FSTV
SSTV
FAX RTTY PACKET
AMTOR OSCAR FM REPEATERS
MICROWAVE AND LOTS MORE!
pat
ib le, e
xcept
by
resorting
to
lowest
-common-denominator
user
interfaces
and st icking by a
640K
memory model. Even then, it's never
really certain that the program that
runs on my PC will run on the PC ne
xt
do
or-and
getting it to print properly
on the system next
door
is well nigh
out of the question.
So, what will become of those 60
million PC 's, plus the Macs , Am igas,
Ataris, and so on? It's sad, but hu-
manity has been down this road be-
fore, and we find that horse carts,
though they were once as abundant
proportionally, simply aren't permit-
ted on t he freeway . Those computers
aren't going to make it either, though
some, notab ly the
DOS
PC, may we ll
hang on for a long wh ile as windows in
some POSIX-OS /2-Windows-DOS-
Sparc
-Mac
-PC-Amiga
machine of
the future.
(After
all, if it were worth
the trouble, it wo uldn't be all that hard
to simulate an Apple or Commodore
64 of seven years ago on a
486
PC,
high-end Mac, or high-end
Amiga-
faster than real timet)
And that raises what should be the
hottest
issue of all,
something
far
more important than ranting and rav-
in g
over
doomed
PC's
versus
doomed
Macs
versus
doomed
Amigas. The issue is our own data,
which we must somehow get out of
that DOS window and onto that ma-
chine of the fu
ture-
to say noth ing of
moving it from one application to an-
other
or
to a
supercomputer
. We
have allowed much of our data, en-
tered laboriously and at tremendous
e
xpense
, to
become
embodied
in
files that are formatted in obtuse, se-
cret , and unstandardized ways .
It is high time that the software
manufacturers who practice this are
forced to change . They are i n effect
thieves who have sto len from us what
is rightfu lly our property. It is time to
insist that all software that we buy
have the capabi lity to disgorge our
data in f ull, including such thing s as
the coordinates of graphical objects,
in an
open,
pub
li
sh
ed-d
ata-int
er
-
change format. As a sy mbo lic dis-
couragement to th
eft
and extortion
by so
ftw
are manufa
ctur
ers , and to al-
low third partie s to assist in retrieving
the stolen property without fear of
litigation, it is time to amend the
copyright law to explicitly perm it re-
verse engineering in any
progr
am
that s to res o utput but won 't prov ide it
in an o pen format, irrespective of any
COMPUTER CLASHES CONTINUED
I really do think that Mr. Cheng 's
comments in the
Apr
il " Letters" co l-
umn
went
a bit far
-and
so did
Mr
.
Ho ltz man 's rep ly . T he
ent
ire ex-
change brings to mind the o ld tale
about the b lind man a nd the e lephant ;
it really is tough to discern the big
picture through all the fog . As one
who has programmed extensively for
80X86
PC's, Am igas , and other com-
puters, I have more comments than I
can fit in a reasonably sized letter. A
few wi ll have to do .
First , on standardization: As Mr.
Holtzman pointed out, the desirable
part about standardization is that it
facilitates communication. There are
two flip sides. One is that many
soft
-
ware (as
we
ll as hardwa re) supp liers
don't want communication . Supp liers
of programs
for
CAD
and music
scor
-
ing are
espec
ially
notorious
-they
want
you locked in tight. The second
is that standards are often ages out
of date
-w
itness the
NTSC
televi-
sion standard
-to
the po int of st ifling
innovation.
The niche mach ines are a paradox.
They owe their existence to the fact
that in one important sense they are
more standardized than PC's . No two
PC's are alike, even in suc h funda -
menta ls as memory organization, vid-
eo
graph
ics
layout,
and i nt err up t
organization. As we all know,
that
causes no end of prob lems . Within
the CP U itse lf, the instr uctio n set is
an unstandardized chaos, havinq on
the
order
of a
thousand
ind ivid ual
qu
irks
. Even
the
largest.
best
-cap -
italized organ izations have been able
to cope with that, so that compiled
code tends to be a wretchedly sub-
optimaljoke. The lesson s of the old
mainframes have yet to be learned.
The upshot is that things that aren't
done often enough to support multi-
billion-dollar software companies are
often best done on niche machines,
especially if speed, large memory, or
a GUI is desired, or interrupts are
needed. Sure , a Lotus or a Microsoft
can hand le the problems caused by
dozens of graphics drivers , dozens of
extended memory drivers, more than
500
printer driv ers , dozens of s lightly
different serial and paralle l ports, hun-
dreds of quirky BIOS variants, and
hundreds
or
maybe thou sands of
hard-disk variants . The person who
writes aspecialized program for filter
analys is and sells a few hundred co p-
ies probably
can't
make it multi-com-
....
z
e
to-
-
:IE
Q
ce
OUR
24TH
YEAR
S
INCE
1967!
MCN ISA (5% added)
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