncements until they’ve really got a product. On the other hand, they also know that writers have an insatiable ap¬ petite for new things to write about, which presents them with something of a dilemma. One way out of that is what’s known in the trade as a peep show: your booth on the show floor has only shipping prod- continued 108 BYTE* AUGUST 1988 Why build a printhead that can punch through aluminum, when all you need is a clear impression on a 5-part form? The answer is uncompromising quality. We built our new 300 Series 9-pin and 24-pin printers tougher and more reliable than they have to be. With printhead pins of carbaloy/tungsten, one of the hardest metals known, they’re tough enough to make a crisp impression on a sheet of aluminum. So you can imagine how sharp they’ll look driving clear to the bottom of a 5-part form. Even after printing on aluminum, we look this good on paper. Our engineers call this “championship specs.” More than 3 million loyal users call it rugged reliability. And it shows in the quality and performance of every printer and modem we make. Call 1-800-OKIDATA for the dealer nearest you. Circle 160 on Reader Service Card Demonstration above made using a 24-pin MICROLINE 391 printer without ribbon on a sheet of .005 inch gauge aluminum. Actual, unretouched photograph. OK I DATA is a registered trademark of Oki America, Inc. Marque deposee de Oki America, Inc. OKIDATA an OKI AMERICA company We put business on paper. CHAOS MANOR ucts, but you also have a hotel suite where you bring selected distributors, dealers, and customers for private showings; and if there’s any time left over in your schedule, you bring in reporters and col¬ umnists you can trust to respect informa¬ tion-release embargoes. As an example, I saw the Zenith laptop computers almost a year before they were announced to the public—I’m rather proud that they incor¬ porated a couple of my suggestions into the final product—and the Zenith Flat Technology Monitor long before it was shown to the industry in general. When I first began writing for BYTE, there was a full 4-month delay between my draft and the actual publication. Over the years, they’ve whittled that down a lot: I’m writing this on May 20, just be¬ fore the Science Fiction Writers of Amer¬ ica’s annual Nebula Awards banquet, and it will be in the August issue, meaning that it will be on the stands in mid-July. Of course, I should have had this in a week ago.... Anyway, one of the COMDEX peep shows was held by Intel, and I have their permission to say this much: Intel has a new PCompatible communications sys¬ tem, hardware and software, that will knock your eye out. I’ve been saying for years “one user, at least one CPU,” and Intel has taken that to heart. I guarantee you’ll hear more about this one. ForComment: I first saw Broderbund in San Francis¬ co’s Brooks Hall at one of the early West Coast Computer Faires. They had a tiny booth over against one wall, and they were showing the best computer games I’d ever seen. The next year they had a larger booth, and the year after that they had one of the biggest in the show, all built around computer games. If you know computer games, you’re likely to know something about com¬ puter graphics, and the temptation for games companies is to use that expertise in an attempt to penetrate the business market. Sometimes that doesn’t work- few even remember the name of Info- corn’s business programs—but some¬ times it works spectacularly, as witness Broderbund’s Print Shop low-end desk¬ top publishing programs and utilities for the IBM PC. I recently received a report that Print Shop was the best-selling PCompatible program of 1987, and I’ve no reason to doubt that. I’ve covered it in other col¬ umns; in the unlikely event you don’t know about it and you have the slightest interest in using a PC for simple bread- and-butter print work, check it out. It’s not as elegant as some of the high-end programs, but it’s easy to get into and good enough for a heck of a lot of jobs. Anyway, Broderbund hasn’t aban¬ doned games, but they have become a se¬ rious contender in the business and edu¬ cation markets. One of their better efforts is ForCom¬ ment: (despite the cutesy-pie name). This is a program that lets from a few to a whole bunch of people take text files, ex¬ amine them, and make editorial com¬ ments complete with date and initial stamps. The commented version can then be sent on to someone else, either by disk or through a local-area network (LAN). Either way, there are simple ways for the final editor to collate the comments and either implement or re¬ move them. One of the neatest features is selectivity: if one of the people making comments turns out to be a complete id¬ iot, you can set the system so that you’ll never see those remarks. Despite the fact that Niven and I are about the most successful writing team since Nordoff and Hall, I’m no great fan of collective writing; realistically, though, most corporate documents are necessarily collaborative efforts. Policy memos have to be vetted by several de¬ partments. Letters often must be re¬ viewed by a number of specialists. All this can be expensive, especially if it’s done in face-to-face meetings. ForComment: can take up some of that burden. It’s easy to learn and easy to use, and it’s not overdeveloped for the job it’s supposed to do. It supports about a dozen word-processing programs (including, of course, straight ASCII text files). My only complaint about ForComment: is that it doesn’t recognize Q&A Write, which is the editor Niven and I are using for our next novel. SideKick Plus Readers of this column will know that I’m a longtime addict of SideKick; in¬ deed, one of the reasons I abandoned old Zeke was that there was nothing like SideKick for CP/M. I can’t imagine there’s anyone out there who doesn’t know what SideKick is, but just in case: it’s a memory-resident program that gives you instant access to a notebook, calendar/datebook, desk calculator, phone book and dialer, and ASCII con¬ version table. It’s a program you can get totally dependent on, as Mrs. Pournelle discovered after I installed a copy on her AT&T 6300 Plus machine. The only real problem with SideKick was that it ate too much memory; and since it was one of the earliest of the memory residents, it didn’t cooperate too well with other such programs. If you loaded it last, though, it worked quite well; and if you used it in its own DESQ- view window, the memory requirements were no problem at all. Consequently, although I’ve had SideKick Plus for some time, I was in no hurry to install it. Bet¬ ter is the enemy of good enough, and SideKick was good enough.... That was foolish of me. SideKick Plus does a lot more than address SideKick’s problems. It does take care of those. True, it uses more memory than SideKick did, but un¬ like its predecessor, SideKick Plus knows how to load most of itself into Lotus/Intel/Microsoft EMS 4.0 ex¬ panded memory. Of course, you must have an expanded memory board, but that’s no problem: a whole bunch of ven¬ dors will be happy to sell you one. Alas, that will be expensive. A year ago, mem¬ ory was essentially free. Now, given the U.S. Department of Commerce’s suc¬ cess in creating and enforcing a memory chip cartel—I guess the government thought Japan, Inc., was at a competitive disadvantage and wanted to level the field—I don’t know what a good ex¬ panded memory board will cost. The important thing is that SideKick Plus has a whole bunch of new features, including an outline processor that com¬ petes with Ready!. For the past couple of years, I’ve used both SideKick and Ready! (Ready! has always had the abil¬ ity to stuff most of itself into expanded memory, so it doesn’t take up too much prime memory space); now, I’ll prob¬ ably eliminate Ready! entirely. There are also alarm clocks, lots of enhancements to the calculator, real im¬ provements to the calendar/scheduler, and enough more that it’s pointless to go on. If you liked SideKick, you’ll love SideKick Plus. If you don’t use Side- Kick, you probably ought to rethink your situation. It was that good, and SideKick Plus is even better. Strongly recommended. Developer’s Dreams There’s been a recent spate of news about a design defect in the Intel 80386/80387 chip combination; sometimes when doing 32-bit calculations, the two chips get into an Alphonse/Gaston situation, each expecting the other to do something first, and the system is locked up. The latest major system here is a big 20-MHz Cheetah 386, with a Priam 330- megabyte hard disk drive. The neat thing about the Cheetah 386 motherboard is continued 110 BYTE* AUGUST 1988 Mainframe Power for your PC! If you need or are accustomed to the throughput of a 32-bit mini, including any of DEC'S VAX series, MicroWay has great news for you. The combination of our NDP compilers and our mW1167 numeric coprocessor gives your 386 PC, VAX speedNf you don’t own a 386 PC, we provide a number of economical PC and AT upgrade paths. Many of our NDP Fortran-386 users are reporting turn around times that are two to six times faster than their VAX. The exact times are a function of the VAX processor being used, the speed of the 386, the number of users being served by the VAX, and the coprocessor being used with the 386. There are currently over 400 developers using our NDP tools to port 32-bit applications. To help the 386/1167 engineering standard emerge, MicroWay is co-marketing several mainframe applications that have been ported by our customers. In addition, this ad in- Dr. Robert Atwell, a leading defense scientist, calculates that NDP Fortran-386 is currently saving him $12,000 per month in rentals of VAX hardware and software while doubling his productivity! Fred Ziegler of AspenTech in Cambridge, Mass, reports 7 ported 900,000 lines of Fortran source in two weeks without a single problem!" AspenTech's Chemical Modeling System is in use on mainframes worldwide and is probably the largest application to ever run on an Intel processor. Dr. Jerry Ginsberg of Georgia Tech reports ”My problems run a factor of six faster using NDP Fortran-386 on an mW1167 equipped 386/20 than they do on my Micro VAX II." troduces the first of many utilities that will ease the porting of your favorite in-house programs. These include tools like NDP-Plot, which provides CalComp compatible screen and printer graphics, and NDP Windows. MicroWay has mWl 167 boards in stock that run on the Compaq 386/20, IBM PS2/80 Tandy 4000, AT&T 6386, Acer 386/20, Everex Step 386/16(20), H.P. Vectra RS/16(20) and others. We now have a new board for the Com¬ paq 386/20 which combines an 1167 with VGA support that is register compatible with IBM — the "SlotSaver". It features an extended 800x600 high res mode that is ideal for 386 workstations. Finally, we still offer the 16-bit software and hardware which made us famous. If you own a PC or AT and are looking for the best 8087/80287 support on the market, call (508) 746-7341 and we'll send you our full catalog. 32-Bit Compilers and Tools NDP Fortran-386™ and NDP C-386™ Com¬ pilers generate globally optimized mainframe quality code and run in 386 protected mode under PharLap extended MS-DOS, UNIX, or XENIX. The memory model employed uses 2 segments, each of which can be up to 4 gigabytes in length. They generate code for the 80287, 80387, or mWl 167. Both compilers in¬ clude high speed EGA graphics extensions written in C that perform BASIC-like screen operations. $595 each • NDP Fortran-386™ Full implementation of FORTRAN-77 with Berkeley 4.2, VAX/VMS and Fortran -66 extensions. • NDP C-386™ Full implementation of AT&T’s PCC with Microsoft and ANSI extensions. NDP Package Pricing. 387FastPAK-16: NDP Compiler, PharLap, and 80387-16 Coprocessor.$1299 1167FastPAK-16: NDP Compiler, PharLap, and mWl 167-16 Coprocessor.$1695 NDP Windows™ — NDP Windows includes 80 functions that let you create, store, and recall menus and windows. It works with NDP C-386 and drives all the popular graphics adapters. Library.$125, C Source.$250 NDP Plot™ — Calcomp compatible plot pack¬ age that is callable from NDP Fortran. It in¬ cludes drivers for the most popular plotters and printers and works with CGA, Hercules, EGA and VGA.$325 NDP/FFT™ — Includes 40 fast running, hand coded algorithms for single and double dimen¬ sioned FFTs which take advantage of the 32- bit addressing of the 386 or your hard disk. Call¬ able from NDP Fortran or NDP C with 1167 and 387 support.$250 387FFT for 16-bit compilers.$250 387BASIC™ — A 16-bit Microsoft compatible Basic Compiler that generates the smallest .EXE files and the fastest running numeric code on the market.$249 MicroWay * 80386Support Parallel Processing Monoputer™ The world's most popular Transputer develop¬ ment product runs all MicroWay Transputer software using either a T414 or T800. The T800 processor has built-in numerics and provides performance comparable to an 80386 running at 20 MHz with an mWl 167. The new 3 L Paral¬ lel C and Fortran Compilers makes this an especially attractive porting environment. Can be upgraded to 2 megabytes. Monoputer with T414 (0 MB). $995 Monoputer with T800 (0 MB).$1495 Quadputer™ This board for the XT, AT, or 386 can be pur¬ chased with 2 , 3 or 4 Transputers and 1,4 or 8 megabytes of memory per Transputer. Two or more Quadputers can be linked together to build networks with mainframe power which use up to 36 Transputers. One customer’s real¬ time financial application has gone from 8 hours on a mainframe to 16 minutes on a sys¬ tem containing five Quadputers.... from $3495 Transputer Compilers and Applications MicroWay and 3L offer Parallel languages for the Monoputer and Quadputer. MicroWay Parallel C.$595 MicroWay Occam 2 . $495 3L Parallel C.$895 3L Parallel Fortran.$895 pField — A specialty finite element analysis package targeted at Transputer networks. Ideally suited to take advantage of the 6 Megaflop speed of the Quadputer.$ 1600 Call (508) 746-7341 for our free catalog! Numeric Coprocessors mWl167™ — Built at MicroWay using Weitek components and an 80387 socket. mWl 167-16 . $995 mWl 167-20 .$1595 mW1167/VGA-20 "SlotSaver" .$ 1995 8087 . $99 8087-2 . $154 80287-8 .$239 80287-10 .$295 80387-16 . $475 80387-20 .$725 287Turbo-12 (for AT compatibles) .... $450 DRAM.CALL (All of our Intel coprocessors include 87Test.) PC and AT Accelerators MicroWay builds a number of 8086 and 80286- based PC accelerators that are backed up by the best customer support in the industry. Number Smasher™ (8087 & 512K) . . $499 FastCACHE-286/9 MHz .$299 FastCACHE-286/12 MHz .$399 SuperCACHE-286/12 MHz .$499 Intel Inboard™ PC (1 MB).$950 Intelligent Serial Controllers MicroWay’s AT4™, AT8™, and ATI 6™ are the fastest 80186-based intelligent serial control¬ lers on the market. They come with drivers for UNIX, XENIX, and PC MOS. AT4 ... $795 AT 8 ... $995 AT16...$1295 32-Bit Applications COSMOS-M/386 — SRAC’s finite element package for the 80386 with an 80387 or mW1167 provides mainframe speed and capacity. Turn around times rival the VAX 8650 and are 6 to 15 times that of an AT: from $995 PSTAT-386 — This mainframe statistics pack¬ age has been used by government and in¬ dustry for 20 years. The full version was ported. Requires 4 to 6 megabytes of memory: $1495 NDP/NAG™ — Features a library of 800 en¬ gineering and scientific numerical algorithms. Callable from NDP Fortran.$895 Micro The World Leader in PC Numerics Way P.O. Box 79, Kingston, MA 02364 USA (508) 746-7341 32 High St., Kingston-Upon-Thames, U.K., 01-541-5466 St. Leonards, NSW, Australia 02-439-8400 Circle 151 on Reader Service Card AUGUST 1988 -BYTE 111 SPECIAL a, PRODUCTS NOT I GENERIC CADD 3.0 • Auto Dimensioning • Dot Plot • Drafting ENH 1 • Drafting ENH 2 ^119 LTD.OTY SAVE UP ^ LISTED...CALL TO 70% ^ S/NCE ' 984 CAD... etc. PC & MAC UPS ShipMate™ Manifest $295 PRINTERS • LASERS • SCANNERS AST Turbolaser/PS.Call 1091i-M2.JI90 Citizen 1201).SI 39 180 0 . SI 57 MSP-15E.S295 MSP 40. S269 MSP-45.S389 MSP-50. S359 MSP-55.$449 1092i . 1524. 1592. 1595. 3131. 3151. Scanner . . $524 . S389 . $399 . $250 . $365 Premiere 35!.$439 Personal Laser (Mac)-$1356 Tribute 124. $439 Star Micronics Tribute 224 .$579 Diconix 150.$309 H P Laser Jet Series II .. .$1699 JOL 850 .Call NEC P 6. $425 P-7. $609 P-9.$1019 3510.3550.$719 NX1000., NX 15 . ND15 . . $169 . $295 . $375 . $325 NR15. $419 Toshiba 321 SL.$465 341 SL.$609 351 SX.$888 351 C-2.$1019 Panasonic I080i-M2.$155 CHIPS 64k. 256k. 8087. 80287/387 .Call MONITORS • TERMINALS • PANELS Amdek 1280 w/card.... . $639 Samsung . .. Call Hilachi. .. Call Sigma Designs Logitech Multiscan. . $449 LaserVicw 15/19" .... .. Call Mitsubishi Sony Multiscan 1303 ... . $549 Diamond Scan. . $475 Taxan . .. Call Olhets .. .. Call Viking . .. Call NEC Multisync. . $539 VMI. .. Call Mullisync II Zenith 1490 Flatscreen .. . . $589 Plus 8 XL. .. Call SOFTWARE ACT'. . $198 Norton Util 4 0. . . $45 AuloCad . .. Call PageMaker. . $429 AuloSkctch. .. $59 Paradox 2.0. . $398 BoeingGraph 3D. . $195 PathMinder. . . $55 Canvas (Mac). . . $93 PC Fullback. . S49 Carbon Copy Plus. . $103 Peachtree CPA* lor Lotus 123- ,. $199 Accounting II . . $145 Clipper . . . $355 PFS First Choice. . . $79 Copy II PC. ... $19 PFS First Publisher ... . . $55 dBase III Plus. . . $355 PFS Professional File .. . $129 OesqView. .. . $69 PFS Professional Plan . .. $55 Dratix 1 Plus . .. $149 PFS: Professional Write. . $105 Drafix 30 Mod/Oplions . ... Call Q&A . . $177 OS Back-Up Plus. ... $33 Q&A Write. . $115 Excel Mac/PC. S176/S281 Quattro. . $145 FastBack Backup- ... $75 R.Base tor DOS. . $416 Fox 8ase Plus.. .. $179 ShipMate'* GEM Draw Plus. .. $159 (UPS Mamlesl). . $249 Genetic Cadd 3.0. . .. $55 SupeiSpool (Mac). . . $36 Generic & Dot Plot 3 0 . ... $71 Tops (IBM or Mac) .... . $101 Generic Editor Choice . .. $119 Turbo Basic. . . $57 Generic Options. ... Call Turbo C . . . $57 Harvard Graphics .... .. $255 Ventura Publishing 11.. . $464 Harvard To! Pro) Mgr . .. $317 VersaCad/Libraries.... .. Call Lighting HD Speedup.. . .. $54 WordPerfect 4 2. . $187 Lotus 123 201 . . . $283 X-Trcn . .. $35 MalhCad 2.0. . . $199 X-Tree Pro . . . $63 MS-Dos 3.3. . . . $95 Digitizers.Call Enter Sweel-p 600 Others . Houston Instruments DMP 41/42. DMP51MP.$3550 Kurta IS 12*12 OMP 51/52MP.$3150 IS 12*17 DIGITIZERS & PLOTTERS Calcomp 1043-GT.$6195 MP Options.Call 1023-GT.Call Hitachi 11*11 Table!.$399 15» 15 Pro Tablet. $589 Call H P Plotters.Call loline.Call 1999 JOL 850 .Call . $299 $499 DMP 52.$2680 Summagraphics 0MP56A.$3685 12*12 Plus.$344 DMP 61.$3295 18*12 Professional ... $569 DMP 62.$4550 COMPUTERS AST Piemium 286 T1200 .$2380 & 386 .Call T1100/T3100 NEC Mullispeed.$1289 Modem H.M .$179 Multispeed EL.$1545 T3100/20 .$3050 Toshiba! 1000 .$759 ( 3200 .$3769 T1100*.$1359 T5100 .$4879 BOARDS & AST Boards.Call ATI EGA Wonder.$169 VIP VGA.$249 Control Sys Artist.Call Genoa SuperEGA.$195 VGA 600*800 .$269 VGA 760*1024 .$389 Grappler C/Mac/GS.$71 Hercules Graphics Plus.. . $169 Intel.Call NEC GB 1. $259 Novell Network 286 .Call Number 9.Call NETWORKS Paradise AutoSwitch EGA 480 . $145 VGA Plus.$229 VGA Pro.$349 ProGrappler.$71 Sigma Designs VGA .$199 Tops Flashcard.$143 Ullimale EGA* Autosw. P-port.$129 Vertlcom.Call Video 7 Vega Deluxe w/VGA.$177 Vega VGA.$259 DRIVES • MODEMS • FAX Hayes.Call Mitsubishi 40/70 Mb 1/2hl AT 23-28ms Otive .... $499 Seagate ST225 20 w/Card.$260 2400B & SW.$145 Toshiba 3.5' XT/AT 720k Drive.$95 360k Drive 5 25 XT/AT. ST238 30 w/Card.$289 US Robotics SmarlModem 1200B & Courier 2400 .$299 SW ml.$59 MOUSE Logitech C7 Seual/Bus.$65 Hi-Res Bus.$85 Logimouse & Logimouse Bus & Publisher .$104 Paint.$84 Microsoil Mouse.$98 HELPERS Logical Connection 256K .$349 512k. $399 MHI Warehouse, Inc. P.O. Box 10261 • Phoenix. AZ 85064-0261 TOLL FREE credit with order S 602-861-1090 ffl Customer Service Hrs 10-3 PT M-F Ordering Hours 7-5 PT M-F 9-2 SAT Pre-aoproved 1*0 5 arc welcome Prices relied cash discount ana arc subiect locfangc without nonce Product I comwhW.ty warrant*; S claims are icsoons-biliiy ol manulaciurei on:y Ail iciums are subicct 10 - resiocking fee PersonaUCo checks delay shipjirg A2 order; oniy add 6 ? ta* CHAOS MANOR that the Cheetah designers saw the 80386/80387 lockup problem in ad¬ vance, and they are pretty sure they’ve designed around it. This kind of hard¬ ware arcana is a bit out of my league, but I do know this much: I’ve got a program said to invoke the Intel lockup bug, and it certainly doesn’t do anything to the Cheetah. Since the bug is probabilistic, it could be that I just haven’t run the lockup program long enough, or, who knows, there may be a bug in the bug program. But I don’t seem to be able to do anything to that Cheetah that can hurt it. In fact, this machine is a developer’s dream. It’s blindingly fast. The Priam hard disk drive is large enough to store nearly every program I have. I have both 1.2-megabyte high-density and 360K- byte “standard PC” floppy disk drives. The Cheetah links to everything else through a serial port: so far, I’ve tried Brooklyn Bridge, Traveling Software’s LapLink and DeskLink, and Artisoft’s LANtastic. All work fine, so I’ve had no problems transferring data into and out of the system. The real kicker is the Maximum Stor¬ age WORM drive. I seem lately to have developed a love affair with this thing. I talked about WORM drives last month. Now I’m ready to make a flat statement: any software developer or se¬ rious writer who doesn’t have a WORM drive has rocks in his head. Well, OK, I know better than to say things like that. There are probably cir¬ cumstances I don’t know about. How¬ ever, for serious software developers, money is not a good reason to avoid get¬ ting a WORM. If you’re really serious about your software development or your writing, you can’t afford not to have one. If your work is worth money, it’s worth a good backup system; and the WORM is darned near the ultimate in backups. A WORM drive lets you save—and re¬ cover—every version of your work. A WORM cartridge holds between 200 and 300 megabytes, and it costs a bit more than $100. You won’t need more than one per software project. (Two if you’re really a worrier: use them on alternate days, and keep one in a safety deposit box well away from your house or office. That way, a fire can’t do you in.) I’ve used half a dozen WORM drives in the last couple of months; of those, the Maximum Storage WORM drive has been the simplest to install and easiest to use. One caution: WORM drives and the DOS program XCOPY do not work well together. I’ve had problems with it, and when I was out to Colorado Springs I found that the Air Force Academy com- — Circle 154 on Reader Service Card puter science people had the same difficulty. XCOPY sometimes does not save sub¬ directory information, even though it re¬ ports that it did. Later on, when you try to recover the files and can’t find them, the tendency is to blame the WORM drive; but in fact the fault lies with XCOPY, which sometimes just plain gets lost in subdirectories. Microsoft says they’re aware of this and will fix it. Enough about WORMs. What I’m really gushing about is the big Cheetah machine. Back in S-100-bus CP/M days, Dr. William Godbout’s CompuPro machines dominated the development market: the major software developers had CompuPro machines, and most of those who didn’t, wished they did. There’s no similar situation in the PCompatible world. There may never be. I will say this: Cheetah has the potential. Their machines are reliable, fast, simple, and well designed. Combine a Cheetah 386 motherboard, Priam 330-megabyte hard disk drive, and Maximum Storage WORM, and you’ve got something ap¬ proaching a software developer’s dream machine. Winding Down Once again I’m out of space, and there’s still a huge pile of stuff on my “ready” table. One of the most important items is Artisoft’s LANtastic, which is just pos¬ sibly good enough to make 1988 the year of the LAN. The game of the month is FTL’s Dun¬ geon Master for the Atari ST. I warn you: this game is addicting. The book of the month is Infinite in All Directions by Freeman Dyson (Harper and Row). In 1887, Adam Gifford left a bequest to establish a series of lectures on natural theology. Since then, Gifford lecturers have included William James and Alfred North Whitehead. The 1985 Gifford Lectures were given by Dyson. I certainly don’t agree with him on many of his points, but Freeman Dyson is one of the sanest people I’ve ever met. ■ Jerry Pournelle holds a doctorate in psy¬ chology and is a science fiction writer who also earns a comfortable living writ¬ ing 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, Jerry cannot guarantee a personal reply. You can also contact him on BIX as “jerryp. ” Microstat-ll will have you up and running in 5 minutes or your money back. Ill perating Microstat-ll couldn't be \ \U\ easier. No matter what your ■■T statistical needs are. Simply select the options you need from the menu system with a keyboard or a mouse and your answer is available instantly. No complex command languages to learn. On-line help is only a keystroke away! Plus, it only takes three disks to operate the program. Microstat-ll is simple to use and fast! The # 1 Selling Micro Statistical Package is Even Better! Microstat is by far the most popular micro statistics package of all time. Tens of thousands of satisfied customers have relied on Microstat since 1979 for all their statistical needs. Microstat has been used for every application imaginable from check¬ ing the brine content of tuna fish to keeping game statistics for an NFL football team. Already 64 of the Fortune 100 companies have purchased Mictrostat. Virtually every major university is presently using Microstat and over 10.000 copies have been sold to the US government. Microstat-ll is even better! The Coverage You Need Microstat-ll has the statistical tests you need. Just some of the areas of coverage are descriptive statistics, ANOVA. correla¬ tion and regression (with stepwise), time series, hypothesis testing, nonparametrics. crosstabs and chi-square, probability distri¬ butions. scatterplots. plus a lot more! Easier Installation Microstat-ll provides all this power with only 3 disks and can run on a hard disk or a floppy disk system with two drives. Our competitors use up to 21 disks and most require a hard disk. Plus Microstat-ll is not copy protected. Even Greater Flexibility We have completely redesigned the data management section to include features our users have requested. You can have unequal cases in the same file, aliased variables, missing data, range checking, and built-in scalars on data entry, plus other new fea¬ tures. You can even use a mouse! Improved Speed and Interface Microstat-ll is 8 times faster than our own Microstat version 4.0 and almost twice as fast as the competition. This exceptional speed was achieved without any loss of accuracy. When running descriptive sta¬ tistics the results were staggering (can be even faster with a numeric co-processor): Microstat-ll.88 seconds Leading Competitor 160 seconds Microstat 4.0.731 seconds In seconds. Tests on an 8 MHz AT-type machine, (no co¬ processor). File with \ 2,800 cases. The user interface has also been greatly improved. A full-model regression on the infamous Longley data takes only 9 strokes with Microstat-ll. One competing package, which claims to have the easiest command structure, requires 88 strokes. Plus, a specifically designed reversable scrolling feature has been added to save you even Yes! 1-800 952-0472 more time. You don't have to rerun a test to see output that has scrolled off the screen. Introductory Price Just $395 until September 1, 1988 Microstat-ll is being offered at the low introductory price of just $395 complete. Want just a peek at Microstat-ll? We'll send you a demo disk and manual for just $19.95. Also, a generous update program is available for our loyal Microstat customers. Just inquire. Absolutely Guaranteed We are so sure that Microstat-ll will satisfy all your statistic needs that we will offer a 30-day no risk money-back guarantee. Make statistics easy, order Microstat-ll today! 1 - 800 - 952-0472 Ecosoft Inc. Circle 83 on Reader Service Card 6413 N. College Ave.. Suite 101. Indianapolis. IN 46220 □ □ □ □ Please send me-copy(s) of Microstat-ll and a complete manual at the low introductory price of $395.00 Please send me-copy(s) of Microstat-ll Demo Disk and summary manual for just $19.95. Add $4 per package for UPS shipping charges. Indiana residents add 5% sales tax. Format: □5 , /4"IBM □3V?."IBM U5V Z 1.2 meg Please send me a Microstat-ll brochure. Please send me information on upgrading my Microstat package to Microstat-ll. Name:. Organization. Address_ City. . State. .Zip. Phone_ □ Bill my credit card. Account Number_ □ VISA □ MC □ American Express -Expiration Date_ 12MHz 80286 ♦ 1Mb on-board DRAM Full setofAT- EGA/CGA/MDA/ Hercules compatible HD/FD controllers ..«and more Big power for smaller systems. Little Board/286 is the newest member of our family of MS-DOS compatible Single Board Systems. It gives you the power of an AT in the cubic inches of a half height 5 1/4” diskdrive. It requires no backplane. It’s a complete AT-compat- ible system that’s functionally equivalent to the 5-board system above. But, in less than 6 % of the volume. It runs all AT software. And its low-power requirement means high reliability and great performance in harsh environments. Ideal for embedded & dedicated applications. The low power and tiny form factor of Little Board/286 are perfect for embedded microcomputer applica¬ tions: data acquisition, controllers, portable instruments, telecommunica¬ tions, diskless workstations, POS terminals ... virtually anywhere that small size and complete AT hardware and software compatibility are an advantage. you see here. THE AMPRO LITTLE BOARD /286 r Compare features. Both systems offer: • 12MHz CPU • 512Kor 1Mbyte on¬ board DRAM • 80287 math co-processor option • Full set of AT-compatible controllers • 2 RS232C ports • Parallel printer port • Floppy disk controller • EGA/CGA/MDA/Hercules video options • AT-compatible bus expansion • A wide range of expansion options • IBM-compatible Award ROM BIOS But only Little Board/286 offers: • 5.75” x 8” form factor • EGA/CGA/MDA/Hercules on a daughterboard with no increase in volume • SCSI bus support for a wide variety of devices: Hard disk to bubble drives • On-board 1Kbit serial EPROM. 512 bits available for OEMs • Two byte-wide sockets for EPROM/RAM/ NOVRAM expansion (usable as on-board solid- state disk) • Single voltage operation (+5 VDC only) • Less than 10W power consumption • 0-60 °C operating range Trademarks: AT& PC—IBM Corp.; Hercules—Hercules Comp. Tech., Inc.; MS-DOS—Microsoft Corp.; Little Board—Ampro Computers. Inc. Better answers for OEMs. Little Board/286 is not only a smaller answer, it’s a better answer... offering the packaging flexibility, reliability, low power consumption and I/O capabilities OEMs need... at a very attractive price. And like all Ampro Little Board products, Little Board/286 is available through representatives nationwide, and world¬ wide. For more information and the name of your nearest Rep, call us today at the number below. Or, write for Ampro Little Board/286 product literature. 408 - 734-2800 Fax:408-734-2939 TLX: 4940302 COMPUTERS. INCORPORATED 1130 Mountain View/Alviso Road Sunnyvale, CA 94089 Reps: Australia-61 3 720-3298; Belgium-32 87 46.90.12; Canada-(604) 438-0028; Denmark-45 3 66 20 20; Finland-358 0 585-322; France-331 4502-1800; Germany, West-49 89 611-6151; lsrael-972-3 49-16-95; Italy-39 6 811-9406; Japan-81 3 257-2630; Spain-34 3 204-2099; Sweden-46 88 55-00-65; Switzerland-41 1 740-41-05; United Kingdom-44 2 964-35511; USA, contact AMPRO. 114 BYTE* AUGUST 1988 EXPERT ADVICE APPLICATIONS PLUS Ezra Shapiro 0 New Directions The column and a shareware classic get a “Plus,” and GrandView defines a new class of software U nderstanding why we’ve changed the name of the col¬ umn from “Applications Only” to “Applications Plus” requires a little historical perspec¬ tive. When I began writing it, BYTE had no equivalent of today’s Short Takes, and application reviews in general were in short supply. The name “Applications Only” was a signal to readers interested in software that here, at least, they could find reactions to lots of programs. Times change, and BYTE’s coverage of software has expanded noticeably. There is no longer quite the pressing need for short reviews. I’ve also found that the name has caused me grief when I’ve found myself writing about hardware or—heaven forfend! —programming. Every time I’ve digressed into those areas, I’ve had to concoct some strained rationale for the excursion. So we’ve borrowed a gambit from the software business by giving the column a “Plus.” It sounded better than “En¬ hanced. ” The major change will be a lit¬ tle breathing room for the author, yours truly. The core material will remain software-oriented, but I won’t feel sheepish if I write about industry issues or trackballs. I’m also hoping to add more head-to-head comparisons of prod¬ ucts and maybe a few application proj¬ ects. Expect any changes gradually, and let me know if they work. Beyond ThinkTank When I first heard about GrandView (Symantec, $295), I had no idea what to expect. The name sounded more appro¬ priate for a street, or possibly a suburb, than it did for software. Also, I had been betting that the next product from the Living Videotext Division of Symantec would be an MS-DOS version of More, the state-of-the-art Macintosh outliner. So when I plugged in GrandView, I was wondering whether I would find More .. .orless. In fact, GrandView could probably be called “too much of a good thing.” It’s billed as “Desktop Planning, Writing, and Information Management,” and there’s a lot to it. It is not merely an up¬ grade to ThinkTank. This is a new type of software, and on first glance it com¬ bines aspects of an outliner with solid word processing, project tracking, and categorization. It strikes me as being a comprehensive blend of ThinkTank, Q&A Write, InstaPlan, and possibly SideKick Plus, though it does not borrow all the features of each of those products. If you’re familiar with the long devel¬ opment history of Living Videotext out¬ line packages, you’ve noticed a steady movement from pure outlining to, well, information management (for want of a more precise term). The company has done a superb job of listening to its cus¬ tomers, and GrandView represents the latest attempt to serve the needs of the business executive. ThinkTank users have been crying for better word process¬ ing, and they have slavered at More. They’ve used the outliners to develop to- do lists, plan projects, store databases of names and addresses, develop agendas, and so on. Living Videotext staffers have been amazed at the odd tasks their programs have been forced to perform. And gradu¬ ally, the sample files included with the rest of the product line have changed to reflect this trend, to the point where the examples could be called “A Manager’s Guide.” If you were to develop generic documents by sweeping all the paper off continued ILLUSTRATION: CHRIS SPOLLEN © 1988 AUGUST 1988 -BYTE 115 APPLICATIONS PLUS an executive’s desk and analyzing the contents, you’d get the idea. Anyway, you start by developing an outline, but you can switch instantly to a document view with full-power word processing (and spelling checking, I might add), or to a category view, where you can attach keywords and priorities to items. Thus, you can produce a more personally styled output document than you could with ThinkTank, and you can easily home in on important tasks. The outliner, which can be seen as the organizing spine of the program, lets you perform all the usual Living Videotext operations: cloning, hoisting, marking and gathering, time stamping, and so on. You’ve got keyboard macro capacities, and GrandView lets you construct instal¬ lable templates so you can quickly zap a preset form into your outline. Aside from a few minor annoyances, such as the fact that once you’ve asked the installation program to set up a sec¬ ond printer you can’t back down from that decision, the program is as solid as Living Videotext’s other offerings, and the company has one of the best records in the business for shipping hassle-free products. I encountered no oddities, but the 3 weeks I’ve been testing have been far from enough to hit all the options. But I have found the program rather Byzantine. You can’t just plug it in and go; gotta read the manual or you’re lost. Good documentation and on-line help provide a big assist, but you won’t learn the program without a few hours of hard study. While the integration is smooth and painless—you can switch quickly among the various views—it’s also con¬ fusing at first go. Once they’ve mastered it, GrandView enthusiasts will spend most of their time living in the software, only coming up for air to fiddle with a spreadsheet or database. For the quick-and-dirty outline per¬ son, like me, who likes to have Ready! around so that I can jot quick notes, GrandView is simply overkill. But I have to say that this is a first impression. I’m still flustered by the category view, and I need to experiment in depth. One of the problems facing people who evaluate software is the need to write about new products as soon as pos¬ sible after they hit the street. GrandView demands much more study. I suspect that, as with any complicated piece of software, I’m going to have to ease into it and work with it for a while before pass¬ ing final judgment. Think of WordStar, XyWrite, dBASE, or most spreadsheets; you can get the rudiments in a few weeks, but the programs seem tough at that point. It’s not until you’ve explored the nooks and crannies that you appreci¬ ate their real power. Though my first reaction is somewhat negative, I’m positive that the product will succeed in management applications and that anybody who is looking for a tool that goes beyond simple outlining will be delighted by GrandView. So I’m going to hold off, take some time, and give you an extended-use report in a few months. GrandView is intriguing and important enough to demand at least that much attention. A Way with Words It certainly isn’t the greatest word pro¬ cessor ever sold, but Professional Write 2.0 (Software Publishing, $199) is without question a solid and workable MS-DOS program. There’s something comfortable about the Software Publish¬ ing interface; you know what you’re continued FREEWARE ONLY $ 2.99 PER DISK ONLY $ 2.99 PER DISK Public Domain & Shareware for IBM and Compatible* - DOS 2.1 or higher Program* and utilities for all your computing need*_ I'lll'IIITi □ EZ-FORMS Rev. D15 (66) - Menu driv¬ en forms generator, mlsc. skeleton forms. □ 8BAS VI.3 (270) - Small Business Ac¬ counting System. Menu-driven. Best avail □ PRO PC-ACCT V3.0 (526) - Integrated G/L. A/R ft A/R Menu-driven. Help. □ EASY PROJECT V1.2 (440) - Complete project management system. Excellent. □ REAL ESTATE ANALYST (S3) - Menu driven, mortgages, interest, etc. □ CK - CHECKBOOK V3.1 (79) Full fea¬ tured checkbook program with reports. □ BEDS N QUOTES V0.9 (463) - Prepares cost estimates ft proposals. Does labor, material, sub contractor costs, etc. □ BUSINESS LETTERS (303 ft 304) - (2 disk set) 650 business letters to (It all your needs. Edit w/ any word processor. □ MR- BILL V3.2 (311 ft 312) - 12 disk set) Time ft billing package: costs, credits, reports, audit trail, etc. □ PC-PAYROLL V2.3 ^164) - Menu drlv en payroll system; 100 employees or less. □ RENTAL PROPERTY (318) - Keeps track of rental activity. Menu driven. □ SLICWORK8 (321) - Framework clone. Integrated database, spreadsheet, word processor, ft communications. □ PARTS INVENTORY CONTROL (479) Tracks inventory of a parts ft service business: qty. ordered, supplier, etc. □ DOCKETMINDER V1.2 (448) - Main¬ tain docket for lawyer or law firm. □ FINANCE MANAGER V4.0 (77) Ac¬ counting package for business or person¬ al finances. Double entry system. □ SOAR V1.92 (449 ft 450) (2 disk set) Accounts receivable program. Handles a variety of services or products. 3 RBBS BULLETIN BOARD VI5.1 (290 - 292) - 13 disk set) TUrn your computer Into a RBBS. Industry standard. □ QMODEM V3.1 (293 ft 294) - 12 disk set) FUll featured modem program. □ PROCOMM V2.42 (53 ft'54) (2 disk set) Menu driven modem program. 3 FILE EXPRE88 V4.14 (33 ft 34) - (2 disk set) Menu driven, easy to use data¬ base for beginners to experienced. □ WAMPUM V3.1B (37 ft 38) - 12 disk set) Menu driven dBase III clone, supports functions of dBase. Knowledge of dBase suggested. Latest update. 3 PC-FILE + V2.0 (493 - 495)- 13 disk set) FUll-featured database: help screens, menus, macros. One of the best. □ dGENERATE V1.0 (511) - Screen & source code generator by Tom Rettlg. dBase III required. □ COMPOSER (3) - Create, save. edit, play, ft print your music. Nice... □ LETTERFALL VI. 1 (119) - Improve your touch typing skills: 16 lewis. □ THE WORLD 3D (127) - Display maps of the world. CGA required. □ FUNNELS ft BUCKETS V 2.0 (130) - Great learning game: add. subtract, multi¬ ply. ft divide. Ages 5 - 10. □ ERYN'S ABC S (131) - Teaches alpha bet ft numbers. Computerized Etch-a- Sketch. Ages 2 - 6. Basic required. □ AMY'S FIRST PRIMER (133)- Alpha¬ bet. numbers, counting, shapes, match¬ ing. etc. Ages 4 - 8. CGA ft Basic req. □ POLYGLOT V6.01 (139) • Vocabulary builder. Grades 7 - college. Excellent. □ BLACKJACK (95) - Advanced black¬ jack game with tutor, multiple players. Best one yet. CGA or Hercules. □ MONOPOLY V6.7 (106) - Just like the board game. 2 to 4 players. CGA req. □ DUNGEONS ft DRAGONS Vl.l (205) The Classic Game. Can you survlw? □ LAS VEGAS (116) - Craps. Roullete. Poker, ft more. CGA req.. Basic on some. 3 3D CHESS VI.01 (215) - Excellent chess game. Switch between 2D ft 3D. □ SOLITAIRE (211) 4 different games. Nice graphics. CGA required. □ SUPER PINBALL (212) 5 different games. CGA required. □ WORDPLAY (367) - Wheel of Fortune clone. You provide the prizes. CGA req. □ DIGITAL LEAGUE BASEBALL (344) Pick your team ft players. Nice graphics. □ MINIATURE GOLF (505) 18 hole golf course with graphics. 3 FINGERPAINT V2.0 (282) - Paint pro gram: 6 fonts. 81 sizes . Desktop publish Ing ft slide-show. CGA. EGA. or Hercules. □ CALENDAR CREATOR (350) - Create ft print your own monthly calendar. □ DANCAD 3D V2.0B (424 ft 425) - 12 disk set) Advanced 2D'3D drafting pro gram. Stereoscopic 3D wire frame anlma tlon. EGA. CGA. Hercules. 640k req. □ CITY DE8K V6.0 (197) - Desktop pub Usher with graphics capabllty. □ TURBO *C" TUTOR (489 ft 490) - (2 disk set) 14 lesson tutorial: learn to pro¬ gram in "C" language. □ -C- LANGUAGE V2.1 (299 ft 300) -12 disk set) Complete programming environ ment. Source, compiler, samples. □ TURBO PASCAL TUTOR (20) 17 les son tutorial with samples, etc. M III INI I II I I M □ STRESS ft SHRINK (74) - Stress stress test. Shrink - personality analysis. □ FASTBUCKS (191) - Menu driven home finance package. Easy to use. □ HEALTH RISK (331) Diagnose your own ailments. □ LITTLE BLACK BOOK (441) Creates pocket sized address book. Prints mini alphabetized pages. □ TIMESAVER (442) - Create daily monthly calendar of appointments. . . . 3 LOTUS 123 PROQRAMS (28 - 32) - (5 disk set) Contains as many applications and utilities that we could find. Requires Lotus 123 program. □ LOTUS LEARNINGb SYSTEM (458) - Beginning tutorial for Lotus 123. □ AS EASY AS V3.0 (302) - Lotus clone. 52 column sheet, graphing, supports functions of 123. "WKS" flies, etc. 3 DOS HELP (255) - Help screen for DOS commands, functions ft batch flies at your fingertips. For DOS 3J0C. □ DOS TUTORIAL V4.2 (256) - Menu driven, learn to use your computer. □ LQ V2.1 (509) - Produces high quality text on dot matrix printers. Multiple fonts with print spooler. □ LASERJET FONT8 / B (471 ft 472) -12 disk set) More downloadable fonts for HP Laseijet Plus /II. Helvetica. Script, etc. □ LASERJET FONTS/UTILITIES (328) Contains 'Pamphlet' (sideways printing) ft mlsc. other utilities ft fonts. □ PRINTPRO V1.2 (468) - Change printer operation from within ANT application at ANY time. □ DESKMATE8 V1.01 (278) - Sidekick like utility plus more features. □ AUTOMENU V4.01 (280) - Access pro grams, batch flies, commands, etc. □ SIDE WRITER (6) - 'Sideways" printing. □ PC-WRITE V2.71 (9 ft 10) -12 disk set) Full featured word processor: all the fea¬ tures of the expensive one's. □ LETTERHEAD (69) - Create and print your owt) letterhead on letters and enve¬ lopes. IBM'Epson comp, printer req. □ GALAXY V2.3 (11) - Easy to use word processor: menus ft quick keyboard com¬ mands. Lots of features. □ PC TYPE + (373 - 375) - (3 disk set) A powerful word processor. Buttonware. S"" NAME_ ' ORDER FORM ST # of 5.25'disks_>§>82.99= CA Res. Sales Tax (6.5%)= Shipping & Handling = 3.00 TOTAL = S ======= Mill order form ft check or money order t California FREEWARE 1466 Springllne Driw Dept. B7 Palmdale. CA 93550 ( 805 ) 273-0300 Call or write for free catalog containing o' 500 disks of quality software. Hour*: M-F 9am - 5pm PST 3.5“ media - S3.99 ea. Sorry, no Credit Card Order*. y 116 BYTE* AUGUST 1988 Circle 172 on Reader Service Card Engineered for speed, flexibility and expandability Bay Technical Associates, Inc., Data Communications Products Division 200 N. Second St., Bay Saint Louis, MS 39520 USA Telex 910-333-1618 BAYTECH, Telephone 601-467-8231 or toll-free 800 - 523-2702 CHECK THE SPECS • The Data Exchange System, Model 24, allows high speed t exchange of data between computers, printers and other peripherals. • Powerful 16-bit CPU plus multiple high performance I/O processors allow super high speed transfer of data demanded by new faster computers and software. • Optimum flexibility: Select the right combination of serial and parallel ports, and set any of these ports as a peripheral port or as a computer port. • Basic unit expandable to 24 ports by 4-port modules offered in serial/parallel combinations. • Standard 512KB buffer expandable to 4V2 megabytes, to handle big print/plot jobs and many small ones. • Buffer memory dynamically allocated to maximize buffer utilization. • Simultaneous data input and output on all ports, so no devices are kept waiting. • Computer-to-computer communication concurrent with all other operations. • Full duplex communication allows file transfer capability with many communications software packages. • Compatible with virtually all computers, printers, plotters, modems and other peripherals. • Pop-up RAM resident PC support software allows peripheral selection via hot key. • Super fast throughput allows data to pass through with no apparent processing delays. • Many user-definable parameters including separate baud rates, flow control and parity for each port. • Internal serial-to-parallel and parallel-to-serial conversion. • Cascading capability to increase available number of ports. • Unlimited hotline tech support. • Designed and manufactured in the U.S.A. Circle 23 on Reader Service Card APPLICATIONS PLUS doing from the start, and you rarely have to consult the excellent manual. I had almost forgotten how pleasant it is to work with this company’s products. Software Publishing is another of the few big companies that rarely releases buggy software, and it aims at the businessper¬ son who’s intent on getting to work rather than the computer guru who’s in love with technicalities. By now, the interface itself has be¬ come something of a standard. You’ve seen it in PFS: Write, Q&A, and a host of imitators. Function-key menu bar across the top of the screen, boxed center area for your typing, ruler and two status lines across the bottom. Hit one of the function keys, and a longer menu pops down. De¬ fault selections in menus are always highlighted, and the default choices make sense. Most commands can be selected either from the menus or by hitting a Control sequence (Alt combinations are reserved for macros). Nothing fancy, and good correlation with printed output. It will probably offend the purists who prefer an absolutely blank screen, but the rest of us will find it unobtrusive. You’ve got three pleasant color schemes to choose from, and all of them are easy on the eyes (es¬ pecially on an EGA monitor or better). Here’s what you get with Professional Write 2.0: a spelling checker with a 77,000-word main dictionary and a 5000-word personal dictionary. A 20,000-word thesaurus. A built-in calcu¬ lator and column math. An address book for mail merge that has a nice entry screen and room for 2000 entries. Auto¬ matic envelope printing (nice, if your printer can handle it). Macro recording. Line drawing, and access to the extended character set. Support for expanded memory. File encryption. A wide selec¬ tion of printers and multiple font capabil¬ ity, including PostScript. Context-sensi¬ tive help. Nothing spectacular in that list, but Professional Write does offer a couple of tricks worth mentioning. Not only can you save a 40-character description of each file, but you can search the com¬ plete text of all your Professional Write documents, directory by directory, look¬ ing for a specific search string. And the program imports files from major word processors, Lotus 1-2-3, and dBASE III without any headaches. Using the program takes absolutely no brains, and I couldn’t break it as hard as I tried. My quibbles with it are relatively minor: I’d prefer a larger user dictio¬ nary, and the 2000-entry limit on ad¬ dress books seems low, even though you Items Discussed GrandView.$295 Symantec Corp. Living Videotext Division 117 Easy St. Mountain View, CA 94043 (415) 964-6300 Inquiry 934. Procomm Plus .$75 Datastorm Technologies, Inc. P.O. Box 1471 Columbia, MO 65205 (314) 449-7012 Inquiry 935. Professional Write 2.0.$199 Software Publishing Corp. P.O.Box 7210 Mountain View, CA 94039 (415) 962-8910 Inquiry 936. can create as many as you require. I do, however, question the use of the word “Professional” in the program’s name. This product strikes me as a basic word processor, fine for everyday use but probably not the best available for industrial-strength applications. You could probably write a book with it, but I wouldn’t want to use it for a doctoral dis¬ sertation in math or physics. Likewise, it lacks legal line numbering and multiple- column printout. So it’s not really a top- echelon package. Professional Write 2.0 is a good answer to Q&A Write, with a few fea¬ tures not available there, but I do rec¬ ommend checking out the Symantec product if Professional Write sounds in¬ teresting to you. In fact, you probably ought to get demonstrations of a few other midlevel word processors at the same time. You won’t be disappointed with Professional Write, but it’s kind of a Ford. Depending on taste, you might do just as well with a Chevrolet. Shareware to Commercialware This column is not the only thing to add a “Plus” to its name; Procomm, that ven¬ erable shareware workhorse, has gone commercial and has become Procomm Plus (Datastorm, $75). The only way to get your hands on this new revision of the product is to buy it from a dealer or order it directly; you won’t find the Plus ver¬ sion on your local bulletin board. Tom Smith and Bruce Barkelew, the authors of the program, are two of the nicest guys in the business, and I hope the change in the program’s status lets them earn a de¬ cent living at last. Procomm was definitely one of my fa¬ vorite telecommunications packages: full-featured, clean, and fairly easy to understand. Procomm Plus adds some new stuff: support for more file-transfer protocols than I knew existed (including Kermit and a couple for error-correcting high-speed modems), emulation of any terminal you’d ever want to emulate, split-screen mode for CB-style on-line chat, host mode for interactive dial-in operations, and a simple text editor. The neatest addition is a decent script language that can be mastered easily; the team’s earlier efforts required you to write in gibberish. The program already had a good interface for setting keyboard macros, exit to DOS as a shell operation, automatic session logging if desired, and a one-keystroke screen capture. There are two other advantages to buy¬ ing the private version. The first is the printed manual. Procomm Plus has some complex aspects, and step-by-step docu¬ mentation is a big help. The second ad¬ vantage is the support files you get in the package, which include scripts for every major on-line service and widespread bulletin board software; and dialing di¬ rectories for bulletin boards in Atlanta, Austin, Boston, Chicago, San Francisco, and Washington, DC. The package also includes long lists of both U.S. and inter¬ national bulletin boards. This is the kind of nicety that is almost never provided with shareware. The program is certainly the equal of many packages already on the market, and it can legitimately compete with the category leaders. Note, however, that there is no provision for background op¬ eration, and that the script language falls short of some of the more extensive pack¬ ages, like Mirror II, the latest Crosstalk, and Framework. But on the whole, you won’t go wrong purchasing and using Procomm Plus unless your requirements are sophisti¬ cated in the extreme. For day-to-day tele¬ communications, this is highly recom¬ mended. ■ Ezra Shapiro is a consulting editor for BYTE. You can contact him on BIX as (< ezra. ” Because of the volume of mail he receives, Ezra, regretfully , cannot re¬ spond to each inquiry. Your questions and comments are wel¬ come. Write to: Editor, BYTE, One Phoenix Mill Lane, Peterborough, NH 03458. 118 BYTE* AUGUST 1988 ... “Makes building PS/2 boards simple” Electronics ... “Quickens Micro Channel board design” Electronic Products ... “Integrates all IBM PS/2 Micro Channel control needs” Electronic Design ... “(CEC is) making it easier to soup up the PS/2” BusinessWeek ... “Their chip is the most flexible we’ve seen” Microprocessor Report ONE CHIP PLUS is a complete Micro Channel interface on a chip, plus a development package that lets you build memory, I/O or multifunction boards in less time for less money. ONE CHIP PLUS is a product of Capita] Equipment Corp., a proven supplier of hardware and software for engineers. Call today. We can help you whether you’re building one board or a million. Literature 1 800 234 4CEC Technical assistance (617) 273-1818 PS/2 and Micro Channel are trademarks of International Business Machines ONE CHIP PLUS is a trademark of Capital Equipment Corp. 99 South Bedford Street, Burlington, MA. 01803 Circle 40 on Reader Service Card AUGUST 1988 -BYTE 119 Make your programs mfflions of times smarter More and more, programmers and work¬ station builders are using DESQview 2.0 as a development tool. The reason is simple. They can create powerful, multitasking solutions today for the millions of DOS PCs in use today. Solutions comparable to those promised for tomorrow by OS/2. The API Advantage Programmers who take advantage of DESQview 7 s API (Application Program Interface) get access to the powerful capabilities built into DESQview-multitasking, window¬ ing, intertask comunications, mailboxes, shared programs, memory management, mousing, data transfer, menu¬ building and context sensitive help. Bells and Whistles A program taking advantage of the DESQview 2.0 API can spawn subtasks for performing background operations or new processes for loading and running other programs concurrently. It can schedule processing after an interval or at a certain time. It can use DESQview 7 s intertask commu¬ nications to rapidly exchange data between programs, share common code and data; or interrupt at critical events. It can use DESQview's menuing and mousing capabilities to create menus. And there's lots more it can do. 80386 Power 80386 programmers can take advantage of the 80386's protected mode for large programs, yet run on DOS and multitask in DESQview-side by side with other 80386 and DOS programs. The breakthroughs that make this possible: DOS Extenders from PharLap Software and AI Architects and DESQview support of these DOS extenders. DESQview Developer Conference So if you are a developer, looking to create programs with mainframe capabilities, but wanting to sell into the existing base of millions of DOS PCs, come to Quarterdeck's first DESQview API Developers Conference, August 16-18,1988 at the Marina Beach Hotel, in Marina del Rey, California. For more information call or write us. Come learn about the DESQview 2.0 API and 80386 DOS Extenders. Meet 80386 experts as well as those smart people who are creating DESQview 2.0 API workstations solutions. And if you want to get a leg up before the conference, ask us about the DESQview API Tools for assembler or C programmers. Some of the applications under development right now using DESQview 2.0 API Tools: CAD, Medical systems, insurance, 3270 mainframe communications, network management, real estate, typesetting, point of sale, education, commodity trading, stock trading and online voting. Bringing New Power to DOS. DESQview 2.0 API Toolkit Quarterdeck Office Systems 150 Pico Blvd.,Santa Monica, CA 90405 (213) 392 9851 120 BYTE* AUGUST 1988 Circle 197 on Reader Service Card (DEALERS: 198) EXPERT ADVICE DOWN TO BUSINESS ■ Wayne Rash Jr. What’s best for your office? This new column offers real-world answers. I n many ways, business users of small computers are just like any other user. We have the same prob¬ lems with hardware that breaks, software that isn’t shipped when prom¬ ised, and salespeople who know less than we do about the machines they sell. But there are differences. We may buy hundreds of computers, risking hundreds of thousands of dollars if we make the wrong decision. We may have an office floor with 60 people who need to share the same information. Or we may have a VAX in the basement that we need to con¬ nect our personal computers to. This is why I’m writing a business col¬ umn about small computers for BYTE. It will approach personal computers from a business viewpoint, but without the bias you find in the “single machine” maga¬ zines. No one type of computer is the solution to all problems, so no one com¬ puter will dominate this column. That’s not to say that I won’t write about IBM and clone machines or about Macintoshes. They are the most heavily used by the BYTE readership, and I will devote a lot of space to them. On the other hand, I won’t ignore the Unix world or the less popular, specialty ma¬ chines either. All these areas show great promise, and the future of your business may lie with one of these machines. The PC Guru If you’re reading this magazine, there’s a good chance that you’re the person in your organization who is the “Corporate Techie,” or the “PC Guru.” While you may or may not be in the organization chart as a computer staff resource, you Staking Out the Territory serve as one. When people find out that they can’t format a floppy disk, or that they did format their hard disk, you’re the person who gets the call. You’re also the person who seems to have a constant stream of visitors to your desk, all asking the same question: “I’ve been thinking about getting a personal computer. What kind should I get?” In many companies, you’re also the person who wields a lot of the influence about what the company buys and how it uses small computers. One of the best ways to decide what will work in your office is to look at the experiences of others. It’s a lot cheaper to let someone else take the risk while you learn from their experiences. Some¬ times you can’t do that, though, so the next best thing is to read about them. For this reason, I’ll try to illustrate my examination of the business small com¬ puter user with case histories where they’re appropriate. I’ll also tell you about trends I see that are important to business users, and I’ll report on hard¬ ware, software, and services that might affect your business. What I won’t do is give conventional, safe answers where another answer is better, nor will I deal with information you can find out from a quick read of the manual. Networking One question that inevitably crops up each week or so concerns networks. Now that local-area networks (LANs) are known to exist, everybody wants one. Usually, the rationale is as simple as, “We have to be able to talk to each other.” This means that there is a need for some portion of an organization to share some common data. Normally, the first application that comes to mind in¬ volves a database, although word processing tends to follow closely. Often, the request for a LAN comes without a full understanding of whether that is the correct solution. Your col¬ league or client has read about these won¬ derful networks and thinks a LAN is the answer to the organization’s information flow. It can be, of course, but it can also do a lot to impede that flow. The software you choose can play a big role in making the LAN work properly— especially when many users on the LAN need to use the same database. Choosing the wrong database can make your net¬ work seem to come to a stop. I ran across an example of this prob¬ lem with a network that was using dBASE III Plus on a number of worksta¬ tions to access a single large database on the file server. At the same time, other users were trying to use WordPerfect. As soon as more than three or four people be¬ gan to use the database, performance dropped drastically. This happened, of course, because all the database users were trying to use the file server’s disk at the same time. The first user to try got control, and the others waited in a queue. Since many single-user databases running on a net¬ work, including dBASE, treat the LAN as a disk channel, all the work for all the stations was being done by a single drive. The drive churned away, searching and indexing, while the other users waited. Of course, the repeated disk accesses added to the network traffic, slowing things even more. Response time was well over a minute on some screens. Clearly, a number of actions can be taken to improve response time when using a database on a network. Some net¬ work operating systems, including Novell NetWare, allow very flexible ar¬ rangements of hard disks. Likewise, add¬ ing more network server cards to the file server can help improve throughput. Probably the best solution, though, is to pick a DBMS that’s designed as a multi¬ user system in the first place. The Database Server Network performance problems with databases that were originally designed for single users have led a few manufac- continued AUGUST 1988 -BYTE 121 DOWN TO BUSINESS turers to develop new solutions. One of the best is the database server. This is a database engine that resides on a CPU dedicated to database use. Queries come to the database engine, and results are re¬ turned to the users. Ashton-Tate, devel¬ oper of dBASE, has announced that, with Microsoft, it will develop just such a database server, but it has yet to deliver. Meanwhile, a few other companies have said that they will bring out server- based database engines. XDB Systems of College Park, Maryland, has one. A server database engine such as XDB works by dividing the DBMS into a front- end processor and the data engine itself. The front-end processor resides on the user’s workstation. It provides the user interface and translates the user’s actions into SQL commands. These commands are then sent to the database server. When the database server receives an SQL command from a workstation, it performs the requested operation and re¬ turns the result. The constant traffic of disk accesses is removed from the net¬ work, and the file server is freed from the need to support the database as well. As a result, functions not related to data¬ base management continue unimpeded, and your file server can be smaller. Powerful Engine There is a down side to all this, of course. In the first place, XDB requires that you dedicate at least one CPU as the database server. Although you can use any IBM PC clone as the server, the ca¬ pability of the server directly affects the speed of the database operations. Dr. Bing Yao, president of XDB, told me that an 80286-based machine should be con¬ sidered for serious database use, and that he would tend to recommend an 80386. There’s also the need for disk space. In addition to buying a large-capacity disk for the file server, you also need one for the database server. Because this disk will be doing all the network’s database work, it should be pretty fast. If perfor¬ mance gets to be a problem with a single database server, XDB allows you to add additional servers. Fast and Easy There is a silver lining. XDB uses indus¬ try-standard SQL to communicate with its database engine. This means that you can move your mainframe data to your microcomputer and take along the que¬ ries that you used with DB2 as well. You can also go in the other direction, using queries from XDB to extract information from a mainframe database. Setting up most applications is quick Products Mentioned XDB Server.$1995 XDB-SQL Developers.$495 Run-time.$195 XDB Forms Developers.$295 Run-time.$95 XDB Systems, Inc. 7309 Baltimore Ave., Suite 220 College Park, MD 20740 (301) 779-6030 Inquiry 846. and easy. XDB provides a fourth-genera¬ tion query language for writing custom applications. In addition, there is a forms manager that allows you to define the database as you design the forms. Expe¬ rienced developers can make use of C and COBOL libraries for creating appli¬ cations that can’t be developed in other ways. Finally, experienced SQL users can enter queries directly into an interac¬ tive SQL system. Once the applications are developed, the user has no way of knowing whether the system is using the database engine on the network, or a single-user database on the local workstation. Indeed, XDB will work equally well in either case without changing the applications. That way, you can create an application for all your users without worrying whether it will ultimately find itself on a network or a stand-alone computer. If you’ve already made the decision to invest in the hardware, software, physi¬ cal plant, and personnel necessary to op¬ erate a LAN that carries a significant database processing load, the additional server and disk capacity you need to as¬ sure adequate performance is worth the cost. When you couple its fast operation and industry-standard query language, XDB is a good deal for the serious data¬ base installation. What’s New for Business? The network version of XDB was one of the pieces of good news at Spring Com¬ dex. In some ways, though, this does not look to be an exceptional year for innova¬ tion in the world of IBM-compatible computers. When I checked with the firms claiming to have OS/2 products at Comdex in May, only 22 products were shipping. A few more were due out this summer, but many will not arrive until after Comdex in the fall, or even into 1989. If you use IBM PCs or compatibles and need software, you probably should plan on looking to the DOS world in¬ stead. There, products seem to be gain¬ ing maturity and functionality. A number of Comdex vendors told me they were still waiting to see what would happen to the market before they com¬ mitted resources to OS/2. Hardware de¬ velopment likewise seems stunted, with most manufacturers simply creating new versions of add-on boards that already exist for PCs or PC ATs and clones. There were some significant efforts demonstrated to give the PC/AT world the same capabilities as the PS/2. These included VGA cards and hard disks and controllers with 1 -to-1 interleave. The Macintosh II continues to woo business buyers away from manufac¬ turers of IBM and compatible machines. Informix promised that its new super¬ spreadsheet, Wingz, would finally make it to market. WordPerfect for the Macin¬ tosh finally shipped just before Comdex. Autodesk announced a version of its AutoCAD for the Mac. Bolstered by the widespread belief that the Mac is faster and easier to use, these products are gaining interest from executives, espe¬ cially now that Presentation Manager for OS/2 seems to be so far away. Unix is making a push as the business standard for microcomputers. While at Comdex, I watched as Commodore’s chief operating officer Henri Rubin used a mouse to click open windows on Unix, MS-DOS, and Amiga DOS on his Amiga 2000 equipped with a 100-megabyte disk. Dr. Rubin told me that the Amiga would soon be available with additional ports to support multiuser operation. He also showed me an Amiga with a screen resolution of 1008 by 800 pixels. I won¬ der if Commodore is aiming at the lucra¬ tive workstation market. On the IBM side of business, things have slowed down a little just now. Per¬ haps this is the time for a breather. On the other hand, perhaps it will give some of the other architectures a chance for a little more market share. ■ Wayne Rash, Jr. is a member of the pro¬ fessional staff of American Management Systems, Inc. (Arlington, Virginia), where he consults with the federal gov¬ ernment on microcomputers. You can reach him on BIX as li waynerash. ” Your questions and comments are wel¬ come. Write to: Editor, BYTE, One Phoenix Mill Lane, Peterborough, NH 03458. 122 BYTE* AUGUST 1988 Great Selection+Superior Service 2 a + Competitive Prices=Top Value Mk Top We have the technical expertise to fulfill your specialized needs in soft¬ ware development, circuit design, data analysis, CAD and much more. Call today! • No one offers you more variety. • 30-day Money-Back Guarantee® • Latest versions • Over 500 name-brand products in stock, if you don’t see it —call! Software Development Tools ASSEMBLERS ADVANTAGE Disassembler, Lifeboat_S Microsoft MASM. OPTASM, SLR Systems. Flash-up, Software Bottling Co... MS Basic Comp. 6.0 MS QuickBASIC QuickPak, Crescent Software.... T BASIC, TransEra Corp. Turbo Basic, Borland. Turbo Basic Toolboxes, Borland .. 279 Micro Focus Products.$ CALL 105 MS COBOL, Microsoft. 465 179 Realia COBOL. 799 RM/COBOL, Austec. 763 SCREENIO, Norcom. 382 so ppq gq MS Pascal. Microsoft.$ 199 B g Pascal-2, Oregon Software. 199 453 Turbo Pascal, Borland. 69 gg Professional Pascal, Metaware. 549 69 a cVpr„ C r,m°nT erCial,ManX . $ C ?ko Turbo Pascal S & E Tools, Quinn-Curtis 3 ‘ 3 . Turbo MAGIC, Sophisticated Software UiJSSSSi pqq Turbo ASYNCH PLUS, Blaise. Qifc r k”M®rosoft::::::::::::::: ::::: 2 i Turb ° Po " erTo " lsPlus ' Blaise Turbo C, Borland. 69 PASCAL LIBRARIES (TURBO) Turbo Pascal Dew. Lib..Borland.$ 2J9 Metrabyte Data Acq. TOOLS, Quinn-Curtis 90 69 80 90 101 101 LOGITECH Modula-2 r n??> S rh US 5 '?'^ Ia t se i ® 1QI Development System ^ 199 C Utility Library, Essential. 125 Toolkit 141 Essential Communications 125 SOLID B+ Toolbox, Solid Software .'"i”" 89 Green eaf Turbo Functions 79 StonyBrook Modula-2. 179 Greenleaf Comm Library. 155 Greenleaf Functions 145 PforCe, Phoenix. 215_ TimeSlicer, Lifeboat. 279 386-Max, Qualitas.$ 66 Turbo C TOOLS, Blaise. 101 ADVANTAGE 386 C, Lifeboat. 839 386 DEVELOPMENT TOOLS Science & Engineering Software CIRCUIT DESIGN SCHEMATIC CAPTURE HiWIRE, Wintek Corp.$ 849 MICRO-CAP II, Spectrum Software. 759 PADS Drill, CAD Software. CALL PADS PCB,. CALL PADS Route,. CALL PSp ice, MicroSim. 899 Device Equations Source. 309 Probe graphics post-processor 399 Parts parameter estimator 399 Monte Carlo Analysis. 309 Digital Files. 309 Schema II, Omation. 449 smARTWORK, Wintek Corp. 849 Tango PCB, ACCEL Tech. 469 Tango Route, ACCEL Tech. 469 DATA ACOUISITION/SIGNAL ANALYSIS Asyst 2.9.$2,179 Asyst Modules 1,2,3.1,989 Asyst Modules 1, 2, 4.1,989 Asyst Module 1. 2.1,609 Asystant Plus, Macmillan. 849 Asystant, Macmillan. 469 DAOISP, DSP Systems. 749 DADISP-488, DSP Systems. 175 Fourier PERSPECTIVE II, Alligator Trans 329 HYPERSIGNAL, Hyperception. 309 HYPERSIGNAL Plus. . 439 LABTECH Acquire, Lab Tech. Corp. 179 LABTECH CHROM, 709 LABTECH Notebook, 759 LABTECH Real Time Access, 269 Lotus Measure 445 Q.E.D. D.A. and Control, Hart Scientific 799 SNAP-CALC, HEM Data Corp. 350 SNAP-FFT, HEM Data Corp. 295 SNAPSHOT STORAGE SCOPE 495 UnkelScope Junior. Unkel Software. 109 UnkelScope Level 1, 315 UnkelScope Level 2 +, 499 PLOTTING AND GRAPHING ChartBuster PC. Interchart Software ..$ 369 Datatap Graph, Milhalisin Assoc. 259 Omniolot. Scientific Endeavors. 269 PC.MAP III,Peerless Engineering. 755 PLOTZ.Curtis Technical Soft. 319 TECH°GRAPH°PAD, binary engineering.. 259 EQUATION SOLVERS MathCAD 2.0. MathSoft. 282 Math Mate, MCAE Technologies. 89 muMATH, Soft Warehouse. 189 SolvelT!, Structured Scientific Software 79 Solver-Q, SDDC. 79 TKISolver Plus, Universal Tech Sys. 395 AutoCAD, by Autodesk.$ CALL Autosketch, by Autodesk. 65 Speed Enhanced Version. 79 Design CAD, American Small Bus. Comp 219 Drafix 1 Plus,Foresight. 239 Drafix 3-D Modeler,Foresight. 169 EASYCAD, Evolution Computing.:.... 139 ECAD, Pelton Engineering. 699 FASTCAD, Evolution Computing.1,849 Generic CADD. 69 Generic 3-D Solid Modeling. 159 3-D Rendering Module. 119 ln°A°Vision, Micrografx. 459 Windows Draw w/Clip Art. 239 Windows Graph. 319 LaserCAD, DSL Link. 89 PRO-3D/PC, Enabling Technologies. 355 TurboCAD, MSA Group. 79 AUTOCAD ADD-ONS AutoESL, Systems Unlimited of CA.$ 279 AutoSHAPES. 189 FSIMPLEX, 89 Turbo View, Sublogic Corp. 449 MOUSE PRODUCTS LOGITECHHiREZMouse LOGITECH Serial or Bus Mouse LOGITECH Others LOGITECH Series 2 Mouse Microsoft Ser or Bus Mouse W/Easy CAD $ 149 99 . CALL 89 99 _y CAD..'. 119 W/MS Windows. 139 SUMMAMOUSE, Summagraphics 99 APLLANGUAGE APL°PLUS/PC, STSC.$ 499 APL°PLUS PC TOOLS, 209 Pocket APL. 80 SCIENTIFIC TEXT PROCESSING m CHEM-TEXT, Molecular Design Ltd.$1,500 Eureka: The Solver, Borland.$ 119 EXACT, Technical Support Software. 419 FoxBASE - /386. 459 High C, Metaware. 839 NDP FORTRAN, Microway. 553 Pharlap 3861 ASM/LINK. 422 386 SOFTWARE DESQview, Quarterdeck.$ 115 Microport —Svs. V/386 Comp. 799 MS Windows/386. Microsoft. 130 PC MOS/386, Software Link. 181 VM/386, IGC. 182 SCO XENIX —Complete. 1279 Periscope II.$ 141 OTHER Periscope Products. CALL Advanced Trace-86. Morgan Computing.. 121 Breakout, Essential. 89 Tdebug PLUS V.4.0, Turbo Power Soft... 41 w/Source. 79 Pfix86plus, Phoenix. 215 GOTO Drawbridge, Courseware Applic. Ill EssentialGraphics. . 229 Graphic, Software Endeavors. 322 GSS Graphics Dev. Toolkit, Software Endeavors. 399 HALO ’88, Media Cybernetics. 229 HOOPS, Ithaca Software. 554 MetaWINDOW, Metagraphics. 162 MetaWINDOWPLUS . 232 Turbo WINDOW/C. 80 Turbo HALO (Turbo C), Media Cybernetics 80 OBJECT - ORIENTED ACTOR, White Water Group.$ 423 ADVANTAGE C + + , Lifeboat. 479 PforCe + + , Phoenix 215 Smalltalk/V, Digitalk. 85 Smalltalk/V286. 159 BRIEF, Solution Systems.$ CALL w/dBRIEF. CALL EDIX, Emerging Technology. 169 EMA6S, Unipress. 268 Epsilon, Lugaru. 151 KEDIT, Mansfield. 129 MULTI-EDIT, American Cybernetics. 90 Norton Editor. 70 PC/EDT +, Boston Business Computing 269 Pmate, Phoenix. 115 SPF/PC, Command Technology. 185 VEDITPLUS.CompuView... . 131 XTC, Wendin. 80 FILE MANAGERS Btrieve, Softcraft.$ 185 Xtrieve. 189 Report Option 109 CBTREE, Peacock System. 141 c-tree, Faircom. 318 r-tree 241 dBC III, Lattice. 172 dBC Ill/ll w/Source 363 dBC III PLUS 599 db.VISTAORdb QUERY, Raima. CALL XOL, Softcraft. 599 ADVANTAGE Graphics, Lifeboat.$ 229 OPERATING SYSTEMS Microport DOS Merge.$ 219 Microport Sys V/AT. 579 SCO XENIX System V. 999 Wendin-DOS. 80 Other Microport, Sco, Wendin Products CALL SCREENS/WINDOWS Greenleaf Data Windows.$ 229 MS Windows, Microsoft. 69 MS Windows Dev. Kit, Microsoft. 329 PANEL Plus, Lifeboat. 395 PANEL/QC or/TC. 99 Vitamin C, Creative Programming. 162 Windows for Data, Vermont Creative. CALL ScreenStar w/Source, Essential. 169 SoftCode, Software Bottling Co. 119 Turbo POWER SCREEN . 101 OTHER PRODUCTS Dan Bricklin's Demo Program, Software Graden.$ 60 MKS Toolkit. 139 MS OS/2 Programmer's Toolkit 239 PC lint, Gimpel. 101 Plink86Plus, Phoenix. 279 PolytronPVCS CORPORATE 323 Pre-C, Phoenix. 159 SEIDL Version Manager 269 Source Print, Aldebaran Labs. 81 EXP, Brooks/Cole Publishing. 129 System ID Toolbox. 375 For Math, Shantha Software. 379 POINT FIVE, Pacific Crest. 279 Lotus Manuscript 445 The Professional Wheel, Dalin Inc. 199 PC TEX, Personal TEX. 229 Units, Curtis Technical Soft. 25 T3 Sci. Word Proc., TCI Software Res.... 499 ABstat, Anderson Bell.$ 315 CSS, StatSoft. 469 Microstat.Ecosoft. 319 NWA STATPAK, Northwest. 749 P-STAT. 659 The Scientific Wheel, Dalin Inc. 99 SPSS/PC +. 749 StatPac Gold, Walonick Associates. 539 STATS+ , StatSoft. 229 THE SYJ>TAT. CALL FORTRAN LANGUAGE DIFF-E-Q, Microcompatibles.$ 449 Extend, Design Decisions. 131 Grafmatic or Plotmatic, Microcompatibles 119 Lahey F77L-EM/32. 799 Lahey Personal FORTRAN. 89 MathPac, Systolic Systems. 445 Microsoft FORTRAN w/CodeView 299 Numerical Analyst, Maqus. 249 RM/FORTRAN, Austec. 479 Spindrift Library, Laboratory LTD. 135 | ADDITIONAL SSE PRODUCTS ATLAS GRAPHICS, STSC.$ 339 | GAUSS Atoms, Curtis Technical Soft. 26 System ES»f^lffi oncep ? s :::;::: PC-Matlab, The Math Works. 659 ■■ — Control System Toolbox 375 Microtec, Reims, Uniware, Quelo X-ASMS/SIMULATORS ..$ CALL Ordering Information We accept AMERICAN EX¬ PRESS. MC. VISA and PERSONAL CHECKS There is no surcharge on credit card or C 0 D New York State residents must add sales tax Shipping and handling S3 95 per item within the U S sent UPS ground Rush and interna¬ tional service available Call for prevailing rates • International orders add $10 for export preparation • Prices and policies may change without notice • Dealers and Corporate Buyers call for special rates. • Mail orders must include phone number. • Ask for details before you buy. some manufacturers won t take returns if disk seals are broken Call for your FREE catalog today! In the U.S. call 1 - 800 - 333-3141 International Orders: 914-332-0756 Science 6 Engineering J SOFTWARE CO. — 1 55 South Broadway, Tarrytown, NY 10591 Circle 214 on Reader Service Card AUGUST 1988 • BYTE 123 Embedded systems designers have already used CrossCode C in over 172 different applications. Introducing CrossCode C for the 68000 Microprocessor Family Finally, a 68000 C Compiler that’s tailor-made for ROMable applications C rossCode C is designed specifically to help you write ROMable code for all members of the Motorola 68000 family. A ROMable C Compiler? To get truly ROMable code, you have to start with a truly ROMable compiler. Here are three CrossCode C features that you won’t find in any ordinary C compiler: • Compiler output code is split into five independent memory sections that you can assign into ROM or RAM as you please. • You can optimize the code for your application becau seyou control the sizes of data types. For example, you can optimize for speed by using two byte inis ; or get maximum versatility by using four byte ints. • You can easily write assembly language routines that call C functions and vice- versa, because the compiler uses simple, well documented parameter passing conventions. How About Low Level Control? CrossCode C comes with an assembler that has all the features that assembly language programmers require. In fact, you could write your whole application with it: • The assembler features an advanced macro language, conditional assembly, “include” files, and an unlimited size symbol table. • Detailed cross references show you where you’ve defined and referenced your symbols. • After a link, you can actually convert your “relocatable” assembler listings into “absolute” listings that contain absolute addresses and fully linked object code. Can It Handle The Link? The CrossCode C linker is designed to handle truly huge loads. There are no limits on the number of symbols in your load or on the size of your output file. And you can always count on full 32 bit target addressability, because the linker operates comfortably in the highest ranges of the 68020’s address space. How Does It Get To ROM? CrossCode C comes with a downloader that puts you in touch with all EPROM programmers and emulators. It can convert your load into Motorola S-Records, Intel Hex, Tek Hex, Extended Tek Hex, and Data I/O ASCII Hex. You can also produce a binary image and convert that image into any format you might want. In all formats, bytes can be split into EPROMs for an 8, 16, or 32 bit data bus. Why Wait? Once you start using CrossCode C, you may just wonder how you ever got the job done before! It’s available under MS-DOS for just $ 1595, and it runs on all IBM PCs and compatibles (640K memory and hard disk are required). Also available under UNIX & XENIX. CALL TODAY for more information: 1-800-448-7733 Inside Illinois or outside the United States, please dial PHONE: 1-312-971-8170 FAX: 1-312-971-8513 SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT SYSTEMS, INC. 3110 WOODCREEK DRIVE DOWNERS GROVE, ILLINOIS 60515 USA CrossCode™ is a trademark of SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT SYSTEMS, INC. MS-DOS® is a registered trademark of Microsoft. UNIX" is a registered trademark of AT&T. XENIX® isa registered trademark of Microsoft. 124 BYTE* AUGUST 1988 Circle 221 on Reader Service Card EXPERT ADVICE MACINATIONS ■ Don Crabb WHAT’S UP with Apple? Late shipments, abandoned products, and blown promises are driving the rest of us crazy A s I write this column, it is the third week of May. I am still waiting for Apple to release its System Tools 6.0 software for the Mac. I had hoped to report on the updated released versions of the System, Finder, and MultiFinder. Apple prom¬ ised members of the Apple University Consortium (AUC) in March that the re¬ vised System software would be available on AppleLink, CompuServe, GEnie, MacNET, and elsewhere by the end of April, with complete shrink-wrapped kits (a la System Tools 5.0) and printed documentation soon after. Late, incomplete, and confused distri¬ bution has plagued the release of Mac system software since the first update in 1984. In the last year, though, the confu¬ sion and problems have spread to other Apple software products, growing almost in parallel with Apple’s impressive fiscal performance. As Apple has grown from an entrepreneurial enterprise to a more traditionally managed technology com¬ pany, several important products have either fallen between management cracks or been released woefully incomplete. The fact is, Apple has blown a lot of promises lately. Two more examples will serve to clarify my point: MacPascal and A/UX. MacPascal Ever wonder what happened to MacPas¬ cal? Did you know that you can’t current¬ ly buy it from Apple (or anyone else)? I first discovered the “MacPascal prob¬ lem” in January. It was then that I had Apple’s new System Tools 5.0 software installed on our laboratory Macs. One of the primary uses for these machines is to teach introductory programming. Be¬ cause of its friendly interface and novice- centered development environment, along with its multiple-window approach to interpreted execution and debugging, MacPascal is a perfect environment for learning. It’s safe to say that MacPascal helped sell a lot of Macs to universities. Almost as soon as the System Tools 5.0 was installed, we started having seri¬ ous problems with MacPascal 2.1 (the latest version). Program files became cor¬ rupted, printing failed, working pro¬ grams refused to run, and so on. To make an excruciating story short, after considerable effort I found that Apple had simply dropped MacPascal. No more versions. No bug fixes. No more Mac¬ Pascal. Nothing. Apple recommended that we either run MacPascal 2.1 with old system software or migrate to another Pascal. What was even more frustrating was that no one at Apple could point to whose decision it was to drop MacPascal. It’s now 5 months later, and the only good news is that Apple is near an agree¬ ment with Symantec/Think Technol¬ ogies (the original authors) to take Mac¬ Pascal back into its fold for an eventual rewrite and rerelease next fall. Are they kidding? People who are using MacPas¬ cal can’t put their work on hold until the autumn of 1989. Most Pascal users will probably adopt our strategy: migrate to Think’s Pascal compiler, Lightspeed Pascal, even though it’s not as good a product for learning programming. A/UX Apple’s much-ballyhooed Unix for the Mac II, A/UX, is another of Apple’s software mistakes. The product missed its initial ship date (August 1987) by more than 6 months. When it finally shipped in February of 1988, Apple had not done its homework in addressing one continued ILLUSTRATION: ROBERT KAUFMAN AUGUST 1988 • BYTE 125 MACINATIONS of its largest groups of potential A/UX customers: users of System V and BSD 4.2/4.3 Unix. As announced, A/UX was simply not competitive with Unix offerings from Sun, Apollo, and AT&T. It was too ex¬ pensive, and could be purchased only on an Apple 80-megabyte hard disk; tape distribution was not available. Apple had made no provisions for distributing the source code for A/UX. Dedicated Unix users simply must have the source code. And despite earlier promises to the con¬ trary, A/UX deflated the hopes of a large segment of its intended market by being mostly plain vanilla System V. A/UX definitely was not Unix for the rest of us. To be fair, we should be able to forgive Apple for this last failing, especially since A/UX 1.0 is its first Unix release. Apple got a lot of technical things right with 1.0. It also broke new ground by making it easier to recover from Unix file-system errors and install new de¬ vices. But the other A/UX problems point to a larger management problem: an inability to announce and deliver soft¬ ware on schedule and as described. Apple’s spin-off company, Claris, will help somewhat (by taking applications like Mac Write away from Apple), but the management difficulties remain for Apple’s languages and system software. Apple’s mistakes make a disturbingly long list; I hope the folks there are learn¬ ing from the errors. All the lawsuits in the world won’t help retain or increase market share if the way it has handled A/UX, MacPascal, and system software becomes a trend. System Tools 6.0 I’ve worked with a beta version of System Tools 6.0 for several weeks. About all I can say is that it lives up to its beta desig¬ nation. It didn’t work properly on the Mac II, SE, or Plus I used for testing. Whether I copied the files to clean hard disks or used the Installer to update an existing System, the stuff just didn’t work right. Screens froze for no reason, the mouse went dead, and bombs with just about every ID number known to In¬ side Macintosh cropped up. Since this is labeled an “early beta,” I hope the prob¬ lems are fixed before release. The new software included a couple of interesting new features worth remem¬ bering: a notification manager and a new font format. The notification manager is supposed to notify foreground applica¬ tions running under MultiFinder when a background application (e.g., a telecom¬ munications program) needs direct at¬ tention. As it stands now, the notification manager should be useful if you expect to upload or download several files in the background while working on something else in the foreground. I hope software publishers will take advantage of this ca¬ pability to allow other functions that need occasional attention to operate in the background (e.g., program compila¬ tion or hard disk backup). The new font format, NFNT, allows up to 16,000 fonts to be loaded into a sys¬ tem, up from the 256 you can load now (without using a third-party DA/font manager like AlSoft’s Font DA/Juggler Plus). You can also install up to 32,000 individual fonts in your system with the new format. The increased limits come from NFNT assigning font numbers to en¬ tire font families rather than to individ¬ ual fonts. Unfortunately, NFNT fonts are not compatible with the existing ones, and Apple does not yet have any software to convert the old fonts to the new format continued WHY SETTLE FOR THIS?... 4 3 ( x - i ) 'nZ y • z X d t n | 3 10 -1 2! 4* v •- — O) X - tY i~l 5 Z X Y ...WHEN WHAT YOU REALLY WANT IS THIS. ' nZ XV' Z dt | V Z 3 +V 10 .^X -tY~ ^ 00 i =1 Quality work should look high-quality. What better reason to try P c TgX®—the full implementation of Prof. D. Knuth’s revolutionary TgX formatting/typesetting program. P c TgX offers professional typesetting capabilities & advantages to PC users. It gives you control—of format, type, symbols, quality—for complex mathematical & TRY THIS: PERSONAL INC To order or for information, call: 415 / 388-8853 or write: Personal T^X, Inc. 12 Madrona Avenue Mill Valley, CA 94941 USA P^ltX is a registered TM of Personal IkX. Inc. It-X is an American Mathematical Society TM. Manufacturers' product names are their TMs. engineering material, statistical tables or straight matter. So whether you’re writing the next starshot manual or a thesis on relativity, you get camera/publisher-ready manuscripts to be proud of, quick & simple. Don’t settle for less. From Personal TgX, Inc., starting at $249; VISA/MC welcome. Satisfaction guaranteed. pc-rtx FORMATTING/TYPESETTING SYSTEM • FINE TYPESET QUALITY from dot matrix or laser printers, or phototypesetters. • A COMPLETE PRODUCT. Includes • our specially written PCT^X Manual that lets you use TeX immediately • custom 'macro package' formats for letters, manuals, technical documents, etc. • the LaTEX document preparation system (with user's manual) macro package for article, book, report preparation • AMS-TeX, developed by the American Mathematical Society for professional mathematical typesetting. • OUTPUT DEVICE DRIVERS available for Epson FX, LQ • Toshiba • HP LaserJet Series • Apple LaserWriter • Screen preview, with EGA, VGA or Hercules card. • REQUIRES: IBM PC/XT, AT or compatible, DOS 2.0 or higher & 512K RAM; hard disk for printer drivers & fonts. This ad is typeset & composed using PCT^X. Bitstream® fonts & laser printer Logotype & black backgrounds done photographically. 126 BYTE* AUGUST 1988 Circle 175 on Reader Service Card An inside look at The more you look into 386 compatibles, the more you realize that well thought-out design innovations (that really work) are few and far between. That's why our engineers set out to design the GV-386. They realized they could unlock more of the chip's potential, if only they could speed up data retrieval, without affecting system reliability. INNER POWER Here's how they did it: a high-speed RAM cache circuit—a full 64K of superfast memory-that puts your most fre¬ quently accessed data right at your fingertips. If you're ever involved in processing complex databases, long spreadsheets, or detailed engineer¬ ing drawings, you'll see the value of this innovation in a second...literally. Best of all, the cache circuit actually makes the GV-386 more reli¬ able than other high-speed machines, by sparing integrated circuits from harsh overloading. Our BBS is on-line 24 hours. Call The Soft Stop at 918-252-9137. Prices subject to change Circle 171 on Reader Service Card GV-386 Specifications □ Available with 16MHz or 20MHz CPU □ Zero Wait States □ 64K Cache (keyboard enabled) □ 1 MB RAM on-board, expandable to 4MB □ Socketed for 80287 or 80387 □ I/O Bus runs at 8MHz for hardware compatibility □ Six 16-bit slots: TWo 8-bit slots □ Price: 20MHz systems start at $2,750:16MHz systems as low as $2,375 QUALITY THROUGHOUT Of course, our most important criterion when designing our super compatible wasn't speed-it was quality. Thke a look inside the GV-386 and you'll see it everywhere: from the highest quality components avail¬ able to the intelligent use of special CMOS RAM to store system set-up information. On the outside, the fit and finish of the GV-386 would make Big Blue green. Even the user's manual has impressed users and reviewers alike. We'd like to tell you more about what went into the GV-386. Give us a call and we'll give you the whole story. We'll also tell you about our exclusive 30-Day Compatibility Guarantee, our full One-Year Warranty and our toll- free support service. The GV-386 from PC Designs. With design innovations this advanced, at this price, it's an open and shut case. PC Call us now at 1-800-32-BIT PC ( 800 - 322 - 4872 ) 2500 N. Hemlock Circle. Broken Arrow. OK 74012 * 918-251-5550 (Fax: 918-251-7057) 19 Rector Street. Suite 2705. New York. NY 10006 * 212-514-7280 (Fax: 212-797-3973) AUGUST 1988 -BYTE 127 Circle 119 on Reader Service Card Do you have PCs and a VAX? Then you need ZSTEM TERMINAL EMULATION The ZSTEM series includes high Take advantage of advanced features performance DEC, Tektronix, and DG including VT340 color and resolution, terminal emulators featuring ZSTEM file transfer, softkeys, network support 240, ZSTEM 220, ZSTEM 100, and much, much more ... all with a ZSTEM 4014, and ZSTEM D400. 30 day money-back guarantee! MACINATIONS (the beta version of the Font/DA Mover 3.8 that I tested in the System 6.0 pack¬ age lacked a conversion feature). The beta 6.0 System disks I tested, de¬ spite taking up four 800K-byte disks, also lacked any NFNT fonts. Still, Apple would not have created the new font for¬ mat if it didn’t plan to use it, so NFNT util¬ ity software and fonts might appear as early as the Boston ’88 Mac World Expo. I expect that vendors like Adobe, who have substantial investments in existing libraries of typefaces, will eventually convert some or all of their fonts to the new NFNT format. Call today for details. ( 800 ) 663-8702 KEA Systems Ltd. #412 - 2150 West Broadway Vancouver, B.C. CANADA, V6K 4L9 Tel: 604-732-7411 Telex: 04-352848 VCR FAX: 604-732-0715 LAHEY SETS NEW FORTRAN STANDARDS LAHEY PERSONAL FORTRAN 77 $95 Low cost, Full 77 Standard, Debugger, Fast Compilation F77L FORTRAN LANGUAGE SYSTEM $477 For porting or developing, this is the critics’ choice. “Editor’s Choice” . PC Magazine . . the most robust compiler tested.” . Micro/Systems . .the most efficient and productive FORTRAN development tool for the DOS environment” . David W. Burleigh, BYTE 11/87 F77L-EM/16-bit $695 F77L-EM/32-bit $895 Break through the DOS 640K barrier. The most powerful PC Fortran Language Systems for downloading or writing large programs. PRODUCTIVITY TOOLS Profiler, ULI Mathematical Functions Library, Overlay Linker, Toolkit, Utility Libraries, Windows, Memory Boards, 80386 HummingBoard. IF YOU DEMAND THE VERY BEST. THEN YOU SHOULD BE USING LAHEY. CALL US TO DISCUSS YOUR PC FORTRAN NEEDS. CALL FOR NEW FEATURES INCLUDING MATH COPROCESSOR EMULATION 30 DAY MONEY-BACK GUARANTEE FOR INFORMATION OR TO ORDER: 1 - 800 - 548-4778 Lahey Computer Systems, Inc. P.O. Box 6091, Incline Village, NV 89450 TEL: 702-831-2500 TLX: 9102401256 FAX: 702-831-8123 Lahey Computer Systems Inc. BP FoxBASE+/Mac I’ve been working with FoxBASE + / Mac, a relational database, since De¬ cember 1987, when it was a low-num¬ bered beta. I’ve had the initial released version (1.0) lor about a month now, and I’m impressed. FoxBASE+/Mac is fast. Not just a little bit fast, but a lot fast. In the 1000-, 10,000-, and 50,000-record flatfile tests I’ve run, it’s faster than any other Macintosh database, relational or not. The same blazing speed held up in the limited multifile relational tests I tried (relating 3 files of 10,000, 5000, and 2500 records each). FoxBASE+/ Mac outruns 4th Dimension, McMax, dBASE Mac, FileMaker Plus, Reflex Plus, Omnis 3 Plus, Double Helix II, and others at the basic tasks of creating, im¬ porting, modifying, sorting, retrieving, and deleting database information. FoxBASE+/Mac is a dBASE III Plus- compatible database for the Mac. It can run any dBASE III Plus code directly (once you’ve ported it over to the Mac using TOPS, or through a serial connec¬ tion, or by using the Apple File Exchange software and a PC-compatible Mac disk drive). It can also read dBASE data files without modifications. FoxBASE-b/Mac also read the PC FoxBASE files I tried. FoxBASE+/Mac, however, is not the first software to offer complete dBASE III Plus compatibility on a Mac. The dMacIII program, first published by Format Software (a West German com¬ pany), and rewritten and rereleased in 1987 by Nantucket Software as McMax, claims that honor. McMax is fast too, al¬ though slower than FoxBASE. If FoxBASE+/Mac were just a faster version of McMax, its market would be limited primarily to developers who want to port their dBASE III applications over to the Mac. Happily, speed is just part of the appeal of FoxBASE 4- /Mac. Unlike McMax, FoxBASE +/Mac in¬ cludes a set of command extensions and additional features that go way beyond 128 BYTE • AUGUST 1988 Circle 125 on Reader Service Card MACINATIONS Items Discussed Apple Macintosh FoxBASE -1- /Mac 1.0. .$395 System Tools 6.0. .$39 Fox Software, Inc. Apple Computer Inc. 118 West South Broadway 20525 Mariani Ave. Perrysburg, OH 43551 Cupertino, CA 95014 (419) 874-0162 (408)996-1010 Inquiry 908. Inquiry 905. FullWrite Professional. .$395 A/UX 1.0 Ashton-Tate Corp. Apple Computer Inc. 20101 Hamilton Ave. 20525 Mariani Ave. Torrance, CA 90502 Cupertino, CA 95014 (213) 329-8000. (408) 996-1010 Inquiry 920. Price not set at press time Inquiry 906. dBASE. FoxBASE can build applications that incorporate many familiar Macin¬ tosh software features, such as pull¬ down menus, radio buttons, scrollable and editable text windows, dialog and alert boxes, resizable and scrollable out¬ put windows, font and font-size control, icon-style menus, and color on the Mac II. These features give FoxBASE+/Mac much more utility as a Macintosh-only database applications development sys¬ tem than McMax. FoxBASE +/Mac’s direct competition is Acius’s 4th Dimen¬ sion. It easily beat 4D 1.04 in my bench¬ mark speed tests (4D 1.04, the current release as of May 1988, suffers from a number of speed problems), and I sus¬ pect that even the improved 4th Dimen¬ sion, version 1.1, will still be drubbed by FoxBASE in speed testing. FoxBASE+/Mac also costs $300 less than 4D. But speed and price are not the only concerns for database developers and users. The total development and user environment is just as important as any performance and value rating based only on speed and list price. In this more complete comparison, FoxBASE still has a lot of catching up to do. 4D provides more features, more development aids, and a better overall environment than does FoxBASE+/Mac. 4D also offers a run-time version for developers, and it supports multiple users (with proper file and record locking) over AppleShare. Fox Software expected to release a run-time version of FoxBASE +/Mac in June for $300. By that time, the company should also have released a LAN version compatible with the file and record lock¬ ing utilities of AppleShare and 3Com’s 3 +Share. Given how rapidly Fox Software has gotten a serious Mac relational database into the market, I’d keep a close eye on it. I expect version 2.0 will keep its speed and add more development tools. FullWrite Professional Here’s a program that looked like quint¬ essential vaporware. First announced at the January 1987 MacWorld by Ann Arbor Softworks (the FullPaint people), its release was repeatedly postponed. Ashton-Tate finally bought it in Febru¬ ary and began shipping it at the end of April. I’ve tried version 1.0 for a week and have some initial impressions. At $395 it’s competitively priced with Microsoft Word 3.02, although Micro¬ soft’s aggressive volume and educational discount purchase program often drops Word’s price to less than $90. In con¬ trast, I paid $219 for my copy of Full- Write Professional from a local Chicago computer store (not a chain franchise). Version 1.0 is slow. In fact, as a basic editor, it is annoyingly slow. I tried writ¬ ing this column using FullWrite but gave up because the screen scrolled too slow¬ ly, and search-and-replace operations creeped along (I finished the column using MindWrite 1.1). I used a 1-mega¬ byte Mac Plus in these tests. Brief testing on an 8-megabyte Mac II showed that impressed. FoxBASE is not just a little bit fast, but a lot fast. FullWrite performed well. Therefore, on a fully configured Mac II, FullWrite is a good editing choice. There’s no question about FullWrite’s credentials as a high-end word proces¬ sor, though. It surpasses Word’s desktop publishing (DTP) features by adding page-layout and drawing functions (al¬ though it’s no match for the page-layout capabilities of a complete DTP program like PageMaker 3.0). Besides the basic DTP capabilities, FullWrite has a slew of editing and formatting features just like Word: a spelling checker, an outliner (yes, a usable integrated outliner, unlike Word’s useless one), automatic hyphena¬ tion, automatic indexing and table of con¬ tents creation, and floating footnotes. FullWrite also has some nice editing fea¬ tures that Word lacks, such as review notes and revision journaling. Like many beta testers, I had problems with FullWrite reading Word files, but my system didn’t crash. Instead, the file would open with corrupted text. The re¬ leased version doesn’t have this problem. Despite FullWrite’s slowness com¬ pared to Word and MindWrite, I still liked the program. It’s very easy to fig¬ ure out and use. If I was in the habit of creating long structured documents with some graphics elements in them, I’d probably choose FullWrite over a combi¬ nation of PageMaker and Word, because it would be simpler to learn and use and still produce an acceptable result. As a basic full-screen editor/word pro¬ cessor, though, FullWrite Professional is just too slow on a 1-megabyte Mac Plus, and it requires too many machine re¬ sources (at least 1 megabyte of memory, preferably 2 megabytes, and as fast a hard disk drive as you can afford). For my basic writing needs, I’ll stick with MindWrite 1.1 and Word 3.02, because I don’t need all the DTP features of FullWrite. MindWrite’s wonderful out¬ liner is reason enough for me to rely on it, while Word’s scrolling speed and global updating acumen more than make up for its other flaws. ■ Don Crabb is the director of laboratories and a senior lecturer for the computer science department and the college at the University of Chicago. He is also a con¬ sulting editor for BYTE. He can be reached on BIX as “deerabb. ” The views expressed are his own. Your questions and comments are wel¬ come. Write to: Editor , BYTE , One Phoenix Mill Lane , Peterborough , NH 03458. AUGUST 1988 -BYTE 129 'MettdeUm 1 - 800 - 422-3525 1 CONTROL YOUR HOME OR BUSINESS FROM YOUR IBM*PC OR PC/AT COMPATIBLE This card is what you need to TURN ON & OFF lights, machinery, and other electrical or electronic equipment. IBM PC* DATA ACQUISITION AND CONTROL ADAPTER & DISTRIBUTION PANEL provides the capability to control and monitor processes within a sensor base system. Up to lour IBM DATA ACQUISITION AND CONTROL ADAPTERS can be attached to an individual PC or AT Compatible • The Adapter has - Pour analog input channels (12-bit resolution) ■ Two analog output channels 02-bit resolution) • 16-channel digital input port - 16-channel digital output port - Programmable sampling rates provided by a 32-bil timer - Event counter programmable rale generator or programmable lime delay provided by a 16-bit user timer/ counter • The Distribution Panel has - Screw terminals provided to attach devices to the distribution panel - Multiple grounds lor twisted pair terminations - Shielded construction to minimize noise interference • USES Chromatography. Electrochemistry. Energy management. Elec¬ tronic testing. Process control. Data logging Robotics Some parameters commonly monitored or controlled include Pressure. Flow. Displacement. Voltage. Light intensity. Rotational speed Some instruments or devices that may utilize the Adapter are Chromatographs. Spectrophotometers. Pressure gages. Relay controls. Thermocouples. Gas analyzers. Humidity sensors. Valve actuators. Level gauges. Load cells. Conductivity cells, ph Meters • TECHNICAL DATA ANALOG INPUT The analog input functions of the adapter oper¬ ate in eigher programed or interrupting mode The analog input (unctions provide f2-bit relative accuracy RESOLUTION - 12 bits INPUT CHANNELS- four differential THIS IS AN ORIGINAL IBM* PRODUCT ! ! ! INPUT MODES- INPUTRANGES unipolar bipolar OUTPUT MODE unipolar bipolar INPUT IMPEDANCE INPUT CURRENT INPUT VOLTAGE Normal mode Common mode COMMON MODE Rejection ratio Integral linearity error DIFFERENTIAL Linearity Error Stability GAIN Error Stability OFFSET Error Unipolar stability Bipolar stability MONOTONICIITY THROUGHPUT to memory OTO * 10volts, user-selectable ±5 and z 10 volts user-selectable straight binary offset binary >100 megohms with 100 picofarads 130 volts maximum without damage power on or power olt * 11 volts maximum 72 db ± t LSB maximum 1 '■> LSB maximum ±5 ppm/degrees C of FSR (max) :0 1 s t between ranges (max) any range adjustable to 0 z32 ppm/degrees C of FSR (max) adjustable to 0 z24 ppm/degrees C ol FSR (maxi ±24 ppm/degrees C ol FSR (max) Oto 50 degrees C 15.000 conversions/second mm IBM PC*DATA ACQUISITION AND CONTROL ADAPTER provides an easy to use interface for accessing the ANALOG and DIGITAL I/O. Integrates analog, binary and time/ counter devices on a single adapter card. The analog output functions ol the adapter operate m programed I/O mode The analog output lunctions provide 12-bit relative accu¬ racy RESOLUTION 12-bits Number ol output channels OUTPUT modes OUTPUT ranges Unipolar Bipolar INPUT CODE Unipolar Bipolar OUTPUT Current OUTPUT Impedance CAPACITIVE loading GAIN Error Stability OFFSET Error unipolar Error bipolar Unipolar stabilrty Bipolar stability MONOTONICITY SETTLING TIME PROTECTION OVERSHOOT THROUGHPUT from memory unipolar or bipolar, user-selectable 0 to 1 10 volts user-selectable i5 and 1 * 10 volts user-selectable straight binary otlset binary ♦ 5 milliamps. min with normal loading and protection from damage with the output shorted to common 2 ohm. max 0 5 microfarads max 0 1 betweem ranges (max ) any range adjustable to 0 ± ppm/degrees ColFSR( max) *3 25 millivolt max adjustable to 0 18 ppm/degrees C of FSR (max) z 24 ppm/degrees C or FSR (max) 0 to 50 degrees C 10 microseconds max to within 0 1% FSR lor a 10 von step with 1000 of load Protected lor shod to common zl^coi FSR max 25 000 conversion/second OUR LOW! LOW! PRICE FOR BOTH UNITS IBM’ DATA ACQUISTION AND CONTROL ADAPTER #6451502 ORGINAL COST $1275 IBM* ADAPTER DISTRIBUTION PANEL #6451504 ORGINAL COST $245 $195 INCLUDES TURBO PASCAL DEMO SOFTWARE W/SOURCE CODES, ADDRESSES, ANALOG & BINARY INPUT & OUTPUT MODULES PER SET Shipping <£ Handling $6.50 MENDELSON’S ADVANCED DEMO IN TURBO PASCAL AVAILABLE FOR $25 Part No. #200-108 Demo Turbo PMendelson Electronic Co., Inc. 20% Restocking Fee on Non-Defective Returns STORE HOURS 8:30 - 5:00 Monday thru Saturday. *IBM PC/XT is a registered trademark of IBM corp. TERMS: MasterCard/Visa/Discover Card, Check or Money order (checks allow two weeks for clearance), C.O.D. add additional $3.00. Ohio residents add 6% State Tax. Above shipping/handling are rates for UPS ground in Continental U.S. only 340 East First Street Dayton, Ohio 45402 513/461-3525 1 - 800 - 422-3525 FAX 513/461-3391 130 BYTE* AUGUST 1988 Circle 142 on Reader Service Card It was the El Dorado of DOSes, lying beyond multitasking, beyond 640K bytes. This new column takes a practical approach to understanding—and living with—the reality of OS/2. O ne of the big selling points of the original 1981 IBM PC was its large (for the time) 256K-byte memory and greater speed. Several microcomputers in the PC’s price class, like the North Star Horizon II and the Altos machines, offered multiuser and multitasking capa¬ bilities. These capabilities were offered on machines with slower CPUs and less memory, so multitasking capabilities seemed (to me and to other IBM PC buy¬ ers at the time, that is) a reasonable fea¬ ture for the PC’s operating system. In fact, at the time, Digital Research of¬ fered a multitasking version of CP/M for the PC. DOS 1.0 wasn't multiuser or multitasking, but at $40 it was the cheap¬ est available operating system, so 96 per¬ cent of the early PC owners chose it over the other options, CP/M or the p-System. By late 1982, everyone at the local PC user’s group had heard of a rumored DOS 2.0. Some of the rumors said that it would be multiuser and multitasking. DOS 2.0 arrived, sans multiuser and multitasking. Ah, well, we told our¬ selves, the next version would redress these deficiencies. In 1984, IBM fired our hopes by offering a new and more powerful computer. The initial press re¬ leases showed a computer with dumb ter¬ EXPERT ADVICE OS/2 AND YOU S Mark Minasi Why Os/2? minals on it and made reference to a 4- megabyte memory capacity. The new “multiuser” AT had powers and abilities beyond that of the PC, we were told. A new DOS, version 3.0, came with it, but it didn’t really do anything new save take up an extra 10K bytes or so. IBM said that a DOS to exploit this new machine’s powers would be released “soon.” The rumors continued. DOS 4.0 would be bypassed altogether for DOS 5.0, the El Dorado of DOSes: Beyond multitasking, and memory beyond 640K bytes —the once-monstrous 640K bytes had become a straitjacket. The trade rags said Microsoft figured that it could knock it out by early 1986. DOS 5.0 then tried to go undercover, assuming new names seemingly each week: CP-DOS, A(dvanced) DOS, 286DOS. We didn’t care what they called it. We wanted more memory and multitasking. Finally, on April 2, 1987, IBM an¬ nounced a whole slew of new hardware and software. DOS 5.0 was finally an¬ nounced, calling itself OS/2. The attractive features of OS/2 are multitasking, access to larger memory, a graphical user interface, an improved local-area network manager, legal termi- nate-and-stay-resident programs, better harmony among programs, a rich system interface, and compatibility with many familiar DOS commands, and, with the Presentation Manager, OS/2 provides a device-independent platform. I’ll exam¬ ine the first three this month and take the rest up next month. Multitasking OS/2 is designed to be a single-user, Unix-like operating system for 80286 and 80386 PCs. A dozen or more (12 for OS/2 1.0, 17 for OS/2 1.1) programs can run at the same time, all loaded into memory and executing. This concurrent multitasking goes be¬ yond many simple systems currently available under DOS that load several programs into memory but give actual CPU attention only to the one that you are currently interacting with. In these sim¬ ple systems, no background processing occurs. Such systems’ main values are that they let you cut and paste between applications and that they eliminate the time required to load and unload a pro¬ gram. A good and inexpensive example of these programs is Software Carousel from SoftLogic Solutions. Gordon Letwin, Microsoft’s chief ar¬ chitect of OS/2, says that it is fundamen¬ tally different from minicomputer oper¬ ating systems like Unix. Multi user systems, he says, must appear to fairly allocate computer resources among multiple users. OS/2, on the other hand, need not appear fair to the multiple pro¬ grams running in the system. In fact, Letwin argues, you really want to give the lion’s share of the CPU time to the program in the foreground—the one the user is currently interacting with. Letwin claims that OS/2 does this. OS/2 has a relatively sophisticated task-switching algorithm, incorporating a 189-level priority scheme and a dy¬ namic adjustment algorithm for those priorities that takes into account things like how long a task has been CPU- starved and whether or not the task is just waiting for I/O. In a future column, I’ll show you how to manipulate these priori¬ ties for optimum performance. Large Memory “Breaking the 640K-byte barrier” has become a cliche, but OS/2 does it. The 80286 and 80386 have, of course, always had the ability to address large amounts of memory, but not while in the “real mode” (are the other modes “unreal”?) that DOS requires. Access to more mem¬ ory is allowed under “protected mode”— 16 megabytes of memory, in fact. OS/2 even goes beyond 16 megabytes. It can use extra disk space where there is insufficient RAM. If you try to run, say, a 3-megabyte program where only 2 continued AUGUST 1988 -BYTE 131 OS/2 AND YOU megabytes of RAM are free, OS/2 will transparently store 1 of the 3 megabytes on disk, treating it as if it were RAM. This scheme, called “virtual memory,” is OK in a pinch, but access to disk is so much slower than access to memory that you’ll want to avoid this one where possible. Another reason to avoid virtual mem¬ ory under OS/2 is that the virtual mem¬ ory manager is buggy. The process of moving memory blocks temporarily to disk and back is called “swapping.” The swapper program will use all the free space on your hard disk drive—you can’t tell it to use only x megabytes for swap¬ ping. The swapper under 1.0 is moder¬ ately stable, although I’ve crashed it a few times. The swapper under the cur¬ rent 1.1 beta release is very fragile. If you want a stable OS/2 platform for your programs, disable the swapper by adding MEMMAN=N0SWAP,MOVE to your CONFIG.¬ SYS file. Bugs like this are fairly com¬ mon in a new system, and they will no doubt be fixed in a future release. As the largest disk addressable by OS/2 is the familiar 32 megabytes (yes, the old DOS limitation on disk size is still with us), and the maximum RAM ad¬ dressable by OS/2 is 16 megabytes, a program using both RAM and virtual memory could theoretically be as large as 48 megabytes. The virtual memory scheme could be very useful were it not for the fact that OS/2 seems unable to swap itself. An IBM PC AT with 2.5 megabytes of RAM cannot boot the Presentation Manager code that Microsoft shipped to develop¬ ers in April, as it must have at least 2.7 megabytes to boot. Apparently, all of OS/2 must reside in RAM. Another disappointment about OS/2’s use of large memory is not Microsoft’s fault, but Intel’s. Even in protected mode, the 80286/80386 chips are de¬ signed to address the 16 megabytes in terms of 64K-byte segments. Going across segments requires more code and is slower. Many compiler writers, dis¬ mayed at how much more slowly a pro¬ gram runs when doing a lot of segment swapping, have simply limited static data areas to 64K bytes—one segment. It would be a real shame if inexpensive compilers maintained this now antedilu¬ vian constraint. There are, of course, no inexpensive compilers for OS/2 cur¬ rently. But an expensive one, the BASIC compiler, still has the 64K-byte limita¬ tion on static data. For OS/2 to get beyond the 64K-byte segments, it would have to put the chip in a different, incompatible mode, the “32- Items Discussed Microsoft OS/2 System Development Toolkit.$3000 Microsoft Corp. 16011 Northeast 36th Way Redmond, WA 98073 (206) 882-8089 Inquiry 945. Software Carousel.$60 SoftLogic Solutions One Perimeter Rd. Manchester, NH 03103 (603) 644-5555 Inquiry 946. bit” protected mode, but this is only available on the 80386 chip. Graphical User Interface Whether you like them or not, WIMP (windows, icons, mice, and pointers) in¬ terfaces are chic these days. The Mac has established a solid market, and the well- dressed PC these days looks like a Sun engineering workstation with a small screen. The hardware for WIMP is now in place—VGA is as good as Mac graph¬ ics , and the PS/2 comes with a rodent in¬ terface built right in. OS/2 supports EGA and VGA, as well as a variety of mice. Unfortunately, the current OS/2 releases do not support Hercules graphics. The “point and click” ease of a graph¬ ical user interface makes using applica¬ tions easier and reduces training time. The Mac can be described as not an ap¬ plication platform, but rather an applica¬ tion funnel in the sense that all Mac ap¬ plications not only can look the same, but pretty much must look the same. The downside of this uniformity is that it grinds programmers’ gears: All of us who have ever touched a compiler to code fancy ourselves artists in the field of user interface design. The graphical user interface is han¬ dled by an optional program called the Presentation Manager (PM). The PM is to OS/2 as Windows is to DOS: Windows is not necessary under DOS, and the PM is not necessary under OS/2. Including Windows/PM, however, opens the doors to some interesting applications. It’s hard to say too much good or bad about the PM, as the current beta code (early June 1988) is very, well, unstable. In his letter to developers, Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer basically said, “Here’s what we’ve got so far, it’s not reliable, better stuff is coming....” I can’t see how Microsoft will have a shippable final product by October—the date Microsoft and IBM have promised release to the general public—but I wish them luck. It’s easy to take potshots at Microsoft for everything being so late, but I don’t see how it couldn } t have been late. According to Microsoft, it took 35 programmers 4 years to write OS/2. That’s a mighty large programming proj¬ ect to manage—larger, I’d guess, than anything the company has tried before. If you know Windows, you’ll spot a lot of it in the PM. The Control Panel is the same, the Alt-spacebar character does similar things, and, as in Windows 2.0, it can be managed without a rodent by using Alt keys. Applications can still communicate via the Clipboard. However, you’ll also miss a few things. As of this writing, Microsoft does not provide the desk accessories that Windows has—the clock, calculator, Re- versi game, notepad, paint program, and terminal. This is a serious flaw, and it points to a major deficiency in OS/2: The frills are gone. Where DOS generally came with a BASIC interpreter and the all-purpose DEBUG, neither is supplied with OS/2 despite its $400 price tag. Come on, now. Would giving us DEBUG and GWBASIC really hurt sales of those $500 compiler/CodeView combinations? OS/2 Tip of the Month If you’re going to use a serial printer under OS/2, OS/2 won’t talk to the printer if it doesn’t see some activity on the CTS line of the serial port, line 8 on an AT’s 9-pin port or line 5 on a standard 25-pin port. The following minimum cable worked to let me “print” from my desktop OS/2 machine with a 9-pin serial connection to my 9-pin laptop (a sneaky way to capture screens for use in text): Side 1 2 3 5 7 8 Mark Minasi is a managing partner at the firm of Moulton, Minasi & Company, a Columbia, Maryland, which special¬ izes in technical seminars. He can be reached on BIX as “ editors. ” Your questions and comments are wel¬ come. Write to: Editor, BYTE, One Phoenix Mill Lane, Peterborough, NH 03458. Side 2 -3 -2 -5 7 I 8 132 BYTE* AUGUST 1988 Look at DOS. It looks back at you. It makes you do all the work. You need the Norton Commander. See this user-defined menu. It runs your favorite programs and routines at a keystroke. View two directories—from one or two disks—at once. And move your files around quickly. Pull down a menu for quick, easy access to the full power and features of the program. Want a tree view? Just pop up a window. You can scroll, mouse or Speed Search for directories. To see your files, pick a directory on the left and see the contents on the right. Remember your last 15 commands? Our Command History does. Take your pick and ru n them again. View your dBASE ® II or HI data without having to run dBASE. It’s as close as a keystoke. Another keystroke shows Lotus® 1-2-3® or Symphony® files—with¬ out running 1-2-3 or Symphony See DOS run like you’ve never seen it before. Like you won’t see it run with other DOS enhancement shell. See version 2.0 of the Norton Commander 1 '' a dramatically advanced version of the program Infoworld called “tops in its class... a new level of convenience for MS/DOS users.” The new Norton Commander combines the functions of a hard disk manager with all the features you need to support and enhance the DOS command line. Yet it’s flexible enough to get out of your way when you don’t need to see it. Novice or expert, you’ll want to see your dealer •- right away. And see how fast DOS can run. I'ClCf lyOfiMU- COMPUTING Circle 176 on Reader Service Card (DEALERS: 177) Designed for the IBM’ PS/2’ and PC families, and 100% compatibles. Available at most software dealers, or direct from Peter Norton Computing, Inc., 2210 Wilshire Blvd. #186, Santa Monica,CA 90403.213-319-2000.Visa and MasterCard welcome. 1 :) 1988 Peter Norton Computing. Tomorrow’s LAN Solutions — Today. EtherLAN Plus “/The Affordable Ethernet Solution In today’s LAN world, every new LAN manufacturer seems to have a new idea of what a network should be. Standards for the industry are few and far between, but are there if you want to pay for them. Wouldn’t it be nice if for once you could buy a LAN system, at a price you can afford, and be fully compatible with the ethernet standard? Well now you can! Turn Key Ethernet EtherLAN is here to give you everything you need to set up an ethernet LAN system. You’ll receive the EtherLAN network adapter, 25 feet of thinwire ethernet coax cable, T connector and easy to understand Installation and User’s Guides, all for one low price. In addition to this, you’ll also receive complete software needed to get your new EtherLAN system up and running quickly. You’ll get NETBIOS software and also a complete network operating system to make using your new EtherLAN system even easier. Even better yet, you can use standard DOS commands to control your network, so you are not stuck spending hours to learn a new set of commands. The operating system functions transparently, so you won’t even know you’re on a network. Features You Can Rely On. • Fully ethernet and cheapernet compatible (IEEE 802.3). • Fast — a full 10,000,000 bit per second. • NO dedicated servers are required. • Transparent operation —operates as a shell above DOS. • Easy to use DOS type commands or pop up menus. • Low memory requirements. • NETBIOS compatible. • Everything you need is included at one low price. The best news of all is the price. At only $699.95 per node, you get all hardware, software, cabling and manuals needed. Introductory Offer Four Node Kit for only $2499.00. Save over $300.00. With features like these, and an affordable price per node, how can you lose? Call Toll Free 1 - 800 - 262-8010 1-714-529-8850 (in CA) ■ VISA, M/C, COD, or jfMpk _ Prepaid orders accepted. EtherLAN 6 Node Comparison 500 Kbytes Read and Write Retail EtherLAN 11 and 10 seconds $4199 3Com® 14 and 12 seconds $5670* Novell SFT® 10 and 9 seconds $8265* ‘Figures from PC Magazine. SimpleWARE ,y Makes EtherLAN Unbeatable The operating system you’ll get works as a shell above DOS, so all your normal DOS programs will run on EtherLAN as well as locally. 134 BYTE* AUGUST 1988 • Share disks, subdirectories, printers and plotters. • DOS file and record locking. • Up to 5 printers per server. • Time and Date sharing. • Electronic Message System. Simple Net Systems, Inc. 545 W. Lambert Rd., Suite A Brea, CA 92621 FAX: (714) 529-2413 Requires IBM PC/XT/AT or compatible, running DOS 3.10 or higher. EtherLAN is a registered trademark of Simple Net Systems, Inc. Other brand and product names are trademarks of their respective holders. Circle 17 on Reader Service Card (DEALERS: 18) Surveying the electronic communications landscape C yrus Field never imagined in his wildest dreams the global effect of his accomplishment in 1866: the laying of the At¬ lantic cable. Ten years later, Secretary of State William Evarts spoke the following words at a ceremony commemorating that event: “Columbus said, ‘There is one world, there shall be two. ’ Cyrus W. Field said, ‘There are two worlds—there shall be one.’ ” Welcome to the wired society. Telecommunications is the infrastruc¬ ture of the computer industry, the lifeline of a wired society. Whether you’re push¬ ing binary files across the country on a dedicated line or simply typing in a com¬ ment on BIX over voice-grade telephone lines at 1200 bits per second (bps), some form of communication is taking place. Consider this electronic communica¬ tions landscape: Local-area networks (LANs) are the city streets; computer conferencing systems are the interstate highways; packet-switched networks are the global trade routes; and bulletin board systems are the rambling country roads that stitch communities together. A Technological Misfit The world’s economy flows across an electronic global highway every day, much of its information base at the beck and call of a simple carrier tone. Yet, for all its importance, telecommunications is a bastard child: merely acknowledged, begrudgingly accepted, never quite fit¬ ting in. For example, a BYTE survey shows that 60 percent of you own a modem and EXPERT ADVICE COM1: ■ Brock N. Meeks The Wired Society 18 percent plan to buy a modem in the near future. However, use of communi¬ cations software ranks a distant fourth behind the “big three” of applications: word processing, spreadsheets, and data¬ base programs. My love affair with PC-based commu¬ nications began with a Commodore Vic- 20, a 9-inch black-and-white TV, and a 300-bps direct connect modem. After some 6 years on-line, half of that spent writing about telecommunications topics ranging from pirate bulletin boards to se¬ curity issues to governmental attempts to strangle free access to public informa¬ tion, my blind love affair has matured into a clearer understanding of and a healthy respect for telecommunications. A good friend and fellow communica¬ tions writer, Art Kleiner, told me he hit a “curmudgeon stage” with the technol¬ ogy a couple years back. This stage en¬ tailed an uneasy satisfaction with the overall environment of “being on-line.” So, instead of merely defending the tech¬ nology to critics, he began asking ques¬ tions. And demanding answers. Why is the technology so difficult to understand? Why is it so difficult to get a modem and communications software package to successfully dial a remote computer? Why, why, why? My own curmudgeon stage shortly followed Art’s. But this isn’t a bad thing. As Art told me, “It’s made me look for answers and explore ways to push the technology, instead of just accepting whatever came along as well and good. ” His philosophy is an information-age extension of the old dictum “Question authority.” So I’m a bit skeptical when I hear that telecommunications is just about to take off, poised to become the “next wave” of computer productivity. It hasn’t hap¬ pened, folks. And for good reasons. For example, people still oversell the technology. It’s good for some things, but bad for others. And there are built-in continued ILLUSTRATION: PAUL COZZOLINO © 1988 AUGUST 1988 - BYTE 135 C0M1: problems with every application, but that should come as no surprise; few things more technologically advanced than a disposable lighter work dependably. For all the above grousing, however, I believe the real advancements and advan¬ tages of telecommunications are indeed just around the corner (the trouble comes in defining just how far up the street that corner lies). In this column I’ll look at the complex factors driving the communications in¬ dustry today and tomorrow. To do that, I’ll examine three broad areas of the in¬ dustry: technology, issues, and effects. Technologies For the purposes of this column, com¬ munications technology deals with the nuts and bolts of pumping bits and bytes from the desktop to other intelligent de¬ vices. Access may be via a direct connec¬ tion, a local-area network, or dial-up communications. My discussions will focus on topics such as modem technology. Modems are becoming more sophisticated, capable of pushing data faster and more efficiently. How is this being accomplished, and why isn’t it being done on a larger scale? The burgeoning modem market is be¬ ginning to demand dial-up 9600-bps modems, and the industry is starting to respond. One small catch, however, is compatibility, the plague of the computer industry. For example, many 9600-bps modem manufacturers use the Microcom Networking Protocol (MNP) for error correction, but each implements it in a slightly different way. The telecommunications environ¬ ment, as a whole, is no different. The drive for faster, faster, faster creates a fractured marketplace with incompatible implementations of “standards” in a kind of free-market “to each his own” mentality. There are signs of a “coming togeth¬ er” on these issues, however, and I’ll keep a close watch on those develop¬ ments. One good sign is the growing ac¬ ceptance of the X.400 electronic message exchange standard among providers of electronic mail services. Then there’s communications soft¬ ware, which is like any other piece of software: The one you’re reared on is the one you’ll most likely die for. Trying to get people to change their brand of com¬ munications software is like trying to get the Dalai Lama to change his religion. When are communications software developers going to learn that the quint¬ essential user isn’t the quintessential pro¬ grammer? And that the user doesn’t want to learn a programming language that may as well be Urdu, just to write ad¬ vanced script files? For telecommunications to become as indispensable as the word processor, pro¬ grammers are going to have to concen¬ trate on truly seamless approaches to telecommunicating. The program should take care of most of the work so you can just boot up and go on-line. I’ll be looking at the best and brightest of the future communications packages here. I don’t expect miracles right away, but I’m impressed with rumblings I hear coming just over that horizon. Another aspect of the technology is the systems—the networks and informa¬ tion services—with which the modems and communications software interact. These include computer conferencing systems like BIX, consumer information continued The WorldPort 2400™ and the WorldPort 1200™ modems are the perfect travel companions for your portable computer. They work virtually anywhere in the world, including hotel rooms and phone booths, allowing you to connect in a few million more locations than other modems. With features superior to internal units, the WorldPort. line of modems is the smart choice for all your communication needs. WorldPort modems operate from their own internal battery, drawing no power from your laptop. Cutting edge technology brings you features such as Bell and CCITT standards, direct connect and acous¬ tic interface (300 and 1200 bps), tiny size and a tiny price. The WorldPort 1200™ can be easily upgraded to 2400 bps and both the WorldPort 2400™ and the upgrade come with Carbon Copy PLUS™ communications software. Find out more about the travel companions that won’t tie down your portable computer. Call us today for more information about the WorldPort line of modems, or the name of your nearest dealer, at 800 - 541 - 0345 . (In New York, 516-261-0423.) Touchbase Systems, Inc. 160 Laurel Avenue Northport, NY 11768 (516) 261-0423 TELEX: 6502848020 FAX: (516) 754-3491 WorldPort 1200 and WorldPort 2400 are trademarks of Touchbase Systems. Inc., Carbon Copy PLUS is a trademark of Meridian Technology Inc. 136 BYTE- AUGUST 1988 Circle 242 on Reader Service Card ; 1 Surprise. Now you get both in the same package. New Clipper™ from Nantucket!" Our latest version—Summer ’87—is still the best¬ performing compiler ever. It lets users run dBASE* applications up to 20 times faster. But there’s a lot more to it than raw speed. Because new Clipper is one of the most powerful, full-featured development languages ever. And gives you more control over your applications than any release of dBASE ever will. Now or in the future. Instead of designing Clipper as an add-on, we’ve structured it as an extended database language that uses dBASE as a subset. In addition to emulating the dBASE language, we’ve added commands for menus, screens, windows and extended functions. As a result, you get dBASE compatibility and an entirely new level of power and versatility. And with Clipper’s open architecture, you can write functions in Clipper, C, Assembler or other languages, and integrate them into one seamless application. Which helps you create more sophisti- O Nantucket Corporation, 1988. Nantucket is a registered trademark and Clipper is a trademark of Nantucket Corporation. dBASE is a registered trademark of Ashton-Tate. cated applications in less time. And by using our full-featured debugger, you’ll be done even faster. We also give you source code security that keeps users from damaging your application. And sophisticated record ana file locking capabilities that make networking applications easier to create. But no matter what you create, you don’t have to buy runtime modules or additional software.You don’t even have to pay licensing fees. If you haven’t tried Clipper yet, just call (213) 390-7923 today. We’ll send you full information and a free demo diskette. Or the complete program, if you’d rather. But call today. And see how easy it is to find the best dBASE development language. Just get the fastest compiler. And open the box. Clipper " Nantucket, 12555 W. Jefferson Boulevard Los Angeles, CA 90066 Telex: 650-2574125 Circle 155 on Reader Service Card AUGUST 1988 • BYTE 137 C0M1: utilities like CompuServe, LANs, elec¬ tronic mail (E-mail), and international packet-switched networks. It’s in these “hot spots” of telecommunications that the technology comes alive, or should come alive. Tom Mandel, a futurist and senior an¬ alyst at the Stanford Research Institute in Palo Alto, California, is completing a landmark study entitled Interactive Tele¬ communications Services: Precursors of the Wired Society. He says, “Direct con¬ sumer access to information through elec¬ tronic means is going to grow dramatically in the next 5 years. I think we’ll see a growth rate, in terms of users, of anywhere between 25 and 30 percent. ” Although Mandel is optimistic about the growth of interactive systems like BIX, CompuServe, and E-mail, he says, “We won’t see a true mass market emerge.” Instead, several niche markets will spring up and profit. Such niche markets include services like NewsNet, which offers the full text of some 300 specialized newsletters and publications; on-line services like BIX, which cater primarily to a more techni¬ cal crowd; or Quantum Link, an on-line entertainment service for owners of Commodore computers. In essence, there isn’t likely to be one service for all people in the near future. “To create sufficient demand for a mass market, people are going to have to be given a reason to go outside their nor¬ mal media requirements: TV, the news¬ paper, and magazines,” says Mandel. “To create sufficient demand for new services at levels attractive to the every¬ day Joe, the design, delivery, and pricing of consumer services will have to im¬ prove significantly.” Here, I’ll examine these “niche mar¬ kets”—what’s hot, what’s not, and why. Issues Congress, in grappling with the effects of new technologies on today’s society, has issued several reports out of the Office of Technology Assessment (OTA). The bottom line for the OTA is that any kind of electronic communications systems, with the possible exception of E-mail ser¬ vices, is actually a publishing medium. When you place something on-line, you become an author; the system becomes the publisher. This author/publisher relationship raises issues of copyright, intellectual property rights, free speech, and the rights of privacy. A 1986 OTA report states, “Electronic dissemination creates some very complex issues with respect to the public interest, and involves the intel¬ lectual property system in other issues such as communications, antitrust, and freedom of speech.” A broad brush, indeed. had students from around the world take my class, and I’ve never set foot in a classroom. Beyond these thorny issues are those of governmental regulation and legislation. Earlier this year, the Federal Communi¬ cations Commission (FCC) withdrew a proposal that would have dramatically increased the rates that on-line service subscribers would have to pay. The FCC withdrew it, in large part, because of a tremendous grass-roots coalition be¬ tween service providers and their sub¬ scribers: you and me. It was an issue near and dear to all users of on-line services. And they won. But only because the entire issue was hashed out on every imaginable system from the basement BBS to BIX. In 1986 Congress saw the need to pass the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, an amendment to the Wiretap Act of 1968. This landmark legislation gave at least some basic privacy rights to private electronic correspondence. And earlier this year, the first lawsuit under the ECPA was filed in an Illinois court. Such issues can’t be separated from discussions about communications, be¬ cause after the smoke of technological advancement clears, the issues are still smoldering. I’ll look at these, too. Effects Any technology that directly affects the way humans interact creates unexpected results. A historical example is the tele¬ phone. Thought of as merely a business tool when first brought into the public, a way for the boss to stay in touch with the remote worker, it quickly became a social tool and has largely remained so, relegat¬ ing its original intent to a secondary level. Electronic communications change the way people work, how they work, and the very structure of organizations that implement such systems (ask Oliver North—who destroyed paper documents but didn’t understand that deleted E-mail messages on a PROFS system are ar¬ chived—about the effects of electronic communications). For example, commu¬ nications technology is changing how edu¬ cational systems accomplish tasks, and new methods of teaching are springing up. I teach graduate-level courses for Con¬ nected Education, a program for the Media Studies department under the aus¬ pices of the New School for Social Re¬ search in New York. And although I’ve had students from around the world take my courses, I’ve never set foot in a class¬ room; the courses are all taught via the EIES conferencing system located on the campus of the New Jersey Institute of Technology. Nonprofit organizations are beginning to use computer communications to ex¬ tend their effectiveness—and their bud¬ gets. And the presidential candidates are relying on telecommunications to help them coordinate campaigns and keep statewide campaign offices informed of new strategies. These effects are crucial to the success of communications because they offer tangible results that you can point out to the critics of the technology. This column will also highlight note¬ worthy applications of communications and keep you informed on how they af¬ fect various segments of the world. Future Stock In the coming months, I’ll take a look at aspects from each of these various areas. From the bumpy back roads of BBSes to the superhighways of computer confer¬ encing systems, the global highway will be well traveled. My regular “watering holes” are: BIX (“brock”), MCI Mail (“bmeeks”), and CompuServe (7036,1355). For those of you who are hooked into the more eso¬ teric Usenet (you know who you are), I can be reached on the WELL via the path¬ way ‘ ‘ ih np4! ucb vax! cogsci. berkeley. - edu! well! brock.” As well-traveled as I am across this electronic landscape, I don’t stop every¬ where. If there’s an issue, a topic, or a technology that you think deserves a stop along the way, let me know. ■ Brock N. Meeks is a San Diego-based freelance writer who specializes in high technology. You can reach him on BIX as <( brock. ” Your questions and comments are wel¬ come. Write to: Editor, BYTE, One Phoenix Mill Lane, Peterborough, NH 03458. 138 BYTE • AUGUST 1988 Introducing REMOTE 2 It’s never been so easy to do so much in distant PC operation. Until now, to have this kind of flexibility and control over a host PC, you’d have to be in the same room. Now, even if you’re thousands of miles away, REMOTE 2 allows you to operate a host PC’s application software with total control and exact mapping of the host keyboard... fast file transfers even while an application program is running ... remote printer redirection... an error-checked, data- compressed link even with conventional modems.. .and CGA color graphics. REMOTE 2 comes in two parts-R2HOST and R2CALL- available together or separately, so you can create the combination to meet your exact needs. R2H0ST is also accessible from most terminals and terminal emulators. REMOTE 2 is packed with features users have asked for. A choice of three distinct automatic and manual answering modes. Directory-to-directory file transfers using a half-screen display of host files. Proprietary file transfer protocol with redundant file skipping and partial file recovery (other popular protocols also supported). A “Phone Book” that facilitates one-entry calls from listings of names, numbers, and passwords. Host call-back capa¬ bility. Integrated, context-sensitive help system. LAN access. Mainframe access to an IBM host with IRMA. And more. Discover the new remote control program from the makers of CROSSTALK. Ask your dealer about REMOTE 2 or write us. REMOTE 2 CROSSTALK COMMUNICATIONS/IOOO Holcomb Woods Parkway, Roswell, Georgia 30076/(800) 241-6393 A Division of Digital Communications Associates, Inc. cicci CROSSTALK is a registered trademark of Digital Communications Associates, Inc./CASL, IRMA and Smart Alec are trademarks of Digital Communications Associates, Inc./CompuServe is a registered trademark of CompuServe, Inc., an H&R Block Company Circle 65 on Reader Service Card AUGUST 1988 • B Y T E 139 FIRST IMPRESSIONS ■ RickGrehan 25-MHz Computing Buzzsaws 140 BYTE- AUGUST 1988 drives (up to 600 megabytes in an expan¬ sion unit), a new 80386 hardware techni¬ cal manual, and sockets for the new 25- MHz versions of the 80387 and Weitek 1167 coprocessors. Interestingly, you can install both coprocessors in the same machine. They will coexist peacefully, and your software can choose between them. (A 25-MHz Weitek processor was not available at the time I was writing this. I did, however, benchmark the ma¬ chine with a 25-MHz 80387). The Flex architecture is still there (see the February review for details), only now it’s running at a higher clock speed. As with the 386/20, you can download the BIOS (including the video BIOS) to RAM for faster execution. The CPU and math coprocessor sit on a local high¬ speed bus with cache memory and are managed by an 82385. Compaq contin¬ ues to deliver the high level of quality the company is famous for. The chassis is well built, with plenty of attention to radio-frequency-interference shielding. My test system was loaded: a 300- megabyte ESDI (enhanced small device interface) hard disk drive, 3 megabytes of RAM, a 1.2-megabyte 5 l A -inch flop¬ py disk drive, a 135-megabyte tape back¬ up unit, Compaq’s Video Graphics Con¬ troller board (VGA- compatible) and more stan¬ dard periph¬ erals than I Compaq Deskpro 386/25 She Canna Go Much Faster Than This, Captain! T he 80386 system builders have cranked the dial up another notch. And from Compaq, Everex, Intel, and SimpleNet, here they come: the first of the 25-MHz 80386-based AT clones. Several other companies, including IBM, Advanced Logic Research, and Everest Computer have also announced 25-MHz machines. Judging from the preproduction sys¬ tems I just looked at, “AT clone” is not a precise term. It’s probably more accurate to say that these machines have AT parts grafted onto them. Like the Six Million Dollar Man, with his frail, biologic human parts stitched together with superhuman bionic limbs, these ma¬ chines marry a significant portion of an 8-MHz AT that limps alongside a high¬ speed, 32-bit 80386 system. Each ma¬ chine accomplishes this dual personality in different ways, yet there are striking similarities—at least on the surface. All four machines have a number of 8-MHz AT- compatible expansion Compaq Deskpro 386/25 Compaq’s Deskpro 386/25 looks so much like the Deskpro 386/20, you’d swear all the company did was jack up the CPU to 25 MHz and jack up the price to over 10 grand. But if you examine the motherboards, there has been some re¬ design: Most of the remaining dual in¬ line package (DIP) chips have been re¬ placed with surface-mount technology. However, Compaq refers to most of the design and options of the Deskpro 386/25 as “current technology.” Cur¬ rent, that is, with respect to the 386/20. (For a review of the Deskpro 386/20, see the February BYTE.) only new options for the 386/25 are new hard disk slots that you can feed from the market’s never-ending supply of peripheral boards. Each machine also has a 32-bit expansion bus for a high-speed memory board supplied by the company (sort of a similarity and a difference—since each machine’s 32-bit expansion bus is propri¬ etary). This leaves you in a predicament: If you want to upgrade memory beyond what you can place on the motherboard, you can either buy a slow, less-expensive AT-bus memory board from any number of sources, or a fast, more expensive 32- bit memory board from the company that made your machine. Everex Step 386/25 have space to mention. You can purchase the Deskpro 386/25 in one of two models that differ only in mass storage. The Model 300 has a 1.2-megabyte 514-inch floppy disk drive and a full-height 300- megabyte hard disk drive and sells for $13,299; the Model 110 has a half-height 110-megabyte hard disk drive and a price tag of $10,299. You can add combina¬ tions of 1- and 4-megabyte memory- expansion boards to bring the system’s total memory up to 16 megabytes. Everex Step 386/25 What really attracts me to the Everex is the tinted-glass window on the front panel that slides open to reveal a minia¬ ture starship’s control panel. This 214 by 5-inch area is a tiny paradise of switches and lights. Across its top is an amber alphanumeric LED panel that keeps you abreast of equipment checks at boot-up (it says things like “DMA OK”) and which disk, cylinder, and head is ac¬ cessed during normal operation (“C:0017 0” means drive C, cylinder 17, head 0). Beneath the LED is a power light and a hard disk access light. Farther down is a three-position toggle switch be¬ side three lights, one each for 8-, 12-, and 25-MHz operation. The next panel down holds the turnkey lock for locking your keyboard, and moving lower you come to a pair of push buttons: one for shutting off the speaker and another for rebooting the system. Inside, the Everex is all business. It houses eight expansion slots: six AT- style, one 8-bit “drop-slot,” (for 8-bit boards that have added to their real estate by extending below the lip of the connec¬ tor) and one 32-bit slot. The 32-bit slot in the review machine held a 2-megabyte RAM card. On the motherboard were eight 256K-byte single in-line memory modules (SIMMs) (filling all the SIMM the cache. The review system also had an 80-megabyte full-height hard disk, a 1.2- megabyte 514-inch half-height floppy disk drive, and a 1.44-megabyte 3 Vi-inch floppy disk drive. For video, Everex supplied one of its EGA boards and an Evervision MN-200 monitor. Everex also provides extensive utility software, including a hard disk utility package and RAMdisk software. The hard disk utility software includes an ex¬ tensive diagnostic section, as well as software for creating either Extended DOS partitions, which allow you to create logical drives of up to 32 mega¬ bytes each on a single physical drive, or Super DOS partitions, which allow you to create a single partition of up to 285 megabytes on one drive. You must be careful about one thing on the Everex, though: The configuration program (you get to it by a hot-key se¬ quence—I stumbled into it via a bug in the ROMs that an engineer at Everex as¬ sured me would be eliminated on future machines). The program asks you a lot of questions. Unless you have the manual to explain what they all mean, and unless you are intimately familiar with the op¬ tions you have tacked onto your system, you can really bunge things up. The cost for a minimum Everex 386/25 system—case, power supply, motherboard, keyboard, 1 megabyte of memory, DOS 3.3, and a 1.2-megabyte floppy disk drive and controller—is $5999. The configuration I tested has a price tag of just over $9500. Intel SYP302 Here’s a machine for OEMs only. I’ve included it here because it will show up on the shelves as the basis for systems from other manufacturers. The System SYP302 from Intel’s OEM Platform di¬ vision gets you a motherboard (populated with a range of memory amounts), power supply, and hard and floppy disk drives (optional). The OEM has to supply the frivolities of computing... such as a key¬ board, video boards, CRTs, and what¬ ever additional peripherals you need. (For a motherboard with 2 megabytes, a chassis, and a power supply, an OEM can expect to pay $6449.) My Intel system came with a half¬ height 44-megabyte hard disk drive, with a pop-out to either add another one or re¬ place the current one with a full-height drive. It also had a 1.2-megabyte 514- inch floppy disk drive and pop-outs for three more half-height drives under that. Between the power supply and I/O sock¬ ets, I found 4 megabytes of memory in 4 SIMM packages, with room for 4 more. (You can take the machine to 24 mega¬ bytes with plug-in memory cards.) Hid¬ den somewhere on the motherboard (I looked, but couldn’t find it—I suspect it was in the darkness beneath the drives) is 64K bytes of 35-nanosecond SRAM used as processor cache memory. There’s also a socket for a 25-MHz 80387. Fortunate¬ ly, the socket was occupied on the ma¬ chine I tested. There is no Intel 82385 cache control¬ ler chip on the SYP302, though I fully expected to see one. In conversation with an Intel engineer, I was told that this is because at the time the engineers were designing the SYP302 system, Intel was unsure that a 25-MHz version of the 82385 would be available in time for the SYP302. Consequently, the engineers of the 302 set about creating a cache con¬ troller from discrete components. The caching system is posted write-through (more on this later) and uses a direct- mapping scheme; that is, there is no so¬ phisticated algorithm—such as a least- recently used formula—used to update main memory from the cache. Arranged along the back of the motherboard is a lineup of eight I/O continued slots available) and AUGUST 1988 • B Y T E 141 25-MHz 80386 MACHINES connectors. You can use seven of these as 16-bit AT slots (they operate as though attached to an 8-MHz AT machine), and the eighth as an 8-bit drop slot. Two of the seven AT-compatible slots are lined up with 86-pin AT32 32-bit expansion slots that operate at full 25-MHz proces¬ sor speed. Currently, the AT32 slots will accept only an Intel AT MEM8 8-mega¬ byte expansion board. The Intel SYP302 uses the Phoenix BIOS. You can have the BIOS down¬ loaded to RAM at boot-up time (the BIOS routines execute faster out of RAM than out of ROM), and a jumper on the motherboard chooses either DOS or Unix operation. Unix operation maps the ROM to the very top of the physical mem¬ ory-address space so that Unix sees a large contiguous RAM space. The Intel machine has to take the prize for being the most unattractive of the group. Its left front panel juts out in a way that suggests either a design afterthought or an engineering kludge and is actually an artistic attempt to hide the intake vents that span the front underside of the chassis. Keep in mind, however, that this is an OEM machine. Anything that might be even remotely mistaken for a frill took a back seat to function. Netpro 386/25 SimpleNet’s Netpro 386/25 is one of the first systems based on the Intel SYP302 box. On the outside, the Netpro 386/25 looks just like the Intel system. When you remove the cover and look inside, the Netpro 386/25 looks just like the Intel system. Then, when you run the bench¬ marks, the Netpro 386/25 performs—if you allow for statistical errors in tim¬ ings—just like the Intel system. The only possible performance differ¬ ences you will see depend on the periph¬ erals you plug in. In the case of my Net- pro machine, I received an Orchid Designer VGA board and a combination hard/floppy disk drive controller hooked to an 80-megabyte hard disk drive, a 1.2- megabyte 5 %-inch floppy disk drive, and a 1.44-megabyte 3-inch floppy disk drive. At the time of this writing, the Netpro 386/25 is available in two models: The Model 1 is a 4-megabyte monochrome system with an 80-megabyte hard disk drive, a 1.2-megabyte 514-inch floppy disk drive, an EtherLan adapter, and a retail price tag of $12,499; the Model 2 sports a VGA display, an extra 3 1 /2-inch floppy disk drive, a 102-megabyte hard disk drive, and a price of $13,499. As an aside, the monitor I received with the Netpro was an RE5515 multi¬ scan monitor from Relisys. For the most part, it worked quite well, but during the benchmarking, the BYTE Lab personnel noticed that whenever the system changed graphics modes, they had to ad¬ just the horizontal width of the display. This did no damage to the hardware or program execution, but the effect was unbearably annoying. All the Difference in the World These machines’ claim to fame is speed. Caching obviously plays an important role in this area; when I inadvertently disabled the cache on the Intel machine, its performance dropped to what I would expect from a 16-MHz AT. Many manu¬ facturers of these (and other) high-speed systems spend much of their time touting their caching system’s high “hit rate” and low “effective wait states.” What about these systems? The Everex uses a proprietary Ad¬ vanced Memory Management Architec¬ ture (AMMA) that—according to the company—gives the system a perfor¬ mance boost beyond standard cache sys¬ tems. First, AMMA permits you to ex¬ pand the cache memory from 64K bytes (the minimum) to 256K bytes as your system memory expands. Second, pro¬ cessor cache systems based on the Intel 82385 cache controller chip—the Com¬ paq uses the 82385—are write-through , which means that as the processor writes data into the cache memory, it also writes the data to the system memory so that system memory is kept up to date with cache memory. A write-through cache will experience a performance re¬ duction during write operations that ac¬ cess the slower main memory. (To be specific, Intel refers to the 82385’s cache implementation as posted write-through and claims that a posted write-through allows the 80386 to issue a write to the cache and proceed with the next opera¬ tion without having to wait for the update to slower main memory. However, if multiple write operations occur back-to- back, the system can bottleneck as the processor waits for the cache controller to update main memory.) Everex’s AMMA controller imple¬ ments a true buffered-write cache that updates main memory only when neces¬ sary (e.g., when the direct memory ac¬ cess system reads a section of main mem- Table 1: Speed differences between 20- and 25-MHz 80386-based systems range from about 50 percent improvement to more than double , when running such standard tests as BYTE's Matrix inversion. CPU IBM IBM PS/2 Compaq Everex Compaq Intel Netpro PC AT Model 80 Deskpro Step Deskpro SYP302 386/25 386/20 386/25 386/25 Matrix 11.69 4.75 3.06 2.44 2.47 2.25 2.56 String Move Byte-wide 80.41 39.51 26.11 16.02 25.01 21.59 21.57 Word-wide: Odd-bnd. 80.41 39.09 31.01 20.01 25.65 23.64 23.60 Even-bnd. 40.26 19.66 13.07 8.02 12.51 10.80 10.80 Sieve 73.65 29.11 23.18 15.25 15.25 16.33 16.34 Sort 84.39 33.11 26.89 11.44 11.45 12.19 12.19 CPU Index: 1.00 2.27 3.13 5.08 4.20 4.44 4.35 FLOATING-POINT 1 Math 46.46 10.77 7.01 5.71 5.64 5.86 5.82 Error 2 0.00E+00 0.00E+00 0.U0E+00 0.00E+00 0.00E+00 0.00E+00 0.00E+00 Sine(x) 20.05 4.61 3.29 2.65 2.58 2.64 2.66 Error 2.00E-09 2.00E-09 2.00E-09 2.00E-09 2.00E-09 2.00E-09 2.00E-09 e x 17.20 4.50 3.06 2.54 2.47 2.56 2.57 Error 1.00E-09 1.77E-02 1.77E-02 1.77E-02 1.77E-02 1.77E-02 1.77E-02 FPU Index: 1.00 4.15 6.10 7.47 7.64 7.40 7.38 1 The floating-point benchmarks use 8087-compatible instructions only. 2 The errors for the floating-point benchmarks indicate the difference between expected and actual values, correct to 10 digits or rounded to 2 digits. All times are in seconds. All figures were generated using the 8088/8086 version of Small-C (16-bit integers). Figures for 80386 machines do not use 80386-specific instructions. For a full description of all the benchmarks, see "Introducing the New BYTE Benchmarks," June BYTE. 142 BYTE* AUGUST 1988 25-MHz 80386 MACHINES ory that corresponds to memory updated in the cache) and does so in blocks of up to 128 bits at a time. Is the AMMA worth its salt (or sili¬ con)? My guess is that the best indicator of the AMMA’s speed advantage over an 82385-based cache would be the String Move benchmark (see table 1), and in fact the Step 386/25 does turn in times that are noticeably faster than the other systems for that benchmark. Whatever the reason—larger cache size or smarter cache management—the Everex does seem to be able to move data between the CPU and memory more quickly than the other machines. For the other bench¬ marks, the Everex shows no clear win over the Compaq, and only a marginal lead over the Intel and Netpro. A Dual Personality As sophisticated as these machines are, I cannot help pointing out how similar their philosophy is to that of the Apple IIGS. The IIGS used the 65816, a pro¬ cessor that was an upgrade to the 6502, with larger registers and a wider address range. Compare this with the 80386’s improvements over the 80286/8086. The IIGS had internal fast RAM, but the sys¬ tem was slowed to 1 MHz during access to the lie-compatible I/O slots. Compare this with how these machines must re¬ duce execution speed during access to the AT-compatible slots. Finally, the IIGS had a special fast-RAM/ROM memory-expansion slot. Compare this with each of the 25-MHz machines’ pro¬ prietary 32-bit high-speed memory ex¬ pansion slots. It seems that compatibility plagues the hardware engineers of the PC world as well as the Apple world. Are these dual-personality machines the only possible response in the demanding face of compatibility? And how much trouble are we getting into with all the propri¬ etary 32-bit buses? My personal choice among these ma¬ chines is a toss-up between the Everex and the Compaq. The Everex does ap¬ pear to have a leg up on the Compaq and the Intel-based machines in terms of raw speed, but the Compaq comes from a fine heritage of dependable workhorses, and there’s certainly plenty of Compaq peripherals to draw from. Ultimately, you have to ask yourself whether or not the extra speed is worth the extra cost. Is there enough software out there that makes use of the 80386 that you need right now? The 80386 should begin showing its real power as more multitasking applications appear, and a serious Xenix or Unix user might have no other choice. For those who use these The Compaq 386s T hough not a 25-MHz machine, I find the new Compaq 386s to be more interesting than the other ones re¬ viewed here. Why? Because the Com¬ paq 386s uses the new Intel 80386SX processor, a 16-MHz CPU that is re¬ lated to the 80386 in the same way the 8088 is related to the 8086. Internally, the 80386SX and 80386 look identical, externally the 80386SX uses a 16-bit data bus. For the manu¬ facturer, this translates to simpler board design, lower chip cost, and smaller package size. For us, it means we can get a good 80386 system for less money. Another attraction of the Compaq 386s is its integration of much of the pe¬ ripheral hardware onto the mother¬ board. Not only will you find the ex¬ pected: real-time clock and calendar, parallel printer port, and serial port; there’s also the unexpected: VGA con¬ troller (with a 16-bit data path that soft¬ ware may one day take advantage of), and a mouse port. Compaq also throws in some welcome utilities: their expanded memory manager (CEMM) package for support of the Lotus/Intel/ Microsoft Expanded Memory Specifi¬ cation (LIM/EMS) and Compaq’s own disk-caching software. Compaq serves the 386s in a variety of flavors. You have your choice of no internal hard disk drive (the Model 1 at $3799), a 20-megabyte hard disk drive (the Model 20 at $4499) or a 40-mega¬ byte hard disk drive (the Model 40 at $5199). All three models include 1 megabyte of memory, a 5 ! /4-inch 1.2- megabyte floppy disk drive, and 4 AT- style expansion slots as standard. If backup is one of your sensitive areas, you might check into their tape backup systems: 40 or 135 megabytes. Be care¬ ful when exploring the memory-up- grade paths for the Compaq 386s, though. There are four memory expan¬ sion options available in a variety of per¬ mutations that take the system to a max¬ imum system memory of between 4 megabytes and 13 megabytes. Inside the Compaq 386s are four AT-style slots and one high-speed memory expansion slot. I’m also giving the Compaq 386s Compaq 386s CPU Sieve: 32.73 Sort: 27.04 Matrix: 5.38 String Move: Byte-wide: 52.24 Word-wide: Odd-bnd.: 44.05 Even-bnd.: 26.14 Doubleword-wide: Odd-bnd.: 29.42 Even-bnd.: 19.70 Floating Point Math: 11.12 Error: 0.0 Sine(x): 4.63 Error: 2E-9 e x : 4.53 Error: 1.77E-2 high marks for external appearance— particularly when placed next to the Bauhaus design of the Intel box. It has a smaller footprint than an AT (15 by 16 inches), so it fits nicely onto typing tables that the other 80386 systems would topple. For an idea of the machine’s perfor¬ mance, the table above shows the bench¬ mark results for our 80386 low-level tests. The Compaq 386s runs at about half the speed of it’s bigger brother (the Deskpro 386/20) for the CPU and FPU tests. The Compaq 386s is not a barn¬ burner in the speed category, but if your plans include a solid 80386 machine it’s worth a closer look. machines as MS-DOS applications boxes, it may well be that a specimen from the apparently endless supply of faster-and-faster AT clones will do. Still, it’s nice to put on your goggles, black flight jacket, and Red Baron scarf and sit down in front of all those megabytes and megahertz to whip through an applica¬ tion in a morning instead of a whole day. ■ Rick Grehan is a BYTE senior technical editor. You can reach him on BIX as “rick_g. ” AUGUST 1988 • BYTE 143 The Dell System220* Once again the critics stole the words right out of our mourn. “The Dell System220runs most PC Labs system benchmark tests at speeds that would make you think you're running a3861' -PC MAGAZINE “the Dell machine is renewed evidence that the price of286based desktop equipment continues to drop rapidly, making such machines very attractive for daily work under MS DOS even as they hold out the promise of running OS/2 in thefuture!' -WILL FASTIE, PC WEEK “.. includes a year's omsite support. Jn the price ofthe computer This is the sweetest support deal offeredby any computer vendor in the industry!' -ERIC KNORR, PC WORLD “The hot itemfrom a technicalpoint of view is the System220. This machine nms a286processor at 20MHz, which is its major claim to fame” -WILL FASTIE, PC WEEK “the System220has more goingfor it thanjust speed" -PC WORLD 144 BYTE* AUGUST 1988 The reviews are beginning to pour in. And they read like a wish list for every power user looking to exceed the ordinary limitations of a 286 computer. The computer everyone is praising in such glowing terms is the Dell System 220. The first 286 computer with a clock speed of 20 MHz. It’s totally MS-DOS® and MS® OS/2 compatible. Yet it sells for much less than you may pay for a 386 computer. Because you buy it direct from us. Eliminating the mark-ups and mar¬ gins of computer stores. We design and build every Dell computer right here in Austin, Texas. We put each and every one through a comprehensive burn-in and a battery of diagnostic tests before we ship it. And after we ship, we give you the best technical support you’ll find any¬ where in the computer industry Our technicians are on the phone from TAM to 7PM every business day. Almost any question you may have about a Dell system can be answered over the phone. And, in the rare case, that your ques¬ tion can’t be answered by an on-line tech¬ nician, well send a Honeywell Bull tech¬ nician by the next business day A frill year of on-site Honeywell Bull service is included within the purchase price of your Dell system. Your Dell computer also comes with a thirty-day money back guarantee. And we back every one of our com¬ puters with a one year limited warranty on any defective parts or workmanship. For more information about Dell computers, read the reviews in the trade press, turn the page, review our product offerings, and call us at (800) 426-5150. You’ll like what we have to say. DELL COMPUTER CORPORATION TO ORDER, CALL 800 - 426-5150 IN THE U.S. AND CANADA AUGUST 1988 •BYTE 145 The Dell Computer Store* Welcome to our store. We believe you’ll find this an extremely pleasant shopping experience. Our sales staff is on hand to serve you from TAM to 7PM (CST) from Monday thru Friday. Just call (800)426-5150 and well give you the technical assistance and information you need to make sure you’re buying the system that’s right for your needs. Then you have the option of either a direct purchase or your company can take advantage of our Leasing Plan* Once you’ve made your choice, our Total Satisfaction Guarantee gives you thirty days from the day you receive your system, to decide if you are absolutely, totally satisfied with the product. If you’re not, simply return the system and you’ll receive a full refund. No questions asked. Your Dell computer is supported by a team of technical experts that can be reached every business day, from 7AM to 7PM (CST), simply by calling (800) 624-9896 In most cases, any question you may have about your Dell system can be answered by one of our technicians on the phone. Our technicians are also supported by Honeywell Bull service engineers who can be sent to your office by the next business day, should on-site service be required. This optional service contract is avail¬ able in over 95% of the United States, with over 1,000 engineers in 198 service locations. We also offer a One Year Limited War¬ ranty, which warrants each system we manu¬ facture to be free of defects in materials and workmanship for one full year. During that period we will repair or replace any defective products properly returned to our factory. Feel free to call or write for the com¬ plete terms of our Honeywell Bull Service Contract, Guarantee and Warranty. Dell Computer Corporation, 9505 Arboretum Blvd., Austin, Texas 78759-7299. Dell products are available on GSA con¬ tract. Call us to get GSA pricing. 146 BYTE* AUGUST 1988 THE NEW 20 MHz 386 SYSTEM THE NEW 20 MHz 286 SYSTEM The top of the line. It’s our highest performance computer available, faster than the IBMt PS/2t Model 80 and the Compaqt 386/20. It runs at 20 MHz with the latest 32' bit architecture. Since it also has Intel’s Advanced 82385 Cache Memory Controller, and high per formance disk drives, the System 310 is ideal for intensive database management, complex spread' sheet development, CAD/CAM, desktop publishing or perfor mance as a network file server. Standard Features: ■ Intel! 80386 microprocessor running at 20 MHz. ■ 1 MB of 80 ns 32'bit RAM expandable to 16 MB without using an expansion slot. ■ Advanced Intel 82385 Memory Controller with 32 KB of high speed static RAM. ■Socket for 20 MHz 80387 coprocessor. ■ 5.25" 1.2 MB or 3.5" 1.44 MB diskette drive. ■ Dual diskette and hard disk drive controller. ■ Enhanced 101'key keyboard. ■ 1 parallel and 2 serial ports. ■ 200'watt power supply. ■ 8 expansion slots. Options: ■ 1 MB RAM upgrade kit. ■20 MHz Intel 80387 math coprocessor. ■ 2 MB or 8 MB memory expan' sion boards. 'Lease for as low as $148/Month. As fast as most 386 computers, at less than half the price—more power for the money than any other system. An 80286 system that runs at 20 MHz, with less than one wait state. Completely compatible for both MS'DOS® and MS® OS/2 applications (it runs faster than IBM PS/2 Model 80), and with a remarkably small footprint, the System 220 is the ideal executive workstation. The system uses page mode inter' leaved memory resulting in a performance increase of about 15 percent. Standard Features: ■ 80286 microprocessor running at 20 MHz. ■ 1 MB of RAM expandable to 16 MB (8 MB on system board). ■ Integrated diskette and VGA video controller on system board. ■ One 3.5" 1.44 MB diskette drive. ■ Integrated high performance hard disk interface on system board. ■ Enhanced 101'key keyboard. ■ 1 parallel and 2 serial ports. ■ LIM 4.0 support for memory over 1 MB. ■ Real'time clock. ■ Three fulhsized ATt compatible expansion slots. ■ Socket for 80287 coprocessor. Options: ■ 3.5" 1.44 MB diskette drive. ■ Intel 80287 coprocessor. ■ 1 MB RAM upgrade kit. ! Lease for as low as $85/Month. System 310 With Monitor & Adapter Hard Disk Drives VGA Mono VGA Color VGA Color Plus 40 MB- 28 ms $4,099 $4,299 $4,399 90 MB- 18 ms ESDI $4,899 $5,099 $5,199 150 MB- 18 ms ESDI $5,399 $5,599 $5,699 322 MB - 18 ms ESDI $7,399 $7,599 $7,699 System 220 With Monitor VGA Mono VGA Color VGA Color Plus One Diskette Drive $2,299 $2,499 $2,599 40 MB- 29 ms Hard Disk $2,999 $3,199 $3,299 100 MB - 29 ms Hard Disk $3,799 $3,999 $4,099 THE 12.5 MHz SYSTEM 200 . A great value in a full-featured AT compatible. An 80286 computer running at 12.5 MHz, this compu¬ ter is completely MS-DOS and MS OS/2 compatible. The System 200 offers high speed drive options, industry standard compatible BIOS and on-site service. As Executive Computing said of this computer’s predecessor, “If faster processing speed and low cost are two key issues affecting your purchase decision, this machine might be the ideal choice for your office!’ Standard Features: ■ Intel 80286 microprocessor run¬ ning at 12.5 MHz. ■ 640 KB of RAM expandable to 16 MB (4.6 MB on system board). ■ 5.25" 1.2 MB or 3.5" 1.44 MB diskette drive. ■ Dual diskette and hard disk drive controller. ■ Enhanced 101-key keyboard. ■ 1 parallel and 2 serial ports. ■ 200 watt power supply. ■ Real-time clock. ■ 6 expansion slots. (4 available with hard disk drive controller and video adapter installed). ■Socketfor8 MHz80287 coprocessor. Options: ■ 512 KB RAM upgrade kit. ■ 8 MHz Intel 80287 coprocessor. "Leasefor as low as $78/Month. System 200 With Monitor & Adapter Hard Disk Drive Mono VGA Mono VGA Color VGA Color Plus 20 MB $2,099 $2,299 $2,499 $2,599 40 MB- 40 ms $2,299 $2,499 $2,699 $2,799 40 MB- 28 ms $2,499 $2,699 $2,899 $2,999 90 MB- 18 ms ESDI $3,299 $3,499 $3,699 $3,799 150 MB - 18 ms ESDI $3,799 $3,999 $4,199 $4,299 322 MB- 18 ms ESDI $5,799 $5,999 $6,199 $6,299 A Full Line Of Computers With A Full Line Of Configurations. At Dell, we understand that different users have different needs. So we tailor each system to the users individual requirements. We offer monitors, graphics boards, tape backups, dot matrix and laser printers, hard disk and diskette drives, expanded memory boards, serial mice and more. every business application includ' ing: accounting, communications, desktop publishing, graphics, word processing, integrated applications and user training. So when your Dell System arrives, you can do productive work the minute you unpack the box. We also offer third party soft' We can build you the system ware applications for virtually you’ve been looking for. COMMON TO THE SYSTEM 310, SYSTEM 220 AND SYSTEM 200: The Dell System Analyzer. MS-DOS and OS/2 compatible. Security lock with locking chassis. 12 month on-site service contract (Available on complete systems). PRINTERS/SOFTWARE* We offer afull-line ofprinters and popular software. All printers come with our 30-day money-back guarantee and one year warranty. LASER PRINTERS. LASER SYSTEM 150; $5,995. 15 pages per minute, text and full-page graphics. Dual 250 sheet-input trays. LASER SYSTEM 80; $3,295. 8 pages per minute, text and full-page graphics. LASER SYSTEM 60; $2,195. 6 pages per minute, text and full-page graphics. DOT MATRIX PRINTERS. PRINTER SYSTEM 800; $699.95. Highest resolution text and graphics from a 24-wire dot matrix printer. Draft quality at 200 cps. Correspondence quality at 132 cps. Letter quality at 66 cps. Standard parallel and serial interfaces. Wide carriage. PRINTER SYSTEM 600; $499.95. 9-wire dot matrix. Draft quality at 240 cps. Near-letter quality at 60 cps. Standard parallel interface. Wide carriage. PRINTER SYSTEM 300; $199.95. 9-wire dot matrix. Draft quality at 144 cps. Near-letter quality at 36 cps. Four standard fonts. Paper parking. Standard parallel interface. SOFTWARE. Operating System Software. Dell Enhanced MS-DOS 3.3 with disk cache and other utilities; $119.95. Dell Enhanced MS OS/2 Standard Edition 1.0 $324.95. ELL COM PU T E R CORPORATION TO ORDER, CALL 800426-5150 IN THE U.S. AND CANADA All prices and specifications are subject to change without notice. Please inquire for current details. Dell cannot be responsible for errors in typography or photography. In Canada, leasing is not currendy available and configurations and prices may vary. Microsoft,® MS® and MS-DOS® are owned by Microsoft Corp. fSignifies registered or unregistered trademarks owned by entities other than Dell Computer Corporation. *Payments based on a 36-month open-end lease. Please inquire for further details i- © 1988 DELL COMPUTER CORPORATION. |ADCODENO.ilEH8| Circle 261 on Reader Service Card AUGUST 1988 • BYTE 147 Product Focus ■ Communications Software The BYTE Lab tests communications programs that can go to work when you go home Steve Apiki and Stan Diehl Carbon Copy Plus Crosstalk Mk.4 Crosstalk XVI HyperACCESS Instant Terminal MaxOnline Mirror II Move-lt PC BLAST II Procomm Plus Relay Silver Smartcom III Softerm PC Communications I f you were stranded on an island with a bottle of aspirin, a personal com¬ puter, and a modem, what communi¬ cations package would you most like to have along? Make the wrong decision and you’re likely to need the aspirin. Finding software that lets you use your modem may be easy, but the package with the speed, automation, and flexibil¬ ity to let you make the most of your sys¬ tem is a rare find indeed. Data communications is often the same procedure from day to day. But say you just got a new 19,200-bit-per-second modem and you need to find a package that can handle it. You may want some¬ thing that can run in the background without a multitasking operating system. Or maybe you’re just tired of running through the same log-on procedure by hand, over and over again. The best thing about new software is the performance increase you can get for a relatively small amount of money. The subjects of this month’s product focus are MS-DOS-based, stand-alone communications software packages that have a script language—a feature that can relieve you of hours of tedium and hours of connect time. Generally, a script lan¬ guage lets you program your system to handle a communications session unat¬ tended. Programmed with a sophisti¬ cated script, your computer can recog¬ nize prompts from the host systems and act accordingly—say, sending queries or transferring files. The packages we reviewed vary, how¬ ever, in their ability to save you from sinking that saved time back into learn¬ ing a cumbersome script language or a difficult command sequence. They also range in maximum transfer speeds from 2400 to 115,200 bps, and in price from about $70 to about $250—but you don’t always get what you pay for. System requirements are generally the same: Most run under DOS 2.0 on a sin¬ gle 3 ^-inch or 5 % -inch floppy disk drive and in 192K bytes of RAM. All the packages let you use BIX, CompuServe, or other information services, and they let you upload and download files from your company’s mainframe. However, many of them will perform at their top transfer rate only when they’re talking to a computer running the same software. We’ll highlight differing requirements in the individual sections that follow (also see table 1). Carbon Copy Plus 5.0 Meridian Technology’s Carbon Copy Plus 5.0 is a good example of a package that is strong overall and provides unique features for specialized needs. It re¬ quires an unusually large (256K-byte) section of memory, but it exchanges code size for speed by loading its configura¬ tion program directly into memory. It in¬ cludes 224 pages of documentation. Carbon Copy is more than a utility for communicating with mainframes—it’s also a remote PC control package. Be¬ cause of this, it is broken down into two executable programs, CC for the host and CCHELP for the remote side. The remote user can access host command files to read or write, control the host’s graphics screen, and send output to the host’s printer. Disk access is made possible through CCDOS, a DOS look-alike that gives host file control to the remote user through an almost transparent additional program layer. For example, CCHELP is able to specify the host’s drive C by en¬ tering HC :. Actual file transfers are ac¬ complished with a simple COPY com¬ mand and are conducted using Carbon Copy’s own error-checking protocol. The host can limit file access by dis¬ abling CCDOS. As an added security measure, the host can dial a preset call¬ back number upon receipt of a valid pass¬ word from an inquiring computer. CC can also be run in a resident (back¬ ground) mode so the host user can con¬ tinue to run applications while file trans¬ fers are taking place. continued 148 BYTE- AUGUST 1988 According to Script PHOTOGRAPHY: PAUL AVIS © 1988 AUGUST 1988 • BYTE 149 PRODUCT FOCUS COMMUNICATIONS SOFTWARE Table 1: Features and price are unrelated in the packages we tested (• — yes; O — no). Package name Price Copy- Documen- Minimum Maximum protected 2 tation RAM data (bytes) transfer rate (bps) Learn mode Text editor Back¬ ground operation Carbon Copy Plus 5.0 $195 • 224 pages 256K 38,400 O O • Crosstalk Mk.4 1.01 $245 O 424 pages 256K 115,200 • • O Crosstalk XVI 3.61 $195 O 199 pages 96 K 115,200 o o O HyperACCESS 3.28 $149 • 232 pages 192K 57,600 o o o Instant Terminal 1.1 $ 95 O 71 pages 192K 19,200 o o o MaxOnline2.4 $ 70 O 222 pages 256K 19,200 • o o Mirror II 3.6.12 $ 70 O 368 pages 192K 115,200 • • • Move-lt 4.02 $150 o 155 pages 128K 19,200 o o o PC BLAST II $250 o 322 pages 256K 38,400 o • o Procomm Plus 1.1 A $ 75 o 340 pages 192K 115,200 • • o Relay Silver 1.0 1 $150 o 591 pages 192K 19,200 • • • Smartcom III 1.08 $249 o 218 pages 512K 115,200 • • • Softerm PC 3.0 $195 o 728 pages 256K 115,200 • • • 1 Requires two floppy disk drives. 2 Disks can be copied, but duplicates will not work together. All this host mode power doesn’t come at the expense of terminal-emula¬ tion capability. Carbon Copy can hold its own against dedicated mainframe links, with transfer speed that puts it right up with Crosstalk Mk.4, support for the most common transfer protocols, and emulation support for five popular terminals. The terminal commands are clear and efficient, mostly Alt-key combinations. In fact, Carbon Copy was the best at our manual keystroke benchmark, and, though the commands are short, they are by no means cryptic. The compilable script language is similarly tight, al¬ though it does not contain the advanced decision-making structures of some packages. If you’re interested primarily in MS- DOS-based communications and need a package that will enable very intimate data sharing over the telephone, then this may be the one you’re looking for. Keep in mind, however, that all the special¬ ized features require at least two copies (one for the host and one for the remote terminal) at nearly $200 apiece. Crosstalk Mk.4 version 1.01 A real communications software Cadil¬ lac, Crosstalk Mk.4 version 1.01 from Digital Communications Associates (DCA) is a hefty package that requires two 360K-byte floppy disk drives and the assimilation of a 424-page user’s man¬ ual. It includes a comprehensive script language and a top-drawer price of $245. The list of terminals it can emulate is as long as your arm (see table 2); you can edit text with a built-in editor; and, in ad¬ dition to supporting every major file- transfer protocol, it introduces one of its own, called DART. DART is essentially an upgrade of the older Crosstalk protocol, with new fea¬ tures that include crash recovery and time and date stamping. Crash recovery enables file transfers to continue after an error is corrected, appending new data onto that already sent. If, despite all the protocol options available, you still must do an ASCII transfer, you won’t have to worry about speed. With a rate of 115,200 bps sup¬ ported and the ability to send and receive with only limited line waits, Crosstalk turned in an excellent time on our file- transfer benchmark. The command mode is built on the Crosstalk system of loading command modules for making preset calls. The modules can contain connection settings, protocols, and terminal emulations. This system is relatively easy to use once you get familiar with it, although keeping track of all the two-letter commands often requires hunting through the man¬ ual. Crosstalk Mk.4 had an average showing on our keystroke benchmark; it suffered from the need to send an atten¬ tion signal before any commands. Most outstanding of all its features is its CASL script language. CASL uses multiple decision loops, has specialized disk-access commands, and can create much more than script files. Because of its command specialization and its size (over half the manual is dedicated to CASL commands), writing simple scripts like our script benchmark can be difficult for those unfamiliar with the language. Fortunately, Crosstalk Mk.4 provides a learn script that lets you record a session into a script file that can simply be edited. With the learn script, what would have taken nearly 500 key¬ strokes to program by hand was reduced to the 197 indicated in table 3. Although Crosstalk Mk.4 is a very powerful package, its price puts it in a range (shared by Smartcom III, as dis¬ cussed later) reserved for only those in real need of its most advanced features. Crosstalk XVI 3.61 Crosstalk XVI, though the standard by which other communications packages are measured, falls short of the mark it¬ self in our tests. Version 3.61 requires only 96K bytes of RAM and costs $195. The software emulates nine popular terminals, but it supports fewer proto¬ cols and is more difficult to learn than most modern packages. The common way to run command mode is to load command files containing directory in¬ formation. You can supplement this by following script menus or by entering two-letter commands. As with Crosstalk Mk.4, the process takes some getting used to but can be efficient once you are familiar with the language. There is a status table that you can access with a sin¬ gle key to find your connect options; however, finding the table with less com¬ monly used information (like the modem commands) can take several commands. The system had an average score on our continued 150 BYTE* AUGUST 1988 You can rely on your file server for LAN communications... You’re getting the drift of this message already. File servers aren’t designed to solve the PC user’s commu¬ nications problem. But now there’s a system that is. Now there’s COMMIX™ 32. It’s a general purpose local area network for PCs and minicomputer hosts. It connects you with the host, other PCs, and peripherals such as printers, plotters, or modems through simple, pop-up menu commands For file transfer and E-mail as a background task. For printer spooling and sharing directly from your applications programs. For terminal emulation that’s automatic. COMMIX 32 will let anyone perform common LAN tasks—without the need for expert assistance. Install it quickly. Expand it easily. Almost any PC user can install and connect with COMMIX. With each connection, you’re saving time and money. Because each COMMIX connection costs as little as $125. Circle 110 on Reader Service Card Then take advantage of expansion possibilities. With our optional Ethernet® Link Module, you can create larger LANs with thousands of users. And through our optional Wide Area Network Module, distant COMMIX LANs can appear as one network. If you're lost at sea. And looking for solid LAN. The COMMIX 32 is available now. Send us a message: 1TRON, a Division of Infotron Systems Corporation, 130 Gaither Drive, Suite 116, Mount Laurel, NJ 08054. TEL: (609) 722-5575 FAX: (609) 234-0451 1-800-423-8044 inn ITRON An Infotron Division COMMIX is a trademark of Infotron Corporation. Ethernet is a registered trademark of Xerox Corporation, AUGUST 1988 -BYTE 151 PRODUCT FOCUS COMMUNICATIONS SOFTWARE Table 2: You should check a package carefully to make sure it supports the protocols and emulations you need (• = yes; O = no). Protocols Package name Carbon Copy Plus 5.0 Crosstalk Mk.4 1.01 Crosstalk XVI 3.61 HyperACCESS 3.28 Instant Terminal 1.1 4 MaxOnline2.4 Mirror II 3.6.12 Move-lt4.02 PC BLAST II Procomm Plus 1.1 A Relay Silver 1.0 Smartcom III 1.08 Softerm PC 3.0 5 o o o o • • • o o • • o o o o o o o o • o • o o • o o o o • • o • o • o o o 0 o o o o o o o • o • • o o o o • o o o o • • o • o • 1 Character mode only. 2 Requires additional hardware (e.g., IRMA and SmartAlec). 3 Requires 7171 protocol converter or equivalent. 4 DEC emulators included; 40 others available at additional cost. 5 Supports 33 additional terminals not listed here. • O O O • • O O O O O O • O O O O O O • O O O • o o o o • o o o • o o o • o • • • o o o o o o o • o o o / £ $ / / <• £ & 5? 4? 4/ OOP -° i> i> 4? jf f i? f .c i 1 i * £ £ v i i t t t o • o • o • o • • • o • o • o • o • • • o • o • o • o • o • o o o o o o o • o • o o o o o o o o • o o o • • • • o o • o • • • • • • • o • o • • • o • • • o o o • • o • o o o o • o o • o o o o • • o o • o o • o • o • o • o • o • o • o • o • • • o • o o o • o • manual keystroke test. Writing a script file is simply a matter of listing commands, and there are no shortcuts except for abbreviated com¬ mand strings. Decision loops based on received strings must be implemented using the when construct—a technique that can lead to errors with unexpected input. Only the XMODEM error-checking protocol is supported in addition to Cros¬ stalk’s own. Data transfer rates are sup¬ ported to 115,200 bps, but our ASCII transfer test shows the severe perfor¬ mance hits that you get when flow-con¬ trol characters and character waits are necessary for error-free transmission. Crosstalk XVI was one of the few pack¬ ages we tested that took longer to send a file to a faster machine than to receive it—a clear indication of high software overhead. Overall, Crosstalk XVI is an average package at an above-average price. Crosstalk look-alike programs are easy to come by, but many of them have added features and flexibility that Crosstalk has not. HyperACCESS 3.28 Hilgraeve’s HyperACCESS is a versatile communications package with solid file- transfer ability and unique features that make it useful for widely varying appli¬ cations. Version 3.28 sells for $149. HyperACCESS supports XMODEM, Kermit, and its own Hyper protocol. De¬ spite its moderate maximum transfer rate, HyperACCESS compared favor¬ ably to higher-rated packages in our throughput tests, with low overhead and flawless XON/XOFF synching. The software features optional data compres¬ sion capability for both XMODEM and the Hyper protocol. But speed is not HyperACCESS’s only asset. It also has a powerful host mode that allows remote control over DOS and DOS programs. Remote user access can be limited to read only, DOS only, or one program only. One weakness in an otherwise good package is its use of a menu-driven com¬ mand mode. Although the manual key¬ stroke score was average, the commands involve constant flipping through layers of menus. Transferring files is especially taxing. HyperACCESS features Hyper Pilot, a compilable script language that lets you check for syntax errors before you’re actually on-line. Unfortunately, the script language itself does not allow many shortcuts, and it fared poorly on the programming keystroke test. In addi¬ tion, if you’re used to other software’s script languages, which are all similar, you’ll find that learning Hyper Pilot re¬ quires some adjustments. Instant Terminal 1.1 Take our advice: When the Instant Ter¬ minal manual mentions that a little file on the supplemental disk is intended only for a “computer engineer, technician, or programmer,” don’t listen. Print the file. Using the sparse 55-page reference manual that came with the package, we assumed Instant Terminal was a cheap Procomm clone. In fact, the sign-on screen tells you that Datastorm Technol¬ ogies, the Procomm people, licensed the software to Softronics. But with a little digging, we found a full scripting lan¬ guage and features that are only hinted at in the published documentation. Instant Terminal even ran a Procomm script, including GOSUBs and condition¬ als, without an edit or a hitch. Still, it’s not a full implementation, the most nota¬ ble omission being a learn facility. One other problem with the “cheap Procomm clone” assumption: Procomm costs less. With a single emulation, In¬ stant Terminal will run you $95. As the name suggests, Instant Termi¬ nal touts its terminal-emulation features. Our review copy included a software module and documentation supplement 152 BYTE- AUGUST 1988 PRODUCT FOCUS COMMUNICATIONS SOFTWARE Terminals Emulated £ £ 'V V A K C\j £ i* o o J $ 9 ** $ / // ff ** # # £ A i & i £ O) o p 9 3 Z £ S' 09 if $ § £ i i i i t t £ £ o • • o o o o o o o o o o o o o o • o o o o o • • • • • • • • o o • •2 •2 •2 • o o • • • • o o o o • • o o o o o o o #1 o o o o • • o • o • o o o o • • o • o o o • o • •3 •3 o o o o o o • • o • 0 o • • • • 4 0 o o o 0 o o o 0 o o o o o o o o 0 0 o • • 0 o • • o o 0 • o o o o o o o o o 0 • o o 0 • • 0 o • o o o 0 • o 0 0 • • o • • • 0 o o o o o o o o o o o o 0 o o 0 o o o o o o o o o o o o • • • • • • o o • o o o o • o • • • • • o o o o • o • o o o o • o • •3 o o • o • • • • • o o • o • • o o o o o o o #1 o o o o o o o o o o o o o o • • • o o 0 o o o o 0 o o o o o o o o 0 o o o o • • • • • • o o • • o o o • o • • • • • o o o Table 3: The packages varied widely in ease of programming and thoughput. (All times are in seconds.) Package Keystrokes to create BIX script Keystrokes for manual BIX session 1 -megabyte send at highest bps 1 -megabyte receive at highest bps Perfect-line 1200 -bps send Perfect-line 1200 -bps receive Typical-line Typical-line 1200 -bps 1200-bps send receive Carbon Copy Plus 286 19 310 722 590 588 592 589 Crosstalk Mk.4 197 26 318 770 595 592 589 591 Crosstalk XVI 237 24 873 618 592 591 588 589 HyperACCESS 479 26 296 770 589 592 593 597 Instant Terminal 343 19 885 884 596 597 596 595 MaxOnline 158 26 579 549 619 597 606 598 Mirror II 117 25 475 926 594 598 597 597 Move-It 145 44 1653 1660 589 590 587 593 PC BLAST II 419 38 435 1259 596 592 600 594 Procomm Plus 142 22 452 542 587 587 590 588 Relay Silver 117 30 740 656 593 592 594 595 Smartcom III 162 23 98 262 582 584 587 585 Softerm PC 195 33 950 954 667 665 655 661 for DEC VT-220 emulation. An order form enclosed with the package lists 40 additional emulator modules. Although most of the telecommunications pack¬ ages reviewed here include a variety of common emulations, documentation was almost invariably poor. Instant Terminal fills this gap. So if you need to emulate an obscure terminal, or if you have a spe¬ cific application on only one or two ter¬ minals, look into Instant Terminal. However, if you access multiple hosts, take note: The first emulation goes for $15; after that, they’re $50 a shot. MaxOnline 2.4 Though sometimes bogged down by multiple menus, this $70 package offers abundant features for its price. The menus are well designed, making Max- Online a very easy package to use, espe¬ cially for novices. The operations you need most show up on the first screen. And if anything’s missing, you can add new functions by editing USER.MNU. MaxOnline reaches a maximum data continued AUGUST 1988 • BYTE 153 Circle 131 on Reader Service Card (UEALEKb:T32) M Give PRODUCT FOCUS COMMUNICATIONS SOFTWARE me one good reason to give upC” “How about 43?” Modula-2 saves more time and money than any other programming environment. 1. High-level language 2. Readable, maintainable code 3. Ideal for team programming 4. Supports multi-tasking 5. Emerging international standard 6. Pascal or C programmers learn it in hours 7. Language for modern engineering 8. Consistency checks across modules 9. User control over exported/imported objects 10. Traps most programming errors 11. Fewer bugs in final code 12. Easy low-level access The LOGITECH Modula-2 programming environment goes far beyond the language. 13. Faster project throughput 14. Corporations rely on it 15. Adds a rich set of tools to the language 16. Best debuggers for any language 17. Configurable, easy-to-use text editor 18. Integrated environment 19. Powerful windowing interface 20. Compiles twice as fast as MS-C 21. Code as fast as the best C compilers 22. Mature and reliable 23. Extended library 24. Standard object format 25. C libraries can be used 26. Supports EGA 43-line mode 27. Automatic MAKE 28. Flexible overlays 29. Price/performance leader transfer rate of only 19,200 bps, but it scored credibly on our benchmarks, tim¬ ing under 10 minutes on both 1-megabyte transfers. Adequate scripting and a func¬ tional learn mode combine for easy auto¬ mation, while the 222 pages of documen¬ tation include plenty of instructive programming routines and command ex¬ amples. The distribution disk also con¬ tains demonstration scripts. MaxOnline touts a windowing feature that supports simultaneous file transfer from two COMM ports. It falls short of true background mode, but it can speed up extensive file-transfer tasks. While one window downloads from a remote host, the other port can process files over a direct line. You can customize each window and easily jump back and forth. Remote operation excels for a program in this price category. Simple commands set passwords, restrict log-ons to specific users, allow varying levels of access, and trigger an interactive chat mode. Easy file management is also available. The compact scripting language han¬ dles most basic commands. It would not, however, support an IF WAITF0R state¬ ment, counting instead on a time-out error to break from the mail loop. Pa¬ rameters are easy to change, with an overview screen and menus available for most entries. MaxOnline illustrates how far communications software has come: A little money buys a professional pack¬ age with plenty of power. Mirror II 3.6.12 Being accustomed to a given command system and script language may be your only reason for sticking with an other¬ wise weak communications product. SoftKlone’s Mirror II 3.6.12 solves that problem by letting you use the familiar Crosstalk system while adding a learn command, background mode, text edi¬ tor, strong terminal emulation, and some friendly screen displays. All this, includ¬ ing 368 pages of clear documentation, will run you a mere $70. Although the command structure is virtually identical to Crosstalk’s and is not any easier to learn, Mirror II’s screen displays present your connect informa¬ tion clearly and let you scroll through all the parameters you have set. It per¬ formed at Crosstalk’s level in the manual keystroke test, the only difference being an added stroke to get past the initial screen display without waiting it out. Running Mirror II in the background is easy, requiring only a hot-key toggle to switch between itself and another appli¬ cation. It can handle the difficult task of simultaneously receiving a file and doing disk-intensive operations with only about a 5 percent performance hit, and without errors. Be warned that Mirror’s 192K bytes plus your operating system take up a big chunk of a 640K-byte mem¬ ory, and you may be severely limited as to the other applications you can run. If you’re not used to the Crosstalk script language, there is a learn facility to help get you started. Using it enabled us to cut the programming keystrokes down to an excellent 117, including edit¬ ing. Mirror adds the ability to access a command completion register to the stan¬ dard Crosstalk command set, which makes possible decision loops based on 22 separate conditions. The software supports all common protocols, including Crosstalk. It scored very well in our ASCII send test, but lower than average on our ASCII receive. In this case, the flow control necessary to properly send the file from the Com¬ paq 386/20 to the AT at 115,200 bps was unusually sluggish. Mirror II is a very good, strong, and flexible package for less than half the price of Crosstalk. Those comfortable with the Crosstalk command file format may well find a new favorite here. Move-It 4.02 When you boot up Move-It, all you get back is an asterisk. After delving through so many programs with reams of overlapping menus and multiple key¬ strokes for one simple command, that lonely command prompt was refreshing. Of course, you have to rely on the 155 pages of documentation—without an in¬ dex—and a few help screens to get you through the learning phase. The stark screen display disguises a powerful pro¬ gram with a full scripting language. Though simple in concept, the pro¬ gram’s price tag ($150) puts it in a class where it must match the performance of some tough competition. Unfortunately, it lacks the basic features required to meet that goal. Take the phone book, for example: It is a raw ASCII file, where each line contains an entry, and a comma separates each argument of an entry (e.g., phone number, data transfer rate, and parity). Again, the simplicity ap¬ pealed to us, but for the price of this package, you should not have to exit the program and run up a word processor each time you add a phone entry. And during XMODEM transfers, you should get more of a status update than just a row of dots across the screen. Move-It’s elegant scripting almost makes up for the lack of a learn facility. Even without automatic generation of 154 BYTE • AUGUST 1988 PRODUCT FOCUS COMMUNICATIONS SOFTWARE code, it took only 145 keystrokes to pro¬ gram the full BIX session. Move-It han¬ dles the BIX mail loop with typical effi¬ ciency. It first looks for the read/action prompt (meaning mail is in the box), then jumps to one label if the prompt is encountered, or to another label if it is not; thus: MA read/action: JU no_more_jnail FALSE JU more_mail Unlike many of the programs we re¬ viewed, you don’t have to wait for a time¬ out to fall through the mail loop. This structure not only produces efficient code but also handles a variety of com¬ plex chores. Still, when the program drifts away (an affliction all too common during telecomputing), you start to miss the menus and status prompts so common in the other packages. And this program drifts off more than others. It hung when it couldn’t detect a dial tone, it hung when connected to a Hayes-compatible modem it didn’t think was compatible enough, and it even hung when an invalid data transfer rate was entered. There’s nothing more infuriating than a hung program that stares back at you with only that lonely asterisk. PC BLAST II In a category with Smartcom III and Crosstalk Mk.4, the $250 PC BLAST II faces some brutal competition. Even with 300-plus pages of documentation and some powerful features, it just doesn’t achieve top-of-the-line status. The manual lacks coherent organization, and the sparse index skips the first two sections. BLAST scripts handle complex chores, but they run erratically—a fatal flaw when automating on-line proce¬ dures. BLAST also comes up short on maximum data transfer rate (38,400 bps) and number of protocols supported (only XMODEM and the functional, though nonstandard, BLAST protocol). BLAST reverts to some cryptic script¬ ing language. Unfortunately, the docu¬ mentation covering the command struc¬ ture doesn’t help much. While most programs use the Wait For standard to await specific prompts, BLAST uses a TTRAP command. Still, even after em¬ ploying numerous traps and delays, BLAST insisted on flooding BIX with a burst of commands. Although BIX han¬ dled it, some services won’t. For proto¬ col transfers, you’ve got to access the on¬ line menu and then send local keystrokes to automate the menu selections. This in¬ efficient method invites trouble. The TUPLOAD and TCAPTURE commands sup¬ port only text transfer. On top of that, BLAST lacks a learn facility. The setup file enhances automation by triggering script files and loading vari¬ ables such as @logf ile and ^password, but this doesn’t make up for the ineffi¬ ciencies. A keystroke count exposes the problem: The manual session took 38 keystrokes to complete, while the com¬ mand script required 419. For the price BLAST demands, it should be doing more of your work. Other programs in BLAST’S price category deliver elegant scripting, full features, and smooth op¬ eration—an enviable standard, and one that BLAST simply does not meet. Procomm Plus 1.1 A Procomm Plus offers the best of both worlds: cheap yet powerful, easy to use yet rich with features. At first glance, it appears plain enough for public domain, and yet it supports almost any telecom¬ puting application: 11 standard proto¬ cols, 14 terminal emulations, every com¬ mon configuration up to 115,200 bps, host mode, split-screen chat mode, an automated phone book, macros, and a surprisingly powerful script language. In the old price ($75) versus perfor¬ mance ratio, Procomm leads the field. Procomm employs the familiar PC- Talk key sequences to get the job done. The key combinations are, for the most part, logical; and for those that aren’t, one keystroke calls a comprehensive overview screen. The 340-page manual, well-organized and indexed, does not leave you ripping out pages with one hand and hair with the other. Page references at the beginning of each chapter supple¬ ment a detailed table of contents and a complete index. Although some compatibility quirks are to be expected in the world of tele¬ communications programs, Procomm did better than some. A few of the pack¬ ages could not handle the POPCOM modem, a purported Hayes compatible, but Procomm had no trouble with it at all. Another Hayes compatible inces¬ santly reported Carrier Detect High, and most of the programs had problems with this. Some dealt with it on boot-up by flashing a warning or initiating a reset. Some even dropped into terminal mode, fully on-line, refusing to believe that no one was home. Procomm Plus simply ig¬ nored it. Perhaps this exposes a lack of sophistication, but it can be a blessing. Telecomputing causes enough headaches without your program getting picky. continued Circle 133 on Reader Service Card (DEALERS: 134) Announcing Modula OS/2. The operating system finally catches up with the language. 30. Support for dual mode operations 31. Dynamic link libraries 32. For standard/extended version of OS/2 33. Multiple threads 34. Virtually unlimited program size 35. Makes mixing languages easy 36. Most powerful editor under OS/2 37. Background compilation while editing 38. Run-time checks 39. Stack checks even in threads 40. OS/2 uses Modula-2 parameter passing mechanism 41. Upgrade available for Modula-2 DOS users 42. Direct Hotline and free Bulletin Board support for all Modula-2 products 43. It’s affordable! Call toll-free: 800 - 231-7717 In California: 800 - 552-8885 99.00 169.00 249.00 rTlease send me: □ Modula-2 Compiler Pack (DOS) $ □ Modula-2 Toolkit (DOS) $ □ Modula-2 Development $ System (DOS, includes Compiler and Toolkit) □ Modula OS/2 $ 349.00 □ Modula-2 VAX/VMS version $2,500.00 Shipping & Handling (per item) $ 6.50 CA residents add applicable sales tax $_ Total $_ □ Check/money order included □ Visa □ MasterCard Card Number Exp. Date Cardholder Name Authorized Signature Ship to: Name Address City State Zip Phone Offer valid in U.S. Only Dealer inquiries welcome. Educational prices available. BY888 Send to: ffl LOGITECH Logitech, Inc. Attn: Coupon Redemption Program ^^6505 Kaiser Drive, Fremont, CA 94555 In Europe, contact: LOGITECH SA in Switzerland Tel: ++41 (0) 21-869-96-56 In the United Kingdom, contact: LOGITECH UK Tel:++44 (0) 525-22-22-11 AUGUST 1988 -BYTE 155 PRODUCT FOCUS COMMUNICATIONS SOFTWARE The Tests O ur tests seek to evaluate communi¬ cations software performance in two broad categories: throughput and ease of use. To this end, we devised benchmarks to pinpoint performance ability in eight separate areas. The first is our manual keystroke test, where we record the number of keystrokes necessary to carry out a de¬ fined session on the BIX conferencing system. It provides a quantitative mea¬ sure of the relative complexity of using the command mode. The session con¬ sists of logging on, filing and download¬ ing mail, filing and downloading mes¬ sages, and logging off. Keystrokes that are used for commands in terminal mode (i.e., commands for BIX’s use only) are not counted. We made every effort to use keyboard shortcuts where these were available. The count begins on the first stroke after the program is started and ends when we have returned to DOS. For our second test, we wrote a script language program to automate the same BIX session, and we determined the keystrokes needed to enter and execute the script. Since BIX’s mail subsystem requires that you file memos individu¬ ally, and the amount of messages can vary from day to day, the program must have some kind of input-based decision structure to work properly. We chose to use the language’s best structure, not necessarily its most com¬ pact, for handling unexpected condi¬ tions. If abbreviated commands were possible, we used them. If the package had a learn facility, we counted only the keystrokes needed to use the learn mode and to edit the resulting script. Throughput was measured using two data files (a 64K-byte file and a 1-mega¬ byte file), transferred between a stan¬ dard IBM PC AT and a Compaq Desk- pro 386/20 under fixed conditions. The terms send and receive are always refer¬ enced to the AT. The 1-megabyte ASCII transfer test times the send and receive timings of one million/I characters via a null modem connection and using no error checking. We pushed for the greatest error-free transfer rate we could get, which is not merely a func¬ tion of data transfer rate; it often meant adjusting flow control and line or char¬ acter wait parameters. At 115,200 bps, we should see 1-megabyte transfer times of about 90 seconds (1 megabyte/ (115200/10)), but typical times were more on the order of 10 minutes, which was the fastest transfer time the soft¬ ware (and the disks) could correctly handle. To determine how the software re¬ acted under everyday conditions, we measured the transfer rate of a 64K-byte data file at 1200 bps over two simulated phone lines. The first line, simulated by our modem testing equipment, was a “perfect” line, with virtually no noise and no line impairment. The connection was made using two 1200-bps Hayes- compatible modems. The second line simulated was a “typical” line, with typical noise, attenuation, and phase jit¬ ter. These parameters were determined by the preliminary draft of EIA-496, a specification for universal communica¬ tion equipment tests. As for the script language, Procomm boasts a complete command set: if... then.. .else looping, case structures, a Shell command for DOS operation, sub¬ routines, and advanced screen handling. This power does not come at the cost of simplicity. For instance, Procomm han¬ dled the BIX mail loop with ease: WAITF0R "read/action" ;BIX prompt ; when you have mail IF WAITF0R ; if you have mail, GOTO more_jnail ; go get it ENDIF Sure, it looks obvious; but few packages handle the loop so easily. For all but the most complex programming projects, Procomm scripting will do the job. Only the lack of a true background mode dampens our endorsement. The Shell command allows you to escape to DOS while still on-line, but file transfers will not proceed until Procomm returns to the foreground. Procomm meets a software designer’s most stringent standard: Pack in the fea¬ tures, but keep the interface simple. It doesn’t intimidate, but it can still handle complex applications. Above all, it strives for invisibility, flashing menus at you only when asked and remaining as unobtrusive as possible. A noble achieve¬ ment, and a goal all too often neglected. Relay Silver 1.0 Relay Silver 1.0 is a fully featured com¬ munications software package that re¬ quires 192K bytes of RAM and two flop¬ py disk drives. It includes two manuals with over 500 pages of well-referenced documentation, and it sells for $150. Re¬ lay Silver is weak in throughput, ease of commands, and terminal emulation, and the unusual extra features it adds are not enough to make up for these basic lacks. Among the added features are a so¬ phisticated background mode, a text edi¬ tor, and a script language learn facility. The background mode allows Relay Sil¬ ver to run as a true terminate-and-stay- resident (TSR) program, always accessi¬ ble through a hot-key combination. Unfortunately, background file transfers were quite slow when running a disk¬ intensive application in the foreground. ASCII transfers were quick enough, but hard to get going. At high speeds, the software occasionally locks when using XON/XOFF, apparently because the re¬ ceiver doesn’t catch all the data and never sends the next XON. For hard-wired con¬ nections, Relay Silver needs a null modem cable configuration that differs from that of almost every other package. The command mode is menu-driven beyond reason, and to accomplish any file transfers with the menu, you must edit an entire directory specification. A command entry mode of sorts is avail¬ able through an attention key, but that handy bit of information is buried well within the documentation. Once you find it, you can enter script commands di¬ rectly from the keyboard. Even with this shortcut, Relay Silver had a lower-than- average score on manual key counts. On the plus side, Relay has a powerful script language and a good learn facility. Relay also finished with an excellent keystroke count in our programming test. The commands are simple and intu¬ itive, and editing a learned script can take remarkably little effort. In addition, Relay includes an application program interface—software hooks that let you easily incorporate Relay scripts into your own programs. The manufacturer says a new release of Relay Silver with script enhancements and additional terminal emulations will be available this fall. Smartcom III 1.08 For elegant scripting, full features, and pure telecomputing power, you just can’t continued 156 BYTE* AUGUST 1988 How to look good from start to finish. The HP LaserJet Series II Printer. Nothing brings your ideas to life like the HP LaserJet Series II Printer— from office memos to forms to newsletters. As the leading laser printer, it works with all popular PCs and PC software packages. And, with a wide range of fonts, you get more options to create superior looking documents. With additional memory you can even print sophisticated 300 DPI full-page graphics. And with HP’s ScanJet scanner, you can also easily add photographs, illustrations and text. No wonder more people choose the original over all other laser printers combined. So call 1 800 752-0900, Ext. 900D for your nearest HP dealer. L„ HEWLETT "P PACKARD © Hewlett-Packard 1988 Print samples were created using Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel, and Aldus PageMaker. Circle 102 on Reader Service Card AUGUST 1988 -BYTE 157 PRODUCT FOCUS COMMUNICATIONS SOFTWARE Company Information Communications Research Group Meridian Technology, Inc. 5615 Corporate Blvd. 7 Corporate Park, Suite 100 Baton Rouge, LA 70808 Irvine, CA 92714 (504) 923-0888 (714) 261-1199 Inquiry 900. Inquiry 893. Datastorm Technologies, Inc. Relay Communications, Inc. 1621 Towne Dr., Suite G 41 Kenosia Ave. Columbia, MO 65202 Danbury, CT 06810 (314) 474-8461 (800) 222-8672 Inquiry 901. Inquiry 902. Digital Communications Associates, Inc. SoftKlone 1000 Holcomb Woods Pkwy. 336 Office Plaza Dr. Roswell, GA 30076 Tallahassee, FL 32301 (404) 998-3998 (904) 878-8564 Inquiry 894. Inquiry 898. Hayes Microcomputer Products, Inc. Softronics P.0 Box 105203 7899 Lexington Dr., Suite 210 Atlanta, GA 30348 Colorado Springs, CO 80918 (404)441-1617 (800) 225-8590 Inquiry 903. Inquiry 896. Hilgraeve, Inc. Woolf Software Systems, Inc. P.O.Box 941 23842 Archwood St. Monroe, MI 48161 West Hills, CA 91307 (800) 826-2760 (818) 703-8112 Inquiry 895. Inquiry 899. Maxon Systems, Inc. 353 Vintage Park Dr., Suite B Foster City, CA 94403 (415) 377-0269 Inquiry 897. beat the Old Guard. Smartcom III re¬ quires a hefty 512K bytes of RAM, an 80-column display, and a hard disk drive, but the package includes every¬ thing: a full-functioned editor, file com¬ pression and data encryption, on-line disk management, a complete command set, an integrated compiler, simulta¬ neous sessions, remote access capability, and an excellent learn facility. The four- disk set is not for the casual user, as the $249 price tag attests, but if you have heavy-duty uses in mind, Smartcom III will do the job. Multiple menus and excessive help screens can be annoying and inflexible, but Smartcom Ill’s implementation of those features works. You can find your way around the system and experiment with only occasional glances at the ample (218-page) documentation. The editor, unlike many integrated editors, is fairly painless, and, when editing script files, it offers some helpful debugging tools. Debugging the scripts of other packages can become tiresome because most errors are only discovered on-line. The Smartcom compiler, acces¬ sible from within the editor, catches many errors; and when problems do arise, you can avoid the headache of switching from one module to another or, worse, from one program to another. After Smartcom detects a compilation error, it puts you right where you need to be: back in the editor. Hayes has included a complete pro¬ gramming environment with multiple conditional structures, windowing, speed optimization, and full error trap¬ ping. The language is verbose (even with a learn facility, it took 162 keystrokes to edit the automated session). But the sell¬ ing point here is power. With the less ex¬ pensive packages, you usually employ a generic routine and hope all unfolds as expected, but Smartcom lets you pick the right command for each application. Start the learn facility and watch Smart¬ com create your script in an upper win¬ dow as the session churns along on the main screen. It even scrambles your password. Slick. Smartcom blazed through our 1-mega¬ byte benchmarks. Unlike almost every other program, Smartcom could truly handle its advertised maximum data transfer rate. Sending the file from the AT to the Compaq, Smartcom scorched along at 115,200 bps with no delays at all and broke the tape in 98 seconds. Of course, the AT can’t capture that fast, but Smartcom let us know about character errors right up front. Instead of waiting for the 1-megabyte transfer to complete, only to find errors in the file, we simply aborted the process, popped down to 38,400 bps, and sent the file to the AT in a record 262 seconds. If you need a full range of features, or if you plan an extensive programming project (such as a bulletin board system or a complex sequence of unattended ses¬ sions), the Smartcom investment pays off quickly. Softerm PC 3.0 Although Softerm did not excel at our benchmarks, registering 954 seconds on the important 1-megabyte receive test, it did run through them with admirable ease. The configuration parameters were not only comprehensive but easy to find and modify. When a problem did occur, the excellent documentation (over 700 pages packed in two manuals) covered it. And there’s lots to cover: a complete script language, learn mode, background operation, direct remote access, six pop¬ ular protocols, queue scheduling, and a text editor. For terminal emulation, Softerm breaks away from the pack. Chapter 4 of the reference manual lists 45 terminals, and each is well documented. That chap¬ ter alone runs 200 pages. In an area where most of the packages come up woefully short, Softerm deserves spe¬ cial accolades. Unique resident features are also note¬ worthy. Softerm’s Communication Agent, coupled with an unattended host mode, enables true background opera¬ tions. A hot-key toggle lets you queue a script file containing the MONITOR com¬ mand, turning control to the remote ter¬ minal while the local computer runs DOS operations or application pro¬ grams. Resident menus also offer disk management and sophisticated host ac- continued 158 BYTE* AUGUST 1988 © Hewlett-Packard 1988 PE12811 Small cash input for laser-quality output. m HEWLETT PACKARD Dear Reader: This letter was printed on one of the finest printers available today. The HP DeskJet Printer. It prints text and graphics more crisp and clear than 24-pin printers. And as you can see from the chart, it's a lot quieter than 24-pin printers, too. PRINTER NOISE LEVELS NOISE (dBa) 80 60 40 20 PRINTER 9-PIN 24-PIN HP OESKJET AVERAGE AVERAGE It's also easy to use. It does your important office tasks, but it's small enough to fit on your desk. Everything considered, it's the perfect personal printer. And one of the most amazing features of all is its price. It's under $1,000. Call us for the name of your local HP Dealer at 1 800 752-0900 Ext. 908B. Then go see for yourself why we call it laser-quality printing. Richard Snyder The HP DeskJet Printer. Laser-Quality Output for Under $1000. hn HEWLETT T PACKARD Circle 103 on Reader Service Card AUGUST 1988 • B Y T E 159 PRODUCT FOCUS A Message To Our Subscribers ROM TIME TO TIME WE MAKE THE BYTE SUBSCRIBER list available to other companies who wish to send our subscribers material about their products. We take great care to screen these com¬ panies, choosing only those who are reputable, and whose products, services, or information we feel would be of interest to you. Direct mail is an efficient medium for presenting the latest personal computer goods and services to our subscribers. Many BYTE subscribers appreciate this controlled use of our mailing list, and look forward to finding information of interest to them in the mail. Used are our subscribers’ names and addresses only (no other information we may have is ever given). While we believe the distribution of this information is of benefit to our subscribers, we firmly respect the wishes of any subscriber who does not want to receive such promotional literature. Should you wish to restrict the use of your name, simply send your request to the following Magazine Attn: Subscriber Service RO. Box 7643 Teaneck, NJ 07666-9866 itilt “IT MAKES C-C-CROSSTALK SEEM T-T-TONGUE-TIED.” If you’re talking to a DEC mainframe, no communication software emulates the VT220, VT100 or VT52 terminal more accurately, easily, or eloquently than VTERM. * Hot keys. Kermit. Automatic reformatting for spreadsheets and databases. VTERM has it all. Why not join the 60,000 users of VTERM (many of whom moved up from Crosstalk). And try the DEC terminal emulation package that has everyone in the business buzzing. " FREEJEVALUATioN KI™' Q Yes, send me a free time-limited,/w//-fr/<9vv/? working copy of VTERM1220, which is mine to keep. Name_ | Title _ Company_ Address _ Telephone ^^_ I am a user □ dealer□. Mail to: Coefficient Systems Corporation 611 Broadway, New York, New York 10012 (212) 777-6707 byc-8/88 J * VTERM refers to VTERM/220, VTERM/4010, etc. products from Coefficient Systems Corporation. Crosstalk is a trademark of Digital Communications Associates, Inc. Questions? Want faster action? Call (212) 777-6707, ext. 420. VTERM o DEC Terminal Emulator COMMUNICATIONS SOFTWARE cess. The File Agent uses configurable device specifiers, letting you access re¬ mote computers as if they were local disk drives. Softerm’s learn mode creates only macros; you’ve got to enter script code manually. The editor saves you some keystrokes by generating commands and by catching entry errors, but it can be in¬ flexible. In fact, the script language it¬ self suffers from a rigid structure. Not an open programming environment, but the kind you may appreciate at debugging time or when coding complex sessions. The menu structure is somewhat con¬ fusing. For instance, F4 from the Sof- term Functions menu, labeled File Transfer, does not let you transfer files; for that feature, you must call the Utility Functions menu. A better design would save keystrokes and enhance clarity. With so many features and admirable power, Softerm deserves its place along¬ side the expensive communications packages. It can do the job, but it’s not a program you can go to work on right out of the box. A steep learning curve, an¬ noying rigidity, and poor performance in our benchmark tests thwart the promise of this full-featured package. The Big Picture Today’s communications software has come a long way. Learn modes, easy macro definition, and context-sensitive help make telecomputing simpler than ever. With powerful scripting and abun¬ dant features, the best programs don’t sacrifice sophistication. If you have a quick and easy session to run, complex features stay out of your way; but if you need more power, it lies in wait. By gleaning the features and checking benchmarks, you should pick a package that is most closely aligned to your application. For instance, if you have limited hard¬ ware and perform long file transfers, background operation becomes vital. It frees your local keyboard and enhances productivity. It also limits your choices considerably: While most programs can access DOS without logging out, they lack true background. On the other hand, if you desire simultaneous transfers, a program like MaxOnline or Mirror II can do the job by accessing both COMM ports. Our line simulator benchmarks show all packages performing XMODEM transfers equally well. Clearly, though, with 1-megabyte transfer rates ranging from over 20 minutes to less than 2 min¬ utes, software affects throughput. And a high data transfer rate does not necessar¬ ily ensure performance; software over- 160 BYTE- AUGUST 1988 Circle 45 on Reader Service Card PRODUCT FOCUS Circle 238 on Reader Service Card COMMUNICATIONS SOFTWARE head and line waits can significantly hamper transfer speed. Crosstalk XVI and Smartcom III both tout maximum data transfer rates of 115,200 bps, yet their 1-megabyte transfer times differ by as much as 13 minutes—very significant when tying up a valuable resource. Proprietary protocols can make a dif¬ ference. Carbon Copy compressed our file of 64,000 A characters and sent it in 12 seconds. The BLAST protocol han¬ dles noise exceptionally well. Each pack¬ age emphasizes specific features, but a couple of them bring it all together. Top of the Line For overall performance, Smartcom III leads the field. It set the standard for 1- megabyte transfer, the most telling of our benchmarks. It includes all necessary features and throws in all those little ex¬ tras that make the job easier—such as re¬ calling filenames from the first couple of keystrokes, encrypting files and scram¬ bling passwords for added security, and allowing simultaneous on-line sessions. Smartcom’s scripting also sets the pace. When faced with ever-changing prompts and the vagaries of on-line com¬ munications, you need a language that has full error trapping and can handle all the anomalies. You’ll still run into pro¬ gramming limits, but, for an application language, Smartcom attains the state of the art. Price vs. Performance Here Procomm Plus wins our endorse¬ ment. Unobtrusive and easy to use, it still includes all major features and sup¬ ports an enviable set of protocols and ter¬ minal emulations. It achieves simplicity with standard Alt-key combinations and with a comprehensive menu that’s a sin¬ gle keystroke away. Its power comes from a surprisingly strong scripting lan¬ guage. And it’s highly flexible—an in¬ dispensable feature for telecomputing tasks. Although it lacks the sophistica¬ tion of Smartcom III or Crosstalk Mk.4, Procomm Plus does the job admirably well at a reasonable price. Generally, we were impressed by the overall quality of all the packages tested. Once lagging behind the telecomputing revolution, communications software has filled the gap with full programming ca¬ pability and creative proprietary fea¬ tures. Going on-line has never been easier. ■ Steve Apiki and Stan Diehl are testing editors for the BYTE Lab. They can be reached at One Phoenix Mill Lane, Pe¬ terborough, NH 03458, or on BIX as “apiki ” and “sdiehl. ” ELIMINATE COSTLY WIRING AND MODEMS! HOST CPU THE MODEL 570 QUICK MUX • 8 full duplex ports • 19,200 baud all ports simultaneously • 5000' link distance • No configuration switches • Built-in surge protection • Bi-directional control signal for each port • Includes 8 25' cables • Complete diagnostics • Channel activity indicators • Male or female connectors • $548 with cables Contact us today at Telebyte Technology Inc., 270 E. Pulaski Road, Greenlawn, New York 11740, (516) 423-3232. ****** v»oo TELESVu “IT MAKES PROCOMM LOOK LIKE AMATEURC0M.” If you talk to a DEC mainframe, no software emulates the VT220, VT100 or VT52 terminal more accurately or professionally than VTERM. * Hot keys. Kermit. Automatic reformatting for spread¬ sheets and databases. VTERM has it all. Why not join the 60,000 users of VTERM (many of whom moved up from Procomm). And try the DEC terminal emulation package that’s in a totally different league. "FREE"EVALUATION “if" Q Yes, send me a free time-limited, full-blown working copy of VTERM1220, which is mine to keep. Name_ Title_ Company_ Address _ Telephone ^^_ I am a user □ dealer□. Mail to: Coefficient Systems Corporation : 611 Broadway, New York, New York 10012 (212) 777-6707 byp-s/ss J * VTERM refers to VTERM/220, VTERM/4010, etc. products from Coefficient Systems Corporation. Procomm is a trademark of Datastorm Technologies, Inc. Questions? Want faster action? Call (212) 777-6707, ext. 419. VTERM o DEC Terminal Emulator Circle 46 on Reader Service Card AUGUST 1988 • B Y T E 161 System Review Variations on the 20-M Hz Theme The Tatung TCS-8000, Proteus 386A, and Everex Step 386/20 take different paths to high performance Ed McNierney A s more 80386-based computers become available, you’d think they’d be as similar as peas in a pod. But that’s not the case. As computers based on the 80386 move be¬ yond the initial 16-MHz wave to 20 MHz, design variations between differ¬ ent systems become more prominent. Those variations show up clearly as dif¬ ferences in performance. The 20-MHz systems reviewed here— the Tatung TCS-8000, Proteus 386A, and Everex Step 386/20—follow differ¬ ent design philosophies. The three sys¬ tems show a remarkable range of perfor¬ mance and operational capabilities for a set of machines that are superficially so similar. Each couples its CPU with an enhanced AT-style keyboard, a reason¬ able-size hard disk drive, and an EGA display subsystem. Yet on closer inspec¬ tion and testing, each shows unique per¬ formance features, and the group as a whole shows a variation in performance of more than 100 percent on some of the benchmarks. Fast Cache The most prominent factor in an 80386- based system’s performance is the mem¬ ory architecture. Since the 20-MHz 80386 is an exceptionally memory- hungry processor with a instruction pre¬ fetch queue to keep filled, its demands on memory access are severe. Unfortu¬ nately, memory costs are such that the several megabytes of sub-50-nanosecond static RAM (SRAM) required to give the 80386 unimpeded memory access would make any system prohibitively expen¬ sive. But that much fast memory isn’t necessary; good performance can be ob¬ tained for a fraction of the cost by using a well-designed memory system. Each of the three systems reviewed uses a differ¬ ent approach to memory architecture. The Tatung TCS-8000 takes the sim¬ plest approach. The CPU accesses all the 80-ns memory through a 16-bit data path and requires no proprietary 32-bit exten¬ sion bus. The resulting system runs with two wait states at all times, and you can add more memory with any conventional memory-expansion board. Unfortu¬ nately, this simple solution almost al¬ ways results in a performance penalty that puts the TCS-8000 at the bottom of this three-system heap in memory-inten¬ sive operations. However, that fast RAM makes the Tatung TCS-8000 almost as fast as the Compaq Deskpro 386/20, which uses 100-ns RAM. The Proteus 3 86A takes an intermedi¬ ate approach with a motherboard that can support 4 megabytes of 100-ns memory with a 32-bit data path. This dynamic RAM (DRAM) is supplemented by a 64K-byte 45-ns SRAM cache. Since most applications do not require more than 4 megabytes of RAM, this system provides a reasonable performance com¬ promise. This system also does not use a proprietary 32-bit expansion slot, so if you add more memory, it must be ac¬ cessed through a 16-bit bus. The cache system caches all memory, however, not just the memory on the motherboard; as a result, the performance degradation that the 16-bit memory produces is moder¬ ated. Testing showed that this caching had little effect on the performance of the system, which ran memory-intensive op¬ erations just slightly faster than the Tatung TCS-8000. The Everex Step 386/20’s memory system is perhaps the most unusual of the Not peas in a pod: From left to right , the Tatung TCS-8000 , Proteus 386A and Everex Step 386/20 travel different paths to improved performance. 162 BYTE* AUGUST 1988 group, but it produces the best overall performance. You can install up to 8 megabytes of 120-ns DRAM on the sys¬ tem board, with another 8 megabytes available in a full 32-bit expansion slot. To boost the performance of this DRAM, a 64K-byte SRAM cache (ex¬ pandable to 256K bytes) is also used— but with a twist. Most PC cache systems are the write- through type. If data is in the cache, it’s read from there; otherwise, it’s read from main memory. But when data is written, it’s always written to the cache first and then “through” the cache into main memory. As a result, the cache of¬ fers little benefit on memory writes. However, since the bulk of a CPU’s work consists of reading instructions to exe¬ cute, this write penalty does not seri¬ ously affect performance. But Everex, deciding to squeeze all possible speed out of its system, has im¬ plemented a write-back cache instead. In this cache system, if a data write occurs to a memory location in the very fast 25- ns cache, that write occurs only to that memory and not to main memory. It then marks the cache location as “dirty” be¬ cause its value differs from the main memory location it is caching. When that same location is read again, it is read di¬ rectly from the cache until a new mem¬ ory access causes that cache location to be overwritten. When new memory is moved into the cache, the current con¬ tents of the cache are checked to see if they are dirty. If so, those contents are written out to main memory before they’re overwritten. Thus, a memory lo¬ cation that is frequently written to gets written much more quickly than in a con¬ ventional “write-through” system. Tatung TCS-8000 The TCS-8000 as reviewed lists for $5288, not including a math copro¬ cessor. The system supports a 10-MHz 80287 or 80387 coprocessor, neither of which Tatung supplies; the review sys¬ tem was equipped with a 10-MHz 80287. You can’t vary the coprocessor speed, but you can switch the system CPU speed between 20 MHz and 8 MHz from the keyboard using the Ctrl-Alt-Minus keys. The system always powers up in the slower 8-MHz speed. If you really get into trouble, a convenient hardware reset switch is provided on the front panel of the system unit. The motherboard of the review unit held 2 megabytes of 80-ns RAM on SIMM (single in-line memory module) chips, with sockets for up to 4 mega¬ bytes. You can add more memory with an AT-style memory card. There are eight slots: two 8-bit and six 16-bit. The serial/ parallel card and the EGA card take up both 8-bit slots, and the floppy/hard disk drive controller takes one 16-bit slot, leaving five 16-bit slots free. The review unit had one 1.2-megabyte 5 Va -inch floppy disk drive and one full- height hard disk drive. There is room for two other half-height devices. The Mini- Scribe 6053 40-megabyte hard disk drive performed well and reliably, but it fell behind the performance expected of a drive in this class. According to the Coretest, it had a data transfer rate of 169.9K bytes per second, an average seek rate of 33.7 milliseconds, and a track-to-track rate of 5.7 ms. As a result, all the Tatung’s disk-based benchmark results were the poorest of the three machines. Although a disk support software package was included with the system, it did not include a disk-cache utility, as the other two systems did. Disk-cache util¬ ities are becoming standard equipment on 80386 machines, and one could im¬ prove the Tatung TCS-8000’s general performance. The display adapter is an ATI EGA- compatible short card with additional support for Hercules graphics modes and several enhanced EGA modes, including 800 by 560, 640 by 480, and 752 by 410 pixels. Tatung supplied its own EGA CM-1480 monitor, which features an ad¬ ditional monochrome mode: When the monitor is operating in text mode, a switch can change the normal white-on- black display to amber on black, green on black, or bright white on blue. The Tatung system suffers from a poor keyboard. Although the feel of the keys is similar to that of many of the softer key¬ boards, the lack of a firm touch is over¬ shadowed by the poor layout. The layout resembles the new IBM Enhanced 101- key layout at first glance, but there are continued AUGUST 1988 • BYTE 163 Everex Step 386/20, Proteus 386A, Tatung TCS-8000 APPLICATION-LEVEL PERFORMANCE WORD PROCESSING Everex 386/20 Proteus 386A Tatung TCS-8000 DATABASE Everex 386/20 Proteus 386A Tatung TCS-8000 Xy Write 111+ 3.52 Med/Lrg Med/Lrg Med/Lrg dBASE 111+ 1.1 Load (large) :14 :13 :13 Copy :51 :50 1:42 Word count :02/:16 :02/:17 :03/:22 Index :19 :19 :23 Search/replace :04/:20 :05/:22 :05/:23 List 1:52 2:56 3:44 End of document :02/:13 :01/:13 :02/:14 Append 1:40 1:35 2:03 Block moves : 10/: 10 : 10/: 10 :11/:11 Delete :02 :02 :03 Spelling check :07/:47 :07/:50 :09/1:02 Pack 1:19 1:36 2:30 Microsoft Word 4.0 Count :17 :16 :19 Forward delete :11 :11 :14 Sort 1:16 1:15 1:23 Aldus PageMaker 1,0a Load document :11 :05 :16 □ Index: 1.55 1.45 1.06 Change/Bold :21 :23 :28 Align right :16 :20 :21 SCIENTIFIC/ENGINEERING Cut 10 pages :16 :17 :19 Everex 386/20 Proteus 386A Tatung TCS-8000 Place graphic :04 :05 :05 AutoCAD 2.52 Print to file 1:40 1:44 2:02 Load SoftWest :38 :5 7 2:01 Regen SoftWest :26 :45 :47 □ Index: 3.06 2.73 2.31 Load StPauls :10 :19 :15 Regen StPauls :05 :09 :09 SPREADSHEET Everex 386/20 Proteus 386A Tatung TCS-8000 Hide/redraw 8:48 14:37 15:22 Lotus 1-2-3 2.01 STATA1.5 Block copy :02 :03 :03 Graphics 1:27 1:17 2:17 Recalc :01 :01 :01 ANOVA :14 :23 :28 Load Monte Carlo :15 :16 :16 MathCAD 2.0 Recalc Monte Carlo :04 :03 :03 IFS 800 pts. :12 :22 :23 Load rlarge3 :04 :04 :04 FFT/IFFT1024 pts. :13 :26 :25 Recalc rlarge3 :01 :01 :01 Recalc Goal-seek :03 :03 :03 □ Index: 3.68 2.26 1.94 Microsoft Excel 2.0 Fill right :04 :04 :05 COMPILERS Everex 386/20 Proteus 386A Tatung TCS-8000 Undo fill 1:26 1:28 2:01 Microsoft C 5.0 Recalc :01 :01 :01 XLisp compile 3:33 4:20 4:51 Load rlarge3 :20 :22 :26 Turbo Pascal Recalc rlarge3 :01 :01 :01 Pascal S compile :04 :05 .06 □ Index: 3.37 3.20 2.98 □ Index: 2.75 2.22 1.92 All times are in minutes:seconds. Indexes show relative performance; for all indexes, an 8-MHz IBM PC=1. LOW-LEVEL PERFORMANCE 1 CPU Everex Proteus Tatung DISK I/O Everex Proteus Tatung VIDEO Everex Proteus Tatung 386/20 386A TCS-8000 386/20 386A TCS-8000 386/20 386A TCS-8000 Matrix 3.04 3.19 3.54 Hard Seek 4 Text String Move Outer track 3.33 3.28 3.31 ModeO 9.12 16.53 22.02 Byte-wide 20.05 31.25 29.42 Inner track 3.31 3.33 3.30 Mode 1 9.09 16.51 22.01 Word-wide Half platter 10.00 6.64 13.29 Mode 2 8.59 16.55 21.68 Odd-bnd. 25.05 25.29 29.59 Full platter 12.56 8.35 16.64 Mode 3 8.57 16.55 21.68 Even-bnd. 10.00 15.65 14.74 Average 7.30 5.40 9.13 Mode 7 N/A 16.87 N/A Sieve 19.10 20.00 22.50 DOS Seek Test Sort 14.29 21.48 25.00 1-sector 11.97 8.25 18.47 average 8.84 16.60 21.85 32-sector 41.90 41.82 64.30 Graphics □ Index: 4.07 3.22 3.01 File I/O 5 CGA: Seek 0.11 0.13 0.11 Mode 4 1.70 1.56 2.00 FLOATING POINT 2 Read 1.09 1.16 0.98 Mode 5 1.65 1.54 2.01 Everex Proteus Tatung Write 1.01 1.14 1.14 Mode 6 1.67 1.65 2.01 386/20 386A TCS-8000 1-megabyte EGA: Math 7.18 32.52 27.99 Write 6.89 7.33 8.55 Mode 13 3.48 3.35 3.98 Error 3 0.00E+00 0.00E-MD0 O.OOE-tOO Read 7.03 7.66 8.22 Mode 14 3.59 3.65 4.27 Sine(x) 3.30 14.37 11.17 Mode 16 3.70 3.70 4.12 Error 2.00E-09 2.00E-09 2.00E-09 □ Index: 1.41 1.44 1.17 Graphics e x 3.19 12.10 9.76 average 2.63 2.57 3.06 Error 1.00E-09 1.00E-09 1.00E-09 □ Index: 1.59 1.17 0.94 □ Index: 5.96 1.42 1.74 N/A = Not applicable; mode not supported by graphics adapter. CONVENTIONAL BENCHMARKS 1 All times are in seconds. All figures were generated using the 8088/8086 version (1.1) of Small-C (16-bit integers). Everex Proteus Tatung Figures for 80386 machines do not use 80386-speafic instructions. 386/20 386A TCS-8000 2 The floating-point benchmarks use 8087-compatible instructions only. 1 IMPAPk' 170 no 623.40 507.90 3 The errors for the floating-point benchmarks indicate the difference between expected and actual values, correct to 10 digits or rounded to 2 digits. Livermore Loops 6 4 Times reported by the Hard Seek and DOS Seek are for multiple seek operations (number of seeks performed (M FLOPS) 0.17 0.04 0.05 currently set to 100). Dhrystone (MS C 5.0) 5 Read and write times for the File I/O benchmarks are in seconds per 64 Kbytes. (Dhry/sec) 6793 5945 5291 6 For the Livermore Loops and Dhrystone tests only, higher numbers mean faster performance. For a full description of all the benchmarks, see “Introducing the New BYTE Benchmarks," June BYTE. 164 BYTE- AUGUST 1988 REVIEW ‘Cumulative applications index. Graphs are based on indexes at left and show relative performance. Everex Step 386/20 VARIATIONS ON THE 20-MHZ THEME some variations in key positions. The system’s documentation includes four binders of material, two of which are supplied by Microsoft for the Tatung version of MS-DOS 3.21 and for GW- BASIC. The other two manuals are the Tatung user’s guide and technical refer¬ ence; these two suffer severely from con¬ fused English, spelling and grammatical mistakes, and poor organization and in¬ dexing. Information is scrambled throughout the manuals, and not much effort was spent keeping complex and technical information separate from the standard user information required to set up and operate the system. A poor set of documentation makes it difficult to take a computer system seri¬ ously. The cost of writing documentation is small compared to developing and dis¬ tributing an 80386-based computer sys¬ tem, yet better documentation would pro¬ duce a big benefit for both the manufacturer and the user. The TCS-8000 has a 1-year parts and labor warranty; service is provided by Tatung. In general, while the Tatung system did not fail or break down, it didn’t have any outstanding features. Its quirky key¬ board and generally ordinary perfor¬ mance put it near the bottom of the list when compared to the other systems available. A new manual, better support software, and a new keyboard could make the system a reasonable, if unre¬ markable, 20-MHz 80386 choice. Proteus 386A The Proteus approach to personal com¬ puters is to be a hardware supermarket. Its catalogs include a wide variety of hardware options, and you order them in whatever combination you want. Proteus offers support and service with a 15- month on-site warranty with each of its systems. For users who don’t have the courage or the time to take the cover off their system units every time something goes wrong, a comprehensive support system like Proteus’s can be very welcome. The Proteus 20-MHz 80386 system comes with a socket for an optional 80287 math coprocessor. The keyboard controls the system’s operating speed and cache memory controller. The Ctrl- Alt-Plus and -Minus keys switch the op¬ erating speed between 20 MHz and 6 MHz, and the Ctrl-Alt-Left-Shift-Plus and -Minus keys enable or disable the SRAM cache memory when the system is running at 20 MHz. The cache is always disabled at 6 MHz, because at that speed continued AUGUST 1988 • BYTE 165 REVIEW VARIATIONS ON THE 20-MHZ THEME Tatung TCS-8000 Proteus 386A Everex Step 286/20 Company Tatung Co. of America, Inc. Proteus Technology Corp. Everex Computer Systems Division 2850 El Presidio St. 377 Route 17 48431 Milmont Dr. Long Beach, CA 90810 Airport 17 Center Fremont, CA 94538 (213) 979-7055 Hasbrouck Heights, NJ 07604 (201)288-8629 (800) 356-4283 Components Processor: 80386 running at 20 Processor: 80386 running at 20 Processor: 80386 running at 20 MHz, switchable to 8 MHz; socket MHz, switchable to 6 MHz; socket MHz, switchable to 10 or 7 MHz; for optional 10-MHz 80287 or for optional 10-MHz 80287 math optional 20-MHz 80387 math 80387 math coprocessor coprocessor coprocessor Memory: 1 megabyte of 16-bit Memory: 4 megabytes of 32-bit Memory: 2 megabytes of 32-bit two-wait-state DRAM standard on zero-wait-state DRAM on zero-wait-state DRAM on motherboard, expandable to 16 motherboard, expandable to 16 motherboard, expandable to 16 megabytes megabytes; 64K bytes of 45-ns megabytes; 128K-byte 25-ns Mass storage: 1.2-megabyte 5V4- SRAM cache memory SRAM cache memory, inch floppy disk drive; optional 40- Mass storage: 1.2-megabyte 5V4- expandable to 256K bytes megabyte 5V4-inch hard disk drive inch floppy disk drive; optional Mass storage: 1.2-megabyte 5V4- Display: Optional Enhanced EGA 720K-byte 3V2-inch floppy disk inch floppy disk drive; optional 80- card with Hercules emulation; drive; optional 320-megabyte 51/4- megabyte hard disk drive optional Tatung CM-1480 EGA inch hard disk drive Display: Optional Everex EGA monitor Display: Optional Everex EVGA card; optional Everex EGA monitor Keyboard: 101-key Modified enhanced EGA with Hercules Keyboard: 101-key Modified Enhanced keyboard emulation and high-resolution Enhanced keyboard I/O interfaces: One DB-25 parallel EGA display modes; optional NEC I/O interfaces: 1 -to-1 interleave port; one DB-9 serial port; six 16- MultiSync II display monitor floppy/hard disk drive controller; bit and two 8-bit expansion slots Keyboard: 101-key Modified one DB-9 serial port; one DB-25 Other: Phoenix Technologies Enhanced keyboard parallel port; six 16-bit, one 8-bit, BIOS with ROM-based Setup I/O interfaces: One DB-9 and one and one dual 32-bit or 8-bit utility; hardware reset switch DB-25 serial port; one DB-25 expansion slot parallel port; six 16-bit and two 8- Other: Front-panel LED status bit expansion slots display; hardware reset switch; Other: American Megatrends speaker disable switch; Everex BIOS with ROM-based Setup Enhanced American Megatrends utility; hardware reset switch BIOS with ROM-based Setup utility Size 63/4 x 22 V 2 x 18Vi inches; 591/2 6% x 2iy 3 x 171/3 inches; 54 7 x 22 x 1 7 V 2 inches; 58 pounds pounds pounds Software MS-DOS 3.21 jGWBASIC 3.2; MS-DOS 3.30; GWBASIC 3.3; MS-DOS 3.3; GWBASIC 3.3; Tatung display drivers; MiniScribe Everex EVGA utilities; SpeedStor Everex Magic I/O support disk management and diagnostic disk caching and utility software software; Everex EGA display software adapter support software Options Monochrome display adapter: $99 720K-byte 3V2-inch floppy disk 80387-20 coprocessor: $1495 Hercules/EGA card: $189 drive: $98 Weitek 1167 math coprocessor VGA card: $595 20-megabyte to 320-megabyte board: $1995 hard disk drives: $261 to $2895 40-megabyte hard disk drive: Everex EGA card: $139 $550 Everex EVGA card: $269 80-megabyte hard disk drive: 14-inch monochrome monitor: $795 $129 Everex EGA card: $169 EGA monitor: $375 NEC MultiSync II monitor: $675 Everex EGA monitor: $399 Documentation Tatung TCS-8000 User’s Manual; MS-DOS User’s Guide; GWBASIC Everex System 386 User’s Guide; Tatung TCS-8000 Technical Manual; Everex Magic I/O Adapter NEC Everex Magic I/O operating Manual; MS-DOS User’s Guide; reference; Everex EVGA Display manual GWBASIC Manual Adapter reference; SpeedStor disk utility software reference; Proteus User’s Guide Price Standard system with 1 megabyte Standard system with 1 megabyte Standard system with 1 megabyte of RAM, 1.2-megabyte 51/4-inch of RAM, 64K-byte cache, floppy/ of RAM, 64K-byte RAM cache, floppy disk drive, and floppy/hard hard disk drive controller, and 1.2- floppy/hard disk drive controller, disk drive controller: $3500 megabyte 51/4-inch floppy disk and 1.2-megabyte floppy disk System as reviewed: $5288 drive: $3190 drive: $4399 System as reviewed: $8522 System as reviewed: $6437 Inquiry 883. Inquiry 884. Inquiry 885. 166 BYTE • AUGUST 1988 Without question, Princeton’s PSC-28 and PSM-03 monitors will bring you the ultimate in VGA performance. Princeton was the first to offer truly compatible VGA dedicated monitors. Our PSC-28 is a 770 x 570, .28mm dot pitch, high resolution analog color monitor that can display an infinite number of colors. The PSC-28 also features a convenient color button for green, amber or cyan text. The PSM-03, a high resolution analog monochrome monitor gives you outstanding 800 x 630 resolution, and the ability to display infinite shades of gray. Plus sharp crisp graphics and character definition from its dynamic focusing circuitry. Both monitors are compatible with IBM PC* XT* AT* PS/2, Apple Macintosh SE* and compatible personal computers. Each gives you full compatibility with the leading VGA adapter cards including the QuadVGA and VEGA VGA. So if VGA meets all your needs (and you don’t require the additional flexibility of our famous ULTRASYNC and MAX-15 autosynchronous monitors), investigate the cost/performance value of the PSC-28 and PSM-03. Unsurpassed quality, service and performance make it hard to beat Princeton monitors. We offer better value than our competition. We call it the Visible Edge. For answers to all your questions about VGA compatible monitors, contact us at 601 Ewing Street, Building A, Princeton, New Jersey 08540 (609) 683-1660, x 810. *Requires proper adapter card PRINCETON Circle 178 on Reader Service Card THE VISIBLE EDGE AUGUST 1988 -BYTE 167 TURN-POINT AMERICA RAMCHIP 41256 -10 lOOj ippppapp ! IT Fi mmm filUfiij ; : -^r • 01‘JWtX‘M SUPER MiG ftivA 0«S -‘.it [S- MAOE i H^TXlV/AH R Q .C aiH iiii»iuu»i(nmi(»t!i)> i a) 80286 Motherboard — 12.5 Mhz 0 wait state, Norton SI 15.3, socketed for 4 Mb DRAM, EMS software included. b) 80386 Motherboard — Available in 16/20 Mhz and 20/25 Mhz versions, full AT size or XT size, socketed for 2 Mb or 8 Mb DRAM. c) VGA Card — 100% register compatible with IBM, resolutions up to 1024x768x16 colors, hardware zoom, pan, and scan, application driver software included. d) Super Multi I/O — Floppy controller for 1.44Mb thru 360k, 2 serial, 1 parallel, 1 game port. "... I picked the Turnpoint 386 board as my first choice... Overall, it was the best buy.. .combining solid perfor¬ mance with a good price." Don Crabb, Byte, June 1988 Please call our toll free line for distributor pricing. All of Turn-Point America's products carry a one year parts and labor warranty. Visa, MasterCard, and COD accepted. Circle 245 on Reader Service Card TRADEMARKS and REGISTERED TRADEMARKS: IBM - International Business Machines Soles 1-800-247-6413 Tech Support (702) 746-1818 Turn-Point America eclat corporation 3495 N. McCarran Blvd. Reno, NV 89503 Telex: 650 308 4898 MCI Fax: (702) 746-2306 REVIEW VARIATIONS ON THE 20-MHZ THEME Circle 3 on Reader Service Card the standard DRAM is fast enough to keep up with the processor at all times. The front panel features a hardware reset switch for desperate moments. The sys¬ tem Setup program is in ROM and can be accessed during boot-up. In the review system, the Proteus motherboard came with 4 megabytes of 100-ns DRAM for the main memory and 64K bytes of 45-ns SRAM for the cache memory, both in DIP chips installed in sockets. Additional system memory re¬ quires an AT-style expansion card. The motherboard has eight slots: six 16-bit and two 8-bit. The EGA/VGA and paral¬ lel/serial cards take both 8-bit slots, and the floppy/hard disk drive controller card takes a 16-bit slot. This leaves five 16-bit slots free. As configured, the re¬ view system lists for $8522. The computer has space for five half¬ height disk drives. The review unit in¬ cluded a standard 1.2-megabyte 5 *4-inch floppy disk drive and an optional 720K- byte 3V6-inch floppy disk drive. The hard disk drive was a full-height Maxtor XT-4380E 320-megabyte ESDI (en¬ hanced small device interface) drive. The Coretest rated this drive as having a data transfer rate of 212.5K bytes per second, an average seek rate of 13 ms, and a track-to-track rate of 3.7 ms. Although the Proteus 386A uses a hardware cache memory system, its per¬ formance on memory-intensive bench¬ marks is not appreciably different from the Tatung system, which does not have a cache. Disk-intensive tests, however, show excellent performance due to the high-performance ESDI hard disk drive. This disk comes with SpeedStor disk management and caching software, which allows the entire disk to be split up into only three DOS partitions, two of which are larger than 32 megabytes. With the SpeedStor software cache in¬ stalled in extended memory, the disk benchmark times dropped dramatically, some running as much as 25 times faster; but even without the cache, the disk’s 13- ms average access time greatly boosted system performance. For someone in¬ vesting in a 20-MHz 80386 system, a high-speed hard disk drive is an essen¬ tial, and the disk drives that Proteus sup¬ plies are more than worth the money. The Proteus 386A uses an Everex EVGA card that can generate either TTL (EGA-style) or analog (VGA-style) out¬ put signals and is an extremely flexible display device. In addition to the stan¬ dard device drivers, the EVGA software utilities include a wide selection of in¬ stallable font files that replace the EGA’s standard fonts with either more attrac¬ tive, more decorative, or more compact fonts, including one suitable for 132-col¬ umn text displays. The card comes with device drivers to support a variety of high-resolution display modes for Auto¬ CAD and Microsoft Windows. Proteus supplied a very nice NEC MultiSync II monitor with the review unit. The Proteus User’s Guide comes in a small three-ring binder and is well orga¬ nized and easy to read. It includes a “New Users” section for beginners and a “For Advanced Users” section for more experienced owners. The Proteus keyboard is another “clone keyboard.” Its layout resembles the IBM Enhanced keyboard, except that the Backspace and backslash/vertical bar keys assume their older AT positions. The keyboard offers no tactile feedback at all, and the keys offer so little resis¬ tance to pressure that it’s a wonder they spring back again. A better keyboard de¬ sign would help this system a lot. If it’s used with a replacement key¬ board or as a file server on which the keyboard gets little use, the Proteus 386A is a reasonable performer with a solid backing of warranty support and repair service. It is worthy of serious consideration in disk-intensive opera¬ tions, provided you can tolerate the minor annoyances in the system. Everex Step 386/20 In several respects, the Everex Step 386/20 is the outstanding member of this group of machines. Its appearance sets it apart right from the start, with a flashy front-panel LED text display, speed and control switches, and a collection of indi¬ cator LEDs all protected by a sliding transparent cover. The text display tracks the progress of the system’s power-on self-test and boot procedure, and from then on it continuously displays the disk drive, cylinder, and head most recently accessed by the disk drive con¬ troller system. The front panel provides three control switches for selecting the system’s oper¬ ating speed at power-up, turning the sys¬ tem speaker on or off, or causing a hard¬ ware reset to occur. The system can operate at either 20, 10, or 7 MHz, and the Ctrl-Alt-Plus and -Minus key combi¬ nations allow you to speed up or slow down the processor. The system includes an optional 20-MHz 80387 math copro¬ cessor whose speed matches the CPU and which is synchronized with it at all times. The review system has a list price of $6362; it came equipped with 2 mega- continued The best Modula-2 compilers for PCs and compatibles Taylor Modula-2 The professional high-performance compiler for PCs: the fas¬ test compiler in the world! * unrivalled speed of compilation 7,000-10,000 lines per minute (80286, 8 MHz). * excellent code Mini-computer standard global optimisation. Code per¬ forms 1580 Dhrystone tests per second! (80286,8 MHz) * ultra-compact high code density and a library of unrivalled compactness (23 modules in a total of 13K!) * completely standard implementation Follows N. Wifth's standard for Modula-2. BIOS indepen¬ dent - uses MS/PC DOS exclusively. * easy to use Straightforward user interface. Comprehensive documen¬ tation for system programmers. * Guarantee and support One year guarantee. Maintenance contracts available. Swiss quality product. TaylorModula-2 $ 900 Demo disk 1 $ 10 M2SDS $99 The professional Modula-2 software development system M2SDS comprises the following features in an easy-to-use window environment: - modem, syntax-driven editor - fast compiler - linker producing EXE programs -unique library manager - comprehensive standard library There are a vast number of tools, toolboxes, demo disks, pub¬ lic domain programs and books for M2SDS - probably more than for any other development system! M2SDS was used for the writing of the Farsight integrated business software pack¬ age! ; Demo disks $ 10 JPI-Modula-2 A reasonably-priced Modula-2 compiler with a c envifphment, integrated Make function $149 The Modula-2 people: /MW INTERFACE [Mm technologies 3336 Richmond, Suite 323 Houston, TX 77098-9990 (713) 523 8422 Dealer inquiries welcome International Austria: 0222/4545010 United Kingdom: 01/6567333 Belgium: 071/366133 Germany: 02983/8337; eFrance: 20822662 0731/26932; Italy: 02/405174 0821/85737; Scandinavia:+45/3/512014 04106/3998; Switzerland: 01/9455432 0531/347121 A. + L. Meier-Vogt Im Spaten 23 CH-8906 Bonstetten/ZH Switzerland Tel. (41)(1) 700 30 37 AUGUST 1988 • BYTE 169 "BorlancfrOsborne/ McGraw-Hill offers you the only full line of endorsed hooks on Quattro. These titles combine Borland’s own technical expertise with Osborne/McGraw-H ill’ s publishing savvy. With these official Quattro titles, you’ll have a com¬ prehensive library that keeps pace with you as you develop greater 'skills with Quattro. Philippe Kahn, President & CEO, Borland International, Inc. by Lisa Biow Guides you through a step-by-step introduction $19.95 600 pp. ISBN: 0-07-881347-6 The Professional Spreadsheet by Stephen Cobb Gets you up and running fast with basic to more advanced techniques. $21.95 584pp. ISBN: 0-07-881330-1 Quattro^: Secrets, S o iutiuns, S h orients by Craig Stinson Unveils a clever selection of Quattro tricks. $21.95 650pp. ISBN: 0-07-881400-6 Available: 8/88 by Stephen Cobb Unlocks Quattro \s full power for serious business. $22.95 600pp. ISBN: 0-07-881367-0 Reference by Yvonne McCoy Details every Quattro feature, command, and function. $24.95 666pp. ISBN: 0-07-881337-9 Quattro®: The-Pocket Reference by Stephen Cobb Puts essential commands and features at your fingertips. $5.95 128pp. ISBN: 0-07-881378-6 ORDER TODAY! Available at Fine Book Stores and Computer Stores Everywhere or CALL TOLL FREE 800-227-0900 Visa, MasterCard. & American Express Accepted Osborne McGraw-Hill 2600 Tenth Street Berkeley, CA 94710 Circle 4 on Reader Service Card REVIEW VARIATIONS ON THE 20-MHZ THEME bytes of 120-ns DRAM on SIMMs and 64K bytes of 25-ns SRAM in socketed DIP chips for the cache memory. You can add additional memory via a propri¬ etary 32-bit expansion slot; up to 16 megabytes of memory can be added at exactly the same performance level as the original system-board RAM. The motherboard has eight slots—six 16-bit and two 8-bit. The floppy/hard disk drive controller uses a 16-bit slot, and the Everex EGA and parallel/serial cards both use 8-bit slots. One 8-bit slot shares space with the 32-bit memory-expansion connector. The system uses a very fast SRAM cache, and the resulting performance shows a noticeable improvement over the other two systems (which were quite close to each other in system speed). The benchmark results show clearly superior performance across the board. The Everex memory system definitely makes a difference. The Step 386/20 has room for five half-height devices. Data storage in the review system consisted of a standard 1.2-megabyte 5 *4-inch floppy disk drive and a Toshiba MK-56FB 72-megabyte hard disk drive with an RLL (run-length- limited) controller. The Coretest indi¬ cated that the Toshiba drive had a data transfer rate of 490K bytes per second, an average seek time of 27.5 ms, and a track-to-track time of 5.6 ms. Video display was handled by an Everex EV-659 EGA/parallel card. I used an NEC MultiSync II monitor with the review system. The system came with a number of utilities, but without an operating sys¬ tem; I used the MS-DOS 3.3 shipped with the Proteus system. The company says that it is now shipping DOS 3.3 with the system. The utility software includes test and diagnostic programs and a RAM disk and disk-cache utility. The system Setup program is in ROM and is accessed during boot-up. The keyboard itself appears to be iden¬ tical to the one used by Proteus, with the same soft feel and poor tactile feedback. The Everex Step 386/20 comes with a 1-year on-site warranty for parts and labor. Service is handled by National Computer Service and covers the U.S. and Canada. The manual for the system was avail¬ able only in a prerelease photocopy form, but it was a well-organized document. A printed version is now available. The manual contains little extraneous mate¬ rial and gets to the point clearly and quickly. Additional documentation sup¬ plied for the monitor (from NEC) and the I/O adapter card was also up to the same standard. On the Bench I tested all three computers with a variety of software: Microsoft Windows 1.03, SideKick 1.56, Turbo C 1.0, Quick C 1.0, and BRIEF 2.0. For hardware tests, I used my Everex Evercom 1200-bit-per- second modem and the Microsoft Bus Mouse. Everything worked fine with each computer. The Small-C and Application bench¬ marks tell the whole story. The Everex Step 386/20 took the honors in the CPU test. This speed difference can be attrib¬ uted to the SRAM cache combined with the fast 100-ns main memory. The Pro¬ teus 386A put in a good second-place performance, with the Tatung TCS-8000 showing a respectable third. The FPU tests went hands down to the Everex Step 386/20—not surprisingly, since :t was equipped with a 20-MHz 80387 while the other machines were running 10-MHz 80287 coprocessors. The File I/O test went to the Proteus 386A. It was running a 320-megabyte Maxtor with a very fast (13-ms) access time. The Video test gives the relative speed of the video cards; in this case, the Everex Step 386/20 (running—what else—an Everex card) was the leader. The Application tests ranked the three in this order: Everex Step 386/20, Pro¬ teus 386A, and Tatung TCS-8000. The Everex Step 386/20 pulled ahead with the combination of its SRAM cache, fast math coprocessor, and efficient hard disk drive. The Proteus 386A placed a close second, with the Tatung TCS-8000 trailing the pack. Everex Step 386/20 Pulls Ahead If you’re comparing machines by price, the Proteus 386A and Tatung TCS-8000 offer good value. The Proteus 386A has the advantage of a superior warranty, and you can order the computer with the options you want. But if you’re betting on a performance and value horse race, the Everex Step 386/20 wins by several lengths. It features good performance and a convenient front panel, and it is manufactured and supported in the U.S. As these early entries into this high¬ speed market show, a careful selection of well-coordinated components can pro¬ duce a true high-speed powerhouse system. ■ Ed McNierney is a principal engineer at Lotus Development Corp. and lives in Groton , Massachusetts. He can be reached on BIX as “meed. ” Tools and Toolboxes Modula-2 Applications Generator Amadeus $ 395 Generate Modula-2 programs directly from your own input, and save yourself hours of coding! Graphics M2Graph* $ 65 Controls Hercules cards in Modula-2. M2EGA* ~ $65 Controls EGA cards in Modula-2. Modula Graphics Toolbox I* $ 112 A collection of extremely fast graphics routines for CGA cards written in Modula-2. Modula Graphics Toolbox II* $ 188 Comprehensive package of Modula-2 procedures for all cur¬ rently available graphics cards. Includes grahics window system, font generator, sprite handler, mouse driver, maths routines, as well as pie chart, histogram and line graph func¬ tions etc. • Input/Output LCR-Window Manager* $ 133 Fast, compact window system. M2Windovus* $ 188 Fast, professional window system. Small, high-performance library with integrated menu system and simple mask gene¬ rator. § | ; Modula Mask & Menu Generator* $ 360 Development system for creating masks and menus in Modula-2 source code. Mask, menu and frame editor. Sup¬ ports all colours and attributes. Other Tools M2Prolib $495 The professional library B-Tree ISAM $ 290 Ultra fast database Pascal-Modula Converter $ 59 Converts Turbo-Pascal to Modula-2. RTA-Utility Disk $30 2—lOx faster 1/0, extended MathLib. EMS-Utilities* $188 Make full use of your Megabytes of memory expansion. M2IEEE-lnterface* $ 144 Modular interface to National Instruments IEEE Interface. This is only a small selection from our comprehensive list of tools for Modula-2. Demo disks are available for products marked with an asterisk. Send $ 10 for three demo disks, $ 20 for seven. There is also a wide choice of books and lite¬ rature on Modula-2. We have Modula-2 compilers for the Amiga, HP-UX, IBM/370, PCs (Taylor, M2SDS, JPl), 0$-9 and Sun. The list is constant- Jexas residents add 8% sales tax. international Orders add The Modula-2 people: /MM INTERFACE /MM TECHNOLOGIES 3336 Richmond, Suite 323 Houston, TX 77098-9990 (713) 523 8422 Dealer inquiries welcome international Austria: 0222/4545010 United Kingdom: 01/6567333 Belgium: 071 /366133 Germany: 02983/8337; France: 20822662 0731/26932; Italy: 02/405174 0821/85737; Scandinavia:+45/3/512014 04106/3998; Switzerland: 01/9455432 0531/347121 A. + L. Meier-Vogt Im Spaten 23 CH-8906 Bonstetten/ZH Switzerland Tel. (41 )(1) 700 30 37 Circle 165 on Reader Service Card AUGUST 1988 -BYTE 171 How fast is Fast ? Ten Times Faster* iMmurs TenTime™ Intelligent Caching Disk Controller *Ten times faster than standard AT 16 bit controller cards Waiting for your disk? The TenTime ™ Controller eliminates disk bottlenecks. 10X Faster Access Speed* • 3X - 10X Faster Throughput • 4Mb/sec Transfer Rate* • 16 Bit AT Controller • On-board Cache Ram • DOS/Unix Compatible o Intelligent Cache Routine + data transfer from controller to PC • Zero Latency Time • 1 to 1 Interleave • Elevator Seeks • Automatic Preread • Optional Floppy Control (goggles not included) Circle 122 on Reader Service Card Available for IBM AT, Tandy AT and compatibles (DEALERS: 123) Leading Innovator Since 1978 1829 West Drake Drive, Suite 103, Tempe, Arizona 85283, FAX 602-345-2829, (602) 345-1300 (602) 345-1300 Hardware Review ^ Four Surrogate Mice Trackballs and trackwheels are becoming common for manipulating text and data Jeff Holtzman Clockwise from top left: the MicroSpeed PC Trac, MicroSpeed FastTRAP, Fulcrum Trackball Plus, and Lightgate Felix. I ntrigued by graphic interfaces but hate mice? Then you might try one of the following four pointing devices to get the functionality of a mouse without the hassle. PC-Trac, FastTRAP, and Trackball Plus utilize optomechani¬ cal trackball technology; the fourth, Fe¬ lix, employs a new optical data-tablet technology. I tested serial versions of these four devices on IBM and compat¬ ible equipment; PC-Trac and FastTRAP also come in bus versions, and a Macin¬ tosh version of Felix is available. Generally speaking, mice have some advantages over trackballs, including smaller size and, often, better bundled software. Trackballs, however, are usu¬ ally easier to control, so you may like them better than mice for more detailed operations. If you’re used to a mouse, it may take a while for you to get used to a trackball. But after overcoming your ini¬ tial resistance, chances are you’ll enjoy using it. MicroSpeed, the company that got its start in the DOS world with a clock¬ speed-enhancement accelerator, de¬ signed and manufactures both PC-Trac and FastTRAP (which stands for fast tri¬ axis pointer). These two devices are sim¬ ilar internally and externally—and they even use the same CMOS microcon¬ troller. PC-Trac combines an opto¬ mechanical trackball with three buttons; to that configuration, FastTRAP adds an additional vertically oriented wheel, called a track wheel, that also drives an optomechanical system. PC-Trac and FastTRAP sell for $119 to $169, de¬ pending on the version you choose. The Fulcrum Trackball Plus, put out by Fulcrum Computer Products, is the Volkswagen of trackballs for personal computers. It combines low price ($95) with many mouse and digitizing pad em¬ ulations, and less-than-perfect support for text modes. Budget-conscious buyers and those who require multiple emula¬ tions will find this a satisfactory, if unin¬ spiring, product. Cats hate mice, and Lightgate’s elec¬ tronic Felix is supposed to be a mouse killer. The documentation is full of near¬ religious fervor about Felix’s merits. Hype aside, it turns out that Felix works acceptably for navigating text and graph¬ ics screens. Its software is a little rough, however: Depending on the application you’re running, you must load various RAM-hungry drivers via a large batch file. And the documentation does little to help you figure out how to streamline the process of loading the drivers. But you will like the fact that Felix comes with a special Lotus 1-2-3 driver that makes it practical to use a pointing device with that program. PC-Trac and FastTRAP The serial version of PC-Trac is available for $119, the bus version for $139. Fast- continued AUGUST 1988 -BYTE 173 REVIEW FOUR SURROGATE MICE Name PC-Trac FastTRAP Trackball Plus Felix Type Trackball Tri-axis pointer Trackball Pointing device Company MicroSpeed, Inc. 5307 Randall Place Fremont, CA 94538 (415) 490-1403 MicroSpeed, Inc. 5307 Randall Place Fremont, CA 94538 (415) 490-1403 Fulcrum Computer Products 459 Allan Court Flealdsburg, CA 95448 (707) 433-0202 Lightgate 6202 Christie Ave. Emeryville, CA 94608 (415) 596-2350 Features Microsoft Mouse emulation in hard¬ ware, three buttons, ballistic-gain-con¬ trol software, 200- dot-per-inch resolution; 10K bytes of memory used Microsoft Mouse emulation in hard¬ ware, 2- and 3-axis operation, three buttons, ballistic- gain-control soft¬ ware, 200-dpi reso¬ lution; 10K bytes of memory used 10 mouse and digi¬ tizing tablet emu¬ lations, six buttons, power pack, 100-dpi resolution; 8K bytes of memory used Two emulations, one button, 1 -to-1 pointer-to-screen mapping, 1-2-3 and AutoCAD support, power pack, 320- dpi resolution; 40K bytes of memory used Size 71/2 x 4Va x 21/2 inches; 12 ounces; 6-foot cord 71/2 X 41/4 x 21/2 inches; 12 ounces; 6-foot cord 4V2 X 5 3 /4 X 13/4 inches; 4V2 ounces; 4-foot cord 6x6x1 inches; 12 ounces; 7-foot cord Hardware Needed IBM PC, XT, AT, PS/2, or compatible with one floppy disk drive IBM PC, XT, AT, PS/2, or compatible with one floppy disk drive IBM PC, XT, AT, PS/2, or compatible with one floppy disk drive and a serial port IBM PC, XT, AT, PS/2, or compatible with one floppy disk drive Software Needed MS-DOS 2.0 or higher MS-DOS 2.0 or higher MS-DOS 2.0 or higher MS-DOS 3.1 or higher Documentation PC-Trac User’s Guide; KeyMap User’s Guide; "50 Things to Do with a Used Mouse” FastTRAP User’s Guide; KeyMap User’s Guide; “50 Things to Do with a Used Mouse” 3-page installation instructions; 30- page technical manual 15-page installation guide; 17-page Lotus 1 -2-3 guide Price Serial version: $119 Bus version: $139 Serial version: $149 Bus version: $169 $95 IBM version: $199 Macintosh version: $149 Inquiry 889. Inquiry 890. Inquiry 891. Inquiry 892. Note: The Macintosh version of Felix does not include Hot Spots. Versions for the Mac II and SE were due in July. TRAP costs $149 for the serial version; the bus version is $169. Both devices use the same case, which is about 2Vi inches high at the highest point. The feel of the trackball in both PC-Trac and FastTRAP is smooth and solid. I wish, though, that the FastTRAP trackwheel had more re¬ sistance and its switches required less pressure; these alterations would give it a more consistent overall tactile sense. Because of their overall similarity, I’ll discuss the two devices as one, distin¬ guishing between them only when necessary. When you rotate the trackball, in either the text or graphics mode, the po¬ sition of a special on-screen cursor varies accordingly. When the cursor moves to a menu title bar or icon, you press a button to make the functions represented by that 174 BYTE* AUGUST 1988 menu or icon available for use. Further trackball movement lets you traverse the list of menu items; pushing a button then executes the currently selected function. Text-mode programs seldom include drivers for pointing devices, so many pointer vendors include programs that enable their devices to at least emulate cursor-key motion. MicroSpeed, for ex¬ ample, includes a utility called KEY- MAP. COM that allows trackball motion to send the cursor up, down, left, and right. This utility also lets you program each of the device’s three push buttons to deliver a single keystroke. Each button can also be used alone or in combination with the Shift, Alt, or Control keys, giving you a total of 12 programmable button combi¬ nations to provide functions such as tra¬ versing the menu system of your spread¬ sheet. However, there aren’t enough button combinations to map every func¬ tion of your word processor or spread¬ sheet. KEYMAP.COM would be much more useful if you could program multiple keystrokes for each button-key combination. An editor also lets you define as many as 32 named sets of programmed key substitutions, which are maintained in KEYMAP.COM. To define more than 32 templates, you can create and save pro¬ grams under different names, such as KEYMAP1.COM, KEYMAP2.COM, and so forth. MicroSpeed supplies key sets for WordStar, Lotus 1-2-3, Turbo Pascal, and several others. You can operate both PC-Trac and FastTRAP either in a Microsoft Mouse- continued Circle 93 on Reader Service Card —► 16 Mhz 286 EGA SYSTEM 80286-16 Processor 1 Meg 80NS Ram 1.2 Meg Floppy 1.44 Meg Diskette Drive 40 Meg Seagate ST251 Samsung EGA Monitor w/Card 2-Parallel/2-Serial Ports 101 Key Enhanced Keyboard DOS 3.3 w/GWBasic 1 Year Warranty 30 Day Money Back Guarantee $2295.00 or mg and sprefcommi competitive sue mg grow ighly 1 ro-computer /ay 2000 is a full-serviWand supporPorga? that realizes the key to our success lies in a satisfied jstomer base. One look at the configuration we have listed below and you will see that we have high quality equipment at an incredible price. We have many different configurations available, so call one of.our kncagfedgeable sales people, if 20 Mhz 386 V6 a SYSTEM 80386 Processor Running at 20MHZ 1 Meg 60 NS Ram (Expandable to 8 Megs) 1.2 Meg Floppy Drive _____ _ _ 1.44 Meg Diskette Dr*g 80 Meg Seagate ST4096 J28MS) WD 1006 Controller (1 ter 1 Interlei Samsung Multisynch Monitor w/VGA Board VGA/EGA/CGA/MDA/Hercules and 800x600 Modes 2-Parallei/2-Serial Ports Enhanced Keyboard ase w/275 W£tt Power Supply 80287,and 80387 Sockets ■ DOS 3.3 w/GWBasic 1 Year Warranty 30 Day Money Back Guarantee .00 * ^ ^ Gateway 2000 • P.O. Box 2414 • SkWcity.lA 51107 800-233-8472/712-255-7899 Due to the volatility in the DRAM market, all prices are subject to change. rW*Pjr REVIEW FOUR SURROGATE MICE emulation mode or in native mode. With native mode, you can utilize Fast¬ TRAP’s tri-axis capabilities. Microsoft mode is the default, but you can alter a DIP-switch setting to force booting in na¬ tive mode. In Microsoft mode, you can program the middle button to emulate si¬ multaneous depression of the two outer buttons. Both devices provide an emulated drag mode. Without this feature, you might find it hard to drag a trackball, pressing the button with one finger while you rotate the ball with others. For example, to choose a block of numbers for formatting in Excel, you position the cursor at one comer of the desired range, initiate drag mode by pressing the middle button, move the trackball to select the desired spread¬ sheet cells, and terminate drag mode by pressing the middle button again. The trackball is handy for navigating even a standard text-mode spreadsheet, such as VP-Planner. You can move by row or column much faster with the trackball than even by holding a cursor key down. And with FastTRAP, you can use the trackwheel to page up, down, left, or right, very quickly. If you use WordStar 4.0, the trackball cursor movement is somewhat jerky. You will have better luck with other editors, such as the one in Turbo Pascal that allows the cursor to roam freely about the screen. You can use FastTRAP’s trackwheel in several ways. You can traverse menus without moving the cursor from the cur¬ rent position, traverse the third ( z ) axis in a CAD program, or, in conjunction with a utility supplied by MicroSpeed, page up and down in a spreadsheet or word processor. Even if you’re not doing three-dimen¬ sional CAD work, the trackwheel can come in handy. In AutoCAD, for exam¬ ple, to get at the command menus, nor¬ mally you must move the drawing cursor (cross hairs) from wherever you are to the far right edge of the screen, make your selections, and then move the cross hairs again to wherever you need the cur¬ sor. With FastTRAP, simply rotating the trackwheel activates the menu; you can traverse it by using more rotation, select¬ ing items as usual with the left button. When you move the trackball again, you pick up where you left off with the cross hairs. You must load a separate driver, however, to use AutoCAD and Windows in this mode. Software Drivers You can install either device easily since they both emulate the Microsoft Mouse Test Setup 1 tested each device in this review on two machines: an AST Pre¬ mium/286 (10 MHz, zero wait states) with 1.5 megabytes of Ex¬ panded Memory Specification (EMS) 3.2 memory, a 40-megabyte hard disk drive (ST-251), an Orchid Designer VGA card, and an NEC MultiSync monitor; and an IBM PC XT with 1.5 megabytes of EMS 4.0 memory, a 20-megabyte hard disk drive (ST-225), a Hercules mono¬ chrome graphics card, and a Micro¬ soft Mach 20 accelerator board. On the AST, I used the following software to test each device: Auto¬ CAD 9.0 (VGA mode), Windows 2.0 (in Orchid’s proprietary 800- by 600-pixel, 16-color mode), and AutoSketch (EGA mode); under Windows, I tested several of the desktop accessories, as well as Page¬ Maker 1.0a and Excel. On the IBM, I tested each device with VP-Plan- ner, AutoSketch, and WordStar 4.0, all running under DESQview 2.01. I also tested compatibility with DESQview itself. in hardware. If you have a Microsoft or compatible mouse, you just unplug the mouse and plug in FastTRAP or PC- Trac; the existing mouse driver will allow you to use it just as you would your mouse. For best performance, you should take advantage of MicroSpeed’s software drivers. You can load the drivers via CON¬ FIG.SYS using MAP.SYS, or via AUTO¬ EXEC.BAT using MAP.COM. With either driver, you can specify which serial port the device is connected to, among other parameters. Driver versions 2.0 and higher allow ballistic gain control, a feature that pro¬ vides dynamic speed and distance man¬ agement. For example, when you rotate the trackball slowly, the pointer tra¬ verses only half the screen. But if you ro¬ tate the ball quickly over the same dis¬ tance, the pointer traverses the whole screen. FastTRAP’s documentation consists of a well-written, well-organized 40- page manual that contains both an index and a table of contents. Beginners will find the information presented clearly and logically; advanced users will not find it insulting. Approximately half the book contains technical information on how FastTRAP works, software proto¬ cols and functions, and even a wiring di¬ agram for 9-pin and 25-pin serial ports. (Microsoft charges $25 for this type of optional technical information.) A sepa¬ rate manual discusses how to use KEYMAP.COM. Documentation for PC-Trac was not complete when I wrote this review. The review device came with the FastTRAP manual and semifinal PC-Trac-specific documentation. MultiSpeed says the fin¬ ished version will be shipping by the time you read this review, and it will not in¬ clude the FastTRAP manual. A booklet of cartoons called “50 Things to Do with a Used Mouse” is sent free to PC-Trac and FastTRAP owners when they send in their warranty regis¬ tration card. Trackball Plus Although Trackball Plus is about the same height as the MicroSpeed devices, it has only about half the footprint. The device has a grand total of six push but¬ tons, only some of which are available in any given emulation mode. You change modes by pressing various combinations of buttons, or by using STB.COM from the DOS command line. Emulations include: mice from Micro¬ soft and Mouse Systems; graphics tablets from Houston Instruments, Retrograph- ics, Tektronix, Hitachi, and Summa- graphics (ASCII and binary); and the USI Optomouse. Separate software drivers provide the proper program in¬ terface for the Microsoft and Mouse Sys¬ tems emulations; for the others, the tar¬ get application must have a built-in driver. The Trackball Plus plugs into an RS- 232 serial port; versions are available with both 9-pin and 25-pin connectors. A separate cable runs from the serial port connector to a wall-mount transformer that supplies the unit with power. After plugging in the hardware, you set the de¬ sired mode and then (if necessary) in¬ stall the Microsoft or Mouse Systems driver. Both .COM and .SYS drivers are supplied for these two emulations. Ful¬ crum’s drivers are unlike most mouse drivers that load at the DOS command line: You cannot remove them from memory without rebooting. When you try to install a different driver, you re¬ ceive a Driver already installed message. The trackball itself functions fairly well in graphics applications. It has a good feel, and on-screen motions are smooth. However, there is no way you continued 176 BYTE- AUGUST 1988 “An exceptionalvalue.” U i was impressed. It wins the cost- effective award.” John Dvorak. PC Magazine a nd S capabS s h o^" the fea,ur <* Programs costing 10 V Leonard Hyre Pr\4 ° n - y C ’ PCM Magazine We appreciated those kind words. They helped make MONEYCOUNTS®4.0 one of today's most popu¬ lar accounting/money management programs for home and business. But we couldn’t leave well enough alone. So we're introducing new MONEYCOUNTS 5.0 ...an unbelievable buy at just $29! MONEYCOUNTS® 5.0 balances your checkbook... prepares your budget... manages your cash, checking, savings, credit cards... prints 5 types of financial statements including net worth...3 types of inquiry reports... general ledger, accountant’s trial balance, and graphics. Its fast financial data base handles up to 999 accounts and 100,000 transac¬ tions a year. M0NEYC0UNTS*5.0 now also... ;ed A 4 prints any type of pin-feed check and updates your records automatically estimates your 1988 income tax analyzes financing options, savings programs...computes interest rates, loan payments...prints amortization schedules manages mail lists—zip and alpha sorts- prints labels and index cards provides password protection, fiscal year and pop-up notepad. -and support, VISA, MASTERCARD & COD ORDERS CALL 1 - 800 - 223-6925 (In Canada, call 319/395-7300) MONEYCOUNTS® 5.0 is a CPA-designed money man¬ agement/accounting system you can use for home or business. It’s easy to use, requires no accounting knowledge, is menu-driven with on-line help, has a fast financial calculator, works with monochrome or color monitors, comes with a printed manual and is not copy protected. SAME DAY SHIPPING. Order today and own MONEYCOUNTS® 5.0 for only $29! Add $5 shipping/ handling (outside North America, add $10). Iowa residents please add 4% sales tax. 375 Collins Road NE Cedar Rapids, IA 52402 moneyI COUNTS \ VERSION 5.0 | Dept. B $29 + $5 shipping 375 Collins Road NE I Cedar Rapids, IA 52402 | NAME_| ADDRESS_ I CITY_ I STATE/ZIP_PHONE_ I CHECK □ MONEY ORDER □ VISA □ MASTERCARD □ I CARD #_EXP. DATE No. of Product Price Total Copies Each MONEYCOUNTS® 5.0 (Needs IBM or compatible computer, at least 256k memory, DOS 2.0 or more, two disk drives or hard disk) $ 29.00 Shipping & Handling $ 5.00 $ 5.00 l_ TOTAL AMOUNT Circle 169 on Reader Service Card AUGUST 1988 -BYTE 177 REVIEW FOUR SURROGATE MICE Inside the Trackballs B oth PC-Trac and FastTRAP use 24-pin CMOS microcontrollers from National Semiconductor’s COPS (Controller Oriented Processor System) family. They contain the program, data, and temporary storage, as well as system timing and I/O control. Inputs to PC-Trac include three push buttons and two slotted optical encoders; FastTRAP is similar but has a third encoder plus a trackwheel and a shaft-mounted encod¬ er wheel. The devices have identical cases, but a panel covers the unused trackwheel slot in PC-Trac. Four transistors on a printed circuit board interface the input devices to the microcontroller; except for the push buttons, all the electronics are mounted on one other small printed circuit board. The two boards are interconnect¬ ed by a four-conductor flex circuit. All subassemblies—the PC boards, encoder shafts, switch caps, and cable—are press-fit into the base of the case. Everything is nicely arranged, and the overall impression is one of quality de¬ sign and manufacture. Because of the devices’ low power re¬ quirements (a few milliamperes), they do not need a separate power trans¬ former; as with most mice, they draw the power they require directly from the control lines of the port to which they are connected. The COPS microcontroller is not in¬ terrupt-driven; rather, it continuously scans the six input ports. When it de¬ tects a switch opening or closure, or a trackball or trackwheel motion, it for¬ mats a message that it sends to the host computer via the serial port. In mouse mode, it sends a standard 3-byte mes¬ sage that contains button status and an 8-bit relative x,y displacement. In native mode, it adds a fourth byte that allows the transmission of third-button status and z-axis information from the trackwheel. At the programming level, interface with the mouse driver is accomplished via the standard interrupt 33 hexadeci¬ mal. MicroSpeed’s driver recognizes the standard Microsoft function calls (0 to 19), and it adds 11 extended func¬ tions of its own (64 to 74). A look at the inside of Trackball Plus showed that it was built with less ele¬ gance and economy than the Micro- Speed devices. The PC board is hand- soldered, and traces of flux were evident all over the board. An Intel 8051 running at slightly over 7 MHz provides the unit’s intelligence. A sepa¬ rate 2764 (8K-byte) EPROM contains the control program and data. Like the MicroSpeed devices, the 8051 works on a polled (not an interrupt-driven) basis. Lightgate was notably tight-lipped about Felix’s internal operation. How¬ ever, by both inspecting the device and talking with technical-support person¬ nel, I was able to gather some informa¬ tion. Two orthogonal plastic slides with precision-etched slots serve to interrupt the beams between a pair of orthogonal optical encoders. A proprietary micro¬ processor then processes that informa¬ tion, formats it, and sends it to the host computer. The microprocessor senses changes in the pointer’s velocity and alters the outgoing message rate, there¬ by varying on-screen response. Layout, materials, and construction in Felix are all first-rate. can adjust sensitivity, nor can you use ballistic gain control. In the Microsoft mode, I found the sensitivity satisfactory under Windows and AutoCAD, but unsatisfactory under AutoSketch. In addition, in the Summa- graphics Bit Pad One mode under the version of AutoCAD (9.0) used for test¬ ing, I got no results from operating the alternate cursor button, which should allow you to move the cursor between two locations. According to the manufac¬ turer, this version of AutoCAD precludes the efficient use of the alternate cursor button. Like the MicroSpeed devices, the Fulcrum Trackball Plus supports a drag- emulation mode. A separate program, SETCUR.COM, is supposed to allow the trackball to emu¬ late cursor keys in text applications, but I found this emulation erratic when used under WordStar. It did work with Xy- Write, however. The installation docu¬ ment states, “Use of this function with word-processing programs, where pre¬ cise horizontal control is needed, may be unsatisfactory.” It is. On the other hand, when I used just the supplied Microsoft- emulation driver, I had no trouble navi¬ gating DESQview’s menus with Track¬ ball Plus. Ergonomically, the buttons aren’t up to today’s standards. They are awkward¬ ly located and definitely biased toward right-handed users. In fact, I can’t see how a left-handed person would be able to use them at all. You also have to use too much pressure to activate them. A 30-page technical manual and a 3- page installation guide are included. Neither is written or produced in the style of most of today’s manuals, and nontechnical users may have trouble finding the necessary installation infor¬ mation. However, the company says the documentation and the packaging are be¬ ing redone, and by the time you read this, the updated documentation and packag¬ ing should be available. Felix Protruding through the Felix low-profile hardware case is a single button mounted on a moving shaft. This button normally functions as the left mouse button; the right button is simulated by moving the shaft to the upper-left or upper-right corner and double-clicking. Right-hand¬ ed and left-handed users will find it easy to use Felix since both corners are pro¬ vided. When you double-click in the lower-right corner, Felix enters a “preci¬ sion” mode in which cursor movement is restricted to just a portion of the screen. However, you have to press the button farther down compared to similar de¬ vices, and there is no tactile feedback to inform you when contact has been made. Thus, I found double-clicking under Windows to be slightly tiring. Felix’s software lets you change the button assignments and even move the buttons to the keyboard (i.e., using Felix just for positioning, and using keyboard keys to perform button functions). The software is supplied in both 5 U-inch (360K-byte) and 3 Vi-inch (720K-byte) formats. Felix’s chief claim to fame is a 1-to-l mapping with the screen (in nonprecision mode). When you move the pointer shaft to the upper-left corner of the 1.1- by 1.1-inch active portion of the device, the cursor will be in the upper-left corner of the screen. When you move the pointer to the lower-right corner, the cursor follows suit. In precision mode, a smaller por¬ tion of the screen is mapped to Felix, thereby allowing more accurate position¬ ing in that portion of the screen. Felix’s secondary claim to fame is a feature called “Hot Spots.” Hot Spots continued 178 BYTE* AUGUST 1988 This Software Won’t Run. Without This. A, ___— * -nd that’s the way California Software Products, Inc. wants it. And a host of other big and not-so-big software devel¬ opers who use our Software Sentinel. Tb make sure their successful software is pro¬ tected. So it stays successful. We’ve become used to being seen with top- notch software. A lot of the reason is how our engineers designed the Software Sentinel family. For the developer and the user. Ib make it the most technologically foolproof yet easiest to use software protection key you or CSPI can get. For users of BABY/36 and the thousands of other programs we’re protecting, it’s a cinch to get up and running. They simply plug the Software Sentinel into the PC’s parallel printer port. That’s it. How much easier can it get? Users can even make unlimited backup copies. And run them wherever and whenever they need to—as long as they have the Software Sentinel key. As long as we’re talking success, there’s some¬ thing else you should \ \ know. Right now, our engineers _— —’HLO are putting the finishing touches on a new micropro¬ cessor that we’ll use in a whole new genera¬ tion of software and data protection products. With the same high-performance and high- reliability of our past successes but with many new features. Which no doubt is going to make life even easier for you and CSPI. The Software Sentinel. Making sure soft¬ ware developers stay successful with the suc¬ cessful software they’ve developed. For more information on the Software Sentinel family, contact Rainbow Technologies, 18011-A Mitchell South, Irvine, California 92714; or call (714) 261-0228. Software Sentinel Features: • Runs under DOS and Xenix • Uses algorithm technique, never a fixed response • Minimal implementation • Higher level language interfaces included • Transparent operation % The New SentinelPro™— Half The Former Size, All The Features. ■„r4? RAINBOW TECHNOLOGIES 18011-A Mitchell South, Irvine, CA 92714 • (714) 261-0228 • TELEX: 386078 • FAX: (714) 261-0260 ©1988 Rainbow Technologies, Inc. Software Sentinel and SentinelPro are trademarks of Rainbow Technologies, Inc. BABY/36 is a trademark of California Software Products, Inc. Circle 203 on Reader Service Card (DEALERS: 204) AUGUST 1988 • BYTE 179 REVIEW FOUR SURROGATE MICE are locations at the perimeter of the pointing area that provide keyboard macro functions. By moving the pointer to a Hot Spot and clicking, you can insert a number of keystrokes into the currently running application. There are 12 Hot Spots. You can acti¬ vate each alone or in combination with the Control, Alt, or left or right Shift key, for a total of 60 Hot Spots. Felix comes with a number of predefined sets of Hot Spot macros, an editor for creat¬ ing your own, and a print utility for dis¬ playing and printing them. The Lotus and AutoCAD Hot Spot macros are ex¬ tremely useful for getting at often-used functions quickly. You can utilize Lotus macros remark¬ ably well, so it is practical, and even de¬ sirable, to use Felix with the spread¬ sheet. For example, moving the pointer into the upper-right corner sends a slash (/) keystroke, activating 1-2-3’s familiar horizontal menu. Other Hot Spots let you move to the be¬ ginning or end of the spreadsheet, scroll by row or column, or make large jumps to distant areas of the spreadsheet. Hot Spots that you activate in conjunction with the Alt key let you execute common Lotus functions (e.g., learn and recall modes, and paging up, down, left, and right). You can add 36 custom macros to the other Hot Spot layers. According to the manufacturer, cursor positioning is erratic under DESQview and programs running under it, so I ran my test software directly from DOS. Lightgate is presently working on drivers for Microsoft Windows/386. Except for the less-than-desirable tac¬ tile feedback for the push button, Felix’s overall feel is quite nice. The pointer slides easily, and I had no trouble posi¬ tioning it accurately on the 800- by 600- pixel enhanced VGA screen. Lightgate is correct when it says that the 1 -to-1 pointer/cursor mapping can aid productivity. Running an Application To run an application with Felix, you move to the application’s subdirectory and load Felix drivers, followed by the application itself. For example, to load AutoCAD, you would move to its sub¬ directory and type C>FELIX ACAD. This Felix command actually invokes a fairly lengthy batch file—more than 100 lines in the version tested—that does condi¬ tional testing to determine which appli¬ cation you’re loading, and then loads the appropriate drivers. M0USE.EXE is used for most applica¬ tions, but FLXACAD.EXE loads drivers for AutoCAD and AutoSketch, and FLX- 123.EXE loads the Lotus (or 1-2-3) driver. Another program loads the Hot Spot macro file for the selected applica¬ tion. Then the application itself is run. Processing a long batch file is ineffi¬ cient; a shorter batch file for each appli¬ cation would be an improvement. To speed things up, you can move the appro¬ priate lines for your application to a sepa¬ rate batch file. To avoid unnecessary waiting, Lightgate should have either supplied separate batch files to load each application or written a single software driver that supports all—or at least most—applications. The supplied drivers generally occupy about 40K bytes of memory, about 3 to 5 times as much as most mouse and trackball drivers use. You install Felix by plugging the cable into your 25-pin serial port (or into the supplied 9-pin-to-25-pin adapter, which is then inserted into the port), plugging a small power transformer into an AC out¬ let, and then inserting the coaxial power plug into the rear of the 25-pin connector. An installation program copies files to a subdirectory called \ FELIX on the user’s disk. The program also adds that directory to the path statement in your AUTOEXEC.BAT file. The old version is saved as AUTOEXEC.OLD. According to the manufacturer, a new version (1.05) is due out by the time that this article is in print. Lightgate says the new version will feature support for rela¬ tive mode, for programs such as Dr. HALO. The quality of the documentation is not as good as the quality of the device itself. Here’s an example of the gibberish that permeates the main manual: “Felix buttons use an innovative technology which is about to change your pointing life. Their operation is based on the kinesthetic space created by the little square which is Felix’s travel area. The implementation is our ergonomically in¬ formed solution to the challenges and hazards of input device use. ” Even the sections in which the com¬ pany really is trying to present useful in¬ formation are difficult because of the verbose, self-conscious writing style. To get the device working, I found the READ.ME file and the FELIX.BAT file to be more useful. All in all, the manual needs to be thoroughly reworked to make it eas¬ ier to understand how to set up and use Felix. A separate manual covers using the special 1-2-3 driver software. You will find it more informative and less filled with rhetoric than the main manual. Trackball versus Mouse If you need a pointing device, first you must choose between a mouse and some other device. The main disadvantage of a mouse is that you must have some clear space on your desk on which to operate it. All the devices discussed here overcome that problem. A trackball can also be ad¬ vantageous for fine, detailed work, be¬ cause it’s easy to control the ball with your fingertips. Some mice, however— the new Microsoft Mouse in particular- are light enough to make fingertip con¬ trol possible. Overall, I prefer a mouse because it’s smaller and easier to handle. If you decide against a mouse, Ful¬ crum’s Trackball Plus is easy to set up and use, and it is the least expensive de¬ vice of its type. A developer desiring in¬ formation on the software protocols of the emulated devices might buy one for the documentation alone, because soft¬ ware protocol data regarding the various devices is all conveniently collected in this one manual. However, Trackball Plus suffers from its lack of support for text modes, its nonergonomic buttons, and its right-handed bias. Despite its problems, Felix is an in¬ triguing device. Its positioning system and Hot Spot macro system are top- notch. You will find the push button less than perfect, however, as is the collec¬ tion of software drivers. With more com¬ pact and elegant drivers, rewritten docu¬ mentation, and some form of tactile feedback on the button, Felix will be a product to contend with. Currently, however, the MicroSpeed devices are my favorites. Both are well designed, engineered, and manufac¬ tured, and neither requires a bulky and inconvenient external power transform¬ er. The documentation is excellent, the plug-in-and-go Microsoft emulation makes it easy to get started, and the bal¬ listic-gain-control drivers provide a long- missing capability for MS-DOS machines. FastTRAP costs $30 more than PC- Trac. Viewed simply as a mouse replace¬ ment, it may not be worth the extra ex¬ pense. But if you are working with AutoCAD or want a fast way of paging through your word processor or spread¬ sheet, it is worthwhile. Other developers are working on FastTRAP drivers that may also justify the extra expense. ■ Jeff Holtzman owns Publishing Con¬ cepts, a firm that specializes in evalua¬ tion, verification, and documentation of high-technology products. He lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and can be reached on BIX as “editors. ” 180 BYTE • AUGUST 1988 Unretouched Screen Images Buy The One On The Left And Yfou'll Have To Put It Where The Sun Don’t Shine. The monitor on the right, however, can be placed anywhere you like. Even in direct sunlight. It's the new Flat Technology Monitor from Zenith Data Systems-winner of PC Magazine's coveted "Technical Excellence Award” in the hardware category for 1987. You Have To See Zenith To Believe It So clear. So precise. So lifelike. It's the only monitor with a completely flat screen. A breakthrough that has redefined monitor quality forever. Industry experts are already convinced. And once you see it in person, you'll be a believer, too. Bigger, Brighter, Glare-Free Our Flat Technology Monitor has an impressive 14- inch display. And even though it's bigger, it's 50% brighter than conventional CRT's and it has 70% greater contrast. So you get colors with greater depth and definition that make your reports, charts and graphs come alive like never before. The Flat Technology Monitor is virtually glare-free. So you can work longer without the usual headaches and eyestrain. And that means greater productivity. But to get the whole picture, you have to see it with your own eyes. Backward And Forward Compatibility You also get full compatibility with the high resolution VGA Video generated by IBM's new PS/2® computers. And with Zenith's Z-449 or other VGA-class video cards, you can enjoy CGA, MDA, Hercules and EGA graphics as well. Experience Zenith's Latest Technology Breakthrough Obviously, a mere picture can't do justice to our new Flat Technology Monitor. It demands a face-to-face evaluation. For a hands-on demonstration, call today for the name of your nearest authorized Zenith Data Systems dealer—the Flat Technology Monitor is available in quantities right now. 1 - 800 - 553-0305 Yemth data systems THE QUALITY GOES IN BEFORE THE NAME GOES ON® © 1988, Zenith Data Systems Circle 255 on Reader Service Card Personal System/2 and PS/2 are registered trademarks of IBM Corp. AUGUST 1988 -BYTE 181 PICK BIX BRAINS --———- ---- »W* . .. .With a 10 Day Trial Membership If you’ve thought about joining BIX before but weren’t sure it was what you needed, now is the time to try' it. Because now for a limited time, we’re inviting you to try BIX for 10 days. If at any time during this 10 day trial period you don’t feel BIX has made you a more knowledgeable microcomputer user, we’ll refund your entire registration fee. You pay only for time spent on the system.* (See log-on instructions for hourly rates). Explore BIX in your home or office. Put its power to work for you and un¬ leash your lull microcomputer potential —programming, designing, specifying, researching—and more. Try BIX for 10 lull days and see what it can do for you. Explore more than 160 conferences. Access vendor support. Speak to expert consultants. Research new products and systems, and down¬ load public domain software. Prepare yourself for success It takes a sharp mind and hard work to stay ahead, and having the right tools helps. Today, you can put one of the most powerful instruments for career ad¬ vancement to work for you: BIX. • Learn about new products before they hit the market. • Get quality marketplace feedback on the products you’re thinking of pur¬ chasing before you invest. • Research problems and find the solu¬ tions that no one else has been able to render. • Access some of the most advanced public domain software available in the industry. • Increase your working knowledge of micros to make more confident purchasing decisions and recommen¬ dations. Join BIX and arm yourself with the latest in microcomputer- related information BIX’s exclusive Microbytes newswire gives you complete, daily, up-to-date computer industry information. You’ll gain insight from BYTE editors and writ¬ ers who analyze new products and their potential impact, inform you of the latest mergers and acquisitions, and re¬ port late-breaking news from important seminars and conferences. Talk to colleagues worldwide You’ll stay on top of your company’s business with BIX’s electronic mail service. “Talk” to your east coast, west coast — even European — contacts all in the same day. Or, simply communicate with other BIX users worldwide. Share information and ideas privately, or in conference. Choose any option for online access with a one time $39 membership fee • Use MasterCard, VISA or American Express and begin your 10 day trial use of BIX right now. • The 10 day trial also applies if you open an individual pre-paid account on BIX Trial commences once we open your account and notify you. • Other billing options including qual¬ ified corporate accounts are available. (Sorry, our 10 day trial is not available for these accounts.) Call or write BIX for details. Use credit cards for immediate access or call the BIX Helpline for infor¬ mation on any other payment option at, 1-800-227-2983 (from U.S. and Canada) 603-924-7681 (in New Hampshire and elsewhere). Act now! Our 10 day trial offer is subject to cancellation at any time. •To notify BIX that you wish to discontinue service at any time during the trial period, call the BIX Helpline, and your entire membership fee will be refunded. **BEX can be accessed via Tymnet throughout the U.S. and Canada. For the Tymnet number nearest you, call the BIX Helpline or Tymnet at 1-800-336-0149. tlf your local Tymnet number is a toll call you will receive additional charges from your local phone company at their prevailing rate. ffContinental U.S. Tymnet rates. Rates from other areas are available from BIX. Circle 450 on Reader Service Card BIX is easy to join To log-on to BIX, simply: Set your computer’s telecommunications program for Hill-duplex, 8-bit characters, no parity, 1 stop bit OR 7-bit characters, even parity, 1 stop bit. Use 300 or 1200 baud. Call your Tymnet number ** and respond as follows: Tymnet Prompt You Enter Garble or request for “terminal identifier” a login: bix BIX logo/name: bix.038 Callers outside the U.S. who have a communicat¬ ing computer or terminal and a packet switching account with their host country phone system can reach BIX by entering 310690157800. To commence registration, enter the code listed at the BIX logo/name: prompt. After you register, you’ll automatically be taken to the BIX Learn Conference, an online tutorial that will show you how to begin using the system immediately. Time spent in the Learn Conference is FREE. Complete system documentation will be sent to you within a few days. Access time will be billed at the following hourly rates.f Off-Peak Time S11 /hr. (§9 BIX, $2 Tymnet)ff (7 PM - 6 AM weekdays, all day weekends and holidays) Peak Time S20/hr. (S12 BIX, S8 Tymnet)it (6 AM-7 PM weekdays) BYTE INFORMATION EXCHANGE One Phoenix Mill Lane Peterborough, NH 03458 L ike this Russian Doll, a careful inspec¬ tion of MIRROR II will reveal layer upon layer of carefully crafted fea¬ tures designed to provide you with the best solution to today's and tomorrow's data communication problems. MIRROR II (the Crosstalk® SuperKlone) pro¬ vides a superior reflection of the best in Crosstalk XVI®, at a fraction of the cost. MIRROR II comes com¬ plete with a superset of the Crosstalk XVI® Script language. This Scripting capability and MIRROR ll's background communications mode gives you the power to fully automate your PC communications, and the freedom to use your PC for other tasks while sending or receiving data. • Background communications mode (call or answer) • File transfer protocols including Xmodem (Batch, CRC or Checksum), Crosstalk®, Hayes®, Ymodem and Kermit • Terminal emulations for DEC VT-100/52, IBM 3101 (charac¬ ter or block mode), Televideo 910 / 920 / 925 (character or block mode), Adds Viewpoint, ADM-3A, Data General D210, ANSI and Honeywell VIP7200 • Learn mode for the automatic creation of auto-logon Scripts • Full screen Wordstar-like text editor • Site License (the cost effective way to standardize) • 60-Day, No Questions Asked Money-Back Guarantee MIRROR!.. TM * 69.95 To order, call Toll-Free: 1 - 800 - 634-8670 (In Florida call 904-878-8564). Visa / MasterCard / COD. $5.00 for Shipping and Handling ($8.00 for COD orders) Florida residents please add 5% sales tax. MIRROR II and SoftKIone are trademarks of SoftKIone Distributing Corp. / IBM is a registered trademark of International Business Machines Corp. / WordStar is a registered trademark of MicroPro International / Crosstalk and Crosstalk XVI are registered trademarks of Digital Communications Associates Inc. / Hayes is a registered trademark of Hayes Microcomputer Products Inc. 336 Office Plaza Drive Tallahassee, Florida 32301 Telephone: (904) 878-8564 Telex: 6714280 KLON MIRROR II is designed for use on IBM and 100% compatible microcomputers (including the IBM PS/2 line) running MS-DOS / PC-DOS 2.0 or higher and is not copy protected. 184 BYTE* AUGUST 1988 Circle 219 on Reader Service Card Software Review <3> Unix for the Mac 11 With A/UX, the Mac II becomes a low-end workstation David Betz and Eva M. White S ure, the Macintosh II’s hard¬ ware is as powerful as some workstations, and it even uses a 16-MHz 68020 like the Sun and Apollo workstations. But before you call the Mac II a real workstation, you need to add a powerful operating system that supports multitasking, virtual memory, and networking to a variety of machines: one like Unix, for instance. That’s exactly what Apple’s A/UX 1.0 is all about. It’s a port of AT&T Unix System V Release 2 for the Mac II. How¬ ever, A/UX differs from most other workstation versions because it is based on AT&T System V instead of Berkeley 4. To maintain compatibility with other workstations, A/UX includes important Berkeley Standard Distribution (BSD) 4.2 and 4.3 extensions, such as signals and sockets. A/UX supports up to two additional users (using the Mac II’s serial ports) and the ability to network across an Ethernet using NFS (Network File Sys¬ tem) and TCP/IP (Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol). What really makes A/UX different from most other versions of Unix is that it gives you the ability to run Mac applica¬ tions and to access the Mac’s user inter¬ face Toolbox ROM routines. With these routines, you can write a Unix applica¬ tion with a Mac windowing interface. Unfortunately, this initial release does not provide a point-and-click windowing interface to Unix similar to that of the Mac operating system. In A/UX 1.0, you can run only one Mac application at a time, and the Toolbox routines don’t yet support the Finder, desk accessories, or the printing manager (see “Unix and the Mac Interface” by Rick Daley on page 89 of the Macintosh Special Edition .) To run A/UX, you need a Mac II with a minimum of 2 megabytes of memory and a paged memory management unit (PMMU). A/UX comes installed on an Apple 80SC 80-megabyte hard disk drive. You can get it on either an internal ($4879) or external ($4979) drive. If you buy it on an external drive, you’ll also need an Apple small-computer-system- interface cable system to attach it to the Mac. Also, if you plan to use A/UX as a multiuser system, Apple recommends adding 2 megabytes of memory for each additional simultaneous user. You will also need an EtherTalk card. The 80-megabyte hard disk drive comes preformatted into five partitions: a small Mac Hierarchical File System (HFS) start-up partition (2 megabytes), a large (56-megabyte) partition that com¬ prises the root (/) and user (/usr) Unix file systems, and a 14-megabyte partition that Unix uses as swap space. The re¬ maining two 3-megabyte partitions hold duplicate copies of the eschatology file system, which are used by the auto-re- covery utility. Using A/UX Starting A/UX involves booting the Mac operating system from the start-up parti¬ tion and then launching the sash stand¬ alone shell application. You can choose to either make sash the start-up applica¬ tion or just double-click on the sash icon. Sash opens a window and starts a count¬ down timer that, if allowed to complete the 10-second count, will then start the Unix boot sequence. Interrupting the counter will drop you into the stand¬ alone shell. While the main function of sash is to continued AUGUST 1988 -BYTE 185 REVIEW UNIX FOR THE MAC II A/UXU Type Multitasking operating system Company Apple Computer, Inc. 20525 Mariani Ave. Cupertino, CA95014 (408) 996-1010 Format Apple 80SC 80-megabyte hard disk Language C and assembly Hardware Needed Mac II with a minimum of 2 megabytes of memory and a 68851 PMMU Documentation Getting Started with A/UX A/UX System Overview A/UX Installation Guide A/UX Command Reference (A-L) A/UX Command Reference (M-Z and Games) A/UX Programming Languages and Tools, Volumes 1 & 2 A/UX Programmer’s Reference A/UX Local System Administration A/UX System Administrator’s Reference A/UX Text Editing Tools A/UX Text Processing Tools A/UX Communications User’s Guide A/UX User Interface A/UX Toolbox: Macintosh ROM Interface Price Monochrome system: $9297 Color system: $9897 Internal upgrade: $4879 External upgrade: $4979 Inquiry 904. load Unix, you can also use it to manipu¬ late the files in the A/UX file systems, or the files in either of the two eschatology file systems. Sash provides a subset of the standard Unix file manipulation tools, including mv, cp, and ed, as well as the file system checker f sck and the file sys¬ tem debugger fsdb. Other uses for sash are to partition hard disks, to build A/UX file systems, and to change ker¬ nel-tuning parameters. Standard Unix A/UX comes with all the standard Unix tools for software development, text processing, and communications. The software development tools include com¬ pilers for C and FORTRAN, an assem¬ bler and linker, a source code control system (sees), a program maintenance utility (make), a parser generator (yacc), and a lexical analyzer generator (lex). The text-processing tools include the vi text editor and the nroff and trof f text formatting utilities. Apple also includes a utility license from Adobe to convert the output of trof f to PostScript. For communications, A/UX provides uucp, the Unix-to-Unix copy program, and its associated utilities, which allow multiple Unix systems to communicate through ordinary dial-up connections as well as by hard-wired serial links. The uucp software is the basis of the world¬ wide Usenet network. However, the Use¬ net software itself is not included with A/UX. The system comes with public domain software source code for GNU EM ACS, Kermit, and Unix compression utilities. This software takes up 9 megabytes of disk space, and you can delete it if you need the space. A couple of features unique to A/UX are the auto-configuration and auto-re¬ covery utilities. The auto-configuration utility simplifies the normal Unix proce¬ dure for installing new devices. Under Unix, installing a new device requires editing make files, copying the required drivers, and rebuilding and installing the kernel. To install an A/UX-supported device, you need to shut down A/UX, power off the Mac, install the hardware, bring the system back up using the de¬ vice’s installation disk, and run the installation program on the disk. This in¬ stalls the driver software and reboots A/UX. When A/UX comes back up, the auto-configuration utility rebuilds the Unix kernel to add the new device driver software and then reboots again with the newly created kernel. The auto-recovery mechanism is in¬ tended to guarantee that you can boot Unix into multiuser mode even after fairly severe file system damage has oc¬ curred. This mechanism uses the escha¬ tology file systems to maintain backup copies of all critical Unix files. If, during the boot process, the recovery program detects that any of these files are missing from the main Unix file systems, it re¬ places them with copies from the recov¬ ery file systems. The auto-recovery pro¬ gram also checks for bad blocks on the disk and fixes file protection and owner¬ ship on critical files. The sash utility handles the auto¬ recovery features of A/UX. If sash has trouble performing the Unix boot se¬ quence, it invokes an auto-recovery pro¬ cedure. The full auto-recovery takes about 45 minutes, but you can reduce this time significantly by disabling the block check portion of the auto-recovery pro¬ cess. Even in the case of an abnormal shutdown, like a power failure, the Unix fsck utility that runs as part of the start¬ up sequence can usually fix most prob¬ lems without having to resort to the lengthy auto-recovery process. To test the auto-recovery utility, we renamed the kernel (/unix) to /unix- .save and attempted to reboot the sys¬ tem. When the reboot failed, we invoked the auto-recovery program, which re¬ stored the kernel from one of the recov¬ ery file systems. We found out the hard way that any time you rebuild the kernel, you should be sure to run the two pro¬ grams /etc/eu and /etc/eupdate to up¬ date the files on the recovery file sys¬ tems. This procedure is only mentioned in the ReadMe file on the hard disk. We missed this step the first time, and the auto-recovery utility was unable to re¬ store the kernel. Also, somehow in the process, we managed to delete the back¬ up copy. Fortunately, we were able to use the sash copy utility to move the ker¬ nel manually from one of the recovery file systems. Backup strategies The auto-recovery mechanism is not a substitute for making regular backups, since it can restore only critical system files. It makes no attempt to restore user data files or programs. Auto-recovery is intended only to get the system back up and running after serious failures so that you can use normal backups to recon¬ struct the complete system. Another good reason for making a backup is that when A/UX boots for the first time, it starts out in what is known as single-user mode. In this mode, all the Unix file protection is disabled, and it is very easy for an inexperienced user to do significant damage to crucial files. The safest approach would be to make a back¬ up copy of the 50-megabyte Unix file sys¬ tem using one of the several Unix backup utilities supplied, such as CPI0. Unfortunately, performing a backup isn’t easy. The only backup medium A/UX 1.0 supports is the 800K-byte floppy disk drive (version 1.0 does not support the cartridge tape drive). Since there are about 45 megabytes of files on the system as distributed by Apple, a full backup requires approximately 56 800K- byte floppy disks. continued. 186 BYTE* AUGUST 1988 TrueVista™ Videographics Adapters ^ Just Made Choosing Your Graphics Card You’ve probably seen ourTrueVista products, or you’ve heard about their powerful features like the real-time frame capture, on-board Tl 34010 coprocessor, large frame buffer, NTSC/PAL compatibility and more. Recently, we announced several new products in the series, each with unique potential for your TrueVista Series application^fem video to digital pre-press to image processing. So now, whether your choice is an AT-class platform or the Macintosh® II, you only need one source for your graphics nepds, the TrueVista series. The chart below Jtlines several key differences in the lets. FEATURES ATVista 1M ATVista 2M ATVista 4M NuVista2M NuVista4M BUS AT AT AT NuBus NuBus MAXIMUM 32 bits/pixel ADDRESSABLE 16 bits/pixel RESOLUTIONS 8 bits/pixel 512x512 1024x512 1024x1024 1024x512 1024x1024 2048x1024 1024x1024 2048x1024 2048x2048 1024x512 1024x1024 2048x1024 1024x1024 2048x1024 2048x2048 VMX EXPANSION 2-10 Mbytes 2-10 Mbytes 2-10 Mbytes TBA TBA PRICE $2995. $4250. $5995. $4250. $5995. Now There’s Software You Can Count On, Too. To complete the equation, add in STAGE™, our comprehensive graphics environment for the 34010. Since STAGE is host-independent, it allows you to access the coprocessor directly, regardless of the bus. So your program on the AT can be quickly ported to the Macintosh II. Customers will not be tied to one platform either, as files and programs will be compatible across both hosts. STAGE is currently available for the AT Vista series, and will be available soon for the Nu Vista as well. With the new members of the TrueVista family and the release of STAGE, you now have everything you need to develop exciting new products for the next generation of computer graphics. And many applications are already appearing to assist you in your immediate needs. Contact us to learn more about our products or our third-party developer program and the support available to you. You’ll soon see how you can count on Truevision to provide all your graphics solutions. rp Truevision, 7351 Shadeland Station, Suite 100, Indianapolis, IN 46256 800/858-TRUE INTERNATIONAL: Canada 416/499-9400 France 33-13-952-6253 Italy 39-2-242-4551 Switzerland 41 -1-825-0949 U.K. 44-1-991-0121 West Germany 49-89-612-0010 Other 617/229-6900 Prices quoted are US Domestic suggested retail prices. Macintosh is a registered trademark of Apple Computer, Inc. Circle 244 011 Reader Service Card l] c Truevision, Inc. 1988 REVIEW UNIX FOR THE MAC II Macintosh Toolbox Support Apple supplies several tools with A/UX to support developing applications that use the Mac interface. You use a utility called mf s to move files between the Mac operating-system environment and A/UX. This utility is not capable of han¬ dling HFS floppy disks, so you must for¬ mat 800K-byte floppy disks as Macin¬ tosh File System (MFS) volumes. The launch utility runs applications that were built in the Mac operating system and moved over with mfs. You can debug Mac applications using the standard Unix debuggers adb(l) and sdb(l). The launch utility successfully ran MacPaint 2.0 and MacDraw 1.9.5, but Mac Write 5.0 bombed, giving a mem¬ ory-fault error. However, the error didn’t disable the machine in any way. A/UX comes with a resource compiler (rez) and decompiler (derez) whose source files are compatible with their counterparts in the Mac Programmers’ Workshop (MPW). The rez utility trans¬ lates resource description files to binary files that resource-manager functions in the Toolbox ROM can use. These re¬ sources describe the windows, menus, and dialog boxes that are familiar parts of all Mac applications. The decompiler translates binary resource files back to source form. It is useful for making al¬ terations in existing resource files without having to reconstruct the entire file from scratch if no source is available for it. There are two approaches to develop¬ ing A/UX applications that use the Tool¬ box. You can develop them under the Mac operating system using the tools there, transfer them to A/UX using mfs, and run them using the launch. Or, you can develop, debug, and run them using A/UX tools. Figure 1 shows the library and header files that make up the Tool¬ box and, graphically, how you construct the code portion of an application under A/UX. Figure 2 shows how you con¬ struct the resource file. (Under the Mac operating system, the code portion and resource portion are stored together; under A/UX, these two pieces are in sep¬ arate files.) To build an A/UX application, you must include the appropriate header files in your program source and then link with the Toolbox files libmac.a, low.Id, low.o, and maccrtO.o. The library lib¬ mac.a contains the entry points for the Toolbox functions and variables; low.Id and low.o arrange access to the Mac low- memory globals; and maccrtO.o initial¬ izes the Toolbox interface and the trap dispatch tables and then invokes the main routine of the application. The initialization code also opens a special device driver, called /dev/ uinterO, that sets up access to the screen buffer, handles events in a manner simi¬ lar to the event manager in the Toolbox ROM, tracks the cursor, and sets up the A-line trap handler. Applications access the Mac Toolbox ROM by issuing A-line trap instructions. A/UX handles these trap instructions by continued appname.c- C source code #include /* Include header files */ InitGraf (&qd.thePort) /* Calls to toolbox */ — cc A/UX C compiler Header files declare functions and data types r— Id- A/UXC link editor *-[ appname r /usr/lib/libmac.a - Library contains entry points for all functions and variables /usr/lib/low.ld Script reserves space for global variables /usr/lib/low.o • File contains symbols for global variables /use/lib/maccrtO.o Initialization routine communicates with kernel Executable code file Figure 1: The steps involved in creating an A/UX application that uses the Mac ROM . — appname.r rez source code ' t Resource compiler .appname.res^ Resource i i file H /usr/lib/mac/rincludes/* Resource library defines resource tools Figure 2: The steps involved in creating a resource file . 188 BYTE* AUGUST 1988 / Systat. Because other statistics and graphics packages are not enough. Systat now offers more statistical graphics than any other PC or mainframe package. And we still give you less bulk with more statistics. Statistics Basic statistics, frequencies, t-tests, post-hoc tests Multiway crosstabs with log-linear modeling, association coefficients, PRE statistics, Mantel-Haenszel, asymptotic standard errors Nonparametric statistics (sign, Runs, Wilcoxon, Kruskal- Wallis, Friedman two-way ANOVA, Mann-Whitney U, Kolmogorov- Smirnov, Lilliefors, Kendall coefficient of concordance) Pairwise/ listwise missing value correlation, SSCP, covariance, Spearman, Gamma, Kendall Tau, Euclidean distances, binary similarities Linear, polynomial, multiple, stepwise, weighted regression with extended diagnostics Multivariate general linear model includes multi-way ANOVA, ANOCOVA, MANOVA, repeated measures, canonical correlation Principal components, factor analysis, rotations, components scores Multidimensional scaling Multiple and canonical discriminant analysis, Bayesian classification Cluster analysis (hierarchical, single, average, complete, median, centroid linkage, k-means, cases, variables Time series (smoothers, exponential smoothing, seasonal and nonseasonal ARIMA, ACF, PACF, CCF, transformations, Fourier analysis Nonlinear estimation (nonlinear regression, maximum likelihood estimation, and more). Graphics Overlay plots Drivers for most graphics devices Two dimensional: Error Bars Scatterplots Line and Vector Graphs Vector, Dot, Bubble and Quantile Plots Bar Graphs (single, multiple, stacked, range) Box plots (single and grouped) Stem-and-leaf diagrams Linear, quadratic, step, spline, polynomial, LOWESS, exponential smoothing Confidence Intervals and ellipsoids (any alpha value) Smooth mathematical functions Rectangular or polar coordinates Log and power scales ANOVA interaction plots Histograms (regular, cumulative, fuzzy) Stripe and jitter plots Gaussian histogram smoothing Scatterplot matrices Voronoi Tesselations Minimum spanning tree Maps with geographic projections (U.S. state boundary file included) Chernoff faces Star plots Fourier plots Pie charts Contour plots on regularly and irregularly spaced points Control charts and limits Three dimensional: Data plots Smooth function plots Vector plots Linear, quadratic, spline, least squares surface smoothing Three- dimensional type fonts. Data Management Import/export Lotus, dBase, and DIF files Full screen data editor Full screen text editor Unlimited cases Missing data, arrays, character variables Process hierarchical, rectangular or triangular files, irregular length records Character, numeric, and nested sorts Merge and append large files Unlimited numeric and character variable transformations Subgroup processing with SELECT and BY Value labels and RECODE Statements Macro processor with programming language, screen control, file manipulation, applications generation, and report writing. SYSTAT Systat operates on IBM PCs and compatibles, MS-DOS and CP/M machines, several UNIX minicomputers, and the VAX/Microvax. Menu/windowed Macintosh version also available. Single copy price $795 USA and Canada, $895 Foreign. Site licenses, quantity prices and training seminars available. No fees for technical support. Statistics and graphics available separately. For more information, call 312 864.5670 or write Systat Inc., 1800 Sherman Avenue, Evanston, IL 60201. The following are registered trademarks: CP/M of Digital Research. Inc., IBM PC of IBM. Inc., MS-DOS of Microsoft. Inc., Macintosh of Apple Computer Inc., UNIX of AT&T and VAX of Digital Equipment Corporation. Systat. Intelligent software. Circle 230 on Reader Service Card (DEALERS: 231) AUGUST 1988 • B Y T E 189 v REVIEW UNIX FOR THE MAC II Table Is While the Sun 386U250 is significantly faster than the Mac II running A/UX, in this configuration, the Sun costs about twice as much. Number of Tasks 1 2 4 8 Mac II with A/UX 2.9 4.9 8.2 15.7 SUN 386i/250 2.0 3.0 6.0 12.0 Note: In both cases, the real execution time is reported. The SUN 386i uses a 25-MHz 80386, and the Mac II uses a 16-MHz 68020. switching to supervisor mode and dis¬ patching to code within the A/UX ker¬ nel. Once this code determines that the trap was a Toolbox ROM call, it invokes the trap handler and switches back to user mode. The user-mode trap handler then uses the dispatch tables to call either a ROM-based routine or a RAM-based patch. RAM-based patches update ROM code, as in the standard Mac operating system, and redirect Mac operating-sys¬ tem calls to routines that translate them to equivalent Unix calls. You must then create the resource file containing definition objects such as windows, menus, and dialogs, and com¬ pile it with the rez resource compiler. Finally, to run any programs under A/UX that use the Mac interface, you must have the program toolboxdaemon running as a background process. This program is responsible for setting up the shared memory structures that all Tool¬ box applications use. It is also responsi¬ ble for cleaning up after a Toolbox pro- cess when it exits. This includes removing shared memory structures and windows from the screen. In version 1.0, the shared memory contains mostly cur¬ sor data. Missing Mac User Interface In A/UX, there is no facility like the Mac Finder to launch applications and man¬ age files. A/UX provides three different shells (command interpreters)—the tra¬ ditional Bourne shell (sh), the Berkeley C shell (csh), and the Korn shell (ksh). Each of these shells uses a command-line interface. The closest A/UX comes to having a windowing interface is a sample pro¬ gram, called Term, that lets you open multiple windows, each running the Unix command-line interface. Since this is a sample program, full source code is provided so that you can modify it to suit your own needs. As you would expect with a Mac appli¬ cation, Term lets you move or resize each window. One nice feature is a history mechanism that makes it possible to scroll back through a session to review output that has already scrolled out of the window. Unfortunately, you cannot cut and paste in these windows. Each window acts as a terminal emu¬ lator implementing a subset of the DEC VT-100 control codes. You can also select the font and size of the text in each window. Since A/UX allows only one Toolbox application to run at a time, it isn’t possi¬ ble to run any other program that uses the Toolbox from within the Term program. This means that to run another Toolbox program, you need to close down what¬ ever is going on in each of the windows and exit from the Term program. This OOPS LITE. LESS FILLING. GREAT TASTE Object Oriented Programming (oops) is the most refreshing development ever to hit PC comput¬ ing because it makes programming natural and easy And if you’ve got a thirst for the world’s best selling oops, get your hands on oops Lite, Smalltalk/V Thousands of scientists, engineers, pro¬ grammers and educators have chosen Smalltalk/V because it’s less filling. Unlike other oops which require deep-pocket workstations and a zillion bytes of RAM, Smalltalk/V runs on box-stock PC/XTs and clones with 512K and still has room to develop full-bodied applications. Thousands more have chosen Smalltalk/V because it’s the fastest, easiest way to get a great taste of oops. And that taste has led to satisfying results in everything from finance to medicine to space. These people found that the real value of personal computing isn’t just manipulating a word processor, a spreadsheet or a modem user interface. It is using their PC as a sculptor uses clay And Smalltalk/V with its unique design clarity natural parallel between problem and solution, and forgiv¬ ing nature gets you there with gusto. Smalltalk/V is only $99.95 and comes with the best object oriented programming tutorial money can buy And when you’re ready for something even more potent, move up to new Industrial Strength oops, Smalltalk/V 286 for just $199.95. Both come with our 60 day money-back guarantee. Check out Smalltalk/V at your dealer. If he doesn’t have it, order toll free: 1-800-922-8255. Or write to: Digitalk, Inc., 9841 Airport Blvd., Los Angeles, CA 90045. oops Lite. Everything you’ve ever wanted in a great oops. For less. 190 BYTE* AUGUST 1988 Circle 77 on Reader Service Card (DEALERS: 78) REVIEW UNIX FOR THE MAC II limits the usefulness of the program as a standard interface to A/UX. Expanded Networking If you want to go beyond the three users that can be accommodated by the console and the two serial ports, you can buy an Ethernet card and use the networking software that comes with A/UX. A/UX supports Sun Microsystems’ NFS, which allows a Mac II running A/UX to participate in a network of workstations and hosts and to share files. NFS makes it possible to treat files on other systems as if they were resident on your local machine. There is also support in A/UX for the TCP/IP network protocol. This protocol and a number of utilities included with A/UX let you copy files between nodes on a network and establish remote log-in sessions with other nodes. AU/X doesn’t support AppleTalk, so if you want to connect a LaserWriter printer, you have to use an asynchronous link to one of the serial ports. Even though the system comes with networking software, the documentation does not include the A/UX Network Ad¬ ministration manual that you need to set up a network. This manual is available for $18.50 to APDA (Apple Program¬ mer’s and Developer’s Association) members. To measure the multitasking perfor¬ mance of A/UX, we ran the multitask¬ ing-shell benchmark published in the August 1984 BYTE on page 406. For comparison, we ran the same benchmark tests on a Mac II with 5 megabytes of memory and A/UX on an external 80- megabyte hard disk drive, and on a Sun 386i/250 with 8 megabytes of memory and a 327-megabyte hard disk drive run¬ ning Berkeley Unix 4.3. In the bench¬ mark results, A/UX on the Mac II ran notably slower than the Unix implemen¬ tation on the Sun system (see table 1). However, performance may be accep¬ table when you consider that the Sun sys¬ tem costs about twice as much. Close, But No Cigar Apple’s A/UX is a good first step toward transforming the Mac II into a Unix workstation. It’s good because it gives you multitasking, virtual memory, and access to a network. But it is not yet well integrated with the Mac user interface. Also, the limitation of running only a single Toolbox application at a time makes it difficult to use even the Term program as a standard interface. You might expect A/UX to make the Mac II into a true workstation, but it doesn’t quite measure up. Although it does provide the ability to connect to a network, it does not provide the kind of interactive interface that is familiar to users of other workstation products. While the Mac interface is available from within A/UX, the primary interface is the Unix command-line shell. However, A/UX is a good implemen¬ tation of Unix System V and should be useful where there is a need for a system that allows Unix applications to run in a network environment and where the abil¬ ity to run Mac applications is required. A/UX will be easier to use when and if Apple provides a Finder-like interface that will truly transform the Mac into a point-and-click Unix machine. ■ David Betz is a Unix consultant and a former senior editor for BIX. Eva M. White is a BYTE technical editor. Clown drawn using the Arts & Letters Graphics Editor and printed on a Linotronic L-300. If You 9 re Serious About Graphics. Why Clown Around Editing Features 4 * 6 ° The Graphics Editor allows you to adjust the direction and shape of each curve interactively by clicking on the control points and fine tuning the curve. You can split a shape at a point, delete segments, join shapes, snap to points, move a point or group of points, and much more. Exchanging Data Arts & Letters supports a variety of techniques for exchanging data between Windows applications and non-Windows products such as Ventura Publisher. Arts & Letters supports TIFF, EPS, WMF and CGM. For more information about Arts & Letters and a FREE Publisher's Typescale, call or write today. Computer Support Corporation 15926 Midway Road Dallas, Texas 75244 (214) 661-8960 Arts & Letters is a family of products with an unsurpassed assortment of object-oriented clip art, typefaces, composition aids, and freeform drawing tools. And Arts & Letters runs on your IBM or IBM compatible personal computer. Can't Draw a Straight Line? For those of us with little artistic skill, the Arts & Letters Composer comes complete with thousands of professionally-drawn clip art images you can size, stretch, twist, bend, flip, and rotate. Compose diagrams, maps, flow charts, word charts, and organization charts. Cut, copy, and paste your compositions into any of the popular desktop publishing applications that support Windows, or print directly to any laser printer (a PostScript-equipped printer is not required). Draw Your Own Depending on your level of artistic ability, use the Arts & Letters Graphics Editor to modify predrawn clip art, trace scanned images, or draw complex illustrations. Even if you're a skilled artist, modifying predrawn clip art can save lots of time when you're working against a deadline. Suggested Retail Arts Sl Letters Composer — $395 Graphics Editor — $595 Circle 56 on Reader Service Card IBM is a registered trademark of International Business Machines Corporation. Arts & Letters is a trademark of Computer Support Corporation. Ventura Publisher is a trademark of Ventura Software, Inc. PostScript is a registered trademark of Adobe Systems, Inc. The Standard for Analog Circuit Simulation Now Available on the Macintosh II Since its introduction just over four years ago, MicroSim's PSpice has sold more copies than all other commercial Spice programs combined. In addition to running on the IBM PC family, in¬ cluding the new PS/2, the Compaq 386, the Sun 3 workstation and the VAX/VMS family, PSpice is now available on Apple's Macintosh II. All these features which have made PSpice so popular are available: • Standard parts libraries for diodes, bipolar transistors, power MOSFET's, opamps, voltage comparators, and transformer cores. • GaAs MESFET devices. • Non-linear transformer devices modeling saturation, hysteresis, and eddy current losses. • Ideal switches for use with, for example, power supply and switched capacitor circuit designs. In addition, all these PSpice options are available on the Macintosh: • Monte Carlo analysis to calculate the effect of parameter tolerances on circuit performance. • The Probe "software oscilloscope", allowing interactive viewing of simulation results. • The Parts parameter extraction program, allow¬ ing you to extract a device's model parameters from data sheet information. • The Digital Files interface, allowing you to transfer data from your logic simulator to (or from) PSpice. The interface performs the necessary D to A or A to D conversions. Each copy of PSpice comes with our extensive product support. Our technical staff has over 50 years of experience in CAD/CAE and our software is supported by the engineers who wrote it. With PSpice, expert assistance is only a phone call away. Please call or write today for a free evaluation copy of PSpice. Find out for yourself why PSpice is the standard in analog circuit simulation. W( A _ L- MicroSim Corporation 23175 La Cadena Drive, Laguna Hills, CA 92653 U.S.A. • (714) 770-3022 (800) 826-8603 • Telex 265154 SPICE UR PSpice is a registered trademark of MicroSim Corporation; Macintosh II is a trademark of Apple Computer, Inc.; Compaq 386 is a trademark of Compaq Computer Corporation; IBM PC, PS/2 are registered trademarks of International Business Machines Corporation; Sun is a trademark of Sun Microsystems, Inc.; VAX and VMS are trademarks of Digital Equipment Corporation. 194 BYTE* AUGUST 1988 Circle 149 on Reader Service Card (DEALERS: 150) Application Review O VersaCAD on a Mac A CAD package for PCs finds its way to the Macintosh Paul Tuten B orn with an established name in the MS-DOS world, Versa¬ CAD Macintosh Edition is a comprehensive two-dimen¬ sional drafting and design system for creating accurate working drawings for a variety of disciplines. The VersaCAD package comes with a 247-page user’s manual that includes a tutorial section, a “tour” disk that contains a demonstra¬ tion program, and a disk with a Hyper¬ Card Help stack. These also serve as valuable training aids. VersaCAD Macintosh Edition retails for $1995. It requires a Mac Plus or SE with 1 megabyte of RAM or a Mac II with a minimum of 2 megabytes of RAM, an Apple monochrome or color monitor, and Finder 5.5 or higher. You’ll need extra memory to use large monitors and to make use of Multi- Finder. If you have a Mac Plus or SE, you should equip it with an accelerator board with a 68881 math coprocessor to take full advantage of VersaCAD’s speed. Fi¬ nally, you’ll need a minimum of 4 mega¬ bytes of hard disk space for programs, temporary workfiles, and drawings. VersaCAD 1.1, the version I tested, supports a comprehensive list of output devices, including the Apple Image- writer and LaserWriter for nonscale hard copies. For accurate drawings, it sup¬ ports plotters from Bruning, Calcomp, Data Products, Enter Computer, Hew¬ lett-Packard, Houston Instrument, United Innovations, Mutoh, Numonics, Roland, and Western Graphtec. A VersaLINK application converts VersaCAD drawings to and from ASCII text, Initial Graphics Exchange Specifi¬ cation (IGES), and .DXF files. In these formats, you can exchange drawing in¬ formation not only between different CAD applications but even between dif¬ ferent computer systems. The Working Area The main display consists of a drawing window bordered by the familiar Macin¬ tosh title bar, close, resize, and scrolling buttons. In addition, five window-option icons are embedded along the bottom left scroll bar. Clicking on these window icons lets you magnify any area of the drawing for detail work, or back away for a bird’s-eye view of the entire drawing, regardless of its size. Beneath the menu bar is a Message window that prompts you for input dur¬ ing object construction and editing. At the screen’s bottom is a Coordinates win¬ dow that shows the location of the draw¬ ing cursor in absolute, relative, or polar coordinates. To the left is a Tools win¬ dow—a palette of icons for object cre¬ ation and manipulation tools. You can toggle all these windows (plus two hid¬ den Constraints and Construct palettes) open and closed from the Settings menu bar selection. I found that I was using the Constraints and Construct palettes more than the Message and Coordinates windows, so I closed the latter two to save room on my SE’s screen. For SE users, a more pro¬ ductive, but also more expensive, solu¬ tion would be to add an external monitor to display the drawing window. Then you could display the support functions win¬ dows on a second screen while using a multimonitor program, such as E-Ma¬ chines’ Double Feature. A Pick of Tools The two choices on the top of the Tools palette are Selection and Group. The Se- continued AUGUST 1988 'BYTE 195 REVIEW VERSACAD ON A MAC VersaCAD 1.1 Type Two-dimensional CAD package Company Versacad Corp. 2124 Main St. Huntington Beach, CA 92648 (714) 960-7720 Format Six 3V2-inch floppy disks Hardware Needed Macintosh Plus or SE with 1 megabyte of RAM, or Macintosh II with 2 megabytes of RAM, and a hard disk drive Software Needed Finder 5.5 or higher Language C Documentation 247-page user’s manual Price $1995 Inquiry 907. lection tool lets you pick individual ob¬ jects for editing and manipulation. Each object that Selection calls up displays its associated, movable, pivot-and-handle point. The Group tools let you build ag¬ gregates of objects. The palette has 12 more tools, which you use to add objects to your drawing. The Line tool lets you create a single or continuous line, and Multiline draws two or more parallel lines simultaneously. Rectangle lets you draw squares and rect¬ angles by designating opposite corners or three points. Polygon draws regular polygons with 3 to 180 sides. To draw a circle, you choose a center and a radius or designate a diameter and its two endpoints. You can make an el¬ lipse by picking the axes or a center and the axes. You create an arc from two end¬ points and an arbitrary point on the arc, or from a center point and two endpoints. With Bezier, you can create three-point Bezier curves and multipoint spline curves. You handle point entry by screen position, grid snap, object snap, or coor¬ dinate entry (this is also the case with all the tools mentioned previously). You can write on the drawing, either in individual lines or in blocks, using the Text tool. Character height and width, as well as line spacing, may be varied. You can assign font numbers to your built-in LaserWriter fonts for PostScript output. VersaCAD can automatically apply lin¬ ear and angular dimensions, either sin¬ gly or as baseline or chain dimensions. The last six tools on the palette are for object manipulation. You can move and stretch objects and groups of objects. You can copy in one or two directions, or cir¬ cularly, leaving one or more copies. Ro¬ tate lets you move objects about their as¬ sociated pivot points. Scale shrinks or expands objects or groups of objects, either proportionally or unproportion- ally. Mirror flips objects or copies of ob¬ jects about an axis. The Explode com¬ mand breaks objects and symbols into their component parts. The Construct palette contains impor¬ tant tools for precise geometric construc¬ tions. Extend/Trim lets you trim ele¬ ments to other elements and objects. With Break, you can split a line and trim it to two different objects or two different portions of the same object. Fillet lets you draw a specified radius between two self-trimming lines, as does Chamfer. Perpendicular lets you create right-angle lines at any distance from the endpoint of a normal line. With Parallel, you can draw lines at a specified distance from each other. The Tangent function makes lines at a specified angle to circles, arcs, and ellipses, or tangent to arcs and per¬ pendicular to lines. You can use Isomet¬ ric to create an isometric view from three orthographic views. The tools in the Constraints palette are used in conjunction with those in the Tools and Construct palettes. Con¬ straints tools help you make your draw¬ ings more precise. Besides Free (or un¬ constrained) input, there is Rotation, X Lock, and Y Lock, which let you fix in¬ put to a specified angle, or to an x or y axis. The Grid and Increment snap tools set up a grid with incremental points. These points then attract the cursor to the near¬ est specified location for geometric input. This is nice in some ways, but it often dramatically slows repainting when the grid is displayed. The No Snap function switches this option off. The In¬ tersection, Object, and Equation tools are excellent for accurate placement of objects in relation to each other, during both construction and later manipula¬ tion. In most cases, the tools have additional options that you can obtain by double¬ clicking on each tool’s icon. Picks from the Menu The menu bar displays the Apple symbol with whatever desk accessories you have installed, along with About VersaCAD and Help. The Help item contains a drawing of the three palette windows mentioned previously, with labels that describe each tool function. The Files menu contains New Draw¬ ing, which is for creating an empty draw¬ ing that retains the current settings of the properties, units, and window. Open Drawing retrieves drawings and also allows them to merge with the current drawing (at the same drawing units). Close stores the drawing window. Save Drawing and Save Drawing As put the current work on disk arranged by objects or by current group. Crunch compresses the workfile by permanently removing all deleted objects. New Library lets you create special files of symbols. Symbols are collections of objects that are used repeatedly, such as windows and doors, or bolts and nuts. Obviously, having them predrawn as part of a library can save you a good deal of drawing time. Open Library gives you access to your symbols files. Page Setup and Print give you a non¬ scale hard copy of displayed drawings on a printer. Besides a long list of plotters to select from, Plot Select contains an en¬ capsulated PostScript selection; this op¬ tion lets you use VersaCAD drawings with page layout programs. Plot Setup and Plot produce accurate output of the entire drawing, to any scale, on laser printers and plotters. Quit closes the VersaCAD program. The Edit menu selection has the usual Macintosh Undo, Cut, Copy, and Paste options, plus Clear Last Entry, Restore Last Entry, Select All Objects, and Show Clipboard Contents. It also has addi¬ tional items to aid you in editing objects. A Properties item lets you edit the level number, pen number, color, line density and width, line style, and top and bottom z-coordinate values of objects. A power¬ ful Geometry item lets you look at and edit almost every geometric attribute of an object on the drawing; you can also in¬ voke Geometry by double-clicking on the object. Handle moves the handle point of the selected object to alternate locations or back to the object’s default location. The Group menu contains options that you use in conjunction with the Group se¬ lection from the Tools palette. Clear Current Group removes all objects from the current group. Build by Inverse creates a group by replacing all objects in the current group with all other objects. continued 196 BYTE* AUGUST 1988 Never Lose Your Work Again! Introducing Cocoon® A Genuine Breakthrough. |t»iqff]i»i«nm(Htn»iaT»[>HHTH»iaffinnaimHianmiianHM blocks '‘Cursor '“text layout '“Options; FI Help 'Ttewove "locate text "Print enhaftcettents "K ey tsacros **iit A Urvto "Next locate 'View page "Graphics I In reviewing the spreadsheet product# SILK# the nedia had the following comments I about it's keystroke logging function*. It is "such a sinple# yet func¬ tional solution." -Info World "The logging feature is one reason why a hard disk should be used with Silk (software)." -PC Week Cocoon’s Recover Mode Brings Back Every > Key Stroke. "Mo other spreadsheet (software) product cones close to providing this degree of protection." -Communique Remember all those times you’ve had an important work session disappear from the computer? Well, that’s one problem you can forget for good! Instant Disaster Recovery Cocoon, a uniquely powerful utility from Daybreak Technologies, protects your work from power failures, system failures, assorted accidents and just plain human error. Cocoon is virtually invisible as it logs each keystroke to hard disk. It stays in the background, with no sacrifice of system or software speed. And your key log file takes up just 10K on your disk! Document Your Work And Review Your Logic Cocoon captures your train of thought while it’s recording your work. You can easily get an instant replay of entire session to reconstruct your logic and assumptions. Create Custom Tutorials And Demos It’s easy to train and sell with Cocoon. Play back one keystroke at a time. Or use fast- forward to skip ahead. Create Keyboard Macros Versatile Cocoon translates keystrokes into macros that you can transport to your application program for use later. Debug Programs Software developers can resimulate the problem or bug — again and again — while reading the program map through the debugging utility to locate the difficulty Truly A Must-Have Utility Daybreak first introduced this remarkable function in the Silk® spreadsheet. PC Magazine put our recovery capabilities high on their “1-2-3 WISH LIST.” “At most, this feature is a life- saver; ... it can save the day (and maybe a job).—J. Blake Lambert, ComputerAge, August, 1987 Well, we say this is the second most important piece of software you can buy, right after DOS. r | Rush My Cocoon Today! Name. Organization Address City State Zip Phone ( ) You’ll find Cocoon indispensable in a wealth of applications, including... Lotus® 1-2-3® and Symphony® WordStar 2000® and WordStar Professional WordPerfect® Codesmithf P-fixf Enable® IBM® PE-IIf Ability Plusf And many, many more! Special Introductory Offer —Just $49.95! No other PC utility offers you Cocoon’s solid protection and worksaving features. Enjoy these unequalled advantages soon — andsavewithourspecial publisher- direct introductory offer. Order by mail through September 30,1988 for just $49-95. (After that, Cocoon retails for $99-00) Credit card holders can call toll-free — or use the coupon today. Act now — you really need Cocoon, and you’ll save by getting it right away Fact is, Daybreaks “work insurance policy” pays for itself the first time you recover a session! Add $5 per copy if you want 3.5" diskette _ Add shipping & handling ($5.00 each for U.S. & Canada. $20.00 each all other countries) _ Cal if. residents add 6.5% sales tax _ Tbtal $_ Payment Method □ Check or money order enclosed, made payable to Daybreak Technologies. (Sorry, no CODs!) Charge my □ Visa □ Master Card Mail Tb: Cocoon Introductory Offer, Dept. 361E Daybreak Technologies, Inc., RO. Box 5629, 21213B Hawthorne Blvd., Torrance, CA 90509 Acct. #_ Signature- _Expir. Date_ L. Do not enclose cash. Offer valid through September 30, 1988. Please allow 4-6 weeks for delivery. DAYBREAK TECHNOLOGIES, INC. Charge to your credit card and call toll-free: 1-800-443-0100, ext. 361E Tbll-free number is for credit card orders only. For product information, call Customer Service at (213) 542-5888. System Requirements: IBM or compatible with DOS 2.0 or higher and hard disk. H -copies of Cocoon @ $49-95 Cocoon and Silk are trademarks of Daybreak Ttchnologies, Inc. IBM and PE-11 are registered trademarks of International Business Machines Corporation. Lotus, 1-2-3 and Symphony are registered trademarks of Lotus Development Corporation. Microsoft and MS-DOS are registered trademarks of Microsoft Corporation. WordPerfect is a registered trademark of WordPerfect Corporation. WordStar 2000 and WordStar Professional are registered trademarks of MicroPro International Corporation. Enable is a registered trademark of the Software Group. Ability Plus is a registered trademark of Migent Software Inc. Codesmilh is a registered trademark of Visual Age. P-fix is a registered trademark of Phoenix Computer Products Corporation. Circle 70 on Reader Service Card (DEALERS: 71) REVIEW VERSACAD ON A MAC Build by Properties lets you create or edit groups by all objects that do or do not have specified properties in common. Build by Fence creates groups by speci¬ fying objects either inside or outside a rectangular area, and Build by Objects lets you add or subtract specific object types to the current or new group. The Settings menu contains valuable features, such as Input, which lets you di¬ rectly input absolute, relative, or polar coordinates for geometric creation and manipulation. Besides the usual decimal degree and degrees-minutes-seconds op¬ tions in the polar mode, bearing is also available. Properties lets you set such ob¬ ject attributes as level number, pen num¬ ber, color, line density and width, up to eight line styles, and top and bottom z co¬ ordinate values. VersaCAD is sometimes referred to as a two-and-one-half-dimen- sional system because it can record z-coordinate values but not display them. This ability to record z coordinates can be useful if you are using drawing-coor¬ dinate data in CAM. You can add arrows or center markers to objects, and you can set template prop¬ erty to objects being added. These ob¬ jects could serve as construction lines for layout development, and they can be turned off for displaying or plotting. With the Units item, you set the draw¬ ing’s unit of measure when you begin. There can be only one unit of measure per drawing. VersaCAD works on the concept of real-world modeling. That is, if you are going to lay out a schematic of a new interstate highway, for example, you might make miles the unit of measure and choose polar coordinates in bearing format. On the other hand, if you were designing an assembly jig for an airplane wing, you would make inches your unit of measure and choose absolute coordi¬ nates in decimals of an inch. For an E- size plot of both drawings, you can set the plot scale so that 1 unit equals 0.125 inch. All the necessary units are available, including decimals and fractions of inches and feet, and fractions of miles, millimeters, centimeters, meters, and kilometers. If you want, you can also de¬ fine your own units of measure. Levels lets you specify up to 250 levels to display and plot. Levels are not self- protecting; for example, you can trim lines to each other even if they are in dif¬ ferent levels. You protect levels by turn¬ ing them off, thus making them invisible. Configuration sets the size of tempo¬ rary Hatch files needed to calculate hatch boundaries. Preferences lets you set a drawing’s background, grid, se¬ lected object, and cursor color (if avail¬ able). Show Marker, Template, and Symbol turn the display of these items on and off. The workfile has a running clock of usage time that can be stopped with a Pause option. Also under the Settings menu are Con¬ straints, Coordinates, Message, Tools, and Construct items, all of which I’ve previously discussed. Symbols opens the symbols library from which the currently selected symbol was placed. Hatch lets you add hatching lines to any enclosed boundary; it also calculates areas and cross sections. Many of Settings’ option windows can be left open for more conve¬ nient access. The Inquire menu contains Drawing, which shows all the level numbers and pen numbers used on a drawing, along with the total number of objects, sym¬ bols, and time used. Workfile displays the storage that all the objects and sym¬ bols use, the total number of different symbols, and the corresponding storage you have left; it also indicates total draw¬ ing time and the elapsed time since your last file operation. VersaCAD’s workfile can contain 6000 objects, 2000 symbol components, and 200 unique symbols. This should be adequate storage for most drawings, but if it isn’t, the workfile storage space can be expanded by an experienced program¬ mer. Keyboard equivalents for almost all icons and menu options are present. Stackware Utilities Bill of Material is a HyperCard stack that counts all symbols used on a drawing. Descriptive data such as name, size, unit cost, unit weight, labor, and grade for each symbol in your library is entered in the Bill of Material stack. A Count func¬ tion automatically counts the symbols, and Create Report prepares a materials- list type of report that shows the totals of each symbol and all the descriptive information. You can edit any part of the report and save it as a text file for use in a word pro¬ cessor or spreadsheet, or you can convert it to VersaCAD format for use on the face of the drawing. Bill of Material also contains a utility for calculating the total length of lines and rectangles on the drawing. For ex¬ ample, in a plumbing drawing, if all drain pipes are represented by lines of the same color, or on a certain level or pen number, Bill of Material can auto¬ matically add the total length of these lines. The FileDump stack provides a conve¬ nient way to examine and edit the con¬ tents of drawing and library files. The source code for getVcad and putVcad are provided. These script functions ex¬ tend HyperCard and let it read/write VersaCAD files; they also let you create customized VersaCAD HyperCard util¬ ities. Sample drawings and libraries are included in the VersaCAD and Bill of Materials tutorials. Drawing Conclusions The most serious of VersaCAD’s few limitations is the lack of an auxiliary view system for creating drawings with views of different scales. For example, if you want a drawing with a quarter-scale main view and a half-scale section view, you have to either draw both views at their respective scales and plot full-size, or draw the main view at half size and the section view at full size and plot at half¬ scale, or draw the main view full-size and the section view twice-size and plot at quarter-scale. In any case, you have a model with one or more views that are not real-world size. Perhaps a better al¬ ternative in this example would be to keep the views in two different models and overplot them on the same paper at the different scales—but VersaCAD has no built-in provisions to do this. A vital feature of VersaCAD is its workfile. When you are working on a drawing, all work is done in a temporary workfile that VersaCAD automatically saves on disk. Thus, even if you are working on a new drawing that you have not saved, you will probably not lose all your work if a system error occurs, which I did occasionally experience. VersaCAD seems to have all the nec¬ essary tools and options that a draftsper- son needs to get the job done. However, I would not buy VersaCAD for an out-of- the-box Mac Plus or SE. Without a co¬ processor accelerator board in the sys¬ tem, VersaCAD’s slowness is a limiting factor. For example, I constructed a model with about 100 objects. On a va¬ nilla Mac SE, a repaint of the model took well over a minute. On a Mac II, the same drawing took less than 3 seconds. VersaCAD Macintosh Edition is a full-featured drafting tool that is well suited for a broad range of applications. But if you’re going to spend almost $2000 for the program, do yourself a favor and run it on a machine that won’t make you long for your drafting board. ■ Paul Tuten of Wichita, Kansas, is a tool engineering contractor for the aircraft in¬ dustry and uses a CAD system daily. He can be reached on BIX as “editors. ” 198 BYTE- AUGUST 1988 Can Your Spreadsheet Do Any Of This For $ 69 . 95 ? Javelin*-type time series model in your conventional spreadsheet Live help English language formulas User-defined validation criteria Spreadsheet validation MAGAZINE EDITOR’S CHOICE “Silk’s improved graphics, fine use of function keys, interactive help, global search and replace, and easy-to-rearrange worksheet are reason enough to buy ... At some point, you have to think about moving onward and upward (from Lotus). Silk gives you rea¬ son enough” - PC Magazine 1 TWice as fast as Lotus® with 8087/80287 coprocessor installed 1 Keystroke logging prevents the loss of your worksheet sessions 1 Fast, productive forms processing — just fill in the blanks 1 Allocation models — cut the pie any way you want 1 Excellent use of function keys ’ Global search and replace Enhanced graphics 1 Easy-to-rearrange worksheets 1 Goal seeking, i.e. what price to charge to make X% profit? TWo foreign exchange formats AndThat’sJustThe Start Of Silk’s® Exciting Features... With all this — and more — going for Silk, Jim Gultinan of Cordata concludes “On a scale of 1 to 10 with Lotus being a 10, Silk is a 12.” Soft Sector sums it up by saying “Silk is one of the most complete spreadsheet packages on the market today.” Yes, here’s your spreadsheet wish list come true. At a price you dreamed of! Special Introductory Offer — New Version 1.1 Is Just $69.95! In reviewing the original Silk spreadsheet, Seybold Outlook said “this is a lot of software for the money.” And we say “with this special introductory offer, it’s a lot less!” Enhanced Silk 1.1 is just $69.95 when you order directly from the pub¬ lisher, now through September 30,1988. After that, it’s still an exceptional value at $298.00 retail. Why not order right now? And see for your¬ self why Orange Bytes Magazine says “Thy Silk, but be careful, you may find your copy of 1-2-3 collecting dust.” Rush My Silk 1.1 Today! .copies of Silk 1.1 @ $69-95 Name. Organization. Address. -State- Add $10 per copy for 3-5" diskettes _ Add shipping & handling ($6.50 each for U.S. & Canada. $40.00 each all other countries) - Calif, residents add 6.5% sales tax _ Ibtal $_ Payment Method □ Check or money order enclosed, made payable to Daybreak 'technologies. (Sorry; no CODs!) Charge my □ Visa □ Master Card Phone L MAIL TO: Silk 1.1 Introductory Offer, Dept. 361E Daybreak 'technologies, Inc.. HO. Box 5629, 21213B Hawthorne Blvd., Torrance, CA 90509 Acct. #_ _Expir. Date- Signature- Do not enclose cash. Offer valid through September 30, 1988. Please allow 4-6 weeks for deliver}: .J DAYBREAK TECHNOLOGIES, INC. Charge to your credit card and call toll-free: 1-800-443-0100, ext. 36lE Toll-free number is for credit card orders only. For product information, call Customer Service at (213) 542-5888. System Requirements: IBM® PC or compatible with PC-DOS® or MS-DOS® 2.0 or higher, with 512KB mem¬ ory; hard disk recommended. Silk is a registered trademark of Daybreak 'technologies, Inc. IBM and PC-DOS are registered trademarks of International Business Machines Corporation, l-otus and Lotus 1-2-3 are registered trademarks of Lotus Development Corporation. Microsoft and MS-DOS are registered trademarks of Microsoft Corporation. Javelin is a registered trademark of Javelin Software Company. Circle 72 on Reader Service Card (DEALERS: 73) Fine-Tuning the Benchmarks The June issue saw the introduction of BYTE’s new system benchmarks. The August issue marks the first, and prob¬ ably not the last, revision. Version 1.1 of the low-level Small-C benchmarks in¬ corporates several changes, all in the Disk I/O tests. A bug fix for the DOS Seek 1- and 8- sector test came first. In the original test, checks for the end of disk failed because the test stored the sector variables in inte¬ ger format. We quickly ran into sector sizes too large for Small-C to deal with as integers. We fixed the problem by changing the integer format to character pointers. This fix uncovered an additional prob¬ lem with the 8-sector part of the test. Ba¬ sically, the 8-sector read was too sensi¬ tive to the effects of disk buffering. In version 1.1, we’ve enlarged the 8-sector read test to 32 sectors. Finally, we changed the method of re¬ cording the results for the File I/O test. We’ve switched from seconds per K byte to seconds per 64K bytes for reporting the disk throughput times. Apart from these changes, we’ve also made a couple of additional revisions. For the application-level benchmarks, we’ve dropped the Cursor Move test from the word-processing suite because of unreliable results. Second, we’ve switched from using an arithmetic mean to a geometric mean for calculating both the application-level and low-level indexes. In light of these changes, we’ve rerun all the benchmarks for Advanced Logic Research’s FlexCache 20386, which we reviewed in June, as well as for our base¬ line systems. The revised disk results are shown in the table above. The changes in the application benchmarks give the FlexCache a cumulative application in¬ dex of 18.0. Application indexes for comparative systems are as follows: 18.0 for the Compaq Deskpro 386/20, 11 for the IBM PS/2 Model 80, and 5 for the 8- MHz IBM PC AT. The review of three 20-MHz 80386 systems on page 162 this month also reflects all these changes. In upcoming reviews of 80386 sys¬ tems, we’ll be using a newly ported 32- bit version of the BYTE Small-C com¬ Review Update The results for the revised Disk I/O benchmarks still show that ALR’s FlexCache 20386 comes in slightly ahead of the Compaq Deskpro 386/20 in disk performance. FlexCache 20386 Compaq 386/20 IBM PS/2 Model 80 IBM PC AT (8 MHz) DOS Seek 1 -sector read 8.48 10.68 14.98 14.95 32-sector read 17.00 19.08 32.79 65.18 File I/O Seek 0.11 0.13 0.12 0.29 Read (sec/64 K bytes) 0.42 0.45 1.11 1.33 Write (sec/64K bytes) 0.79 0.78 1.07 1.23 Disk I/O Index (relative to PC AT) 2.50 2.23 1.46 1.0 Note: All times are in seconds, except as noted. piler for low-level benchmarks. For details on the 80386 version of the bench¬ marks, see the text box “80386 Bench¬ marks” by Rick Grehan on page 142 of this issue. One last note: The graphs for the sys¬ tem reviews in June—ALR’s FlexCache 20386, NEC’s MultiSpeed HD, and Deviance with Concurrent DOS 386 Sometimes benchmark tests give you alarming results, and it’s difficult to pin down the problem. That’s just what hap¬ pened with my review of Digital Re¬ search’s Concurrent DOS 386 in the July issue. The BYTE Lab ran the single-task benchmark for Concurrent DOS 386 on several different systems and obtained essentially the same results (which were printed with the review)—that it per¬ formed about as well as MS-DOS. But the test results obtained using my own ARC 386i were quite different, at least at first. In fact, my preliminary findings showed a single task under Concurrent DOS 386 to be about 3 times slower than the same task running under MS-DOS. I initially ran the benchmark tests on my ARC 386i with 3 megabytes of 16-bit 120-nanosecond memory on an Everex 159 memory card installed “above” the 512K bytes of 32-bit memory on the Hewlett-Packard’s Vectra CS Model 20—were labeled incorrectly. The appli¬ cation indexes, cumulative application indexes, and low-level indexes were cor¬ rect, but the keys for the graphs were labeled in reverse order. We apologize for the error. —Cathryn Baskin ARC’S motherboard. With the 16-bit memory installed, Concurrent DOS 386 barely puttered along, taking 40 seconds to perform one iteration of the bench¬ mark in one window, while the same task ran in only about 13.5 seconds under MS-DOS. Because the test program was only about 5K bytes, I decided to try the test without the 16-bit memory board in¬ stalled. Admittedly, running even a 5K- byte program in only the 512K bytes of 32-bit base memory makes for a tight squeeze since Concurrent DOS 386 is so large. And certainly, most real applica¬ tions cannot fit in so little memory. Nonetheless, without the 16-bit memory, performance improved noticeably. A single task actually ran faster than under DOS, taking 12.5 seconds to complete an iteration. The explanation for the anomaly is painfully obvious: Running tasks in 16- bit memory on an ARC 386i slows per¬ formance down dramatically. —Alex Lane 200 BYTE* AUGUST 1988 Inside MultiFinder Mac Networks Color QuickDraw HyperCard A/UX § Short Takes dBASE Users—Attack the Mac with FoxBASE+/Mac Speed and Power. FoxBASE+/Mac gives you speed to burn—plus the power and performance you’ve come to expect from Fox. In fact, FoxBASE+/Mac is by far the fastest database system available on the Mac today—up to 200 times faster! View Window. The View Window is the master control panel for FoxBASE +/Mac’s graphical, non-programming interface. Use it to open and close files, set up indexes, establish relations, access BROWSE, and even to modify database structures! Fox Software = Nothing Runs Like a Fox. Fox Software, Inc. (419) 874-0162 Ext. 320 118 W. South Boundary FAX: (419) 874-8678 Perrysburg, OH 43551 Telex: 6503040827 New Frontiers, No Fears. FoxBASE+/Mac gives you the unprece¬ dented ability to run your dBASE pro¬ grams on the Macintosh immediately— without changing a single line of code! But there’s much more. With FoxBASE+/Mac you can create beautiful, robust applications that are truly Mac-like—using the familiar dBASE language! BROWSE. FoxBASE +/Mac’s BROWSE feature brings new convenience and power to database display and editing! You’re in complete control —BROWSE lets you dynamically adjust the size and order of fields displayed, add or delete records, and split the window to show different database sections side-by-side. Together, BROWSE and View Windows eliminate the need to write programs for common database operations! Integrated Graphics. Copy and paste graphs, charts, diagrams and even pictures into your database — instantly! FoxBASE+/Mac gives you the power to display these graphics, or merge them into reports and documents! FoxBASE and FoxBASE + are trademarks of Fox Software. dBASE and dBASE III PLUS are trademarks of Ashton-Tate. Macintosh is a trademark of McIntosh Laboratory, Inc., licensed to Apple Computer, Inc. You can create stunning screens like this with FoxBASE + /Mac— immediately! This actual FoxBASE 4- /Mac screen photo illustrates the View Window, Command Window, Integrated Graphics, Memo field editing, Trace and Debugging Facilities, and the BROWSE feature. Command Window. FoxBASE+/Mac’s Command Window gives both experienced developers and novice user ultra-convenient access to the dBASE command language—just type a command into the Command Window, and it’s executed! Get The FoxBASE+/Mac Facts Now! Call (419) 874-0162 Ext. 320 for more information about FoxBASE+/Mac. Or visit your local software retailer. FoxBASE+/Mac is part of the award-win¬ ning family of products from Fox Software. For two years in a row, FoxBASE + has been given the prestigious Editor’s Choice award by PC Magazine, and scored an impressive 9.2 out of a possible 10 when tested by InfoWorld 's Review Board! Circle M26 on Reader Service Card AUGUST 1988 VOLUME 13 NUMBER 8 EVTE Macintosh Special Edition Editorial: Microcomputing’s Vanguard by Fred Langa 4 Short Takes 7 Twelve All-Time Favorites by Ezra Shapiro 21 Macintosh Redux by Bruce Webster 29 Take a Walk on the Mac Side by Jerry Pournelle 35 MultiFinder Revealed by Phil Goldman 46 The Well-Connected Mac by Janet J. Barron and Robert L. Mitchell 57 HyperCard: What Is It? by Brian L. Dear 71 HyperCard: How Does It Work? by Laurence H. Loeb 75 Using Color QuickDraw on the Mac II by Jan Eugenides 83 Unix and the Mac Interface by Rick Daley 89 Editorial Index by Company 95 BYTE (ISSN 0360-5280) is published monthly with an additional issue in Oc¬ tober by McGraw-Hill Inc. Founder: James H. McGraw (1860-1948). Execu¬ tive, editorial, circulation, and advertising offices: One Phoenix Mill Lane, Peterborough, NH 03458, phone (603) 924-9281. Office hours: Monday through Thursday 8:30 AM-4:30 PM, Friday 8:30 AM-1:00 PM, Eastern Time. Address subscriptions to BYTE Subscriptions, P.O. Box 7643, Tea- neck, NJ 07666-9866. Postmaster: Send address changes, USPS Form 3579, undcliverable copies, and fulfillment questions to BYTE Subscriptions, P.O. Box 7643, Teaneck, NJ 07666-9866. Second-class postage paid at Peterbor¬ ough, NH 03458 and additional mailing offices. Postage paid at Winnipeg, Manitoba. Registration number 9321. Subscriptions are $22.95 for one year, $39.95 for two years, and $55.95 for three years in the U.S. and its posses¬ sions. In Canada and Mexico, $25.95 for one year, $45.95 for two years, $64.95 for three years. $75 for one-year air delivery to Europe. Y28.800 for one-year air delivery to Japan, Y 14,400 for one-year surface delivery to Ja¬ pan, $40 surface delivery elsewhere. Air delivery to selected areas at addition¬ al rates upon request. Single copy price is $3.50 in the U.S. and its posses¬ sions, $3.95 in Canada, $4.50 in Europe, and $5 elsewhere. Foreign subscriptions and sales should be remitted in U.S. funds drawn on a U.S. bank. Please allow six to eight weeks for delivery of first issue. Printed in the United States of America. Address editorial correspondence to: Editor, BYTE, One Phoenix Mill Lane, Peterborough, NH 03458. Unacceptable manuscripts will be returned if accompanied by sufficient postage. Not responsible for lost manuscripts or photos. Opinions expressed by the authors are not necessarily those of BYTE. Copyright © 1988 by McGraw-Hill Inc. All rights reserved. Trademark registered in the United States Patent and Trademark Office. Where neces¬ sary, permission is granted by the copyright owner for libraries and others registered with the Copyright Clearance Center (CCC) to photocopy any arti¬ cle herein for the flat fee of $1.50 per copy of the article or any part thereof. Correspondence and payment should be sent directly to the CCC, 29 Congress St., Salem. MA 01970. Specify ISSN 0360-5280/83, $1.50. Copying done for other than personal or internal reference use without the permission of McGraw-Hill Inc. is prohibited. Requests for special permission or bulk orders should be addressed to the publisher. BYTE is available in microform from University Microfilms International, 300 North Zeeb Rd., Dept. PR, Ann Arbor. MI 48106 or 18 Bedford Row, Dept. PR. London WC1R 4EJ. England. ■' Jt 4| Subscription questions or problems should be addressed to: ?! U BYTE Subscribcr Service. P.O. Box 7643, Teaneck. NJ ■ ■nil 07666-9866. COVER PHOTOGRAPHY: PAUL AVIS © 1988 1988 Mac Special Edition • BYTE 1 How Macintosh of the safest ded The business computing world has recently undergone some fairly radical changes. Consequently, so has the entire concept of “safety” Because, at present, only one computer offers all the promise for the future, and delivers on it today: the Macintosh* II personal computer. First,we met your standards. Serious business has some seri¬ ous standards, and Macintosh n is prepared to meet every one. Like breakneck speed. Ml ex¬ pandability. Vast memory. A choice of monitors. A wide range of sophis¬ ticated programs for every business use. And the capacity to store even the most intimidating mountain of information. Its own power aside, Macintosh n is also more than prepared to meet the standards of other machines. Whether they speak MS-DOS, UNIX® or assorted dialects of mainframese, from IBM to DEC. So it can work with files from —and run—MS-DOS programs like Lotus 1-2-3 and WordPerfect. Connections are perfectly pain¬ less via the AppleTalk' network sys¬ tem, using a wide variety of cabling, including Ethernet! Then,we raised them. Of course, there’s more to busi¬ ness than simply meeting standards. Which is why we’ve put such effort into exceeding them. Macintosh D is an entirely new generation of computer, building on the graphical interface pioneered by Macintosh. Its working at full strength today, with an operating system that exploits every bit of its astonishing power. The latest part of that system, MultiFinder” adds multitasking cap¬ abilities. The result being, you can switch effortlessly between applica¬ tions or do a number of different things at the same time. This higher standard leads to a new world of possibilities. For example, you can now use advanced programs for Apple® Desk¬ top Publishing—the standard we created over two years back—right alongside your business programs. So it’s much easier to integrate differ¬ ent efforts into a single document. In the Macintosh tradition, what you see on screen is exactly what you can expect on paper. And everyprogram works very much the same way, helping to cut training costs drastically It’s a technology that can actu¬ ally raise the standard of how you get all your information. Because with Macintosh, all your computers (including mainframes) can be ac¬ cessed in the same intuitive way. But why read about itwhen you can be an eyewitness. See the whole family of Macintosh computers and LaserWriter® n printers at an author¬ ized Apple dealer. Call 800-446-3000, ext. 300, for a location nearby. Then you’ll understand why so many business people feel the same way about getting a Macintosh D: Better safe than sorry The power to be your best: © 1988Apple Computer, Inc. Apple, the Apple logo, Macintosh, AppleTalk and LaserWriter are registered trademarks of, and MultiFinder and HyperCard are trademarks of Apple Computer, Inc. MS-DOS is a registered trademark ofMicrosoft Corp. UNIX is a registered trademark of AT&T. IBM is a registered tradetnark of IBM Corp. DEC is a registered trademark of Digital Equipment Corp. WordPerfect is a trademark 2 BYTE* 1988 Mac Special Edition Ilcametobeone skits in business. HD40:HypcrLanl hunt I ni Macintosh ft Eighth National Savings and Loan Fact She< STATEMENT OF INCOME AND EXPENSE SUMMARY easehotd Improvement Multitasking. It's a fad, not a promise. Our MultiFinder lets you run multiple programs simultaneously. Compatibility. Digests data from—and even runs—MS-DOSprograms. Works with minisand mainframes, too. Applications. New-generation programs for every business use. Not next year. Ibday. . Display. Choose any size or shape, includ¬ ing color and targe-screen. lent hie toil Upturns G imp Char . Graphical Interface . We pioneered the intuitive graphics- based operating system others are only now beginning to imitate HyperCard T A revolutionary way to customize your offices information—using associations instead of commands. Expandability . With six slots, Macintosh II is open to just about anything. of WordPerfect Carp. Lotus and 1-2-3 ar ? trademarks of Lotus Development Carp. Ethernet is a registered trademark of Xerox Carp. NuBus is a trademark of Tbcas Instruments. Macintosh II comes with a CPU (which isn t shown here) and a mouse (which is). For the sake oficustom configuration, monitor and keyboard areimrcbased separately. A are your desk, chair, trash can andpencil cup 1988 Mac Special Edition • BYTE 3 EDITORIAL ■ Fred Langa Microcomputing’s Vanguard More and more, it’s a Blue and Red world out there. BYTE readers have seen it coming for years. Q uick! Name the only maga¬ zine whose coverage of the Macintosh II won an award for editorial excellence in an international competition that was spon¬ sored by the Society for Technical Communication. Need a hint? It’s a large publication, routinely reaching over 147,000 Macin¬ tosh users, far more than publications like Mac Week, Macazine , Macintosh To¬ day, and the like. Another hint: In addition to being one of the world’s largest magazines for Mac users, it’s one of the very few that has been there from day one back in 1984; it has covered every Mac in detail, from the first fledgling machine through the world-class power of today’s Mac II. Still stumped? Well, it’s about the only magazine for Mac users that doesn’t have a “Mac” in its title. You’re holding it in your hands: BYTE. BYTE’s readers were among the earli¬ est and most enthusiastic adopters of the Macintosh. Year by year, as the Mac’s power and expandability have grown—as it has finally delivered on that early bright promise—the installed base of Mac users among BYTE readers has climbed steadily. Today, over 35 percent of BYTE’s 420,000 readers use Macs, and that number is still growing fast. What amazes me is that almost all BYTE’s Mac users are also IBM PC users. These readers are truly the van- 4 BYTE* 1988 Mac Special Edition r Dll guard of microcomputing—proficient on more than one type of machine and com¬ pletely comfortable in the increasingly common office environment where Macs and PCs sit cheek by jowl. Like all BYTE readers, these folks are a versatile, prag¬ matic group, not at all locked into a sin¬ gle mold, or constrained by arbitrary philosophical blinders. Faced with a given task, they’ll use whatever hardware and software will get the job done well, religious debates about microcomputing purity be damned. They’re the corporate gurus who can assist any user on any ma¬ chine anywhere in their organization. But you already know this: It’s you I’m talking about. For some 4 years now, BYTE has covered the Mac as part of our “regular” coverage. No, that won’t change. For ex¬ ample, the August issue of BYTE carries a full review of A/UX—Apple’s interest¬ ing implementation of a “semigraphical” Unix for the Mac II. But from time to time we want to do more, to concatenate our coverage and focus attention on the Mac in a major way. The result is the Mac supplement you’re now reading. If you use a Mac, you’ll find plenty of useful information on Mac technology and applications in BYTE’s best tradition—information that no Mac-specific magazine gives you. If you’re not currently a Mac user, you’ll find a rich vein of interesting, perspective-building information that can broaden your microcomputing hori¬ zons and help prepare for the day when— count on it—you’re called upon for ad¬ vice in a Macintosh matter. For example, “MultiFinder Re¬ vealed” isn’t just a glossy list of features or a simplistic user’s guide to Multi- Finder. Instead, Apple’s Phil Gold¬ man—one of MultiFinder’s creators— provides a true insider’s look at how the Mac’s multitasker works. Another Apple employee, Rick Daley, explains some of the design decisions un¬ derlying A/UX, and he offers insights that can help make your use of or pro¬ gramming for A/UX more effective. A very meaty piece on networking the Mac will fill you in on Mac-to-Mac, Mac-to-PC, Mac-to-VAX, and other connectivity options to allow the Mac to peacefully coexist with other hardware in almost any setting. Two articles on HyperCard explain its strengths and weaknesses (as one author points out, there are times, after all, when a word is worth a thousand pic¬ tures). They go on to show you how to build practical, workable stacks, and point to some of the best sources for ob¬ taining user-written stack ware. Jerry Pournelle, Ezra Shapiro, and Bruce Webster all offer their own unique perspectives on how far the Mac has come, where it’s going, and what it’s like to make the switch from the DOS world to that of the Mac. A hands-on article on Color Quick¬ Draw shows you how to make use of the Mac II’s color capabilities. And (of course) lots more. We’re pleased to bring you this high- quality bonus reading, and we welcome your feedback by mail (Write to: Editor, One Phoenix Mill Lane, Peterborough, NH 03458), by BIX, by MCI Mail, or by telephone. Enjoy. —Fred Langa Editor in Chief (BIXname “flanga”) Borland’s new Hirbo Pascal Family makes programming fast and easy T urbo Pascal® code com¬ piles and runs at better than a sizzling 12,000 lines per minute. Its clear, logical design makes it easy to learn and use. Tlirbo Pascal is truly compatible with Inside Macintosh, which means that you’re on familiar ground—that’s why so many Mac users have made it their standard. Best of all, it’s only $99.95! NEW! The Turbo Pascal Tutor is just for you! A companion to Tlirbo Pascal, Tlirbo Pascal Hitor quickly teaches you how to program your Mac in Pas¬ cal! This interactive tutorial on disk and 700-page man¬ ual really show you how— from the basics to advanced programming on the Mac- in Ttirbo Pascal, MPW Pas¬ cal or any version of the lan¬ guage you’re using. You get... □ A concise history of Pascal and step-by-step concepts for the beginning programmer. □ A Programmer’s Guide taking you through all the specifics you’ll need from Pascal pro¬ gram structure to data types, records and files. □ An advanced programming section covering linked lists, stacks, sorting and searching algorithms and more. □ A full guide to using the power of the Macintosh in Pascal, from use of the visual interface to memory manage¬ ment and debugging. □ Source code on disk you can use in your own programs without paying royalties. Only $69.95! Turbo Pascal Numerical Methods Toolbox"' Numerical analysis at your fingertips! This complete collection of state-of-the-art routines and programs solves all the most common prob¬ lems in science and engineer¬ ing. And you’re free to include the source code in your own programs. Includes: □ Solutions to equations □ Interpolations □ Matrix operations: inversions, determinants and eigenvalues □ Differential equations □ Least squares approximations □ Fourier transforms Only $99.95! ne^ ! Tlirbo Pascal Database Toolbox® Provides you with the search and sort routines you need for your Pascal data¬ base applications. □ Tlirbo Access locates, inserts or deletes records using B+ trees, and does it fast. □ Tlirbo Sort uses the Quick¬ sort method to sort data on single items or multiple keys. □ You get source code on disk and a free sample database using the Mac interface that you can tailor to your spe¬ cific needs. Only $99.95! ££ Turbo Pascal is fast: 12,000 lines of good, compiled Pascal code in 60 seconds. Howard Katz, MACUSER 11 All producls require a Macintosh with at least 512K. All Borland producls are trademarks or registered tradmarks of Borland International. Inc. or Borland/Analytica, Inc. Other brand and product names are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective holders. Copyright ©1987 Borland International BI-1127B BORLAND INTERNA T I O N A L For the dealer nearest you or to order by phone Call (800) 543-7543 Circle M9 on Reader Service Card (DEALERS: M10) When The Price Counts As Much As The Performance A picture is worth a thousand words. But should it cost you thousands of dollars to scan one into your Macintosh™ generated documents? We think not! Announcing the new super hero of scanning technology - VisionScan™. VISIONSCAN - A FULL FUNCTION OPTICAL SCANNER FOR $695.00 VisionScan is easy to use. Our unique flat bed design will allow you to quickly and quietly scan virtually anything. VisionScan does not require an additional investment in hardware, nor does it monopolize your ImageWriter™ like the other lower priced scanner. In fact, VisionScan software operates as a desk accessory and will allow you to continue using the computer while scanning. VisionScan is shipped complete with all of the hardware, software and connecting cables needed to allow your Macintosh to begin scanning immediately. And it works in the ambient light found in most office environments. GREAT WITH GRAPHICS VisionScan is the perfect companion to your desktop publishing program. Included with every VisionScan is DeskPaint™, the graphics editor desk accessory. DeskPaint will allow you to edit the captured image by cropping, re¬ sizing, redetailing, lightening, darkening or otherwise embellishing it to suit the design of the page. And all of this can be done without exiting from your desktop pub¬ lishing programs like PageMaker™, Quark XPress™ and Ready,Set,Go!™, to name just a few. VisionScan with DeskPaint is also compatible with other popular paint pro¬ grams like Illustrator™ and Freehand™. WE ALSO HAVE A WAY WITH WORDS For an additional $200.00 a specially developed version of Read-lt!™ O.C.R. by Olduvai Corporation is also available. Read-lt! is a trainable software program that will allow your Macintosh to read and store the printed word. VISIONSCAN - TECHNOLOGY MADE AFFORDABLE Call us! Mike and Lisa are ready to ship your VisionScan today. 30 DAYS TO LOVE IT l/l/e are so confident that you will love your VisionScan that we will give you 30 days to use it. If at the end of that time you don’t think that VisionScan is a great buy call us and send it back for a full refund. ^I/iswscm TOLL FREE 800-654-5294 IN MINNESOTA 612-633-3255 2644 Patton Road, Roseville, MN 55113 Circle M51 on Reader Service Card VisionScan is a trademark of Warp Nine Engineering, Inc. Macintosh and ImageWriter are trademarks of Apple Computer Company. DeskPaint is a trademark of Zedcor, Incorporated. Pagemaker and Freehand are trademarks of Aldus Corporation. Quark XPress is a trademark of Quark, Incorporated. Ready.Set.Go! is a trademark of Letraset USA. Read-lt! is a trademark of OLDUVAI Corporation. Illustrator is a trademark of Adobe. © Copyright Warp Nine Engineering, Inc. SHORT TAKES BYTE editors offer hands-on views of new products Spectrum/24 MacRecorder PageMaker 3.0 scriptExpert Gofer for the Mac The SuperMac Spectrum/24 Video Board I f you try to use a Macintosh II with a standard video board to do image processing, you’ll soon discover that hav¬ ing only 256 colors available for a digitized picture is pretty limiting. No longer: Not only does SuperMac Technology’s Spectrum/24 video board provide you with a 1024- by 768-pixel display on a 19-inch monitor, but each pixel can have 24 bits of color informa¬ tion. Put another way, while standard video boards use 1 byte per pixel for color infor¬ mation and give you a choice of only 256 colors out of a palette of 16,777,216 colors, the Spectrum/24 uses 3 bytes per pixel in a “chunky-planar” color format that lets you use the entire color palette. The Spectrum/24 also supports Apple’s 13-inch AppleColor RGB monitor. Because Apple has recently announced 32-bit indexed and “chunky” direct color formats that are incompat¬ ible with the Spectrum/24’s color format, it’s sold only to developers. When Apple issues its system using the new color formats, SuperMac plans to re¬ lease an INIT that will patch QuickDraw to properly drive the Spectrum/24. The Spectrum/24 comes with an adapter cable and a 314-inch floppy disk. The adapter cable matches the video board’s DB-25 connec¬ tor to the DB-15 connector of either a 19-inch SuperMac Color Trinitron monitor cable or an AppleColor RGB moni¬ tor cable. On the disk, a Moni¬ tors CDEV file lets you set the display’s depth (1, 2, 4, 8, or 24 bits) and size (640 by 480 pixels, 1024 by 768 pixels, or in the 1-bit mode [4096 by 1536 pixels]) from the Control Panel. The SMT-Images appli¬ cation displays 24-bit color images. Several digitized images are on the disk for use with SMT-Images and show off the board’s capabilities. The source code for SMT is in¬ cluded, so a developer can write applications to use the board’s color capabilities. Board installation is quick and easy: You simply turn off the Mac II, pop the hood, and plug the Spectrum/24 into a NuBus slot. Then close the hood, connect the cables, switch on the power, and drag the software files from the floppy disk to the hard disk, Spectrum/24 video board $2000 Requirements: Macintosh II with 2 megabytes of RAM and color monitor making sure to place Super- Mac’s Monitors CDEV into the System Folder to replace Apple’s Monitors file. In the 1-bit color (black- and-white) mode, you can configure the Spectrum/24 for a 4096- by 1536-pixel display, which comfortably holds a MacDraw document that’s two pages tall and seven pages wide. Hardware pan¬ ning, where the image auto¬ matically scrolls vertically or horizontally when the mouse pointer reaches the screen edge, is supported for this ex¬ tended display. This panning feature worked smoothly. If you find 8-bit color images breathtaking, 24-bit color images will knock you out. In this mode, digitized pictures retain their photo¬ graphic quality. There is no granularity to the image: You cannot see any fringing or “boundaries” in areas of subtle color changes at all. On the down side, you’ll need THE FACTS SuperMac Technology 295 North Bernardo Ave. Mountain View, CA 94043 (415) 962-2900 Inquiry M141. more memory: a minimum of 2 megabytes of RAM is re¬ quired, and you’ll do lots bet¬ ter with 5 megabytes or more. Screen updates are noticeably slower, if not downright se¬ date, but that’s because there is 3 times as much color infor¬ mation to manage. However, you can set the display to the usual 8-bit color mode and work as before and use the 24- bit color mode only when your work requires it. Finally, 24- bit color image files are a lot larger than their 8-bit color counterparts: A typical 24-bit color file often fills an entire 800K-byte floppy disk. Plan to budget for a large hard disk along with the extra memory. Although the Spectrum/24 demands more memory and limits display performance, the results are well worth it. The ability to use a virtually unlimited choice of colors with this board makes the Mac II a serious image-processing engine. —Tom Thompson Digitize Sound, Put It in HyperCard M acRecorder is one of those great products that lets you be constructive and also have some fun. It’s a hardware/software combina¬ tion for inputting sounds into a Macintosh and then manipu¬ lating them with a sound-edit¬ ing program. The package comes with a small recording device, the MacRecorder it¬ self, and the editing/enhanc¬ ing software, called Sound- Edit. And if that’s not enough to justify paying out $199, Farallon has tossed in the neatest HyperCard applica- continued 1988 Mac Special Edition ‘BYTE 7 Circle M29 on Reader Service Card Save Big Bucks On Mac Hardware ■H MEMORY UPGRADES ■ 1 Megabyte CMOS SIMMs . Call! 68020 Accelerator Boards . Call! i^^HHARD DRIVES Hardware House Internal 3 1/2" Drives for SE/J1: MAX 30 (30mb Seagate, 33ms) .. $477 MAX 40 (40mb Quantum, 12ms) .,647 MAX 80 (80mb Quantum, 12ms) ..977 CMS 30 MB “MacStack” .$589 60 MB “MacStack”.777 60 MB Tape Backup.697 Call for other CMS products; Prices too low to print! Microtech Int'l (5-Year Warranty) Nova 20 MB External.$597 Nova 30 MB External.697 Nova 50 MB External.997 Nova 80 MB External.1397 PCPC MacBottom 21 MB SCSI ....$747 MacBottom 32 MB SCSI.847 MacBottom 45 MB SCSI ....1147 Internal 1200 baud modems available SuperMac Dataframe XP30 (w/Cable) ...$849 Dataframe XP60 (w/cabie) ... 1197 Dataframe XP150 Internal. 2097 MONITORS Classic II 13" Mac II Color Monitor ..$399 Moniterm Viking 1 (19” SE/m.$1549 Radius Full Page Display (Mac-Plus) $1449 Full Page Display (se/id .1549 Sony 13" Multiscan color.$677 Sigma Designs Laserview 19" (se/id.$1695 mmm apple hardware Mac SE 30mb System: (2 WHITE PINE / SOFTWARE (^) Reggie™ — Convert MacPaint™, MacDraw™, and Clipboard™ images into ReGIS™ or S1XEL™ formats. CALL (603) 886-9050 for your desktop communication solutions. Mac240, VMacs, and Reggie are trademarks of White Pine Software, Inc., DEC, VT, VAX, are trademarks of Digital Equipment Corporation; MacDraw, MacPaint, and Clipboard are trademarks of Apple Computer, Inc.; Macintosh is a trademark licensed to Apple Computer, Inc. USED Mac STUFF!! UUe Bug, Sell & H orsetra d g Papular Computers!! [MlfPlfE fOPIU] 0 ^ Mac SE.Call Mac Plus.Call Mac 512e.Call Mac 512.$750. rg^re^fpim^fgg; SE20 Internal to: 45 meg. Int....575. 100 Meg.1375. Mac mouse to Kensington turbo mouse.55. 400k External.75. Image II.400. Image 1.300. Mme semes Mac* Roms....100. Keyboards.Call MotherB'ds....Call Pouuer Sply...225. 800k Driues....Call Hard Drives...Call Carry Bag.45. Mouse.65. mg rBifuijw [Ripping Pfpirrits fSr [HlfEfEn Shreve Systems 2421 Malcolm St. S,port,La. 71108 Fax 318-865-2006 ** 318 - 865 - 6743 ** SHORT TAKES good box of special effects that let you do all kinds of things to the sounds you’ve re¬ corded, including adding re¬ verb, changing pitch and vol¬ ume, filtering, and flanging. The program can also gener¬ ate frequency-modulated sig¬ nals and tones. One of my favorite effects turns recordings backward; we could have used something like this 20 years ago to run Beatles songs backward and find out if Paul was really dead, without ruining our record players. SoundEdit also has a mixer that lets you work with input from four different channels. I don’t know if professional stu¬ dio engineers would use this program (and I’m sure Faral¬ lon doesn’t expect them to), but you could use it at home to do some interesting things with music tracks. HyperSound is where you can get really constructive with this package. It’s an inno¬ vative program for recording mono sounds and then pain¬ lessly copying them into HyperCard stacks, from which you can play them back. The possibilities for develop¬ ers working on music instruc¬ tion or history stacks, for just one sample application, are in¬ triguing. And it really works. Getting graphics into Hyper¬ Card is simple; Farallon has made getting sound into it just as easy. You just record the sound or music or voice using MacRecorder and then copy it to the stack that you want it in; you don’t have to do any HyperTalking. Due to Hyper¬ Card limitations, output has to be in mono. HyperSound’s interface looks like a cassette tape deck; you don’t have to be a record¬ ing engineer to figure this thing out. The accompanying manual has a good section on sound and recording, explain¬ ing things like waveforms and frequencies, samples and cycles, and envelopes and mixers. This is one of the best Mac packages out there because it’s innovative and inexpen¬ sive; it lets you work with sound and play with sound. For people developing stack- ware, it’s a low-cost way to add sounds to stacks, which is no little feat. My one com¬ plaint is that I wish Farallon would sell a version that comes with the adapter (male DB-9 and female DIN-8 con¬ nectors) needed to hook MacRecorder to older Macs. Finding such a cable is not easy in some parts of the world, like New Hampshire, for example. — D. Barker Aldus Makes a Fine Program Even Finer: PageMaker 3.0 H aving done time in a newspaper production room, I’m partial to the paste¬ up approach to page makeup. You know: Take the typeset galley, run it through the hot wax, slap it down on the gridded layout sheet, and hack at it with an X-acto knife until it fits the design (or at least seems to fit). I took an instant liking to Aldus’s PageMaker because it uses the paste-up metaphor, an intuitive ap¬ proach that makes sense to me, and it means no more cranky typesetters, hot wax- ers, and deadly knives. But I had enough problems with the first version of the program to make me start shopping around for another desktop publishing package. The 1985 edition of Page¬ Maker sometimes just did weird things. Text wouldn’t flow properly into the col¬ umns, chunks of type would disappear, and sometimes the program just wouldn’t do what it was supposed to do. These inexplicable problems didn’t occur consistently, which continued 10 BYTE* 1988 Mac Special Edition Circle M45 on Reader Service Card Mac II/PC Workstation Recapture Valuable Desk Space! Everyone who needs the power of a Personal Computer or Mainframe also needs the space that the Monitor and Processor occupy. With no desk space to organize work and lay out projects, the computer's effectiveness is limited. The Mac II/PC Workstation by Ergotron takes a totally new approach to work¬ station ergonomics. It provides a unique arm suspension system and shelf area giving the operator the ultimate in ad¬ justability and space savings. The Radial Arm raises the monitor off the desk and an adjustable Shelf takes the Processor out of the way, but still within reach of the operator. The list of features includes: • A sturdy tubular frame that is positioned on the side of or behind your desk or work area. • 6" vertical Monitor adjustment with the simple touch of a hand. • 20" horizontal Radial Arm adjustment - the monitor can be pushed into a "park" position. • The Mechanism on the end of the Radial Arm provides unequalled 360° rotational and 20° tilt adjustment for the CRT. • Adjustable Processor shelf. • Compatible with Macintosh, PC's & compatibles, Mainframes, and other CRT's and graphics systems that have monitors weighing up to 65 lbs. • Ideal for Businessmen, Engineers, Graphics Designers, & Desktop Publishers. For more information, contact Ergotron or your local Computer Dealer. GRQOTROn® 3450 Yankee Drive, Suite 100 Eagan, MN 55121 612/452-8135 • 800/888-8458 Circle M25 on Reader Service Card 1988 Mac Special Edition -BYTE 11 Circle M50 on Reader Service Card Make Your Mac Into a Forecasting Wizard! RATS Time Series/Econometrics RATS is your key to an integrated environment for analy¬ sis, forecasting and graphics with time series data. Gen¬ erate forecasts using Box-Jenkins (ARIMA), exponential smoothing, large model simulations, and others. Use the wide variety of regression procedures to analyze your data. Almost unlimited power is yours for only $300!! Call or write for more information today! EZ-X11 Seasonal Adjustment With EZ-X11 and your Mac, seasonal adjustment has never been easier. It handles both quarterly and monthly adjustments, and includes trading day and holiday op¬ tions. You can adjust series singly or set up EZ-X11 to adjust hundreds at a time. The full Mac interface makes XI1 comprehensible. At $150.00 , it’s a program you must have. (Works with or without RATS). VAR Econometrics (800) 822-8038 P.O. Box 1818 (312) 864-8772 Evanston, IL 60204-1818 SHORT TAKES THE FACTS PageMaker 3.0 $595 ($75 upgrade for registered owners of 2.0) Requirements: Macintosh Plus, SE, or II with a hard disk drive; System 4.1 and Finder 5.5 or higher Aldus Corp. 411 First Ave. S Seattle, WA 98104 (206) 622-5500 Inquiry M143. Pack your Mac in seconds Padded Cordura case holds either Macintosh Plus or SE. Padded interior compartments protect and organize your Mac’s keyboard, mouse and external drive. It’s easy to carry with leather handle grip and adjustable non-slip shoulder strap. Six colors: Black, Burgundy, Charcoal, Navy, Royal and Platinum New version also holds extended keyboard. For a dealer near you call toll free 1-800-548-0053 West Ridge Designs 1236 N.W. Flanders • Portland, OR 97209 made them even more frustrat- ing. But the fact that they weren’t consistent makes me wonder if some Mac weird¬ ness was to blame. (I’ve seen Mac users with EE degrees shrug and say, “Well, the Mac just does screwy things some¬ times. ”) I came close to being unemployed once when a long document was delayed be¬ cause of my problems with PageMaker. Aldus fixed all that with version 2.0. I’ve pushed that program hard and not run into any snags. With PageMaker 3.0 for the Mac, PageMaker got even better. The biggest change to 3.0 is a feature Aldus calls “auto¬ flow.” In the older editions, you have to place text on the page column by column. You click the mouse, and the text pours onto the page, stopping when it gets to the bottom of the first column. You then click on a little thing that looks like a window-shade handle to get the rest of the text, move to the next column, and pour in some more text. You keep doing this clicking and load¬ ing/clicking and pouring, col¬ umn after column, until the whole story is on the page. Well, with autoflow, you have to click only to get the text pouring out; the program will then snake it into subsequent columns and not stop until the whole threaded file is down on the page. This automatic flow¬ ing of text doesn’t work with complicated or fancy lay¬ outs—for that, you have to use the old manual approach or the new semiautomatic ap¬ proach—but it works swell with basic pages. This might not sound like a big deal, but if you’re working on a long document that involves laying down lots of files on multi- column pages, autoflow can save you hours. If you need to wrap text around graphics, the semi¬ automatic text-flow mode is adequately fast and easy to use. In general, PageMaker is now considerably better at placing text in unusual ways and gives a designer more flexibility in laying out a page. Aldus has also added publi- continued 12 BYTE* 1988 Mac Special Edition Circle M52 on Reader Service Card YOU CAN WRESTLE WITH A FEW THOUSAND LINES OF CODE TO PROGRAM YOUR EXPERIMENTS. Developing scientific experiments takes creativity. Writing code to run them takes sweat. At least it used to. But no longer. Because we've just solved the scientific and engineering programming problem. OR YOU CAN USE LabVIEW. Picture the perfect programming language. Imagine software where diagrams are really executable programs. Imagine running experiments and simulations through front panels that look and act just like instruments. On screen! Imagine reusable software modules that can control your instruments, in any application. Programs for data acquisition, data reduction, signal processing, analysis, conversion, and display. Imagine a programming environment so powerful that productivity is measured in hours instead of days. The Macintosh made it possible. LabVIEW made it happen. Automated testing, measurement, and simula¬ tion has never been easier or faster. Call for details. 800/531-4742. DESKTOP ENGINEERING HAS ARRIVED. 1 rr NATIONAL K INSTRUMENTS 12109 Technology Blvd. Austin.TX 78727 800/531-4742 512/250-9119 Circle M38 on Reader Service Card 1988 Mac Special Edition • BYTE 13 SHORT TAKES Computers For The Blind Talking computers give blind and visually impaired people access to electronic infor¬ mation. The question is how and how much? The answers can be found in "The Second Beginner's Guide to Personal Computers for the Blind and Visually Impaired" published by the National Braille Press. This compre¬ hensive book contains a Buyer's Guide to talking microcomputers and large print dis¬ play processors. More importantly it in¬ cludes reviews, written by blind users, of software that works with speech. Send orders to: National Braille Press Inc., 88 St. Stephen Street, Boston, MA 02115 (617) 266-6160 NBP is a nonprofit braille printing and publishing house. Equations Made Easy Expressionist 2.0 -*■ The Personal Mathematical Equation Editor 1 example doc 1 snow ma r mfc tr ansmiss i on eotmae nrs ior ngnrwara~ propogating" waves, 7 ^\ has the following asymptotic form for long wavelengths: r analysis for waves that impinge 01 black hole from outside (“leftward- lOlPaqe 1 m Paste into any Word Processor or Page Layout document as PICT or text format. All mathematical symbols available from an editable palette. Expressionist 2.0 is a powerful application and desk ac¬ cessory that enables mathematical equations to be quickly and easily placed into your word processor or page layout documents. If you use equations, and you have a Macin¬ tosh, you will find Expressionist very useful. All you do is create, copy, paste, and get results like this: sin (X) = dt i_. -P q p\ A a,..a p °y r .y p y pt ,..y pli Windows’ Why not Uiy a Wa*:. <>r wait lor Presentation Manager’ 'Wind]fUMiat*.. JC I :j| windows | f“im7ere~“ used/ )-■■ - ■■ . , - .. rrr,. . _„ conceDtd (NeMUind*f )(n' ■ )( I’m.,,- Jt - , said. 3»fc l M,«~ _ Ol,r Ki«a rwrf! t •It pro) - t ind*;»nd •-. < are th^r i- -■■■ —- - . -.... . r -.l file tail Search foim.it font Douimcnt Window GOfm DSDD I wasjfl Hrtlo till te iiram. in ««ti immi windo*, UkxmI) onlv'on* a'l dlSCOve N dr to at a I and Macreauon* pr*t.W*nt Thorn Hog.m Calling Window*, Vh- worst COS shvil ever written," ho addod that the biggest Windows problem tor the user is the nigh cost ot hardviiv "You need to spend lots oi 3.5" DISKETTES The same quality diskettes used by software publishers. 100% certified, Lifetime war¬ ranty. Order in 50's. Add $ 3 per 50 for UPS. 1-312-433-8796 MacOnly, Inc. P0 Box 256 Highland Park IL 60035 ■ IMAGE WRITER 1 THE FACTS Gofer $79.95 Requirements: Mac 512Ke with System 4.1/Finder 5.5 or higher cise and thorough, you can set up Boolean searches using the logical operators AND, OR, NOT, or NEARBY; for exam¬ ple, you could tell Gofer to look for Shapiro NEARBY Pournelle , and it should find all the places where Shapiro and Pournelle are mentioned within a certain specified dis¬ tance of each other. Gofer will copy files to the Clipboard or write them to an application. If you want a hard copy of what you find, you can send the retrieved text to a printer. This capability wasn’t implemented in the beta ver¬ sion I used, which was called 1.0a33, but Microlytics says it will be ready soon. The pro¬ gram can also work as a file browser, letting you scan se¬ lected files without having to set up a search. I used Gofer to look through tons of Word and PageMaker documents, scattered across hard and floppy disks. In its simple search mode, it almost always found what I asked it to look for. When I polished up the search using the operators, it always found the text I asked it to look for. The only odd¬ ness was the scrambling of Microlytics, Inc. 300 Main St. East Rochester, NY 14445 (800) 828-6293 (716) 377-0130 Inquiry M145. PageMaker files. In Gofer’s display window, they were readable but filled with gib¬ berish text and hieroglyphics. This should be corrected when Microlytics (or developer Mil¬ lennium Computer Corp.) adds new “handlers” for dif¬ ferent storage formats. It’s asking for trouble to compare the MS-DOS version of a program with the Mac ver¬ sion, but I’ll do it anyway. While both programs are good, reliable, fast text re¬ trievers, the Mac version is easier to use. The whole Mac approach—windows, menus, and dialog boxes—makes it easier to set up a search. On the other hand, it took me a while to get comfortable with the MS-DOS version. After Microlytics imple¬ ments the features mentioned in the prerelease documenta¬ tion (such as letting you be more specific as to which files to look in) and makes the “close match” unit more dis¬ criminating as to what it turns up, Gofer will be a fine desk accessory for anyone who has to go through lots of crowded places to find something. —D. Barker RIBBONS ' Each Brand new. Not i reinked. Imagewriter ' I or II. Black only. Add $ 2 for shipping per 6 ribbons. Color ribbons. Shipped in $ 7.75 each in packs I 6'S. of6 - 1-312-433-8796 MacOnly, Inc. P0 Box 256 JHiijhjand Park IL 60035 1 Macintosh Typeface / 1 ■ Clip Art Encyclopedia ■ A complete encyclopedia of all typefaces] and clip art currently availble for the Mac.d See what they're offering before you buy. B The encyclopedia is FREE, but there is a $2 shipping charge. 1-312-433-8796 OC MacOnly, Inc. P0 Box 256 Highland Park IL 60035 1-312-433-8796 MacOnly, Inc. P0 Box 256 Highland Park IL 60035 Circle M31 on Reader Service Card 1988 Mac Special Edition • BYTE 17 People who deal with'baud’ of McGraW'-HiU information. Nobody understands the value of good informa¬ tion better than the people who work in computers and communications. And for those people, no information carries more weight than McGraw-Hill's. We provide the databases, analyses and news that computer and communications professionals rely on to illuminate the workings of their industries. Everyone in the business keeps up with the latest developments by reading McGraw-Hill maga¬ zines. BYTE, Electronics and Data Communications are all required reading in the field. So are books from Osborne/McGraw-Hill. For MIS/EDP and communications professionals, Datapro’s print and on-line directories and reports cover every aspect of computer hardware and software from mainframes to micros, as well as communications and office automation. For people who manufacture or sell microcom¬ puters and microsoftware, Future Computing is the and'byte use every bit number one information source for product tests, analyses and comparisons. People who specialize in communications are wired into CCMI/McGraw-Hill, to receive not only the hard facts on communications tariffs, but also in-depth analyses and bottom-line recommendations via print, software and on-line products. And when telecommunications and computer companies plan for the future, they rely on DRI Communications to provide them with forecasts of economic forces and industry trends. When it comes to turning megabytes into mega¬ bucks, nothing computes like McGraw-Hill information. McGraw-Hill, Inc., 1221 Avenue of the Americas, New York, N.Y. 10020. McGraw-Hill. Information that leads to action. km * ’I wJm Enter The New Age of Electronic CAD ■ The wait is over for a powerful, easy to use electronic design workstation. With the new Douglas CAD/CAM Professional System, you can now experience computer-aided design without going over budget and without sitting through months of tedious training. Running on the Apple Macintosh Plus, SE and II, the Professional System from Douglas Electronics excels in price/performance, short learning curves and ease of use. As the newest addition to the Douglas CAD/CAM line of printed circuit board design and manufacturing systems, the Profes¬ sional System is a My integrated engineering tool that will take you from the schematic drawing to the final routed board. The soft¬ ware features bill color, unlimited multi- Circle M22 on Reader Service Card Photography: ©1987 Ted Jew layers and .001" control which makes surface mount technology (SMT) and other difficult tasks a snap. Professional Layout includes a parts placement facility. Schematic includes fully interactive digital simulation and net list generation. A flexible, multi-pass router completes the design cycle with a 16 layer routing capability. The new age of electronic CAD has come with the high resolution and speed of a Macintosh engineering workstation. You’ll be designing your first circuit board just minutes after the Professional System software has been loaded into your computer. In addition, the Macintosh’s graphics capa- Macintosh is a trademark of Apple Computer, Inc. bilities allow for powerful features such as the ability to transfer Professional System drawings into final engineering documentation. Computer-aided design wasn’t meant to be time consuming and complicated. If your present CAD system has got the best of you, it may be time you enter the new age of electronic CAD with the powerful, easy to use Douglas CAD/CAM Professional System. Take your first step by ordering a full- feature Demo. All three programs are included for just $25. Call or write for more information and to place your order. Douglas 718 Marina Blvd. Electronics San Leandro, CA 94577 (415) 483-8770 ©1988 Douglas Electronics BYTE MACINTOSH SPECIAL EDITION Twelve All-Time Favorites Ezra Shapiro Let’s say you were going to be ship¬ wrecked on a desert island for the rest of your life, and someone offered you a twist on the classic question. Instead of the traditional 10 favorite books or records, you would be allowed to bring your 10 most prized software packages for your Macintosh (yes, it’s a very re¬ fined desert island, with three-pronged electrical outlets all over the place). What would you choose, and why? The above is a therapeutic exercise that was suggested to me by Bruce Webster as a way to help me narrow my focus when I was beginning to work on this article. I dutifully sweated over my list, cheated a little (“Does it have to be 10? How about 14?”), and came up with my own per¬ sonal Mac favorites. Some of the choices were predictable—and some were a little weird—but I had concocted my list. I proceeded to put it away and ignore it for a week; when I returned to it, I no¬ ticed that it made a pretty good assess¬ ment of the state of refinement, or lack thereof, in the Macintosh universe. It also recapitulated my history with the Mac, a long story of alternately falling in and out of love with the machine. In the Beginning These days, it’s not very fashionable to advocate a computing environment based on a closed system architecture. In many ways, however, today’s open Macintosh owes its rich universe of software—if not its very existence—to the authoritarian nature of its initial design. Ask any mem¬ ber of the original Macintosh design team, from Jef Raskin on down, and you’ll get the same answer: The Mac se¬ duced developers into using a standard¬ ized interface. The difficulty of writing meaningful code in the limited memory space of the first 128K-byte Mac made the interface routines provided in the machine’s ROM so attractive to programmers that they adopted the standard Macintosh “look” without too much grumbling. The Tool- Ezra recounts the Mac’s history and names his dozen top programs box ROM turned out to be far more than a collection of shortcuts for programmers; it became the guiding force in all Mac software. The combination of the Tool¬ box, a modular program structure, and extensive use of bit-mapped graphics proved to be a fertile ground indeed for the development of new software. And it was new software, too, built around graphics rather than text. The Mac was the first successful personal computer that pumped out pixels rather than characters (though characters could be made from pixels easily enough). Looking back, it’s not surprising that MacPaint was the program that propelled the Mac into consumers’ hearts, while Mac Write evoked little enthusiasm, par¬ ticularly from business buyers. But as the Mac slowly matured, the software base grew with it. The gaps began to be filled with spreadsheets, database managers, and other prosaic applications. It took a few years, but the Mac became a “real” computer at last. But in the beginning, the Mac was something of a dog. Intriguing, yes. Easy to use, yes. But boy, was it frustrat¬ ing to do any serious computing on the machine. When I first joined the staff of BYTE in 1983,1 found a Lisa on my desk. After playing with it for a few days, noting its slowness and inflexibility, I embarked on a serious project to unload the ma¬ chine on anyone in the office who would take it off my hands. I worked out a trade and was relieved to replace the Lisa with a stock IBM PC. Nothing fancy, but soft¬ ware availability alone made the ex¬ change worthwhile. The Lisa spawned the Macintosh, and in 1984 a few Macs began filtering into the office. What caught my fancy—and indeed made everyone take notice of this new machine—was MacPaint. On a character-oriented machine like the IBM PC, I pushed words and numbers. On the Mac, I could doodle or even produce le¬ gitimate artwork. I was enchanted. So here we have the first program category for one of my Mac favorites—design. Today, I vote for SuperPaint from Sili¬ con Beach Software. It’s a direct descen¬ dant of MacPaint, but it allows for much greater refinement. You can create with all the MacPaint tools, perform distor¬ tions, swap graphics with a wide range of other programs, edit at laser-printer res¬ olution, magnify and shrink your work area with pinpoint control, and, in gen¬ eral, have a real good time. SuperPaint also lets you work on a second plane of draw-type artwork, so you also get much of the functionality of MacDraw. I have to give a nod of appreciation to GraphicWorks, which is equal in many respects to SuperPaint, though more con¬ fusing and tougher to learn. Graphic- Works was originally named Comic- Works, and it’s designed to integrate text and graphics into the sort of panels you’d have in a comic strip. The airbrush tool is more adjustable than SuperPaint’s, and you can work on multiple layers. Another nod goes to Adobe Illustrator, Aldus FreeHand, and Cricket Draw, all excel¬ lent programs at the higher end of profes¬ sionalism for the serious artist. But the all-around winner is SuperPaint. One aside: I have to promote one other art program to my list, Fontographer from Altsys. With it, you can create your own laser fonts. It predates any other program that manipulates the Bezier continued 1988 Mac Special Edition •BYTE 21 TWELVE ALL-TIME FAVORITES curves that make up PostScript outlines, and it contains the germ of the technol¬ ogy on which they’re all based. If you’re patient, you can do wonderful things with this product. Back to the Story Even though I fell in love with MacPaint, I did not fall in love with MacWrite, Apple’s companion word-processing program. The typefaces were nice, but I could run rings around it with grubby old WordStar on the IBM PC. So I held back; I was not yet ready to become a Mac convert. The program that started to convince me that the Macintosh might be a tool for more than creative doodling was Think- Tank 128 from Living Videotext. This gem of an outliner ran perfectly well on those early memory-poor Macs. Writing an outline, then moving branches of it from place to place, made perfect sense as a mouse operation. It was exciting to realize that text manipulation could, in fact, be a very visual process. ThinkTank 128 was rudimentary compared to the version for MS-DOS machines; many of the spiffier editing features were nixed due to memory con¬ straints. But as soon as the Macintosh was fattened to 512K bytes, there was ThinkTank 512, which was more than enough to fulfill the promise of its prede¬ cessor. ThinkTank 512 had a host of new features, including a convenient text edi¬ tor that let you create long text sections as part of an outline, and the ability to im¬ port graphics. ThinkTank 512 was sud¬ denly far more than an outliner; it was a word processor, a database for artwork, and a spectacular tool for constructing tightly organized reports. The reigning heir is called More (though Living Videotext has become part of Symantec), and it defines the state of the art in outline processing. More remains true to the visual outliner from which it grew, but it’s almost an op¬ erating system in and of itself—an oper¬ ating system within the context of in¬ dented outlines. You can use the program to sketch ideas, flesh them out with the word-processing functions in the editor, create databases with installable outline templates, dial phone numbers, convert your outlines to tree diagrams or bullet charts, and on and on and on. More was one of the first programs to launch the discipline of desktop presenta¬ tion, and it is so good a program that I almost forgot to include it in my list. It’s such a natural, I assume everyone has it; I have to remind myself that it isn’t sold as a part of the Mac package. The Next Phase Shortly after the arrival of the 512K-byte machine, dubbed the Fat Mac, my head was turned even farther by PageMaker from Aldus and Microsoft’s Excel spreadsheet. PageMaker was responsible for that all-consuming concept of desk¬ top publishing. It lets you gather text and artwork created with other programs and pull them into finished layouts. It’s based on the metaphor of the paste-up artist’s drawing board, and you cut and paste on the screen as you would in a graphics studio, only you can dispense with the scissors and the rubber cement. PageMaker began as a sophisticated piece of program design, and Aldus has continued to improve it. We’re now up to version 3.0, which finally lets you create humongously long publications without having to perform every little design op¬ eration one at a time. It fully supports style sheets (in fact, it can exchange named styles with Microsoft Word 3.01), and it is a pleasure to use. I have to nod at Quark XPress and Ready-Set-Go! 4.0, PageMaker’s worthy competitors, but PageMaker was my first love in this category. Also, PageMaker was the program that con¬ vinced me that the Mac was a real ma¬ chine, one that I could both use and love. Excel proved that the Macintosh inter¬ face was ideal for spreadsheets. Though I wouldn’t have thought so before, it turned out that zooming around on a grid of numbers was made easier with a mouse. And Excel allowed linked work¬ sheets to avoid the bloat of large work¬ sheets fenced into smaller regions for printing. The program also has an excep¬ tionally powerful macro language. Excel was the spreadsheet that finally began to get the Mac into business workplaces. However, I haven’t included Excel as one of my top choices, but only due to my personal habits. Though I like spread¬ sheets, I’m not a number cruncher by trade. I vote for Microsoft Works, a nice integrated package with spreadsheet, word processor, database, and telecom¬ munications modules. Nothing spectacu¬ lar, but solid and reliable. With the addi¬ tion of two add-in programs from Tim Lundeen, WorksPlus Spell (one of the slickest spelling correctors I’ve ever used) and WorksPlus Command (an awe¬ inspiring macro package that completes the job of integration), Works handles just about everything I need to do. Need¬ less to say, it’s also my winner in the word-processing category. If you need super power in any of Works’ areas, I’d recommend going with a stand-alone program (Works is a mite 22 BYTE* 1988 Mac Special Edition slow), but for overall flexibility, Works with the Lundeen additions is my pick. This Year’s Craze “Hypertext,” the current buzzword in Macintosh application design, has come to be a term that’s at least as ill-defined as desktop publishing, the former title- holder in the ambiguity department. As near as I can figure, hypertext means “interrelated text and graphics organized by the creator into a structure not neces¬ sarily bound by the limits of hard-copy output.” In other words, hypertext is an attempt to exploit the abilities of the com¬ puter itself as a presentation device. Typically, hypertext programs let you link screen areas (called buttons) that can be clicked with a mouse to reveal new regions of data. Rather than nominating HyperCard, Apple’s hypertext Erector-Set-in-a-box, or Guide, a solid implementation of the concept, I find myself leaning toward TeleRobotics’ Course Builder, a pro¬ gram that lets instructors manufacture self-contained teaching programs that implement many of the core ideas of hypertext. Written by the prolific Bill Appleton, Course Builder lets you link artwork, sound, text, and animation into the framework of a teaching system. A student can move from item to item at his or her own pace, answer multiple-choice or specific-answer quizzes, and refer to related materials in a neatly structured environment. What’s so beautiful about Course Builder is that you don’t have any need to program; you define the course using a straightforward “logic editor” (that’s my phrase, not Appleton’s). You simply link blocks representing elements of your course in a kind of flowchart, and then Course Builder does the rest for you. The other prong in my mild attack on HyperCard is provided by 4th Dimen¬ sion, the database development system from Acius. If you’re going to have to program, you might as well go for top power. This is a full-featured relational database that gives the developer abso¬ lute control of the interface. You want your own menus, click boxes, entry forms, whatever? Fine, you got ’em. You can program and debug in a program- merish way, or you can build a flowchart (much like Course Builder), and away you go. This is my choice for databases. My third hypertext-like favorite is a game, Chris Crawford’s Balance of Power. Working with maps, menus, graphs, and descriptions, Balance of Power lets you play out a global political continued Circle M13 on Reader Service Card —► QuiekNIail InBox™ / WllcroSoffMait / CE hardware devices and other software systems, or around the world See your dealer today. 1854 Fuller Road, P.O. Box 65580, West Des Moines, IA 50265. Ph: 515-224-1995 QwXMail OuitfcMail logo & CE Scftwzrt iofo are Sadwnarc of CE Software. Inc. Matinteh & LssatWritsr are registered trademarks« Appte Conputer. Inc. MisrcSort is a registered trademark ol the MicroSon Corporation. InBca is a trademark o tstered Mni ot Dn MteraSolt Corporation. Into Is a trademark ot Symantec. TWELVE ALL-TIME FAVORITES Here’s why. Want to draw a picture without ever leaving the program? Easy. Want to wrap text all the way around it or let the text flow right through? Easy. Want to see it all in glorious color? Easy. Need a particular word or phrase by searching through all files, open or not? Easy. Need to use our superior diction¬ ary, thesaurus, hyphenation or outlining? Easy. Want to undo what you just did, or any number of things you did before? Easy. Want to use the fastest word processor on the market? Easy. Line numbers? Envelopes? Auto-save? Col¬ umn selection? Adjustable page preview? Ten clip¬ boards that can be edited and printed? Your favorite page lay¬ out ready when you open a new file? Easy. It’s all easy when you have Nisus. SRaGON 1 concepts, inc. Nisus is a trademark of Paragon Concepts. Inc. (619) 481-1477 Outside CA (800) 922-2993 4954 Sun Valley Rd., Del Mar, CA 92014 24 BYTE* 1988 Mac Special Edition Circle M40 on Reader Service Card confrontation between the U.S. and the USSR. Click your mouse on Mexico on the map, and you get a display of the sta¬ tus of your relations with that country. Select menu items to adjust your policies, read newspaper reports, or dig for his¬ torical or quantitative analysis. Very hyper, and one hell of a game. Finally, Some Fun VideoWorks II from MacroMind is an¬ other impressive example of pushing the Mac interface to its limits. It’s an anima¬ tion package that lets you mix sound and graphics into your own Macintosh movies. You have to write a script (called a “score”), which takes some time to learn, but once you get the hang of it, you’re in the motion picture business. VideoWorks II even provides a nice shortcut if you’re pressed: You can place an object on the screen in one position, place it again in a second spot, and VideoWorks II animates the transition. It could very well be next year’s hyper¬ text; if not, it still represents a great area for creative exploitation. Even if you don’t want to make your own cartoons, you can use it to animate your bar-graph or pie-chart presentations. Imagine an exploded diagram that actually explodes! Not All Roses Of course, depending on whom you talk to, the Macintosh interface is far from perfect. It lacks a number of the ameni¬ ties we’ve come to associate with more traditional computer systems. The icon- based environment is certainly easy to learn, but some users eventually resent the way the Mac’s simplicity gets in the way of real operating speed. I have rounded out my set of favorite programs with three utilities that extend the power of the Macintosh’s operating system to cover some of the gaps. One of the Mac’s most lamented defi¬ ciencies is the absence of a good key¬ board macro facility. Fast touch-typists find the constant interruption of mouse movements to be both distracting and time-consuming, particularly during text entry. Though most menu functions can be abbreviated to a combination of shortcut keystrokes, mouse actions (e.g., scrolling and selecting) are not usually automated from the keyboard. Enter QuicKeys from CE Software, a keyboard enhancing utility that lets you attach any single Mac operation to a one-keystroke combination command. You can still mouse along if you want to, but judicious assignment of functions to keystrokes will keep your fingers on the keyboard continued V.I.E The First Family of Macintosh Programming Getting the most from your Macintosh means taking control — programming! Creating full-featured Mac programs used to be difficult. Not any more! Programming a Mac is as easy as using one. Visual Programming The idea is to use the visual power and intelligence of the Mac to make it easy to program. You program visually and the Mac interacts with you, preventing mistakes. Thus the name Visual Interac¬ tive Programming™ or V.I.P. for short. V.I.P. is a new type of language where a graphic interface replaces a text editor. Traditionally, programming is done by typing program statements into an editor following the rigid rules of a language's arcane syntax. Visual programming, on the other hand, is done by pointing, clicking icons and entering expressions and arguments into an on-screen diagram. A V.I.P. program is composed of graphic elements which can be cut, copied and pasted. The program is auto¬ matically structured with classical logic forms such as if. .then.. .else or loops such as while.. .do and for.. .next. These are presented graphically. The program becomes visual! V.I.P. provides more than 220 pre¬ compiled procedures, greatly simplifying programming. On-line help is always there, keeping you on track. |0| ct docuMnt none |Ol r-teL _ i _ tel— , pi \z m [ ] l°L.. KH ■ TT cc 1 9 2 z 1 A 1 & rp lAi [Qir:„cio«7f.i. jan J £ E* 2 u to) n V.I.P. 's Graphic Editor Beginners Love It V.I.P., an interpreter, provides quick feedback. It's ideal for learning. Create programs with full Mac features thirty minutes after opening the package. A separate tutorial, Macintosh Introductory Programming, explains the basics. V.I.P. is also great for experienced programmers who are seeking a painless introduction to the Mac. Experts Are Amazed V.I.P. forms the nucleus of a powerful development system. A family of products offers amazing versatility. Managers, sold separately, add new procedures facilitating spreadsheets, databases and vertical applications. Translators, also sold separately, turn a V.I.P. program into “C” or “Pascal” source code, ready for compilation. Imagine the benefits of developing in a friendly, interactive environment and with a few mouse clicks, having a stand¬ alone application. Extend HyperCard & 4D V.I.P. programs, translated to “C”, can be automatically compiled to HyperCard XCMDs or XFCNs or Fourth Dimension external procedures. These can offer added features such as multiple windows or full color on a Macintosh II. Write Programs Faster V.I.P. improves productivity. In tests at Fortune 500 corporations, programs were finished ten times faster. V.I.P. also means linear progress; the last 10% of a project won't take 50% of the time. Other benefits are structured programs and automatically documented modules. The Press Agrees V.I.P. received overwhelmingly positive reviews. MacUser called it “the wave of the future”, while MacWorld described it as a “Very Important Program”. MacTutor characterized V.I.P. as “The Next Generation”. Features Icon-based programming. Simplified interface to Mac toolbox. Visual, source level debugger. Fast, interpreted with many pre-compiled routines. 200 page tutorial/reference manual. 20 example programs (2 disks). Run-time package. No license fees. Not copy-protected. Managers: Speech $49.95, Grid $59.95, Matrix $95, Advanced I $95, Advanced II $125, Communications $125, Data- base/Form $295. Translators: to Light- speed C or Pascal, MPW C or Pascal, or to Turbo Pascal $89.95 each. Tutorial: Macintosh Introductory Programming Book (2 disks/275 pages) $49.95 Order V.I.P. Today To order, see your dealer or call Mainstay at (818) 991-6540. Master¬ card, VISA, AMEX and COD are OK. Add $5 for shipping/handling. CA residents add 6.5% sales tax. For more information, write or call Mainstay, 5311-B Derry Ave. Agoura Hills, CA 91301 (818)991-6540. In Europe, contact Mainstay at 71 rue des Atrebates, Brussels, Belgium (02) 733 97 91, Telex 62239. Mainstay Visual Interactive Programming is a trademark of Mainstay. Lightspced is a trademark of Symantec. MPW and HyperCard are trademarks of Apple computer. Fourth Dimension is a trademark of ACIUS. Circle M33 on Reader Service Card 1988 Mac Special Edition -BYTE 25 TWELVE ALL-TIME FAVORITES Items Discussed Balance of Power.$49.95 Mindscape 3444 Dundee Rd. Northbrook, IL 60062 (312) 480-7667 Inquiry M241. Course Builder.$395 TeleRobotics International 8410 Oak Ridge Hwy. Knoxville, TN 37931 (615) 690-5600 Inquiry M242. Fontographer.$395 Altsys Corp. 720 Avenue F, Suite 108 Plano, TX 75074 (214) 424-4888 Inquiry M243. 4th Dimension.$695 Acius 20300 Stevens Creek Blvd., Suite 495 Cupertino, CA 95014 (408) 252-4444 Inquiry M244. More.$295 Living Videotext 117 Easy St. Mountain View, CA 94043 (800) 441-7234 (800) 626-8847 in California Inquiry M245. PageMaker.$595 Aldus 411 First Ave. S Seattle, WA 98104 (206) 622-5500 Inquiry M246. QuicKeys.$99.95 CE Software 801 73rd St. Des Moines, IA 50312 (515) 224-1995 Inquiry M247. Suitcase.$59.95 Software Supply 599 North Mathilda Ave. Sunnyvale, CA 94086 (408) 749-9311 Inquiry M248. SuperGlue.$89.95 Solutions International 29 Main St. P.O. Box 989 Montpelier, VT 05602 (802) 229-9146 Inquiry M249. Super Pai nt.$149.95 Silicon Beach Software 9770 Carroll Canyon Center, Suite J San Diego, CA 92126 (619) 695-6956 Inquiry M250. VideoWorks II.$195 MacroMind 1028 West Wolfram St. Chicago, IL 60657 (312) 871-0987 Inquiry M251. Works 1.1.$295 Excel.$395 Microsoft 16011 Northeast 36th Way P.O.Box 97017 Redmond, WA 98073 (206) 882-8080 Inquiry M252. WorksPlus Command.$99.95 WorksPlus Spell.$79.95 Lundeen & Associates P.O. Box 30038 Oakland, CA 94604 (800) 233-6851 (800) 922-7587 in California Inquiry M253. and your train of thought intact. You can even chain keyboard macros into long se¬ quences, thus automating a whole string of commands. My second utility, one that is fast be¬ coming everyone’s favorite, is a little program from Steve Brecher of Software Supply called Suitcase. The original Mac design allows for only 16 desk ac¬ cessories and a limited number of fonts (the maximum varies from program to program). If you like to have a large col¬ lection of memory-resident desk accesso¬ ries, or if you want wider access to the growing panoply of Mac typefaces, you need Suitcase. Though there are theoreti¬ cal limits, installing Suitcase gives you as many accessories and typefaces as any mortal normally needs. You’re more likely to run out of RAM and/or disk space before you make Suitcase choke. The third utility, Solutions’ Super- Glue, is a print-to-disk driver that lets you look at formatted output on the screen without requiring the originating program. If you send a file to disk using SuperGlue, the saved image can then be manipulated by any other program as if it were a graphic. Thus, you can capture a page of a spreadsheet, drop the image into a layout program, shrink it, and make marginal notes before printing it out. You can build a report with a word processor that uses the output of any so¬ phisticated analytical tool you have. In many cases, the SuperGlue image is smaller than the original file, which is handy for data transfer and true elec¬ tronic publishing. The program lets you crop, resize, reposition, and extract text from images to your heart’s content. Why Apple didn’t see a need for such a utility built into the operating system is beyond me, but this little gem is an essen¬ tial addition to the Mac arsenal. I wish I could add one more capability to this list of remedial utilities—batch files, some sort of concise language to pipeline a series of operations that in¬ volves a number of programs and a num¬ ber of files. I’d settle for the ability to add a shell to the Mac interface that could give me (dare I say it) a command line with batch handling that is not based on icons. I realize that this flies in the face of the icon-and-mouse dogma, but the more you work with computers, the more you appreciate ways to slice off a few sec¬ onds, even if it involves procedures that are not quite so easy to learn. The Wrap-Up There you have it, an even dozen recom¬ mendations spanning the range of Mac¬ intosh applications: SuperPaint, Fontog¬ rapher, More, Works (with WorksPlus Spell and WorksPlus Command), Page¬ Maker, Course Builder, 4th Dimension, Balance of Power, VideoWorks II, QuicKeys, Suitcase, and SuperGlue. If you ask another Mac aficionado for his or her top dozen selections, you probably won’t get the same list, but I guarantee you’ll get several duplicates. The Mac is getting its share of excellent software. ■ Ezra Shapiro is a consulting editor for BYTE. You can contact him on BIX as <( ezra. ” Because of the volume of mail he receives, Ezra, regretfully, cannot re¬ spond to each inquiry. Your questions and comments are wel¬ come. Write to: Editor, BYTE, One Phoenix Mill Lane, Peterborough, NH 03458. 26 BYTE* 1988 Mac Special Edition The Breakthrough UsedTbBeATs And Macs InThe Same Room. Now They're InThe Same Computer. 6 Macintosh U It was getting pretty crowded. As more and more Macintoshes started showing up at work, the duplication of computers, monitors, printers and keyboards was simply getting out of hand. And while there was still a need to use vital programs like Lotus® 1 -2-3® and dBASE® there was also an ever increasing demand for the Macintosh. Would the two computer environ¬ ments be able to work together? Times have changed. Now Macintosh™ IIs can run MS-DOS® software just as easily as Macintosh applications. With AST's Mac286,™ the AT-compatible, 80286 computer-on-a- board that runs inside the Macintosh II. Its advanced hardware design actually runs faster than an IBM® PC AT. With Mac286, familiar MS-DOS programs take advantage of many of the elements of the Macintosh environment. Copy and paste text, print on an Apple® LaserWriter® store your files on the Mac hard disk and share DOS files with other users. It's that easy. Of course, the future is built in, too. By installing an advanced hardware solution for MS-DOS compatibility, you're insuring a home for the best of today's, and tomorrow's, soft¬ ware programs. Because there's one thing you can always count on in the world of personal computers. Times will change. If you're interested in putting an AT-com¬ patible computer inside your Mac II, call AST at ( 714 ) 863-0181 or fill out the coupon, and we'll tell you how you can have the best of both worlds. HrYes, send me information on the Mac286^ □Yes, have an AST representative call me. Name_ Title_ Company. Address_ City. Phone. . State_Zip. Send to: AST Research, Inc. 2121 Alton Ave. L Irvine, CA 92714-4992. Attn: M.C. BYTE ® RCS6RRCH INC. Times Have Changed. AST markets products worldwide—In Europe and the Middle East call: 44 1 568 4350; in the Far East call: 852 5 717223. AST and AST logo registered and Mac286 trademark of AST Research, Inc. IBM and AT registered trademarks International Business Machines Corp. Apple and LaserWriter registered and Macintosh trademark of Apple Computer, Inc. MS-DOS registered trademark Microsoft Corp. Lotus and 1 -2-3 registered trademarks of Lotus Development Corp. dBASE registered trademark Ashton-Tate. Copyright © 1988 AST Research, Inc. All rights reserved. Create a 3.5 Micro Diskette with unlimited protection against a hostile world. You’re covered. BASF molds the rigid plastic jacket of its 3.5" Micro Diskette to its own specifications, providing unsurpassed protection for the flexible disk within. Call 80CF343-4600 for the name of your nearest supplier. The Spirit of Innovation. BYTE MACINTOSH SPECIAL EDITION Macintosh Redux Bruce F. Webster It’s mid-April as I write this, and a lot of water has gone under the bridge since last I wrote for BYTE. I’ve moved back to California, penned a number of articles for other publications, written some manuals for a certain unnamed software firm, and have even started work on my first honest-to-goodness book. So, why am I here? Because, in light of my exten¬ sive and consistent coverage of the Mac¬ intosh from 1984 to 1987, BYTE has gra¬ ciously invited me back for the first-ever BYTE Macintosh supplement. They fig¬ ured I might have a few things to say, and, true to form, I am not at a loss for words. The still-warm (but cooling) news is, of course, the lawsuit by Apple against Microsoft and Hewlett-Packard for “vio¬ lation of audiovisual display copyright,” because Apple thought that the New Wave user interface from HP looked too much like the Mac Finder. And, of course, Microsoft has filed a countersuit. The merits and issues of this case are best dis¬ cussed elsewhere (and, in fact, I think I will), but it indicates the direction Apple’s attitude has taken since the Mac burst upon a skeptical world AVi years ago. Evolution in Action I first saw the Macintosh in Guy Kawasa¬ ki’s office at Apple, in December of 1983, a month or so before its announce¬ ment. Wayne Holder and I were there, representing Oasis Systems/FTL Games as president and vice president, respec¬ tively. Our ostensible purpose was to consider porting our word-processing utilities (spelling, punctuation, and style checkers) to the Mac. Our real purpose was to see the Mac ahead of time. I was initially disappointed at the lack of slots, but Guy assured me that schemes were underway to use the high-speed RS-422 ports as “virtual slots.” Three weeks after the Mac was an¬ nounced (February, 1984), I bought one, off the shelf, with money out of my own pocket. It had 128K bytes of RAM, 64K bytes of ROM, a 512- by 342-pixel mono- The path from then to now was anything but easy for the Mac chrome display, a single 400K-byte flop¬ py disk drive, no slots (virtual or other¬ wise), and an 8-MHz 68000 processor. It was slow, crashed a lot, required multi¬ ple disk swaps to copy a file, and had lit¬ tle software available. But it was mine, and I was thrilled to have it. The Macintosh I use today is a Mac II, with 5 megabytes of RAM, 256K bytes of ROM, two displays (AppleColor high- resolution RGB monitor with a fully ex¬ panded Mac II video card, and a Sony GDM-1952 19-inch Trinitron RGB monitor with the SuperMac Spectrum video card), a 40-megabyte hard disk drive, an 800K-byte floppy disk drive, six NuBus slots, a 16-MHz 68020 pro¬ cessor, and a 16-MHz 68881 math co¬ processor. It’s fast, seldom crashes, has thousands of software titles available, and copies files with no extra disk swap¬ ping. Unfortunately, it’s not mine, and I’m not sure when I’ll be able to come up with the money to buy such a system. Apple has come a long, long way in the past 4 years, as has the Macintosh. The Mac was initially derided as a toy or dis¬ missed as a curiosity. And through the last 4 years, it’s always been a major source of controversy and contention. The Mac versus IBM debates have been hot and heavy, reaching a level of inten¬ sity reserved for such classic issues as calculators (RPN vs. algebraic notation), languages (Pascal vs. C, BASIC vs. Pas¬ cal, and assembly vs. high-level), and operating systems (Unix vs. anything else). Now, the Macintosh is the system that everyone either wants or wants to imi¬ tate, IBM included. That’s something of an amazing feat. How Apple Got There The path from then to now was anything but easy for the Mac. It’s hard to remem¬ ber now, and seems incredible in retro¬ spect, but it was several months after the Mac’s introduction before external disk drives (much less hard disk drives) were generally available. After an initial spurt of sales, fueled by technophiles like me, the Mac went into a slump for almost a year, a slump that many believed was not only the end of the Mac but the end of Apple as well. Some of Apple’s decisions along the way (anyone remember the $1000 RAM upgrade from 128K to 512K bytes?) did little to help things. Even the emergence of the “Fat” Mac with 512K bytes didn’t help that much; software and operating system alike were space hogs, and the memory and disk configurations of the Macintosh just weren’t sufficient to handle their demands. The real breakthrough, in retrospect, was the Mac Plus. With 1 megabyte of RAM and an 800K-byte floppy disk drive as standard, plus a small-com- puter-system-interface port for hard disk drives and significant speed improve¬ ments in the operating system and ROM, it was the first Mac system that had the resources and horsepower to do serious work. Sales took off, surprising every¬ one (including, I suspect, Apple); for a while there, the Mac Plus was the single best-selling model of computer in the U.S. The enlarged basic configuration and improved sales drew in a lot of soft¬ ware development firms that had been watching from the sidelines. The final steps toward success were the introductions of the Mac SE and the Mac II. Like a lot of other folks, I fo- continued Circle M7 on Reader Service Card 1988 Mac Special Edition ‘BYTE 29 MACINTOSH REDUX cused mostly on the Mac II (an open Macintosh, at last!) and dismissed the Mac SE as just another “toaster,” in a platinum case instead of beige. However, it was the SE that shot off in sales this time, displacing the Mac Plus. The key was the capacity for an internal hard disk drive. Sales reports I’ve seen indicate that about 80 percent of all Mac SEs are sold with a hard disk drive. Meanwhile, the Mac II established an open architecture for the Mac family. Hardware developers now had a standard upon which to base their efforts, and owners had a machine that could be ex¬ panded with special tools and bizarre cables. And, despite the hefty price tag, Mac II sales have been strong. What Apple Does Right Given its strong financial condition and growth of market share, Apple has done many things right. But what the company does best isn’t something that shows up directly on the balance sheets, though ul¬ timately it’s reflected there. Its greatest strength is that Apple operates from a place of vision. Before I get accused of succumbing to Apple evangelism, let me explain. I’ve visited a lot of computer firms, talked with their leaders and employees, read their press releases, and used their prod¬ ucts. It’s obvious that a lot of them have an attitude of “sell the iron and move on. ” Most of those companies just get by, despite (in some cases) having signifi¬ cant or innovative products. The ones that succeed the most are the ones with a vision, whatever it may be. Apple, from what I can see, has a very well defined vision of the future and its role in that future. Its vision is reflected in its internal documents, in the talks given by its people, and by its communi¬ cations with developers. The company is planning now for products that will be re¬ leased in 5 years, based on how it thinks things will (and should) be then. Apple sees its products as a force for social change—hence the almost religious fer¬ vor at times. But this imbues the com¬ pany with a desire for innovation not often found at firms concerned only with the bottom line. That innovation gives Apple an impor¬ tant place in the market; it is the leader and everyone else is following, even IBM and Microsoft. What else can you say after an IBM spokesman, at a press con¬ ference about the forthcoming Presenta¬ tion Manager, explains the product’s need by pointing to the relatively brief time required for learning how to use the Macintosh? Would products like Presen¬ tation Manager, GEM Desktop, and Amiga’s Workbench really exist if it weren’t for the Macintosh? The fact is, Apple has some hot ideas and technol¬ ogy, and others want it for their systems. In the ancient Chinese game of Go, there is a term, sente, which refers to one player having control of how the game is being played. I have sente if every move I make forces you to respond. I may have a pple has a very well defined vision of the future and its role in that future. weaker position overall, but for now, I get to control how the game goes, be¬ cause you perceive each of my moves as being too threatening to ignore. Apple right now has sente in the com¬ puter market. Apple plays the user-inter- face move; pretty soon, everyone is try¬ ing to come up with a Mac-like user interface (while, of course, avoiding a lawsuit). Apple plays the desktop pub¬ lishing move; pretty soon, everyone says they’re into desktop publishing. As other moves come into play, the rest of the players must react. That may be overstat¬ ing the situation, but not by much. Just look at all the nifty “new” concepts in hardware and software on MS-DOS sys¬ tems and ask yourself: How many of these showed up on the Mac first? Apple leads instead of following. This is not to say that Apple doesn’t derive ideas and concepts from else¬ where; its heritage from the Xerox PARC and other such places is well known. But the Xerox PARC stuff was around for years; why didn’t anyone else use it be¬ fore Apple? As it was, IBM (and Micro¬ soft) waited until the Mac user interface was well established (and well proven) before tentatively following suit. No pun intended. It’s easy to see how many con¬ cepts pioneered or developed on the Mac have migrated to other systems; there is little evidence of concepts flowing the other way. One more thing that Apple does right, at least from the viewpoint of its employ¬ ees and stockholders: It makes money. Lots of it. True, that’s not always popu¬ lar with consumers. I’ve groused for years about Apple’s standard product pricing policy: Start it out high, let it drift down as needed to keep supply and demand matched, make one last official price cut to make room for its replace¬ ment product, then (at some point) halt production and let the remaining inven¬ tory sell off. And it works, especially with good products. The result is that Apple had $1 billion in sales during the last quarter of 1987, with net profits dou¬ ble those of a year earlier. On top of that, Apple has no real debts. Adjusting for the 2-to-l stock split that took place last year, Apple stock currently sells for about $82 a share, whereas 3 years ago it hit bottom at around $13 a share. And that cash allows Apple to continue its innovation. What Apple Does Wrong I was tempted to make this section “What Apple Did Wrong,” but it’s too easy to pick over Apple’s past mistakes, and, besides, it’s been hashed over too many times already. What’s more, Apple has fixed many of those problems. The real question is, what is Apple doing wrong now? First, Apple is squandering its advan¬ tage. Sente works only as long as you are willing to avoid responding directly to your opponent’s moves. Once you decide to turn and fight, there’s a good chance of sente shifting to your opponent. And I think that’s what may very well happen with the Apple lawsuit against HP and Microsoft. Let me stop here to say that I am not as unsympathetic to Apple’s suit as others are. Apple has a copyright on the Mac user interface; to fail to defend that copy¬ right could mean losing it. And, as I’ve pointed out, it is Apple who spent the money and took the risk, and the com¬ pany is less than thrilled about other folks jumping on the bandwagon after the fact, especially when some of those folks have the initials IBM. Apple has fought long and hard to get into corporate offices; its penetration is based largely on the strength of its user interface and its desktop publishing abilities. The IBM/MS-DOS domination is based on a substantially inferior user interface; how much of Apple’s gains will disappear if the Other Side comes up with something even half as good as the Mac? Having made Apple’s case, I must now assert my feelings that the lawsuit will ultimately cost the company more than it saves. Reaction among industry, press, and users (including a lot of Mac users) 30 BYTE* 1988 Mac Special Edition MACINTOSH REDUX has been overwhelmingly negative. Some have even pointed out how good IBM looks by comparison. This, of course, ignores IBM’s litigious history, as well as its subtle hints about landing with both feet on anyone cloning PS/2s without a license; I’m not sure the com¬ parison is valid. I don’t think the lawsuit is unfounded, but I do think that it won’t slow up the competition as much as Apple hopes, and it will cost the company more in goodwill than it’s worth. Ultimately, the only way for Apple to continue to succeed is to continue to innovate. Rightly or wrong¬ ly, many interpret the lawsuit as a tacit admission by Apple that it doesn’t have much else going for it. The second thing that Apple is doing wrong is ignoring the home market. MS- DOS clones have gotten so inexpensive that they are making a substantial pene¬ tration into households, hurting sales of Apple IIs (especially the overpriced IIGS), Amigas, and Atari STs. Apple has taken a step in that direction by dropping the price of the Mac Plus some, but the drop isn’t enough; you won’t see signifi¬ cant home market penetration of the Mac until it hits the critical $999 price point. Given how little it costs to make a Mac Plus at this point (even with the rise in RAM prices), Apple could afford to sell the Mac Plus that cheap. True, margins on the Mac Plus itself might be a bit thin, but anyone who buys a Mac is going to buy an Imagewriter and probably an ex¬ ternal floppy or hard disk drive. Besides, Apple is ignoring the influ¬ ence that the home market can have on business purchases. If I buy a cheap MS- DOS clone for home, I have a strong in¬ centive to have an MS-DOS system at work as well. If I have a Macintosh at home, chances are I’m going to want one at work, too, both because I can bring work home and because it’s a heck of a lot easier to use all the way around. Folks have a way of getting hooked on the Mac; having an inexpensive home system could well be another foot in the office door. Third, Apple is getting a bit too com¬ placent, smug, and fat. Complacent, in that it is slow to correct design flaws and bugs in its products and has sometimes been unwilling to even acknowledge their existence. Smug, in that the com¬ pany goes around telling everyone its vi¬ sion and seems terribly sure that no one else has an equal (much less superior) vi¬ sion; that no one else might pass it up in the race for leadership. Apple might be in for a surprise. Fat, in that its current growth is explosive and appears to bog down operations somewhat. I’ve had friends interview at Apple recently who have commented on how nobody seems to know fully what’s going on, that they aren’t willing to take action or make a decision. A recent article in the San Jose Mercury News (Business Section, March 17, 1988, by Alex Barnum) stated that the group within Apple that is responsi¬ ble just for finding and buying real estate consisted of over 100 people. The symp¬ toms of corporate obesity are starting to appear. Apple’s Current Problems On top of what I think are its current mis¬ takes, Apple also has a number of prob¬ lems to face. The biggest problem is the aging of its system software. John Scul- ley has publicly stated that Apple is doing a slow rewrite of the entire operating sys¬ tem. Good. MultiFinder is, from a user’s viewpoint, nicer than the original Find¬ er, but it’s still not a true multitasking system. Ultimately, it’s going to require a from-the-ground-up rewrite of the Mac operating system to transform it from what was developed for that original, crippled 128K Mac to something capable of truly supporting a multimegabyte, multitasking system with large mass- storage devices. The question is, can Apple do that without making all the cur¬ rent software obsolete? The answer is, possibly, but it ain’t gonna be easy. Another problem is the challenge of developing applications for the Macin¬ tosh. Apple has done little (if anything) to make the Macintosh easier to pro¬ gram. In fact, with the introduction of color, sound, and MultiFinder, program¬ ming the Mac has become even more dif¬ ficult. Look at all the major companies that have had delay after delay in release dates for Macintosh software, in some cases over a year. A fair amount of criti¬ cism has been leveled at those firms (and sometimes justly so), but the trend has gotten too broad for it to be strictly a problem of the firms themselves. A case in point: the WordPerfect Cor¬ poration. I happen to be good friends with one of the lead programmers on the team that developed the Macintosh ver¬ sion of WordPerfect. Back when I was living near the company in Orem, Utah, I used to ask him regularly how things were going. The response I usually got was a rueful grin, a shake of the head, and a brief discussion on the newest ob¬ stacles presented by the Mac operating system and ROMs. These were bright, talented, knowledgeable programmers; they were just frustrated by a system that was difficult to code for. The common wisdom about programming the Mac is that there is a steep learning curve at first, then it tapers off. In truth, there are two steep curves, the second showing up as you try to get an application ready for market. In other words, once you get the knack of it, it’s very easy to produce Mac software that’s 75 percent reliable. It’s that last 25 percent (especially the last 10 percent) that’s a killer. Finally, lawsuit or no lawsuit, Apple can’t keep its competitors from being in¬ novative. Even IBM appears to have learned some things from Apple and seems to be taking steps to foster creativ¬ ity in PC development and to market its products more aggressively. The prob¬ lem with being the leader is that everyone has a clear shot at your back. If Apple can’t respond quickly and effectively, it may find itself falling behind. Future Directions Ezra Shapiro made a cogent observation about predicting the Macintosh’s future: Those who know what’s really being de¬ veloped won’t talk, and those who are free to speak don’t really know what’s going on. I’m in that latter group, but, heck, I’ve never let a lack of hard infor¬ mation stop me before. In the MS-DOS world, you have an al¬ most continuous spectrum of systems from under $1000 to over $7000; in many cases, you can use the same expan¬ sion cards (and certainly the same soft¬ ware) on both extremes of that range. In fact, it’s easy to start out with a system in the sub-$2000 range and upgrade it, piece by piece, to the over-$6000 range, with commensurate improvement in power, speed, and flexibility. By contrast, you’ve got four basic Macintosh systems: Mac Plus; Mac SE with floppy disk drives; Mac SE with a hard disk drive; and Mac II with a hard disk drive. (Yeah, you could buy a Mac II with just floppies, but that’s like buying a Ferrari with a two-gallon gas tank.) The Plus, SE, and II have three different standards for hardware expansion; the Plus has different ROMs than the SE and the II; and only the II supports color (of¬ ficially). In other words, you basically have three subfamilies within the Macin¬ tosh line, with little ability to recycle hardware as you upgrade. Apple needs something to bridge the gap (in money, size, compatibility, and performance) between the Mac SE and the Mac II. Two possibilities come to mind. One is an “SE-in-a-box”: a system that looks somewhat like a Mac II, though possibly smaller, with just a 16- continued 1988 Mac Special Edition • B Y T E 31 25 Standard Oil (Ohio) 49 Consolidated Foods 2 General Motors 26 AT&T Technologies 50 Lockheed 3 Mobil 27 Boeing 51 Georgia-Pacific 4 Ford Motor 28 Dow Chemical 52 Monsanto 5 IBM 29 Allied 53 W.R. Grace 6 Texaco 30 Eastman Kodak 54 Signal Companies 7 E.l. du Pont 31 Unocal 55 Anheuser-Busch 8 Standard Oil (Ind.) 32 Goodyear 56 Nabisco Brands 9 Standard Oil of Cal. 33 Dart & Kraft 57 Johnson & Johnson 10 General Electric 34 Westmghouse Elec. 58 Coastal 11 Gulf Oil 35 Philip Morris 59 Raytheon 12 Atlantic Richfield 36 Beatrice Foods 60 Honeywell 13 Shell Oil 37 Union Carbide 61 Charter 14 Occidental Petroleum 38 Xerox 62 General Mills 15 U S. Steel 39 Amerada Hess 63 TRW 16 Phillips Petroleum 40 Union Pacific 64 Caterpillar Tractor 17 Sun 41 General Foods ! 65 Aluminum Co. of Amer. 18 United Technologies 42 McDonnell Douglas 66 Sperry 19 Tenneco 43 Rockwell Int. 67 Gulf & Western Ind. 20 ITT 44 PepsiCo 68 Continental Group 21 Chrysler 45 Ashland Oil 69 Bethlehem Steel 22 Procter & Gamble 46 General Dynamics 70 Weyerhaeuser 23 R.J. Reynolds Ind. 47 3M 71 Ralston Purina 24 Getty Oil 48 Coca-Cola 72 Colgate-Palmolive 27 million Americans can’t read. And guess who pays the price. While American business is trying to stay competitive with foreign companies, it's paying an added penalty. The penalty of double-digit illiteracy. Believe it or not, 27 million American adults can’t read and write. Another 47 million are literate on only the most minimal level. That adds up to almost one third of our entire population.. .and probably a disturbing number of your employees. What does illiteracy cost you? Get out your calculator. Illiterate adults make up 50%-75% of our unemployed. Every year they cost us an estimated $237 billion in lost earnings. They swell our welfare costs by $6 billion annually and diminish our tax revenues by $8 billion. Illiteracy costs you through your community, too. It robs the place where you work and live of its resources. It undermines the potential of the people who make your products and the people who buy them. No dollar figure can be assigned to this. But over the years, this may be the costliest loss of all. What can your company do about this? It can join in local efforts to fight illiteracy. It can volunteer company dollars and facilities for better school and tutorial programs. It can invest in a more literate community. The first step is to call the Coalition for Literacy at 1 - 800 - 228-8813 or fill out the coupon be¬ low. Do it today. You may find it’s the greatest cost-saving measure your company has ever taken. A literate America isagood investment. Coalition for Literacy i-1 □ I want my company to join the fight against illiteracy I Please send brochure with additional information i □ We want to discuss funding the Coalition for Literacy Please have a representative contact me j Name_ ' title _ i Company_ i Address_ City_State_Zip_ Phone_ j Please return to Coalition for Literacy Business Division i PO Box 81826 Lincoln. NE 68501 1826 I_I MACINTOSH REDUX MHz 68000 on-board and a socket for a 68881. It would have room for two flop¬ py disk drives, or a floppy and a 3 Vi-inch hard disk drive. It would also have, say, four slots. Such a box could sell for around $2000, the current street price for an SE with two floppies. Yet it would allow users to make use of multiple video cards, color displays, and other Mac II expansion cards. And it would be a great add-in box, encouraging owners to ex¬ pand in a way the Mac SE doesn’t. The second possibility is a mini-Mac II, essentially a Mac II in the box de¬ scribed for the Mac SE above. It would create a Mac II that didn’t take up quite so much space or cost quite so much. It would have fewer slots, but the smaller box would be more popular in corporate desktop settings. A motherboard up¬ grade from the SE-in-a-box to the mini- Mac II would be yet another source of revenues for dealers and Apple alike. It would be priced to sell for about $1000 less than a equivalent Mac II system. Finally, there’s probably a Mac III in the future—essentially a Mac II with a 68030 processor, an 80-megabyte inter¬ nal hard disk drive, and lots of memory. It might even have some direct memory access support and a graphics copro¬ cessor, though Apple has shown a sad re¬ luctance to unburden the CPU from doing just about everything. The Mac III will be a good $1500 to $2000 more than an equivalent Mac II system and will be aimed at the workstation market. From Scorn to Success Apple has done a great job of taking a system that so many scorned and making it a rousing success. However, success can lead to complacency, complacency to caution, and caution to stagnation. The Macintosh has replaced the Apple II as Apple’s breadwinner. Is Apple working on the Macintosh’s replacement? As for me, the ride’s been fun. The Macintosh has long been my system of choice, and the shots I’ve taken at Apple over the years have been out of a desire to see things improve, not out of any intent to harm or tear down. I hope that things do continue to improve at Apple; I’ll be interested to see what steps the company takes over the next year or so. In the meantime, I’ve got work to do, so I’ll get off my soapbox and get to it. ■ Bruce F. Webster is a freelance writer liv¬ ing in Soquel, California. You can reach him on BIX as li bwebster. ” Your comments are welcome. Write to: Editor , BYTE, One Phoenix Mill Lane, Peterborough , NH 03458. 32 BYTE* 1988 Mac Special Edition Dallas Sept. 14-15 Boston Sept. 21-22 Palo Alto Oct. 5-6 © Informix Software, Inc. ‘‘HyperScript" und "Informix" arc trademarks of Informix Software, Inc. "Macin¬ tosh" is a trademark of Apple Computer, Inc. Put The Power ofWingz Behind Your Applications. In two days, you can learn to program powerful custom applications using this much-anticipated new software for the Macintosh. The Wingz Developer Seminar: we will show you how to build appli- cations with all the power, speed, capacity and incredible graphics that Wingz has to offer. Learn how to fully exploit HyperScript, the new powerful command language specifically designed to unleash the full potential of Macintosh workstations. The two'day Wingz developer seminar costs $495. It’s a hands- on intensive training program. We recom¬ mend that attendees have some prior pro¬ gramming experience. Seminar fee includes: • Two Days Classroom Instruction, • A Fully-Functioning First Release of Wingz Software, • Including HyperScript Development Language and Sample Files, • Wingz Souvenir Flight Bag, • Wingz Developer Sportshirt. Return the postage paid application card. If the card is missing, please call 1-800-331- 1763 ext. 3800. Wingz from Informix Software, Inc. High-Performance Electronic Design Software It’s a whole new ballgame for electronic CAE/CAD. MAC II has given the EE powerful new tools to work with. And McCAD — the world’s leading desktop engineering software for the Macintosh — gives you the way to press those advantages when designing PCB’s. Put it all together, and you have a CAD system that’s faster, that has more memory, more storage and filing... and color. Remember, McCAD is a true integrated system. We have modules that take you from schematics to PCB design to fabrication, with a lot of stops in-between. Buy one stand-alone component or the whole package. It’s up to you. Mix and match for your own workstation needs. And easy? If you’re tired of user-friendly promises that turn sour with incomplete systems, complicated manuals and convoluted procedures, McCAD is your answer. T7 MAC WORLD tvt Exposition ...J VISIT US AT MACWORLD EXPOSITION BAYSIDE EXPO CENTER, BOSTON AUGUST 11-13, 1988 Booth #816 McCAD is a registered trademark of VAMP, Inc./ Macintosh is a trademark of Apple Computer, Inc. McCAD is so easy to understand and use, the engineer can start operating it immediately with no break in his work. You ask about economy? This might just be the best part. Not only does McCAD have one of the most enticing price tags around, it also gives you the best price-for- performance in the industry. For example, our integrated EDS system — including PCB, schematic, router and Gerber output — costs only $1,495. And our stand-alone modules start as low as $395. When it comes to engineering software for the Macin¬ tosh, McCAD cannot be underpriced and outperformed by anyone. Period. So, it’s simple. All you have to do is make the best investment of your professional life, and then sit back and relax. McCAD does the rest. M C CRD Published by VAMP, Inc. 6753 Selma Ave., Los Angeles, CA 96028 (213) 466-5533 FAX: (213) 466-8564 Telex: 650-262-3069 Answer Back: 650-262-3069-MCI 34 BYTE • 1988 Mac Special Edition Circle M49 on Reader Service Card BYTE MACINTOSH SPECIAL EDITION Take a Walk on the Mac Side Jerry Pournelle I’d worked until quite late and was trying to sleep in, when I was awakened by hys¬ terical laughter. Roberta was standing at the foot of the bed whooping, “Now they’ve done it!” “Uh? What?” I demanded. “Now they’ve done it!” No matter what I said, she cackled in¬ sanely and repeated her line. I got up and padded to the front door, where I found they’d indeed done it: I was greeted by a pile of boxes higher than my head. In fact, several piles of boxes, all wedged together. Enough boxes that it was im¬ possible to get past them. We were barri¬ caded by boxes of computers. “Now they’ve done it,” Roberta gig¬ gled. I had to admit things had gone a bit far. Just then the UPS truck drove up with more boxes, only there wasn’t any way for him to get past the ones Federal Express had delivered—and the mailman was coming. Eventually, we got the stuff sorted out and brought inside. It wasn’t all com¬ puters. Some was stuff we had ordered from Sears. Some was software—it’s amazing what all Microsoft sends in their OS/2 package. Most, though, was from Apple: a Mac¬ intosh II, a color monitor and monitor stand, two enormous boxes of software, a LaserWriter, and another box of accesso¬ ries for the LaserWriter, including cables for AppleTalk. There was also Priam’s new 330-megabyte MacDisk and some other stuff I’ve forgotten. All told, it nearly filled the front room. Each box from Apple was topped off with a paper threatening dire conse¬ quences if I lost anything: machine, soft¬ ware, boxes, packing material (including plastic worms); Apple wants everything back. The letter is stiff enough that I con¬ templated packing everything back up and getting it out of here the same day, but of course I didn’t. Eventually, we had everything upstairs and unpacked, and I sent the boxes out to our public stor¬ age locker. Jerry unleashes a Macintosh II on his treasure trove of software Setting Up Everyone has the problem of computer furniture, but with me it’s worse than most because we have so many systems here: not just computers, but also printers and monitors. Although there are always one or two main machines I’m using constantly, most systems are here just for testing. There’s not enough space for everything, so some machines have to be brought out, used awhile, then put away until new software or boards arrive and they’re needed again. I looked at commercial computer en¬ closures, and I even bought one from Yield House, but it was too expensive and too large. Then I bought several heavy-duty, two-shelf, lab-equipment rolling carts and fastened keyboard drawers under their top shelves. These were large enough for big machines like CompuPro S-100 “boat-anchor” systems with 8- inch disk drives. The only problem was that the carts were too big; it wouldn’t take many to fill the storeroom. Then the local Builder’s Hardware had a sale on microwave carts. These come with casters and three shelves. There’s even an enclosed bottom compartment, where I can store system documents and software. The tops of these carts were too high for comfortable typing, but I solved that by making a plywood shelf that I attached at the proper height and putting a keyboard drawer under that. These carts worked so well that Roberta is using one as the permanent place for her AT&T computer. Those were fine at first. The carts were nearly perfect for early IBM com¬ puters. Alas, they’re no good at all for Macintoshes. There’s no room in those keyboard drawers for a mouse to operate. You can put the mouse on the shelf above the keyboard, but reaching across the keyboard for the mouse gets tiresome in a big hurry. After many experiments, I set up my Mac Plus on an oversize typing table. The Plus sits on the AST-2000 hard disk drive, the DataDesk 101-key keyboard sits in front of that, and the mouse rests next to the keyboard on a genuine Apple mouse pad thoughtfully provided by Apple’s Bruce Chamberlain. All in all, it works quite well. I’ve also seen a computer desk called a Mac Station from Hubbard Furniture. This comes on casters and has a drop¬ down keyboard shelf that’s wide enough for keyboard and mouse. Alas, neither the Mac Station nor a simple typing table will work with a Mac II. The machine is too large, and you don’t want to sit as close to the Mac II monitor as to that of the Mac Plus. Hubbard also has a two-shelf system on casters. This isn’t bad, and it would be more than good enough for most offices; but due to severe space limits, I need the area under the table for manuals, and the Hubbard system wasn’t designed for that. I could see that the Mac II was going to need a lot of space for manuals—at least at first—and I’d also need a place to put the MacDisk. I temporarily solved the problem by putting the Mac II on one of the rolling lab carts and setting the keyboard and mouse on a typing table in front of it. This works pretty well, but it makes for an awfully big station. The furniture problem isn’t made any easier by the Mac II’s basic design. The continued 1988 Mac Special Edition • BYTE 35 THE MAC SIDE keyboard port is on the back, on the right side as you face the Mac II. The cable has to be plugged into the left side of the Mac II keyboard, because, although there’s a cable socket on the keyboard’s right side, you have to plug the mouse into that. I suppose if you’re left-handed every¬ thing would be fine. Well, maybe not. Even if you plug the mouse into the left side of the keyboard, you won’t want to route the keyboard cable along the right side of the Mac II because that’s where the hardware reset button is. Sometimes you just can’t win. Once you decide where to put the Mac II, setting it up is a snap. The monitor is clean and crisp. Its stand is worth com¬ menting on, too. Most monitor stands are clearly afterthoughts, but the Mac II’s tilt/swivel stand was clearly designed for the system and is about the best-working one I’ve ever seen. After you get everything installed, you won’t have to reach behind the ma¬ chine very often, either. Although there’s an on/off switch back there, the Mac II has a shutdown command in soft¬ ware. When you use it, both the Mac II and the monitor are completely powered down. There’s a switch right on the key¬ board that turns them back on. This is an idea whose time has come. Incidentally, it’s just as well that the shutdown procedure turns off the Mac II’s monitor; it gives off more heat than my 19-inch Electrohome monitor. Getting Started When the Mac II came, I was in the mid¬ dle of doing my taxes. Tax time at Chaos Manor used to be pretty grim, but lately it’s been much better. First, over the years I’ve refined my accounting pro¬ gram-written in compiled CBASIC for CP/M and later transferred to an IBM PC—to the point where it does most of the work. There’s still a flurry of year-end entries into the journal, but that’s more tedious than difficult; and once all the entries are made, the accounting soft¬ ware posts them to over a hundred ledger pages, keeping track of what was family expense and what was business expense, then posts the proper percentages of fam¬ ily items like electricity and house insur¬ ance into the appropriate ledger pages. I did have to go in and manually correct entertainment to match the new tax law’s 80 percent requirement, but that was no problem. The second reason I don’t go mad try¬ ing to do my taxes is SoftView’s Macln- Tax. I’ve said before that MacInTax is worth buying a Mac for—and I haven’t changed my view. Taxes are traumatic enough, though, that I didn’t want to be learning to use the Mac II while I was doing them, so I set MacInTax up on the Mac Plus. Everything worked fine until I wanted to print my tax forms. Then I discovered that the Mac Plus had forgotten how to use the Imagewriter. I don’t normally have a printer at¬ tached to the Mac Plus. The Image- writer, a very early one bought (along with the 128K-byte Mac that eventually was upgraded into a Mac Plus) about a month after Apple brought out the Mac¬ intosh, normally resides in my youngest son’s room. Richard Stefan is on the Notre Dame debate team—they’re going to both the state and national competi¬ tions this year—and has his own Mac that he uses to support the debate team activi¬ ties. Every year, though, I borrow the Imagewriter to print my taxes, and it has always worked until now; thus, it was 36 BYTE* 1988 Mac Special Edition Circle M19 on Reader Service Card THE MAC SIDE quite a shock when it wouldn’t print. Since it was after 6 p.m. on April 15th, I was more than a bit concerned. Then I remembered the Mac II. Surely it would know how to print. In something of a panic, I unpacked the Mac II and set it on one of my test stands. I didn’t read any papers. I just plugged the cables into the obvious places and turned it on. It came up just fine. I used the Mac Plus to download MacInTax and all my tax forms onto a 3 Vfe-inch floppy disk and brought that over to the Mac II; made a new folder on the Mac IPs hard disk drive and labeled it “Taxes 1987”; and copied everything into it. MacInTax came up fine when I double-clicked it. For about a minute I contemplated setting up the LaserWriter, but I thought that might be pushing my luck. I connected up the Imagewriter and tried to print. I forget the error message, but it was considerably more informative than the one I got with the Mac Plus; it said some¬ thing about driver not installed, I think. Whatever it said drove me to open the Mac II manual for the first time. That told me that on disk II of the System Tools I would find the Imagewriter driver, and I should copy that into the System Folder on the Mac II’s start-up disk. Then I should use the Chooser, which I’d find by pulling down the Apple Logo, to install the Imagewriter, after which everything ought to work fine. It did. In a couple of minutes I had the satisfactory sound of the printer going wheep! wheep!, and I could go to dinner. It took about an hour to print out the forms, but so what? I figured out the next day that if I’d followed the same procedure—copying the driver into the System Folder and using the Chooser to select it—on the Mac Plus, that would have worked, too. I think what happened is that sometime in the past year, one of the boys updated the system software on the Plus and didn’t bring over the printer driver. Anyway, once the taxes were done, it was time to set up the Mac II properly. As I said earlier, the modified micro- wave carts were totally inadequate, so I found a new and better workstation; the Mac II is now right next to my desk. The Mac II is shipped with a booklet that says “DON’T DO ANYTHING UNTIL YOU’VE READ THIS.” Natu¬ rally, I didn’t see it until long after I had the Mac II up and running; if I had, I wouldn’t have had to go to the thick Mac II manual to get my taxes printed. The booklet is pretty complete on how to set it up and get going. A pity I didn’t see it earlier, but there was no harm done. On the other hand, I did learn that you really can get these things going with a minimum of fuss and bother. Most of the setup is intuitive, and where it’s not, the manuals are very clear and well indexed. Usually. There are exceptions, as we’ll see; but my pleasant introduction to the Mac II certainly prejudiced me in its favor. Priam MacDisk I have a Priam 330-megabyte hard disk drive on my big Cheetah 386, and I love it. While I was on the phone to Priam’s Pat Kline, I mentioned that I was getting a Mac II. “We make the same disk for the Mac that you have on your PC.” She laughed. “Want to try one?” That decision didn’t take long. As it happens, the MacDisk came in the same continued Math (TvnP The Mathematical Equation \y m y x Editor for the Macintosh Edit equations like this: - 1 n J 00 [ f‘ 0 ’ll ? ( ^ + r ) dxdy = 1 tl 0 oo e i H>|a A Vis > *|-i|±|x *1 HIS ?□■!-.... i. »:|vo & HgpaZnzalJa Jjs Jb (]:; aiiii IL-I.... And get printer output like this: A_ K J j* e { x +y } dx dy = 1 o o 6475-B East Pacific Coast Highway, Suite 392 Long Beach, CA 90803 • (213) 433-0685 Tired? Frustrated? Still struggling to construct equations using MacDraw or MacPaint? Then you're ready for MathType™ - a new tool for putting mathematical equations in your documents. Equations by Clicking MathType is visual and intuitive, the way Macintosh applications were meant to be. All you do is click on symbol and template icons - no codes or Option/Shift key combinations to remember. And by nesting templates within templates, you can build even the most complex expressions quickly and easily. Working Together Use the familiar Cut and Paste functions to move MathType equations into word processing or desktop publishing documents. MathType works with MacWrite, Microsoft Word, PageMaker, Ready, Set, Go and any other programs that accept graphics from the clipboard. Two-way TeX Interface MathType can also translate equations to Tj> one. Needless to say, following that advice only produces that same message. MindWrite is a rather good word pro¬ cessor and outline program that I have grown rather fond of on the Mac Plus. It isn’t copy-protected, either: it runs fine off the Plus’s hard disk drive. However, not only wouldn’t it work on the Mac II, Our Copier Comes With A Fancy Wrapper. APPLIED DRTR COMMUNICATIONS 14272 Chambers Road • Tustin, CA 92680-6998 CopyMfel^ I n these days of plain wrap labels, it’s nice to know that somebody still lets you dress things up. Applied Data Communications’ new CopyMaker Plus 3.5-inch diskette duplication system is a master at the finishing touch: creating and applying custom-printed labels as fancy as you like in flat or wrap-around styles. In one very quick operation, the CopyMaker Plus copies diskettes, prints up to 15 lines of custom type on your labels, and applies the labels to the diskettes. With easy-to-use soft¬ ware running on your Macintosh or PC that automatically turns out hundreds of the fanciest copied and labeled diskettes around. Day after day. The CopyMaker Plus makes you look good in other ways too. With accuracy that places labels within 1/32 of an inch and white glove handling that keeps your diskettes factory- fresh and scratch-free. Fast-and-fancy copying and labeling skills make the CopyMaker Plus the best- dressed duplication system going for software manufac¬ turers and large companies that distribute data on diskettes. For more information on how you can dress up your 3.5-inch diskettes, call Applied Data Communications today toll-free at 1-800-221-5486. Applies flat and wrap-around labels. ©1988, Applied Data 800/221-5486 Communications.Inc. California: 800/334-5486 • 714/731-9000 CopyMaker Plus is a trademark of Applied Data Communications. Inc. Macintosh is a trademark of Apple Computer, Inc. it failed disastrously: when I tried to run it, the machine hung so thoroughly that I had to use the hardware reset to recover. Apparently the MindWrite folks had the same problem I did when I tried to run MindWrite 1.1 on the Mac II. They wrote MindWrite 1.1 to Apple’s specs and released it shortly before Apple re¬ leased MultiFinder. They tell me that Apple changed the MultiFinder just be¬ fore they released it, in a way that causes MindWrite 1.1 to crash. They’re provid¬ ing a free update that corrects the problem. On the other hand, WriteNow, an eas¬ ily learned and very “Mac-like” word processor/text editor that was written be¬ fore the Mac II ever came out, works fine on every Mac I have, from the old 512K- byte Mac through the Plus to the II (and is perfectly adequate for most of my word-processing jobs). Epyx’s Sub Battle, which is also not copy-protected, almost works, but some of the visuals are distorted, there’s no sound, and eventually the machine hangs and has to be reset. Mac Attack, a tank battle game, has to be started from the floppy disk drive; when you do, it first displays a logo, then a message that the sound effects won’t work on a Lisa (!), then finally gives you bombs and a sys¬ tem error message, after which the ma¬ chine goes so dead you have to use the power switch to restart it. I could go on listing things that do and don’t work, but surely the point is made: you simply can’t know what Mac Plus software will run on the Mac II. In gen¬ eral, it’s less likely to work if it’s copy¬ protected, but that’s no infallible guide, as witness MindWrite. All I can really tell you is to experiment. LaserWriter and AppleTalk The Apple philosophy is to make things simple. That’s fine as long as everything works. But as soon as something goes wrong, it’s a different story. Setting up the Mac II was simple enough that I didn’t think there’d be any problem installing the LaserWriter. After all, the directions were clear. I went through them step by step, install¬ ing first the hardware, then the software. In 5 minutes both were done, and it was time to test the printer. It wouldn’t work. The Mac II couldn’t find the printer. Unfortunately, the error message wasn’t any more helpful than that, either. I went back through the printer docu¬ ments and carefully followed the instal¬ lation procedure again. When that didn’t work, I read everything I had about 40 BYTE* 1988 Mac Special Edition Circle M56 on Reader Service Card THE MAC SIDE AppleTalk. Alas, that wasn’t much, but it was enough to show I’d connected all the cables properly. Finally, I tried setting up the Mac Plus to run the LaserWriter. I got the same re¬ sults as with the Mac II. That printer just wasn’t talking to computers. It was time to call Apple. I suppose I could have used this as an opportunity to test Apple’s technical-support system, but BYTE was in a tearing hurry for this column, so I called the office that sent me the Mac II in the first place. The people there know their stuff. I described what I’d done. I was conducted through a few tests. I’d guessed them from the documents, but I was glad to have my guesses confirmed. The diagno¬ sis was positive: either a cable was bad, or the electronics board in the Laser¬ Writer had gone south in shipment. I was offered a choice: they’d send new cables and a new electronics board by Federal Express, or I could take the printer to a local Apple dealer. I opted to have the parts sent to me. By this time, I was really desperate. This was a Wednesday afternoon. Thurs¬ day at noon I was due to catch an airplane to Colorado Springs to take part in some activities at the Air Force Academy. On Saturday morning, I was due to catch an airplane that would get me back here just in time to attend Larry Niven’s 50th birthday party—and this column had to be in New Hampshire by the following Monday morning. Apple was true to their word: on Thursday morning, the new cables and board arrived. It took me precisely 1 minute to replace the LaserWriter’s elec¬ tronics board. (I’ll admit that I rehearsed by removing and reinstalling the original the night before.) Then I plugged in the new AppleTalk cables and turned on the system. It still didn’t print, but that was because I’d skipped a step in the reinstal¬ lation; when I called in the Chooser and set things up properly, everything was fine. Cables After I got back from Colorado Springs, I left the new cables in place and rein¬ stalled the old board in the LaserWriter; not only wouldn’t it print, but I got the same symptoms as before. So that board definitely was defective; it wasn’t the cables at all. On the other hand, it might have been. I’ve had some experience in cable design: I was once in charge of human factors for a good part of Boeing, and designing cable ends so that they can’t be plugged in backward or to the wrong place is one task of the human factors group. Thus, I can say with some authority that the Apple cabling system is a miserably poor design. The original Macintosh—all the way up to the Mac Plus—used standard DB-9 plugs for the printer and a different plug system entirely for the keyboard. Under the new system (Mac Plus, SE, and II), all Apple cables terminate in tiny round cable ends about % inch in diameter. Some of these cables have 8 or 9 active pins in them. Others have only 3 or 4. They’re supposed to have small plastic keys that make it impossible to plug the wrong cable into the wrong socket, but in fact that doesn’t work. It’s not only phys¬ ically possible, it’s also fairly easy to jam an AppleTalk (9-pin) cable into a socket intended as the auxiliary key¬ board socket. Worse, since these are on the back of the machine and are labeled only with ambiguous (and tiny) icons, continued With all the advantages of the Macintosh . The Macintosh promises enormous benefits to engineers and other designers. All it takes is the right software to take advantage of the superior ease of learning and speed of the Macintosh. Not just drawing programs, but real CAD. MGMStation™ is real CAD. It’s part of a fast, sophisticated, cost-effective CAD/CAM package developed for engineers and designers. It offers capabilities equal to mainframe CAD packages, with floating point precision up to 16 decimal places. Unlimited zoom. Color or black-and-white output. Auto dimensioning. Multiple layers, multiple windows. Hatching and filling of arbitrary shapes. Sophisticated functions like filleting and chamfering. Display precision beyond that of QuickDraw™ (note the smooth curves). And built-in plotter drivers. Options include symbol libraries and an IGES conversion utility. If you’re designing mechanical parts, you may be interested in our CAM package, too. It handles milling, turning, sheet metal cutting and wire EDM. See your dealer for your HypeiCAD™ demo stack or write us on your letterhead for a free disk. If you are serious about creating producible designs quickly and efficiently, you can’t afford to waste your time on anything less. MGMStation. Real CAD. MGMStation from Micro CAD/CAM Systems, Inc. 5900 Sepulveda Blvd., Van Nuys, CA 91411 (818) 3764)008 AppleLink D0572 Telex: (650) 310-7078 MCI-UW Macintosh is a Registered Trademark and QuickDraw is a Trademark of Apple Computer, Inc. Circle M35 on Reader Service Card 1988 Mac Special Edition • B Y T E 41 Circle M30 on Reader Service Card mm •30 day money-back guarantee •2 year warranty •Call or send for your FREE Technical Guide ’Serial / IEEE controller for long-distance applications HPIB plotter interfacing •Desk accessory software for IEEE control from any application from BamC^FoiSa^iasS^ 01 lOtech offers the widest selection of easy-to-use IEEE 488 (GPIB) interfaces for the Macintosh. •NuBus IEEE board for the Macintosh II •SCSI / IEEE controller for the Macintosh Plus, SE & II IEEE-Z IOtech...the choice is easy ( 216 ) 439-4091 Fax (216) 439-4093 25971 Cannon Road • Cleveland,Ohio 44146 London (0734) 86-12-87 • Paris (1) 34810178 • Zurich (01) 821 944 Milan 02-4120360 • Linkoping 013 11 01 40 • Gorinchem 01830-35333 Sidney (2) 452 3831 • Seoul 784-9942 • Munich and other European, North African and Middle East countries not listed (089) 710020. THE MAC SIDE that’s easy to do even if you’re trying to be careful. I managed to do it, with the result that the machine did some very odd things until I set it right. Worse, though, if you do jam the cable into the wrong socket, you may well damage the cable. The pins in a male Apple cable are tiny and are easily pushed deep into the cable end. I ruined two AppleTalk cables. One was repair¬ able with needle-nose pliers and a lot of patience. The other had the wires pushed so far back into the cable that nothing would get them out again. Since it’s also impossible to take the cable housing apart, once that plug is damaged, you’re probably going to have to buy a new cable. Except for potential profits to Apple in cable sales, I see no reason for going to these delicate and unrepairable cable ends. I predict considerable profit for a third-party outfit ready to supply better cables for Apple computers. WriteNow Nonsense WriteNow is not a bad editor, but its pub¬ lisher, T/Maker, has done something that could drive you crazy if you’re not careful. T/Maker provides you with two disks, one containing the WriteNow program, and another with a demo version called Sample WriteNow, which you’re free to copy and pass on to friends who want to try it out. Sample WriteNow works just like the regular version, with one excep¬ tion: it prints “CREATED WITH SAM¬ PLE WRITENOW” across the top and bottom of every page of every document you create. Here’s the problem: if you have Sam¬ ple WriteNow anywhere on your hard continued Items Discussed Mac-101. DataDesk International 7651 Haskell Ave. Van Nuys, CA 91406 (818) 780-1673 Inquiry M254. ..$169.95 Reach for the Stars. Strategic Studies Group 1820 Gateway Ave. San Mateo, CA 94404 (415) 571-7171 Inquiry M259. .$40 Mac Station.Price not available Hubbard Furniture 1946 Raymond Northbrook, IL 60062 (312) 272-7810 Inquiry M255. Strategic Conquest Plus. PBI Software, Inc. 1163 Triton Dr. Foster City, CA 94404 (415) 349-8765 Inquiry M260. ...$59.95 MacDisk. Priam Corp. 20 West Montague Expy. San Jose, CA 95134 (408) 434-9300 Inquiry M256. ....$4895 VideoWorks II. MacroMind, Inc. 1028 West Wolfram Chicago, IL 60657 (312) 871-0987 Inquiry M261. .$195 MacInTax. .$119 WriteNow SoftView 1.07. .$175 4820 Adohr Lane, Suite F Camarillo, CA 93010 (805) 388-2626 Inquiry M257. 2.0. T/Maker Co. 1973 Landings Dr. Mountain View, CA 94043 (415) 962-0195 .$195 MindWrite. Access Technology Access/MindWork Division .$195 Inquiry M262. 200G Heritage Harbor Monterey, CA 93940 (408) 648-4000 Inquiry M258. 42 BYTE* 1988 Mac Special Edition The Problem is not a lack of text it’s a lack of Information Introducing TRUE, Relational Hypertext The Difference Between Text and INFORMATION jli & Ui f 1 ' * 1 " 1 \ 1 M • Quickly transform raw text into useful information • Inherent graphic interface for ease of use ArchiText™ is a revolutionary text analysis, management and presentation package for researchers, educators, writers, marketing professionals and anyone who needs to organize large quantities of textual information. FREE run-time application for viewers, complete with unique activity tracking system • Quickly build, search and link nodes of information • Manage text from many different sources Circle Mil on Reader Service Card Call now for a free brochure! ArchiText manages text originating from diverse sources such as keyboard entry; word processing files (text format); scanned data from OCR devices; files imported via modem or from other applications (databases, spreadsheets, outliners, etc.); and files imported from optical disk storage systems. ArchiText, $349.95, from Brainpower, Inc. 24009 Ventura Blvd, Calabasas, CA 91302 800-345-0519 • (CA) 818-884-6911 • Full-feature, stand-alone program that requires less than 400k of memory to operate • Powerful tool for the analysis and synthesis of textual information Come see us at booth 5655 during the August MacWorld Expo/Boston. THE MAC SIDE disk when you click on a WriteNow docu¬ ment, it could come up in the Sample version. That is and isn’t T/Maker’s fault. When you click on a Macintosh docu¬ ment of any kind, the Finder will locate the appropriate application no matter where you’ve got it ferreted away (unlike DOS machines, which won’t look out¬ side of the current directory unless you explicitly tell them to). In the case of WriteNow, the version you get depends on which one you most recently fiddled with—even moving a version to another folder seems to be enough to reset the de¬ fault to that version. It happened that Larry Niven’s birth¬ day came just after I got the Mac II. Now that I had a LaserWriter, I thought I’d make a really fancy card to go with the present. I’d used WriteNow on the Plus, and since I was more or less familiar with it, I tried it first. Alas, I hadn’t elimi¬ nated Sample WriteNow before I did that, and my 3 hours of composition were completely wasted, since I couldn’t print the card without the “CREATED WITH SAMPLE WRITENOW” idiocy. Surprise: so diligently does the Finder search for that idiotic Sample version that even with the Sample version on another hard disk , the Finder will go find it and bring it in when you invoke WriteNow by clicking on a document. After eliminating all traces of Sample WriteNow from the MacDisk, I wrote a new birthday card by invoking Write¬ Now. It printed fine; but the next time I called it in, that damnable message printed across top and bottom. I was about to erase all copies of WriteNow and go to Mac Write or Ready- Set-Go!, when I got suspicious and used the Mac II’s Find File desk accessory to search for the word Sample in a file¬ name. Sure enough, it told me there was a copy of Sample WriteNow on the inter¬ nal hard disk drive. When I erased that and tried to bring in my birthday card, the system told me I should get the appli¬ cation file out of the Trash. In rage, I turned off the machine. When I turned it back on, I was finally rid of the Sample Curse: now I can bring in documents and print them without the horrible “CREATED WITH SAMPLE WRITENOW” printed top and bottom. For all that, WriteNow is a good editor that is easy to use—once you’ve perma¬ nently eliminated all traces of the Sample program. Locked! The real reason for getting a Macintosh isn’t languages (although if you’re an APL addict, you’ll find that works better on a Mac than it’s likely to on a PCom- patible). When Excel was available only on a Mac, you might have been seriously tempted to get one just for that; but now they’ve got Excel available running under Windows, and it’s at least as good on PCs with EGA as it is on the Macin- he real reason to get a Mac is that it can run programs and do things few other machines can do. VideoWorks II is a spectacular program for the Mac. tosh. MacInTax also runs about as well on PCompatibles with EGA as it does on the Macintosh. You might get a Mac because of its ease of operation. Unfortunately, there are problems. I personally find it as easy to get around in PC-DOS as to manipu¬ late icons, and indeed, I can get awfully sick of dragging little pictures to the Trash. Worse, though, the Mac can do strange things to you. Example: in trying to test the Mac- Disk, I created an enormous file by copy¬ ing into one folder named Foo every¬ thing else on both the MacDisk and the Mac’s internal hard disk drive. Then I moved the files back and forth. Eventu¬ ally, I was through playing and needed to eliminate the Foo folder. I dragged it to the Trash, but it wouldn’t erase. The Mac kept telling me the folder contained locked files. To make it worse, after the machine told me it wouldn’t do what I wanted, it made me click on “OK, ” even though it wasn’t OK at all. Study of the Mac II manual eventually showed me how to determine whether a file is locked or not: you have to find the file, select it, then go up to the menu bar and “Get INFO” on it. After that, you can unlock it. Unfortunately, the Mac operating sys¬ tem has no other way to tell you which files are locked, so you have to go through them one at a time. I had over 70 different files in Foo, and I had to look at each one before I could erase the thing. I can’t say I appreciated that. VideoWorks II The real reason to get a Mac is that it can run programs and do things few other machines can do. VideoWorks II is one of the most spectacular programs for the Mac. This is a program for creating and displaying animated graphics. It will also do sound effects. I’ve only started playing with Video- Works II, and I already love it. The tuto¬ rial programs are good enough that I haven’t much needed the manual. The manual is good enough to remind you of what you learned in the tutorials. Video- Works II can take advantage of color monitors and other features of the Mac II; indeed, it’s one of the best demonstra¬ tions of the Mac II’s capabilities. Rec¬ ommended. Winding Down I’m out of space, and there’s still scads of Mac II stuff lying on my desk. I haven’t discussed HyperCard, which is another program you might consider getting a Mac for. There’s no room for Owl Internation¬ al’s Guide, a program that’s a serious match for HyperCard. What with the Apple/Microsoft lawsuit, one wonders how hard Microsoft will work on Mac software in the future, but even so there’s a pile of it now. The Mac game of the month is PBI Software’s Strategic Conquest Plus. I hope they come up with a version that works on the Mac II. I expect it’s obvious that although I started off with serious reservations, I like the Mac II quite a lot. The bottom line is that I’ve moved Old Zeke, my original CompuPro Z80, off to the store¬ room, and I’m using a CAD program to help me design furniture to put the Mac II in his place. ■ Jerry Pournelle holds a doctorate in psy¬ chology and is a science fiction writer who also earns a comfortable living writ¬ ing 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, Jerry cannot guarantee a personal reply. 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C COREL COREL Systems Corporation, 1600 Carling Avenue, Ottawa, Ontario, K1Z 8R7 Tel: (613) 728-8200 Fax: (613) 728-9790 Circle M18 on Reader Service Card 1988 Mac Special Edition • B Y T E 45 BYTE MACINTOSH SPECIAL EDITION MultiFinder Revealed Phil Goldman MultiFinder is a first-generation multi¬ tasking operating system for the Macin¬ tosh. It runs on all machines from the Macintosh 512Ke up to the Mac II. The phrase “first generation” has two important meanings. First, it highlights the fact that MultiFinder has been added to the system software at a time when the Mac environment is relatively stable and well defined. Therefore, it was neces¬ sary to support all the features of the sys¬ tems, some very subtle, that applications have come to depend on. “First generation” also implies that there will be successive generations. MultiFinder is released every six months as a part of the Apple system-software update. As a result, MultiFinder is an evolving product; yet, at the same time, it must guarantee that applications con¬ tinue to work across releases. The Look of MultiFinder MultiFinder doesn’t markedly change the look and feel of the Macintosh. When a Mac boots up, the only indication that MultiFinder is running is the small icon located on the far right-hand side of the menu bar. The look does change, how¬ ever, in one small but important way: When you open an application from the Finder (the application you see when you start up the Mac), the Finder itself doesn’t disappear. Before MultiFinder, you could execute only one application at a time, and only one application could be visible at a time. With MultiFinder, multiple applica¬ tions can be visible at once. Each applica¬ tion is represented by its set of windows, known as its layer. As a user, you inter¬ act with only the frontmost layer (i.e., the application in the top layer receives all the user events, such as mouse and keyboard clicks), the same way you typi¬ cally interact with only the frontmost window of a given layer. Other layers can be visually active, but the actions of the corresponding applications don’t occur in direct response to your actions. The One of MultiFinder’s coauthors provides clues to the mysteries of MultiFinder application in the frontmost layer also owns the menu bar. You can switch between applications in three ways. First, clicking the mouse in any window of a layer brings the appli¬ cation in that layer to the front. Second, the apple menu includes a list of the cur¬ rently running applications; choosing a particular item with an application’s name brings that application’s layer to the front. And third, clicking on the icon in the menu bar cycles through the appli¬ cations in each layer. Cooperation, Not Competition At the very heart of MultiFinder lies its task-switching mechanism. This mecha¬ nism implements an operating-system technique known as cooperative multi¬ tasking , which allows the tasks them¬ selves to completely control the mecha¬ nism. In MultiFinder, a task is simply one instance of an application program. There is no policy to which applications must adhere; each task determines ex¬ actly when it wishes to yield control of the CPU—it will never return control until it explicitly decides to do so. Cooperative multitasking has its ad¬ vantages and its disadvantages. As an ap¬ plications developer, you can assume your application has complete control over the machine while it runs. Thus, you can make many simplifying assumptions, especially when you want real-time con¬ trol. If the operating system itself decides when to switch between tasks, as in pre¬ emptive multitasking, it can’t always know exactly when is the best time to switch; it simply doesn’t know as much about a task as the task itself does. On the other hand, cooperative multi¬ tasking requires correct responses from every task. If a single task decides that it won’t yield the CPU, then the entire sys¬ tem will appear to hang. Even if a task just holds the CPU for too long a period, the response time of the system can suf¬ fer dramatically. The entire structure of the Macintosh application model revolves around the assumption that an application will con¬ stantly call the Toolbox traps, _GetNext- Event, _WaitNextEvent, and _Event- Avail, to retrieve an event and respond to it. It’s relatively painless to switch be¬ tween applications when those calls are made. For these same reasons, cooperative multitasking would be a disaster in a ge¬ neric Unix environment. In this case, there is a real loss of transparency as Unix tools are command-line-driven rather than event-driven, and thus don’t necessarily make certain calls with any known frequency. Also, when you use such an environment, you’re more likely to create your own quick-and-dirty appli¬ cations, which might crash but shouldn’t hang the entire system if they do. Of course, if you use only shell scripts as tools, then it would be simple to build the necessary cooperation into the shell interpreter. The moral of this is that cooperative multitasking is very useful, but only when you can make certain assumptions about the run-time environment. How¬ ever, there wasn’t much of a choice for the Macintosh. Although the existing ap¬ plication model could theoretically sup¬ port preemptive multitasking, it would involve a great deal of rewriting of Tool- continued 46 BYTE* 1988 Mac Special Edition ILLUSTRATION: ROBERT WISNEWSKI © 1988 1988 Mac Special Edition ‘BYTE 47 MULTIFINDER REVEALED box and operating-system code, code that is currently in ROM. In addition, there would be greater compatibility problems. Heaps of Memory Before explaining the hows and whys of cooperative multitasking under Multi- Finder, let’s discuss the backdrop against which task switching occurs: the mem¬ ory model provided by MultiFinder. MultiFinder doesn’t radically change the Macintosh interface that a user sees, but instead extends that model in a logi¬ cal manner. This is also true of the model that the applications developer uses. The memory model, for example, changes little except to support multiple applications in memory at one time. The basic Macintosh memory model consists of one application heap (a heap is a large chunk of memory partitioned and managed by the Memory Manager) and one system heap. MultiFinder has multi¬ ple application heaps (see figure 1). These heaps are created as nonrelocata- ble blocks in the MultiFinder heap, which is located in the same place as the single application heap is in the basic model—directly above the system heap. MultiFinder still uses a single system heap. The basic Macintosh model has a somewhat arbitrary partitioning of mem¬ ory and resources between the system and application heaps. With the new model, one of the primary purposes of the system heap is to share resource blocks among the applications (resources are blocks of data that are read from re¬ source files and tracked in memory using resource maps). This design works out nicely for three reasons. First, sharing naturally saves space, which is critical on a system with 1 megabyte or less of RAM. The space needed by a single application can be a very large percentage—sometimes 100 percent—of the machine’s total memory. Second, moving system resources out of the application heap implies that sig¬ nificantly fewer system-memory re¬ quirements will be made of the heap. An application that attempts to do a complete accounting of memory usage in its heap has problems when the system allocates blocks behind its back. The new scheme alleviates this problem to a great extent. Finally, since all the shared resources are located in the system heap, they don’t need to be reinitialized each time an ap¬ plication launches. Much of the time spent in the original system’s launch code, and in the initialization code of the application itself, was spent reloading the resources from disk. Some of these re¬ sources, such as fonts, can be very large. However, MultiFinder’s sharing creates a much greater, and much more dynamic, need for space in the system heap. Early in the development effort, the system heap was significantly en¬ larged when MultiFinder itself started up. However, it became obvious that this was too great a space penalty to pay. The Memory Manager was modified to allow the system heap to grow and shrink (at the expense and gain of the MultiFinder heap) as memory needs dictated, thus al¬ lowing extra space for both system-mem¬ ory requests and new application heaps. Although the changes to the memory model are fairly subtle, some applica¬ tions make assumptions that are no longer valid. Some applications assume that the system and application heaps are contiguous. Others assume that certain resources will be put in the application heap rather than the system heap. The latter assumption is particularly danger¬ ous because of the actions that an appli¬ cation might take based upon it. For ex¬ ample, one application has a procedure that continually purges such resources when there is no free space in the appli¬ cation heap. Under MultiFinder, the ap¬ plication is actually freeing space in the system heap, and not alleviating the problem at all. Worse, the application actually ends up deadlocked in a loop, continually purging these resources but never freeing up enough memory. This entire situation is a result of cer¬ tain strong implicit assumptions about the “classic” Mac’s memory model. Fortunately, very few applications make such assumptions. Context Switching MultiFinder employs cooperative multi¬ tasking, switching contexts only when the application calls the trap _WaitNext- Event, _GetNextEvent, or _Event- Avail. The scheduler does a context switch in three cases: as part of a layer switch, as a switch into a background ap¬ plication, or to let an application update its windows. A context switch is a fairly large oper¬ ation on a Macintosh. The environment is so rich that the context belonging to a task is potentially very large. Fortunately, on average, most applications avoid creating huge contexts for themselves (except for the many low-memory locations that are MultiFinder Memory Map Addresses increasing Above BufPtr world (RAM cache, inits.etc.) MultiFinder jump table MultiFinder globals MultiFinder stack MultiFinder code and data Backgrounder Finder Application heap Free space, handles Some other application heap Free space, handles System heap Low memory MultiFinder heap Figure 1: The MultiFinder memory map. Notice that MultiFinder has more than one application heap. 48 BYTE* 1988 Mac Special Edition MULTIFINDER REVEALED accessed on their behalf) by making use of the memory-saving features below. In general, a context switch consists of saving the context of the task being switched in (known as the source task) and then restoring the context of the task being switched out (the destination task). In the Mac, the switch also requires re¬ moving (and saving) application-specific entities from system data structures from the source task, and restoring those enti¬ ties from the destination task. These enti¬ ties include: • Device-control entries (DCEs): The Unit Table is an array of handles to de¬ vice-control entries, located in low mem¬ ory. Each DCE corresponds to a local driver, one that belongs to the applica¬ tion. The driver’s resources come from the application’s resource file. (Al¬ though it might come from a different file, it can never be the system file.) The memory for the driver is located in the application’s heap. When a task is switched out, the sys¬ tem must remove all the DCE handles for its local drivers from the Unit Table and save them in a structure local to the task. When the task is switched back in, the system restores its drivers from its local structure. When an application quits, either with dignity or because of a crash, the system again removes its DCE han¬ dles from the table. Most applications don’t employ local drivers. An application’s own desk ac¬ cessory (such as a word processor with a spelling checker) is simply a special type of driver on the Mac. However, most of the drivers come from the system file, including the sys¬ tem desk accessories, AppleTalk drivers, and default print drivers. These drivers are never switched; therefore, it’s very important that the unit number (i.e., the index into the Unit Table) of a particular local driver not match that of any system driver. If it does, then when the local driver is switched in, its local DCE han¬ dle will clobber that of the system driver in the Unit Table. Worse, when the task is switched out, there will be an empty hole in the Unit Table, and you won’t know which system driver should be restored. • Trap patches: Trap patching is the method by which the routine associated with a given A-line trap is replaced by a new routine. (An A-line trap captures those instructions whose first byte is A.) Pointers to these routines are kept in two tables in low memory known as the oper¬ ating-system and Toolbox trap tables. The A-line dispatcher indexes into the appropriate table based on the number of the trap executed. While most applications never need to patch traps, there are some that do. For example, an application might patch out all the Memory Manager traps that allo¬ cate master pointers (MPs). When the Memory Manager runs out of MPs in a heap, it allocates a new block of them. This new block is nonrelocatable, so it could easily cause fragmentation. There¬ fore, the trap patches would just make sure to compact the heap if there are no MPs left when the trap call is made. MultiFinder tracks the traps that each application patches. When the applica¬ tion is switched out, its patch-routine pointers are removed from the trap table and replaced by the pointers to the previ¬ ous routines. When the application is switched back in, its routines are re¬ stored. Patches are also permanently re¬ moved when the application quits. In order to track patches by the appli¬ cations, MultiFinder itself must patch the trap _SetTrapAddress, which is the mechanism by which other traps are patched. At the time the trap is called, a record is saved denoting the new trap routine, the old routine (i.e., the one that is currently being used), and the trap number. One of the problems with patching is that the application’s patch must jump to the old routine; it can’t call the old rou¬ tine as a procedure. This is necessary be¬ cause system patches often look back up the stack to see who called them. They will activate only if they see a particular return address on the stack. Therefore, you have to call these routines without changing the stack. The only way to do this is to jump to them. This has two major implications. First, it’s not possible to do patch code entirely from a high-level language. At the very least, you’ll need assembly lan¬ guage glue (a glue routine is one that con¬ verts between the different calling con¬ ventions of other languages and the Pascal that the Macintosh ROM ex¬ pects). Second, it’s illegal for an applica¬ tion to have a patch that does post-pro- cessing—that is, that has code after the call to the old routine. • Vertical-blank tasks (VBLs): VBLs are small routines that run during the verti¬ cal-retrace interrupt on the Macintosh. This is the interrupt that signifies that the Mac screen has just been completely re¬ drawn from the screen memory. It is used for creating flicker-free animation and also for any type of quick, repetitious tasks. Under MultiFinder, VBLs are treated much like DCEs; that is, they are switched in and out of the VBL queue as their corresponding application is switched in and out. MultiFinder doesn’t track these VBLs in the same way it does trap patches. Instead, during the context switch, it walks down the VBL queue, looking for tasks that fall within the ap¬ plication’s heap; the VBLs are saved and removed like the DCE handles. They are restored in the same manner. The VBLs belonging to an application are also re¬ moved when it quits. This method provides a way for appli¬ cations to have persistent VBLs. That is, if an application installs its VBL in the system heap rather than its application heap, the VBL is never removed, not even if the application itself quits. • Resources: The Resource Manager has been changed under MultiFinder so that all resources from the system file are placed in the system heap. This is neces¬ sary in order to share these resources among the applications. It’s impossible to share a resource in another applica¬ tion’s heap; the data for the resource will be destroyed if that other application quits. Originally, MultiFinder used an algo¬ rithm for resources similar to those for VBLs, patches, and DCEs. That is, it would walk through the system map, sav¬ ing and restoring resource entries be¬ longing to each application. Besides the wasteful redundancy of data involved, using this method greatly damaged the application-initialization and context¬ switching times. The latter time was so poor that background tasking seemed too inefficient to implement if a context was to be provided to the background application. The sharing itself is easily imple¬ mented by allowing all the applications to share the system resource map in their resource chains. A resource chain is a linked list of resource maps used as a search path for resources (see figure 2a). Therefore, the old picture of a resource chain has been transformed into a re¬ source wheel (see figure 2b), with the system heap as its hub and each chain as a spoke. The arrows illustrate the search order for resources. They also represent the only order in which the list compris¬ ing each spoke is linked. It’s impossible for any application to traverse from its spoke to another, so each application still sees only its resource chain. • Low memory: Toolbox and operating- continued 1988 Mac Special Edition • B Y T E 49 MULTIFINDER REVEALED system low-memory locations are con¬ ceptually divided into those locations that are application-specific and those that are system-wide. For the most part, these correspond to the Toolbox and op¬ erating-system locations, respectively, but there are many exceptions. Under MultiFinder, the application-specific lo¬ cations are saved and restored between low memory and a copy of those loca¬ tions (one per application) when the task is switched out and then back in. You must take special care when switching certain memory locations. Some must be switched in a prescribed order relative to others. For example, there is a system VBL, called the “stack sniffer,” that constantly checks to make sure the bottom of the application’s stack is above the top of the application’s heap. Its purpose is to detect collisions be¬ tween the two—if detected, a system error is generated, and the application quits. Therefore, it’s necessary to actu¬ ally set the variable named StkLowPt to 0 (disabling the stack sniffer), and then switch out the variable that points to the application heap. You must restore this variable, called ApplZone, from the new application before you restore StkLowPt, because as soon as the latter becomes nonzero, the stack sniffer is reenabled. When this occurs, the system had better be in a consistent state. • Registers: Each application must have its own set of registers, so the context switch remains transparent in this regard as well. However, since MultiFinder knows that context switches occur only inside calls to particular traps, it needs to save only those registers that, by conven¬ tion, a trap routine won’t destroy: data registers D3 through D7 and address reg¬ isters A2 through A7. Some of these registers indirectly con¬ tain more context information that is switched when the register itself is. For example, register A7 points to the appli¬ cation’s stack. Therefore, when A7 is switched, so is the run-time stack being used, even when processing is still in the heart of the MultiFinder switching code. Likewise, register A5 typically points at an application’s global variables, which are referenced as negative offsets from this pointer; for this reason, they are known as A5 globals. When register A5 is switched, references to globals are switched as well. If the machine has a floating-point unit (FPU), as the Mac II does, then the floating-point registers and context are also saved and restored. Here, the term “context” refers to the internal state of the FPU itself. Moving Between Layers A layer switch is the process by which another layer of windows comes to the front, ahead of the current top layer. The process is rather lengthy compared to a context switch (it occurs across several calls to _WaitNextEvent or _GetNext- Event), and actually includes it as part of the layer-switch process. Layer switching is not transparent to the application. In fact, the switch re¬ quires the explicit cooperation of the ap¬ plications being switched, whether they know it or not. They must accomplish such activities as changing the active state of their topmost window, convert¬ ing their local Clipboard format to and from the global one if necessary, and de¬ sisting from attempting to control the cursor or the menu bar. It’s difficult to persuade older applica¬ tions (written before MultiFinder) to do all these things, so a little subterfuge is in order. MultiFinder uses a technique known as scrap coercion to fool an appli¬ cation into believing that you have chosen a desk accessory (with a window that’s very far off-screen) and the copy item (from the edit menu) from the source task; it convinces the destination task that you have chosen the paste item and then closed the desk accessory. (Scrap is data that you want to transfer between applications.) The motivation for employing this process is twofold. First of all, it forces the source application to deactivate its frontmost window (usually deactivating its scroll bars) in its layer when moving from the front, and vice versa for the des¬ tination task, which is coming to the front. Without this, the visual effect of multiple layers would be confusing—the frontmost window of every layer would appear to be active. Worse, some appli¬ cations take advantage of the fact that no other window lies on top of the frontmost window, and do semilegal drawing that wouldn’t work if the application weren’t continued o — °— — o Map opened by System map Application map application Resource Chain Figure 2a: The original MultiFinder plan for sharing resources involves searching a resource chain like this one. App 2 Resource Wheel Figure 2b: A more efficient plan has been implemented using a resource wheel. The resource chain still exists for each application , but the plan adds the system heap as the hub of the wheel. 50 BYTE* 1988 Mac Special Edition Circle M34 on Reader Service Card Aztec C’s NEW Source Debugger Takes The Work Out Of Debugging! Stop entering print statements and re-compiling over and over. Stop spending your time looking at assembly language and hex dumps. Stop agonizing over features you need but can’t find...Start using Aztec C’s NEW Source Debugger (SDB). It has all the features you expect and more! -UNIQUE SDB FEATURES- ■ Debug your code at the Source Level ■ Set Breakpoints and Single Step by Source Line ■ Access all Global and Local Variables by Name ■ Evaluate and Print the Value of Any C Expression ■ Displays all Structure Element Names and Values ■ Assembly Language Debugger for intermixed routines ■ Debug drivers and desk accessories ■ Separate Windows for Source, Data and Commands ■ Supports 68010, 68020 and 68881 processors Take Advantage of the Introductory Special / Call Tbday 1-800-221-0440 i?r 201/542-2121 Telex: 4995812MANX (NJ and Outside U.S.) Fax: 201/542-8386 Aztec C now supports MPW! It compiles blocks of more than 64k for larger applications — which always breaks other compilers. And it produces tighter and faster code. The only logical choice for the Mac is Aztec C and its New SDB. Macintosh II Benchmarks Dhrystone Aztec C MPW-C Lightspeed Build Time (sec) 16 25 22 Object Size 4k 4k 107k Code Size (bytes) 9824 10976 17090 Run Time 258 299 299 Optimizer (Released May 1) gives even Better Performance! See for Yourself — Demo Disk Available. SDB Introductory Special through August 31, 1988 30 Day Satisfaction Guaranteed Source Debugger (Reg $199.). ONLY $ 99. Aztec C68k/Mac Prof. Sys (Reg $199). ONLY $99. Package of Both . . . SAVE OVER 50%. ONLY $179. Reseller and Distributor Inquiries Welcome COD, VISA, MC, Wire (domestic & inti.) & terms ©MANX 1 Industrial Way, Eatontown, New Jersey 07724 MULTIFINDER REVEALED in the frontmost layer. An application can’t see the window list of other appli¬ cations, so the scrap-coercion desk- accessory window can be viewed as a re¬ minder to the application that there are other windows above it, even if it can’t quite see them. In another way, the desk accessory acts as a marker for the rest of the world, and this is its primary role in the scrap- coercion process—to “coerce the scrap. ” That is, it must persuade an application to convert its private scrap to the global scrap (the data for the Clipboard). This is important because the application’s private scrap could be located anywhere, in any form, in memory or on disk. When the application converts to the global scrap, it puts the data in a well- defined location (in a file named clip¬ board or in memory referenced from low-memory global ScrapHandle) in a well-defined format. Thus, MultiFinder can copy the data to the global scrap of the destination application. The premise behind scrap coercion is that once you have cut or copied work with desk accessories, it’s necessary for an application to convert to the global scrap when you wish to paste the Clip¬ board into a desk accessory. Likewise, the application must convert the global scrap to its private one when it thinks you have chosen paste with the frontmost desk-accessory window. The application thinks that the desk accessory has altered the contents of the global scrap; thus, the private one must be refreshed. If applications are somewhat more MultiFinder-friendly, you don’t need to go through the entire charade. If an ap¬ plication can handle Suspend and Re¬ sume events, then it knows when it’s be¬ ing layer-switched to and from (for which it receives Resume and Suspend events, respectively, as notification). However, in this case, it’s still necessary to convince the application of the desk- accessory activity, so it will deactivate its top window. Therefore, an application can actually set a flag that officially deems it MultiFinder-friendly, meaning that it will deactivate its front window when it receives a Suspend event and activate it again when it receives a Re¬ sume. In this way, you don’t need any of Figure 3: MultiFinder’s method of optimized scrap coercion. Note that you can keep the number of states down by using Suspend and Resume events and if your application has the most recent data in its scrap. This method eliminates the process of copying between global scraps. 52 BYTE* 1988 Mac Special Edition MULTIFINDER REVEALED the machinery for the desk-accessory charade, thus speeding up the layer switch. MultiFinder uses a state machine in order to implement scrap coercion. Each state represents the accumulation of all the expected actions the application has accomplished during the process, and the arcs between states represent the cor¬ rect or expected action to get closer to getting the desk accessory opened and eventually closed again. An action basi¬ cally consists of a call to some Toolbox trap, most likely _GetNextEvent or _WaitNextEvent, or a time-out caused by not calling the expected trap soon enough. The state machine is really known as optimized scrap coercion (see figure 3). The original notion of scrap coercion came from Switcher, an application from Apple to switch applications, allowing one application at a time on the screen. Much of the time in Switcher’s scrap co¬ ercion was spent copying the scrap be¬ tween applications. Therefore, Multi- Finder keeps track of whether you have done a cut or copy, and thus changed the Clipboard, and it copies handles only when the application being switched to has stale data. This is reflected in the flowchart. Notice that the number of states entered is much smaller if the ap¬ plication receives Suspend and Resume events and is MultiFinder-friendly. The number of states is also smaller if the ap¬ plication already has the most recent data in its scrap, and the potentially time-con¬ suming process of copying between global scraps is completely eliminated. What’s New One of MultiFinder’s goals was applica¬ tion-level transparency, as evidenced by the machinery described for context and layer switching. However, in certain areas, providing new services creates major optimizations in time and space. Thus, only those applications that use the new services break the transparency; for them, it’s obviously beneficial. WaitNextEvent: One example of the new services is the new Toolbox trap _Wait- NextEvent. This trap is similar to _Get- NextEvent, in that it can be used as the event dispatcher at the heart of any event loop. In addition, it provides a way for an application to sleep for a specified time if no events are pending. This allows the trap to move away from the polling be¬ havior implicit in the use of _GetNext- Event, which is called as often as pos¬ sible. continued 1988 Mac Special Edition • B Y T E 53 Circle M39 on Reader Service Card SS For solving QuickDraw mysteries, call on the one and only... PICT DETECTIVE Turns any PICT file into its C or Pascal source! You know how difficult solving PICT incompatibilities can be. Most major Macintosh developers use PICT Detective to solve those mysterious problems— you should, too! Version 2.0 Features Stand-alone application Analyzes any PICT Displays symbolic description of each picture element C, Pascal, Rez output Examines damaged pictures Full Color QuickDraw support Parses picture comments—both standard and your own Complete with MPW tools ONLY $125 Ask your local dealer, or order direct with Visa/Mastercard: Call (619) 721-7000 lalomar Software, Inc. 2964 Oceanside B > P.O. Box 120 • Oceanside, CA 92054 PICT Detective is a trademark of Palomar Software, Inc. Macintosh is a trademark of Apple Computer, Inc. * California residents add 7% sales tax. Nominal shipping and handling charges extra. SEE US AT MACWORLD EXPO/BOSTON MULTIFINDER REVEALED Another service provided by _Wait- NextEvent is to return a new event, mouse-moved, when the cursor has moved outside a bounding region pro¬ vided by the application. This again makes polling unnecessary, as in the case where an application needs to change the cursor as it passes over differ¬ ent areas on the screen. This need might occur, for example, when an application wants to change the cursor from the ar¬ row to the I-beam cursor shape while the cursor moves into a region that contains editable text. A final need for polling in the classic Mac model was to give drivers time to run. This was accomplished by requiring the application to call the trap .System- Task as often as possible, which, in turn, would dispatch time to the drivers as ap¬ propriate. This requirement is elimi¬ nated by using .WaitNextEvent. The trap routine is responsible for scheduling the drivers. The Pascal calling convention for the trap is as follows: FUNCTION WaitNextEvent(mask: INTE¬ GER; VAR event: EventRecord; sleep: LONGINT; mouseRgn: RgnHandle) : BOOLEAN; The mask and event parameters are the complete set of arguments for .GetNext- Event. The sleep parameter is the num¬ ber of clock ticks until the system should awaken the application (and return a null event to it) if no events have been re¬ turned beforehand. MouseRgn is a handle to a region that should bound the cursor. Temporary memory calls: MultiFinder provides a service by which it can, for ex¬ ample, allocate or deallocate blocks in its heap just as it would handles in other heaps. This is useful when an application has a short but memory-intensive need. There is a new set of traps for accessing these services—different from the direct Memory Manager traps available. These traps allow for a level of indirection that will prove useful for MultiFinder. For example, they would allow memory to be found in places where it wasn’t originally located (perhaps not even in a heap). This might be useful, for instance, if a Mac II NuBus card provides extra RAM, but the RAM isn’t contiguous with main memory; with these new traps, it would be possible to build an¬ other heap from which to allocate tem¬ porary memory. More importantly, the explicit calls for the temporary memory allow Multi¬ Finder to track memory use by all appli¬ cations. Therefore, if an application quits without deallocating its memory, or if it crashes, then MultiFinder can clean up after it and not orphan the temporary memory blocks that the application didn’t release. Also, it would be desir¬ able to do more stringent error checking on the blocks, as an inconsistent Multi¬ Finder heap could easily cause the entire system to crash. Launch: The original operating-system trap _launch terminates the current ap¬ plication and then executes the new ap¬ plication. Recent systems have provided an additional feature to .launch known as sublaunch. Basically, in sublaunch, an application sets a certain launch flag that tells the operating system that it expects to be relaunched after the new applica¬ tion terminates. This provides a degree of automation when the launchee is to be used for a brief, specific purpose. How¬ ever, it suffers from all the obvious prob¬ lems inherent in a unitasking model. Also, the launcher’s context (e.g., the documents that are open, the window sizes, and the positions) is lost when the application is relaunched, unless it ex¬ plicitly saves and restores it itself. Even then, this is a fairly time-consuming pro¬ cess to sit through. With MultiFinder, the application can set yet another launch flag that tells the operating system that the application ex¬ pects to return from the launch trap it¬ self; it doesn’t automatically wish to be terminated. In this way, the application avoids the loss of context caused by the sublaunch, as it just sticks around. In its development stages, MultiFinder always allowed .launch to return to the launching application, rather than termi¬ nating it. This offered a great deal of lev¬ erage to many applications in that they automatically could take advantage of the new launch capabilities without having to be programmed for them explicitly. Un¬ fortunately, some applications implicitly assume that the .launch trap will never return. Usually, the problem is that there is simply no more code in the program after the call to .launch; after the re¬ turn, the application runs wild. Thus, it was necessary to force applications to prove that they were ready to continue running. They prove it by setting the TwitchLaunch flag in the extended .launch parameter block. Under MultiFinder, the call to .launch is simply a request to launch and execute an application. In the trap it¬ self, memory is allocated for the applica¬ tion from the MultiFinder heap, and the system data structures necessary to sup- 54 BYTE* 1988 Mac Special Edition MULTIFINDER REVEALED port the application are initialized. How¬ ever, the first instruction of the applica¬ tion code isn’t actually executed until the layer switch, which was also initiated in _launch, is completed. In newer ver¬ sions, MultiFinder determines if the launchee already exists. If it does, Multi- Finder merely initiates a layer switch to the application; it doesn’t create a new copy. Open document and quit events: When the user chooses Shutdown from the Finder’s Special menu, the Finder will try to quit all the other running applica¬ tions first. It does this by passing a spe¬ cial event to MultiFinder, one per appli¬ cation, which MultiFinder converts into the actions necessary to persuade the ap¬ plication to quit gracefully. Basically, these actions are used to in¬ form the application that the user has de¬ cided to quit. More specifically, they convince the application that the Quit item has been selected from its File menu. Then control returns to the user for responses to any ensuing dialogues, such as requests to save changed docu¬ ments before quitting. A problem arises if the application has no File menu or Quit item, or if they are spelled slightly differently. Therefore, the Finder doesn’t actually pass these strings explicitly in the Quit event that it sends to MultiFinder. Instead, the Finder specifies two resource IDs, num¬ bers 100 and 101. These are used to find string resources of type 'mstr' where the two IDs refer to the File-menu name string and the Quit-item name string, respectively. MultiFinder first looks in the applica¬ tion for these resources. If it doesn’t find them, then it will use the default ones lo¬ cated within its own resource map. This allows applications with nonstandard versions of these strings to still be quitta- ble before shutdown. For example, Hy¬ perCard has its own resource ( 1 mstr', 101) set equal to the string “Quit Hyper¬ Card.” Using the resources also solves the one problem posed by using applica¬ tions in other languages. You can cus¬ tomize older applications with different menu strings by using ResEdit or some other tool to put the 'mstr’ resources in the application’s resource file. Multi¬ Finder itself can be modified so that its default ’mstr' resource is in the lan¬ guage most commonly used by the appli¬ cations it runs. In much the same way as with the Quit event, the Finder also sends an Open event through newer MultiFinders when you open the document of an already existing application (usually by double¬ clicking on its icon). The Open event is converted to the actions necessary to convince the application that you have chosen the Open item from the File menu, but it really looks for the re¬ sources ('mstr',102) and (’mstr', 103), respectively, for the title and item strings. Unlike the situation with the quit actions, in this case MultiFinder doesn’t return control to the user quite yet. Most applications at this point bring up the Standard-File dialog box to allow you to choose which document to open. MultiFinder already knows which docu- E i xplicit calls for temporary memory will allow MultiFinder to track memory use by all applications. ment it wishes to open (the Finder has told it), and, therefore, it convinces the application that it has indeed put up the dialog box (by patching out _SFGetFile and _SFPGetFile), and that the user has chosen the particular document. Since the dialog box is never made visible, what you see after the double-click in the Finder is a layer switch to the document’s creator application, followed by the ap¬ plication magically opening a window for the document. Building and Burning Bridges During the development of MultiFinder, we were amazed at how many applica¬ tions worked with it, no matter what twist or turn we were experimenting with at the time. These applications were so resilient that they seemed to be impossi¬ ble to break, even while MultiFinder it¬ self was unstable. Unfortunately, certain other applica¬ tions were much more fragile. While the number of incompatible applications eventually became very small, this was due largely to explicit fixes within Multi¬ Finder to fix problems within the appli¬ cations themselves, bugs that the Multi¬ Finder environment revealed. For example, a couple of applications would crash unless they were loaded into the first megabyte of the MultiFinder heap. Therefore, we had to “special- case” these applications and make sure that the launch-time memory allocation kept the blocks for these applications within the first megabyte. This was dif¬ ficult because the Mac’s Memory Man¬ ager has no concept of absolute ad¬ dresses; the memory-allocation traps grab memory from wherever they can find it. You have to play some ugly tricks on the Memory Manager to get the bounded block. Another problem with the allocation is that because the application’s heap block must lie so low in the MultiFinder heap, it might have to be launched into a block lower than the system heap can shrink, and thus these applications might be unlaunchable even when there’s plenty of memory above 1 megabyte. In any case, they definitely stunt the system heap’s growth. Another application assumes that the value of low-memory global CurrentA5 never changes during asynchronous file reads and writes. This variable is so named because it serves as a static pointer to an application’s globals; you could reload register A5 from this global if for some reason the register’s contents had changed. Unfortunately, the asyn¬ chronous file-completion routine sup¬ plied by the application runs at interrupt time, so it might execute after another application that has a different value for CurrentA 5 is already running. There¬ fore, MultiFinder waits for a pending asynchronous file operation to complete before context switching. There are many more examples of such hacks in MultiFinder. From one point of view, they are ugly, application- specific pieces of code that shouldn’t be part of an operating system. But, from another point of view, they can be seen as bridges between the liberties permitted applications in the original Macintosh operating system and the more restrictive rules necessary in the MultiFinder envi¬ ronment. Newer applications must obey these rules, so no new hacks will be added. In addition, as applications are re¬ vised and fall into disuse, it will be possi¬ ble to remove the hacks for them. Thus, these bridges will eventually be burned—but not until the entire applica¬ tion base has crossed them. ■ Phil Goldman is coauthor of MultiFinder and a member of the Macintosh OS Group with Apple Computer in Cuper¬ tino, California. You can reach him on BIX as t( editors. ” 1988 Mac Special Edition • BYTE 55 FLEXSCAN 9070S, PC Hi-Res That Looks Like a Million. 1024 dots X 768 lines Graphics (Non-interlace) AutoCAD The FLEXSCAN 9070 Multiple Scan monitor is of course compatible with other multi-scans, but includes improvements that will give you the professional edge which is the mark of a good investment. You can extend your multi-scan range from 20kHz to 50kHz in practical terms. This means that, at the 48-50 kHz range, you can make use of PC CAD/CAE capabilities at a resolution of up to 1024 dots X 768 lines. The FLEXSCAN 9070 takes advantage of non-interlace high resolution signal as high as 1024 X 768 to provide you with a flicker free display at much brightness. You can also use the 9070 with IBM PS/2 or VGA compatible boards at a high resolution mode like 800x600 and 1024 X 768 (non-interlace). The FLEXSCAN 9070 provides a 16-inch screen, large enough for CAD/CAE and 3-D projections, yet small enough to fit comfortably into your home work space. Also, for your convenience, all controls and switches, including the alternate video input, are located within easy reach on the front panel. The FLEXSCAN 9070 is compatible with a wide range of IBM, Apple, and other products, allow you to use all of today’s popular programs—at a resolution that looks like a million. FLEXSCAN |MODE L|9070S • IBM VGA(PS/2), 8514/A, PGC, EGA compatible and CAD/CAE use. • Apple Mac. n and SuperMac Spectrum compatible • Max. 1280 dots X 800 lines high resolution • 1024 dots X 768 lines display on Non-Interlace signal delivers flicker-free high-res graphics • 20kHz to 50kHz horizontal scan automatic adjustment. 50Hz to 80Hz vertical scan automatic adjustment • 16 inch, 0.31mm dot pitch and newly developed XF(Extended Field) Gun to obtain both brightness and sharp focus. • Front mounted controls including the input signal select switch between 2 video input. • Selecting white or Amber displays colored application in shades of gray or amber • Tilt-Swivel stand standard NAHAO NANAO USA CORPORATION 23510 TELO AVE..SUITE 5 TORRANCE, CA 90505 PHONE (213) 325-5202 FAX (213) 530-1679 Specifications are subject to change without notice. APPLE. Macintosh II aie registered trademarks Ot Apple Computers Inc ARTIST, ARTIST 1 Plus. ARTIST 10. ARTIST 10/16 are trademarks ot Control Systems Inc IBM. IBM PC. XT. AT and PS/2 are registered trademarks ot International Business Machines Corporation SuperMac is a trademark ot SuperMac Technology SuperEGA HiRes. SuperVGA and SuperVGA HiRes are trademarks ot Genoa System Corporation Orchid Designer VGA. Orchid Designer VGA-2. TurboEGA and TurboVGA are trademarks ot Orchid Technology. Paradise VGA Professional Card. Paradise VGA Plus Card and Autoswitch EGA are trademarks ot Paradise Systems. Inc Paradise Systems is a registered trademark of Paradise Systems. Inc. VEGA Deluxe and VEGA VGA are trademarks ot Video-seven Inc Metheus is a registered trademark ot Metheus Corporation Imagraph is a trademark ot Imagraph Corporation AutoCAD is a registered trademark ot Autodesk Inc. GEM is a registered trademark ot Digital Research Inc. Lotus and 1-2-3 are registered trademarks ot Lotus Development Corporation. SigmaVGA and SigmaEGA are trademarks ot Sigma designs, Inc FLEXSCAN is a trademark ot NANAO CORPORATION, NANAO is a registered trademark ot NANAO CORPORATION 56 BYTE • 1988 Mac Special Edition Circle M36 on Reader Service Card (DEALERS: M37) BYTE MACINTOSH SPECIAL EDITION The Well-Connected Mac Janet J. Barron and Robert L. Mitchell What constitutes a network? Everyone has a different opinion. Essentially, a network is any hardware or software con¬ figuration that interconnects computers and other intelligent devices to allow a meaningful exchange of data. A network can comprise a simple set of connections that allow two Macin¬ toshes to share a laser printer. It may be a more sophisticated local-area network (LAN) that supports application, file, and peripheral sharing, or it may include microcomputer-to-host links that let the Mac access mainframe resources, such as the corporate database. The success of the Mac has helped Apple get its foot in the corporate door. Now, with an increasing number of Macs in the office, the next step is to integrate them with other computing resources. Macs, IBM PCs, minicomputers, and mainframes can share the same building, but they can’t always share the same ap¬ plications or data. Fortunately, much of the technology necessary to network these disparate environments is already in place. The foundation of Mac networking is the LAN: the physical and logical con¬ nections that assemble data into packets and route it through a cabling system to its proper destination. Upon this plat¬ form, higher-level functions such as file sharing, electronic mail (E-mail), and internetwork communications occur. Applecentric Networking Because networks have never been easy to implement, most people probably think of LANs as being quite compli¬ cated, consisting of a bunch of jerry- rigged wires connecting groups of simi¬ lar, local machines. The ease with which you can construct an AppleTalk network may go far to change that image. Anthony Cagle, Apple’s manager of Communications Product Development, breaks networking into two basic models: a simple AppleTalk Personal Network configuration in which you can A guide to networking on the Macintosh share peripherals among multiple work¬ stations, and a more sophisticated, more recent model that, via Appleshare file- server software, centralizes file storage to let networked Macs share resources and control file access. At the heart of the company’s commu¬ nications strategy is AppleTalk, a propri¬ etary seven-layer communications archi¬ tecture that’s similar to the International Organization for Standardization’s Open Systems Interconnection (OSI) reference model. AppleTalk comprises a suite of networking protocols built into the Mac that serve as the foundation of the Apple- Talk Personal Network and that deter¬ mine every aspect of Macintosh commu¬ nications, from the type of LAN inter¬ connections that is used to how applica¬ tions communicate between workstations (see figure 1). What sets an AppleTalk LAN apart from its PC LAN counterparts is that it supports peer-to-peer communications between devices. Unlike a 3Com or Novell PC LAN, there is no controlling node in an AppleTalk network; all com¬ munications are of equal importance and all commands are processed sequen¬ tially. An AppleTalk network is also rela¬ tively easy to set up because the network is self-configuring. This is made possi¬ ble by the AppleTalk Name Binding Pro¬ tocol (NBP), which dynamically assigns a name and address to each node as it’s connected to the network. By contrast, adding a new node to a typical PC LAN requires the system administrator to bring the network down and then make the necessary hardware and software changes to reconfigure it. AppleTalk’s Printer Access Protocol (PAP) provides the connections neces¬ sary to allow shared access to a laser printer, and AppleTalk Filing Protocol (AFP) determines how file sharing takes place over the network. AppleTalk runs over a proprietary shielded twisted-pair cabling scheme called LocalTalk at 230.4 kilobits per second (kbps). Since AppleTalk is part of the Mac operating system, network operating-system soft¬ ware is not required. The AppleTalk de¬ sign also includes a LocalTalk interface that’s built into the Mac serial port, eliminating the need for a LAN interface card. LocalTalk supports up to 32 users over distances of up to 1000 feet between nodes. However, bridge devices, such as Hayes’s NetBridge, let you interconnect distinct AppleTalk LANs to expand the total number of users. Repeaters amplify the AppleTalk signal to extend maxi¬ mum cabling distances; the TOPS re¬ peater, for example, increases the maxi¬ mum cabling distance to 2000 feet. Alternatives to LocalTalk AppleTalk is not limited to LocalTalk connections: You can configure it to op¬ erate over a variety of other media. One alternative is to use less expensive un¬ shielded twisted-pair wire. Farallon Computing’s PhoneNet, for example, re¬ places LocalTalk with telephone wire and RJ-11 telephone jacks. You can daisy chain the devices together or use existing telephone wire in a star config¬ uration. In the latter, a hub controller routes data between devices. Another, more expensive implementation is Northern Telecom’s LANStar Apple- Talk, which supports up to 1344 Mac IIs, IBM PCs, and other devices at 2.56 megabits per second (mbps) over existing telephone wiring. A central controller can directly connect all devices, or it can continued 1988 Mac Special Edition • BYTE 57 THE WELL-CONNECTED MAC 7. Application 6. Presentation 5. Session 4. Transport 3. Network 2. Link access 1. Physical Figure 1: AppleTalk's seven-layer architecture is similar to that of the OSI reference model. The protocols , however , are proprietary. act as a bridge between AppleTalk LANs throughout a building. If electrical interference or network security is a problem, another alternative is to run AppleTalk over a fiber-optic ca¬ bling system, such as that supplied by DuPont Electronics of New Cumberland, Pennsylvania. Fiber isn’t easily tapped, it’s impervious to electromagnetic inter¬ ference, and you can run it up to 4900 feet between devices. On the other hand, fiber cabling systems are expensive, and the medium’s high bandwidth (in the hundreds of megabits) usually makes it more cost-effective as a backbone for interconnecting multiple AppleTalk LANs. Dupont’s scheme currently sup¬ ports transmissions at LocalTalk speeds (230.4 kbps), far short of fiber’s poten¬ tial. Dupont is working on a system that will support AppleTalk at higher speeds. If LocalTalk speeds are too slow, you can run AppleTalk over a 10-mbps coax¬ ial-cable Ethernet network. Ethernet is key to connecting the Mac to many other computing environments. Apple’s imple¬ mentation, EtherTalk, is a NuBus Ether¬ net interface card for the Mac II that re¬ places AppleTalk’s physical and link- access protocols with the IEEE 802.3 coaxial-cable Ethernet specifications. Other vendors, like Kinetics, offer an Ethernet interface card for the Mac SE or an external box that works with the Mac’s small computer system interface (SCSI) port. An alternative to connecting Macs directly to Ethernet is to provide an AppleTalk-to-Ethernet gateway, such as Kinetics’ FastPath. Macs on LocalTalk access Ethernet through a device that converts between LocalTalk and Ether¬ net protocols. A recently approved standard for run¬ ning Ethernet over unshielded twisted¬ pair wire offers the advantages of Ether¬ net speeds without the expense of installing coaxial cable. A Mac interface card that supports Ethernet over standard telephone wire should be available from Kinetics by the time you read this. LocalTalk simply provides basic con¬ nectivity between Macs. You’ll need ad¬ ditional software to support services such as file sharing. Apple’s Appleshare file-server software lets you share files stored in a central location. Designed around AFP, Appleshare runs on a dedi¬ cated Mac Plus with a hard disk drive and lets you restrict access to files you create. You must first log on to Appleshare be¬ fore you can access the server. You own each file that you create, and you deter¬ mine who has access to each file and at what level. Each person on the network can have no access, read-only access, or read-and-write access. Another security feature is Appleshare’s drop folder; any¬ one on the network can deposit docu¬ ments into it, but files in the drop folder are invisible to everyone except the fold¬ er’s owner. In addition to file-sharing capability, file- and record-locking capabilities are necessary to ensure that two users don’t attempt to write to the same file at the same time. Each application must handle this function for its own files; most con¬ form to the AFP specifications. The main drawback of Appleshare is that you have to dedicate a Mac Plus as a file server. One alternative, TOPS, takes advantage of AppleTalk’s peer-to-peer communications capability to provide distributed file service; all nodes act as both file servers and requesters (see the continued 58 BYTE* 1988 Mac Special Edition Introducing our new Macintosh* Communications Package': 2400bps modem, MicroPhone' software, cable, and a price that makes it all worthwhile. IMPRACTICAL PERIPHERALS » 31245 La Baya Drive, Westlake Village, CA 91362 Sales Office: 1-800-442-4774 Corporate Headquarters: 1-818-706-0333 FAX: 1-818-706-2474 All products and names trademarked are properties of their respective manufacturers. © 1988 Practical Peripherals, Inc. All rights reserved. This one’s just for the Macintosh. Even the color is Mac-compatible. And you’ll look a long time for a more complete value...a value that begins with our Practical stand¬ alone 2400 modem. Feature for feature the PM2400SA is way out in front of anything comparable. Hayes’™ compatibility is 100%. Even the Macintosh version of Hayes’ Smartcom™ can’t tell the difference. But there’s more to the PM2400SA than that... • 2400,1200, or0-300bps operation. • Automatic adaptive equalization for error-free operation over common phone lines. • LED displays for all functions. • Full or half-duplex operation. • Pulse or touch-tone dialing. • User modifiable, non-volatile, RAM stores modem configurations. • Automatic answer mode. • Complies with Bell 212A, 103, FCC Part 68, etc. We’ve made a great deal greater! By itself the PM2400SA is a great value. But, along with the modem, our Communications Package includes both the cable you need and MICROPHONE™., the communications program that goes beyond any program available for the Mac...FREE. The complete package is an absolutely irresistible $299! Improved technology. Performance. Value. And the best guarantee in the business...a performance guarantee that’s 5 full years long. Hardware, software, a rock solid guarantee, and superior value...we’ll say it again, “macnificent!” Circle M42 on Reader Service Card 1988 Mac Special Edition • B Y T E 59 THE WELL-CONNECTED MAC T OPS is an AppleTalk-compatible distributed network operating sys¬ tem that lets Macintoshes and IBM PCs share files, hard disks, and laser printers. Unlike Appleshare, however, TOPS does not require a dedicated cen¬ tral file server, but distributes this function between all workstations. TOPS consists of software for each Mac and IBM PC, and it runs over Local- Talk or telephone-wire cabling, such as Farallon Computing’s PhoneNet. It’s compatible with applications that sup¬ port the AppleTalk Filing Protocol (AFP), and it can also support Sun workstations. If you’re using TOPS/DOS on the PC, you’ll also need the TOPS Flash- Card or another AppleTalk PC interface card. FlashCard supports standard 230.4-kilobit-per-second (kbps) Local- Talk speeds for laser printer and PC-to- Mac communications, but it can also transmit PC-to-PC at 770 kbps. By the time you read this, a similar product may be available for the Mac, according to TOPS. FlashCard includes a standard plug-in card with software drivers and an installation guide. Distributing File Service TOPS is a distributed network operating system. When you use TOPS, you don’t need to dedicate a Mac as a file server, text box “It’s TOPS” by Nicholas M. Baran). Another way to avoid buying a dedicated server is to allow a Mac to act as both a central file server and a work¬ station. Tangent Technologies’ Mac- Serve, for example, offers the benefits of centralized file storage for up to 16 users on a Mac hard disk. You can designate the hard disk of any Mac as a shared disk and divide it into private or shared vol¬ umes. This arrangement works best with a few nodes; as network activity in¬ creases, the server workstation’s perfor¬ mance rapidly decreases. Mac to PC Unlike the Mac, there is no de facto com¬ munications architecture built into the IBM PC. Rather, each LAN vendor has developed its own proprietary set of net¬ working protocols. While these compa¬ nies use industry-standard LAN topolo¬ gies, such as Ethernet and Token Ring at It’s TOPS Nicholas M. Baran as you do with Appleshare, Apple’s cen¬ tralized file-server software. Each ma¬ chine in the network acts as both a “cli¬ ent,” using the resources of other machines, and as a “server,” providing its resources to other computers on the network. For example, if your workstation is an IBM PC XT, once you run TOPS/ DOS and log on to the network, you can “publish” local file folders, volumes, or an entire hard disk, so any networked Mac or PC can access it. Only those files that you publish are available to other network clients. On the Mac desk¬ top, the XT’s hard disk appears as an icon representing another Mac hard disk. The Mac can also transfer files from the XT for local storage. A key issue with every network is se¬ curity. TOPS uses a password scheme that you can apply to any published folder, volume, or disk on the network. You can also specify that the files be read-and-write or read-only access, and that only one user access the volume at a time. It’s not possible, however, to let some users have limited access and some have no access to a file, as you can with Appleshare. By contrast, Appleshare lets you set access privileges with a desk accessory, and security is more stringent. You must log on to the network to access the file their lowest levels, each one has its own method of providing higher-level func¬ tions. The result is a fragmented ap¬ proach to interconnecting Macs and PC LANs. There are two ways to integrate Mac and PC LAN environments: You can in¬ tegrate PCs into an AppleTalk network, or you can extend the PC LAN environ¬ ment to support the Mac. The latter may not be an option if your PC LAN doesn’t support the Mac, however. On the other hand, if all you need to do is perform simple file exchanges between Macs and PCs or occasionally access a PC applica¬ tion, you may want to look into several LAN alternatives (see the text box “Ex¬ changing Data” by Cynthia W. Harri- man on page 62). PCs can participate on an AppleTalk network via an AppleTalk PC interface card, which fits into a standard expan¬ sion slot on the IBM PC. However, this server. You own the folders (or sub¬ directories) that you create, and you determine which users have access to those folders and what level of access each user has. Setting Up I set up a TOPS network that consisted of a Mac SE, an IBM PC XT, and an Apple LaserWriter IINTX, arranged in a typical daisy-chain configuration. I connected the devices to each other via Farrallon’s PhoneNet connectors, which consist of two RJ-11 plugs: one input jack, and one output jack. The daisy-chain end connectors have only one RJ-11 connection; a special resistor provided with the connector kit termi¬ nates the other plug. Getting TOPS up and running is sim¬ ple. You connect each Mac by plugging a LocalTalk connector into the Mac’s printer port. If you’re connecting PCs to the network, you install FlashCards, connect the RJ-11 cables supplied with the PhoneNet RJ-11 connectors, and in¬ stall the software on each system, and you’re ready to go. TOPS on the PC is a RAM-resident program that you load from the DOS prompt or via an AUTOEX¬ EC.BAT file. The program requires 170K bytes to 230K bytes of RAM, and it is copy-protected, so you must buy a copy of TOPS for each workstation. still limits PCs to printing documents on a networked laser printer. Appleshare PC, an extension of Appleshare, lets PC users access an Appleshare file server. Other software packages, such as Tan- gentShare from Tangent Technologies, let you configure an IBM PC or PS/2 to participate on an AppleTalk network as an AFP-compatible file server. Another way to network Macs and PCs is by linking the Mac to a PC LAN. However, PC LANs are generally more complicated and more expensive than AppleTalk LANs, and they may be less cost-effective for small work groups. The dominant vendors are 3Com, No¬ vell, and Banyan. As a participant on the LAN, a Mac may have access to a range of services, including E-mail, file shar¬ ing, gateways to hosts, and other LANs. 3Com offers an extension to its 3 +Share network operating system that allows the Mac SE or II to participate as a 60 BYTE* 1988 Mac Special Edition THE WELL-CONNECTED MAC On the Mac, the TOPS system resides as a desk accessory that automatically loads when you start the Mac. (You can bypass TOPS installation by holding down the Command and Option keys when you start up.) Making an Impression Aside from file sharing, perhaps the greatest incentive for using TOPS is be¬ ing able to share a laser printer. But using a laser printer on the network has some limitations. PCs can’t print di¬ rectly to the laser printer unless you buy a copy of NetPrint software for each PC. If you don’t have NetPrint, you can send a file to the laser printer from the DOS prompt using the TPRINT com¬ mand, which is similar to the DOS PRINT command. With TPRINT, you have to first print the file to disk using your word processor or some other ap¬ plication and then send it to the laser printer via TPRINT. This two-step print¬ ing process can prove to be a bit cumbersome. NetPrint intercepts output that has been directed to the PC’s printer port and sends it instead to the laser printer on the network. It supports PostScript files and includes a translator for print¬ ing IBM ProPrinter or Epson-compat¬ ible files. NetPrint operates in the back¬ ground so that you can continue with other work after you’ve sent the file to the print queue. Another feature allows Mac or PC users without hard disks to share hard disks in other workstations. I created a 3Com network node. As such, it can share peripherals and access PC or Mac files stored on a central file server. An Appleshare file server can also support Mac workstations over a 3Com network; however, 3Com’s file server does not support AFP. Appleshare file servers on LocalTalk can be linked directly to a 3+Server, which acts as a gateway to 3Com’s Ethernet network. Macs with an Ethernet interface card can also operate on a 3Com network directly. A product is also in the works that will allow the Mac to communicate with the 3+Open file server, which runs OS/2 Extended Edition. Once linked to a 3Com network, Mac participants can access gateways to other LAN environments, such as a token-ring network. Many large corporations also use 3Com’s internetwork bridges and gateways to construct wide-area net¬ works (WANs) that connect geographi¬ separate directory on my PC’s hard disk for Mac files, installed several Mac programs on the PC, and ran them from the Mac without a hitch. The major consideration when shar¬ ing a hard disk is data compatibility. Obviously, you can’t use a Mac file in a PC application unless it has a compat¬ ible data format. TOPS provides a set of translator programs on the Mac that converts between many popular Mac and MS-DOS application files. For ex¬ ample, you can translate a WordStar file to Mac Write or a Lotus 1-2-3 file to Jazz. Many other applications use com¬ mon data formats on the PC and the Mac or include conversion utilities. My only complaint with the TOPS system is the documentation, which could explain some details more clearly. I had to make several calls to TOPS’s technical-support line before I had things running smoothly. However, TOPS’s technical support was excel¬ lent. TOPS also provides on-line techni¬ cal support on BIX. The cost for TOPS is about $250 for each Mac, $59 per laser printer, and $430 for each PC without NetPrint. In¬ cluding NetPrint, which I highly recom¬ mend, the cost per PC rises to almost $620. Although the price per PC is a bit steep, TOPS is an elegant and simple solution for small networks of PCs and Macs. Nicholas M. Baran is a BYTE technical editor . He can be reached on BIX as “nickbaran. ” cally dispersed LANs via Tymnet or other packet-switched networks. Novell recently introduced NetWare Macintosh, an AppleTalk-compatible version of its NetWare LAN operating system. In contrast to 3Com’s approach, Novell does not require that an extension of its network operating system reside on each Mac. Instead, Novell has mapped the AppleTalk protocols to NetWare. All protocol translation occurs on the Novell file server, which provides the Mac with transparent access to Novell LAN re¬ sources. To Macs attached to a NetWare LAN, the NetWare server appears to function as an Appleshare device. You can connect the Mac to a NetWare server via Ethernet or LocalTalk connections. Once linked to the Novell LAN, you can access resources on DEC and IBM hosts and can take advantage of X.25 inter¬ faces to packet-switched services and WAN bridges. TOPS 2.1 Type AppleTalk networking software for Macintosh and IBM PC TOPS/Macintosh Price: $249 Requirements: Mac512K, Plus, SE, or II TOPS/DOS Price: $189 Requirements: IBM PC or compatible with DOS 3.1 or higher; 512K bytes of RAM recommended; one expansion slot for FlashCard TOPS FlashCard Price: $239 Requirements: IBM PC and one available expansion slot TOPS NetPrint Price: $189 Requirements: Same as TOPS/DOS TOPS Teleconnector Price: $59 Company TOPS, a Sun Microsystems Co. 950 Marina Village Pkwy. Alameda, CA 94501 (415) 769-9669 Inquiry M151. At the time of this writing, Banyan had not introduced its much rumored soft¬ ware that would extend its VINES net¬ work operating system to the Mac. How¬ ever, Macs can indirectly access files on a Banyan server via a TOPS network. A PC attached to both a TOPS and a VINES network acts as a gateway be¬ tween the two environments. Mac to DEC Early last spring, Apple and DEC an¬ nounced a joint development effort to in¬ tegrate AppleTalk and DECnet net¬ works. While products have yet to emerge, areas for potential product de¬ velopment include terminal emulation, file sharing and network management, and services such as E-mail. The Apple/ DEC alliance strengthens AppleTalk’s credibility in the corporate world and may provide users with network-man- continued 1988 Mac Special Edition • BYTE 61 THE WELL-CONNECTED MAC I f a simple exchange of data between Macs and IBM PCs and compatibles is what you’re looking for, several inex¬ pensive alternatives to constructing a LAN are available: establishing a direct connection, performing disk-format conversion, and adding PC coprocess¬ ing to your Mac. Direct-connection schemes use file transfer software to send data between the Mac and PC over dial-up lines or through an RS-232C or small computer system interface (SCSI) link. Disk-for¬ mat conversion requires adding a third disk drive to your Mac that can read and write PC disk formats. PC coprocessing boards and software let you run PC ap¬ plications on the Mac. Depending on your needs, a combination of these op¬ tions may be appropriate. You may also need file-translation software to allow Mac applications to read PC files. Direct Connection The easiest approach to exchanging data is to cable the Mac and PC machines to¬ gether for quick file transfers. If you choose this approach, you can connect the serial ports on the two machines with an appropriate cable (if you al¬ ready own one, Apple’s Imagewriter I printer cable has the right pin-outs), and you can use standard communications software to send files back and forth. A more basic approach is to buy a turn¬ key package like MacLink Plus. This product comes with a serial cable and easy-to-use custom file-transfer software for both the Mac and the PC. The draw¬ back of serial connection, however, is that you’ll have to transmit at a relatively slow speed: 57.6 kbps is the current limit. agement capabilities under Ethernet that AppleTalk currently lacks. The venture also benefits DEC, which has had limited success with its personal computer offerings. Integrating the Mac into DECnet will be good news for the many firms that use both Macs and VAXes. DEC’S research has shown that 36 percent of its VAX users also have Macs and need ways to integrate and en¬ hance these systems. In the meantime, there are several ways to connect Macs and VAXes. These include VT-100 and VT-200 terminal emulation, DECnet software for the Exchanging Data Cynthia W. Harriman You can overcome this constraint by using the Mac Plus, SE, or IPs SCSI. This requires a SCSI PC board and a connecting cable to the Mac’s SCSI port. Transmission speed ranges from 1.4 mbps (Mac SE to PC) to 4.2 mbps (Mac II to AT)—substantially faster than serial connections. QuickShare is one product that supports SCSI Mac-to- PC file transfer. If your machines aren’t close enough to allow direct connection, you can use a modem to establish a dial-up connec¬ tion. For example, MacLink Plus offers a modem option that includes password protection. You can boot MacLink Plus on your office PC, then dial in from a Mac at home, enter the password, and download a Lotus 1-2-3 worksheet. You can then work on it using Excel (which accepts 1-2-3 files) and send it back to the office PC when you’re finished. The remote Mac controls the session; you don’t need someone at both ends. In ad¬ dition, MacLink Plus translates many PC application files to Mac application formats. Adding a Drive Another popular file-transfer solution is to add a special disk drive that lets the Mac read and write DOS-formatted disks. Several options currently exist that let you add an MS-DOS drive to the Mac, and at least one product, Match- Maker, provides a Mac drive on the PC. While all three MS-DOS drives let the Mac read PC disks, each differs in its hardware requirements, its user inter¬ face, its file-translation capability, and the PC media it supports. Dayna Communications’ DaynaFile Mac, and AppleTalk file-server software for the VAX (see figure 2). The latter two alternatives require a Mac connec¬ tion to DECnet’s Ethernet backbone via an Ethernet interface card or an Apple- Talk/Ethernet gateway. Terminal-emulation packages, avail¬ able for the Mac Plus, SE, and II, per¬ form the necessary protocol translation to allow the Mac to act as a DEC termi¬ nal. Terminal emulation requires soft¬ ware for the Mac and the host, and an RS-232C cable to link the two machines. In addition to remote-terminal capabili¬ ties, many terminal-emulation packages connects to the SCSI port on any Mac Plus, SE, or II and handles both PC-to- Mac and Mac-to-PC conversions. It’s available in configurations that support either 360K-byte and 1.2-megabyte 5 1 4- inch floppy disks, or 720K-byte and 1.44-megabyte 3y2-inch floppy disks. DaynaFile interacts with the Mac’s op¬ erating system and other software to ap¬ pear as another Mac drive. In Finder, you can transfer files to and from your PC disk just as you would between Mac floppy disks. Within applications, you can access PC files transparently with the usual Open and Save commands. DaynaFile also includes translation software that converts between PC and Mac application files. Apple’s PC 5.25 Drive is similar to DaynaFile, but it requires a special in¬ terface board that makes it usable on only the Mac SE and II. You can trans¬ fer files in both directions, but the flop¬ py disk drive reads only 360K-byte PC disks and requires a special transfer program (included with the Mac) to move files; Mac Finder and Mac ap¬ plications can’t access the PC disk directly. A third alternative is Peripheral Land’s Infinity I, a high-capacity 514- inch floppy SCSI drive intended as a mass-storage device for Mac files. It reads 360K-byte and 1.2-megabyte PC disks, but you can’t write Mac files to it. If you primarily use a PC, you can in¬ stall MatchMaker, a half-size drive controller board and software that lets you connect a single- or double-sided Mac external floppy disk drive to your PC. The software supports five com¬ mands: COPY, DIR, DELETE, TYPE, and also provide file transfers and other functions. Pacer Software’s PacerLink, for example, supports file transfer, vir¬ tual disk, and print spooling. Unfortunately, terminal emulation does not take advantage of the Mac’s in¬ telligence; all processing takes place on the host. One solution is to install DEC¬ net software, such as Technology Con¬ cepts’ CommUnity-Mac, which lets a Mac function as a DECnet end node. Such packages support the Mac interface so that attached Macs can share host re¬ sources and access files transparently. Unlike terminal emulation, however, 62 BYTE* 1988 Mac Special Edition THE WELL-CONNECTED MAC Products Mentioned DaynaFile MacLink Plus. ...$195 single-drive unit.$650-$850 DataViz, Inc. two-drive unit.$810-$ 1205 16 Winfield St. Dayna Communications, Inc. Norwalk, CT 06855 50 South Main St., Suite 530 (203) 866-4944 Salt Lake City, UT 84144 (801)531-0600 Inquiry M180. Inquiry M182. MatchMaker. Micro Solutions ...$149 Infinity I.$1095 132 West Lincoln Hwy. Peripheral Land DeKalb, IL 60115 47800 Westinghouse Dr. (815) 756-3411 Fremont, CA 94538 (415) 657-2211 Inquiry M185. Inquiry M184. PC 5.25 Drive. Apple Computer, Inc. ...$528 Mac + PC 20525 Mariani Ave. for MacPlus.$995 Cupertino, CA 95014 for Mac SE.$1095 (408) 996-1010 PerfecTek Corp. 726 South Hillview Dr. Inquiry M183. Milpitas, CA 95035 QuickShare. ...$465 (408) 263-7757 Compatible Systems Corp. Inquiry M188. P.O. Drawer 17220 Boulder, CO 80308 Mac286 .$1499 (303) 444-9532 AST Research, Inc. 2121 Alton Ave. Inquiry M181. Irvine, CA 92714 SoftPC. ...$595 (714) 863-1333 Insignia Solutions, Inc. Inquiry M186. 1255 Post St., Suite 625 San Francisco, CA 94109 (415) 885-4455 Inquiry M187. INIT (format). [Editor’s note: For more information on QuickShare, DaynaFile, and MatchMaker, see “PCs and Macs Working Together ” by Emil Flock in the May BYTE.] Coprocessing If you need to run PC programs as well as access PC data on your Mac, con¬ sider adding PC coprocessing. You can choose either of two coprocessor boards from PerfecTek and AST Research, or you can select software from Insignia, which emulates MS-DOS on the Mac. Mac coprocessing is currently unavail¬ able for the PC. When comparing coprocessing op¬ tions, look into the way each product emulates various PC video options (CGA, Hercules, and monochrome are available); how it allows for keyboard differences between the two machines; whether it can access DOS data files and programs from a PC floppy disk drive attached to the Mac; and whether MS-DOS files can share a Mac’s hard disk drive. Further, check out how much memory this two-for-one approach eats up, and how performance compares to that of a stand-alone PC or AT. Whatever system you use to exchange data between Macs and PCs, keep in mind that transferring data between the two machines may be only half the bat¬ tle; files often need to be translated be¬ tween Mac and PC application formats before they’re usable. Luckily, the cur¬ rent trend is toward greater file compati¬ bility between Mac and PC programs. For example, Microsoft’s Excel can ac¬ commodate Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheets, and Mac and PC versions of Excel, Microsoft Word, and other applications are available. But many other programs still require file-translation software that may or may not be included with the data exchange option you choose. Cynthia W. Harriman of Portsmouth, New Hampshire, is the author of The MS-DOS—Mac Connection (Brady/ Simon & Schuster, 1988). She can be reached on BIX as “editors . ” DECnet node emulation allows the Mac to function as an intelligent peer device and requires no special host software. Connection to the DECnet backbone re¬ quires an Ethernet interface card or Ethernet gateway. Community software for MS-DOS computers and Sun work¬ stations also provides connectivity with the Mac via DECnet. A third option is to buy software, such as Alisa Systems’ AlisaTalk, that lets a VAX operate as an AFP-compatible file server. A similar alternative is Pacer Software’s PacerShare, which is an im¬ plementation of Appleshare for the VAX. These packages let the Mac access VAX files and laser printers, and they are based on AppleTalk for VMS, a develop¬ er’s tool that implements the AppleTalk protocol suite on the VAX. Once Mac-to-VAX network links are set up, application-level communications can occur. One promising development in Mac-to-VAX communications is Net¬ work Innovations’ CL/1, an SQL-based connectivity language that programmers can use to transparently link Mac and VAX databases. Mac databases that sup¬ port CL/1 can automatically retrieve data from a VAX database. Access of re¬ mote data is transparent to the user, to whom all transactions appear to be hap¬ pening locally. An Apple subsidiary, Network Innovations plans to extend CL/1 to support other host computers in the future. A few Mac database pro¬ grams, such as HyperCard, are already providing VAX links through CL/1. Mac to IBM Host The primary method of connecting the Mac to an IBM mainframe is through terminal emulation. Several configura¬ tions are possible (see figure 3). A co- continued 1988 Mac Special Edition • BYTE 63 THE WELL-CONNECTED MAC Mac Plus, SE, or II with terminal-emulation software □ RS-232C VAX with AppleTalk for VMS Mac Plus orSE Dedicated Appleshare file server (Mac Plus) MS-DOS PC with AppleTalk interface card and Appleshare PC LaserWriter a □ □ 1 connector i f LocalTalk || _J l Gateway Ethernet backbone Gateway LocalTalk or SCSI a & a Mac SE with DECnet software and Ethernet interface card Mac Plus or SE a Mac SE with Ethernet interface card Mac II with NuBus Ethernet interface card n \ -^ \\ A 1 Unix workstation Figure 2: Macs connected to DECnet’s Ethernet backbone can function as DECnet nodes , or the VAX can act as an AppleTalk file server. axial cable can connect the Mac to an IBM 3174 cluster controller, which as¬ sembles terminal input into packets and forwards them to the mainframe. A similar approach is to install an AppleTalk-to-IBM 3270 gateway such as Tri Data Systems’ Netway 1000. The Netway acts like an IBM 3274 cluster controller to let multiple workstations on AppleTalk establish concurrent 3270 ter¬ minal-emulation sessions (Netway sup¬ ports up to 16 simultaneous sessions). Most 3270 terminal-emulation packages also support file transfer, but the Mac is still a dumb terminal: It simply acts as a window to processes occurring on the host. The third option is far more powerful. It’s a peer-to-peer approach in which Mac applications support MacAPPC, a developer’s tool that implements IBM’s Advanced Peer-to-Peer Communications or Logical Unit (LU) 6.2 architecture on the Mac. Unlike terminal emulation, MacAPPC lets the Mac interact transpar¬ ently as an intelligent node with any computer supporting LU 6.2. In an APPC environment, the user may know nothing about the network and need not be aware of when a connection to the network or to another computer oc¬ curs. The application running on the Mac handles this automatically. Appli¬ cations supporting MacAPPC operate on behalf of the user to transparently pro¬ vide connection to the network. MacAPPC comprises a set of APPC functions that reside on a Mac II acting as a nondedicated LU 6.2 gateway on AppleTalk. MacAPPC includes a 68000- based intelligent communications card installed in the Mac II, and an LU 6.2 server utility that supports LU 6.2/Node Type 2.1 functions and acts as the LU 6.2 gateway. The system administrator controls the APPC gateway. Once activated, the gate¬ way downloads all the LU 6.2 and Node Type 2.1 protocols onto the 68000 card, which distributes sessions over Apple- Talk to Macs running special driver soft¬ ware. The Mac’s Chooser lets you select from one or more LU 6.2 gateways on the network. With the advent of MacAPPC, the stage is set for distributed processing be¬ tween Macs and IBM mainframes. You’ll have to wait for the development of applications that take advantage of this new platform, however. Mac to Others Apple’s push is in the areas of DEC and IBM connectivity; however, the Mac can link to many other systems, as well. For example, several methods are available for connecting Macs with Unix worksta¬ tions and hosts. Here, the standard Mac¬ intosh operating system, which supports AppleTalk, requires a different approach than the A/UX Mac, Apple’s Unix work¬ station. A/UX supports the Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) and Sun Microsystems’ Net¬ work Filing System (NFS)—the de facto network transport and file-sharing stan¬ dards in the Unix environment (see “Unix and the Mac Interface” by Rick Daley on page 89). Since the A/UX Mac supports NFS and TCP/IP, connecting to a Sun or other 64 BYTE* 1988 Mac Special Edition THE WELL-CONNECTED MAC Cluster controller a- Mac SE internal 3270 card m IBM 3174 Mac II NuBus 3270 card a a m "" □ |-L| LocalTalk |-L^ AppleTalk 3270 gateway IBM 3725/3745 connector Communications controller a □ a □ -a -o- LocalTalk connectors V J u _ t (t \ w MacAPPC gateway IBM S/370 mainframe Figure 3: MacAPPC goes beyond 3270 terminal emulation and 3270 gateways to let the Mac act as an intelligent peer node on an IBM SNA network. Unix workstation is simply a matter of buying an Ethernet interface card to es¬ tablish the LAN connection. For the standard Mac operating system, TOPS/ Sun workstation software lets a Sun workstation act as a TOPS network file server. Macs can access both PC and Sun files on the file server, and can indirectly access host files through an NFS net¬ work. The Sun workstation connection to the TOPS network requires an Apple- Talk-to-Ethernet gateway. Information Presentation Technol¬ ogies offers even broader connectivity with Unix-based systems. Its product, uShare, connects Macs, A/UX Macs, PCs, and Apollo workstations, and it provides gateways between AppleTalk, Ethernet, and Apollo Domain token-ring networks. Macs can also take advantage of gateways between Apollo, DEC, and IBM environments. The uShare software lets the A/UX Mac or an Apollo Unix-based worksta¬ tion function as a nondedicated Apple- share-compatible file server on an Ap¬ pleTalk LAN, or the Mac can emulate a Unix workstation to access and run Unix applications. To the Mac, the Unix work¬ station appears as an ordinary Apple- share server. Connection is via an Apple- Talk interface card in the Unix host or an Ethernet interface card in the Mac. Other services supported include E-mail, vir¬ tual disk, and print-spooling capabili¬ ties. Beyond the Unix environment, links to other hosts are limited to terminal em¬ ulation. Packages are available to con¬ nect the Mac to Prime, Pyramid, Data General, Stratus, Tandem, Wang, Hew¬ lett-Packard, and Cray hosts. Coming Attractions In addition to supporting AppleTalk, Apple has stated its commitment to de¬ velop links to IBM’s Systems Network Architecture (SNA), the OSI protocols, and the TCP/IP internetworking proto¬ col suite. Apple has also committed itself to supporting the OS/2 environment, and the company is developing a Micro Chan¬ nel-compatible AppleTalk interface card for PS/2s. When it comes to support for inter¬ networking, Apple is being pragmatic; it plans to support both OSI and TCP/IP. Apple already supports TCP/IP on the A/UX Mac and plans to support it under the Mac operating system. Regarding OSI protocols, Apple is also working on X.400 and X.25 gateways. An X.400 gateway would provide LocalTalk con¬ nectivity to other networks supporting the X.400 E-mail interchange standard. An X.25 gateway would provide a direct interface between AppleTalk and public packet-switched networks such as Tym¬ net. Support for token-ring LANs is also in the works. However, Apple has not an¬ nounced when these products will be available. Apple owns a minority stake in Touch Communications, an OSI software ven¬ dor that implements the full suite of OSI protocols in a variety of computing envi¬ ronments. Touch’s OSI Mac Developer’s Kit ports the OSI protocol stack to the Mac. Developers who write applications for Touch’s OSI Mac can link them to continued 1988 Mac Special Edition ‘BYTE 65 THE WELL-CONNECTED MAC of Mac Connectivity Products A Sampling 3 + for the Mac 3 + for the Mac.$495 3+Share and 3 + Server.$7995 Extension of 3+Share network operating system that connects the Mac to 3Com ’s 3+Network Requirements: 3 +Share, Ethernet interface card or LocalTalk, 3+Server 3Com Corp. 3165 KiferRd. Santa Clara, CA 95052 (408) 562-6400 Inquiry M152. 3+Mail for the Mac.$595 Lets Mac send E-mail to other Macs or PCs over 3+Network Requirements: 3 +Share, 3 + for the Mac 3Com Corp. Inquiry M153. EtherLink/NB.$595 Ethernet interface card Requirements: Mac II 3Com Corp. Inquiry M154. AlisaTalk.$4700 to $14,400, depending on VAX CPU Software lets DEC VAX function as AFP file server Requirements: AppleTalk/Ethernet gateway or Ethernet interface card Alisa Systems, Inc. 221 East Walnut St., Suite 175 Pasadena, CA 91101 (818) 792-9474 Inquiry M155. TSSNet.$495 DECnet terminal-emulation and file- transfer software for the Mac Requirements: AppleTal k/Ethernet gateway or Ethernet interface card Alisa Systems, Inc. Inquiry M156. MacMainframe Mac II card.$995 Mac SE card.$795 External unit.$1195 3270 terminal-emulation card Requirements: Mac 512Ke or higher (external unit) Avatar Technologies, Inc. 99 South St. Hopkinton, MA 01748 (617) 435-6872 Inquiry M157. Constellation III for the Mac Constellation III.$495 Mac network interface card.$249 20-megabyte Omnidrive.$2795 Mac network operating system that runs on Omninet twisted-pair LAN Requirements: Omninet, Mac interface card, Omnidrive disk server Corvus Systems, Inc. 160 Great Oaks Blvd. San Jose, CA 95119 (800) 426-7887 Inquiry M158. MacIRMA.$1195 IRMA card for Mac 3278, 3279 Requirements: Mac II or SE Digital Communications Associates 1000 Alderman Dr. Alpharetta, GA 30201 (404) 442-4000 Inquiry M159. FastNet.$899 and up Ethernet controller products for the Mac SE, Plus, and II (SCSI version also available); includes Technology Concepts, Inc.’s CommUnity-Mac software Requirements: Mac SE, Plus, or II Dove Computer Corp. 1200 North 23rd St. Wilmington, NC 28405 (919) 763-7918 Inquiry M160. InterBridge.$799 Bridge device interconnects AppleTalk networks via remote or direct connection Requirements: Mac 512Ke or higher Hayes Microcomputer Products, Inc. P.O. Box 105203 Atlanta, GA 30348 (404) 449-8791 Inquiry M161. PhoneNet Per Mac...$59.95 StarController.$1695 Cabling system supports up to six AppleTalk nodes over twisted-pair. Optional StarController links up to 12 PhoneNets Requirements: None Farallon Computing, Inc. 2150 Kittredge St. Berkeley, CA 94704 (415) 849-2331 Inquiry M162. uShare Mac.$149 Host.$395 to $2995 AppleTalk interface card.$395 AFP-compatible file-server software for A/UX Mac II, Apollo, and other Unix machines. Supports AppleTalk, Ethernet, and Apollo Domain token¬ ring environments Requirements: Mac Plus, SE, or II; Unix to Appleshare connection requires AppleTalk/Ethernet gateway, Ethernet interface card, or AppleTalk Interface Card (for Unix hosts). Information Presentation Technologies, Inc. 23801 Calabasas Rd., Suite 2011 Calabasas, CA 91302 (818) 347-7791 Inquiry M163. Liaison.$295 Software bridge that interconnects LocalTalk networks via RS-232C or dial-up links. Liaison also connects LocalTalk and EtherTalk networks and lets remote Macs access AppleTalk or EtherTalk networks Requirements: Mac 512Ke or higher, RS-232C cable, or Hayes-compatible 1200-bps modem on each network Infosphere, Inc. 4730 Southwest Macadam Ave. Portland, OR 97201 (503) 226-3515 Inquiry M164. 66 BYTE* 1988 Mac Special Edition THE WELL-CONNECTED MAC MacServe.$250 Software converts Mac on AppleTalk to disk and print server; read-access file sharing only; runs in background mode Requirements: AppleTalk Infosphere, Inc. Inquiry M165. FastPath.$2495 AppleTalk to Ethernet gateway Requirements: Mac 512Ke Kinetics, Inc. A Division of Excelan 2540 Camino Diablo Walnut Creek, CA 94596 (415) 947-0998 Requirements: Mac Plus or higher. Inquiry M166. EtherPort EtherPort II.$695 EtherPort SE.$695 SCSI connection...... $1150 to $1250 EtherPort SEL.$695 Network interface controllers for direct Mac-to-Ethernet connections. EtherPort Hand SE are internal cards for the Mac SE and II. EtherSC is a stand-alone device that uses any Mac SCSI port. The SEL is an interface to Synoptics' Lattisnet Requirements: Mac SE, Plus, or II Kinetics, Inc. Inquiry M167. Series II, Series III Twinax Series II (multiport). $1495 to $3495 Series III (single port).$1195 Mac to IBM System 34, 36, and 38 protocol-conversion and file-transfer software Requirements: Any Mac KMW Systems Corp. 6034 West Courtyard Dr. Austin, TX 78730 (512) 338-3000 Inquiry M168. MacMenlo.$395 Tandem 6520 and 653X terminal- emulation and file-transfer software Requirements: Any Mac Menlo Business Systems, Inc. 201 Main St. Los Altos, CA 94022 (415) 948-7920 Inquiry M169. PacerLink.$2000 and up Software performs terminal emulation, file transfer, and resource sharing between Mac and DEC VAX (VMS and Ultrix), Prime, Pyramid, Cray, and Stratus hosts. Connection is via Ethernet (AppleTalk/ Ethernet gateway or Ethernet interface card), RS-232C, or modem Requirements: Mac 512Ke or higher Pacer Software, Inc. 7911 Herschel Ave., Suite 402 La Jolla, CA 92037 (619) 454-0565 Inquiry M170. PacerShare.$400 and up Turns VAX/VMS into an Appleshare file server and lets the Mac access VAX files Requirements: PacerLink, Ethernet Pacer Software, Inc. Inquiry M171. NetBridge.$399 AppleTalk network device bridge Requirements: Mac 512Ke or higher Shiva Corp. 222 Third St., Suite 100 Cambridge, MA 02142 (617) 864-8500 Inquiry M172. InBox Software for three Macs.$350 Each additional Mac.$125 Per PC.$195 E-mail software for AppleTalk networks Requirements: AppleTalk Symantec Corp. Think Technologies Division 135 South Rd. Bedford, MA 01730 (800) 648-4465 Inquiry M173. TangentShare Server.$700 AFP file-server software for IBM PCs or PS/2s Requirements: IBM PC or PS/2 with 512K bytes and a hard disk drive Tangent Technologies, Ltd. 5990 K-Unity Dr. Norcross, GA 30071 (404) 662-0366 Inquiry M174. CommUnity-Mac Per license.$495 to $350 Media/documentation fee.$200 DECnet-compatible software; includes VT-100 and VT-220 emulation Requirements: Mac Plus, SE, or II Technology Concepts, Inc. A Bell Atlantic Co. 40 Tall Pine Dr. Sudbury, MAO 1776 (800) 777-2323 (617)443-7311 Inquiry M175. TOPS Terminal.$189 Terminal-emulation software that links to any host supporting TCP/IP Requirements: Mac 512K or higher, AppleTalk/Ethernet gateway or Ethernet interface card TOPS, a Sun Microsystems Co. 950 Marina Village Pkwy. Alameda, CA 94501 (415) 769-9669 Inquiry M176. Netway 1000 .$3995 AppleTalk-to-3270 gateway device provides IBM 3270 terminal emulation and file transfer for up to 16 Macs Requirements: Mac 512Ke or higher, AppleTalk Tri Data Systems, Inc. 1450 KiferRd. Sunnyvale, CA 94086 (408) 746-2900 Inquiry M177. Reflection 1 for the Mac.$249 Hewlett-Packard 2392A terminal- emulation and file-transfer software Requirements: Mac 512K or higher Walker Richer & Quinn 2825 EastLake Ave. E Seattle, WA 98102 (206) 324-0350 Inquiry M178. Mac 240.$199 DEC VT-100, VT-200, VT-220, VT- 240 terminal-emulation software Requirements: Mac 512Ke White Pine Software, Inc. 94 Route 101A Amherst, NH 03031 (603) 886-9050 Inquiry M179. 1988 Mac Special Edition • B Y T E 67 THE WELL-CONNECTED MAC Apple’s Macintosh Connectivity Products Network Interface Cards LocalTalk PC Card AppleTalk interface card for the IBM PC that provides basic connectivity to a LocalTalk network; it lets the PC access a networked laser printer. Price: $249 EtherTalk Interface Card An Ethernet interface card for the Mac II. Price: $699 Terminal Emulation AppleLine A protocol converter that translates between AppleTalk and IBM 3270 protocols to establish Mac-to-IBM mainframe communications. Price: $1295 MacTerminal Multifunction terminal-emulation software that lets a Mac emulate a DEC VT-52 or VT-I00 terminal or an IBM 3278 Model 2 terminal when used with an AppleLine protocol converter. Price: $125 AppleLine 3270 File Transfer Software that works with the AppleLine protocol converter to transfer files between the Mac and an IBM 32 70 mainframe. Price: $99 Software Development AppleTalk for VMS An implementation of AppleTalk that runs on a VAX. Price: $5000 per site license CL/1 Database connectivity language from Apple subsidiary Network Innovations Corp. Mac database applications supporting CL/1 can transparently access data in VAX databases. Price: $3000 to $23,750 per host MacAPPC Hardware and software that lets Mac applications support IBM’s Advanced Program-to-Program Communications architecture. APPC allows for distributed transaction processing between Macs and other computers supporting APPC. Available late 1988. Price: $2500 per site license MacWorkstation Software that lets minicomputer and mainframe host software developers create applications that support the Mac user interface. Price: $2500 per site license, $5000 per developer’s license LAN Software Appleshare Apple’s file-server software that runs on a Mac Plus. The Mac Plus becomes a dedicated file server. Price: $799 Appleshare PrintSpooler Print-spooler software that runs on Appleshare. Price: $299 Appleshare PC Software that lets PCs participate on an Appleshare file server. It requires an AppleTalk interface card. Price: $149 Interpol Network-management utility; troubleshooting and fault isolation. Price: $99 DEC VAX and IBM PC environments through Touch’s OSI implementations for those systems. Another promising development is Apple’s MacWorkstation, which lets host software developers and programmers build a Mac user interface into host- based applications. MacWorkstation goes a step beyond terminal emulation in that it gives host applications access to the Mac interface without requiring host processing time. In addition, MacWork¬ station “Exec” software modules let pro¬ grammers migrate some host-processing tasks to the Mac. One benefit of MacWorkstation is that it makes network use more efficient. By allowing MacWorkstation to handle the user interface, Apple claims that some beta users have reduced network traffic by 75 percent. MacWorkstation will run over a variety of connections, including AppleTalk, Ethernet, serial, and IBM SNA networks. What’s Missing Ultimately, to have a complete range of networking capabilities for the Mac, companies such as Apple, DEC, IBM, and others must agree on ways to make their systems work together. Progress to¬ ward this goal is being made through Apple’s joint development project with DEC and through commitments to OSI and to providing links to IBM’s SNA. However, to a large extent, Apple de¬ pends on other companies to provide con¬ nectivity products for the Mac. Apple plans to meet with many of these companies to present a complete set of specifications and interfaces for which developers will be invited to build prod¬ ucts. The point, as Apple’s Cagle puts it, is to develop products that go beyond simply allowing the Mac to emulate dumb terminals. “Are we doing any¬ thing more useful than would be done by putting a dumb terminal on a desk?” Ca¬ gle asks. “If not, for the same amount of money [that you’d spend on a Mac], you can get several dumb terminals. ” Developers need to do more than just provide a window to the mainframe, Cagle says. “Electronic mail is a begin¬ ning, but there are a lot of vertical appli¬ cations that are very important. We in¬ tend to be more focused from the perspective of the user’s needs. ” ■ Janet J. Barron is a technical editor and Robert L. Mitchell is an associate techni¬ cal editor for BYTE. They can be reached on BIX as <( neural” and “r.mitchell. ” 68 BYTE* 1988 Mac Special Edition Circle M48 on Reader Service Card THE WELL-CONNECTED MAC Glossary AFP AppleTalk Filing Protocol allows file sharing to take place by controlling file access on an AppleTalk network. APPC Advanced Program-to-Program Communications, also known as Logical Unit (LU) 6.2, is IBM's SNA session protocol In an SNA network, APPC allows direct, peer-to-peer communications between applications, eliminating the need for a host to act as an intermediary. AppleTalk Apple 's proprietary communications architecture for the Mac. AppleTalk's seven-layer structure is similar to that of the OSI Reference Model (see the text box “Overview of AppleTalk, " on page 164 of the July 1987BYTE). Bridge A device that interconnects similar local-area networks, such as two AppleTalk LANs. Both LANs must share a common addressing scheme. No protocol conversion is necessary. CSMA/CD Collision Sense Multiple Access with Collision Detection. LAN access protocol used in Ethernet and the IBM PC Network. Nodes listen to the bus and wait until the network is quiet before transmitting. When two nodes attempt to transmit simultaneously, each detects the resulting collision and waits a random time interval before attempting to retransmit (see the text box “IEEE 802 LAN Standards, " on page 150 in the July 1987BYTE). CSMA/CA Collision Sense Multiple Access with Collision Avoidance. Network access scheme used in AppleTalk's link access protocol. As with CSMA/CD, the node waits until the bus is quiet before attempting to transmit, but rather than detecting collisions, CSMA/CA attempts to minimize their occurrence by using request-to-send and clear-to-send packets before sending data (see the text box “Overview of AppleTalk, ” on page 164 in the July 1987 BYTE). Gateway An intelligent device that interconnects dissimilar networks; it performs necessary protocol conversion to allow communication between both environments. LocalTalk The physical network components and link-level protocols for sending data across an AppleTalk network. These protocols are built into the Mac and can run over shielded twisted-pair or telephone wire at 230.4 kbps. LU 6.2 See APPC. Node Type 2.1 Also called Physical Unit 2.1. IBM SNA network-node specification that allows direct physical links between peer nodes. Previously, SNA specified a master/slave relationship in which two nodes couldn't establish a session without going through a mainframe. SDLC Synchronous Data Link Control. Link-level protocol that forms the foundation of IBM's SNA. SNA Systems Network Architecture. IBM's communications architecture that defines physical connections, protocols, and procedures for all IBM computers and devices. TCP/IP Transmission Control Protocol/ Internet Protocol. A set of internetworking protocols originally developed by the Department of Defense for ARPANET; now an industry standard. X.400 International standard for E-mail exchange specified by the CCITT. operation ■ No additional port needed ■ No card slot needed No extra software needed Completely transparent to any program; looks like keyboard input Most formats available Also available: Bar code printing software Magnetic encoders Portable bar code readers Readers for other micros and terminals YOUR MACINTOSH' CAN READ BAR CODES & MAGNETIC STRIPES TPS ELECTRONICS 4047 Transport Street Palo Alto, CA 94303 415-856-6833 Telex: (Graphnet) 371 9097 TPS PLA FAX: 415-856-3843 1988 Mac Special Edition • BYTE 69 120 MINUTES OF SPAGHETTI WESTERNS OR 80 MEGABYTES OF BACKED-UP DMA. Did you ever dream that you could record data as well as movies on an ordinary inexpensive videocassette? That, after the shoot-em-ups leave you laughing, a head crash doesn’t have to leave you crying? Pinch yourself. And start keeping those precious megabytes safe and sound with the newest version of our ingenious Videotrax® system. Now featuring a controller and software for the Macintosh™ Plus, Macintosh SE, or Macintosh II computer. The system utilizes our enhanced Videotrax VCR—or any old VCR for that matter—to back up data on stan¬ dard VHS or Beta cassettes. Hooks up to your Mac’s SCSI port with standard cables. And—by reason of exhaustive testing, self-monitoring, and the long-term experi¬ ence of tens of thousands of microcomputer users— is more reliable than any other backup option. Not to mention easier. Because a VCR, you already understand. And our pull-down menus tell you everything else you need to know. How to copy or restore an entire hard disk, specific files, or just the files that have been added or changed since the last backup. Could anything be simpler? As a matter of fact, yes. With our “smart” Videotrax VCR, everything happens automatically. You can see it for yourself by visiting your nearest Videotrax dealer. And you can get the name of your nearest dealer by calling 800 - 992-9779 (in California, 800 - 821 - 0612 ). We strongly suggest you do that. Because if your data means anything to you, acquiring Videotrax protection is a thought you should definitely entertain. nisi DATA BACKUP FROM alpha micra Corporate Headquarters: 3501 Sunflower, P.O. Box 25059. Santa Ana. CA 92799. © 1988 Alpha Microsystems. All rights reserved. Videotrax is a registered trademark of Alpha Microsystems. Macintosh is a trademark of Apple Computer. Inc. For a demonstration of Videotrax see us at Booth #636. 70 BYTE • 1988 Mac Special Edition Circle M4 on Reader Service Card (DEALERS: M5) Finally, the Macintosh has a friendly en¬ vironment for programmers. HyperCard has been called a hypertext system, a re¬ lational database manager, a game, and an “information handler.” Despite all proclamations, however, it’s none of these; rather, it’s a tool for developing any and all of them. Undeniably, it’s a fun way to work, but what exactly is it, and why the fuss? HyperCard is an au¬ thoring system , and it is significant be¬ cause it is the first authoring system to reach the general public. Classifying HyperCard as an author¬ ing system opens the door to all the issues, implications, and problems that have come to be associated with such sys¬ tems. For example, one of the strongest temptations for an author is to overuse available special effects: too many colors or fonts, too much text, too many graph¬ ics, too much audio. Much of the stack- ware currently available for HyperCard suffers from these kinds of problems. Perhaps, if we understand what is already known about authoring, we can lessen the likelihood of repeating history. Authoring Systems An authoring system is an integrated software toolkit used to create interac¬ tive applications that communicate knowledge. Typically, the goal of these applications is to impart knowledge, and the purpose behind using them is to learn. In computer-based learning appli¬ cations, for example, this knowledge falls into a particular academic or train¬ ing domain: The application takes the role of tutor; the user takes the role of stu¬ dent. Increasingly, authoring systems have been used to develop other kinds of applications as well. With an authoring system like HyperCard, the knowledge is likely to be of a more practical nature, such as name and address lists, appoint¬ ment calendars, and travel and business information. Authoring systems are not new. There is an old and well-established authoring BYTE MACINTOSH SPECIAL EDITION HyperCard What Is It? Brian L. Dear Sometimes a word is worth a thousand pictures community, whose scope, historically, hasn’t spread much beyond the bounds of educational institutions. Authoring sys¬ tems originated out of a need to generate large amounts of computer-based learn¬ ing materials, or courseware, in a shorter period of time than it would take with a traditional programming language. Educators have many long-standing reasons for favoring authoring systems over more traditional programming lan¬ guages. Key among them is the emphasis on interactivity, or give and take, with the machine. In computer-based learn¬ ing situations, it’s crucial that the com¬ puter actively stimulate and involve the student. Stimulation requires a wisely chosen blend of outputs—graphics, text, and, when appropriate, color, audio, and video. Involvement requires the same wise selection of available inputs—key¬ board, mouse, touch-sensitive screen, digitizing pad, speech, and so on. Good courseware is, by definition, highly interactive. A good authoring sys¬ tem typically features a variety of tools, providing a rich assortment of possibili¬ ties for stimulating and involving the stu¬ dent. While the number and sophistica¬ tion of these tools varies greatly from system to system, experienced authors agree on the “essential” ingredients. • Branching. An authoring system must support direct, conditional, and user- controlled movement through the appli¬ cation. • Creating , storing , and displaying bit¬ mapped graphics. For most applications, you need a resolution of at least 512 by 350 pixels; the system should support such resolutions. • Response analysis. Since interactivity is the key to success in an authoring sys¬ tem, it should support a powerful set of string functions to examine a user’s in¬ put and match it against a list of correct alternatives. The system should also check for correct spellings and let you set a threshold level for misspellings; that is, it should accept minor misspellings if you wish. • Audio and video support. The system should support the software routines re¬ quired to control random-access audio and videodisk devices. • Multiple levels of authoring. Because expertise varies greatly from author to author, the system must be able to sup¬ port a range of authoring skills. The low¬ est level is typically menu-driven and the easiest to use. A more experienced au¬ thor would probably access a higher level, which should include an editor for writing source code in an authoring language. • Standard programming features. The authoring language should support the constructs found in a standard program¬ ming language, such as IF...THEN... ELSE, REPEAT...UNTIL, FOR...NEXT, and so on. • File manipulation. The authoring sys¬ tem should support the necessary tools to manipulate (e.g., create, read, write, and destroy) files; in other words, it should support database management. • Other language support. You should be able to write your own routines in a gen¬ eral-purpose language, like Pascal, C, or assembly language, and include them in the authoring language. Strengths and Weaknesses When you need to develop a highly inter¬ active application, an authoring system is probably your best bet. A good authoring system often turns out to be especially continued 1988 Mac Special Edition -BYTE 71 HYPERCARD amenable to developing materials that have nothing to do with education. Over the years, many people have discovered that such a system proved to be just the right tool for creating presentation pro¬ grams or developing games (except for those that require assembly language, such as arcade games). Authoring sys¬ tems save time because you don’t need to program a specific set of response-anal¬ ysis, display, and branching routines for each application. These functions are built in and usually much more flexible than those available in a traditional lan¬ guage library. On the other hand, applications devel¬ oped with an authoring system almost always run more slowly than their tradi¬ tional counterparts. Sometimes the in¬ creased flexibility is worth the cost in speed and efficiency, but it’s a choice you have to make. Applications devel¬ oped with an authoring system are also likely to consume more disk space and memory, due to the larger overhead re¬ quired. HyperCard, for instance, re¬ quires a great deal of overhead to keep track of cards, buttons, and scripts. Three Ways of Seeing The Macintosh interface is based on solid psychological theory that can be traced to the work of psychologist Jerome Bruner and his colleagues. In Bruner’s book Toward a Theory of Instruction (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1966), he identified three types of mental representation: enactive, iconic, and symbolic. The first, enactive representation, in¬ volves how we remember action, move¬ ment, and coordination—the “psycho- motor” skills. Learning the latest dance, how to swing a baseball bat, or how to operate a stick shift, we represent these skills enactively. When we want to “tear off” HyperCard’s Tools menu, we call upon enactive representations of various actions with the mouse: clicking, drag¬ ging, and releasing. The second type of mental representa¬ tion is iconic; it refers to the mental sum¬ marization of visual and other sensory stimuli. We call on iconic representa¬ tions to fill in, complete, or extrapolate. Icons and bit-mapped graphics are two examples of the Macintosh’s heavy use of iconic representation. The highest levels of abstraction in¬ volve the third type, symbolic represen¬ tation: This refers to words and lan¬ guage. When we name a card in a HyperCard stack, write a HyperTalk script, or say the word HyperCard itself, we are using symbolic representations. any nonprogrammers are quickly becoming HyperTalk experts. The Macintosh is considered a user- friendly machine because it appeals to all three forms of mental representation. It’s easy to learn, and its software is easy to use because of the heavy dose of enac¬ tive and iconic representation, forms we are most likely to resort to when learning something new. The success of the Mac¬ intosh user interface is largely due to its rich mix and constant cycling of the en¬ active, iconic, and symbolic. In contrast, we could classify IBM PC software—dBASE III, WordStar, and the command-line style of MS-DOS itself, for example—as more symbolic than Mac software. One theory might be that preference for a Mac over an IBM PC or vice versa is due at least in part to how comfortable you are with heavily sym¬ bolic representation. Recent software developments reveal some intriguing trends. The IBM PC world is paying more and more attention to enactive and iconic representations: Witness Microsoft Windows, Excel, and OS/2. The Macintosh world, on the other hand, is now adding more symbolic kinds of representation to its repertoire: Con¬ sider A/UX, Apple’s implementation of Unix. HyperCard takes advantage of the var¬ ious capabilities of the Macintosh inter¬ face. It resides in the Mac’s very flexible operating environment, whose design is sensitive to all three modes of mental representation. HyperCard incorporates highly advanced concepts in computer science, many of which originated in the research on object-oriented program¬ ming environments such as SmallTalk. Many people who have never pro¬ grammed before are quickly becoming experts in HyperTalk and stack develop¬ ment because of its ingenious context. Everyone knows what a button is. Older authoring systems, especially those on time-shared minicomputers or mainframes, were limited in their ability to meet an author’s demands. The speeds at which you could display text, graphics, and animated sequences on older hard¬ ware had a great impact on the possibili¬ ties available. In a way, this was a bless¬ ing, because the limitations forced you to consider your options more carefully. As these hardware and software limi¬ tations disappear, the range of options widens tremendously. HyperCard is merely a hint of the future for authoring systems. But as the range of options ex¬ pands, we will have to be increasingly careful with our designs. Creating Stacks Stack developers need to be especially careful in designing stacks. There is a strong temptation to overdo it and get car¬ ried away with all the options available. Designing and developing interactive computer applications is an exciting and engrossing task, but it requires restraint, temperance, and constant consideration of the user for whom the stack is in¬ tended. Here are some points for you to consider, based on lessons learned by au¬ thors of computer-based learning materials. • The right tool. Is HyperCard the right tool for the job? Or would a conventional Macintosh programming language be more appropriate for this application? HyperCard isn’t the solution to every problem. • Time. How much time do you have to develop the stack? Applications take time, and you’re just as likely to find bugs in your HyperTalk scripts as you are in a C or Pascal program. The au¬ thoring process is very similar to the life cycle of creating any programming prod¬ uct; good programs require constant test¬ ing and refinement. • Goals. Why are you using HyperCard? What do you hope to achieve? Does your goal meet the user’s needs; for example, will it increase the user’s productivity? • Usefulness. Will the stack serve some genuinely useful purpose? Or are you writing it simply as an exercise, as pro¬ gramming practice? Experienced au¬ thors always ask, “Why does this appli¬ cation need to be on-line?” You should make a list of all the reasons why it should be on-line and compare it to one showing all the reasons it would work fine off-line—in print, for instance. • Audience. Who will be using the stack? Is it for personal use, or do you plan to sell it commercially or offer it as shareware? Even if it’s just for your own use, you should be sensitive to how its de¬ sign appeals to the three levels of mental representation. Pictures get old fast. Sometimes, as Bruner said, a word is continued 72 BYTE* 1988 Mac Special Edition Low prices, great service Hard Drives CMS Mac Stack SD Series (Mac Plus, SE, II) SD 20 Megabyte . s 549 SD 30 Megabyte . s 649 SD 43 Megabyte .$789 SD 60 Megabyte. s 825 SD 80 Megabyte . s 1249 SD 102 Megabyte. s 1289 SD 140 Megabyte. s 1389 CMS Pro Series Internal Mac SE/II 20 Megabyte SE rear. s 489 30 Megabyte SE rear. s 529 45 Megabyte SE rear. s 689 43 Megabyte Mac II .*645 60 Megabyte Mac II . s 699 80 Megabyte Mac II . s 1145 100 Megabyte SE rear. s 1489 102 Megabyte Mac II. s 1189 140 Megabyte Mac II. s 1389 150 Megabyte Mac II. s 1879 300 Megabyte Mac II. $ 2799 Everex External 20D.*509 External 40D. 2929 91D (II, SE, Plus only). s 1445 Zero Footprint 20 DLX.$575 40 DLX.$989 91 DLX. $1549 40/60 DTL.$1795 Everex Internal for Mac II 20 ID.$445 40 ID.$845 91 ID. $1395 Tape Back-up Everex 60 Megabyte External 60T.$895 Epson Printers FX-86e, FX-286e, LQ-500, LQ-850 LQ-1050, LQ-2500, Call for prices jfpf ; ite : 1 K-; : ^XHTill Disk Drive . .. s 175 internal fan iiF' lit Keeps it cool & quiet .. .7*39 Dove Computer MacSnap Tool Kit.$15 MacSnap 524 .$170 MacSnap 524S.$215 MacSnap 548 .$395 MacSnap 548S.$450 Mach ll/SE Accelerator.$589 Co-Processor 68881 .$295 Call for SIMM prices Data Desk Keyboard 101 -key layout, 15 Function keys, separate numeric and cursor pads, positive Tactile feel. $ 139 Accessories Mouse Systems A+ Mouse.$65 A+ ADB Mouse.$79 Dust Covers Mac/+/SE.$14 Mac Keyboards (specify type) .. s 9 Mac II CPU only.... $10 Mac II with mono monitor. s 19 Mac II with color monitor. s 19 Apple LaserWriter.$23 Apple Imagewriter.$9 Apple Imagewriter LQ.$12 Carrying Cases CM7 Tall Bag for extended keyboard. s 75 CM 6 for standard +/SE keyboard.$69 Kensington Microware System Saver.$63 System Saver SE.$52 Tilt & Swivel .$22 Superbase. $33 Masterpiece Mac II. S 105 System Stand Mac II . s 19 Printer Stand.$15 Mouse Pad. $8 Aldus Pagemaker .$395 Please call for competitive system pricing. OUR POLICY * Plain and simple. Hardware; your satisfaction guaranteed or your money back. * Software; defective software will be replaced immediately Manufacturers policies prohibit us from offering refunds on opened software » We accept most major credit cards with no surcharge added » Vour credit card is not charged until we ship » Please allow 10 days for personal and company checks to clear. * C O D. orders accepted. * We gladly accept purchase orders from most major institutions * California. Texas and Georgia residents please add the appropriate local sales tax. » To place orders call Monday thru Friday 7AM to 6PM PST » Prices and Availability subject to change Computer professionals since 1975. 1-800-426-8166 From Beverly Hills (213) 273-3710 Fax Machine (213) 675-2522 279 South Beverly Drive, Suite 1200, Beverly Hills, California 90212 Circle M8 on Reader Service Card 1988 Mac Special Edition • BYTE 73 HYPERCARD worth a thousand pictures. If you’re de¬ signing the stack for many users, then you need to be extra sensitive to the broad range of user preferences. For example, suppose you’re design¬ ing a personal financial-planner stack that ends with a simple electronic check¬ book. Which would be better for its users: making them use the mouse to click on a bunch of buttons in a fancy graphic representation of a calculator (emphasis on the enactive and iconic), making them type their arithmetic ex¬ pression into the HyperCard message box (emphasis on the symbolic), or giv¬ ing them the option to do either? • Sound. The Macintosh can generate fairly decent digitized and synthesized sound. You should use sound resources with restraint. Ask yourself whether the stack’s users will really benefit from those digitized audio clips of Captain Kirk’s voice. • Title pages. Do you really need one? How often do you expect users to access the stack? Will they use it all the time, or only once in a great while? Most soft¬ ware packages deliberately lack a title page. Consider what the users really get out of looking at your title page every time they enter the stack. • Shadowing. Shadowing two adjacent sides of a box may indeed enhance the three-dimensional illusion. But are you trying to highlight the box, or the infor¬ mation in the box? If you’re only shadow¬ ing for aesthetics, you may be better off without it. • Fonts. Using too many different fonts is almost always worse than using just a few. If the design calls for using unusual fonts in a stack intended for other users, remember that many users may not have your font files on their systems; if you use them, you may have to include them as resource files in your stack. • Foreground vs. background. A rela¬ tively recent feature of authoring systems is the ability to designate some portions of the screen as foreground and others as background. Sharing the same back¬ ground among a sequence of cards re¬ duces both the amount of new informa¬ tion on the screen and the amount of storage required for the stack. • Visual effects. One of HyperCard’s more interesting—and fun—features is its collection of visual effects. When de¬ signing your application, however, be careful about using them. Effects like barn door, iris, dissolve, and Venetian blind may be stimulating and attention- getting, but they may also be distracting. An application that uses a lot of visual ef¬ fects tends to call attention to itself; in other words, too many or too complex vi¬ sual effects can make what should usu¬ ally be a transparent interface all too apparent. • Degree of realism. If there’s one thing authors of computer-based learning ma¬ terials face every day, it’s the balance be¬ tween realism and practicality. How re¬ alistic do graphics have to be to get the point across? Unfortunately, many Mac- Figure 1: Do the Rolodex card-file notches really add to the understanding of the information in this stack? "Take a note of that; his Lordship says he will turn it over in what he is pleased to call his mind." Richard Bethell Lord Westbury "Take note, take note, 0 World! To be direct and honest is not safe.' Shakespeare Othello III,iii, 378 ifor !: V : "He listens well who takes notes." j Dante Alighieri Figure 2: Torn scraps of paper and memo pins look realistic , but what purpose do they serve on a computer screen ? Figure 3: The books make a pretty menu, but is it an appropriate user interface? File Edit Go Tools Objects First Name and Initial Lost Name Mr./Ms. Customer Number Order date Mail or Phone 1 1 1 U U Visa/MC Number Expiration Code Credit Card or Check |(..Q. Mkt. code ®Red Widget OBlue Widget OGreen Widget OBook Order ...| | Order Entry Check $ P Gift Order □ ( Cancel ) ( Nem Order Figure 4: Forms like these may work fine on paper, but on¬ line they impede the user's productivity. 74 BYTE* 1988 Mac Special Edition HYPERCARD HyperCard How Does It Work? Laurence H. Loeb intosh developers can’t resist the tempta¬ tion to over-simulate physical reality: In effect, they try to make hardware out of software. Stackware developers need to ask themselves these kinds of questions over and over again: Do I really need that pretty, digitized image of a telephone? Will the users really benefit from pic¬ tures of Rolodex cards so faithful to the real thing that even the card’s notches are present? Real Rolodex cards have those two notches for a reason. Think long and hard before putting them on-line. Re¬ member, in stackware (as in course¬ ware), graphics gobble up disk space fast. Consider the degree to which your HyperCard displays facilitate or impede the user’s abilities to mentally process what you have presented (see figures 1, 2, and 3). • Forms. When designing fill-in-the- blank forms on a computer display, first consider how faithful the form must be to its paper equivalent. Some forms, like the 1040 tax form, work well when faith¬ fully transferred on-line. Users are quite familiar with the paper versions of the 1040 forms; thus, a faithful computer rendition is important. But most paper forms demand a better design when put on-line. Remember that paper forms are designed primarily for the benefit of the clerk who must read them. Since on-line forms eliminate that drudgery, the de¬ sign of such forms should consider its users (see figure 4). A New Standard In its short lifetime, HyperCard has be¬ come the standard against which all others must now compete. Its ease of use and intuitive interface have captured the imagination and boosted the confidence of many novice programmers. But we must remember that Hyper¬ Card is the latest in a long line of author¬ ing systems. Many lessons have been learned over the years, and stackware developers should strive to consider the issues, both good and bad, that authoring systems raise. With an understanding of the design principles of authoring sys¬ tems, we are less likely to make the same mistakes again. ■ ACKNOWLEDGMENT / am grateful to Apple Fellow Alan C. Kay for a discussion of Bruner’s theory and the Macintosh. Brian L. Dear is director of product de¬ velopment at Coconut Computing, Inc., in San Diego, California. He can be reached on BIX as (< whofan. ” Make it work the way you want it to What I remember most from the Boston MacExpo in August 1987 is Bill Atkin¬ son’s smile as he showed off Hyper¬ Card’s tear-off menus for the first time. He waited as the implications of using tear-offs started to percolate through the room. As more and more people started to comprehend what their eyes were tell¬ ing them, Bill broke out into this great, loopy grin that said, “Isn’t it nice to have something work the way you want it to?” This new tool forced me to do some se¬ rious questioning about how I’d been using the Macintosh in my dental busi¬ ness. I had been using several discrete programs to do the business functions, in a manner that had remained basically the same since 1984. I generated informa¬ tion for each patient with a database and a word processor, and I used the Finder to sort by date for accounts receivable. A simple system, true, but it worked. I had tried to make an electronic pa¬ tient chart with MacPaint. While I could save the graphical information I needed, I hadn’t used it very much. I needed dif¬ ferent kinds of information while I was working, not just graphics; I needed the text as well. Moreover, I didn’t want to have to reenter data I already had in elec¬ tronic form. I needed the maximum re¬ turn for each input. HyperCard lets me combine graphics with text—it’s MacPaint with buttons that do things. (I use a mouse better than a keyboard when I h^ve gloves on, any¬ way.) A HyperChart can bring up de¬ tailed areas of interest without a fixed se¬ quence. That’s the point of the navigation features: to let HyperCard keep track of where you’ve been. It does housekeep¬ ing—and windows, to boot. They’re called cards, but you can do things with them that are “windowlike.” The patient chart is a common denomi¬ nator in dental treatment: It’s a graphical record that’s pretty standard in content. Specific implementations of it may vary, but the information tends to be similar. If I could devise a way to present this record on a Mac’s screen, I could refer to it, as I do to paper records, during treatment. And while I was at it, I thought I’d make it user- extensible; that is, if I wanted to change the symbols I used to mean various kinds of treatments, or add new ones, I could— without a major effort. Customizing with HyperCard HyperCard gives me the paint tools that let me customize an application any way I see fit—and they’re built in. I don’t need any complicated calling sequences. Eventually, I used the background of a card the same way I had used the Mac¬ Paint document earlier; that is, the back¬ ground contains the basic graphical in¬ formation I need on all charts (see figure 1). I can then overlay whatever symbols I want on top of this, ending up with a graphical record that is the equivalent of a drawing on a preprinted form (see fig¬ ure 2). If I need a reminder about some¬ thing specific, I can attach a Post-it note at the touch of a button (see figure 3). More “paper simulation,” sure, but that’s what I’m comfortable with. After deciding on the basic paradigm, I had to decide how the stack should “flow.” In this application, I need to move from the general to the specific— from the basic chart to a specific tooth. And what simpler way to get there than to click over its position on the chart? HyperCard lets me do this with a “trans¬ parent” background button—one that a patient-information card can inherit. If I click on the button, it tries to do what its continued 1988 Mac Special Edition -BYTE 75 HYPERCARD Figure 1: The basic graphical information needed for a dental chart. * File Edit Go Tools Objects Figure 2: This chart contains bone-level information drawn with a brush tool 6 File Edit Go Tools Objects This is a "post -it" style note attached to a card location. When the top left hand rectangle is clicked this will go away and leave just the small rectangle showing. Press on a tooth to add procedures r=-> r_l - , , -Hr” <3 Patient name: . □ saue detailing |Update Patient's Record) | Edit Patient's Record! tfc File Edit Go Tools Objects Figure 3: A Post-it note serves to remind me of anything unusual. Figure 4 :1 can put in the treatment for a specific tooth by pushing the applicable buttons. script tells it. Since it’s “transparent,” all I see is that I’m pointing at and click¬ ing on a specific tooth. In the back¬ ground button’s script, I set up the card I want to go to next. Once I select a spe¬ cific tooth—and, by implication, the card as well—I can either record current information or call up a history of what has occurred in the past. I find that the simplest way of showing history is to have a procedure record in English that I can display as I need it. To make the integration work well, the stack has to create this record as each treat¬ ment is recorded. To input the informa¬ tion, I simply click on the applicable but¬ tons (see figure 4), and the stack creates a text container with this information in it. To do this, the stack checks the high¬ light property of each of the buttons when the card is closed by the action of the return button. (A fragment of the closeCard routine I used is shown in listing 1.) If the highlight of a detail but¬ ton is true, that button has been clicked. The stack then builds a text container that has the name of the clicked button in it. When I have recorded all the treat¬ ment information, a button click updates the appropriate text file with all the text containers for a particular date. (It would be easy, for example, to use tabs in build¬ ing the text file if I later wanted to use this file in Excel or another database that recognizes tabs.) Adding the Extras One protection I wanted to build into the stack was to have it remind me if I forgot to save my changes. Almost all Macin¬ tosh programs do this, so why not a stack? The script to do this is deceptively simple (see listing 2) and is performed when control leaves the patient’s card. (The variable changedRec is set to true when one of the hold variables has some¬ thing other than empty in it. The name of the current patient, currentpt, is also the name of the patient’s card.) This script shows HyperTalk’s ability to send messages that HyperCard can actually perform. Instead of having to goto a line of a script, you can pass an activating message to a particular object, and it will perform its own script. For in¬ stance, in this script, sending the mouse- Up message to the button has the same ef¬ fect as clicking on the button with the mouse. This kind of system message is an elegant way to program “top down.” Each object can potentially be accessed as a executable module. (Yes, this is ob¬ ject-oriented programming.) But HyperTalk can’t deal with every¬ thing: It can’t put up a standard Mac file- select dialog box, for example. For this, HyperCard’s designers left a “back¬ door” entry, called XFCNs, which pro¬ vide a way to link code generated by an- 76 BYTE* 1988 Mac Special Edition HYPERCARD Listing 1: This routine checks the highlight property of the buttons when the card is closed. on closeCard [omitting global setups and the like] put empty into buildline —you can't use a container without letting —HyperCard know about it first put empty into flagger —check each button get the hilite of background button id 4 if it is true then put "L" before buildline put true into flagger —let our end know we have —something in the buildline end if get the hilite of background button id 5 if it is true then put "B" before buildline put true into flagger end if [more similar code omitted] if flagger is true then put "—5—" & return & buildline && restmat & return into hold5 —holding area for tooth 5 end if end closeCard other programming language (like C or Pascal) into HyperTalk-accessible verbs. Steve Mailer of Apple wrote a nice XFCN to put up the file-select dialog box. In my text-editor card, I use this widely available XFCN, along with Dewi Williams’s HyperTalk function for getting only the last part (the true filename) out of a full path name; that’s what the FileName XFCN puts into a container (see listing 3). continued Subscription Problems? We want to belp! If you have a problem with your BYTE subscription, write us with the details. We'll do our best to set it right. But we must have the name, address, and zip of the subscription (new and old address, if it's a change of address). If the problem involves a payment, be sure to include copies of the credit card statement, or front and back of cancelled checks. Include a "business hours" phone number if possible. BYTE Subscriber Service P.O. Box 7643 Teaneck, NT 07666-9866 1988 Mac Special Edition -BYTE 77 HYPERCARD Back, by popular demand. Just a few years ago, illegal hunting and encroaching civilization had all but destroyed the alligator population in the south. They were added to the official list of endangered species in the United States. Mow alligators have made a comeback. - *- Conservationists intent on preserving this legendary reptile helped the alligator get back on its feet. Once again some southern swamps and marshes are teeming with alligators. With wise conservation policies, other endangered species have also made comebacks ... the cougar, gray whale, Pacific walrus, wood duck, to name a few. If you want to help save our endangered species, join the National Wildlife Federation, Department 106, 1412 All#** 16th Street, MW, Washington, DC 20036. 78 BYTE* 1988 Mac Special Edition Listing 3: This routine gets the real filename out of a full path name. on mouseUp put FileName ("TEXT") into theFile —invoke the FileName XFCN only showing TEXT files set lockscreen to true if theFile is not empty then — cancel hasn't been pressed open file theFile read from file theFile for 16384 —take the entire file in at once; up to the EOF put it into card field "Text Box" —display file in text box on card set the scroll of card field "Text Box" to 0 —set to the top of the field close file theFile put LastPathComponent(theFile) into card field "File Name" —file name from full path put "Patient Record" into card field "whatKind" —force feed this, so the edit card can be reused end if set lockscreen to false end mouseUp — LastPathComponent: given a file pathname, returns the last — component (i.e., whatever comes after last colon, if anything). — From Dewi Williams function LastPathComponent name —scan backwards for the last colon, repeat with i = the length of name down to 1 if character i of name is ":" then exit repeat end repeat if i is 1 then — Name was of the form ":thing" or "thing". Check for leading — colon, and adjust if necessary. Done for generality, if first character of name is ":" then put 2 into i end if else add 1 to i — skip the colon end if — Name was of the form "Thing:otherthing". Return "otherThing". put empty into lastpath repeat with j = i to the length of name put character j of name after lastpath end repeat return lastpath end LastPathComponent One of the tools I used during develop¬ ment was a stack that had most of the available public domain HyperCard tools available on it. You don’t need to reinvent the wheel. The creator of the Developer Stack is Steve Drazga, who organized the information in a HyperCard-like man¬ ner. This is an extremely well done stack. He even put HyperTalk syntax in it for a quick on-line reference, similar to Steve Capps’s Programmer’s On-Line Companion. I found it easier to have the syntax available within HyperCard for the odd quick reference than to have to search through a book. (I probably could have used the Help stack that is included with HyperCard, but the arrangement in the Developer Stack was much more compact.) Updating the stack is also done in an ingenious manner that doesn’t require downloading the entire stack again and again. You can transmit just the changes, and the stack updates itself. System Details I finally came up with a “master record” card that I could clone into specific pa¬ tient records. This is the first card you encounter upon opening the stack. I wanted to allow only three actions at this HYPERCARD Listing 4: This script creates an employee card by hiding and showing a card field. —"edit the employee data" button on mouseUp set lockscreen to true set the scroll of card field 4 to 0 show card field 4 show card button id 9 set lockscreen to false end mouseUp —when done editing click this button on mouseUp global nopush put true into nopush send opencard to this card —surprise! send an openCard message end mouseUp —what happens when you open an employee card? on openCard global nopush if nopush is true then —otherwise the openCard message —would scramble the popping order put false into nopush else push recent card end if set lockscreen to true hide card field 4 —hide the history field put card field 4 into record —put the text into a variable if offset("**",record) > 0 then —i s a marker for end of —employee's address information put char 1 to (offset("**",record) -2) of record into card field 3 —put up to the "**" into a visible LOCKED field, —so user can't mess with the data else put "Error encountered in opening card" into msg play boing show msg wait for 3 seconds hide message pop card exit openCard end if set lockscreen to false end openCard point—go back home, make a new card, and open an existing one. So I wouldn’t alter the master card, I covered it with buttons in the forefront that will do these tasks when clicked. Most HyperCard novices overlook the manner of arrang¬ ing buttons (or other objects) so that an intended overlap occurs. The Home Card button overlaps all the other buttons on my stack, for instance. If two HyperCard objects occupy the same space, one will overlap the other. To get the desired overlap, you select the button and invoke the bring closer/send back HyperCard commands. This is similar to what you might do in MacDraw with objects, ex¬ cept that in HyperCard each type of ob¬ ject has its own layer. If I select the open button, a dialog box appears asking for a name. At this point, an implicit shift in the card handling may occur. You can define a special name to mean that a different kind of record—for instance, an employee record—should be retrieved rather than a patient record. That employee card may include em¬ ployee data, such as address and phone number, or you could use it as a payroll system if appropriate HyperCard func- continued MacRobotics TM • Connect our LAB 40 Controller to serial port on Mac or any PC. Add these available modules: 2 axis Servo, 4 axis Stepper, 8 or 12 bit A/D, Digital I/O, Proto-card. • Controller w/Forth language ROM, A/D, 68HC11, LAB 40 port for adding modules or ASICS, complete docs, software for Mac or IBM $345. • Opportunity for programmers or developers. Customer exchange network. Call our BBS (415) 755-1524. For catalog & Tech Support call (415) 755-1978 Advertise your computer products through BYTE BITS (2” x 3” ads) For more information call Dan Harper at 603-924-6830 BYTE 70 Main St. Peterborough, NH 03458 Circle M57 on Reader Service Card Add-Ons for the Blind What you add on to your computer, if you’re a blind operator, is almost more important than the computer itself. Scanners, modems, braille printers, speech synthesizers, braille output devices and a host of other peripherals are described in ‘‘Add-Ons: The Ultimate Guide to Peripherals for the Blind Computer User.” The product reviews contained in this book are written by those who know them best—blind computer users. $16.95 for braille or cassette $19.95 for print. Send orders to: National Braille Press Inc. 88 St. Stephen Street, Boston, MA 02115 (617) 266-6160 NBP is a nonprofit braille printing and publishing house HYPERCARD Some Available HyperCard Stacks Focal Point.$99.95 Activision, Inc. 3885 Bohannon Dr. Menlo Park, CA 94025 (800) 345-2888 Inquiry M211. DentalStack .$395 PBC Enterprises P.O.Box 925 Wallingford, CT 06492 (203) 269-6903 Inquiry M212. Electronic Call Screening .$49.95 Kanode Associates 4709 East Sandra Terrace Phoenix, AZ 85032 (602) 482-3155 Inquiry M213. HyperCard.$49 Apple Computer, Inc. 20525 Mariani Ave. Cupertino, CA 95014 (408) 973-2222 Inquiry M214 Typefaces of DT Publishing... $24.95 with book.$39.95 Publishing Resources, Inc. 1785 Pearl St. Boulder, CO 80302 (303) 442-1100 (800) 553-1666 Inquiry M2 15. An assortment of public domain stacks is available on BIX in the stackware area of the listings tions are embedded in it. I made a HyperText employee card simply by hiding and showing a card field. (A card field works for this rather than a background field, because it can store individual information as well as display it. If you used a background field common to all employee cards, there would be more overhead to make sure the correct information was being shown.) Listing 4 contains the script for the but¬ tons that do all the work for this field. Create Your Own What possible use would you have for a dental stack? Perhaps a lot, if you’re a dentist; probably none if you’re not. But HyperCard as a tool can, with a dose of ingenuity and creativity, help you make something that you need. I certainly couldn’t have created this application as simply without it, and DentalStack has helped me a great deal. ■ Laurence H. Loeb is an electrical-engi- neer-turned-dental-surgeon in Walling¬ ford, Connecticut. He is comoderator of the macintosh conference on BIX. He can be reached on BIX as (< lloeb. ” The Macintosh as an Engineering Workstation Design Works™ brings you electronic schematic and simulation capabilities formerly available only in systems 10 -100 times the price. This design capability is integrated with the Macintosh's well-known text and graphics capability to give you an amazingly easy to use and low cost engineering workstation for digital circuit designers. DesignWorks Features: • fully interactive, 13-state digital logic simulation. • simulation output through on-screen "probes" or a logic-analyzer style timing diagram. • individual device delays can be from 0 to 32767 units. • lasec dot-matrix and pen plotter output support • simulation support for PROMs, PL As and RAMs. • many editing features including full Cut /Copy /Paste clipboard support, device dragging with full rubber-banding, symbol rotation and mirroring, etc. • includes libraries with hundreds of common logic devices with full simulation. • supports bussing and multipage drawings with off-page connectors. • interfaces with Douglas CAD/CAM PCB layout. • full price, including libraries and simulation: $685.00 • low-cost educational versions also available. Capilano Computing 545 -108th NE, Suite 6, Bellevue WA 98004 (604) 669-6343 Macintosh is a trademark of Apple Computer, Inc. DesignWorks is a trademark of Capilano Computing Systems Ltd. Douglas CAD/CAM is a trademark of Douglas Electronics 80 B Y T E • 1988 Mac Special Edition Circle M12 on Reader Service Card Introducing Bit Pad Plus. No Matter What You Do On Your Macintosh Desktop PUDiismng CAD/CAM/CAE Business Graphics Now You Can Do It Better. Bit Pad Plus is the latest tablet from Summagraphics - the world’s leading supplier of graphics tablets. This versatile, 12" by 12" input device greatly enhances the graphics capabilities of your Macintosh to create a more productive, more professional graphics workstation. Our Bit Pad Plus comes with a four-button cursor, stylus, and an Apple® Desktop Bus ™ interface to connect to your computer—no separate power supply is needed. It performs menu selection and steering functions as well as a mouse. Plus it allows you to trace and draw naturally. Provides better accuracy through higher resolution. And it’s compatible with all Macintosh II and SE software. Why settle for less from another tablet or mouse? If you ’re really serious about graphics, move up to Bit Pad Plus today. Swnmcupoptm Draw on our experience® 203-384-1344 See us in Mac World Expo Booth #5546. © 1988 Summagraphics Corporation. All rights reserved. Circle M47 on Reader Service Card I’M SERIOUS ABOUT GRAPHICS Send me more information on the Bit Pad Plus graphics tablet. Type of industry: __ Type of application: _ ( ) I’m interested in OEM information. Name: _ Title:. Company: __ Address: _ . State: B8/88 \ - \ Mail to: Summagraphics Corporation \ 777 State Street Extension , Fairfield, CT 06430 \ Images courtesy of: Page maker from Aldus Publishing, VersaCAD, Powerpoint from Microsoft, PixelPaint from SuperMac Technologies, True Vision and Apple Computer, Inc. 1988 Mac Special Edition -BYTE 81 The Joystick Ousts the Mouse A Professional Mouse/Joystick for all Apple Users The new MACH IV plus (mouse/joystick) from CH Products is a pro¬ fessional mouse replacement and joystick for all Apple II and Macintosh computers. Engineered for use with all mouse inten¬ sive applications software. At the Hip of a switch the MACH IV plus can shed its serious work ways and be ready for use with your favorite simulation or game software. The MACH IV plus has many advanced fea¬ tures over its predecessor, the MACH IV, including an absolute mode that tracks and acts like a mouse, as well as three rate modes. It also provides greater reliability and is 100% compatible with all mouse and joystick driven software. Suggested Retail - $89.95 or Plug the Mirage into Your Existing Apple Computer and Use Your Existing CH Joystick MIRAGE™ - Joystick/Mouse Interface for all Apple Computers The new MIRAGE from CH Products is a multi-featured inter¬ face for using CH Products' Apple compatible joysticks with all Apple II and Macintosh computers and programs which use a mouse for input. MIRAGE turns your joystick into a high per¬ formance mouse alternative that is 100% compatible with all Apple mouse ports and software. Installation is a snap, just con¬ nect the MIRAGE connector where you usually plug your mouse, plug your joystick (Mach II, Mach III or FlightStick) into the MIRAGE and you're ready to mouse around! Suggested Retail - $54.95 COMPATIBILITY: MACH IV plus - Quad and MIRAGE - Quad for: Apple II, HE, IIC, Mac 128, Mac 512 (Apple II, HE require Apple mouse card to use in mouse mode). MACH IV plus - ADB and MIRAGE - ADB for: Apple IIGS, Mac SE, Mac II. A Joystick Technologies, Inc. Company A Division of Joystick Technologies, Inc. 1225 Stone Drive, San Marcos, CA 92069 See your Dealer today, or for credit card orders, call:. USA 1-800-624-5804; CA 1-800-262-2004. For more information, call: (619) 744-8546. 82 BYTE • 1988 Mac Special Edition Circle M14 on Reader Service Card (DEALERS: Ml5) BYTE MACINTOSH SPECIAL EDITION Using Color QuickDraw on the Mac II Jan Eugenides I have to admit it: I didn’t think color on the Macintosh was important. But when I began to explore my new Mac II, I saw I was wrong. Color adds vitality and clar¬ ity; it’s no mere frill. Best of all, it’s not that difficult to add color to your own programs, using Color QuickDraw. I obtained an early beta draft of Inside Macintosh Volume V (1987, Apple Pro¬ grammer’s and Developer’s Assoc.), which contains information on the vari¬ ous color routines. After much experi¬ mentation, I worked out an interesting method of color animation. The tech¬ nique involves constantly modifying the color lookup table contained in the video RAM. It works with any AppleColor monitor and video card, and should work with any third-party video board as long as it supports a 256-color mode. This ap¬ plication produces absolutely stunning, almost mesmerizing, effects, so I’ve named it Mesmer (see photo 1). The C listing is fairly long, so only fragments of it appear here. [Editor’s note: The com¬ plete listings for this article are available in a variety of for mats. See page 3.] I’ll briefly explain some of the fea¬ tures of Color QuickDraw and how these are used to produce Mesmer’s effects. A detailed description of Color QuickDraw is beyond the scope of this article, but it is available in Inside Macintosh Volume V or you can check out Scott Knaster’s Macintosh Programming Secrets from Addison-Wesley. We’re only going to cover the groundwork we need to under¬ stand what Mesmer does, and dive right in for a close look at the code. At the end of this article I’ll explain some caveats to using this technique, but Mesmer pro¬ vides several working examples of how to access and use Color QuickDraw for your own needs. Color QuickDraw If you are familiar with QuickDraw, Color QuickDraw holds few surprises. Most of the same drawing commands are available, except that you can now sped- Here’s a working example of a Mac II color animation fy the color to be used for the operation. The standard Macintosh drawing inter¬ face, the grafPort, supports the eight original QuickDraw colors: black, yel¬ low, magenta, red, cyan, green, blue, and white. Since Mesmer uses 256 colors to produce its effects, this requires you to draw in a color grafPort (cGrafPort) instead. The structure of a cGrafPort is practically identical to a grafPort, and both structures are the same size. Apple was able to pack more information into a cGrafPort by changing several fields (bkPat, pnPat, and fillPat) from bit- pattern data to handles pointing to color information. Also, the portBits field no longer points to a BitMap structure that itself points to the grafPort’s bit¬ mapped data, but has a handle to a color pixel map that contains information on the color image. The easiest way to allo¬ cate a cGrafPort is to simply call NewC- Window() in your application. This ROM call is similar to the old New- Window() call, but instead creates a color window using a cGrafPort. All colors in Color QuickDraw are manipulated in an RGB space. The RGB space serves as a common ground where applications can use color in a consistent, hardware-independent manner. Color values are represented by an RGBColor data structure that specifies the red, green, and blue components of a color. (See code fragment 1.) Each of the three components are short integers (16 bits) that can have values from 0000 hexadeci¬ mal for the lowest intensity to FFFF hexadecimal representing the highest in¬ tensity. If all three components are zero, the color is black. If all three are FFFF hexadecimal, the color is white. When¬ ever all three components are equal to one another, the result is a shade of gray. All other combinations result in colors. You should note that although RGBColors store each component as a short integer, Color QuickDraw currently uses only one byte of information per color compo- continued 1988 Mac Special Edition ‘BYTE 83 COLOR QUICKDRAW Code fragment 1: RGBColor data structure. typedef struct RGBColor{ unsigned short red; /* magnitude of red component */ unsigned short green; /* magnitude of green component */ unsigned short blue; /* magnitude of blue component */ } RGBColor; Code fragment 2: ColorTable data structure. typedef struct ColorTable{ long ctSeed; /* unique identifier for table */ short ctFlags; /* flags describing the spec array */ short ctSize; /* number of entries - 1 */ CSpecArray ctTable; /* array [0..0] of ColorSpec */ } ColorTable, *CTabPtr, **CTabHandle; Code fragment 3: The Environs structure. short machine, rom; Environs(&rom, Smachine); Code fragment 4: Using GetGDevice to extract the pixel depth GDHandle gH; PixMapHandle pH; gH = GetGDevice(); /*get a handle to main graphics device*/ pH = (**gH).gdPMap; /*get a handle to its PixMap*/ if((**pH).pixelSize == 8) /*examine the pixelSize field*/ /*a pixel size of 8 indicates 256 colors are available*/ Code Fragment 5: Inner drawing loop for Mesmer. for (theta = 0.0; theta < 480.0*v; theta += v) { RGBForeColor(&color); /* set the drawing color */ r = theta/v; x = midx+r*cos(theta); /* make some patterns */ y = midy+r*sin(theta); LineTo(x,y); /* draw a line from the last point to this one */ index++; /* cycle thru all 256 colors in the clut */ if(index>=255)index = 0; Index2Color(index,Scolor); } Code fragment 6: Using SetEntries ( ). for(n = 0; n < 512; n++) tempval = temptable[255]; /* shift all entries down one */ for (j=254; j>=0; j —) temptable[j+1] = temptable[j]; temptable[0] = tempval; SetEntries (0,255, temptable) ; /* install the new clut */ Delay(1L,Sticks); /* slow rotation slightly */ } nent, which gives you a palette of 2 24 or 16,777,216 colors. How is an RGBColor presented on, say, a monitor? Color QuickDraw uses a lookup table mechanism that translates RGBColors into values that a video board then uses to index into its own map of color information. The information in this map, or color lookup table (CLUT), is used by the hardware to drive the monitor. This arrangement effectively hides the messy hardware details from programmers and allows them to focus on developing products rather than worry about compatibility problems. Color QuickDraw groups a cGraf- Port’s colors into a data structure called a ColorTable. Its structure is shown in code fragment 2. As you can see, each entry in the color table is not simply an RGBColor but a ColorSpec. A Color- Spec data structure consists of a value field (short integer) followed by an RGBColor. This value field is nothing more than 3 to 5 of the most significant bits of each component of the RGBColor record. These values are used to index into the video board’s color map to deter¬ mine what colors you see. My output de¬ vice was a color monitor, but these values could index into a color map whose values describe the “best-fit” colors for a color printer. These values are used in¬ ternally by Color QuickDraw (actually the Color Manager) and shouldn’t be modified by your application. I’ll show how this mechanism works in the “Using the Color Manager” section. In place of the old familiar BitMap used by a grafPort is the PixMap, a structure that defines the cGrafPort’s pixels. The first three fields of a PixMap are the same as those of a BitMap: a pointer to the pixel image (baseAddr), an offset that determines the number of bytes from one row of pixels to the next (rowBytes), and the boundaries of the image (bounds). A PixMap contains ad¬ ditional fields that define the horizontal and vertical resolution of the image (hRes and vRes); the image’s depth, or physical bits per pixel (pixelSize); and other information. In its current incarna¬ tion, Color QuickDraw uses a “chunky” pixel image format that has all of a pixel’s bits stored consecutively in mem¬ ory, and all of a row’s pixels stored con¬ secutively as well. Although QuickDraw works with RGB colors, it also provides other ways to define a color. Color QuickDraw has conversion routines for HSV (hue, satu¬ ration, and value), HLS (hue, lightness, and saturation) and CMY (cyan, ma¬ genta, and yellow) color models. The 84 BYTE* 1988 Mac Special Edition COLOR QUICKDRAW Color Picker package contains routines to display a color wheel that lets you select a particular color from it (see photo 2), and routines to convert between the various color definitions. There’s more to Color QuickDraw, of course: color cursors, color patterns, new drawing modes, a new picture for¬ mat, and new text-handling routines. But, in general, Color QuickDraw can be regarded as an enhancement to the old QuickDraw, not a departure from it. Pro¬ grams written with the original Quick¬ Draw still run under Color QuickDraw, as long as they don’t make any assump¬ tions about an image’s pixel depth or memory requirements. Checking Your Machine Environment When writing a color application, it’s a good idea to add code that checks whether Color QuickDraw is available on the Macintosh executing your program. Since these routines are written in 68020 code, attempting to run them on a Mac Plus or Mac SE will produce a system bomb—a clearly undesirable result. For¬ tunately, it’s easy to have your applica¬ tion check what type of machine is run¬ ning it. The Environs() function returns information about the machine and the ROM; it is shown in code frag¬ ment 3. If a Mac II is running your appli¬ cation, machine will be equal to 2. Currently, only the Mac II has color capabilities, so this is a sufficient check. However, for future compatibility, it’s better to check directly for the availabil¬ ity of Color QuickDraw itself, using the SysEnvirons() call. Apple’s Technical Note #129 explains how to do this. Once you have determined that the color calls are available, you should de¬ termine the current pixel depth; put an¬ other way, how many colors are current¬ ly available? This question arises from the fact that the number of colors dis¬ played can be set by the user via the Con¬ trol Panel. For simplicity, I designed Mesmer to require 256 colors. This is not a great idea for a commercial application, which should be capable of running with any number of colors, but it’s fine for a short demonstration application. To ensure that the display is using 256 colors, Mes¬ mer examines the pixel depth of the main graphics device, which is the display that encompasses that part of the Desktop with the menu bar. continued Photo 2: The Color Picker Dialog box. You can select a color by pointing and clicking on the color wheel or by typing values into the text field boxes. Values for a color can be entered as an RGB color model or an HSV color model. Listing 1: The gDevice data structure. Mesmer extracts information about the depth of the screen from gdPMap, which is a handle to the PixMap associated with this gDevice. typedef struct / GDevice \ short gdRefNum; /* reference number of driver */ short gdID; /* client ID for search procedures */ short gdType; /* device type */ ITabHandle gdITable ; /* handle to inverse lookup table */ short gdResPref; /* preferred resolution of GDITable */ SProcHndl gdSearchProc; /* list of search procedures */ CProcHndl gdCompProc; /* list of complement procedures */ short gdFlags; /* grafDevice flags word */ PixMapHandle gdPMap; /* PixMap for displayed image*/ long gdRefCon; /* reference value */ GDHandle gdNextGD; /* handle of next gDevice */ Rect gdRect ; /* device's bounds in global coordinates */ long gdMode; /* device's current mode */ short gdCCBytes; /* rowBytes of expanded cursor data */ short gdCCDepth; /* depth of expanded cursor data */ Handle gdCCXData; /* handle to cursor's expanded data */ Handle gdCCXMask; /* handle to cursor's expanded mask */ long gdReserved; /* future use. MUST BE 0 */ } GDevice, *GDPtr, **GDHandle; 1988 Mac Special Edition • BYTE 85 COLOR QUICKDRAW Graphics Devices Because the Mac II supports a variable- size screen, different pixel depths, and even multiple screens, we need a way to keep track of and manipulate whatever video devices are attached. Color Quick¬ Draw uses a structure called a gDevice, or graphics device, that describes each device’s characteristics. The structure of a gDevice is shown in listing 1. When you start up the Mac II, it deter¬ mines the number of installed video boards, reads the device-specific infor¬ mation on each (such as screen size and pixel depth), and creates a linked list of gDevices for each video board. A gDevice doesn’t have to correspond to a physical device, however. A logical gDevice behaves just like a real screen device, but it won’t have a software driver associated with it. For example, you can create a logical gDevice in mem¬ ory, and draw into it. This is useful when you want to write into an off-screen Pix- Map whose pixel depth or set of colors is different from that of the screen. The routine GetGDevice() returns a handle to the current gDevice, which is just what we need to find out how many colors the monitor is using. Code frag¬ ment 4 shows the C code for doing this. Another thing you should check, al¬ though it’s not color-related, is the size of the screen. The QuickDraw global screenBits .bounds contains the rect¬ angle of the main screen. Mesmer uses this information to open a full-screen- size window. If your application needs to figure out the shape and size of a Desk¬ top that spans several screens, the low- memory global GrayRgn (at address 9EEh) contains the RgnHandle (region handle) to a standard QuickDraw region that describes the Desktop. Creating a Color Look-Up Table To achieve its swirling animation ef¬ fects, Mesmer requires a customized CLUT. Color QuickDraw uses a CLUT to select the colors to be displayed; each graphics device has its own. The colors in the screen’s CLUT are the only colors available for display. A request for a par¬ ticular RGB value is matched to the near¬ est available color in the CLUT, and that color is displayed. An application cannot be sure of getting the exact color it re¬ quests unless it provides a CLUT to the graphics device that specifies the exact values it needs. Mesmer sets the screen’s CLUT directly. An approved method of accomplishing this in a way that is more suitable in a complex environment is the Palette Manager (see the “The Good and the Bad” section). I took advantage of the HSV color def¬ inition to calculate a “rainbow” of colors (that is, colors that blend smoothly from one hue to another). By leaving the satu¬ ration and value parameters at their high¬ est values and varying only the hue, it’s easy get colors that are evenly spaced all around the rim of the color wheel. These are the most brilliant colors available, which is just what I wanted for Mesmer. The Color Picker’s HSV2RGB() routine converts each HSV color to its RGB equivalent, and these values are then stored in an array. Listing 2 shows a part of the code I used to create Mesmer’s CLUT. It generates an array of 256 even¬ ly spaced colors that are then written into a clut resource of an arbitrarily named resource file. After creating the file, I used ResEdit to copy and paste the clut resource into Mesmer’s resource file. Using the Color Manager The Color Manager is a set of routines designed to work directly with graphics hardware, providing RGB color space in¬ formation to Color QuickDraw or in¬ structing the hardware to modify its color map as required to display a new set of colors. Macintosh graphics devices convert arbitrary pixel values in their frame (display) buffer into actual RGB values, as determined by the CLUT for the device. Changing the CLUT changes Listing 2: LightspeedC code to generate the color look-up table (CLUT) resource for the Mesmer application. A CLUT that contains a “rainbow ” of smoothly blended colors is generated and written into a resource file called Fred. /*color table generator*/ MakeCLUT() { CTabHandle ctabH; HSVColor hColor; short refNum; ctabH = (CTabHandle)NewHandle( (long)sizeof(ColorTable)); /*allocate space for color table*/ hColor.saturation = 65535; hColor.value = 65535; for(n = 0; n < 256; n++) { hColor.hue = n*256; /*set saturation to max*/ /*set value to max*/ /*for 256 colors*/ /*create 256 evenly spaced hues*/ HSV2RGB(ShColor,&(**ctabH).ctTable[n].rgb); /*the value field is just the most significant bits of the RGBColor* (**ctabH).ctTable[n].value = 0; /*just set it to zero, color manager the rest*/ / does } (**ctabH).ctSeed = GetCTSeedO; /*use the current version identifier*/ (**ctabH) .ctSize = 255; /*size of color table minus one*/ CreateResFile("\pFred"); /*create a resource file*/ refNum = OpenResFile("\pFred"); AddResource(ctabH, 'clut', 200, "\pFred"); /*add our new clut to it*/ CloseResFile(refNum); 86 BYTE * 1988 Mac Special Edition COLOR QUICKDRAW the colors displayed without changing the pixel values stored in the frame buffer. This is the secret of Mesmer’s animation effects: Once an image is created, the colors can be changed by modifying the device’s CLUT without redrawing the image. By carefully selecting the se¬ quence of colors in the CLUT and shift¬ ing the index to them around, you can generate a wide variety of special ef¬ fects. Mesmer’s graphics, as nice as they are, really just scratch the surface. There are three sets of Color Manager routines that Mesmer uses to produce the animation effect: Color2Index( ), Index2Color(), and SetEntries(). Color2Index() finds the best match to a random starting RGBColor for each drawing sequence. It returns the index value into the CLUT for that color, which becomes the starting color. For each iter¬ ation of the inner drawing loop, this in¬ dex is incremented. It wraps around at 255 so that all 256 colors of the CLUT are used in sequence, starting with the random color. This produces a rainbow- colored drawing. The pattern itself is randomized as well, so it produces many combinations of colors and patterns. As the index is incremented, the In- dex2Color() routine is used to retrieve the RGBColor corresponding to that in¬ dex from the CLUT. The Color Quick¬ Draw call RGBForeColor () sets the drawing color, and LineTo() does the actual drawing. This inner drawing loop is shown in code fragment 5. The vari¬ able v is set randomly before the loop be¬ gins, as is the starting index value, in¬ dex. The variables v, theta, and r are all float-type variables, while index, x, and y are short integers. Once the rainbow-colored pattern has been drawn, the real fun begins. Set- Entries ( ) changes the current gDevice’s CLUT (in this case, it’s the screen). You can change the entire table, or just specified entries. Mesmer uses SetEntries () to swap the whole CLUT. First, a copy of the CLUT is made. Next, each table entry is rotated up one posi¬ tion, with the contents to the top entry moved to the bottom. Then the screen is set to the new CLUT using Set- Entries ( ). The result is that each color on the screen changes to the color that was adjacent to it in the CLUT. Because the colors are selected sequentially around the color wheel, it appears as though the colors themselves move to the next line in the pattern. Since the pat¬ terns move in a circular way outward from the center of the screen, the colors appear to swirl outward as well, blending and changing as they go (see photo 1). The C code fragment 6 shows how this is done. After the CLUT rotates a couple of times in one direction, it reverses direc¬ tion for another two full rotations. There is one caveat to using the Set- Entries ( ) routine. You must be careful to set the CLUT back to its original state before leaving your application. Other¬ wise, you can wind up with some very strange and even illegible displays pro¬ duced by subsequent applications that rely on the screen CLUT having the stan¬ dard set of colors. Mesmer does this by using its own copy of the standard CLUT, saved as a resource. A better way would be to save and restore the current CLUT each time the application runs. The Good and the Bad The main disadvantage to Mesmer’s ap¬ proach is that it uses the Color Manager directly, instead of the Palette Manager, to animate colors. The Palette Manager routines operate more or less transpar¬ ently across multiple screens, while the Color Manager routines do not. Thus, Mesmer is limited to operating on the main screen only. Apple strongly recom¬ mends that color animation be accom¬ plished through the Palette Manager to avoid potential problems that result from manipulating colors at the Color Man¬ ager level. In a multitasking environ¬ ment, changing the screen CLUT di¬ rectly can confuse other applications that are running concurrently with your own, since there is no way for them to sense that the colors have changed. Nothing will crash, of course, but the displays may be less than optimal. The advantage to Mesmer’s animation scheme is that it’s relatively easy to imple¬ ment, while the Palette Manager routines are more complex. Since most of us have only one screen, Mesmer still serves as a good example of how to use Color Quick¬ Draw, and it shows the interaction between Color QuickDraw, the Color Manager, and the video hardware. ■ Jan Eugenides is a senior software engi¬ neer at Solutions Inc. in Montpelier , Ver¬ mont. He has written articles for several Macintosh-specific magazines. He can be reached on BIX as “j. eugenides. ” “the richest and most expressive programming language I’ve ever used” AlphaPop Pop-11 for the Macintosh “the ideal language... an artful blend of Pascal, Lisp, and Forth with a dash of Smalltalk and Prolog” Quotes: Dick Pountain, BYTE May 1988 For orders, information, and free HyperCard stack about AlphaPop, please contact: Computable Functions Inc. • 35 South Orchard Drive, Amherst, MA 01002 U.S.A. • 413-253-7637 Circle Ml 6 on Reader Service Card 1988 Mac Special Edition • BYTE 87 dalapro M Circle M58 on Reader Service Card DATAPRO Means Accurate. Information. We base our purchases on it. Formulate opinions from it. Make intelligent decisions with it. Provided. . . it is correct. Inaccurate in- formation is oftentimes less useful than none at all. It leads to misinterpretation. And in making a poor choice. giL, Wm, PS Datapro means accuracy. Our information services contain up-to-date documented reports on products and services in microcomputers , information processing and data and voice communications. Reports that help you sepa¬ rate truth from fiction. And in today’s ever- changing industry, that requires constant re¬ search and revieiv. Our product and pricing comparisons are carefully developed. Technol- ogy reports are documented. User ratings are statistically analyzed. Competitive reports are scrutinized. And How-to-Advice columns are meticulously edited. Start making your decisions based on the facts. To receive your free liter attire pack on Datapro’s subscription services, call us today at 1-800-DATAPRO (1-800-328-2776) or use the reader service card. BYTE MACINTOSH SPECIAL EDITION Unix and the Mac Interface Rick Daley A/UX 1.0 is Apple’s version of AT&T Bell Laboratory’s Unix System V version 2 for the Macintosh II. What makes A/UX stand out from other Unix systems is the A/UX Toolbox (software that gives A/UX programs access to the Mac user interface ROM routines). With the Tool¬ box, applications developers can give their programs the familiar look and feel of the Mac user interface. (For further details on A/UX 1.0, see “Unix for the Mac II” by David Betz and Eva M. White on page 185 of this issue.) The Toolbox is a set of tools and li¬ braries that let you run existing “well- behaved” Mac applications under A/UX, or write new A/UX applications that can use the Mac user interface. There are two main components in the Toolbox: It has a program named launch for executing existing Mac binaries, and a C library named LIBMAC.A for creating new A/UX programs that can access the user interface toolbox as well as standard Unix libraries. Table 1 shows which Mac operating system routines the Toolbox 1.0 sup¬ ports. In this first release, you can run only one A/UX Toolbox application at a time, and the finder, desk accessories, and printing manager are not supported. Nor does the Toolbox support custom de¬ vice drivers. The A/UX Toolbox in A/UX 1.1 (which should be in beta ver¬ sion by the time you read this) will sup¬ port the desk manager, the printing man¬ ager, the color manager, and the palette manager. Compatibility Issues The main compatibility issues are in the areas of memory management, process scheduling, and file management. To understand what is involved in integrat¬ ing these environments, you must first understand the differences between A/UX and the Mac operating system. A/UX is a multitasking, 32-bit virtual memory operating system; the Mac is a single-tasking operating system that uses The A/UX Toolbox for the Mac II gives you the potential for a point-and-click Unix a handle-based memory manager. A/UX requires a 68851 paged-memory-man- agement unit (PMMU) for multitasking and virtual memory support as well as protection of one task from another. Vir¬ tual memory lets a process access more memory than the machine physically has. Unfortunately, these features isolate you from the hardware, and you are ex¬ pected to make requests to the operating system kernel to manipulate the hard¬ ware. This is important, because it means that a bug in one program won’t inadvertently crash the entire system. While the Mac operating system pro¬ vides an interface to the hardware, it can¬ not prevent you from accessing hardware and memory directly. Other conflicts between the Mac operating system and A/UX are caused by the fact that the Mac’s handle-based memory manager assumes only 24 bits of significance. The A/UX library takes care of the 24- to 32- bit problem for programs that used the prescribed interface, but some programs go around the Mac operating system’s in¬ terface to gain speed. You must modify these so-called “ill-behaved” applica¬ tions for them to run under A/UX. A/UX and the Mac ROM The Mac ROM contains a large library of routines that an application can call. These routines are broken into two sec¬ tions. The first section is the user inter¬ face toolbox, which contains code to pre¬ sent the standard Mac user interface. These include routines to draw text and graphics, to create and manipulate win¬ dows and menus, and to get input from the user through the mouse and key¬ board. The second section of the Mac ROM contains the operating system calls. These are routines to read and write files, to allocate memory, and to manipulate various devices, such as the serial ports. Figure 1 shows the strategy that A/UX uses to communicate between an A/UX C program and the Mac ROM: When you make a call to the Mac operating system, the Toolbox routes the call to one of A/UX’s operating system calls; when you make a call to a Mac user interface routine, the Toolbox translates it to a call in the Mac user interface ROM code. The A/UX Toolbox sets up a memory map that is close enough to the one used by the native Mac operating system that it fools the code in ROM and in applica¬ tions. Because the PMMU’s job is to keep programs from accessing anything but their own code and data, Apple had to provide a means to get around some of the protection facilities of A/UX so that programs can get to the screen’s frame buffer and the Mac ROM. Before trans¬ ferring control to a program, the Toolbox library makes several calls to the A/UX kernel to change the memory map mak¬ ing the ROM and the screen’s frame buffer accessible. Also, it creates a small memory segment at virtual address 0 to contain Mac low-memory globals. The ROM code maintains these globals, and some applications can even access them directly. The resulting memory map is shown in figure 2. The recommended way for an applica¬ tion to access the Mac ROM routines is through the 68000 CPU family’s 1010 emulator trap mechanism, often called an A-line trap. A 1010-emulator trap oc- continued 1988 Mac Special Edition • BYTE 89 UNIX AND THE MAC INTERFACE Table 1: A list of the Macintosh operating system calls that the Toolkit 1.0 supports. ROM library Implemented? Apple desktop bus No AppleTalk manager No Binary-decimal conversion package Yes Color manager Dummy routines only Color picker package Dummy routines only Control manager Yes Deferred task manager No Desk manager Dummy routines only Device manager Some dummy routines Dialog manager Yes Disk driver Some dummy routines Disk initialization package Dummy routines only Event manager, OS Partially Event manager, toolbox Yes File manager Partially Font manager Yes International utilities package Yes List manager Yes Memory manager Partially Menu manager Yes Package manager Yes Palette manager Dummy routines only Printing manager No QuickDraw Yes Resource manager Yes SANE package Yes Scrap manager Yes Script manager No SCSI driver No Segment loader Partially Serial driver No Shutdown manager Yes Slot manager No Sound manager Some dummy routines Start-up manager Not needed Standard file package Yes System error handler Partially TextEdit Yes Time manager Partially Utilities, operating system Partially Utilities, toolbox Yes Vertical retrace manager Partially Video drivers No Window manager Yes curs when the CPU executes an instruc¬ tion that begins with the hexadecimal digit A. The CPU then transfers through an exception vector to a routine that han¬ dles the A-line trap. A/UX also uses the A-line trap mechanism to access the Mac ROM. Under the Mac operating system and the A/UX Toolbox, the A-line trap rou¬ tine uses the low 12 bits of the A-line trap word and a dispatch table, found in the low-memory globals, to locate the ad¬ dress of the routine that actually per¬ forms the requested function. Initially, the entire dispatch table is loaded with pointers to functions in ROM. However, under the Mac operating system, many entries in the dispatch table are replaced with pointers to functions in RAM. These patches are installed to fix bugs and to add new features. Consequently, Apple had to install these same patches under the A/UX Toolbox. And, of course, calls made to the Mac operating system are replaced with equivalent Unix system calls. For example, A-line traps that call the file manager are replaced with code that uses A/UX system calls, such as open, close, read, and write. A-line traps that call the vertical retrace manager are re¬ placed with code that uses the A/UX sys¬ tem calls setitimer and signal. Memory Manager The differences between the two mem¬ ory managers require the most adjust¬ ment. These differences mainly stem from the fact that A/UX is a 32-bit vir¬ tual memory system while the Mac is a 24-bit handle-based system. Apple implemented A/UX’s virtual memory by making calls to the C li¬ brary’s malloc, free, and realloc rou¬ tines. These routines simply maintain a circular list of memory blocks. When an application makes an allocation request, the system searches the list to find the first free block that is large enough. If there is no free block large enough, the sbrk system call asks the kernel to ex¬ tend the heap, thus creating more virtual memory. If this fails, which only hap¬ pens if the area of the disk reserved for paged-out memory is full, then so does Figure 1: The strategy A/UX uses to communicate between an A/UX C program and the Mac ROM. If the C program makes a call to the Mac operating system , the Toolbox routes the call to an equivalent A/UX kernel function; if the program calls a Mac user interface routine , the Toolkit does an A-line trap to the Mac ROM. 90 BYTE* 1988 Mac Special Edition UNIX AND THE MAC INTERFACE the request. These routines don’t per¬ form memory compaction, so they are much simpler than the algorithms that the memory manager uses in the Mac op¬ erating system. Without compaction, memory frag¬ mentation can cause paging even though there is actually enough physical mem¬ ory. Applications can start paging and run more slowly even if they allocate less memory than the system has. However, there are also some advan¬ tages to A/UX’s memory-allocation scheme. It does not spend time moving blocks around in an effort to compact the heap. A common bug in a Mac applica¬ tion is to dereference a handle, then call a memory manager routine using the de¬ referenced handle. Since the block can move due to heap compaction, the de¬ referenced handle is no longer valid. These bugs will not occur under the A/UX Toolbox because memory blocks are moved only when their size in¬ creases. Applications also have trouble recovering from out-of-memory condi¬ tions; many don’t even try to recover, but some try and fail. Even if the application recovers, it’s still likely that it won’t be able to do what you request. With virtual memory, running out of memory is very rare. Some of the Mac memory manager functions don’t make sense under virtual memory. In a virtual memory environ¬ ment, it’s not clear what value the call to determine the amount of free memory available should return. The current im¬ plementation returns 1 megabyte minus the amount of memory already allo¬ cated. However, the amount of memory an application can allocate is typically much more than this. This seems to keep existing applications running well. Still, developers of future applications should really try not to use these calls; it’s better to allocate the amount needed and check to see if the request succeeds. Significant Bits The most common reason a Mac applica¬ tion fails to run under the A/UX Toolbox is if it stores extra data in the high bits of pointers. Having only 24 bits of the 32- bit handles be significant was a limitation designed into the 68000 CPU. However, the 68020 CPU used in the Mac II can use all 32 bits of addresses. The current version of the Mac operating system, to maintain backward compatibility, uses the PMMU to ignore the high 8 bits of ad¬ dresses. Under A/UX, all 32 bits of ad¬ dresses are significant. Some current Mac applications go around the memory manager routines to gain speed. The memory manager rou¬ tine NewHandle allocates a relocatable storage block. Instead of returning a pointer to a memory block, like the C routine malloc, NewHandle returns a pointer to a master pointer, which points to the memory block (see figure 3a). This extra level of indirection lets the memory manager compact memory by moving these relocatable memory blocks. The application can still find the data because the memory manager will update the master pointer when it moves the block. The memory manager stores some flag bits in the high-order bit of the handle, telling the memory manager whether the corresponding block is relo¬ catable or temporarily locked (and there¬ fore can’t be moved). Storing these flag bits in the high- order bits of the master pointer works in the Mac operating system, but not in A/UX where all 32 bits of the address are significant. So the memory manager ver¬ sion that runs under the A/UX Toolbox stores the flag bits in a second longword of memory, just after the master pointer (see figure 3b). This works fine as long as the application uses the access routines to manipulate these flag bits. Unfortu¬ nately, many applications currently by¬ pass the access routines. For example, rather than calling the HLock routine, some applications just set the appropriate bit in the master pointer. These applica¬ tions will not run under A/UX without modification. Another example of access routines that applications often bypass is access routines to low-memory global variables. These variables are automatically up¬ dated via hardware interrupts in the Mac operating system, but not under A/UX. For example, under the Mac operating system, some applications directly ac- continued Stack Screen frame buffer ROM | Application heap Application data Application code or launch program Low memory globals 200000000h 10500005h lOOOOOOOh 400000h Oh Figure 2: Except for the low-memory globals , none of the addresses that A/UX uses are the same as the ones used by the native Mac operating system. This doesn ’t matter , since everything is referenced through pointers in memory. Figure 3a: A relocatable memory block under the Macintosh operating system. Flag bits are stored in the high bits of the master pointer. This saves space , but it doesn \t work in a 32-bit environment. Handle Master pointer Data block Flags Unused f Figure 3b: Under the A/UX Toolbox , the flag bits are stored in a separate long- word. Some space is unused , but this is 32-bit clean. 1988 Mac Special Edition ‘BYTE 91 UNIX AND THE MAC INTERFACE cessed the Ticks variable, which con¬ tains the number of clock ticks since the last reboot. This variable never gets changed under the A/UX Toolbox; you should use the TickCount access routine, instead. Other such variables include Time and EventQueue. Application developers are sometimes concerned about the extra CPU time the A-line trap mechanism uses. The over¬ head is not very large, but it can make a difference in some tight loops. In those cases where the A-line trap overhead is significant, you should consider using the GetTrapAddress trap to get a pointer to the access routine. Then you can call the routine directly, without the over¬ head of the A-line trap. In the case of a trap like HLock, it is not quite as fast as setting the bit directly, but it will work on all future systems. Process Scheduling Mac applications are event-driven. Typi¬ cally, the main body of an application is a loop that uses the GetNextEvent trap to look for events, such as keystrokes or mouse clicks. If there are no events pend¬ ing, GetNextEvent returns null. The busy-looping model worked fine in the original Mac system. However, it is a waste under a multitasking operating system such as A/UX. Busy looping takes time away from any other processes that are currently running. Also, the pro¬ cess scheduler makes scheduling deci¬ sions based on how much CPU time a process has recently used. To solve this problem, a new trap, named WaitNextEvent, will be added in A/UX 1.1. WaitNextEvent is similar to GetNextEvent, but you use it to yield the CPU until an event is available. This trap is available under the A/UX Toolbox, MultiFinder, and even under the Mac op¬ erating system, if you use a recent system file. All future applications should use WaitNextEvent when possible. Wait¬ NextEvent is defined in C like this: short WaitNextEvent(eventMask, theEvent, timeOut, mouseRgn) short eventMask; EventRecord *theEvent; long timeOut; RgnHandle mouseRgn; The eventMask and theEvent param¬ eters are just like the parameters to Get¬ NextEvent. The eventMask specifies a set of events the application is interested in, and theEvent is a pointer to a record that will get filled in with information about the event. The timeOut parameter defines how long (in sixtieths of a sec¬ ond) WaitNextEvent should wait before returning a null event. The mouseRgn specifies a QuickDraw region that con¬ tains the mouse. If the mouse moves out of this region while WaitNextEvent is waiting, an event of type app4Event is returned with a value of FAOOOOOOh in the message field. This allows an appli¬ cation to use WaitNextEvent even if it is tracking the mouse position. Storing Macintosh Files Another area where A/UX differs great¬ ly from the Mac operating system is in file structure. An A/UX file is just a se¬ quence of bytes. Some information about the file is also stored apart from the data. This information includes the file’s name, length, owner, permissions, and creation date. A Mac file has two se¬ quences of bytes: a data and a resource fork. Typically, the data fork contains the same sort of data you would find in an A/UX file. The resource fork contains a list of resources. Resources can store a wide range of things. For example, they often contain templates that describe windows or menus. Often, resources contain code fragments. The segments that make up a Mac application are stored as code resources. You refer to a resource by a resource specification, which is a four-character type, and either an ID number or a name. Resources are manip¬ ulated by the Mac resource manager. In addition to the two forks, a Mac file con¬ tains information that the Mac Finder uses. This information includes the file’s type, creator, and icon location. Apple has defined two closely related formats for storing Mac files on non-Mac file systems. The formats are called AppleSingle and AppleDouble. The A/UX Toolbox supports both these formats. In the AppleSingle format, both of the forks and the finder information are all stored in a single Unix file. In the Apple- Double format, the data fork is stored in a separate file. The file containing the resource fork and the finder information has the same name as the file containing the data fork, but it is prepended with a % character. The AppleSingle format is generally more convenient; it is easier to rename, move, and manipulate files in this format. However, the AppleDouble format also has several advantages. First, this is the only way to store re¬ sources in an application built under A/UX. The executable code must be stored in a separate file. Second, it is often desirable to access a file’s data fork using Unix utilities. This is simple with the AppleDouble format, since the data fork is in a separate file. Finally, the Ap¬ pleDouble format files can be more effi¬ cient to manipulate than AppleSingle for¬ mat files. Since both forks are stored in one file with the AppleSingle format, the second fork gets moved whenever the first one increases in size. A/UX’s filenames are 14 characters long. You can use a backslash instead of a colon to separate directories, and the filenames are case sensitive, whereas the Mac does not differentiate between up¬ percase and lowercase. Also, in ASCII files in the Mac environment, lines are terminated with a carriage return (ODh); under A/UX lines are terminated with a line feed (OAh). This difference is usu¬ ally masked by the C language’s newline character. Another issue unrelated to the file sys¬ tem is that the Toolbox is run as a process in user mode, so privileged instructions are not available. This means you must use move ccr to access the condi¬ tion code bits. The instruction ccr is available on the 68020 but not on the 68000, so you will have to check which CPU your code is running on. Because the finder is not available under the Tool¬ box routines, you must call the Init- Dialogs and TEInit routines yourself, or use the -i option with the launch command. Not Here Yet Unfortunately, A/UX 1.0 is really only the foundation for a point-and-click Unix. It makes it possible for you to write applications using windows and menus, but you still have to use the same com¬ mand-line interface and telegraphic com¬ mands to use A/UX. A novice can’t sit down and execute A/UX commands from windows and menus. The version of the A/UX Toolbox that shipped with A/UX 1.0 was really only useful for developers. Applications could use the user interface toolbox, but sever¬ al key features were missing. The most notable omission was access to the print¬ ing manager. However, version 1.1, when it becomes available, will fill in these holes by adding support for print¬ ing, desk accessories, and color devices. Ultimately, A/UX will be a Unix that a naive user can use without ever seeing anything but the mouse and window- based user interface that has made the Mac so successful. At the same time, a programmer will still be able to use all the tools that make Unix so powerful. ■ Rick Daley of Cupertino , California , is a software engineer at Apple Computer. He can be reached on BIX as “ editors. ” 92 BYTE* 1988 Mac Special Edition Only $4 oo Per Disk ^FREEWARE * V* Public Domain and Shareware Software for Macintosh™ Computers Programs and Utilities to meet all your computing needs. NOVELTY □ Novelty 1 (M101) - Contains 3 BI- orythm programs, a diet helper. Morse code and 1-Ching astrology. □ Novelty 2 (M102) - Contains Mac- baby. an educational program written with Videoworks. that teach¬ es the evolution of a baby in the womb. Does not require Videoworks to run. a VW player is included on the disk. BASIC PROGRAMS These programs require Microsoft Basic (Mbasic) version 2.0 or later to run. □ Basic Programs 1 - 5 (Ml03 - M107) - (5 disk set) Contains over 200 miscellaneous Basic programs. Includes games, business, utilities & more. All the Basic programs we could find on 5 disks. GRAPHICS TOOLS □ Screen Graphics #1 (M108) - Con¬ tains 17 various graphic programs that show on your screen. Hours of fun. □ Graphic Tools / Printer Utilities (Mill) - Several printer utilities and tools for creating slide shows, editing and making screens and much more. □ Paint Tools (Ml 12) - Contains many flies for viewing, printing and manipu¬ lating paint flies. Can be used to view Mac- paint graphics. A MACPAINT GRAPHICS These graphics can be printed, viewed or changed by using Mac- paint, Fullpaint or similar bit¬ mapped paint packages □ Star Trek Graphics (Ml 15) - Con¬ tains miscellaneous Star Trek graphics. Includes Kirk. Spock. McCoy and more. Great for Star Trek fans. □ Famous Women #1 & #2 (Ml 16 & Ml 17) - (2 disk set) Contains mis¬ cellaneous famous women graph¬ ics. Includes Madonna. Brooke. Marilyn. Tina. Natalie & more. □ Car Graphics (Ml 18) - Contains Porsche. BMW. car logos. Mercedes and other car graphics. □ Holidays Graphics (Ml 19) - Con¬ tains Christmas. 4th of July. Thanksgiving & more holiday graphics. □ Miscellaneous Objects (M121) - Contains miscellaneous objects graphics like arrows, aspirin, ban- daids. cameras, cards, dollar bills, eyeglasses & many more. □ Disney Characters (M126) - Con¬ tains Minnie. Mickey. Scrooge. & other Disney characters. □ Animals #1 & #2 (M127 & M128) - (2 disk set) Contains miscellane¬ ous animal graphics Including cheetah, bear, racoon, lion, horse. Jaguar, owl. pigs & many more. □ Planes (M129) - Contains graph¬ ics of planes featuring F-14. F-15. F-16. DC-10. helicopter & others. □ Fantasy Graphics #1 & #2 (M130 & M131) - (2 disk set) Contains miscellane¬ ous graphics, in¬ cludes; Conan, drag¬ ons. castle, ghosts, knights, minotaur & more. □ Borders (M132) - Contains mis¬ cellaneous borders including thick, thin, gothic. & others. □ Icons / Clip Arts #1 (M133) - Contains miscellaneous icon/clip art graphics. 15 various flies con¬ taining a multitude of small graphics. □ Icons / Clip Arts #2 (M134) - Contains mis¬ cellaneous icon/clip art graphics. 14 more flies of art. □ Sports (Ml35) - Contains miscel¬ laneous sports graphics of baseball, skier, football, tennis, running & others.. □ Space (M136) - Contains miscel¬ laneous space graphics with Ad Astra, comet, earth. Lost. NASA. Space dock. Space race & more. □ Famous Men #1 (M138) - Con¬ tains miscellaneous graphics of fa¬ mous men. Includes Beatles. Bo¬ gart. Rambo. R2D2. the Coz & more. □ Comic Book Characters (M140) - Contains Garfield. Bill the Cat. Opus & others. □ Miscellaneous Graphics #1(M141) - Contains miscellaneous graphics that could not be categorized. Fea¬ tures Batman, billboard, ghostbust- ers. robots, jack in the box & oth¬ ers. FONTS □ Laser Fbnts #1 (Ml44) - Contains fonts that require an Apple Laser¬ Writer. Anti-particle. Avant Garde. Bookman. New Helveitica. New Century’ & Zapf Dingbats. Also 2 utility folders. □ Laser Fbnts #2 (M145) - Contains fonts that require an Apple Laser¬ Writer. Palatino. Thin Times. Tiny Helvetica & Zapf Chancery. Also has Postscript Worker & PS Tester utilities. UTILITIES □ Editor Utilities #1 (M166) - Con¬ tains miscellaneous text editor util¬ ities □ Editor Utilities #2 (M167) Con¬ tains more miscellaneous text edi¬ tor utilities □ Communications #1 (M168) - Contains Red Ryder modem utility. □ Communications #2 (Ml69) - Contains miscellane¬ ous modem utilities. □ Communications #3 (M170) - Contains mis¬ cellaneous modem utilities & programs. □ Copy Utilities (M171) - Contains miscellaneous copy and initialization utilities Format disks faster, copy disks quickly & easily. DESK ACCESSORIES □ DA's #1 (Ml82) - Contains screen saver desk accesories. □ DA's #2 (Ml83) - Contains busi¬ ness desk accesories. □ DA's #3 (M184)-Contains desk¬ top desk accesories. □ DA's #5 (M186) - Contains mis¬ cellaneous keyboard & printer desk accesories. □ DA's #6 (M187) - Contains miscel¬ laneous paint & word processing- desk accesories. □ DA's #9 (M190) - Contains hu¬ mourous or games desk accesories. BUSINESS □ Business #1 (M207) - Contains Inventory. Depreciation. Auto ex¬ pense. amortize, bill payer & mort¬ gage calc. □ Business #2 (M208) - Contains scheduler. New Rolodex, rolodex. Pcalc. reminder, directory. Ad¬ dress & Idea Liner. □ Business #3 (M209) - Contains miscellaneous Pagemaker tem¬ plates. Requires Pagemaker to use or modify. □ Business #4 (M210 - M214) - (5 disk set) Con¬ tains miscellaneous Multi¬ plan/Excel templates. All the templates we could And. Requires Multiplan/ Excel to use or modify. EDUCATION □ Math #1 (M216) - Contains Mac- Grapher. MathMaster. Number In¬ vestigator & two other programs. Ages 10 - adult. □ Math #2 (M217) - Contains Mac- Graph. MacMath™ Demo & Math 21 3D grapher. □ Spelling Aids (M219) - Contains Word Drill. Spelling Tutor. Spin & Spell. Word Search. Typing Tdtor & Venn. Can be modified for all ages. □ Childrens (M220) - Contains Animals. Dot 2 Dot. Flashcards & Lau¬ ra's Letters. Ages 5 and up. □ Teachers Aids (M221) - Contains Grades database & Quizmaster. GAMES □ Board, Breakout & Flight Games (M223) - Contains Yahtzee. Connect 4. Pente Tic Tac Tbe. Blocks. Bricks. Stuntcopter & many more.. □ Trivia & Maze Games (M224) Contains MacPuzzle. Maze. Mr. Cy¬ cloid. Trivia & others. □ Mind Games (M225) - Contains Concentration. Destroyer. Eliza. GoMoku. Master Guess and sever¬ al others. □ Novelty Games (M226) - Con¬ tains Biorythm. Climber. Cookie. Juggler. Lotto 6/49. Mac Attack & more. □ Space Games (M227) - Contains As¬ teroids. Pierre Molle. Space Artillery’. Space Invaders & others. □ Card & Casino Games (M228) - Con¬ tains Blackjack. Casino. Draw Pok¬ er. Hearts & several more. □ Word Games (M229) - Contains Ars Magna™ Storymaker. Websters Revenge (DEMO). & Wheel. □ Arcade Games (M230) - Contains Bash Big Blue. Centipede. Daleks. Mac Bugs & others. □ Star Trek (M232) - Also contains miscellaneous adventure games. □ Adventure Games #1 (M233) - Contains Crystal Quest adventure game--DEMO. ORDER FORM Please write disk numbers. NAME_ ADDRESS CITY_ PHONE (_) _ ST ZIP Multiple disk sets are calculated at { the number of disks in the set at \ S4.00. IE: 2 disks @ $4.00 = $8.00. # of disks @$4.00 = CA Res. Sales Tax (6.5%) =_ Shipping & Handling = 4,00 All orders sent UPS ground. TOTAL ======= All monies to be in US funds only. International orders require SI0.00 for Shipping & Handling. Please send check or money order to: CALIFORNIA FREEWARE 1747 E. Ave Q. Unit C-l Department M Palmdale. CA 93550 ( 805 ) 273-0300 Hours M-F 9 am - 5 pm PST. COD orders placed before 1pm PST j sent same day Sorry we do not accept Credit Cards at this time. Call or write for free catalog. All diskettes are formatted single sided (400k). Circle M41 on Reader Service Card 1988 Mac Special Edition ‘BYTE 93 HOW DO YOU GET A JOB WITHOUT EXPERIENCE? ANDHOWDOYOl) GET EXPERIENCE WITHOUT A JOB? Most young people have one answer to this problem. They avoid it until they’re out of college. But they could be getting solid work experience while they’re still in col¬ lege. With your company’s help. And ours. We’re Co-op Education. A nation¬ wide program that helps college students get real jobs for real pay, while they’re getting an education. But we can’t do it without you. Those real jobs have to come from real companies. Like yours. For more information on how you can participate in this valuable program, write Co-op Education, Box 775E, Boston, MA 02115. Not only will you be giving stu¬ dents a chance to earn money and pick up the most valuable kind of knowledge, you’ll be giving yourselves a chance to pick up the most valuable kind of employee. Co-op Education. You earn a future when you earn a degree. CjOUICII A Public Service of This Publication ©1987 National Commission for Cooperative Education 94 BYTE • 1988 Mac Special Edition EDITORIAL INDEX BY COMPANY Index of companies covered in articles, columns, or news stories in this issue Each reference is to the first page of the article or section in which the company name appears INQUIRY n COMPANY PAGE M258 ACCESS TECHNOLOGY.35 M244 ACIUS.21 M211 ACTIVISION.71 ADDISON-WESLEY.83 M143 ALDUS.7,21 M246 M155 ALISA SYSTEMS.57 M156 M243 ALTSYS.21 M183 APPLE COMPUTER.57, 71 M214 M186 AST RESEARCH.57 M157 AVATAR TECHNOLOGIES.57 M247 CE SOFTWARE.21 M181 COMPATIBLE SYSTEMS.57 M158 CORVUS SYSTEMS.57 M254 DATADESK INTERNATIONAL.35 M180 DATAVIZ.57 M182 DAYNA COMMUNICATIONS.57 M159 DIGITAL COMMUNICATIONS ASSOCIATES.57 M160 DOVE COMPUTER.57 DUPONT ELECTRONICS.57 M142 FARALLON COMPUTING.7, 57 M162 HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS.71 M161 HAYES MICROCOMPUTER INQUIRY # COMPANY PAGE PRODUCTS.57 M255 HUBBARD FURNITURE.35 M144 HYPERPRESS PUBLISHING.7 M163 INFORMATION PRESENTATION TECHNOLOGIES.57 M164 INFOSPHERE.57 M165 M187 INSIGNIA SOLUTIONS.57 M213 KANODE ASSOCIATES.71 M166 KINETICS.57 M167 M168 KMW SYSTEMS.57 M245 LIVING VIDEOTEXT.21 M253 LUNDEEN & ASSOCIATES.21 M251 MACROMIND.21,35 M261 M169 MENLO BUSINESS SYSTEMS.57 M145 MICROLYTICS.7 M252 MICROSOFT.21 M185 MICROSOLUTIONS.57 M241 MINDSCAPE.21 NETWORK INNOVATIONS.57 NORTHERN TELECOM.57 M170 PACER SOFTWARE.57 M171 INQUIRY tt COMPANY PAGE M212 PBC ENTERPRISES.71 M260 PBI SOFTWARE.35 MI88 PERFECTEK.57 M184 PERIPHERAL LAND.57 M256 PRIAM.35 M215 PUBLISHING RESOURCES.71 M172 SHIVA.57 M250 SILICON BEACH SOFTWARE.21 M257 SOFTVIEW.35 M248 SOFTWARE SUPPLY.21 M249 SOLUTIONS INTERNATIONAL.21 M259 STRATEGIC STUDIES GROUP.35 SUN MICROSYSTEMS.57 M14I SUPERMAC TECHNOLOGY.7 M173 SYMANTEC.57 M262 T/MAKER.35 M174 TANGENT TECHNOLOGIES.57 M175 TECHNOLOGY CONCEPTS.57 M242 TELEROBOTICS INTERNATIONAL.21 M152 3COM.57 M153 M154 M176 TOPS.57 TOUCH COMMUNICATIONS.57 M177 TRI DATA SYSTEMS.57 M178 WALKER RICHER & QUINN.57 BYTE ADVERTISING SALES STAFF: Dennis J. Riley, Director of Sales, One Phoenix Mill Lane, Peterborough, NH 03458, tel. (603) 924-9281 NEW ENGLAND SOUTHEAST SOUTH PACIFIC BYTE BITS (2x3) Regional Advertising ME, NH, VT, MA, RI, ONTARIO NC, SC, GA, FL, AL, TN SOUTHERN CA, AZ.NM, Dan Harper (603) 924-6830 (Pacific NW, Midwest, CANADA & EASTERN CANADA Carolyn F. Lovett (404) 252-0626 LAS VEGAS BYTE Publications New York/New England) John C. Moon (617)262-1160 McGraw-Hill Publications Jack Anderson (714) 557-6292 One Phoenix Mill Lane Scott Gagnon (603) 924-6830 McGraw-Hill Publications 4170 Ashford-Dunwoody Road McGraw-Hill Publications Peterborough, NH 03458 BYTE Publications 575 Boylston Street Suite 420 3001 Red Hill Ave. One Phoenix Mill Lane Boston, MA02116 Atlanta, GA 30319 Building #1—Suite 222 The Buyer’s Mart (1x2) Peterborough, NH 03458 Costa Mesa, CA 92626 Mark Stone (603) 924-3754 ATLANTIC MIDWEST BYTE Publications BYTE Deck Mailings NY, NYC, CT, NJ (NORTH) IL, MO, KS, IA, ND, SD, MN, Tom Harvey (213) 480-5243 One Phoenix Mill Lane National Leah G. Rabinowitz (212) 512-2096 KY, OH, WI, NB, IN, MI, MS McGraw-Hill Publications Peterborough, NH 03458 Ed Ware (603) 924-6166 McGraw-Hill Publications Bob Denmead (312) 751-3740 3333 Wilshire Boulevard #407 BYTE Publications 1221 Avenue of the Americas— McGraw-Hill Publications Los Angeles, CA 90010 Regional Advertising One Phoenix Mill Lane 36th Floor Blair Building (So. CA, Mid-Atlantic, Peterborough, NH 03458 New York, NY 10020 645 North Michigan Ave. NORTH PACIFIC New York/New England) Chicago, IL 60611 HI, WA, OR, ID, MT, Elisa Lister (603) 924-6830 A/E/C Computing Deck (203) 968-7111 NORTHERN CA, BYTE Publications Computing for Engineers McGraw-Hill Publications SOUTHWEST, NV (except LAS VEGAS), UT, One Phoenix Mill Lane Mary Ann Goulding Building A—3rd Floor ROCKY MOUNTAIN W. CANADA Peterborough, NH 03458 (603) 924-9281 777 Long Ridge Road CO, WY, OK, TX, AR, LA Mike Kisseberth (415) 362-4600 BYTE Publications Stamford, CT 06902 Karl Heinrich (713) 462-0757 McGraw-Hill Publications Regional Advertising One Phoenix Mill Lane McGraw-Hill Publications 425 Battery Street (Southeast, Southwest) Peterborough, NH 03458 EAST 7600 W. Tidwell Rd.-Suite 500 San Francisco, CA 94111 Denise Vernier (603) 924-9281 PA, NJ (SOUTH), Houston, TX 77040 BYTE Publications MD, VA, W.VA, DE, D.C. Bill McAfee (415) 349-4100 One Phoenix Mill Lane (215) 496-3833 McGraw-Hill Publications Peterborough, NH 03458 McGraw-Hill Publications 951 Mariner’s Island Blvd.— Three Parkway 3rd Floor Philadelphia, PA 19102 San Mateo, CA 94404 International Advertising Sales Staff: Mr. Hans Csokor Mrs. Maria Sarmiento Karen Lennie Seavex Ltd. Hiro Morita Publimedia Pedro Teixeira 8, Off. 320 McGraw-Hill Publishing Co. 400 Orchard Road, #10-01 McGraw-Hill Publishing Co. Reisnerstrasse 61 Iberia Mart 1 34 Dover St. Singapore 0923 Overseas Corp. A-1037 Vienna, Austria Madrid 4, Spain London W1X4BR Republic of Singapore Room 1528 222 75 76 84 1 45 52 891 England 01 493 1451 Tel: 734-9790 Kasumigaseki Bldg. Telex: RS35539 SEAVEX 3-2-5 Kasumigaseki, Mrs. Gurit Gepner Michael Karnig Emilio Zerboni Chiyoda-Ku McGraw-Hill Publishing Co. Andrew Karnig & Associates McGraw-Hill Publishing Co. Seavex Ltd. Tokyo 100, Japan PO Box 2156 Finnbodavagen Via Flavio Baracchini 1 503 Wilson House 3 581 9811 Bat Yam, 59121 Israel S-131 31 Nacka, Sweden 20123 Milan, Italy 19-27 Wyndham St. 3 866 561 321 39 8-44 0005 (2)89010103 Central, Hong Kong Mr. Ernest McCrary Tel: 5-260149 Empresa Internacional de Ros Weyman Mr. Alain Faure Telex: 60904 SEVEX HX Comunicacoes Ltda. Serving Germany, Austria, & Switzerland McGraw-Hill Publishing Co. Rua da Consolacao, 222 McGraw-Hill Publishing Co. 128 Faubourg Saint Honore Conjunto 103 34 Dover St. 75008 Paris 01302 Sao Paulo, S.P., Brasil London W1X4BR France Tel: (11)259-3811 England 01 493 1451 (1)42-89-03-81 Telex: (100) 32122 EMBN 1988 Mac Special Edition • BYTE 95 READER SERVICE To get further information on the products advertised in BYTE, fill out the reader service card by circling the numbers on the card that cor¬ respond to the inquiry number listed with the advertiser. This index is provided as an additional service by the publisher, who assumes no liability for errors or omissions. Alphabetical Index to Advertisers inquiry No. Page No. Ml 1ST DESK SYSTEMS, INC.CIV M2 AFFINITY MICROSYSTEMS.15 M3 ALLAN BONADIO ASSOC.14 M4 ALPHA MICRO .70 M5 ALPHA MICRO .70 * APPLE COMPUTER.2,3 M56 APPLIED DATA COMMUNICATION ... 40 * AST RESEARCH INC.27 M7 BASF.28 M8 BEVERLY HILLS COMPUTER.73 M9 BORLAND INTERNATIONAL.5 M10 BORLAND INTERNATIONAL.5 Mil BRAINPOWER.43 M57 BYTE BITS.79 * BYTE SUB SERVICE .77 M41 CALIFORNIA FREEWARE.93 Ml2 CAPILANO COMPUTING .80 Ml3 CE SOFTWARE .23 MUCH PRODUCTS.82 M15CH PRODUCTS.82 Inquiry No. Page No. M16 COMPUTABLE FUNCTIONS INC.87 * COMPUTER CONTINUUM.79 Ml8 COREL SOFTWARE.45 Ml9 D2 SOFTWARE .36 M58 DATAPRO .88 M20 DCM DATA PRODUCTS.8 M21 DESIGN SCIENCE.37 M22 DOUGLAS ELECTRONICS .20 M23 EDUCOMP COMPUTER SERVICES . . 38 M24 EDUCOMP COMPUTER SERVICES . . 38 M25 ERGOTRON.11 M26 FOX SOFTWARE .Cll M27 GENERIC SOFTWARE.9 M28 GENERIC SOFTWARE.9 M29 HARDWARE HOUSE.8 * INFORMIX SOFTWARE.33 M30 10 TECH.42 M31 MACONLY, INC.17 M32 MACDOCTOR ELECTRONICS.Clll M33 MAINSTAY.25 Inquiry No. Page No. M34 MANX SOFTWARE SYSTEMS.51 * MCGRAW-HILL INFORMATION. . . 18,19 M35 MICRO CAD/CAM INC.41 M36NANAO.56 M37 NANAO.56 M38 NATIONAL INSTRUMENTS.13 M39 PALOMAR SOFTWARE INC.54 M40 PARAGON CONCEPTS INC.24 M42 PRACTICAL PERIPHERALS.59 M43 SECOND WAVE INC.16 M44 SHER-MARK PRODUCTS.39 M45SHREVE SYSTEMS .10 M47 SUMMAGRAPHICS.81 M48 TPS ELECTRONICS.69 M49 VAMP INC.34 M50 VAR ECONOMETRICS.12 M51 WARP NINE ENGINEERING.6 M52 WEST RIDGE DESIGNS.12 M53 WHITE PINE SOFTWARE.10 * Correspond directly with company Index to Advertisers by Product Category Inquiry No. Page No. HARDWARE M60 ADDINS • AST RESEARCH INC. . 27 M61 DRIVES M18 COREL SOFTWARE. . 45 M32 MACDOCTOR ELECTRONICS . Clll M62 INSTRUMENTATION * COMPUTER CONTINUUM . . . . . 79 M30 10 TECH . . 42 M63 KEYBOARDS/MICE M14 CH PRODUCTS. 82 M15 CH PRODUCTS. . 82 M47 SUMMAGRAPHICS. . 81 M64 MASS STORAGE M4 ALPHA MICRO. . 70 M5 ALPHA MICRO. . 70 M7 BASF. . 28 M18 COREL SOFTWARE. . . 45 * MISCELLANEOUS M56 APPLIED DATA COMM. . . 40 * AST RESEARCH INC. . . 27 M43 SECOND WAVE INC. . . 16 M44 SHER-MARK PRODUCTS . . . . . 39 M65 MODEMS/MULTIPLEXORS M42 PRACTICAL PERIPHERALS. . . . 59 Inquiry No. Page No. M66 MONITORS M36 NANAO.56 M37 NANAO.56 M44 SHER-MARK PRODUCTS .39 M67 PRINTERS/PLOTTERS M30 10 TECH .42 M68 SCANNERS M48 TPS ELECTRONICS.69 M51 WARP NINE ENGINEERING ...6 M69 SYSTEMS * APPLE COMPUTER.2,3 SOFTWARE M70 APPLE2/MAC APPLICATIONS Bu3lness/0ffice Ml 1ST DESK SYSTEMS, INC. ..CIV Mil BRAINPOWER.43 M26 FOX SOFTWARE.Cll M71 APPLE2/MAC APPLICATIONS Scientific/Technical M3 ALLAN BONADIO ASSOC.14 Ml 2 CAPILANO COMPUTING.80 M21 DESIGN SCIENCE.37 M30 10 TECH .42 M38 NATIONAL INSTRUMENTS .... 13 Inquiry No. Page No. M50 VAR ECONOMETRICS.12 M72 APPLE2/MAC APPLICATIONS Miscellaneous M23 EDUCOMP COMP. SERVICES . 38 M24 EDUCOMP COMP. SERVICES . . 38 M73 APPLE2/MAC APPLICATIONS Word Processing M40 PARAGON CONCEPTS INC. . . . 24 M74 APPLE2/MAC— ■CAD M22 DOUGLAS ELECTRONICS . . . . . 20 M27 GENERIC SOFTWARE. . . . 9 M28 GENERIC SOFTWARE. . . . 9 M35 MICRO CAD/CAM INC. . 41 M49 VAMP INC. . . 34 M75 APPLE2/MAC— -LAN M13 CE SOFTWARE. . . 23 M20 DCM DATA PRODUCTS. . . . 8 M76 APPLE2/MAC—LANGUAGES M9 BORLAND INTERNATIONAL . . . . 5 M10 BORLAND INTERNATIONAL . . . . 5 M16 COMPUTABLE FUNCTIONS INC.87 M20 DCM DATA PRODUCTS. . . . 8 M33 MAINSTAY . . . 25 M34 MANX SOFTWARE SYSTEMS . . 51 M77 APPLE2/MAC—UTILITIES M2 AFFINITY MICRO SYSTEMS . . . 15 Inquiry No. Page No. M9 BORLAND INTERNATIONAL .... 5 M10 BORLAND INTERNATIONAL .... 5 Ml9 D2 SOFTWARE.36 M34 MANX SOFTWARE SYSTEMS . . 51 M39 PALOMAR SOFTWARE INC. ...54 M78 APPLE2/MAC—COMMUNICATIONS M42 PRACTICAL PERIPHERALS .... 59 M53 WHITE PINE SOFTWARE.10 M79 MAIL ORDER/ RETAIL M8 BEVERLY HILLS COMP.73 M41 CALIFORNIA FREEWARE.93 M29 HARDWARE HOUSE .8 M31 MACONLY, INC.17 M45 SHREVE SYSTEMS.10 M80 EDUCATIONAL/ INSTRUCTIONAL M58 DATAPRO.88 * INFORMIX SOFTWARE.33 * MCGRAW-HILL INFO.18,19 MISCELLANEOUS M25 ERGOTRON .11 M52 WEST RIDGE DESIGNS.12 ' Correspond directly with company 96 BYTE* 1988 Mac Special Edition Macintosh Supplement im supplement JusHoNow^epTl^f and* 3 h products and advertis ers in this sped 1 Circle numbers on reply card which correspond to numbers assigned to items of interest to you. 2 Check all the appropriate answers to questions “A” through “F”. 3 Circle for FREE INFORMATION Print your name ant address and mail. Ml M8 M3 M10 M2 M9 M15 M16 M17 M22 M23 M24 M29 M30 M31 M36 M37 M38 M43 M44 M45 M50 M51 M57 M58 M64 M65 M66 M71 M72 M73 M52 M59 M4 M5 Mil M12 M18 M19 M25 M26 M32 M33 M39 M40 M46 M47 M53 M54 M60 M61 M67 M68 M74 M75 M6 M7 M13 M14 M20 M21 M27 M28 M34 M35 M41 M42 M48 M49 M55 M56 M62 M63 M69 M70 M76 M77 M78 M79 M85 M86 M92 M93 M99 M100 M106 M107 M113 M114 M120 M121 M127 M128 M134 M135 M141 M142 M148 M149 M80 M81 M87 M88 M94 M95 M101 M102 M108 M109 M115 M116 M122 M123 M129 M130 M136 M137 M143 M144 M150 M151 M82 M89 M96 M103 M110 Ml 17 M124 M131 M138 M145 M152 M83 M84 M90 M91 M97 M98 M104 M105 Mill M112 M118 M119 M125 M126 M132 M133 M139 M140 M146 M147 M153 M154 M155 M156 M162 M163 M169 M170 M176 M177 M183 M184 M190 M191 M197 M198 M204 M205 M211 M212 M218 M219 M225 M226 M157 M158 M159 M164 M165 M166 M171 M172 M173 M178 M179 M180 M185 M186 M187 M192 M193 M194 M199 M200 M201 M206 M207 M208 M213 M214 M215 M220 M221 M222 M227 M228 M229 M160 M161 M167 M168 M174 M175 M181 M182 M188 M189 M195 M196 M202 M203 M209 M210 M216 M217 M223 M224 M230 M231 M232 M233 M239 M240 M246 M247 M253 M254 M260 M261 M267 M268 M274 M275 M281 M282 M288 M289 M295 M296 M234 M235 M241 M242 M248 M249 M255 M256 M262 M263 M269 M270 M276 M277 M283 M284 M290 M291 M297 M298 M236 M237 M243 M244 M250 M251 M257 M258 M264 M265 M271 M272 M278 M279 M285 M286 M292 M293 M299 M238 M245 M252 M259 M266 M273 M280 M287 M294 ill out this coupon carefully. PLEASE primt d« * requested via TIPS. This car'd is va.id forTLnr;fm C cre^at h0n0red U "' eSS the zip code is -eluded. A. Do you have management responsibilities within your company? 1 jO Senior-level management 2 LJ Other management 3 U Non-management th,? eaSO , n J or rec l uest: (Check all that apply.) 1 O Business use for yourself 2 U Business use for your company 3 □ Personal use C. For how many Macintosh personal computers do you ctw'entfy buy, specify or approve brands of products? 1 D 10 or less 2 □ 11-25 3 □ 26-99 4 □ 100 or more D. For how many Macintosh personal computers will you buy specify or approve brands of products within the next two years? 1 □ 10 or less 2 □ 11-25 3 □ 26-99 4 □ 100 or more Supplement inquiries cannot be E. In total , how many Macintosh personal computers is your entire organization considering for purchase within the next two years? 1 □ 10 or less 2 □ 11-25 3 □ 26-99 4 □ 100-499 5 □ 500 or more F. What type of personal compu do you primarily use? 1 □ IBM AT or 80286-based compatible 2 □ Compaq 386 or 80386- based compatible 3 □ IBM PS/2 (with Micro- Channel) or compatible 4 U Apple Mac (except Mac II) 5 □ Apple Mac II ' 6 □ Other Company Address City NO POSTAGE NECESSARY IF MAILED IN THE UNITED STATE BUSINESS REPLY MAIL FIRST CLASS MAIL PERMIT NO. 176 DALTON, MA POSTAGE WILL BE PAID BY ADDRESSEE reader service PO Box 5110 Pittsfield, MA 01203-9926 USA Macintosh supplement receive free information on Macintosh products and advertisers in this special element, just follow steps 1, 2 and 3. 1 Circle numbers on reply card which correspond to numbers assigned to items of interest to you. 2 Check all the appropriate answers to questions A through “F”. Print your name and address and mail. NO POSTAGE NECESSARY IF MAILED IN THE UNITED STATES I I I I business reply mail FIRST CLASS MAIL PERMIT NO. 176 DALTON, MA POSTAGE WILL BE PAID BY ADDRESSEE READER SERVICE PO Box 5110 Pittsfield, MA 01203-9926 USA Circle for FREE INFORMATION Ml M2 M3 M4 M5 M8 M9 M10 Mil M12 M15 M16 M17 M18 M19 M22 M23 M24 M25 M26 M29 M30 M31 M32 M33 M36 M37 M38 M39 M40 M43 M44 M45 M46 M47 M50 M51 M52 M53 M54 M57 M58 M59 M60 M61 M64 M65 M66 M67 M68 M71 M72 M73 M74 M75 M6 M7 M13 M14 M20 M21 M27 M28 M34 M35 M41 M42 M48 M49 M55 M56 M62 M63 M69 M70 M76 M77 M78 M79 M85 M86 M92 M93 M99 M100 M106 M107 M113 M114 M120 M121 M127 M128 M134 M135 M141 M142 M148 M149 M80 M81 M87 M88 M94 M95 M101 M102 M108 M109 M115 M116 M122 M123 M129 M130 M136 M137 M143 M144 M150 M151 M82 M96 M103 M110 M117 M124 M131 M138 M145 M152 M83 M84 M90 M91 M97 M98 M104 M105 Mill M112 M118 M119 M125 M126 M132 M133 M139 M140 M146 M147 M153 M154 M155 M156 M162 M163 M169 M170 M176 M177 M183 M184 M190 M191 M197 M198 M204 M205 M211 M212 M218 M219 M225 M226 M157 M158 M159 M164 M165 M166 M171 M172 M173 M178 M179 M180 M185 M186 M187 M192 M193 M194 M199 M200 M201 M206 M207 M208 M213 M214 M215 M220 M221 M222 M2Z7 M228 M229 . Supplement inquiries cannot be D. For how many Macintosh A Do you have management responsibilities within your company? 1 □ Senior-level management 2 □ Other management 3 □ Non-management B. Reason for request: (Check all that apply.) 1 □ Business use for yourself 2 □ Business use for your company 3 □ Personal use C For how many Macintosh personal computers do you currently buy, specify or approve brands of products? 1 □ 10 or less 2 □ 11-25 3 □ 26-99 4 □ 100 or more U. ror now many -- personal computers will you buy, specify or approve brands ot products within the next two years? 1 □ 10 or less 2 □ 11-25 3 □ 26-99 4 □ 100 or more E. In total, how many Macintosh personal computers is your entire organization considering for purchase within the next two years? 1 □ 10 or less 2 □ 11-25 3 □ 26-99 4 □ 100-499 5 □ 500 or more F. What type of personal computer do you primarily use? 1 □ IBM AT or 80286 -based compatible 2 □ Compaq 386 or 80386- based compatible 3 □ IBM PS/2 (with Micro¬ Channel) or compatible 4 □ Apple Mac (except Mac II) 5 □ Apple Mac II 6 □ Other Name. Title _ Business Phone (_ Company Address _ City_ . State. -Zip. B efore you buy a memory upgrade, it pays to really exam¬ ine what you’re getting for your money. We can show you what to look for by making these points of distinction on Brainstorm,™ the complete memory expansion kit from Mac Doctor Electronics. GUARANTEED EXPANDABILITY All memory upgrades are expandable, right? Wrong. Only Brainstorm guarantees full expanda¬ bility up to 4 megabytes. When you try to expand the others, they require you to insert memory chips that they don’t even provide! Or they tell you to remove the Mac’s motherboard and wait 8 weeks to get your upgrade back. Brainstorm lets you up¬ grade quickly and easily by simply exchanging a plug¬ in memory module. 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Circle M32 on Reader Service Card Accessory Programs: IstDESK accessory programs increase data productivity, versatility, and appearance. ® Easy-To-Use Macintosh Vertical Market Databases for Every Size Business. § & c .2 Im o> > C o U T3 G 3 u v Vi G 03 u H fa 3 & *3 O ed «g 4) -a p 3 P 5 o H Pi O Ph 3 ■5 a j§ x3 o .s ■g I a«| 0) u 113.35 362.02 322 -^C n n in OO vO Company Ajax Co. Harris flotor Co. FHisnn Tools Co. I Area | n; ai □: 1— k— 1—1 cc d oq o o a r O) 23 ■4— 1 L. O Q. t/ CO CO 7 LU LU i — 1 — 1 / XX/ a: or/ S' tg CD £ U y O ca X r-r. « y S C/J 3 Dm s ■g 3 o s •q rt C- -O W) £ I -E Vi 03 -O G x m— i o G c a 1 O) E s i £ a> Pi . — 60 ^ “ O *c 2 c •- 03 .2 -a £11 £> ”3 ■s £ a> 3 p * g 1 a-°s PQ CP W H < O >S i 3 - o ■ 8 . i .1 -S m oj vi a> B g ‘So G a> a> cn 03 JQ 03 >*-» 03 T3 T3 G 03 w H S 00 1 E _ 3 .S G 8 g G O a> Pi w W s 1) 3 s •c 4> cx 4) r3 * H X W H fa co ju O cx c* E CJ ‘So « l 3 S s ■5 .S O oo m 3 & 3 I & 5 2o d « 1 g W oo £1 y s <3 w H 11 s -o M " £ 3 S3 g ? *2 w) ^ ° .5 g ^30 .5 -a -a m o ca ! S | § «g ca 3 .S w W> 4) .s s s C > 3 •3 8 .3 ^ j= ca ca cj 3 -3 i 4) £ £3 g 4) 5 •g & X) 3 — E T 3 § 8 | n W 3 2 4) 2 co *£3 3 «> g 2 s I D O) o ► u O) cn £3 a> > > o c/5 m T3 4> 3 kb 4) < 3 X .3 oo LJ u g H c 3 ^ fell rv .« ca "> «i u ? §b § < UJ H s 3 a s •= cx o a ^ 2 g -O 4> ca oO O 3 £ £ q vT § § •p •- % “ y 8 4> O & cC g J5 p .oo § > .3 ° a I x q 2 & 3 3 d f M Uh I £ I I 3 < & X k § CJ G o lm Qm ^ -A < bX) 2 2 t " oo oT ^ a >s ^ o. & X 2 ! s co W 1 H. •C 0> c ^ VD co 00 C f) !-> 4) U OO 3 o> .X Vi .3 5 o 3 3 S 3 3 6 o 3 fa •p o a. a S' -a < § IsfllESIL $Y s ^ ems > Inc 7 Industrial Park Road, Medway, MA 02053 1-800-522-2286 FREE 68 Page Color Catalog and DEMO Disc - See us at MacWorld, Boston , World Trade Center Circle Ml on Reader Service Card CHAOS MANOR MAIL continued from page 34 or bottom of screen; top or bottom of document. • Screen: one screen forward or back; scroll 12 lines up or down. • Delete: character; next or previous word; to end or beginning of line; sen¬ tence (cursor anywhere in the sentence); paragraph (cursor anywhere in the paragraph). • Other: underscore from cursor to end of line; change case (uppercase to lower¬ case or lowercase to uppercase); direc¬ tory; certain other DOS functions; auto¬ matic paragraph numbering. And that’s only a partial list. If you want these things laid out as in WordStar, you can come close. In fact, with that in mind, someone has written a keyboard file for XyWrite called XyStar. Many other functions are available, and all are called by two-letter codes that can be installed or rearranged within the keyboard file at any time you wish. You can have more than one keyboard file and load the alternates for use at any point in a document. You can create style sheets, or their equivalent, save them as save/gets, and load them at boot-up or any other time, including in the middle of a document. Text reformats instantly as you make insertions or deletions. The spelling checker can either do a whole document at once or correct you as you go along. Be assured that I have no connection with XyQuest other than my faith in its product. Peter H. Weil Larchmont, NY My original introduction to XyWrite was from my friend and publisher Jim Baen, who told me I’d love it. Alas, by then I was addicted to SideKick, and in those days XyWrite wouldn't run with SideKick or, indeed, with any other mem¬ ory-resident program. The latest XyWrite does work nicely with memory-resident programs, and it even runs under DESQview, so there aren’t any real barriers to my using it; but by the time they got it to do that, I was in the middle of a book with something else. Til get at XyWrite Real Soon Now, I promise. I know that a lot of my col¬ leagues use it, and it does a neat job of interfacing with Atex, which most pub¬ lishers like. —Jerry OS/2 Makes It Easier Dear Jerry, You’ve missed some of the major points concerning OS/2. These include the following: • Hardware independence. OS/2 has the potential of blowing the roof off the soft¬ ware industry. Instead of having to write device drivers for video, printers, and in¬ put devices, programmers can concen¬ trate on improving algorithms, adding features, and better debugging. Develop¬ ing new products and upgrades to old ones can thus be speeded. By the way, there is absolutely no reason OS/2 won’t support EGA. All someone has to do is write a display driver for it. Once. The issue of device independence also applies to Microsoft Windows, which is part of the proving ground for these ideas. • OS/2 does not replace MS-DOS. OS/2 will not be available to end users until sometime this year. Applications will start to trickle out about that time. It won’t be until 1989 that OS/2 applica¬ tions will start putting pressure on the MS-DOS market. Millions of 8088/86 machines will be able to run only MS- DOS. Many of these machines will never need OS/2. Microsoft has announced its continuing support of MS-DOS. • You don't have to buy a PS/2. IBM would like you to believe that the PS/2 is the wave of the future. Fortunately, be¬ cause OS/2 frees applications from being hardware-dependent, we will be saved from enslavement to Big Blue. All you will need to run OS/2 with Presentation Manager is an 80286 or higher proces¬ sor, 2 or more megabytes of memory, a hard disk drive, and a graphics adapter. These are my recommendations, not necessarily the listed requirements. These features are increasingly common these days. It’s not as if you are required to buy the most expensive configuration available. Many 8088 machines will be upgradable to OS/2 compatibility. If you can run CP/M until your Z80s grow moldy, then I’m sure there will be those who are still running MS-DOS when I crumble to dust. Operating sys¬ tems are tools for applications; applica¬ tions are tools for users. In the “old days,” users shopped for software and then bought the computer that ran it. Now that computers have become some¬ what commodity items, users will shop for software and buy the operating sys¬ tem that runs it. If you don’t need OS/2, then don’t buy it. Dennis Williamson Memphis, TN We'll just have to see what happens; the key to OS/2 will be how many soft¬ ware developers write programs making use of it. I do hope you 're right about the operating system making things easier; I also hope that someone gets a good Mod¬ ula-2, or even Ada, for OS/2, since I am not about to try programming in C, par¬ ticularly the C that comes with the OS/2 Developer's Kit. — Jerry ■ PC voice mail, now only $199. INCU/DBS •HAYES- COMPATIBII MODEM! Watson®, hailed by one reviewer as “the premier voice mail station” at $498, is an even better value at $199. Watson eliminates telephone tag and gives you big-system features like auto speed-dial, auto answer, message forwarding, and built-in 300/ 1200 bps modem. For an ear-opening business applications demo, call 1 (800) 6-WATSON (in Mass., (617) 651-2186). To order, call 1 (800) 533-6120 (in Mass., (617) 65S6066). Credit Cards Accepted. Watson Natural Microsystems Corporation Circle 156 on Reader Service Card AUGUST 1988 • BYTE 201 IN DEPTH TheC Language 205 The State of C by Brian W. Kemighan and Dennis M. Ritchie 215 A Better C? by Bjarne Stroustrup 219 It’s an Attitude by Jonathan S. Linowes 226 Resource Guide P rogramming languages—what can you say about them? They’re supposed to let you write software that can be understood more easily than machine language, and in fairness they do. But many are so terse and cryptic that you wonder how machine language could be any more difficult to read. And choosing the right language for a particular task is becoming as complex as knowing which dialect of which tongue the people speak in a remote area of Botswana. If you’re writing artificial- intelligence applications, you want one language; for scientific formulas, you want another; and the choices multiply almost by the number of variables in your system. On-line business applications might require one language, while the off-line ones should be written in yet another. One constant that arises out of this ap¬ parent chaos is the choice of the C lan¬ guage for system programming. From its inception, C has lifted the system pro¬ grammer out of the constant bit-twid¬ dling of assembly language—a welcome relief. And now C is expanding its influ¬ ence to applications programming as well. But C has its limitations. While you can program around most of them, you have to do just that. C+ + was designed to be C’s succes¬ sor. It overcomes many of the limitations of the C language, it offers object-ori¬ ented programming, and it presents a more comprehensive applications-pro- gramming language. This month, we are proud to offer two articles by noted experts in the C lan¬ guage. First, the famed team of Brian W. Kernighan and Dennis M. Ritchie ex¬ plains how C is evolving in “The State of C. ” They delve into what C can do—and what it can’t—and provide a look at the elements involved. Then, the guru of C+ + , Bjarne Stroustrup, explains how C+ + differs from C and describes the object-oriented approach to applications programming in “A Better C?” But C devotees are not to be outdone. In “It’s an Attitude,” Jonathan S. Linowes shows how object-oriented pro¬ gramming can indeed be accomplished in C, although that’s not its natural habi¬ tat. This article discusses the OOPC conventions. The battle between C and C + + is just heating up. There are quantities of C compilers and interpreters available for both the Macintosh and the IBM PC worlds. More and more companies are announcing C + + compilers and trans¬ lators. C has seized control of the system¬ programming field, but only time will tell whether C or C + + will win the fight for the applications arena. —Jane Morrill Tazelaar Senior Technical Editor , In Depth 202 BYTE* AUGUST 1988 ILLUSTRATION: ROBERTTINNEY © 1988 AUGUST 1988 -BYTE 203 CLEO is your SNA, BSC and Coax Gateway Sharing Information Whatever your industry, your computers need to share information with your mainframe. Or, they need to exchange data with other computers. In either case, you need a total communications solution. You need software, hardware interfaces and modems that all work together smoothly. You need CLEO! CLEO software products allow your computer to communicate with mini¬ computers and mainframes, and to emulate their workstations. Since 1981, CLEO has provided communications between micros, minis, and mainframes for the automotive, insurance, medical and banking industries. Today over 78,000 CLEO users worldwide are running on all major computer brands. The greatest number of these users run CLEO software on IBM Personal Computers and NETBIOS LANs. Complete Software/Hardware Package Every CLEO package contains all the software and hardware accessories you’ll need. Your selected CLEO SNA, BSC, or Coax software is packaged with 1) an internal modem card for dial-up applications, or 2) an interface card and cable for use with your existing modem, or 3) a Coax card for local connectivity. There’s no waiting for non-CLEO add-ons. And, you get prompt, single- for most stand-alone packages, up to $1,995.00 for the 32-user SNA gateway. Call us today to discuss your application. CLEO Software 1639 North Alpine Rd. Rockford, IL 61107 Telex 703639 FAX 815/397-6535 Headquarters: USA: 1 - 800 / 233-2536 Illinois: 1-800/422-2536 International: 815/397-8110 Sales and Distribution: Benelux: 31 (O) 33-948888 Canada, East: 800/361-3185 Canada, West: 800/361-1210 Canada, Montreal: 514/737-3631 Colombia, S.A.: 12172266 Denmark: 02 94 81 19 France: 146861136 Italy: (0331) 634 562 Mexico City: 596-5539 Sweden: 468311780 CLEO|| CLEO and 3780Plus are registered trademarks of CLEO Software. IBM is a registered trademark of International Business Machines Corporation. IN DEPTH THE C LANGUAGE The State of C It’s not just for system programming anymore Brian W. Kernighan and Dennis M. Ritchie C is a general-pur¬ pose program¬ ming language that was originally designed and implemented around 1972 by Dennis Rit¬ chie at Bell Labs. Its early growth was closely associated with the Unix system where it was developed, since both the system and most of the pro¬ grams that run on it are writ¬ ten in C. In recent years, C has become popular in a much wider variety of environ¬ ments, and it is no longer tied to any one operating system or machine. The C language was origi¬ nally designed for “systems programming”—that is, for writing programs like com¬ pilers, operating systems, and text editors. But it has proven quite satisfactory for other ap¬ plications as well, including database systems, telephone¬ switching systems, numerical analysis, engineering programs, and a great deal of text-processing software. Today, C is one of the most widely used languages in the world, and C compilers exist for al¬ most every computer. Where Did It Come From? C has its roots in the language BCPL, de¬ signed by Martin Richards around 1967. BCPL is a “typeless” language: It oper¬ ates only on a single data type, the ma¬ chine word. As such, BCPL was an ex¬ cellent match to the hardware of word- oriented machines. In 1970, Ken Thompson designed a stripped-down version of BCPL for use with the first Unix system on the PDP-7; this language was called B. It too is typeless. With the advent of the PDP-11, on which the next version of Unix was written, it became clear that a typeless language did not match this hardware nearly as well. The PDP-11 provided several different sizes of fundamental ob¬ jects—1-byte characters, 2- byte integers, and 4-byte floating-point numbers—and B provided no way to even talk about these different-size objects, let alone operators to manipulate them. The C language was origi¬ nally an attempt to deal with a variety of types of data by adding the notion of data type to the B language. In C, as in most languages, each object has a type as well as a value; the type determines the mean¬ ing of the operations that can be applied to the value, and how much storage is occu¬ pied. For example, declara¬ tions like int i, j;, double d;, and float x; determine the opera¬ tions and space requirements of the vari¬ ables. In the statement d = x + i * j ;, the compiler uses the type information to de¬ termine that integer multiplication is ade¬ quate for i * j, but the result must be converted to floating point before it is added to x and then converted to double precision for assignment to d. continued ILLUSTRATION: ROBERT TINNEY © 1988 AUGUST 1988 • BYTE 205 IN DEPTH THE STATE OF C Although C was originally imple¬ mented for a PDP-11, it was used on other machines as early as 1975. Steve Johnson implemented a “portable com¬ piler,” designed to be relatively easy to modify, to generate code for different machines. Since then, C has been imple¬ mented on most computers, from the smallest microcomputers to machines as large as the CRAY-2. The C language is sufficiently well standardized, even without a formal standard, that with some care you can write C programs that will run without change on any machine supporting the language and a minimal run-time environment. C began on a small machine and was derived from a sequence of small lan¬ guages; its designer preferred simplicity and elegance to features. Furthermore, C has, from the beginning, been meant for system-programming applications, where efficiency matters. Accordingly, it’s not surprising that C is a good match for the capabilities of real machines. For example, it provides as its basic data types only those objects that are directly supported by typical hardware: charac¬ ters, integers (perhaps of several sizes), and floating-point numbers (again in several sizes). You can create more complicated ob¬ jects like arrays, structures, and so forth, but C provides few operators for manipu¬ lating them as a unit; you must write the functions that compare strings, assign one array to another, and so on. Somewhat more unusual, C doesn’t provide input and output operations as part of the language. This is not to say that C programs can’t do I/O, of course, but simply that I/O is done by functions defined by the user or in a library, and not by built-in statements of the lan¬ guage. This is in contrast to, for exam¬ ple, FORTRAN’S READ and WRITE, and the INPUT and PRINT of BASIC, which are parts of those languages. To complete the list of things that C might provide but doesn’t: It has no stor¬ age management, like Pascal’s new func¬ tion, and no facilities for concurrent pro¬ cessing, such as Ada’s rendezvous mechanism. You can easily write these capabilities in C, but they are provided by function libraries, not as part of the language. Function calls are notationally clumsier than direct operators; for exam¬ ple, compare BASIC’s string comparison IF A$ = B$ THEN ... to the way you might write it in C: if (equal(a, b)) ... Function calls also involve more over¬ head than in-line code. In any case, the degree to which fea¬ tures are omitted from C is one of its dis¬ tinguishing characteristics. Linguistic Elements Control flow: Control flow in C is quite conventional, although richer than in FORTRAN or BASIC. C contains two decision-making statements: if.. .else and switch. In the statement if ( expr) statl else stat2 expr is evaluated; if it’s true (nonzero), statl is executed; otherwise, stat2 is exe¬ cuted. The entire else part of the state¬ ment is optional. In switch (expr) { case constl: statl case const2 : stat2 default: stat } expr is evaluated and its value compared against the various consts. If it finds a match, the corresponding stat is exe¬ cuted. If it doesn’t, the stat for the de¬ fault part is executed. The default is optional. The switch statement is like Pascal’s case statement, except that Pas¬ cal has no default. C also contains three loops: while, for, and do. In the statement while (expr) stat expr is evaluated; if it’s true, stat is exe¬ cuted, and expr is evaluated again. When expr becomes false, the loop terminates. The statement for (statl; expr; statJ) stat2 is equivalent to the while loop: statl while (expr) { st at2 statH } The do statement is like Pascal’s re¬ peat... until except for the sense of the termination test. In the statement do stat while (expr) stat is executed, and expr is tested. If it’s true, the loop repeats. The statement break causes an imme¬ diate exit from an enclosing loop or switch; the statement continue causes the next iteration of a loop to begin. C also provides a goto statement, but it’s infrequently used. In all these examples, a stat can be a single statement like x = 3 or a group of statements enclosed in braces, which are like begin...end in other languages. Statements end in semicolons. Data types : The basic data types in C are char (a single byte); int, short, and long (integers of various lengths); and float and double (floating-point num¬ bers of two different lengths). The char data and the various integers can be signed or unsigned. You can combine these objects into an infinite (in principle) set of “derived” data types using arrays, structures, unions, and pointers. Arrays are famil¬ iar: char mesg[100]; defines an array mesg of 100 bytes, ac¬ cessed as mesg[0] through mesg[99]. C doesn’t provide a string data type; it uses arrays of char instead, with the end of the data marked by a 0 byte. This is what the compiler generates for a string con¬ stant like "hello world\n M . Within a string, certain “escape sequences” like \n are used to represent special charac¬ ters like newline. This string contains 12 characters and a terminating 0 byte. A structure is a collection of related variables that need not have the same type (like a record in Pascal). For example, struct object { int x, y; /# position #/ float v; /# velocity #/ char id[10]; /* identification*/ h struct object obj; declares a structure called object and defines a variable obj of type struct object. Individual members of the structure are referred to as obj . v, and so on. Notice that the object structure in¬ cludes an array id, whose components are obj . id[0] through obj . id [9]. You can have arrays of structures, as well. C provides pointers, or machine ad¬ dresses, as an integral part of the lan¬ guage, in a much less restricted form than in Pascal and Ada. The declarations char #pc; struct object *pobj; declare pc to be a pointer to char, and pobj to be a pointer to an obj ect struc- 206 BYTE* AUGUST 1988 IN DEPTH THE STATE OF C ture. The value that a structure points to is accessed by *pc or *pobj, as sug¬ gested by the form of the declaration; the “dereferencing” operation * is equiva¬ lent to the caret (~) in Pascal. Individual members of the structure are accessed by, for example, pobj->v. If p is a pointer to an object of type T and currently points to an element of an array of Ts, then p+1 is a pointer to the next element in that array. Similarly, if p and q point to elements of the same array, and p is less than q, then q - p is the number of elements from p to q. In short, arithmetic operations on pointers are scaled by the size of the object to which they point; the actual size is usu¬ ally irrelevant as you program. When it is relevant, a sizeof operator exists to compute it, so the program doesn’t spec¬ ify the explicit size for any particular machine. C’s complete integration of pointers and address arithmetic is one of the strengths of the language. Operators and expressions : C has a rich set of operators compared to most conventional languages. Besides the usual arithmetic operators and % (remainder), several other groups deserve special mention. First, C provides operators for ma¬ nipulating bits within a word (see table 1). For example, the function in listing 1 counts the 1-bits in its argument by re¬ peatedly testing the rightmost bit, then shifting the argument one position to the right until it becomes 0. The declaration unsigned means that n will be treated as a logical quantity, not an arithmetic one. The function bit count illustrates a second group of operators. Any operator such as >> that takes two operands has a corresponding “assignment operator,” such as >>=, so that the statement v = v » expr can be written more concisely as v >>= expr This notation is easier to read, particu¬ larly when v is a complicated expression instead of a single-letter variable. A third group of operators deals with logical conditions. The operators && and 11 are evaluated left-to-right, and evalua¬ tion stops as soon as the value of the ex¬ pression is known. In a construction like if (i < N && x[i] > 0) ... if i is greater than or equal to N (which is presumably the size of the array x), then the test involving x[i] will not be made. This behavior of logical operators is called “short-circuitevaluation.” Functions : The overall structure of a C program is a set of declarations of vari¬ ables and functions. These definitions are often kept in separate files if the pro¬ gram is large; you can compile them sep¬ arately and link them together with a linking loader. Within a function, variables are nor¬ mally “automatic”—that is, they appear when the function is entered and may dis¬ appear when it is left, as in the bitcount. However, if you declare a variable as static, it retains its value from one call to the next. Variables declared outside of any function are global; they can be re¬ ferred to anywhere in the program. Functions are recursive; the standard (and hackneyed) example is the factorial function (see listing 2). The arguments to a function are passed by value, which means that the function receives a copy of the argument, not the original object. (Notice that the function bitcount mod¬ ified its argument; this is safe because it’s actually a copy.) You can always ob¬ tain the effect of call by reference when necessary by passing a pointer to the ob¬ ject. Function arguments and return values can be any of the basic types— pointers, structures, or unions. To pass an array, you pass a pointer to its first element. The ANSI Standard For many years, the definition of C was the reference manual in the first edition of The C Programming Language. In 1983, ANSI established a committee to provide a modern, comprehensive defi¬ nition of C. The result, the ANSI stan¬ dard, or ANSI C, is expected to be ap¬ proved late in 1988. Modern compilers already support most of the features of the standard. The language has changed relatively little since 1978; one of the goals of the standard was to make sure that most existing programs would remain valid, or, failing that, that compilers could pro¬ duce warnings of new behavior. Basically, the most important change is a new syntax for declaring and defin¬ ing functions. A function declaration can now include a description of the function’s arguments; the definition syn¬ tax changes to match. This extra infor¬ mation makes it much easier for com¬ pilers to detect errors that are caused by mismatched arguments; in our experi¬ ence, it’s a very useful addition. continued Table 1: The C operators for manipulating bits within a word; these are necessary for many system-programming applications. & bitwise AND | bitwise OR * bitwise exclusive-OR one’s complement << left shift >> right shift Listing I: The bitcount function counts the 1-bits in its argument by repeatedly testing the rightmost bit , then shifting the argument one position to the right until it becomes 0. bitcount(n) /* count 1 bits in n */ unsigned int n; { int b; for (b = 0; n != 0; n >>= 1) if (n & 1) ++b; return b; Listing 2: The classic example of a recursive function—the factorial function—written in C. fact(n) int n; /* returns n! (n >= 0) */ if (n <= 0) return 1; else return n * fact(n-1); AUGUST 1988 -BYTE 207 To illustrate, consider this typical fragment of C as it would once have been written: int n; double x, sqrt(); x = sqrt(n); The sqrt function expects an argument of type double, but n is an int. This error is not detected, and the results are guaranteed to be nonsense. With the new function prototype syntax from ANSI C, you would write the fragment this way: int n; double x, sqrt(double); x = sqrt(n); Here the compiler has been informed about the type that sqrt expects, so it generates code to convert the integer n to floating point. If you inadvertently wrote an expression that couldn’t be converted to double, such as x = sqrt(&n);, the compiler would catch the error. The syntax of function definitions changes to match; formal parameters are listed between parentheses after the function name. Thus, the function bit- count would become: bitcount(unsigned int n) { f ’ There are also other small-scale lan¬ guage changes. Structure assignment, enumerations, and the void data type, all of which had been widely available, are now officially part of the language. You can initialize automatic structures and arrays, and you can do floating-point computations in single-precision; this may lead to more efficient computation on smaller machines. The properties of arithmetic conver¬ sions are spelled out more carefully. There are now hexadecimal constants and escape sequences as well as the octal ones. The C preprocessor, which does textual macro substitution, is much more elaborate; it gives substantially more control over the macrogeneration pro¬ cess. Most of these changes will have only minor effects on your program¬ ming. A second significant contribution of the standard is the definition of a li¬ brary to accompany C. It specifies func¬ tions for accessing the operating system (e.g., to read and write files), formatted input and output (scanf and printf), memory allocation (malloc), string ma¬ I N DEPTH THE STATE OF C nipulation (e.g., strcmp), mathematical computations (e.g., sin and log), and the like. A collection of standard header files to be included with user-written programs provides uniform access to declarations of functions and data types. Programs that use this library to interact with a host system are assured of compatible behav¬ ior. Most of the library is closely mod¬ eled on the Unix system’s “standard I/O library,” and similar routines are widely available on other systems as well. Again, you won’t see much change. Because most computers directly sup¬ port the data types and control structures that C provides, the run-time library re¬ quired to implement self-contained pro¬ grams is tiny. The standard library func¬ tions are only called explicitly, so you can avoid them if you don’t need them. Most of them can be written in C and, ex¬ cept for the operating-system details they conceal, are themselves portable. An Assessment of C C is a compact, efficient, and expressive language. Indeed, C is good enough that it has almost completely supplanted the use of assembly language programming on many systems. The use of a clean, readable high-level language has over¬ whelming advantages; one is simply that it becomes possible to read programs, which is excruciatingly difficult in some languages. C is a relatively “low level” language. This characterization is not pejorative; it simply means that C deals with the same sorts of objects that most computers do— namely, characters, numbers, and ad¬ dresses. These can be combined and moved about with the arithmetic and log¬ ical operators implemented by real machines. Since C is relatively small, it can be described in a small space and learned quickly. You can reasonably expect to know and understand and, indeed, regu¬ larly use the entire language. Another advantage is its portability. Although C matches the capabilities of many computers, it is independent of any particular machine architecture. With a little care, it’s easy to write portable pro¬ grams that can be run without change on a variety of machines. The standard makes portability issues explicit and pre¬ scribes a set of constants that character¬ ize the machine on which the program is run. Another of C’s strengths is its absence of restrictions. A popular trend in pro¬ gramming languages is “strong typing,” which (roughly speaking) implies that the language undertakes to check care¬ fully that the program contains only valid combinations of data types. Strong typing sometimes catches bugs early, but it also means that some programs just can’t be written, because they inherently require violations of the type-combina¬ tion rules. A storage allocator is a good example: You can’t write Pascal’s new function— which returns a pointer to a block of stor¬ age—in Pascal, because there’s no way to define a function that can return an ar¬ bitrary type. But it’s easy and safe to write it in C because the language lets you state that a specific violation of the type rules is intentional. C is not a strongly typed language, but as it has evolved, its type checking has been strengthened. The original defini¬ tion of C frowned on, but permitted, the interchange of pointers and integers; this has long since been eliminated, and the standard now requires the proper decla¬ rations and explicit conversions that good compilers had already enforced. The new function declarations are another step in this direction. Compilers will warn of most type errors, and there is no automatic conversion of incompatible data types. Nevertheless, C retains the basic philosophy that programmers know what they are doing; it only re¬ quires that you state your intentions explicitly. C has even proven to be a good lan¬ guage for other languages to compile into. One of the best examples is the Yacc-compiler compiler, which converts the grammar specification for a lan¬ guage into a C program that is used to parse statements in that language. Natu¬ rally, one language specified this way is C itself. What’s wrong with C? At the lowest level, there are some poor choices of op¬ erator precedences. Some users feel that the switch statement should be changed so that control doesn’t flow through from one case to the next, as it does now. The concise syntax is sometimes daunting to newcomers; complicated declarations are often hard to read. One of the new ex¬ amples in the second edition of The C Programming Language is a pair of pro¬ grams to convert C declarations into words and back again. Portability problems sometimes arise if you rely on undefined or implementa¬ tion-defined properties. For example, the order in which function arguments are evaluated is not specified, so it’s pos¬ sible to write code that depends on that order and will thus execute differently on continued 208 BYTE* AUGUST 1988 How to create high-performance programs frhrtf ("Iks math iriatf(”xFsNiaFsNazF* xFm •UrHttmt, *Ur ->ci •to = liaoKitwct MIB Output Window 0x02cb iobt8] pointer P0x02cb 0x02ed ► ioht0] Tobfi] struct pointer without wasting your time or money rder now by calling our toll free number or mail the coupon to Mix Software, 1132 Commerce Drive, Richardson, TX 75081. Power Ctrace Debugger Watch Point Window Variables Window Step 1: The $19.95 Power C compiler ower C is the new ANSI compatible C compiler that runs faster than Microsoft C and has more functions than Turbo C®. Power C combines high-performance software with superb docu¬ mentation, all for less than the price of most C books alone. It’s your fast route to fast programs without the fast bucks. Compare Power C to the competition and see how much time and money you’ll save. Step 2: The $19.95 Power Ctrace debugger flu* llltclfPtrrfoMtdrue C Compiler C Source Window 35 printf("addr->street start Mi " . 37 • • >p»i -—---1 3B , P*! 9 watchpoiirt has natured. 39 pr size > 0 • > I Old value was 0 - Hew value is 122 - Space bar will clear notice 8 watchpoint Space for strucl -—- starting at address 5416:0000 Jkiir Assigning values to nenbers. ittr>un ■Ilf >ltlMt The structure nenber values... feJ8r~)city iiarnim tx5416:«l "Joe Bob's h ”1251 Cm CM Joe Bob's Texas 1251 Cow Chip Trail fort Worth TX 76442 Technical Specifications Power C includes: Power C compiler with integrated Make. Power C Linker. Power C Libraries (450 functions), the Power C book (680 pages), and support for... v 0 ANSI standard * IEEE floating point ^ 8087/80287 coprocessor auto-sensing of 8087/80287 v 0 automatic register variables v unlimited program size v 0 mixed model (near & far pointers) * graphics on CGA, EGA, VGA. & Hercules Optional Products: ^ Power Ctrace debugger Library source code * BCD business math Performance/Price Chart (execution times in seconds) Power C Quick C® Turbo C R 1) fib 23.8 53.4 26.4 2) sieve 27.6 43.2 25.5 3) tdbl 3.5 9.0 9.6 4) diskio 13.5 14.4 14.3 5) report 11.0 71.7 60.7 6) drystone 36.6 41.6 31.8 Compile/Link 73.9 113.5 81.4 EXE File Size 25120 32092 27184 Compiler Price $19.95 $99.00 $99.95 Debugger Price $19.95 N/C N/A Library Source $10.00 $150.00 $150.00 Total Cost $49.90 $249.00 $249.95 N/C no charge - N/A not available Benchmarks compiled using Make utility, command-line compiler, and medium memory model Power Ctrace is the new state-of-the-art C debugger that makes Microsoft’s CodeView look like old technology. Power Ctrace will reduce the time you spend debugging your C programs by at least a factor of 10. With Power Ctrace, you’ll be working smarter instead of harder. Actu¬ ally, you’ll be having so much fun that it won’t even feel like work anymore. Unlike other debuggers, Power Ctrace lets you debug graphics programs on a single monitor. You can even debug programs that write directly to video memory. However, the major advantage of Power Ctrace is simple operation. You won’t waste any time trying to understand or remember cryptic commands. With Power Ctrace, a single keystroke is all it takes. Help screens show you which key to press and pop-up menus list your options. Invest just 10 minutes with Power Ctrace now and you’ll save hours from now on. 1-800-333-0330 For technical support call: 1-214-783-6001 Minimum System Requirements: DOS 2.0 or later. 320K memory. 2 floppy drives or hard drive. Runs on IBM PC. XT. AT. PS/2 and compatibles. 60 day money back guarantee Name_ Street_ City_ State_ Zip_ Telephone_ Paying by: □ Money Order □ Check □ Visa □ MC □ AX □ Discover Card #_ Card Expiration Date_ Computer Name Disk Size _□ 51 / 4 " □ 31 / 2 " Product(s) (Not Copy Protected) □ Power C compiler ($19.95) $_ □ Power Ctrace debugger ($19.95) $_ □ Library Source Code ($10.00) $_ (includes assembler & library manager) □ BCD Business Math ($10.00) $_ Add Shipping ($5 USA - $20 Foreign) $_ Texas Residents add 8% Sales Tax $_ Total amount of your order $_ Power C & Power Ctrace are trademarks of Mix Software Inc Quick C & CodeView are registered trademarks of Microsoft Corp Turbo C is a registered trademark of Borland International B Circle 152 on Reader Service Card AUGUST 1988 • BYTE 209 IN DEPTH THE STATE OF C Computers For The Blind Talking computers give blind and visually impaired people access to electronic information. The question is how and how much? different machines. This is not a grave problem, since it’s easy to detect the de¬ pendency, but people still overlook it from time to time, with unfortunate effects. The answers can be found in "The Second Beginner's Guide to Personal Computers for the Blind and Visu¬ ally Impaired” published by the National Braille Press. This comprehensive book contains a Buyer’s Guide to talking microcomputers and large print display processors. More importantly it includes reviews, written by blind users, of software that works with speech. Send oiders to: National Braille Press Inc., 88 St. Stephen Street Boston, MA 02115, (617) 266-6160 NBP is a nonprofit braille printing and publishing house. FULL POWER AT YOUR FINGERTIPS. DISCOVER TWO WORLDS WITH THE ADVANCED SCREEN GENERATING FACILITY FOR "C" PROGRAMMING ENVIRONMENTS, STAGEHAND, and its COMPREHENSIVE DEMO FACILITY, PLAY WRITE. Create your screens with STAGEHAND: • Full screen editor. • User defineable edit function keys. • Set multiple color text & prompts. • Define window borders, size and position. • Create full screen & context sensitive help. • Extensive printouts for documentation. • Define valid function keys, pageup, pagedown. • Define intemal/extemal help screens. • Idle and active input field color. • Fully defineable input sequence. • Define default prompt values. • Full input field definitions including: Protected Auto dear CunorType Must Pill Keystroke Edit Cursor Positioning Required Yes/No Auto Move Full runtime support with STAGEMANAGER: • Full library support routines w/source code. • Multiple overlapping windows. • Scrollable regions. • Auto scolling windows. • User idle time routine support. • User prompt routine support. • User keystroke routine support. • User function key routine support. • User pageup/pagedown routine support. • Hot key to user printer handler. • Hot key to DOS. • Auto screen timeout Powerful demo generating P LAY WRITE: • Screen quick display demos. • Create quick interactive demos. • Create powerful full featured interactive demos. Total product support for: • Microsoft 4.x, 5.x, Quick C, Turbo C. • No royalties or runtime fees. • FREE updates to registered users. • FREE telephone support. • FREE STAGEMANAGER source code. • Comprehensive manual including library routine definition and examples. SPECIAL PACKAGE PRICE $199.00! TO ORDER CALL 1 800-DATACODE OR (516) 331-7848 - CO.D. OR AMER. EXPRESS. DEALER INQUIRES WELCOME. LOOK FOR MS/OS2, UNIX AND VAX VERSIONS THIS SUMMER] DATACODE INCORPORATED 1085 ROUTE 112, PORT JEFFERSON STATION , N.Y. 11776 What’s Next? Over the past decade, C has evolved, al¬ though the rate of change has been slow. The ANSI standard formalizes these changes and adds a few of its own. There has been a steady increase in the amount of error-checking by the compilers: Al¬ though there are still few restrictions on what you can say, you now need to be more explicit when you’re doing some¬ thing strange. Where is C likely to go in the next few years? The most likely evolution is to continue this slow but steady improve¬ ment, with new features added cau¬ tiously. Caution is necessary simply be¬ cause of the importance of maintaining compatibility with the huge body of C code already in use. Changes cannot be made gratuitously. Realistically, C itself isn’t likely to change to a major degree; rather, new languages will come from it. One exam¬ ple is C ++, which provides facilities for data abstraction and object-oriented pro¬ gramming while remaining almost com¬ pletely compatible with C (see “A Better C?” on page 211). In the meantime, C wears well as your experience with it grows. With 15 years of C experience, we still feel that way. ■ Editor’s note: Adapted with permission from Potentials, December 1983, pages 26-30. Copyright 1983 IEEE. BIBLIOGRAPHY Kernighan, Brian W., and Dennis M. Rit¬ chie. The C Programming Language . 1st ed. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice- Hall, 1978. This is the standard refer¬ ence on C. Kernighan, Brian W., and Dennis M. Rit¬ chie. The C Programming Language. 2nd ed. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice- Hall, 1988. This edition describes ANSI C. Stroustrup, Bjarne. The C++ Program¬ ming Language . Reading, MA: Addison- Wesley, 1986. Brian W. Kernighan and Dennis M. Ritchie are members of the Computing Science Research Center at AT&T Bell Laboratories in Murray Hill, New Jersey. Dennis is the designer of the C language. Together they wrote the standard refer¬ ence on C. They can be reached on BIX as “editors. ” 210 BYTE* AUGUST 1988 Circle 273 on Reader Service Card Test Drive InfoWorld's Best 386 Value! Of the 24 80386-based machines tested by InfoWorld only 3 received "Excellent Value" ratings. Micro 1 received the highest rating of the group. NOW AVAILABLE WITH NATIONWIDE ON-SITE SERVICE Micro 1 MICRO 1 POWER 380 T he speedy Power 386 by Micro 1 is among the five fastest systems for CPU speed. It features solid performance scores and a competitive price tag. The Power 386 clocked an impressive 5.20 CPU in our Autobench testing. This speed surpasses the Compaq Deskpro 386/20 by .21 and rates a well- deserved excellent score. The system’s 80-megabyte Seagate hard drive had a sequential access of 2.86 for a very good score. With a rating of 3.21, hard disk random access also receives a very good score. Neither software nor hardware compatibility was a problem for the Power 386. Micro 1 claims Microsoft OS/2 compatibility. Software compatibility is very good; hardware compatibility earns an excellent score. The Micro 1 machine met all the expandability requirements, earning an excellent score in this category. Micro 1 packs manuals for hard disk, 80387, I/O, monitor, and V-Cache in one common binder. The user’s manual includes step-by-step operation and installation guidelines for beginners. Documentation earns a good score. A one-year warranty is offered on the Power 386. Micro 1 also offers a 30-day money-back guarantee on the system. Repairs are handled by the vendor or authorized dealers. A five-year extended warranty is available. Support policies are good. In short, we consider this an excellent value. Call for a free consultation. $3095 16MHz, 50MB system Tower add $190 For 3 years, we've been the choice of Corporate America: Pay only $1395 with trade in of your IBM AT. Only $52/mo! 20MHz add $595. 80MB add $495 110MB add $595. RAM to 10MB call for quote. UNIX systems available. PRODUCT SUMMARY MICRO 1 POWER 386 Company: Micro 1 Inc., 557 Howard St., San Francisco, CA 94105; (800) 338-4061, (415) 974-5439 in CA. List Price: $6,145. Features: 20-MHz, zero-wait-state 80386 CPU; EGA board and monitor; one serial port; one parallel port; 80287 coprocessor support; optional card available for 80387 support. Peripherals: Enhanced keyboard; 200-watt power sup¬ ply; battery-powered clock/calendar. Storage and Memory: 80-megabyte MFM hard disk; 1.2-megabyte floppy drive; 4 megabytes of RAM. Support: One-year limited warranty; 30-day money-back guarantee. Pros: Second highest performance scores overall. Cons: Technical support difficult to reach. Summary: Low price and solid performance make this system hard to beat. Note: Micro 1 has increased our cus- Amcrican Express Anheuser-Busch Associated Press Boeing Aerospace Clorox Coca-Cola Dean Witter Ernst & Whinney Federal Communications Com. Ford Aerospace Heath Zenith Honeywell Intel Itel ITT Lockheed Missiles & Space Lucas Film Martin-Marietta MasterCard McDonnell Douglas MCI NASA Pacific Bell Rockwell International Siemens Tandem Computers TRW United Airlines University of Calif. Wells Fargo Westinghouse tomer service department staffing by 100%. Try our direct line and see for yourself! (415) 974-6997 Call to discuss your custom configuration. 1 - 800 - 338-4061 In California, call (415) 974-5439 Circle 274 on Reader Service Card MICRO 557 Howard St. San Francisco, CA 94105 (415) 974-5439 Tech Support: (415) 974-6997 Fax: (415) 974-6996 AUGUST 1988 • B Y T E 211 fotodudig the fastest possiblewwto create the fastest MSDOS progjams possible. scrnbuf Microsoft C 5.1 Optimizing Compiler Watch I Options Language File View Search Run Add Watch Watchpoint.,, Tracepoint. Delete Watch... Ctrl+U Delete All Watch 23383:5936 f* Draw top of box. #/ #P = 210 ; /* Draw side of box. */ Now includes OS/2 systems support! mcmsofS For Personal Computers Running the MS> OS/2 or MS-DOS* Operating System Microsoft C Optimizing Compiler 5.1 Techbox Comp iler • Optimizations that generate the fastest code for DOS and OS/2 systems. - In-line code generation. - Loop optimizations. - Elimination of common subexpressions. • Full OS/2-system support to break the 640K barrier. New. - Family API programs that run under DOS and the OS/2 systems. New. - Write multithreaded programs and Dynamic Link Libraries. New. • Small, medium, compact, large, and huge memory models. • Mix models with NEAR, FAR, and HUGE keywords. • Fast compilation (10,000 lines/minute) with Microsoft QuickC. • Fastest math, in-line 8087/80287 instructions, and floating-point calls. • More complete support of proposed ANSI standard. • Over 350 library functions, including a graphics library. Microsoft CodeView • Full OS/2 systems support. New. - Debug applications of up to 128 MB under the OS/2 systems. New. - Debug multithreaded programs and Dynamic Link Libraries. New. • Source-level debugging for precise control over programs. - Dynamic breakpoints in die source. - Debug programs written in a variety of Microsoft languages. New. - Full symbolic display of C structures. New. - Interactively follow linked lists and nested structures. New. - Watch variables, memory, registers, and flags. Other Utilities • Fast linking (twice as fast as the C 4.0 version linker). • OS/2 incremental linker- up to 20 times faster than a hill link. New. • OS/2- and MS-DOS reconfigurable programmer’s editor. New. Everything about Microsoft® C Optimizing Compiler version 5.1 is dedicated to the professional programmer. Fast code. Fast development. Fast debugging. And full support for both MS-DOS® and the OS/2 systems in a single package. There’s no faster C code on a PC, because power¬ ful optimizations, such as in-line code generation and loop enregistering, generate executables that are com¬ pact and efficient. The documentation even teaches you special coding techniques to squeeze eveiy last bit of speed out of your code. Fast code isn’t all you get. Under MS® OS/2, the 640K barrier is gone so you can write C programs as large as a gigabyte. You can call the operating system directly. Create more responsive programs (multiple threads allow program operations to overlap). And build Dynamic Link Libraries (DLLs) that can be shared, saving valuable memory. DLLs also allow your main programs to be smaller, so they load faster. 212 BYTE* AUGUST 1988 For Personal Computers Running the MS, OS/2 or MS-DOS, Operating System Microsoft C 5.1 0 ; i < cols; p Now includes OS/2 systems support! ile View Search Run UatchI Options Language Add Watch Watchpoint,., Tracepoint,,, Delete Watch,., Ctrl+U Delete All Watch set. cur.so sernbuf I /* Draw top of box. */ /* Draw side of box. */ Microsoft Optimizing Compiler Microsoft C Optimizing Compiler 5.1 Techbox Comp iler • Optimizations that generate the fastest code for DOS and OS/2 systems. - In-line code generation. - Loop optimizations. - Elimination of common subexpressions. • Full OS/2-system support to break the 640K barrier. New. - Family API programs that run under DOS and the OS/2 systems. New. - Write multithreaded programs and Dynamic Link Libraries. New. • Small, medium, compact, large, and huge memory models. • Mix models with NEAR, FAR, and HUGE keywords. • Fast compilation (10,000 lines/minute) with Microsoft QuickC^ - • Fastest math, in-line 8087/80287 instructions, and floating-point calls. • More complete support of proposed ANSI standard. • Over 350 library functions, including a graphics library. Microsoft CodeView • Full OS/2 systems support. New. - Debug applications of up to 128 MB under the OS/2 systems. New. - Debug multithreaded programs and Dynamic Link Libraries. New. • Source-level debugging for precise control over programs. - Dynamic breakpoints in the source. - Debug programs written in a variety of Microsoft languages. New. - Full symbolic display of C structures. New. - Interactively follow linked lists and nested structures. New. - Watch variables, memory, registers, and flags. Other Utilities • Fast linking (twice as fast as the C 4.0 version linker). • OS/2 incremental linker - up to 20 times faster than a ftill link. New. • OS/2- and MS-DOS reconfigurable programmer’s editor. New. You can even write a single Family API program that mns under both MS-DOS and MS OS/2. Microsoft Editor is the first reconfigurable text editor for programmers that lets you develop under MS-DOS and MS OS/2. Under MS OS/2, multitask¬ ing lets you edit one file while you compile another, which cuts development time. You can even generate multiple compiles that report errors directly back into your source code. Microsoft CodeView® is the highly acclaimed window-oriented source-level debugger that makes debugging fast and efficient. You can view program execution while you watch variables and register values change. And under MS OS/2 you can debug multithreaded applications, DLLs, and programs as large as 128 MB. New Microsoft C Optimizing Compiler 5.1 for the professional programmer. It’s all the speed you need Call (800) 541-1261, Department 153. IWJInl/vl/!fl Microsoft, the Microsoft logo, MS, MS-DOS, and CodeView are registered trademarks of Microsoft Corporation. AUGUST 1988 •BYTE 213 Get your work done before The future of personal computing is dear. More powerful PCs. Easier to use PCs. With graphics and character-based programs working side by side. Talking to each other. Multitasking. Win¬ dowing. Menuing. Mousing. Getting your work done easier and faster. Have it all now. DESQview™ is the operating envi¬ ronment that gives DOS the capabil¬ ities of OS/2.™ And it lets you, with your tmsty 8088,8086,80286, or 80386 PC, leap to the productivity of the next generation. For not much money. And without throwing out your favorite software. Add DESQview to your PC and it auickly finds your programs and lists tnem on menus. So you can just point to the program, using keyboard or mouse, to start it up. DESQview knows where that program lives. And what command loads it. For those who have trouble remembering DOS commands, it adds menus to DOS. It even lets you sort your files and mark specific files to be copied, backed-up, or deleted— all without having to leave the program you're in. Best of all, DESQview accom¬ plishes all this with a substantial speed advantage over any .alternative environment. ML Suitch Uindous Close Uindou f. RBfiSE For DOs 100 Sarah 101 Walter \ J Mechxx f. DESQuinu LINK ——-3—3 Cost of Sales Selling General I Administration Interest Expense Total Revenue Link.' 1-" "" " \ 8felp for DESQview 7 '*^'[6=mordStar““ Quit DESQview Q Mechanical _ » _ j_2 ——————— -Bale, Equity (Het Earn, of Affiliates) [station Interest and Other Income Total Revenue Cost of Sales Selling General I Administration For programmers, DESQview" s API, with its strengths in inter¬ task communications and multi¬ tasking, brings a quick and easy way to adapt to the future. With the API's mailboxes and shared programs, programmers are able to design programs running on DOS with capabilities like those of OS/2 fullscreen. have memory for. And multitask them. In 640K. Or if you own a special EMS 4.0 or EEMS memory board, or a 386 PC, DESQview lets you break through the DOS 640K barrier for multitasking. If you have other non-EMS memo¬ ry expansion products like AST's Advantage or the IBM® Memory Expansion Option, we have a labels while you're writing a report in Word Perfect, or laying out a newsletter in Ventura Publisher, or designing a building in AutoCAD. DESQview even lets you transfer text, numbers, and fields of information between programs. Fulfill the 386 promise. For 80836 PC users, DESQview becomes a 386 control program when used in conjunction with Quarterdeck s Expanded Memory Manager (QEMM)-386—giving faster multitasking as well as virtual windowing support. And when you use DESQview on an IBM PS/2™ Model 50 or 60 with QEMM-50/60 and the IBM Memory Expansion Option, DESQview gives you multitaslang beyond 640K. Experts are voting for DESQview. And over a million users, too. If all of this sounds like promises you've been hearing for future systems, then you can understand why over a million users have chosen DESQview. And why PC " igazine gave DESQview its Editor's Choice Award for "The EDITOR'S CHOICE IMWMT3 best Alternative to OS/2," why NOVL 24,1987 Multitask beyond 640K. When you want to use several programs together, you don't have to leave your current program. Just open the nexl pro¬ gram. View your programs in windows or r solution for you, too. The ALL CHARGE- CARD™ 'unifies' all your memory to provide up to 16 megabytes of continuous workspace. DESQview lets you use this memory to enhance your productivity. You can start 1-2-3 calculating ana tell Paradox to print mailing readers of InjbWorld twice voted DESQview "Product of the Year" .why, by popular vote at world [Xfro 19871 Comdex Fall for two PRODUCT years in a row, DESQview o F t h E was voted "Best PC Environ- Y E A R ment" in PC Tech journal's ~^H^^HSystems Builder Contest. DESQview lets you have it all now. DESQVIEW SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS. IBM Personal Computer and 100% compatibles (with 8086, 8068,80286, or 80386 processors) with monochrome or color display; IBM Personal System/2* Memory: 640K recom¬ mended; for DESQview itself 0-145K* Expanded Memory (Optional): expanded memory boards compatible with the Intel AboveBoard; enhanced expanded memory boards compatible with the AST RAMpage; EMS 4.0 expanded memory boards* Disk: two diskette drives or one diskette drive and a hard disk*Graphics Card (Optional): Hercules, IBM Color/Graphics (CGA). IBM Enhanced Graphics (EGA), IBM Personal System/2 Advanced Graphics (VGA)* Mouse (Optional): Mouse Systems, Microsoft and compatibles* Modem for Auto-Dialer (Optional): Hayes or compatible* Operating System: FC-D05 20-33; MS-DOS 20-32* Software: Most PC-D05 and MS-DOS application programs; programs specific to Microsoft Windows 1.03- 203, GEM 1.1-33, IBM TopVrew 1.1 • Media: DESQview 20 is available on either 5-1/4" or 3-1/2” floppy diskette. I YES! 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Circle 199 on Reader Service Card (DEALERS: 200) Trademarks are property of their respective holders: IBM, OS/2, PS/2,1- 214 B Y T E • AUGUST 1988 IN DEPTH THE C LANGUAGE A Better C? This child of C goes its parent one better in compatibility and portability Bjame Stroustrup T he C + + language is a general-pur¬ pose programming language that is, except for minor details, a superset of C. It improves on C through its support of data abstraction and object-ori¬ ented programming. The main influences on its design, in addition to C, were Simula- 67 and Algol68 (see refer¬ ences 1 and 2). C++ was first installed 5 years ago. Today, it has sev¬ eral independent implementa¬ tions and many thousands of installations. It is being used for major university research projects and for large-scale software development in com¬ panies such as Apple, Apollo, AT&T, and Sun. It has been applied to most branches of programming, in¬ cluding banking, CAD, com¬ piler construction, database management, image processing, graph¬ ics, music synthesis, networking, pro¬ gramming environments, robotics, sim¬ ulation, scientific computation, switching, and very-large-scale-integra- tion design. A Better C C++ improves the notational conve¬ nience of C and provides greater type safety. It compensates for C’s weak¬ nesses without compromising C’s strengths. In particular, there is no pro¬ gram that can be written in C but not in C + +, nor is there a program that can be written in C so that it achieves greater run-time efficiency than it does in C + + (see reference 3). C is clearly not the cleanest language ever designed nor the easiest to use, but it owes its current pervasiveness to several key strengths: • Flexibility : You can apply C to almost every application area and use almost every programming technique with it. The language has no inher¬ ent limitations that preclude writing particular kinds of programs. • Efficiency : C’s semantics are “low-level.” That is, its fundamental concepts mirror those of a traditional com¬ puter. Consequently, it’s rel¬ atively easy, both for you and for a compiler, to efficiently use hardware resources for a C program. • Availability : Given any computer, from the tiniest microcomputer to the largest supercomputer, chances are that there’s an acceptable- quality C compiler available for it, and that such a com¬ piler supports an acceptably complete and standard C language and library. There are also libraries and support tools available, so you rarely need to design a new system from scratch. • Portability : While a C program may not be easily or automatically portable from one machine (or operating system) to another, such a port is usually possi- continued ILLUSTRATION: ROBERT TINNEY © 1988 AUGUST 1988 -BYTE 215 IN DEPTH A BETTER C? The Origin of C + 4- Rich Malloy C + + (pronounced “C plus plus”), like many other languages, began life as a tool to solve a specific problem. Bjarne Stroustrup, a Bell Labs re¬ searcher, needed to write some simula¬ tion programs. Simula67, the first real object-oriented language, would have been ideal for these programs except for its comparatively slow execution speed. Dr. Stroustrup chose instead to write a new version of C, which he called “C with Classes.” By 1983, the language had evolved considerably and the name was changed to C + +. After further evolution, Bell Labs’ parent company, AT&T, began offering the language as a product in 1985. The name C + +, like the language it¬ self, is terse but meaningful. The name, coined by an associate of Stroustrup’s named Rick Mascitti, concisely de¬ scribes the evolutionary nature of the language. The term “ + + ” is, of course, the increment operator in C, suggesting that the language C + + is “a bit more than C. ” A possible alternative name, C + , is not only less inspired but also liable to generate a syntax error. Rich Malloy is an associate managing editor at BYTE. You can reach him on BIX as “rmalloy. ” ble. The level of difficulty is also usually low enough that even porting software that contains inherent machine depen¬ dencies is both technically and economi¬ cally feasible. C++ preserves these strengths and remedies some of C’s most obvious prob¬ lems. For example, function arguments are type-checked in C+ + , and coer¬ cions are applied where they are found to be appropriate: extern double sqrt(doublt); // declare square-root function double dl = sqrt(2); // fine: 2 is converted to //a double double d2 = sqrt("two"); // error: sqrt() does not // accept a string The II notation was introduced into C + + from BCPL (see reference 4) for comments starting at the // and ending at the end of the line. As shown, C+ + makes you specify a function’s argument types in a function declaration so that the standard type con¬ versions (such as int to double) can be implicitly applied, and type errors (such as calling a function requiring a double with a char* argument) can be caught at compile time. With minor restrictions, the draft ANSI C standard accepts the C++ function-calling rules and the syn¬ tax for function declarations and func¬ tion definitions (see reference 5). C++ provides in-line substitution of functions: 216 BYTE* AUGUST 1988 inline int max(int a, int b) { return a>b?a:b; } int x = 7; int y = 9; max(x / y) ; // generates: x>y?x:y max(f(x) / x); // generates: // temp=f(x); temp>x?temp:x Unlike the macros commonly used in C, in-line functions obey the usual type and scope rules. Using in-line functions can lead to apparent run-time improvements over C. In-line substitution of functions is especially important in the context of data abstraction and object-oriented pro¬ gramming. With these styles of pro¬ gramming, very small functions are so common that function-call overhead can become a performance bottleneck. In addition, C+ + provides typed and scoped constants, operators for free store (dynamic store) manipulation, and many other features. When the ANSI C committee finishes its work, the definition of C + + will be reviewed to remove gratuitous incom¬ patibilities. This will not be a major task, though, because C++ and ANSI C have already absorbed most of the “new ANSI C” features from each other. For example, the notion of a pointer to “raw storage,” void*, was incorporated into C+ + from ANSI C, as were nota- tional conveniences such as the suffix u indicating an unsigned literal (e.g., 12u) and hexadecimal character constants (e.g., *\xfa ! ). However, the most im¬ portant features of C++ relate to the support of data abstraction and object- oriented programming and are thus out¬ side the scope of ANSI C and unaffected by changes in the draft ANSI C standard. Data Abstraction Data abstraction is a programming tech¬ nique in which you define general-pur¬ pose and special-purpose types as the basis for applications (see reference 6). These user-defined types are convenient for application programmers since they provide local referencing and data hid¬ ing. The result is easier debugging and maintenance and improved program or¬ ganization. In C+ + , you can define types that you then can use as conveniently as, and in a manner similar to, built-in types. Common examples are arithmetic types such as rational and complex numbers. class complex { double re, im; public: complex(double r, double i) { re=r; im=i; } complex(double r) { re=r; im=0 } // float->complex conversion friend complex operator+(complex, complex); friend complex operator-(complex, complex); // binary minus friend complex operator-(complex); // unary minus friend complex operator*(complex, complex); friend complex operator/(complex, complex); }; The declaration of class complex speci¬ fies the representation of a complex num¬ ber and the set of operations on it. The keyword class is C + + ’s term for user- defined type. The declaration of class complex has two parts. The initial part specifies the represen¬ tation of a complex number and is by de¬ fault private. This representation (con¬ sisting of the two double-precision floating-point numbers re and im) is ac¬ cessible only to the functions defined in the declaration of class complex. The second part of the declaration specifies how a user can create and ma¬ nipulate complex numbers. It is called the public part of the declaration be¬ cause it provides an interface to the gen¬ eral public. It consists of two construc¬ tors and the usual arithmetic operations. A constructor is a function that con¬ structs a value of a given type. The first constructor for complex creates a com- continued Circle 146 on Reader Service Card —► 12/Slot Power /286/386 'e put the 80286 on d card so you can The Power 386 outruns the IBMYtfodel u pgrade to the 8038)5 whenever you're ready. Most of ou t corporate accts. prefer this Amencan-designed, in- dustrial quality /machine. 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Ask about our Tower! 12MHz,/zero wait states with l/to 1 \or industmal use, 557 Howard St. "T San Francisco, CA 94105 ' Tech Support: (415) 974-699' Fax: (415) 974-6996 12MHz 1 wait state, 640K,/50MB 101 Keyboard, 1.2MB Summit Computer System Colchester Essex C02 7AT UK (0206) 761950 FAX: (0206) 761941 Telex: 940 11232 Ask our customers abcpt our quality, service and pri< Honeywell Intel Itel ITT Lockheed Missiles & Si NASA Pacific Bell Rockwell International Siemens Tandem Computers American Express Anheuser-Busch Associated Press Boeing Aerospace Clorox Martin-Marietta Master-Card McDonnel Douglas MCI United Airlines University of Calif, Wells Fargo Westinghouse Dean Witter I Ernst & Whinney I Federal Communications Com. Ford Aerospace I Heath Zenith / In California call IN DEPTH A BETTER C? plex number given a coordinate pair; the second creates a complex number given a single floating-point number (using the obvious mapping of the real line into the complex plane). Together they provide the two obvious ways of initializing a complex variable. For example: complex a = complex(1.2); // a becomes (1.2,0) complex b = complex(3.4,5.6); The arithmetic operations are defined by friend functions: Specifically, these functions are completely ordinary except that they are granted access to the other¬ wise inaccessible representation of com¬ plex numbers by the friend declara¬ tions. The notation operator* is used to name a function defining the addition operator, +. The number of arguments determines whether an operator function implements a binary or a unary operator. For example, operator- (complex, com¬ plex) defines subtraction of complex numbers, whereas operator-(complex) defines unary minus. Such functions can be defined as complex operator*(complex al, complex a2) { return complex(al.re+a2.re, al.im+a2.im); } and used like this: main () { complex a = 2.3; complex b = complex(1/a,7); complex c = a+b+complex(1,4.5); } Here, a receives the value (2.3,0) by implicit application of the constructor complex (double); b receives the value (1/2. 3, 7); and c becomes the value (2.3+l/2.j+l,7+4.5) — that is, about (3.7,11.5). The constructors and the operator functions let you use complex numbers just as if they were built into the lan¬ guage. In-line functions let the run-time efficiency of a user-defined type come close to an equivalent built-in type. Hiding the representation is the key to modularity. It allows the representation of a class to be changed without affecting users. For example, you might decide to change the Cartesian representation of complex used above to a polar one. Such a change would affect only the functions listed in the class definition. User code, such as main(), is unaffected. Debug¬ ging can also be greatly simplified by proper use of such data hiding. Programming with classes shifts the emphasis from the design of algorithms to the design of classes (user-defined types). Each class is a direct representa¬ tion of a concept in the program; each ob¬ ject the program manipulates is of some specific class that defines its behavior. In other words, every object in a program is of some class that defines the set of legal operations on that object. This lets you program in a language with a set of types, or concepts, appropriate to the ap¬ plication. An engineer might use com¬ plex numbers, matrices, and fast Fourier transforms, while the telephony-soft¬ ware designer might prefer types such as switch, line, trunk, handset, and digit buffer. In C + +, this style of programming is supported by a general and flexible set of mechanisms for data hiding, by con¬ structors providing optional guaranteed initialization, by destructors providing optional guaranteed cleanup (termina¬ tion), and by operator overloading and user-defined coercions providing a conve¬ nient and conventional notation for many kinds of applications. All these features are cleanly integrated into the language, and all uses are checked for type viola¬ tions and ambiguities at compile time to catch errors as early as possible and to avoid unnecessary run-time overheads. Object-Oriented Programming Concepts do not usually come as self- contained entities. On the contrary, most concepts relate to other concepts in a va¬ riety of ways. For example, the concepts of airplane and car relate to those of vehi¬ cle and transport; the concepts of mam¬ mal and bird relate to each other through the more general concept of vertebrate animal, through the concept of food, and so forth; and the concepts of a circle, rectangle, and polygon involve the gen¬ eral concept of a shape. Therefore, representing concepts di¬ rectly as types in a program also requires ways of expressing the relations between types. C++ lets you specify hierarchi¬ cally organized classes. This is the key feature supporting object-oriented pro¬ gramming. Hierarchical organization is an extremely important way of coping with complex issues in many fields and has, not surprisingly, also proven to be a good way of organizing programs in a wide variety of application areas. Consider defining a type shape for use in a graphics system. The system has to support circles, triangles, squares, and many other shapes. First, you spec¬ ify a class that defines the general prop¬ erties of all shapes: class shape { point center; color col; // ... public: point where() { return center; } void move(point to) { center = to; draw(); } virtual void draw(); virtual void rotate (int); // ... }; You can define the calling interfaces for draw() and rotate (), but you can¬ not yet define their implementation. They are, therefore, declared virtual (the Simula67 and C + + term for “to be defined later in a class derived from this one”). They will be defined for each spe¬ cific shape. Given this definition of class shape, you can write general functions manipulating shapes: void rotate_all(shape* v[], int size, int angle) // rotate all members of // vector "v" of size "size" // "angle" degrees { for (int i = 0; i < size; i++) v [i]->rotate(angle) ; } For each shape v[i], the proper ro¬ tate ( ) function for the actual type of the object will be called. That “actual type” is not known at compile time. To define a particular shape, you must say that it is a shape and specify its par¬ ticular properties: class circle : public shape { // a circle is a shape int radius; public: void draw() { /* ... */ }; void rotate(int) {} // yes, the null function }; A class is said to be derived from another class, which is then called its base class. Here, circle is derived from shape, and shape has a base class of circle. A de¬ rived class is said to inherit the proper¬ ties of its base. In addition to such inher¬ ited properties, a derived class has its own specific properties. For example, class circle has the member radius in addition to the members col and center that it inherited from class shape. Note that the new shape center was continued 216B BYTE* AUGUST 1988 Command. CompuServe Navigator speaks your language. If you’re accustomed to the friendly Mac® computing style, you no longer have to compromise when you go online. Because now CompuServe Navigator SM software gives you user-friendly, Mac-like icons and the kind of familiar display formats you prefer. You’re in command. Search Forum Message Boards and Data faster than humanly possible, automati¬ cally. Retrieve files using the latest and est version of B Protocol. Write and answer EasyPlex®and Forum correspondence, offline. Performance. Run your Mac on auto pilot. CompuServe Navigator makes the most of every second you spend online. It logs on, takes care of your Forum business and pending electronic mail, and logs off. It can even run unattended, while you’re away or in the background as you use another program. You can pre-set CompuServe Navigator to go online during off-peak hours. And of course there’s a terminal mode for easy conventional access. No other software gets more out of CompuServe Forum resources. All for just $59.95. Regularly $79.95. To order online, type GO ORDER at any! prompt, or call 1 - 800 - 848 - 8199 . In Ohio and Canada, call 614-457-0802. CompuServe* Informadon Services, PO. Box 20212 5000 Arlington Centre Blvd., Columbus, Ohio 43220 An H&R Block Company Circle 52 on Reader Service Card Requires 512K minimum memory 800K drive storage, and a CompuServe Informadon Service membership. Mac is a registered trademark of Apple Computer, Inc. CompuServe Navigator is a service mark of CompuServe Incorporated. added without modifying “old code,” such as the rotate_all() function and other shapes. The ability to extend a pro¬ gram by adding new variations of a basic concept (i.e., adding new derived classes given a base class) without touching old code is a major boon. Using traditional techniques, such additions require ac¬ cess to the source code of the system you want to extend, require understanding of the key implementation details of the old code, and carry the risk of introducing errors in the already-tested old code. Furthermore, using derived classes, im¬ provements and bug fixes done to a base class are automatically “inherited” by every class derived from it. I chose the “shape” example because everyone understands about shapes, not because object-oriented programming has anything particular to do with graph¬ ics. Graphics is a good area for object- oriented techniques, but most uses of such techniques in C + + have nothing to do with graphics. Other examples are compilers, operating-system kernels and device drivers, switching software, and network simulations. In many contexts, it is important that the C++ virtual-function mechanism be nearly as efficient as a “normal” function call. The additional run-time overhead is about five memory refer¬ ences (depending on the machine archi¬ tecture and the compiler), and the mem¬ ory overhead is one word per object plus one word per virtual function per class. C++ provides multiple inheritance (see reference 7), or the ability to derive a class from more than one direct base class. For example, if you have a class task representing the concept of a con¬ current activity, and a class displayed representing the concept of something displayed on the screen, you might write: class displayecLtask : public displayed, public task {•••} Now a displayed_task is really both a displayed and a task, so a displayed, task can be used wherever a displayed or a task is required: void wait(task*,int); // do something to a task void update(displayed*); // do something to a displayed f() { // make a displayed_task: displayed_task* dtp = new displayed_task( /* appropriate arguments */ ); IN DEPTH A BETTER C? wait(ctp,10); // use displayed_task as a task update(ctp); // displayed_task as displayed Naturally, the usual type-checking rules, ambiguity rules, and encapsula¬ tion mechanisms are applied to multiple inheritance to ensure the usual degree of safety and efficiency. Why C + +? What distinguishes C++ from other programming languages? C++ was de¬ signed under severe constraints of com¬ patibility, internal consistency, and effi¬ ciency. No feature was included that would cause a serious incompatibility with C at the source or linker levels; would cause run-time or space overheads for a program that did not use it; would increase run time or requirements for a C program; would significantly increase the compile time compared with C; or could only be implemented by making more demands than in a traditional pro¬ gramming environment. Traditional languages such as C, FOR¬ TRAN, Pascal, and Modula-2 don’t pro¬ vide anything comparable to C + + ’s fea¬ tures for data abstraction and object- oriented programming. This gives the C++ programmer a strong advantage when it comes to understanding, writing, and maintaining programs. It’s often im¬ portant that the improved structure of C+ + programs be achieved without sacrificing efficiency or restricting the range of areas for which the language is suitable. Ada provides facilities for data ab¬ straction that may not be as elegant as C + + ’s but should be about as effective in actual use. But Ada doesn’t provide an inheritance mechanism to support ob¬ ject-oriented programming, so C+ + has greater expressive power in this area. C+ + is distinguished among lan¬ guages that support object-oriented pro¬ gramming, such as Smalltalk, by a vari¬ ety of factors: its emphasis on program structure; the flexibility of encapsulation mechanisms; its smooth support of a range of programming paradigms; the portability of C+ + implementations; the run-time efficiency (in both time and space) of C + + code; and its ability to run without a large run-time system. C++ is a programming language in the traditional sense and is not a complete program development system or a com¬ plete execution environment. It can be in¬ stalled easily into an existing C program development or execution environment, and C++-specific tools can then be added as needed. In addition, several C++-specific environments are being built to suit specific needs (see refer¬ ences 8 and 9). The emphasis on explicit static struc¬ ture (as opposed to a weak type-check¬ ing, as in C, or purely dynamic type¬ checking, as in Smalltalk) is particularly important for projects involving many programmers and for individual pro¬ grammers using large libraries written by others. C + + ’s strong type-checking and encapsulation mechanisms have re¬ peatedly proven themselves by dramati¬ cally reducing integration time for larger projects. Similarly, C++ provides a good base for designing libraries with precisely defined, elegant, and statically checked interfaces. C + + has a single, very flexible, type system. This makes it possible to use hy¬ brid programming styles without violat¬ ing the C + + type system. It also lets you choose a style of programming closely matching individual application areas. ■ REFERENCES 1. Birtwistle, Graham, et al. SIMULA BE¬ GIN. Studentlitteratur, Lund, Sweden, 1971. Chartwell-Bratt Ltd., U.K., 1980. 2. Woodward, P. M., and S. G. Bond. Algol 68-R Users Guide. London: Her Maj¬ esty’s Stationery Office, 1974. 3. Stroustrup, Bjarne. The C+ + Program¬ ming Language. Reading, MA: Addison- Wesley, 1986. 4. Richards, Martin, and Colin Whitby- Strevens. BCPL—The Language and its Compiler. New York: Cambridge Univer¬ sity Press, 1980. 5. Prosser, David F. Draft Proposed Amer¬ ican National Standard for Information Systems—Programming Language C X3 Secretariat, CBEMA, Washington. 6. Stroustrup, Bjarne. “What Is ‘Object- Oriented Programming’?” IEEE Software Magazine , May 1988. 7. Stroustrup, Bjarne. The Evolution of C++: 1985-1987. Santa Fe, NM: Proc. USENIX C + + Workshop, November 1987. 8. Linton, Mark A. “Distributed Manage¬ ment of a Software Database. ” IEEE Soft¬ ware, November 1987, pp. 70-76. 9. Stroustrup, Bjarne. Possible Directions for C++: 1985-1987. Santa Fe, NM: Proc. USENIX C+ + Workshop, Novem¬ ber 1987. Bjarne Stroustrup is the designer and original implementor of C+ +. He works at AT&T Bell Labs, Murray Hill, New Jersey. You can reach him on BIX as “bstroustrup. ” 216D BYTE* AUGUST 1988 Only NRI teaches you to service all computers as you build your own, fully PC-compatible micro-now with 20 meg hard disk drive! The Department of Labor ranks computer service high on its list of top growth fields, with accelerated demand creating more than 30,000 new jobs within the next 10 years. You can cash in on this opportunity—either as a full-time corporate technician or an independ ent service-person—once you’ve learned all the basics of computers the NRI way. Get inside the latest, fully IBM PC- compatible Sanyo computer—now with hard disk drive As an NRI student, you’ll get total hands-on training as you actually build the latest-model Sanyo 880 Series computer from the keyboard up. 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These are specific facts you should know about the prospective seller before placing an order: Ask These Important Questions • How long has the company been in business? • Does the company offer technical assistance? • Is there a service facility ? • Are manufacturers warran¬ ties handled through the company? • Does the seller have formal return and refund policies? • Is there an additional charge for use of credit cards? • Are credit card charges held until time of shipment? • What are shipping costs for items ordered? Reputable computer dealers will answer all these questions to your satisfaction. Don't settle for less when buying your computer hardware, software, peripherals and supplies. Purchasing Guidelines • State as completely and ac¬ curately as you can what merchandise you want in¬ cluding brand name, model number, catalog number. • Establish that the item is in stock and confirm shipping date. • Confirm that the price is as advertised . This message is brought to you by: the MICROCOMPUTER MARKETING COUNCIL of the Direct Marketing Association, Inc. 6 E. 43rd St., New York, NY 10017 MMC MICROCOMPUTER MARKETING COUNCIL of the Direct Marketing Association, Inc. • Obtain an order number and identification of the sales representative. Make a record of your order, noting exact price in¬ cluding shipping, date of order, promised shipping date and order number. If you ever have a problem, remember to deal first with the seller. If you cannot resolve the problem, write to MAIL ORDER ACTION LINE, c/o DMA, 6 E. 43rd St., New York, NY 10017. t*t CC* © Direct Marketing Association, Inc. 1988 v KEY INTO OUR LANGUAGE TECHNOLOGY Microlytics is the Leading Supplier of Linguistic Technology in Software & Firmware. We offer spelling verifier/correctors in English (U.S. and U.K.) and nine European languages. Our Word Finder® thesaurus is the best selling electronic thesaurus on the market, with over 1.5 million copies sold. 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For further information contact: Mr. Robert Atkins, Vice President, Sales/Marketing Mr. Roger Fearing, Western Regional Sales Manager MICROLYTICS, INC. 300 Main Street, Suite 1592 East Rochester, New York 14445 (716) 248-9150 FAX: (716) 248-3868 Telex: 6503021536 Word Finder is a registered trademark of Microlytics, Inc. Spell Finder, GOfer and Microlytics are trademarks of Microlytics, Inc. Other brand and product names are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective holders. ©1988, Microlytics, Inc. All rights reserved. IN DEPTH THE C LANGUAGE It’s an Attitude There’s a lot of extra coding, but you can do object-oriented programming in conventional C Jonathan S. Linowes O bject-oriented pro¬ gramming is not dependent on any given program¬ ming language; it’s an atti¬ tude. Structured program¬ ming asks you to answer the questions, “How is my data transformed?” and “What are my inputs and outputs?” Object-oriented program¬ ming asks, “What are the things I will be working with?” and “What do I expect these things to do?” It is be¬ coming a popular alternative to conventional structured techniques for organizing and thinking about programs. OOPC is a mechanism for object-oriented programming using standard C. It’s not a programming language in it¬ self, nor is it a preprocessor. Rather, it’s a collection of conventions and program¬ ming techniques that, if fol¬ lowed, give you many of the benefits of today’s object-oriented programming languages—benefits such as data encap¬ sulation, modularity, and inheritance. Through OOPC, I introduce the con¬ cepts of object-oriented programming in a practical and familiar context, rather than complicating the issue with a new language and a new syntax. To demon¬ strate OOPC techniques in action, I have implemented the MyShape example adapted from The C++ Programming Language by Bjarne Stroustrup (Addi- son-Wesley, 1986), pages 213 to 221. Object-oriented programming tech¬ niques are very good for prototyping ap¬ plications. In fact, OOPC was developed for the MIT Media Laboratory UselT project, a user-interface test-bed system. The UselT system lets you easily build components of a user inter¬ face, modify an interaction technique (such as changing a pop-up menu into a pull¬ down), and quickly program entirely new objects. This was a fairly complex project with multiple programmers and required the ability to make quick code modifica¬ tions. Using object-oriented programming techniques made the UselT system easy to understand and modify. Objects as Virtual Devices You can think of object-ori¬ ented systems as a collection of independent virtual de¬ vices communicating with each other, each with its own internal structure. These vir¬ tual devices, called objects , consist of properties (private data) and methods (the opera¬ tions applied to that data). The internal structure of an object is not accessible to any other ob¬ ject or program. This concept of data en¬ capsulation is key to object-oriented pro¬ gramming, as it separates the object’s implementation from its use. Objects communicate with other ob¬ jects through messages. You send mes¬ sages to create new objects, to modify and inquire about an object’s property continued ILLUSTRATION: ROBERT TINNEY © 1988 AUGUST 1988 -BYTE 219 IN DEPTH IT’S AN ATTITUDE Listing 1: OOPC code for the My Shape example program. This code creates several shapes—a rectangle, a line, and a face (MyShape)—and then stacks them on top of each other. stack_on_top( p2, p3 ); stack_on_top ( pi, p2 ); /* re-draw */ refresh_shapes( screen ); stack_on_top( q, p ) Object q, p; { Msg_North_Result north; Msg_South_Result south; Msg_Move_Param move; Send( p, MSG_NORTH_r, NULL, &north ); Send( q, MSG_SOUTH_r, NULL, &south ); move.dx = north.x - south.x; move.dy = north.y - south.y +1; Send( q, MSG_MOVE_p, &move, NULL ); } refresh_shapes( screen ) Object screen; { extern Object shape_list[]; extern int shape_count; Msg_Draw_Param draw; int i; Send( screen, MSG_CLEAR, NULL, NULL ); draw.screen = screen; for (i=0; i #include "oopc.h" main () { Object Object Ms g_Se t_Re ct angl e_P ar am Ms g_Se t_H 1 i ne_P a ram Msg_Set_Myshape_Param Msg_Draw_Param Ms g_Move_P a ram int /* create screen buffer */ screen = New( Screen ); /* create shapes */ pi = New( Rectangle ); set_rect_p.xmin =0; set_rect_p.ymin =0; set_rect_p.xmax = 10; set_rect_p.ymax = 10; Send( pi, MSG_SET_RECTANGLE_p, &set_rect_p, NULL ); p2 = New( Hline ); set_hline_p.x =0; set_hline_p.y = 15; set_hline_p.length = 17; Send ( p2, MSG_SET_HLINE_p, &set_hline_p, NULL ); p3 = New( Myshape ); set_myshape_p.xmin = 15; set_myshape_p.ymin = 10; set_myshape_p.xmax = 27; set_myshape_p.ymax = 18; Send( p3, MSG_SET_MYSHAPE_p , &set_myshape_p, NULL ); /* draw them */ refresh_shapes( screen ); /* re-arrange the shapes */ move_p.dx = -10; movejp.dy = -10; Send( p3, MSG_MOVE_p, &move_p, NULL ); screen; pi, p2, p3; set_rect_p; set_hline_p; set_myshape_p; draw_p; move_p; i; are creating. The function New returns the handle of the instance into whatever variable name you’ve specified for the object. When you create an object, New allocates memory for the object’s prop¬ erties and initializes this memory to de¬ fault values. It returns a null object if it can’t create the instance. Objects are sent messages with the Send macro function: error = Send( object, message, ¶meters, &result ); where object receives the message, message enumerates it, and the last two arguments are pointers to the parameter and result blocks whose contents depend on the particular message specified (they could be null). The function Send re¬ turns an error code (0=ok). A message is actually just an enumer¬ ated integer type, such that each message has a unique-value. Some examples in¬ clude MSG_SET_RECTANGLE_p, which sets a rectangle’s corner coordinates; MSG_ASK_NORTH_r, which requests the top-center point of a rectangle; and MSG_DRAW_p, which tells the object to draw itself. The name extensions _p, _r, and _pr remind you that the object re¬ quires a parameter block, result block, or both, along with the message. When a message requires parameters, it has an associated data structure for stuffing the parameter values, named, by convention, message_ Param. For ex¬ ample, Msg_Draw_Param is the param¬ eter block for the MSG_DRAW_p message (Msg_Draw_Param specifies the screen on which to draw the object). Similarly, results are returned in the structure mes- sage_Result. For example, structure Msg_North_Result contains the point returned by MSG_ NORTH _r. These pa¬ rameter and result blocks are the same regardless of which object receives the message. Unfortunately, because OOPC re¬ quires that you be able to send different data structures to the same function, you can’t perform type checking to verify that the correct blocks are specified for a given message. However, the message¬ naming convention, combined with the parameter- and result-block structures, form a satisfactory interim solution without a preprocessor. The naming con¬ ventions make it easier to visually verify the code, and the C compiler will verify the types of each specific parameter/re¬ sult field within the blocks. An Example The class hierarchy in figure 1 shows the superclasses and subclass used for the MyShape example. The class Rectangle includes coordinates defining its two corners. MyShape is a subclass of Rect¬ angle that implements a picture of a face. It uses the Rectangle properties to define its border and adds properties for the eyes and mouth (defined as horizon¬ tal lines). Messages and methods regard¬ ing the border of a MyShape object are in¬ herited from its superclass, Rectangle; other messages are handled by the local method, MyShape. In OOPC, all objects are subclasses of class Common. The main program, shown in listing 1, creates three shapes—a rectangle, a hori¬ zontal line, and an instance of MyShape (a face)—and draws them on the screen. Then, the line is stacked on top of the face, the rectangle is stacked on top of the line, and the drawing is refreshed. When an instance of a class is created, its properties are set to default values, leaving it to the application to set them to desired values. For example, new rect¬ angles are created at (0,0)-(0,0), which is not very useful. The new object must then be set, such as at (0,0)-(10,10), as in the example. The MyShape example shows how you can write procedures that manipulate ob¬ jects without knowledge of the objects they will be manipulating. For example, the stack_on_top function rearranges arbitrary objects, as long as they under¬ stand the messages MSG_N0RTH, MSG_ SOUTH, and MSG.MOVE, to get their top- center and bottom-center points and to change their positions. Similarly, the function refresh_shapes sends MSG_ DRAW to the objects in the display list, without knowing anything about the ob¬ jects there. In fact, you can code and compile these functions before writing the object classes they are manipulating. continued AUGUST 1988 • BYTE 221 IN DEPTH IT’S AN ATTITUDE Listing 2: The chain of inheritance for the rectangle class. If a rectangle object is not able to recognize a message, the Base macro will pass it up to a superclass, Shape, to see if the message is defined there. //'Shape can *t decode the message, it will pass it up to Common. If Common can't understand the message, an error is returned. I* --- * excerpt from file: rectangle.c * definition of rectangle object structure typedef struct { # include "rectangle.p" } RectanglejObject; /*- * file: rectangle.p * properties for Rectangle class (subclass of Shape) -*/ #include "shape.p" /* inherited properties */ /* local properties */ int xmin, ymin; /* northeast corner */ int xmax, ymax; /* southwest corner */ /*- * file: shape.p * properties for Shape class (subclass of Common) - - - */ #include "common.p" /* inherited properties */ /* no local properties */ /*- * file: common.p * properties for Common class -*/ /* Common is top level, has no parent */ /* properties common to all objects */ Functionp dispatch; /* message handler function */ /* other properties may include a class identifier, archive file name, etc,*/ /*- * excerpt from file: rectangle.c * methods for Rectangle class (subclass of Shape) -*/ #include #include #include "oopc.h" /* base class dispatcher */ #define Base(this,msg,par,res) Shape(this,msg, par,res) /*-*/ /* message dispatcher */ /*-*/ continued Implementing OOPC Objects OOPC uses an #include chaining tech¬ nique that requires that each object be compiled separately. Each class is made of at least two source files: class .C and class.?. The .C file contains the mes¬ sage handler and individual methods. The .P file contains the class properties. You must include the header file OOPC.H at the top of every source (.0) file in addi¬ tion to the object’s class property file. Using nested file inclusion, the .P files provide the mechanism for property in¬ heritance. For example, listing 2 shows the Rectangle_Object data structure. The fields of this structure are included from the RECTANGLE.P file. The first statement of the file is another include file, SHAPE.H, containing the properties from Rectangle’s superclass. Superclass properties appear in mem¬ ory before subclass properties, as shown in figure 2, which facilitates method in¬ heritance. When a message is deferred by a class to its superclass, the object’s handle is passed. Since this handle is actually a pointer to the object’s prop¬ erty data, the superclass can access the properties it knows of, yet need not (and should not) access the subclass prop¬ erties. Each object class has a single message- handler function having the same name as the object itself. Thus, rectangles have a message handler called Rectangle. The handler is a “switch” statement with cases for each message recognized locally by the class, calling the corre¬ sponding method—a static local func¬ tion. If the message handler does not rec¬ ognize the message, the message is forwarded up to the superclass message handler. Listing 2 is an excerpt of the file RECTANGLE.C, showing the chain of in¬ heritance an unrecognized message will follow. Even if an object has a method for a message, it can still inherit the super¬ class method and then augment the re¬ sult. In the initialization method, for example, the object first inherits its superclass method to initialize the super¬ class properties and then initializes its own properties. Because the topmost class is Common, the first property of every object is a pointer to the object’s message-function handler. The Send macro function takes advantage of this fact by simply access¬ ing the first field of the object. The fol¬ lowing is an excerpt from OOPC.H show¬ ing how Send is implemented: typedef int (#Functionp)(); continued 222 BYTE* AUGUST 1988 New diskdoubler doubles the storage capacity doubles the storage capacity of your hard disk Upgrade the disk drive in your PC the easy way! Datran's new DiskDoubler dd2000 is a short card that simply fits into any avail¬ able slot on an IBM, PC, XT, AT, 386 or compatible, DOS 2.0 or greater. Upgrade a 20 MB disk into a 40 MB. The DiskDoubler lets you double the storage capacity of any hard disk without loss of performance. No matter what size hard disk you have, the Disk- Doubler will double it. Works With All Data. The DiskDoubler compresses data stored on a hard disk, including application programs, pro¬ gram files, COM and EXE files. You will appreciate the doubling of capacity for word processing, spreadsheets, and database files. Powerful dBASE Capacity. The Disk- Doubler is especially powerful when handing dBASE II, III and III Plus files, storing on the average three times as much data on your hard disk, i.e., your 20 MB hard disk will perform like a 60 MB disk ... an 80 MB disk will act like a 240 MB model. It works equally well for any size hard disk .. . and for only $189.00. Principle of Operation. At the heart of the DiskDoubler is a new, powerful high-speed data compression micro¬ processor that incorporates Datran's state-of-the-art data compression technology, which represents years of research and development. Totally Transparent Operation. 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Long Life Performance. With a long three-year limited warranty, DiskDou- bler is a simple, inexpensive and reliable way to double your disk storage. Satisfaction Guaranteed. Datran backs the DiskDoubler with s 30-day no ques¬ tions asked money back guarantee. FOR THE DEALER NEAREST YOU OR _ TO ORDER DIRECT BY PHONE: ® 1 - 800 - 332-0456 INI DA TRAN Leadership in Data Compression Technology Datran Corporation/2505 Foothill Blvd./La Crescenta/CA 91214/Phone (818) 248-8780/FAX (818) 248-8788/Telex 4932115/TurboCom (818)248-8789 IBM PC. AT AND DBASE II. Ill AND III PLUS ARE THE TRADEMARKS OF THE RESPECTIVE OWNERS. AUGUST 1988 -BYTE 223 IN DEPTH IT’S AN ATTITUDE typedef struct { Functionp dispatch; } *0bject; ^define Send(obj ,msg,param, result)\ ((*(obj->dispatch))(obj,msg, param,result)) To implement Send, I first define the data type Functionp, which is a pointer to a function. Then I define a data struc¬ ture that declares as its member an item called dispatch, which is of type Func¬ tionp. Finally, I give this structure the tag *0bject, so that Object is a data type that is a pointer to a structure whose first member is a pointer to a function. In the Send macro, obj is of type Object, so obj->dispatch will fish out the pointer to the desired function. The rest of this line executes the function. Finally, the function New is an inter¬ face for sending a MSG_NEW message to a dispatch function. New creates an in¬ stance for an object class that you can then use with the function Send. typedef struct { Object object; } Msg_New_Result; Object New( dispatch ) Functionp dispatch; { Msg_New_Result new; (*dispatch) ( NULL, MSG_NEW_r, NULL, knew ); return new.obj ect; } Limitations of OOPC As you can see, there is a lot of extra cod¬ ing you must tend to yourself, such as set¬ ting up the include chain and making sure that you pass the correct parameters to an object. These are details that an ob¬ ject-oriented language can manage for you. Object-oriented languages differ in their support for memory management. The advantage of using a conventional language is that it doesn’t require the ad¬ ditional investment of buying and learn¬ ing a new language. Plus, it’s code-com¬ patible with any existing libraries and tools you currently use. ■ Editor’s note: The source code for the OOPC object classes and the MyShape example are available in a variety of for¬ mats. See page 3 for further details. Jonathan S. Linowes is a founding part¬ ner of Sirlin Computer Corp. in Hudson, New Hampshire, specializing in database Figure 2: Memory organization of MyShape class properties. an( ^ computer graphics systems. He can _ be contacted on BIX as “editors. ” int Rectangle( this, msg, param, result ) Rectangle_Object* this; t Message msg; Caddr param; Caddr result; { int error = 0; switch (msg) { case MSG_NEW_r: error = Rectangle_new ( result ); break; case MSG_INITIALIZE: error = Rectangle_init( this ); break; case MSG_SET_RECTANGLE_p: error = Rectangle_setrect( this, param ); break; case MSG_MOVE_p: error = Rectangle_move( this, param ); break; case MSG_DRAW_p: error = Rectangle_draw( this, param ); break; case MSG_NORTH_r: error = Rectangle_north( this, result ); break; case MSG_SOUTH_r: error = Rectangle_south( this, result ); break; default: error = Base( this, msg, param, result ); break; } return error; } /* - */ /* rectangle class methods */ /*-*/ static int Rectangle_move (this, param) Rectangle_Object *this; Msg_Move_Param *param; { this->xmin += param->dx; this->ymin += param->dy; this->xmax += param->dx; this->ymax += param->dy; return 0; Object handle Common properties Object + sizeof(Common_Object) Shape properties Object + sizeof(Shape_Object) Rectangle properties Object + sizeof(Rectangle_Object) MyShape properties Object + sizeof(MyShape_Object) 224 BYTE* AUGUST 1988 Bring to your DTP systems a new style and give your HP series II a second life. 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PageStyler, the only way to go, if you go in style. • Ventura Publisher™ • PageMaker™ • Harvard Graphics™ • Designer™ COMPATIBLE SOFTWARE • Other software based on Windows™ • WordPerfect 5.0™ • The Office Publisher™ • Microsoft Word 4.0™ & Excel™ Manuscript™ Destiny has tested these software packages. More software packages will be tested and announced. Destiny Destiny Technology Corporation 930 Thompson Place • Sunnyvale, California 94086 Phone: 800-874-5553 • 415-537-9044 (inside CA) FAX: 408-733-0870 TLX: 3729687 ftistSeript Language is a trademark of Adobe Systems LaserJet Plus and LaserJet Series II are trademarks of Hewlett-Packard. Canon LBP is a trademark of Canon. Inc. PCL (Printer Command Language) is a trademark of Hewlett-Packard. PageStyler is a trademark of Destiny Technology Corp. PC/AT is a trademark of Iniernalkmal Business Machines. Macintosh is a trademark of Apple Computer. Inc. Software trademarks belong to their individual manufacturers. Circle 272 on Reader Service Card AUGUST 1988 -BYTE 225 IN DEPTH THE C LANGUAGE Resource Guide Advantage C + +.$495 PC, XT, AT, and compatibles Run/C Interpreter.$120 PC, XT, AT, and compatibles Run/C Professional.$250 PC, XT, AT, and compatibles Lifeboat Associates 55 South Broadway Tarry town, NY 10591 (800) 847-7078; in New York, (914) 332-1875 Inquiry 947. Aztek C68K-r B-shell... $120 Aztek C68K/MFW-p.$175 Aztek C68K/MPW-d.$299 Mac Manx Software P.O. Box 55 Shrewsbury, NJ 07701 (201)542-2121 Inquiry 948. C Compiler.$495 PC, XT, AT, and compatibles C/2.$560 PC, XT, AT, and compatibles IBM Corp. Old Orchard Rd. Armonk, NY 10504 (914)765-1900 Inquiry 951. C Compiler.$99 PC compatible Supersoft, Inc. 510 West Park Ave. P.O. Box 1628 Champaign, IL 61820 (800) 678-3600; in Illinois, (217)359-2112 Inquiry 952. C Compiler (one user)....$895 PC compatible Wintek Corp. 1801 South St. Lafayette, IN 47904 (800) 742-6809; in Indiana, (317) 742-8428 Inquiry 953. C Native Compiler.$1000 PC-DOSfor 8088, 8086, 80186, and 80286 machines Whitesmiths, Ltd. 59 Power Rd. Westford, MA 01886 (617) 692-7800 Inquiry 954. Consulair 68020 C Development System.$600 Mac MacC.$425 Mac MacC Jr.$79.95 Mac Consulair Corp. P.O. Box 2192 Ketchum, ID 83340 (208) 726-5846 Inquiry 977. CrossCode C for the 68000.$1595 PC compatible UniWare Z80 C Compiler.$1595 PC compatible Software Development Systems, Inc. 3110 Woodcreek Dr. Downers Grove, IL 60515 (800) 448-7733; in Illinois, (312) 971-8170 Inquiry 955. C Talk.$149.95 PC compatible CNS, Inc. Software Products Dept. 7090 Shady OakRd. Eden Prairie, MN 55344 (612) 944-0170 Inquiry 956. C-terp MS-DOS version .$298 Xenix version . .$398 Gimpel Software 3207 Hogarth Lane Collegeville, PA 19426 (215) 584-4261 Inquiry 957. The C Workshop.$69.95 PC compatible Wordcraft 3827 Penniman Ave. Oakland, CA 94619 (800) 888-0852 ext. 955; in California, (415) 534-2212 Inquiry 958. C68.$795 PC compatible C68/020.$995 PC compatible Alcyon Corp. 6888 Nancy Ridge Dr. San Diego, CA 92121 (619) 587-1155 Inquiry 959. C-8096.$995 PC compatible Archimedes Software, Inc. 2159 Union St. San Francisco, CA 94123 (415) 567-4010 Inquiry 960. C-86 Plus C Compiler... .$497 PC, XT, AT, and PS/2 compatible Computer Innovations, Inc. 980 Shrewsbury Ave. Tinton Falls, NJ 07724 (201) 542-5920 Inquiry 961. C 86/88 RTX866.$1295 XT and AT compatible Real-Time Computer Science Corp. 1390 Flynn Rd., Unit E Camarillo, CA 93010 (805) 987-9781 Inquiry 962. Definitive C XT under THEOS .$395 AT under THEOS .$499 THEOS C.$599 AT, 80386 machines under THEOS Theos Software Corp. 1777 Botelho Dr., Suite 360 Walnut Creek, CA 94596 (415) 935-1118 Inquiry 963. Delta-C.$495 NC4016 SC-C.$695 PC, XT, AT, and 80386 machines Silicon Composers 210 California Ave., Suite K Palo Alto, CA 94306 (415) 322-8763 Inquiry 964. Designer C+ + .$495 MS-DOS and PC compatible; 80386 Unix, 80386 Xenix Oasys 230 Second Ave. Waltham, MA 02154 (617) 890-7889 Inquiry 965. DeSmet DC88.$99 PC compatible C Ware Corp. P.O. Box 428 Paso Robles, CA 93447 (805) 239-4620 Inquiry 966. Eco-C.$59.95 Mac and Z80 CP/M ECO-C88 C Compiler.$99.95 MS-DOS Ecosoft, Inc. 6413 North College Ave. Indianapolis, IN 46220 (317) 255-6476 Inquiry 967. Guidelines C++ .$295 PC, XT, AT, and compatibles Guidelines Software, Inc. P.O. Box 749, Suite B Orinda, CA 94563 (415) 254-9183 Inquiry 968. 226 BYTE* AUGUST 1988 IN DEPTH THE C LANGUAGE High C.$595 PC compatible High C for the 80386.$895 80386 MetaWare, Inc. 903 Pacific Ave., Suite 201 Santa Cruz, CA 95060 (408) 429-6382 Inquiry 969. Hyper-C.$100 Mac Spectra Micro Development P.O.Box 41795 Tucson, AZ 85717 (602) 884-7402 Inquiry 970. Instant-C.$495 PC, XT, AT, and compatibles Rational Systems P.O. Box 480 Natick, MA 01760 (617) 653-6194 Inquiry 971. Lattice AmigaDOS C Compiler.$200 Amiga Lattice AmigaDOS C Development System.$375 Amiga Lattice C Compiler.$450 MS-DOS and OS/2 Lattice C+ -I-.$500 Amiga Lattice, Inc. 2500 South Highland Ave. Lombard, IL 60148 (312)916-1600 Inquiry 972. Let’s C/csd.$75 PC and PS/2 compatible Mark Williams Co. 1430 West Wrightwood Chicago, IL 60614 (800)692-1700; in Illinois, (312)472-6659 Inquiry 973. Lightspeed C.$175 Mac Think Technologies, Inc. 135 South Rd. Bedford, MA 01730 (617) 275-4800 Inquiry 974. Living C Plus.$199.95 PC, AT, XT, and PS/2 compatible Living Software, Inc. P.O. Box 1188 Framingham, MA 01701 (617) 881-6343 Inquiry 975. “LPI-C”.$695 80386 and 68000 compatible Language Processors, Inc. 959 Concord St. Framingham, MA 01701 (617) 626-0006 Inquiry 976. Mac-to-IIGS C Compiler.$500 Apple IIGS Megamax C.$199.95 Mac Megamax, Inc. P.O. Box 851521 Richardson, TX 75085 (214) 987-4931 Inquiry 978. Microsoft C (includes QuickC).$450 PC compatible; OS/2, MS-DOS QuickC.$99 PC, AT, and compatibles Microsoft Corp. 16011 Northeast 36th Way P.O. Box 97017 Redmond, WA 98073 (206) 882-8080 Inquiry 979. Mix C Compiler.$19.95 PC compatible Mix C Works.$39.95 PC compatible Mix Software 2116 East Arapaho, Suite 363 Richardson, TX 75081 (214) 783-6001 Inquiry 980. MPWC.$150 Mac Apple Programmers and Developers Association 290 Southwest 43rd St. Renton, WA 98055 (206) 251-6548 Inquiry 981. NDP C-386.$595 PC and 80386 compatible; MS- DOS and Unix MicroWay, Inc. P.O. Box 79 Kingston, MA 02364 (617) 746-7341 Inquiry 982. Objective-C (per user) ...$495 PC/MS-DOS The Stepstone Corp. 75 Glen Rd. Sandy Hook, CT 06482 (203) 426-1875 Inquiry 983. Optimum-C.$139 PC compatible Datalight 17505 68th Ave. NE, Suite 304 Bothell, WA 98011 (206) 367-1803 Inquiry 950. QC88 C Compiler.$90 PC compatible The Austin Code Works 11100 Leafwood Lane Austin, TX 78750 (512) 258-0785 Inquiry 949. Sierra C (68000 cross compiler).$2000 AT compatible Sierra Systems 6728 Evergreen Ave. Oakland, CA 94611 (415) 339-8200 Inquiry 984. Small-C PC compatible A variety of shareware and public domain versions are available. Inquiry 985. Toolworks C.$49.95 PC compatible; MS-DOS and CP/M The Software Toolworks 13557 Ventura Blvd. Sherman Oaks, CA 91423 (818) 907-6789 Inquiry 986. Turbo C.$99.95 PC, XT, AT, and compatibles Borland International, Inc. 4585 Scotts Valley Dr. Scotts Valley, CA 95066 (408) 438-8400 Inquiry 987. Watcom Express C.$125 Introductory offer .$75 PC compatible Watcom C (includes Watcom Express C).$495 Introductory offer .$295 PC compatible Watcom 415 Phillip St. Waterloo, Ontario Canada N2L 3X2 (519) 886-3700 (800) 265-4555 (U.S. and Canada) Inquiry 988. Zortech C.$49.95 MS-DOS; PC compatible Zortech C+ +.$99.95 MS-DOS, PC compatible Zortech, Inc. 366 Massachusetts Ave., Suite 303 Arlington, MA 02174 (800) 848-8408; in Massachusetts or international, (617) 646-6703 Inquiry 989. AUGUST 1988 •BYTE 227 NATURAL LANGUAGE INTERFACE THE COMPUTER CHRONICLES MAKES KEEPING UP WITH THE INFORMATION AGE EASY Stewart Cheifet and Gary Kildall are your co-hosts for a weekly half-hour television program aimed at eomputer users, owners, educators and eomputer industry pro¬ fessionals If you’re looking for help in finding out what’s new and what’s news, tune in to THE COMPUTER CHRONICLES every week on your local public television station. Regular commentators are Jan Lewis, President of Lewis Research Corporation and publisher/editor of JAN LEWIS GEORGE MORROW The Computer Chronicles is funded in part by McGraw-Hill’s BYTE magazine. The Computer Chronicles is a co-production of WITF/ Harrisburg and KCSM/San Mateo. HyperAge magazine, and George Morrow, founder of Morrow Designs. Topics this season include: CD ROMS — Shareware — Multitasking — Business Graphics — Investment Software — PC Imaging — PC Networks — Decision Support Software — Laser Printers — HyperCard — Input Devices — and MUCH MORE. Each week THE COMPUTER CHRONICLES looks at the top stories of the week in Random Access, a news segment designed to keep you informed about the latest developments in the eomputer industry. THE COMPUTER CHRONICLES, a weekly half- hour of public television that just might be the help you need. THE COMPUTER CHRONICLES IS NOW ON BIX Bix, the Byte Information Exchange, now has a conference for the Computer Chronicles. Now you can communicate directly with the staff of the Computer Chronicles to suggest topics for future shows or to request information or details on past shows. Once on Bix, just type “join comp.chron” at the colon (:) prompt. 228 BYTE* AUGUST 1988 FEATURE Making the Move TO OS/2 Top programmers from Borland, Norton, and Lotus talk about converting a database, TSR, and spreadsheet from MS-DOS to OS/2 ith all the talk about OS/2—its multitasking fea¬ tures, the heritage it brings from MS-DOS, the problems it leaves behind, complaints that it costs too much or takes up too much memory— the question foremost in the minds of most per¬ sonal computer users is: Should I bother? Granted, OS/2 has some powerful features, but how many programs will actually run under it, and how many of those will take full advantage of its capabilities? If only a few programs run under OS/2, or if they run only in the DOS-compatibility box, why not just stick with MS-DOS? Whether or not a critical mass of OS/2 programs becomes available depends on two things: how hard it is to write new OS/2 programs, and how hard it is to port established MS-DOS programs to OS/2. Given the time it takes to develop an applica¬ tion program, we can expect that the first OS/2 programs will be updates of MS-DOS programs. So, how hard is it to port a program from MS-DOS to OS/2? To find out, we asked top programmers from Borland, Norton Computing, and Lotus Development to tell us about their expe¬ riences in converting a popular program to run under OS/2. Their thoughts should be valuable if you’re considering upgrad¬ ing to OS/2—and wondering whether the number of available programs will justify the cost and effort—or if you’re thinking about porting your own programs to OS/2. An OS/2 Paradox Robert E. Shostak Y ou might expect that with its gaggle of new features, in¬ cluding multitasking and interprocess communication, porting a DOS program to OS/2 might be a big job. Indeed, if you plan to take advantage of these new features, a port could involve significant redesign and implementation work. On the other hand, if you don’t need fancy multitasking capabilities and your program has minimal direct interface to the operating system or BIOS, you might only need to recompile and relink your source code. Paradox is a high-end relational database management sys¬ tem. It is quite a large and elaborate program, so we ended up dealing with many of the issues that would arise in porting other applications. These issues fall into two categories: external and internal. External issues arise by virtue of new or different features in OS/2 that are apparent to the user. Internal issues, by contrast, are implementation concerns that have no bearing on function¬ ality or performance and are therefore transparent to the user of the program. External Issues The more interesting considerations in porting to OS/2 have to do with taking advantage of its new functions, such as multi¬ tasking. These are the ones that users will notice; they’re also the ones most likely to vary from application to application. In the case of Paradox, we wanted a user to be able to run multiple copies (called instances in OS/2 parlance) of the program simultaneously. In fact, we wanted to make it possible for these instances to access the same tables simultaneously. For example, a user should be able to query a table at the same time that the program is printing a report for that table in the background. OS/2’s session manager automatically handles scheduling among multiple instances of a program(s). It does not, how¬ ever, automatically manage concurrent access to data. But since Paradox 2.0 was written as a multiuser (i.e., networked) application, it already had the built-in mechanisms needed to synchronize multiuser access to tables. We had only to adapt these mechanisms so that multiple sessions would be treated in the same way as multiple users. continued AUGUST 1988 'BYTE 229 FEATURE MAKING THE MOVE TO OS/2 The most difficult technical problem we needed to resolve to obtain this effect involves Paradox’s “private directory” ma¬ chinery. In a multiuser configuration of Paradox, each user designates a certain directory as his private directory. It stores temporary tables (such as the Answer table) that other users cannot access. It is essential that no two users specify the same private directory, and, in fact, this directory is usually chosen to reside on each user’s local hard disk. A n OS/2 program must be better behaved than a DOS program. In order to handle multiple sessions in addition to multiple users, we needed to provide a unique private directory for each session. To obtain maximum transparency to the user, we opted to use a mechanism that would automatically create a new sub¬ directory for each session a user initiates. The mechanism de¬ pends on OS/2’s support of global shared memory, allowing different program instances to communicate with one another. Other external issues we needed to deal with had to do with sharing memory and CPU resources among OS/2 tasks. Under DOS, applications (other than terminate-and-stay-resident [TSR] programs) typically grab all the memory when they’re loaded. Applications also assume, of course, that they have ex¬ clusive use of the CPU. Under OS/2 and other multitasking or multiuser operating systems, programs must be better behaved. In particular, they must be careful to allocate only as much memory from the operating system as they actually need. They must also be written in a way that does not tie up the CPU un¬ necessarily; for example, a tight keyboard-check loop could needlessly hog the CPU. Under OS/2, you need to give control back to the operating system periodically so it can dispatch other tasks while your task is waiting for input. Internal Issues The most obvious difference between programs written for OS/2 and those written for DOS is the way programs make calls to the operating system. In DOS, an operating system call is made by loading up some registers with arguments to the call, then issuing INT 21h (hexadecimal). In OS/2, program¬ mers must replace these INT 21h calls with calls to a set of named routines known as the OS/2' Application Programming Interface (API). You can think of the API as a function library of the kind normally provided with languages such as C and Pascal. The main difference is that references to functions in the API are resolved not at program-link time, but at load time, using OS/2’s dynamic-linking capability. Arguments pass to the API routines on the stack, just as with high-level languages. Most DOS function calls have an exact correspondent in the API, though the arguments or error-handling conventions may be somewhat different. The API also has functions to replace the BIOS interrupts that DOS applications typically call. Owing to its multitasking capabilities, OS/2 needs much more control over devices such as the screen and keyboard than does DOS, so tasks don’t inter¬ fere with each other. Indeed, these devices and the mouse are treated as first-class system devices. With OS/2, gone are the days when you could write directly to screen memory at B800. Of course, this is a benefit rather than a restriction, because it resolves the compatibility issues associated with BIOS-level primitives and provides greater device independence. Be aware that OS/2 programs use Pascal calling conventions to call API functions, with the consequence that the arguments are popped off the stack by the API function itself, not by the caller. Many C compilers use the “caller pops” convention as the default, which means you might need to use a compiler op¬ tion to get the right effect. You should also make sure your com¬ piler does not truncate the names of external references to eight characters, since many of the API functions have longer names. If, like Paradox, your program is written at least partly in assembly language, you need to be aware of a number of other minor internal issues. Assembly language for OS/2 needs to be written more carefully than for DOS in a number of respects. First, OS/2 requires that every segment be given a class name of either CODE, DATA, or STACK; in DOS, on the other hand, class names are largely unimportant. Another restriction is that segments in class CODE cannot con¬ tain self-modifying code. The reason is that OS/2 permits code segments to be shared among different instances of the same program, or even different programs. If the first instance of an already-loaded program changes its code, the second instance (which will be a copy of the instance already residing in mem¬ ory) would not be a true copy of the original code. A further constraint is that segment registers cannot be used as general-purpose scratch registers for 16-bit quantities, as they can under DOS. Since OS/2 programs run in protected mode, you can load the segment registers only with valid mem¬ ory handles, called selectors. If you load a segment register with an arbitrary 16-bit datum, you are likely to trigger a pro¬ tection violation. Still another internal issue we came across in porting Para¬ dox is the difference in how the system handles the Control- Break key combination. Under DOS, applications that detect Control-Break typically trap interrupt lBh, which is triggered by the BIOS when that key combination is pressed. Under OS/2, a Control-Break key press generates a signal. Signals are asyn¬ chronous event notifications, much like software interrupts, which an application can trap using the DosSetSigHandler API primitive. OS/2 will also generate signals when the user presses Control-C or when a process is terminated. Better Than Expected As you can see, our port required the consideration of many technical issues, though most of them were fairly minor in scope. The process was greatly facilitated by the protection fea¬ tures of OS/2, which make debugging C code much easier. Since references to invalid memory addresses are caught in¬ stantly by the operating system, bugs manifest themselves in OS/2 much sooner than they do in DOS. Upon completing the job, we were delighted to discover that the resulting product—Paradox for OS/2—performed even bet¬ ter than we expected. Not only does it offer true multitasking, but it also runs faster than the DOS version, owing to OS/2’s support for large amounts of physical and virtual memory. Robert E. Shostak, formerly chief scientist for Borland Interna¬ tional , is the cofounder of a new company, Mira Technology. He is the co-creator of the popular Paradox database management system, and cofounder of the product's parent company, Ansa, a subsidiary of Borland. He can be reached on BIX as “editors. ” continued 230 BYTE- AUGUST 1988 SPECIAL TURBO SALE Get $5.00 Off Every Turbo Pascal 4 Book Get $3.00 Off Every Turbo C & Turbo Basic Book Using Turbo C* _ by Herbert Schildt For all C programmers, beginners to pros, this excellent guide helps you write Turbo C programs that get professional results. [jHH^Paperback, ISBN: 0-07-881279-8, 431 pp„ 7% x 9% Borland’Osborne/McGraw-Hill Programming Series 516.95 Advanced Turbo C " _ by Herbert Schildt Unveils Turbo C power programming techniques to serious programmers. Covers Turbo Pascal conversion to Turbo C and Turbo C graphics. JS2M5 Paperback, ISBN: 0-07-881280-1, 397 pp., 7% x 9% Borland’Osbome/McGraw-Hill Programming Series 519.95 Using Turbo Pascal r< VERSION 4 _ by Steve Wood Build the skills you need to become a productive Turbo Pascal 4 programmer. Covers beginning concepts to full-scale applications. Paperback, ISBN: 0-07-881356-5, 546 pp., 7 3 /a x 9% Borland-Osborne/McGraw-Hill Programming Series $14.95 Advanced Turbo Pascal * VERSION 4 _ by Herbert Schildt The power of Turbo Pascal 4 will be at your fingertips when you learn the top-performance techniques from expert Herb Schildt. 3*k9$ Paperback, ISBN: 0-07-881355-7, 416 pp., 7% x 9% Borland*Osborne/IVIcGraw-Hill Programming Series $16.95 Turbo C ,s> : THE COMPLETE REFERENCE _ By Herbert Schildt Covers Version 1.5 Programmers at every level of Turbo C expertise can quickly locate information on Turbo C functions, commands, codes, and applications—all in this handy encyclopedia. y&tSS Paperback, ISBN: 0-07-881346-8, 850 pp., 7 3 /a x 9% Borland-Osborne/McGraw-Hill Programming Series $21.95 Turbo Pascal ® THE COMPLETE REFERENCE Covers Version 4 by Stephen O'Brien The first single resource that lists every Turbo Pascal command, function, and feature, all illustrated in short examples and applications. Ideal for every Turbo Pascal programmer. Paperback, ISBN: 0-07-881290-9, 814 pp., 7% x VA Borland-Osborne/McGraw-Hill Programming Series $19.95 Turbo Pascal H) PROGRAMMER'S LIBRARY, SECOND EDITION _ by Kris Jamsa and Steven Nameroff Take full advantage of Turbo Pascal, and the newest versions of Turbo Pascal, with this outstanding collection of programming routines. Includes routines for the Turbo Pascal toolboxes. ;}2M5 Paperback, ISBN: 0-07-881368-9, 600 pp., 7% x 9% Borland-Osborne/McGraw-Hill Programming Series $17.95 TURBO BASIC Using Turbo Basic® _ by Frederick E. Mosher and David I. Schneider Introduces Turbo Basic to novices and seasoned pros alike. Learn about the Turbo Basic operating environment and the interactive editor. 3*9*3$ Paperback, ISBN: 0-07-881282-8, 457 pp .,7%x9 ] A Borland-Osborne/McGraw-Hill Programming Series $16.95 For A Limited Time Only ORDER TODAY! CALL TOLL-FREE 800-227-0900 Use Your Visa, MasterCard, or American Express Osborne McGraw-Hill risVS 2600 Tenth Street I ■ H11 Berkeley, California 94710 Turbo Basic, Turbo C. and Turbo Pascal are registered trademarks of Borland International. Copyright© 1988 McGraw-Hill, Inc. Circle 166 on Reader Service Card AUGUST 1988 -BYTE 231 •OSBOR FEATURE MAKING THE MOVE TO OS/2 Guides to Porting, Porting Guides John Socha and Linda Dudinyak O ur first impressions of OS/2 weren’t exactly positive. After all, here was an operating system whose manuals filled 2 feet of shelf space, compared with the single manual for MS-DOS 2.0. We weren’t thrilled at having to master such a complex operating system. But once we cracked the manuals, we changed our minds. Our task was to convert the Norton On-Line Programmer’s Guides—a pop-up reference program for programmers—from a TSR program running under MS-DOS to a protected-mode OS/2 program that could run concurrently with other pro¬ grams. TSR programs like the Norton Guides are often diffi¬ cult to write under DOS. But not under OS/2. TSRs under OS/2 OS/2 handles most of the hard work of writing a pop-up pro¬ gram under OS/2, making such programs almost a joy to write. There are three main areas where OS/2 proves quite helpful: monitoring the keyboard for the hot key, saving the current screen contents, and switching screen modes. Since MS-DOS is not a multitasking operating system, TSR programs for MS- DOS need extra code to switch screen modes and to determine when the programs can make DOS calls. Both problems vanish entirely under OS/2 because they’re handled by the operating system, which leaves only the issue of how to monitor the keyboard. Under OS/2, this function is supported by device monitors , which allow programs to monitor raw keystrokes before they’re passed on to the keyboard services. Any program that registers itself as a device monitor can monitor the keyboard buffer (looking for a hot key), change key sequences, or add key se¬ quences (which is useful for macro programs). The Norton Guides monitors the buffer looking for Shift-Fl and pops up on the screen as soon as it sees this key combination. Writing the device monitor for a single screen group was easy. What we wanted, however, was to register the Norton Guides as a global device monitor, which can monitor key¬ strokes in all screen groups. In this way the Guides could pop up in any screen group, not just the screen group from which Guides was installed. We discovered several interesting things about screen groups in the process. Now Appearing on Multiple Screens OS/2 has 16 independent screen groups; this allows multiple programs to run at the same time, each with its own virtual screen. Strictly speaking, a screen group refers to all the threads that are attached to a given virtual screen. The physical screen (the monitor) displays only one virtual screen and can be switched between the different screen groups at will. So far, so good. What isn’t obvious is that the first four screen groups (0 through 3) are reserved for use by OS/2: 1 is unknown, 2 is for the session manager, 3 is for the DOS-compatibility box, and 4 is for detached processes. Registering a device monitor with all these screen groups can cause OS/2 to lock up. Only screen groups 4 through 15 are available for OS/2 programs. As it turns out, we were able to register our device monitor with screen group 1 without any ill effects; the Guides popped up over the session manager. But registering with screen groups 2 or 3 caused OS/2 to lock up. Registering with screen group 0 caused no visible problems, but we still weren’t able to deter¬ mine what it’s for. In the end, we decided to register the Guides with only screen groups 4 through 12. This allows you to run the Guides as a pop-up on top of an application in any of those windows. A Problem with Threads Another sticky issue had to do with the thread priorities. The Norton Guides starts a separate thread for each of the 12 screen groups it monitors. Each thread goes through a very tight loop that reads one character (from its screen group), checks to see if it’s the hot key (in which case it calls pop_up_ng), and writes the character to the next keyboard monitor in the chain (or Kbd- Charln and KbdPeek if there are no more monitors). We had a problem, however. When we typed characters on the keyboard, they appeared very slowly on the screen. We soon found that the individual threads didn’t have high enough priorities. For some reason, the 12 threads weren’t receiving enough of the system time to be able to pass on keystrokes efficiently. Our first thought was to increase the priority on each of the 12 threads we created to time-critical. We suspected that in¬ creasing each thread’s priority shouldn’t slow down the system, since each thread would receive CPU time only when a new keystroke became available. We tried this method, and it seemed to work—that is, until we ran a program that used the mouse. Programs that use the mouse can’t afford to sit around until KbdCharln returns a keystroke, since they must also constantly poll the mouse. As a result, they must loop until either there is a mouse event, or there is a keystroke waiting in the buffer. This looping consumes more CPU time than a program that simply waits until KbdCharln returns a keystroke. This means that less CPU time is left over for background tasks. We didn’t under¬ stand why this should cause a problem; having set the priority of our 12 threads to time-critical, we assumed that our threads would receive time when—and only when—new keystrokes be¬ came available. But for some reason, this wasn’t the case for programs that used the mouse. Thanks to Microsoft’s technical support, we finally found a solution that seems to work in all cases: We set the priority on the main thread (thread 1), rather than the individual threads, to time-critical. This in turn set all the child threads used to monitor the 12 screen groups to time-critical as well. We still don’t understand why the other method didn’t work and this method does, though it almost certainly has to do with the algo¬ rithms used in the OS/2 scheduler, which Microsoft has not made public. Optimizing Screen Performance The other area that required some attention was optimizing screen performance. Most programs in the DOS world write directly to the screen to obtain fast screen updates because both the DOS and ROM BIOS calls for writing to the screen are very slow. OS/2, on the other hand, provides a number of different procedures for writing to the screen that are fairly fast—as long as you follow a few basic rules. These procedures include writ¬ ing to the physical screen (which is possible, but discour¬ aged), writing to a logical screen, and using the VioWrtxxx calls. We first considered writing directly to the physical screen, since our code was fine-tuned for writing directly to screen memory, but we quickly abandoned this idea since OS/2 continued 232 BYTE* AUGUST 1988 TRY THE NEW GENERATION FOR $30 KNOWLEDGEPRO KnowledgePro uses Topi csjix-stefe" ^ of knowledge." Topics can contain data. BHflSBSBH procedures, calculations, rules, lists and pictures. Ustng^dozen simple commands, non-programmers can use topiaTtfrex^lain complex procedures, rules or recommendations. U^ftTg^he other 100 plus commands, professional programmers cancTeate sophisticated expert system tools and applications quicfTy^^ and easily. HYPERTEXT Hypertext can be a powerful tool for organizing text, graphics and data, but without an underlying structure the user becomes lost in a maze of information. KnowledgePro adds structure, control and intelligence to create an exciting new teaching medium. Once you KnowledgePro never go back to your shell! Q. Who's using it? A. Engineers, Educators, Lawyers, Scientists, Managers, Authors, Bankers, Software Developers, Expert System Developers, Computer VARs and VADs, Trainers, Consultants, Experts in Agriculture, Manufacturing, Insurance, Petroleum, Government and many many more. Q. What are they doing with it? A. Intelligent tutorials, smart manuals, procedure guides, rule books, computer aided instruction, sales and promo¬ tion, data analysis, non-linear documents, text analysis, diagnostics, software front-ends, expert systems, training and education, hypertext authoring, case studies, insurance claim determination, investment analysis, intelligent forms - there seems to be no limit to the diversity of applications. Q. What can I do with the demo system? A. The KnowledgePro demonstration system comes with a 100 page manual and lots of examples to get you started. You can create and save small working knowledge bases. The only commands that you can't use are those for handling external files or chaining knowledge bases. We even credit your $30 toward the cost of the full system. Q. How much is the full development system? A. KnowledgePro costs $495 and there are no run-time charges, so you don't have to pay more when you distribute your applications. The Database Toolkit (for access to dBASE and Lotus 123 files) costs $49 and the Graphics Toolkit (for access to PC Paintbrush pictures) costs $89. Our KnowledgeMaker induction system (for creating rules from data) costs $99. KnowledgePro runs on IBM PC, AT and PS/2 compatible machines with 640K memory. TO ORDER Call 518-766-3000 (Annex, Visa, M/C accepted) or send $30 + $5 shipping & handling for the demo ($38 total foreign) or $495 + $8 shipping & handling for the full system ($553 total foreign) to Knowledge Garden, Inc., 473A Malden Bridge Road, Nassau, NY 12123. In NY State please add 7% sales tax. KnowledgePro® By Bev & Bill Thompson The first Knowledge Processor. published by Knowledge GARDENhc In association with KnowledgePro is a registered trademark of Knowledge Garden, Inc., Lotus 123 is a registered trademark of Lotus Development Corp., dBASE is a trademark of Ashton Tate. IBM is a registered trademark of International Business Machines Inc., KnowledgeMaker is a trademark of Knowledge Garden Inc. Photo Tcherevkoff © Circle 121 on Reader Service Card AUGUST 1988 -BYTE 233 FEATURE MAKING THE MOVE TO OS/2 doesn’t allow pop-up programs (which use VioPopup) to access the physical screen. The next option was to use the logical screen buffer, which lets you write to a screen buffer as if it were the physical screen. You then have to call VioShowBuf to display the changes you’ve made to the logical screen. Again, we abandoned this approach because pop-up programs are not allowed to use these calls. In other words, pop-up programs are allowed to use only the VioWrtxxx calls to write to the screen. As it turned out, we were able to convert our library routines over to calls to VioWrtxxx easily and quickly since, in most cases, we replaced long assembly language routines with a few C calls. Unfortunately, updating the screen display went from very fast (in the DOS version) to painfully slow. Something was wrong. The Case of the Missing Cursor The original assembly language code for the Norton Guides used a virtual cursor for writing characters and strings to the screen—the system kept track of where the virtual cursor was last positioned, and it recalled this offset from the screen buffer when placing new characters on the screen. This let us write one character at a time almost as quickly as writing a string. OS/2, on the other hand, has no virtual cursor for writing. Instead, whenever you want to write a character or string to the screen, you have to pass the row and column where you want to start writing on the screen. So when we converted our assembly language routines in the Guides over to OS/2 calls, we often asked OS/2 to write a single character at a time. Each time we asked it to do that, it had to calculate the offset in the screen buffer from the row and column values. This calculation takes time, which accounted for the slow screen updating in our ini¬ tial conversion of the Guides. The solution was to write an entire line (or at least large chunks of a line) at a time, rather than a single character at a time. Once we rewrote several routines to buffer their output for transfer in large chunks, screen performance increased to the point where the OS/2 version of the Guides was nearly as fast as the DOS version. Helping Ourselves We were delighted with the ease of converting the Norton Guides from a TSR program running under MS-DOS into an OS/2 protected-mode pop-up program. The conversion was much smoother and quicker than we could have hoped for; it took a total of about 2 months from first opening the OS/2 box until we shipped the OS/2 version of the Norton Guides. Thanks to OS/2’s DOS-compatibility box, we were able to use the Norton Guides itself to help us convert the Guides to OS/2. As we were starting the conversion, we had a 900K-byte Guides database to the OS/2 API that was nearing completion. The database has a DOS-to-OS/2 equivalency chart that helped us learn OS/2 and convert the Guides software. To access the database, we ran the original version of the Guides in OS/2’s DOS-compatibility box. The database is cross-referenced elec¬ tronically, and we found using it to be faster than looking things up in the manual. John Socha is director of R&D at Peter Norton Computing and creator of the Norton Commander and the Norton Guides soft¬ ware. He is also coauthor of Peter Norton’s Assembly Lan¬ guage Book. Linda Dudinyak , a programmer with Norton Com¬ puting , converted the Norton Guides into an OS/2 program. Before joining Norton Computing , she worked at Lotus Develop¬ ment on Lotus Metro. They can be reached on BLK as “editors. ” 1-2-3 FOR OS/2 David P. Reed I n developing 1-2-3 Release 3 for OS/2, the development team at Lotus learned a number of useful things about program¬ ming for OS/2 that would benefit anyone about to embark on a serious OS/2 programming project. One of our objectives for 1-2-3 Release 3 was that it be the ultimate Family API applica¬ tion—with common, compatible code for both DOS and OS/2 versions, down to the binary level—without being limited by the functions available in the Family API. Other objectives, such as high quality, performance, and portability, made the picture more complex. Realizing these objectives required, first, that we go beyond the standard Family API by emulating OS/2 functions in DOS to enhance the Family API and bring it closer to OS/2’s func¬ tionality; second, that we get directly at the graphics functions of the EGA, VGA, and other special devices; and finally, that we use OS/2’s dynamic-link library (DLL) facility for configurability. The Family Way The Family API, a subset of the OS/2 system API, is designed to allow construction of applications that run equally well in DOS (versions 2.0 and higher) and OS/2. The Family API sub¬ set lets you do nearly anything you would have done in MS-DOS and BIOS calls. One advantage this facility provides to the designer is that programs that stick to the Family API can be linked and bound into “dual-mode executable” files that can run either in MS- DOS or in OS/2. The BIND utility combines the OS/2 program with a special stub loader that takes over at program start-up in MS-DOS, replacing the calls to OS/2 system routines with stubs that emulate those calls with their MS-DOS equivalents. An additional advantage is that each system loads only those portions of the bound executable file that are of interest to that particular system. These dual-mode programs are great for those little (and not so little) utilities, such as installation programs and file util¬ ities, that you don’t want to maintain separately on each operat¬ ing system. But there’s more value to this mechanism than might be ob¬ vious right away. For example, suppose you want to write a pro¬ gram that behaves well in DOS but, when running in OS/2, uses some of the new features of OS/2, such as starting up a program as a background task, loading a DLL, or changing the size of memory segments. You can still tell whether these features are available at run time by using the DosGetMachineMode call (in¬ cluded in the Family API subset), which returns a 0 if you are running under DOS, and a 1 if under OS/2. Or, you can extend the Family API. Imagine a typical OS/2 call (say, DosSetMeUpAndKnockMeDown) that wasn’t included in the Family API subset. You can add new routines to the li¬ brary of emulators that are substituted by OS/2. All you need to do is write your own DosSetMeUpAndKnockMeDown call that works in DOS and add it to a library that you bind in with your program. When you run the program in OS/2, it will call the OS/2 version, and when you run in DOS, it will call the substi¬ tute version. In 1-2-3 Release 3, we built our own simple multitasking sys¬ tem that is implemented in OS/2 by using threads (which are not in the Family API), and in DOS by hooking various BIOS inter- continued 234 BYTE* AUGUST 1988 MICROMINT'S Gold Standard in Single Board Computers and Industrial Controllers _. BCC180-$395.00 Multitasking Controller The BCC180. only 4.5" x 8.5" uses the same 64180 CMOS Z80 instruction compatible processor as Micromint’s SB 180 and SBI80FX single board computers. Configured primarily for process control w/ 384K of memory, 6 parallel I/O ports, console serial port, RS-232/422/ 485 selectable auxiliary serial port, and an interrupt driven ROM- resident multitasking BASIC-180 compiler, the BCC180 uses the same 44-pin I/O expansion bus as Micromint’s BCC52 controller board. PROCESSOR • CMOS HD64I80, 9.2I6MIU 8-bil CPU, 6S-pin PLCC package MEMORY • Up to 384K bytes total memory on-boartl • I28K of either static RAM (62256) or EPROM (27256) • 256K dynamic RAM SIMM • Full-function 8K ROM monitor included INPUT/OUTPUT • Console RS-232 serial port with auto baud rate select to 19.200 baud • Peripheral serial port, 150-19,200 baud, selectable RS-232. RS-422. or RS-485 • 48 bits bidirectional parallel I/O • 64K I/O available through the BCC bus edge connector DIMENSIONS and CONNECTIONS • Dual 22-pin (0.156') edge connector • Compatible with all Micromini BCC-series I/O expansion boards • Two 26-pin headers for six bidirectional parallel ports • 25-pin 011-25 for RS-232 console I/O • 20-pin header for RS-232 auxiliary serial port • 4 screw terminals for RS-422/485 connection BCCI80-I-20 9MHz assembled and fully socketed S395.00 BCCI80 Computer/Controller with 32K bytes of static RAM, ROM Monitor, BASIC-180 development software and user’s manual For Additional 256K. DRAM add $100.00 BCC180-1 100 Quantity w/32K RAM w/o ROM Monitor $209.00 BCC52 ■ $189.00 BASIC-52 Computer/Controller The BCC52 Computer/Controller is Micromint's hottest selling standalone single board microcomputer. Its cost- j effective architecture needs only a power supply and terminal to become a complete development or end-use system, programmable in BASIC or machine language. The BCC52 uses Micromint’s new 80C52-BASIC CMOS microprocessor which contains a ROM resident 8K byte floating point BASIC-52 interpreter. The BCC52 contains sockets for up to 48K bytes of RAM/EPROM, an “intelligent’’ 2764/128 EPROM pro¬ grammer, 3 parallel ports, a serial terminal port with auto baud rate se¬ lection, a serial printer port, and it is bus compatible with the full line of BCC-bus expansion boards. The BCC52 bridges the gap between ex¬ pensive programmable controllers and hard-to-justify price sensitive control applications. BASIC-52’s full floating point BASIC is fast and efficient enough for the most complicated tasks, while its cost effective design allows it to be considered for many new areas of im¬ plementation. It can be used both for development and end-use ap¬ plications. Since the BASIC-52 is bus oriented, it supports the following Micromint expansion boards in any of Micromint’s card cages with optional power supplies: BCC22 Smart terminal board BCC40R 8-Channel relay output ADP500 User vocabulary, digitized board speech board BCC53 Memory and 6 port I/O BCC25 LCD display board expansion board BCC33 3 port I/O expansion board BCCI3 8-bit and BCC30 12-bit BCC40D 8-Channel optoisolated A/D converter boards I/O expansion board BCC 18 Dual channel serial I/O board BCC52 BASIC 52 Controller Board $189.00 BCC-SYST.5 “52 PAK’’ Starter System includes: $449.00 BCC52.ROM A&B UTIL.,CC01,MB08,UPSI0 BCC52 OEM 100 Quantity Price -- $149.00 BCC52C Lower power all CMOS version of the BCC52 $199.00 NOTE: The BCC52 series is available in Industrial Temperature Range, fully tested at temperature. Prices start as low as $294.00 in single quantities. Be sure to call for a quote on your specific Industrial OEM requirements. BCC11-$139.00 Z8 BASIC Computer 8 —$ Board The Micromint BCC40D is an 8- channel optoisolated input/output expansion board designed for use with Micromint’s family of BCC- bus Computer/Controllers. Using industry-standard optoisolated I/O modules, the BCC40I) provides on/ off control and input monitoring of eight II5-230VAC or 5-48VDC devices used in data acquisition and control applications. Up to 16 BCC40D boards can be used together in a single system to provide a total of 128 input and output channels. Individual chan¬ nels can be read or updated by reading from or writing to a single I/O address. The BCC40D can be directly controlled from BASIC or it can function completely in the background under an application program using high-speed interrupt- driven ROM C firmware. This firmware sets aside a table in memory which reflects the status, setpoints, and change-of-state flags of the I/O modules. Interaction among programs within a multiboard BCC40x system merely consists of reading or setting these memory table values. Each optoisolated channel is fused and has screw contacts for direct connection to the controlling device and/or the power source. Both input or output modules, and AC or DC functions can be intermixed on the same BCC40D board. SPECIFIt ATIONS Latched outputs * Uses industry-standard OAC5, ODC5, IAC5, I DCS type modules Dual-ported module addressing LED on/off indicator on each channel Can be used concurrently with BCC40R and other BCC-bus pe¬ ripherals Operates on +5V Operating conditions: temperature: 0-50°C (32-l22°F) relative humidity: 10-90% non¬ condensing 4.5“ x 6" board dual 22-pin (0.156") edge connec- BCC40D/0 without modules BCC40D/4 with 4 modules BCC40D/8 with 8 modules BCC40R—$169.00 8-Channel Relay Output Board Features: * Uses Z8 single chip microcomputer * On-board tiny BASIC interpreter * 2 on-board parallel ports & serial port * 6 interrupts (4 external) * Just connect a terminal and write control programs in BASIC * 6K. bytes of RAM or EPROM memory on-board * Baud rates 110-9600 bps * Data and address bus available for 56K memory and I/O expansion * Consumes only 1.5 watts at +5, +12, and -I2V BCC11* BASIC System Controller $139.00 OEM 100 Quantity Price $89.00 * Now Available in Industrial Temperature Range The Micromint BCC40R is an 8- channel relay output expansion board designed for use with Micromint’s family of BCC-bus Computer /Con¬ trollers. Using efficient mechanical relays, the BCC40R provides con- tact-closure on/off control of eight AC- or DC-powered devices for data acquisition and control applications. Up to 16 BCC40R boards can be used together in a single system to provide a total of 128 relay output channels. The relays are controlled by writing to a board-specific I/O ad¬ dress. The relays on a BCC40R board can be controlled either as a set of eight relays at a single I/O address or individual relays at eight separate I/O addresses. The BCC40R can be directly con¬ trolled from BASIC or it can function completely in the background under an application program using high speed interrupt-driven ROM C firmware. This firmware sets aside a table in memory which reflects the status and setpoints of the relays. Interaction among programs within a multiboard BCC40x system merely consists of reading or setting these memory table values. The eight relay outputs have screw contacts for direct connection to the controlling device and/or the power source. Four of the relays have single-pole-double-throw (SPDT) output connections and four relays have single-pole-single-throw (SPST) output connections. SPECIFICATIONS * Contacts raicd for 1/10 HP, 3A 120V resistive, or 3A 30VDC * Latched relay outputs * LED on/off indicator on each channel * Power on/off failsafe: No arbitrary closures on power up/down * Can be used concurrently with BCC40D and other BCC-bus peripherals * Operates on +I2V * Operating conditions: 0-50°C (32-122°F) relative humidity: 10-90% noncondensing * 4.5“ x 6" board * dual 22-pin (0.156”) edge connector * 20-terminal screw connector (#14 wire) The BCC18 is a general-purpose dual-serial-port interface board for use with the Micromint BCC-bus. Optional support software is available for the BCC52 and BCC 180 computer/ controllers. The BCC18 Serial Board contains two serial interfaces. Each interface can be either a 110/300/1200-bps modem, or a hard-wired RS-232C/ RS-422/RS-485 interface. The modem interface uses a Xecom XEI201/XE1203 MOSART (MOdem Synchronous/Asynchronous Re¬ ceiver/Transmitter), capable of 110, 300, or 1200 bps communication and compatible with Bell 103 and Bell 212A standards. The hard-wired serial interface uses an industry- standard 8251A USART (Universal Synchronous/Asynchronous Re¬ ceiver/Transmitter), capable of supporting asynchronous serial com¬ munications at speeds up to 19.2 kbps and synchronous serial commu¬ nications at speeds up to 64k bps. The BCC18 can be configured with two MOSARTs, two 8251As, or one of each. Up to 16 BCC18s can be used in a single system (for a total of 32 serial ports). MOSART - Connects directly to any phone I - DTMF or pulse dialing - DTMF reception and decoding - Call progress monitoring - Parity generation/checking 8251A - Full-duplex, double-buffered transmitter and receiver - Fully programmable with several speed and character modes • Error detection for parity, overrun, and framing • False start bit detection; automatic break detect and handling - Supports bisync - Bit r3te is software programmable using an on-board 8253 counter/timer - RS-232C, RS-422, and RS-485 supported Software - MOSART and 8251A - Optional support soft' Sync byte deteclion/insertion Extensive built-in diagnostics Telephone-line diagnostics Synchronous and asynchronous operation Voice synthesis capability (XEI203 only) se the same program interface, so mot sonware for the BCC52 and BCC 180 is avail se features of the MOSART and 8251A fror BCC18S OEM configuration fixed dual 8251 RS-232 only $175.00 serial port board BCC18S OEM 100 Quantity Price $134.00 BCC18U-1 8251/8251 Dual RS-232/485 serial $209.00 BCC18U-2 8251/1201 Modem and serial port $359.00 BCC18U-3 1201/1201 Modem/Modem board $499.00 BCC52/18 BCC52 serial port utilities software $75.00 BCC-BUS Expansion Products Single Qty. Price 8-Channel relay output board OEM 100 Quantity price $124.00 BCC08 Single Channel UART Serial Board $149.00 BCC13 8-bit, 8 Channel A/D Board $129.00 BCC30 12-bit, 16 Channel A/D Board $197.00 BCC22 25-line, 80 Character Terminal Board $249.00 BCC25 LCD Board (4x20) or (8x40*) $159.00 BCC55 Fully Decoded & Buffered Prototyping $ 79.00 Board BCCxx X-10 Power Line Controller $ 59.00 BCC53 Multifunction Expansion Board $160.00 MB04 4 Slot Mini-Motherboard $ 69.00 MB08 8 Slot Full Motherboard $ 85.00 "Call for current pricing REPRESENTATIVES ACCESS TECHNOLOGIES 1408 Richmond Dr Placentia, Ca. 92670 Tel:(714) 996-3917 MICROFUTURE 41040 Comae Terrace Fremont, Ca. 94538 Tel:(415) 657-0264 DISTRIBUTOR J.B. DESIGNS SC TECHNOLOGIES LTD. 15 Market Place Cirencester, Glos. GL7 2PB England Tel: 0285-68122 Fax: 0285-68859 To order call 1-800-635-3355 TEL: (203)871-6170 TELEX:643331 FAX : (203) 872-2204 MICROMINT INC 4 PARK STREET VERNON, CT. 06066 AUGUST 1988 -BYTE 235 FEATURE MAKING THE MOVE TO OS/2 rupts. Using the Family API and dual-mode executable file tools made it a straightforward project. A Peripheral Issue? The wide variety of peripheral equipment, such as printers, plotters, video displays, and math coprocessors, made possible by the IBM PC’s open architecture is a boon to users. However, dealing with that variety in a programming environment in¬ volves a great deal of planning. For Release 3, we decided to break the code up and have one major portion—the core— that would always be the same no matter what peripherals were present, and a set of replaceable parts—the drivers— that could be chosen by the core, depending on the environment. For ex¬ ample, depending on the presence or absence of a math copro¬ cessor, the core could load a hardware-optimized or software- emulated math library. OS/2 provides a nice tool for implementing these replaceable modules in the form of DLLs. Although OS/2 provides several different ways to use DLLs, our development team chose one that was particularly appropriate for handling the case of re¬ placeable modules. One form of dynamic linking allows you to use ordinal entry points to select the entry points of a DLL. To define the inter¬ face to a replaceable module, we assigned ordinal numbers to each of its entry points (e.g., 1=INIT, 2=TERMINATE, 3 = ADD, 4=SUB, and so on). Then each version of a replace¬ able module received its own unique name: FLT87.DLL, FLTSOFT.DLL, and FLT1167.DLL, for example. At start-up time, we decide which modules to use (depending on which peripherals are available) and load them. To use a par¬ ticular version of the module, we initialize a table of pointers to each of the ordinal entry points of the desired module. First, we call DosLoadModule to get a module handle for the module of the right name. Then for each integer n from 1 to N, we call DosGetProcAddr to get the address of the entry point to put into the entry-point table. Finally, to call the entry point at run time, we use the C macro facility to make the procedure look just like a regular C call: ^define floating_add/ (#((void (*) (void)) entrypoint[2])) where entrypoint[2] is the pointer to the desired floating¬ point add procedure that we obtained. The user of float- ing_add(), then, never needs to know that it is a DLL. One more key point: If a DLL must be written in C (only a few of ours were in the Microsoft Macro Assembler [MASM]), it must be compiled with special options under the Microsoft C 5 (or IBM C/2) compiler. The option /Au specifies that entry points are to load the 80286 segment register DS with the DGROUP group address belonging to the DLL itself, and that the segment register SS will not equal DS. Few of the stan¬ dard C libraries can be safely called from such DLLs because of this special memory option. See the C compiler manual for further details. Minimal-Fuss Graphics Although OS/2 will eventually have the full graphics function¬ ality available in the Presentation Manager, OS/2’s initial sup¬ port for graphics is limited. On the other hand, 1-2-3 has al¬ ways had graphics, so we had to find a way to make graphics work under OS/2—something that is not obvious at first. The major block to doing graphics right is that I/O operations (IN and OUT instructions) to EGAs and VGAs must be done fre¬ quently (every few instructions) in the course of drawing lines, symbols, and characters. In OS/2 protected mode, IN and OUT instructions cause an illegal instruction trap. However, you can bypass this restriction by using the linker’s definition (.DEF) file facility to make one or more code segments run at the pro¬ cessor’s I/O privilege level (IOPL). In this situation, the required graphics code will usually be written in assembly language. Since the code cannot be de¬ bugged with a debugger and can cause the whole operating sys¬ tem to crash (just like a device driver), it is a good idea to keep these IOPL routines short and simple. We recommend passing arguments in registers (though you can use the stack if you specify the right information in the .DEF file). For example, a routine that does an OUT to port 3D5h of the current value of AL might be written as follows: RISKY SEGMENT BYTE PUBLIC 1 CODE' PUBLIC OUT3D5 OUT3D5 PROC FAR MOV DX,3D5H OUT DX,AL RET OUT3D5 ENDP RISKY ENDS The segment RISKY would be declared as an IOPL segment in the .DEF file, and the entry point OUT3D5 would be declared as IOPL as well. With all the work done at assembly and link time, the payoff comes when OS/2 loads this program. OS/2 loads the segment RISKY so that it runs at IOPL level, and an 80286 call gate is set up for the procedure OUT3D5. When some program calls OUT3D5, it actually calls the call gate, which causes the proces¬ sor to switch modes to the IOPL, switching to a new stack re¬ served for that purpose. Here, it is perfectly acceptable to exe¬ cute OUT instructions, and so forth. Then, when the RET instruction is executed, another mode switch and stack switch happens, so that you are now back at the caller’s level. One more note about saving and redrawing: If you create your own graphics, you lose OS/2’s screen-group switching features and have to spawn a separate thread to handle saving and redrawing the screen. Unfortunately, such a thread is nearly impossible to debug! Lots to Learn, Lots of Benefits Fashioning 1-2-3 Release 3 so that it will run equally well under OS/2 and DOS has, thus far, been easier than we ex¬ pected. OS/2 has fewer bugs than we anticipated from the ini¬ tial release of a major operating system. Its documentation is also better than we thought it would be—certainly better than the first generation of MS-DOS manuals—though still lacking in its tutorial aspects. The programmer who wants to explore OS/2 will find lots to learn, discover, and invent with this new environment. OS/2 has a tremendous amount of power and flexibility that we’re all only just learning to use. Over time, we’ll learn even more so¬ phisticated things to do with it, from which users and program¬ mers alike stand to benefit. ■ David P. Reed, vice president for R&D with the Software Prod¬ ucts Group at Lotus Development, heads up the team that de¬ signed the forthcoming 1-2-3 Release 3. He has an MS and a Ph.D. in computer science from MIT. Dr. Reed came to Lotus from Software Arts, the developers of the original VisiCalc spreadsheet. He can be reached on BIX as “editors. ” 236 BYTE* AUGUST 1988 (f PRO-C. The first complete ‘C’ application tool . that produces ‘C’ code. Programming can f now be easier and routine coding problems are now eliminated. The only source code generator that runs on MSDOS, QNX, XENIX and UNIX, PRO-C has the facilities to produce the normal functions of complex application software. • DATA DEFINITION __ Utilizing the integrated PRO-C ■ pi generators to create menu, screen ■ and report programs or batch processes. • INTEGRATED GENERATORS Screens Menus Reports Batch processes. Combined they can generate any business ■ or database applications. • CONTEXT-SENSITIVE HELP Complete context sensitive help is available at the touch of the help key. a •UTILITIES Professional utilities allow the selection of your development environment on line help for generated programs and full program documentation. Call today for more information. Toll free 1 - 800 - 265-8887 North America Only. Chancelogic Inc. / Allen Square, 180 King St. South J Waterloo, Ontario, Canada L N2J1P8. V Tel: 519-746-4800. A Fax: 519-746-1613. A PRO-C — CHANCELOGIC INC. XENIX and MSDOS — Microsoft Corp. QNX — Quantum Software Systems Ltd. UNIX — AT&T Bell Laboratories. Circle 271 on Reader Service Card AUGUST 1988 -BYTE 237 ■ mm wMmM SB f ‘le Directory Edit Option Application Corn* Pun highlighted program Directory I is Jun 1987 SYSMOMTG An Incredible Display Of Power And Versatility For just $599,* the new 965 gives you ASCII, ANSI and IBM® PC com¬ patibility in one terminal. The new 965’s versatility is unparalleled. It supports 23 ter¬ minal emulations, more than any other model in its class. You even get your choice of ASCII, ANSI or IBM Enhanced PC keyboard styles. There’s a 14" flat display in green or page-white with crisp, clear characters in a high-resolution 10x16 matrix. A 2-position keyboard with a true accounting keypad, 20 user- programmable editing keys, and 128 programmable function keys. The 965 can display up to 49 data lines, enough to show large spreadsheets or two normal display pages of text at the same time. No other terminal this affordable can do that. The 965’s state-of-the-art single board design uses a 16-bit CPU and sophisticated gate array to give you a high-performance, very reliable terminal with a full one-year end- user limited warranty. The 965. A whole new look in terminals from TeleVideo. Call us toll-free or write today for more information. TeleVideo Systems, Inc., 1170 Morse Ave., Sunnyvale, CA 94088-3568. Circle 270 on Reader Service Card TeleVideo* THE VISION YOU NEED TO SUCCEED. Call 1-800-835-3228 O' | OHM IcIeVicltv SvMcnis. Iiu IBM is a registered trademark of Inter national Business Machines Corporation. *Suggestcd Retail Price HANDS ON CIARCIA’S CIRCUIT CELLAR ■ Steve Ciarcia Part 1 Why Microcontrollers? Microcontrollers are used in keyboard and disk interfaces and in numerous other devices. Here’s a tutorial on the 8031/8051 microcontroller family. Photo 1: Two versions of the Intel MCS-51 family: the 8031 ROMless microcontroller and the 8751 programmable (EPROM on-chip through the quartz window) microcontroller. G one are the days when a com¬ plex project required a suit¬ case full of TTL ICs and a wire-wrap gun. As with most of the recent Circuit Cellar designs, under the hood there are a few carefully chosen discrete ICs controlled by a microprocessor. The trade-off is simple: Hardware is expensive and software is cheap—once you get it right. Many of you have noticed that I have been using two popular microcontrollers from Intel—the 8031 and the 8051—as the control elements in Circuit Cellar de¬ signs. I’ve received many requests for general information about these micro¬ processors and for guidance in applying them elsewhere. With that as an incen¬ tive, I decided to present this combina¬ tion tutorial/development system project. In this first part of a two-part article, I’ll introduce the members of the 8031/ 8051 chip family and describe using them as embedded microcontrollers. The second part will present all the elements of a useful development system intended to simplify the process of designing sys¬ tems using the 8031/8051 family. The Difference in a Name It’s important to be clear on the distinc¬ tion between microcomputers, micropro¬ cessors, and microcontrollers. That way, you’ll understand where the 8031/8051 family fits in the big picture. A microprocessor is just the CPU part of a computer, without the memory, I/O, and peripherals needed for a complete system. For example, 8088 and 80286 chips are microprocessors (the “micro” prefix designates that this CPU element is at the chip level). All other chips in an IBM PC are there to add features not found within the microprocessor chip it¬ self. The hardware designer can choose different chips to implement those fea¬ tures in different ways, although a de¬ signer has little room for choice if the end result is supposed to be an IBM PC clone. When a microprocessor is combined with I/O and memory peripheral func¬ tions, the combination is called a micro¬ computer. Of course, vendors anxious to designate that their computer is more powerful than others often shed the “micro” prefix, but it’s still a micro¬ computer given today’s definition. Ulti¬ mately, good economic sense suggests that all computers, including minicom¬ puters and mainframes, will utilize the same basic elements, just differentiated by quantity. The fact that combining a CPU with memory and I/O produces a microcom¬ puter also holds true at the chip level. Many companies add these peripheral functions onto the same substrate with the CPU to make a complete microcom¬ puter. These devices are called single¬ chip microcomputers to differentiate them from their big-cousin desktop microcomputers. Generally speaking, microcomputer chips are designed for very small com¬ puter-based devices that don’t need all the functions of a full computer system. In cost-sensitive control applications, continued COPYRIGHT © 1988 STEVEN A. CIARCIA. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. AUGUST 1988 • B Y T E 239 HANDS ON CIARCIA’S CIRCUIT CELLAR even the few chips needed to support a CPU like an 8088 or Z80 are too many. Instead, designers often employ a single¬ chip microcomputer (or a slightly ex¬ panded circuit using one) to handle control-specific activities. When single¬ chip microcomputers are designed or used in industrial control systems, they are often called single-chip microcon¬ trollers. Basically, there is no difference between microcomputers and microcon¬ trollers; the name depends on how we use them. Frequently, microcontrollers are used to replace circuit functions that ordinar¬ ily require many low-level chips or need the main CPU’s attention each time the circuit is active. The IBM PC keyboard- interface circuit is a prime example of the use of a microcontroller chip. In the PC, a half dozen chips (excluding I/O ad¬ dressing and decoding) are necessary to receive and decode the serial clock and data bit stream from the keyboard. In the IBM PC AT (and the CCAT I presented in September and October 1987), this low-level circuitry is replaced with an 8742 microcontroller that completely simulates the old circuit and incorporates additional features in one chip. The Intel 8051 Family The Intel 8051 is a classic microcon¬ troller (a generation more advanced than the 8742) and a true single-chip micro¬ computer containing parallel I/O, coun¬ ter/timers, serial I/O, RAM, and EPROM or ROM (depending on the part type). The 8051 family contains several members (Intel refers to it as the MCS- 51 family), each adapted for a specific type of system. The different versions are outlined in table 1, and a block diagram of the 8051 is shown in figure 1. The 8051 has two close relatives, the 8751 and the 8031 (see photo 1), and a cousin, the 8052. All versions contain the same CPU, RAM, counter/timers, parallel ports, and serial I/O. The 8051 contains 4K bytes of ROM, which must be custom-masked when the chip is manufactured. In the 8751, the ROM is replaced with EPROM that you can program (the schematic for an 8751 programming adapter for the Circuit Cellar serial EPROM program¬ mer presented in October 1986 is avail¬ able by writing to me). The 8031 is meant for expanded appli¬ cations and uses external memory. The 8031 uses three of the four on-chip paral¬ lel ports to make a conventional address and data bus with appropriate control lines. You might wonder why you’d choose a single-chip microcomputer in the first place if you end up converting it back to function as a CPU with other peripheral chips. Basically, it depends on the de¬ gree of expansion required. Since the 8031 still contains RAM, a parallel port, and a serial I/O port—even when func¬ tioning as the CPU core of an expanded circuit—the eventual number of chips necessary to expand the I/O or memory is still considerably less for the same ulti¬ mate capability than with a straight Table 1: Members of the 8051 microcontroller family tree. Device name ROMIess version EPROM version ROM bytes RAM bytes 16-bit timers 8051 8031 (8751) 4K 128 2 8051 AH 8031 AH 8751H 4K 128 2 8052AH 8032AH 8752BH 8K 256 3 Address/data i Counter inputs Figure 1: Inside the 8051. 240 BYTE* AUGUST 1988 HANDS ON CIARCIA’S CIRCUIT CELLAR microprocessor and peripheral chips. I’ll go into the possible expansion techniques later. Intel and other companies sell varia¬ tions of the 8051 family with more inter¬ nal memory, more I/O, lower power, and so forth. An 80C31 is a CMOS low- power version of the 8031, for example. The 8052, which I have also used in proj¬ ects, is the same as the 8051, except that it has another counter/timer and addi¬ tional RAM and ROM. Using an 8051 is as simple as hooking up the power supply and clock crystal. Unlike the 8031, however, you have to supply Intel with a program for the 8051 so it can create a chip mask defining the internal ROM. (If your program is not quite right, it’s time for another mask.) As you might expect, both mask mak¬ ing and chip building take time and money. (Since I did this for a recent proj¬ ect, I thought you might be interested in some manufacturing information. If you plan on making an 8051 microcontroller and need to mask your own chip, the one¬ time masking charge is about $3000, with a minimum order of 1000 chips.) Mask programming makes sense for an application that uses thousands of identi¬ cal 8051s a year, but it is not practical for low-volume systems and prototypes. The 8751 has all the features of the 8051, except that an on-chip EPROM re¬ places the ROM program storage. Mak¬ ing a program change is as simple as erasing the EPROM with ultraviolet light and burning another program. Many de¬ velopers use 8751s until the code works, then commit to a large 8051 order with the program in ROM. If the product vol¬ ume is low enough, it’s often worthwhile to use 8751s in the final product. An 8051 costs about $4 to $5 apiece in thou¬ sands; an 8751 is about $25 to $40. The 8031 has no on-chip program storage at all. The system must include an external EPROM and an address latch. Considering the falling prices of EPROMs and the heavy costs of using either 8051s or 8751s in low volumes, the 8031 is a viable alternative despite the additional chips. For many small sys¬ tems, the 8031/EPROM combination is far more cost-effective than an 8051. (This is the type of system I’ll describe in my examples.) As I mentioned before, all members of the 8051 family have the same core hard¬ ware and therefore use the same core in¬ struction set. While some members have one or two additional instructions for features unique to the particular chip, I’ll use the term “8051” to describe the “8051 chip family,” unless I’m talking about a specific version with unique requirements. Making It Real With all that in mind, let’s look at con¬ figuring a usable “computer/controller” using an 8031 microcontroller chip as part of the system. Remember that in a single-chip microcontroller, internal hardware replaces all the digital logic you’d normally add for control, timing, and so forth. You need add only the key¬ board, display, relays, switches, and user-specific I/O that actually makes up the final product. Figure 2a shows the bare-bones 8031 microcontroller system: the 8031, a 2764 EPROM to hold 8K bytes of program, and a 74LS373 latch to demultiplex the address/data bus. The system has 128 bytes of RAM on the 8031, a bidirec¬ tional parallel I/O port, a bidirectional serial port, two counter/timers, and two external interrupt inputs. With a 12- MHz crystal (most often, we select 11.0592 MHz for communications rate compatibility), it executes most instruc¬ tions in one machine cycle—a peak rate of 1 million instructions per second. Not bad for three chips, is it? A single I/O port can scan a 16-key matrix. With an additional output bit, it can drive a 2-line by 20-character smart liquid crystal display at the same time. The remaining I/O bits can handle triacs or power field-effect transistors for AC or DC control. Burn a program into the EPROM, and you have a real-time power controller. Run the serial port through a MAX232 RS-232C level converter, and you have a standard serial port for re¬ mote control or status monitoring at your master computer. If you don’t need the serial port, coun¬ ter/timers, and external interrupts, the 8031 can use those special bits as a sec¬ ond parallel I/O port, so the minimum system can have up to 16 I/O bits. Each bit can be tested, set, and cleared individ¬ ually under program control. If one or two parallel I/O ports aren’t enough for your application, figure 2b (an expansion of figure 2a) shows what’s needed to get three more: Add a single 8255 programmable peripheral inter¬ face. The 8255’s port C can be set up for automatic handshaking, so now you have the basis for a serial-to-parallel (and back) format converter or 24 more I/O bits for a bigger controller. Notice that no “glue” chips are needed between the 8031 and the 8255. Because the 8255 uses the RD\ and WR\ bits, the second I/O port isn’t com¬ pletely free. The 6 remaining bits can still handle either general I/O or their in¬ dividual special functions, though. If your application requires more than 128 bytes of RAM, figure 2c (figure 2a expanded to include 2b and 2c) shows how to get 8K bytes of RAM by adding a 6264 static RAM chip. Now you can build a fancy buffering format converter, a data logger, or a serial-programmable power controller. A 62256 RAM would give 32K bytes with no more effort, still with no glue chips! Finally, for those of you who need lots of RAM and I/O, figure 2d (figure 2a expanded to include the circuitry of 2b, 2c, and 2d) shows how to connect multi¬ ple I/O chips. The 74LS138 decoder generates chip select signals from the 8031 ’s output addresses, with each select covering an 8K-byte range. The system shown has 16K bytes of RAM and seven bidirectional I/O ports. Pretty nice for seven chips. The point of all this is that the “com¬ puter” part of your control system need not require elaborate hardware. For a unit of any reasonable size, you’ll spend most of your hardware design time on the I/O devices rather than on the 8031 cir¬ cuits, which is exactly as it should be. Perhaps now you understand why I have been using the 8031 frequently. The main benefit of a microcontroller is the ease of adding new features to your sys¬ tem, just by changing the program, not changing the circuit-board connections. A new EPROM can give the hardware a completely new personality. Try doing that by rewiring a board of TTL control logic! The Software Swamp Every microprocessor has an instruction set exhibiting the conflict between all the instructions that could possibly be useful and the few that fit on the chip. The 8051 has many bit-manipulation instructions and few general instructions, reflecting its design as a controller rather than as a computer. Most 8051 instructions are 1 or 2 bytes long, with the remainder requiring 3 bytes. All instructions except MUL and DIV execute in one or two instruction cycles. An instruction cycle is 1 micro¬ second (n s) at a 12-MHz clock rate. MUL and DIV lag along at 4 /*s. If you’ve written assembly language programs for any other microprocessor, you’ll find some of the same instructions in the 805l’s code. To understand the 805l’s instructions, you must be famil¬ iar with the three main address spaces defined on the chip: 64K bytes of pro- continued AUGUST 1988 • BYTE 241 HANDS ON CIARCIA’S CIRCUIT CELLAR PINS 10-17 MAY BE USED AS A GENERAL-PURPOSE I/O PORT IF THE SPECIAL FUNCTIONS ARE NOT NEEDED m m RECEIVE DATA TRANSMIT DATA (TTL SERIAL DATA) EXTERNAL INTERRUPT 1 EXTERNAL INTERRUPT 0 TIMER 1 INPUT ■ TIMER 0 INTERRUPT ■ MINIMUM 8031 SYSTEM XTAL1 PI 7 P16 XTAL2 PI 5 P14 P13 P12 IC1 8031 Pll P10 P27 P26 P25 RST P24 P23 P22 P21 P20 ea/v dd P07 P06 P05 P04 RXD P03 TXD P02 P01 POO INTI PSEN INTO AE T1 WR TO RD FIGURE 2A GENERAL- )PURPOSE _3_ 2 I/O PORT 1 28 A15 v f - 27 A14 , 26 A13 . 25 A12 „ 24 All v AD7 18 23 A10 , r AD6 17 22 A9 , ^ AD5 14 21 A8 . r AD4 13 AD3 8 32 AD7 „ ^ AD2 7 33 AD6 ^ f ADI 4 34 AD5 , r ADO 3 35 AD4 , s - 36 AD3 j 37 AD2 j 38 ADI j 39 ADO J IC2 74LS373 8D 8Q 7D 7Q 6D 6Q 5D 5Q 4D 4Q 3D 3Q 2D 20 ID 10 EN OE 19 A7 16 A6 15 A5 12 A4 9 A3 6 A2 5 A1 2 AO "I PROGRAM STORAGE ENABLE ADDRESS LATCH ENABLE WRITE EXTERNAL MEMORY READ EXTERNAL MEMORY 8031 SYSTEM WITH I/O EXPANSION FIGURE 2B 8031 SYSTEM WITH I/O EXPANSION RAM EXPANSION FIGURE 2C + 5V IC7 74LS138 JF 8031 SYSTEM WITH ADDRESS DECODE I/O EXPANSION RAM EXPANSION G1 Y7 G2A Y6 G2B Y5 Y4 Y3 Q Y2 B Y1 A YO 11 8000H 12 _ 13 14 2000H 15 OOOOH FIGURE 2D Figure 2: Growing an 8031 system, (a) A minimum configuration, (b) minimum system with I/O expansion, (c) system with I/O and RAM expansion, and (d) system with address decode logic and even more RAM and I/O. 242 BYTE- AUGUST 1988 HANDS ON CIARCIA’S CIRCUIT CELLAR J +5V > ^ All 23 ^ A10 21 ^ A9 24 in 00 < w A7 3 > c A6 4 > ^ A5 5 > ^ A4 6 J . A3 7 > ^ A2 8 J ^ Al 9 > w AO 10 22 20 Vpp PGM A12 All A10 A9 A8 A7 A6 A5 A4 A3 A2 Al AO OE CE 1C3 2764 s AD5 29 , AD3 31 . AD2 32 ADI 33 l ADO 34 A12 2 All 23 A10 21 A9 24 A8 25 A7 3 A6 4 A5 5 A4 6 A3 7 A2 8 Al 9 AO 10 27 26 tv All 1/06 A10 1/05 A8 1/03 A7 1/02 A6 1/01 A5 1/00 A4 A3 A2 IC5 Al 6264 AO R/W CE2 ce! OE AD4 30 ^_A0_ D7 PA7 D6 PA6 D4 PA4 D3 PA3 D2 PA2 D1 PAi DO PAO PC7 PC6 IC4 PC5 8255 PC4 PC3 PC 2 PCI PCO PB7 PB6 RD PB5 WR PB4 Al PB3 PB2 RST PB1 CS PBO 37 38 39 40 \ _ 2 _ 3 4 _ 10 11 12 13 17 16 15 14 25 24 23 22 21 20 19 18 ) I/O PORT A \ I/O PORT C ( OR CONTROL > I/O PORT B AD7 27 AD6 28 y AD5 29 AD4 30 AD3 31 AD2 32 y~ ADI 33 y~ ADO 34 in 18 AD6 y J All 23 17 AD5 A10 21 16 AD4 y A9 24 15 AD3 y Ki A8 25 13 AD2 J A7 3 12 ADI L V A6 4 11 ADO y V A5 5 s. A4 6 v_ A3 7 V. A2 8 Al 9 \ AO 10 A12 1/07 All 1/06 A10 A9 1 1 UD 1 /04 A8 1/03 A7 1/02 A6 1/01 1/00 A4 A3 A2 IC6 Al 6264 AO R/W CE2 CE1 OE 19 AD7 18 AD6 17 AD5 / 16 AD4 / 15 AD3 / 13 AD2 12 ADI > 11 ADO y D7 PA 7 D6 PA6 D5 PA 5 D4 PA4 D3 PA 3 D2 PA 2 D1 PAI DO PAO IC8 PC7 PC6 PC 5 8255 PC4 RD PC3 PC2 PCI PCO PB7 PB6 PB5 WR PB4 Al PB3 AO PB2 RST PB1 CS PBO ) I/O PORT A ) I/O PORT C OR CONTROL > I/O PORT B AUGUST 1988 -BYTE 243 HANDS ON CIARCIA’S CIRCUIT CELLAR gram memory addressed by the program counter (PC), 64K bytes of external data memory addressed by the data pointer (DPTR), and the on-chip internal data memory addressed in several different ways. Each instruction implies a particu¬ lar address space, so you have to know where your data resides to select the right instruction. There is a sharp distinction between internal and external data addresses. In¬ ternal addresses refer to locations on the 8051 chip, which can be accessed in a va¬ riety of ways. External addresses are lo¬ cated off the chip, in the 64K bytes of ex¬ ternal data memory, and can be accessed only with MOVX instructions. The four main internal data memory¬ addressing modes are direct, immediate, register, and register indirect. Direct mode embeds an internal RAM address in the instruction. Immediate mode uses the data value itself. Register and regis¬ ter indirect modes use a register number, with indirect addressing taking the con¬ tents of that register as a direct address to access the data. The MOVX instructions transfer a single byte between the accumulator and exter¬ nal data memory. The DPTR register contains a 16-bit external data memory address, which can be either loaded by a single MOV or incremented. Unfortu¬ nately, there aren’t any other 16-bit in¬ structions. The 8051 has a single accumulator, called ACC or A depending on the in¬ struction. Nearly all instructions use the accumulator in one way or another. An auxiliary accumulator (called B, of course) is used by MUL and DIV. Many data-manipulation instructions can move data to or from one of the active banks of eight “working registers” in internal RAM. Four register banks are available. Because most controller applications require handling at least a few I/O bits, the 8051 has a rich selection of bit- manipulation instructions that are com¬ pletely separate from the standard byte instructions. A single instruction can set, clear, complement, or copy any bit in in¬ ternal data memory. The on-chip I/O ports show up in that address space, so there’s no need for the “read, mask, set, combine, write” instructions found in most other microprocessors. Unlike the Intel 8088 or Z80 micro¬ processor families, the 8051 has no ex¬ plicit I/O instructions. The on-chip I/O ports are mapped into the internal data memory-address space and accessed with the same MOV instructions used for other transfers. You have to map off-chip I/O into the external data memory-ad- dress space and access it with MOVX instructions. Rather than belaboring the various in¬ structions in detail, I’ll introduce them next month in short chunks of code that do useful tasks as we build some hard¬ ware. With those examples as a base, you should have little trouble designing your own system. Ugly Reality The trade-off for not wiring up a board of TTL gates is writing a program for the EPROM. That program tests the inputs, computes the outputs, and handles all the timing to make the system work cor¬ rectly. Unless you are much better than average, your program won’t do the right thing the first time you try it out. The ugly reality of microcontroller systems is getting the software to work. It’s made considerably more ugly by microcontrollers buried inside special¬ ized systems—those never intended to look or act even vaguely like a computer. For example, which system would you rather debug: an IBM PC AT with a full keyboard, EGA display, hard disk drive, and state-of-the-art editors and debug¬ gers, or a microcontroller in a 3- by 5- by 4-inch box with four push buttons and two LEDs, cabled to a heater in a vat of photographic solution? The traditional way to debug micro¬ controller programs is called “burn and crash.” You burn the program into EPROM, plug it in, turn it on. . . and then try to figure out why it crashed. Doing a Sherlock Holmes on the listing is the only way to find bugs in the program, al¬ though a logic analyzer and an oscillo¬ scope help a lot. The major problem with burn-and- crash debugging is the damage caused by a crash if you are trying to debug a pro¬ gram when the controller is attached to actual machine hardware. Imagine what happens when your new 10-story ham¬ merhead crane controller goes “full speed counterclockwise” and refuses to reset. Obviously, burn and crash has its limi¬ tations. An 8051 simulator program run¬ ning on a host computer development system removes most problems and sim¬ plifies finding program bugs. The simu¬ lator reads the EPROM’s data and inter¬ prets the 8051 program one instruction at a time. Because all the 805l’s registers, I/O ports, and memory are provided by simulator variables, you can display and modify memory contents at will. Even better, because the simulator’s software replaces the 805l’s hardware, there’s no way that an errant program can damage anything. With the simulator, you can use pro¬ gram breakpoints to stop execution at specific 8051 instructions or when a given condition occurs. Also, since the simulator records how the 8051 program got to a particular instruction, you can undo each step back to the source of the problem at the press of a key. Unfortunately, while a simulator is a great step up from burning and crashing, it is not a true real-time test. Because the execution of each 8051 instruction re¬ quires the execution of many program in¬ structions in the development system, the Photo 2: A prototype of the DDT-51 development system. Note the DIP clip at the end of the cable for attaching onto the target system 's processor. 244 BYTE* AUGUST 1988 HANDS ON CIARCIA’S CIRCUIT CELLAR Figure 3: A block diagram of the DDT-51 8031/8051 development system . simulated run time is much slower than the real-time rate on the actual hardware. A further complication is that interrupt timing is not easily duplicated on a simulator. The ultimate solution is an in-circuit emulator (ICE), which is a special devel¬ opment system peripheral plugged into the 805l’s socket in the actual hardware (called the target system). From the tar¬ get’s point of view, the ICE is an 8051 running at full speed. From the user’s perspective, the ICE provides many of the features of a simulator, along with the ability to run programs at full speed using the real hardware. Ideally, an ICE will have no effect on the target system, because all the 805l’s features are provided in high-speed hard¬ ware. The 805l’s internal registers and I/O ports are visible because the ICE uses discrete logic rather than a single chip. The development system directly monitors what’s going on, logic compar¬ ators control the breakpoints, and there’s no interference until the ICE stops at the selected instruction. All this hardware makes ICE systems rather expensive. If you are developing many 8051 designs, an ICE is the only way to go. As a practical matter, how¬ ever, an ICE is far beyond the typical user’s budget and is generally reserved for the corporate lab. A More Modest System There is a middle ground between personal computer-based software simu¬ lators and hardware ICE systems. It’s often enough to stop at a breakpoint and single-step through instructions while watching the target system’s LEDs blink and relays click. By trading off some speed and hardware for time and money, a much simpler program development system can provide many features of an ICE at a fraction of the cost. The DDT-51 system is an IBM PC- based 8031/8051 development and dy¬ namic debugging tool (see photo 2). It uses a modified parallel printer port and a small circuit board to give the IBM PC complete control over the target system’s hardware. The DDT-51 downloads the 8051 program into 8K-byte static RAMs, thus eliminating the need to burn an EPROM for each program change. An on-board 2K-byte static RAM holds the small amount of 8051 code required to support single-stepping and breakpoints. A disassembler shows the current 8051 instruction on the IBM PC’s display while single-stepping, as well as the cur¬ rent 8051 registers and internal data memory values. This system connects between the IBM PC and the target system (see figure 3). It has only about a dozen chips, in¬ cluding the world’s simplest (and slow¬ est) 2764 EPROM programmer. The DDT-51 won’t handle all possible 8051 target systems, but it will give you a good start. With that in hand, we can continue on with other interesting Circuit Cellar project designs. Experimenters As is the custom with Circuit Cellar proj¬ ects, the software for the DDT-51 devel¬ opment system is available for download¬ ing from my multiline bulletin board free of charge. The number is (203) 871- 1988. Of course, this downloaded soft¬ ware is limited to noncommercial per¬ sonal use unless licensed otherwise. Next Month The hardware and software specifics of the DDT-51. ■ continued Capital Gain. T ime and again, you’ve heard it said, “To make money, you have to have money.” The truth is, you have to know how to save money before you can think about making more. That’s why more and more people are joining the Payroll Savings Plan to buy U.S. Savings Bonds. That way, a little is taken out of each paycheck automatically. In no time, you’ll have enough Bonds for a new car, your child’s education, even a dream vacation. Whatever you save for, Bonds are the safest, surest way to gain capital. Take f . stockVs^ in^merica. When you put part of your savings into U.S. Savings Bonds you re helping to build a brighter future for your country and for yourself. IIWl A public service of this publication and The Advertising Council. AUGUST 1988 -BYTE 245 The bad news is, t his is a quiz. The good news is, we’re going to make it easy. All three of these 24-pin dot matrix printers are versatile, rug¬ ged office-quality printers. They ail provide a variety of type styles and compatibility with most popular software. But there’s only one Top Dot. And all the clues you need to find it are right here in this ad. 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You have to visit a dealer to buy two of the printers on this page. But you can get Top Dot delivered to your door by UPS.® Just call 1-800-637-7878, cor¬ rectly identify the Top Dot, and COMPARISON CHART Print speed (12cpi) AMT Accel-500 Kpson hQ-2500 Toshiba P35ISX Draft Mode 480 cps 324 cps 300 cps Memo Mode 200 cps N/A N/A LQ Mode 80 cps 90 cps 100 cps Plug-in fonts card card cartridge Color printing standard N/A optionalt Warranty 24 mo 18 mo 18 mo On-site service 1 yr N/A N/A Price $985 $1449* $1499* Starter Kit standard N/A N/A **manufacturer's suggested list price t$239 we’ll ship it to you. FREE* If after 30 days, the Top DoL hasn’t become indispensable to your office, just send it back. Otherwise, do nothing. We’ll charge $985 to your credit card or bill you against your pur¬ chase order. That’s all ihere is to it. And if you’re still not sure of the answer, don’t worry. Our operators will give you three chances to get it right. Quick-Son KiL contains supplies, cable, soft¬ ware, documentation—even transparency materials. A $150 value FREE with Top Dot. ACCEL-500 1 - 800 - 637-7878 VISA Ventura Peripherals, 100 Rancho Road. Suite 27 Thousand Oaks, California 91362 HANDS ON CIARCIA’S CIRCUIT CELLAR Special thanks for the technical contributions provided on this article from Jeff Bachiochi and Ed Nisley. Diagrams specific to the Intel 8031/8051 architecture are reprinted by permission of Intel Corp. Parts Sources One advantage of using an industry standard like the 8031 is that it’s easy to obtain. The following companies are a few possibilities: Digikey Corp., P.O. Box 677, Thief River Falls, MN 56701, (800) 344-4539 Jameco, 1355 Shoreway Rd., Belmont, CA 94002,(415) 592-8121 JDR Microdevices, 110 Knowles Dr., Los Gatos, CA 95030, (800) 538-5000 Krueger Technology, Inc., 2219 South 48th St., Tempe, AZ 85282, (800) 245-2235 Literature The 8051 family doesn’t have the wealth of publications you’re used to seeing for the IBM PC. Fortunately, Intel prints a few useful and surprisingly readable manuals covering the tricky hardware and software details. These manuals are available from your local Intel of¬ fice for a reasonable fee, or contact Intel Corp., Literature Dept., 3065 Bowers Ave., Santa Clara, CA 95051. The order numbers include the latest revi¬ sion after the dash, so you may find that there’s a new edition out: Embedded Controller Handbook , number 210918-005: The straight dope on all Intel’s microcontrollers, from the 8096 to the 8048, including the 8051 family. It includes many hardware details, along with quite a bit on 8051 software and applications. Microsystem Components Handbook , number 230843-004: This two-volume set gives as¬ sorted Intel microprocessor and peripheral chip data sheets. These are the definitive words on how the chips are supposed to work: heavy-duty specs, not for beginners. Hardware Although the DDT-51 development system in¬ cludes a simple 2764 EPROM programmer, you’ll eventually need a “real” EPROM burner. You need look no further than the Circuit Cellar serial EPROM programmer available from CCI, 4 Park St., Suite 12, Ver¬ non, CT 06066, (800) 635-3355. Software The single most essential program is a cross assembler that runs on your IBM PC, eats as¬ sembly language files, and spits out hexadeci¬ mal files for the EPROM burner. You can spend as much or as little on these as you see fit, but doing assemblies by hand is not much fun. I speak from experience. The shareware Pseudo-SAM 8031 cross as¬ sembler is available on the Circuit Cellar BBS under the name PS51A123.ARC. It has most of the useful features, few frills, and is quite serviceable. A newer version is available from Pseudocode, P.O. Box 1423, Newport News, VA 23601, BBS phone (804) 898-7493. Avocet Systems (120 Union St., Rockport, ME 04856, (207) 236-9055) produces excel¬ lent “industrial-strength” assembler and sim¬ ulator programs for a variety of microproces¬ sors and microcontrollers. The AVMAC51 assembler and AVSIM51 simulator have con¬ tributed to many recent projects. They give excellent results. I recommend using one or both of these as the best way to optimize the performance and cost benefits of the DDT-51 development system and an excellent way to get a system up and running in a short time. Editor’s Note: Steve often refers to previous Circuit Cellar articles. Most of these past arti¬ cles are available in book form from BYTE Books, McGraw-Hill Book Co., P.O. Box 400, Hightstown, NJ 08250. Ciarcia’s Circuit Cellar, Volume 1 covers articles in BYTE from September 1977 through November 1978. Volume II covers December 1978 through June 1980. Volume ///covers July 1980 through December 1981. Volume IV covers January 1982 through June 1983. Volume V covers July 1983 through De¬ cember 1984. Volume VI covers January 1985 through June 1986. Circuit Cellar Ink It’s virtually impossible to provide all the pertinent details of a project or cover all the designs I’d like to in the pages of BYTE. For that reason, I have started a bimonthly supple¬ mental publication called Circuit Cellar Ink, which presents additional information on projects published in BYTE, new projects, and supplemental applications-oriented mate¬ rials. For a one-year subscription (6 issues), send $14.95 to Circuit Cellar Ink, P.O. Box 3378, Wallingford, CT 06494. Credit card orders can call (203) 875-2199. There is a multiline Circuit Cellar bulletin board system (running TBBS 2.0M) that sup¬ ports past and present projects in BYTE and Ink. You are invited to call and exchange ideas and comments with other Circuit Cellar sup¬ porters. The 300-/1200-/2400-bps BBS is on¬ line 24 hours a day at (203) 871-1988. To receive information about the Circuit Cellar Ink publication for hardware de¬ signers and developers, please circle 100 on the Reader Service inquiry card at the back of the magazine. Steve Ciarcia (pronounced “ see-ARE- see-ah ”) is an electronics engineer and computer consultant with experience in process control, digital design, nuclear instrumentation, and product develop¬ ment. The author of several books on electronics, he can be reached on BIX as