From the July 1993 Bits of Blue

PRESIDENT’S COLUMN:

By Harvey Bruneau

I was unable to attend our last meeting due to business commitments. I want to thank our VP, Tom Cone, for stepping up to fill the void. Since I did not write a president’s column last month and I missed the meeting, I will write a larger than normal column this month. I bet you thought I would spare you. Wrong!

DOS 6.0 DoubleSpace:

20 minutes! For those of you at the DOS 6.0 meeting, 20 minutes represents the time it took DOS 6.0 DoubleSpace to compress my 486/25mhz PCs 209Mb hard drive with about 40 Mb of data on it. If you remember, I closed the DOS 6.0 presentation by starting DoubleSpace on the PC. During the process I rebooted and restarted the process several times to experience that what if feeling. It’s the same feeling I have about winning the state lottery. I do not recommend rebooting your PC during the DoubleSpace process unless you feel lucky! During the process we saw different estimates of time displayed by DOS 60 as it tried to calculated the total amount of time it would take to complete the compression process. The time varied between one and two hours. Since our meeting ran late, we decided that we would not sit around past 10 PM to see it finish. At that point I powered down the system with DoubleSpace running. Once I got home I turned the PC back on and started the process again. When I checked the PC a half-hour later during a TV commercial break, the job had completed. AMAZING! On the screen was a message displaying the process was complete and the time it took. At this point I was baffled, why did it display to us one to two hours and run in 20 minutes at my house. Well, there are several reasons I imagine, but the one I like is AI (Artificial Intelligence). In retrospect, DoubleSpace knew the exact time it would finish. It based this time not on the file types and megabytes to compress but the fact that the membership was ready to go home. It knew it would not complete during our regular meeting and it knew the time it took for me to drive home and restart the procedure. In reality AI knew it would take between one and two hours to complete. OK, so maybe I’m stretching it a bit with the AI stuff. It did complete in 20 minutes. However, the process to remove DoubleSpace was even a bigger challenge. It took the better part of half a Saturday to remove DoubleSpace without losing any data. Prior to starting the rebuild process, I could’ve sworn I heard Clint’s (Dirty Harry) voice “You feel lucky, punk?” in our house. While I use DOS 6.0 and it is a good product, I personally do not recommend the use of DoubleSpace at this time. Microsoft reports DOS 6.0 sales in excess of 4 million copies. Microsoft says 2 percent of DOS 6.0 customer support callers believed they had experienced a loss of data. However, support technicians were able to help most customers reconstruct or salvage their data. The results were that only .5 percent of customers lost data. That may seem like Microsoft did a good job, but .5 percent represents 20,000 customers with some kind of data loss. Those numbers sure bring back the sound of Clint’s voice.

COMDEX:

Comdex really consist of two parts. One is Comdex “The World’s #1 Computer and Communications Marketplace for Resellers and Corporate Decision Makers” and Windows World “The Official Conference and Exposition for Windows Computing”. Several vendors and products drew the attention of large crowds. WordPerfect 6.0 for DOS appeared to garner the biggest crowds in each of its theater type presentations. Microsoft also had big crowds attend its continuous hands-on session of Visual Basic 3.0. This product will be the hot product for the masses. Its ease of use, power and great flexibility will allow non-programmers to create almost anything. Windows NT with third party products running on it was displayed in one of the Microsoft areas while IBM had a similar area for its OS/2 2.1 offering. Microsoft seemed to garner more interest. Intel also drew a big crowd with their Pentium show.

One last thing I noticed was the broad availability of green PCs and peripherals. No, these are not items which are available to those suffering from the Incredible Hulk syndrome. This is a futuristic move for saving our planet and ourselves by changing certain facets of PCs and peripherals. They include power management, consumables and personal health.

The typical 8 hour use of a PC consumes $35 dollars a year while the 24 hour use of the same PC cost $105. The average PC consumes 162 watts while the IBM green PC will consume 36 watts. If current trends continue, the EPA estimates that PCs will represent 10 percent of the energy used. The EPA estimates that a monitor is only looked at 20 percent of its power-on time. Even screen savers are accused of using 20 percent more power than a blank screen. The future PC and peripheral will monitor themselves and reduce their power appetites when not in use.

We waste more paper than ever before. Businesses consume 775 billion pages of paper a year. How many of us: copy a fax when we first receive it; copy or print to single sided paper when we can print it double sided, print that document several times before we get that just right printout. The technology to view faxes from your PC is here as is the capability to print double-sided copies. Many software packages include a preview mode or WYSIWYG to show you what a page of printed text will look like before you print it. Email software systems are abundant to reduce the paper flow which chokes many companies. Many vendors at Comdex promoted their products as Green enabled.

Our health is another issue. Ergonomics and electromagnetic emission are important issues today. We are spending more of our time with our computers than ever before. At one point PCs were used for business at work. As prices drop, PCs are invading our homes as education, game and auxiliary work machines. Mice, more so than keyboards, are evolving as ergonomic, or, as I would say, hand-friendly. The Swedish National Board for Measurement and Testing has provided a standard (MPR II) for monitors producing electromagnetic emission. Several vendors had monitors that would go in sleep mode when not in use, and most said they adhered to the MPR II standard.

The EPA has created a program which will discourage waste. President Clinton has mandated that in the near future vendors wishing to sell PCs to the government will have to meet guidelines stated by the EPA in the near future. Once in place PCs purchased by the Federal government will need to meet the guidelines of this program

I saw one thing that I never in my wildest dreams expected to see. The weirdness kicked in as I realized that an IBMer in a polo shirt was demonstrating to me IBM DOS 6.0 (not available yet) on a CompuAdd and Gateway PC. Way to go IBM. Speaking of Gateway, their systems were prevalent throughout Comdex and used by most of the big companies for demonstration purposes. u