MAIN LINE COMPUTER USERS - MAY 1997 - ISSUE #180 **** MAY 1997 ************************************ ISSUE #180 **** VILLANOVA UNIVERSITY, ST. AUGISTINE CENTER MEETING STARTS - 09:30 - MAY 03 !! ST. AUGUSTINE CENTER - SEE PAGE 9!! ---------------------------------------------------------------- CONTENTS History of Computing - Part IV 2 Announcements 3 ! JUNE ANNIVERSARY ! 3 State of the eAMIGAf Market 3 New Equipment 4 Old Equipment appeal 5 Trading Post 5 64/128 meeting minutes 6 AMIGA User Happenings 6 SuperCPU 64 + RAMlink 6 MAP/Masthead/Meeting schedule 9 Membership Form/Dues 10 ---------------------------------------------------------------- MAIN LINE 64/128 USERS - Room 110 Well - as reported on page 6, we had a sterling demonstration last month. In the discussions before, during and after the feature, the subject of partitions raised its head (again!). We plan to tackle that issue via a flexible disk format to provide a vehicle to show folks and get their questions answered on how best to use them. Thru the good offices of our veteran equipment man, Charles Curran, we have available to us a Creative Micro Designs (CMD) 40 meg hard drive. This will readily allow us to deal with 1581 and CMD partitions, subdirectories and, also, hard disk drives. Plus, the interaction between hard drives, and 3.5-inch floppy drives like the 1581 and CMD FD's. (continued on page 3) MAIN LINE AMIGA USERS - Room 210 As of this writing, I don't have the foggiest idea of what the main presentation for May will be, but I do know that we will briefly discuss our FREE June celebration luncheon. See Emil's dissertation elsewhere in this issue about the FREE luncheon for members. Lacking a focused program, I would say that we will fall back to a question and answer session and try to resolve everyone's individual Amiga problems and concerns. With your help we will also try to formulate some future focus programs. I know that several members are trying the different Mac and PC emulators, so maybe we'll spend some time beyond what we allotted at our March (continued on page 7) ---------------------------------------------------------------- SPECIAL MEETING NOTICE! WHAT'S COMING UP! Our JUNE MEETING will be the 15th anniversary meeting since the founding of the club. We are planning to have a special celebration at the Villanova Diner, following the regular meeting. See P.3 for more details! *************************** CHRONOLOGY OF SIGNIFICANT EVENTS IN THE DEVELOPMENT OF COMPUTING MACHINES (PART IV) BY JAY R. BAKER 1884 - Herman Hollerith (b. 1860 in Buffalo, New York, d. 1929), American engineer, filed the first in a series of patents which evolved into an electromechanical system that counted and sorted punched cards. It is noteworthy that Hollerith's system used electrical contacts to read the punched cards. Hollerith worked for the U.S. Census Office and knew that the analysis of the 1880 census data by hand would take many years, be very costly and would probably be out of date by the time it was completed. Furthermore, the 1890 census, with the large increase of population due to immigration, was likely to take even longer to complete. Hollerith's equipment won a competitive trial by tabulating sample data 8 to 10 times faster than alternative methods. Hollerith received a contract to supply 56 machines for the 1890 census which was completed in less than 7 years with a much more comprehensive analysis than that of the 1880 census which had taken 9 years to complete. Hollerith's success with the U.S. census led to worldwide use of his equipment for census tabulation and then for general business applications such as accounting and inventory control. In 1911 his company, the Tabulating Machine Company, merged with two other companies to become the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company (CTR) which in 1924 was renamed the ** INTERNATIONAL BUSINESS MACHINES Company (IBM) **. 1885 - Dorr E. Felt (1862-1930), a mechanic for the Pullman Company in Chicago, invented a key-driven calculator, called the Comptometer, which simplified entering numbers by using a typewriter-like keyboard. He later added a built-in printer which automatically recorded the entries and answers. Thus Felt had removed the two major limitations of existing calculators that had kept them from appealing to the mass market. Felt and Robert Tarrant, a Chicago businessman, formed the Felt & Tarrant Manufacturing Company which began production in 1889. 1892 - William Seward Burroughs (1857-1898) patented a successful keyboard calculator (his first calculator patent was in 1888) with a built-in printer which was superior to that of Felt's machine and which outsold every other calculator on the market. His company, the Burroughs Adding Machine Company, went on to become, by 1913, as big as all of its competitors combined. 1927 - Vannevar Bush (1890-1974), American electrical engineer and professor at MIT, began the construction of a differential analyzer machine which was completed in 1930 and was the realization of Lord Kelvin's vision. Although the machine was successful and seven or eight copies were built in the U.S. and abroad, and although Bush went on to build a much faster electromechanical version which was the first to use vacuum tubes, analog machines were not destined to be the choice for achieving accurate, general purpose computing. Nevertheless the success of Bush's differential analyzer did, by the mid 1930's, stimulate a great deal of interest in developing general purpose machines for mathematical calculations. 1938 - Konrad Zuse (b. 1910 in Berlin), German engineer, completed his first computing machine, which he called the Z1. He had pursued the project at home and at his own expense in order to cope with the drudgery of solving the linear equations which his work required. Although the Z1 was entirely mechanical, it was particularly notable as the first machine to use binary arithmetic and Boolean logic, which were particularly advantageous. [To be continued] DIRECTIONS FOR ST. AUGUSTINE CENTER MEETING ROOMS For the next many months, we have shifted our monthly meetings from Mendel Hall to the St. Augustine Center at Villanova University. The 8-bit meeting will be in seminar room 110 and the AMIGA meeting in seminar room 210. Please be sure to enter the campus from the ITHAN AVENUE main gate, then proceed to the 2-level parking building adjacent to the St. Augustine Center, on the Ithan Avenue side. However, you may have to enter the building via the front door, as shown in the sketch below. ------------------------------------------------------------------ 64/128/Amiga Meetings 1997 Steering Committee Meetings May 03 May 14 June 07 ** June 11 July 12* July 16** ** SPECIAL MEETING! * = second Saturday ** = third Wednesday ------------------------------------------------------------------ NEWSLETTER DEADLINE is May 22 !!! ********************************************************** EDITOR: Emil J. Volcheck, Jr. 1046 General Allen Lane West Chester, PA 19382-8030 (Produced with C-128, RAMlink, HD-40/85, 1571, FD-4000, THE WRITE STUFF 128, XETEC Super Grafix, Panasonic KX-P1123, Swiftlink RS-232 and Motorola 288 modem) MLCUG BBS: 610-828-1359 (300 --> 28800 bps), 24 hr/day ######################################## ANNOUNCEMENTS & SPECIALS ######################################## ! JUNE ANNIVERSARY ! As you know by now, June will be the 15th anniversary of the first formal meeting of the group that decided to call itself the MAIN LINE COMMODORE USERS GROUP (MLCUG)! We are planning on a small celebration that will follow after the regular June monthly meeting - which normally ends in the 12:45 to 13:15 timeframe. After the meeting, we will be able to gather in the back room of the Villanova Diner from around 2 PM onwards for a little latish FREE luncheon. Yes, for all of you members who would like to come and share a few memories, as well as cheer us on to year 16, the club will be BUYING lunch. We'll say more next time. BUT, as soon as possible after you read this, if there is someone you recall as being a special contributor to the club's activities in past years - AND WHO MIGHT STILL BE LIVING IN THE AREA - please get that info to Emil Volcheck (610-388-1581) or post on the BBS. We'll try to contact and invite them to join us! SPECIAL NOTE - if you expect to attend, please let us know as soon as possible; so we will be able to determine how much table space to ask the diner folks to set aside for us - NUFF SAID! --------------- Commodore Support - as many of you are aware, publications that support the 8-bit line have become few and far between. The publication, Commodore World by CMD, is one of the newer and better. However, it appears that in spite of the lack of competition and the high quality of the mag and its contents, the 8-bit folks will not support it. Witness the following quotation from an email on the subject: "While the loss of ad revenue does hurt, the drop in subscribers has been the real factor in scaling back the publication. Right now the base is a little over half what it was a year ago. Phone polling indicates that the main reason has been users leaving the market (about 70 percent of those polled). Twenty percent resubscribed when we called them to ask why they hadn't. ;) Anyway, scaling back the cost has been the only way to assure that the publication will continue. If the loss of subscriptions continues, we may have to do away with the color cover, and we can still cut back a few pages and keep the thing going. I don't expect those moves unless the subscriber base fall below 1000 or so, so we should be safe for quite some time. I think we could safely guarantee that the publication can last at least another two years at this point, and I suspect that if the other cost reductions do become necessary, there'll be enough of a niche to keep it going indefinitely at the lower production costs. Doug Cotton" If you plan to use your 64 or 128 for the next year or more, why not send the few bucks to CMD and keep at least one good source of support info flowing??? ---------------------- THE STATE OF THE AMIGA MARKET ---------------------- If you haven't already heard, then I have a surprise for you. The new owner of Amiga Technologies is Gateway, the company from South Dakota that has a reputation for selling PC clones. Here's one of the recent INet newsclips. Gateway2000 offer to buy AMIGA accepted! North Sioux City, S.D., March 27 (Reuter) - Gateway 2000 Inc said Thursday its offer to acquire the assets of AMIGA Technologies has been accepted by a bankruptcy court in Germany. The value of the offer was not disclosed. Gateway 2000's purchase includes patents, trademarks and trade names. The agreement is subject to regulatory approval. "AMIGA will strengthen our intellectual property position and invigorate a company that has been a pioneer in multimedia solutions and operating systems technology. This acquisition is good news for Gateway and customers of AMIGA," said Rick Snyder, Gateway 2000 president, in a statement. AMIGA will be renamed AMIGA International. The company will operate as a separate business unit and will retain its current president, Petro Tyschtschenko, who will work to develop new products for the AMIGA market. "Gateway 2000 will give us new life and energy for the future," said Tyschtschenko, in a statement. Gateway 2000 is a direct marketeer of personal computers. It shipped 1.9 million systems in 1996 and reported revenues of $5 billion. Gateway 2000, Inc., a Fortune 500 company founded in 1985, is a global leader in the direct marketing of PCs. The company, headquartered in North Sioux City, South Dakota, has manufacturing facilities in the United States, Ireland and Malaysia, and employs over 9,700 people worldwide. Gateway 2000 products and services consistently win top awards from leading industry publications. In 1996, the company shipped 1.9 million systems and reported revenues of $5 billion and net income of $250 million. MORE JUNE MEETING STUFF - there will be no flea market meeting in June. Because of a very low level of participation by both sellers and buyers, the Steering Committee decided to skip the mid-year flea market. As of this writing, we still plan to have one for our November (pre-Christmas?) meeting - pending facilities availability at VU. Comments/reactions? *************************** NEW EQUIPMENT With the vanishing of our equipment setup used for meeting demos, we have had to come up with replacement stuff, as well as accomodate to the new, longer and narrower meeting room. Here's a progress report: Firstly, the meeting room. For those who attended the April meeting, we had the new monitor setup in place. Charlie Curran had put together a cable hookup that allowed us to have two RGB monitors attached to either a 64 or 128 - and separated up to a distance of 20 feet apart. This allowed the monitors to be placed very conveniently for all attendees. We will continue to use the dual monitor arrangement until something better is identified (anyone want to provide an RGB video projector???). Secondly, the replacement equipment. We were able to commandeer a pair of 128's (one for regular use and one for backup) from units available to us in our parts stock. Also, we came up with the two RGB monitors, a 1571 disk drive and a Star Micronics NX-1000C printer. This was the no-cost part of the job. Thru Charlie, we were able to purchase a used CMD FD-4000 disk drive (which will be both our FD AND 1581 emulator) and a never-used Super 1750 Clone RAM expansion unit. From CMD, we purchased one of the new Turbo232 modem interfaces (see notice in last month's issue), a new BOCA 33.6 Kbps data/fax modem and a proper cable. With the loan of an cartridge expander board, we have all we need to be pretty much equipped as we were before the hardware was lost. Since we do have some new stuff, why not come out to the next meeting(s) and check it out? You may be wanting to upgrade your Commodore 8-bit stuff (while you wait for those "other" computers to come way, way below $1000!!!) ! OLD EQUIPMENT ! We are looking for an original PET (4 or 8K will do)! Anybody have a lead to offer on who might have one we could borrow? The second generation, and later ones, are available to us. Since we have access also to the VIC, 64, 64C, PLUS4, 128 and 128D, we have pretty good representation of the Commodore 8-bit line. Any help - please get the word to Emil (610-388-1581) - thanks! --------------- COMPUTER BIG LIE #1 - "This is easy". There's little that's easy about computers. That's why people like Kennedy (director of the Center for Information Technology at NJIT) can charge a fee, and why thousands of authors make money writing books on the subject. Finding an easy-to- read book on your subject of choice - word processing, spreadsheets, networking - makes sense! --------------- $$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$ $ TRADING POST $ $$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$ FOR SALE: C-64, 2 monitors and printer No further info available. Asking $100. Call Dixie Westerland, 610-692-4840. (1) FOR SALE: C-64 with 1541 drive and a Sanyo color monitor. Best offer takes them. Call Janet at 610-623-0120. (2) FOR SALE: 2 C-64's, 1541 drive, Koala Pad, Okidata printer w/interface. Quite a few programs, plus extra stuff. Call Charles Golt at 302-366-1363. (2) FOR SALE: C-128 w/JiffyDOS, 1571 and 1581 drives, 1902A RGB monitor, C= 1200 bps modem, Xetec Super Grafix interface, Mach 128 cartridge, Epyx Fastload, 1530 datasette, and scads of programs. All in good condition (exc. monitor). Asking $200 for the lot - OBO on separate items Call Tom Johnson at 610-525-3440. (2) FOR SALE: C-64, 1541 drives, MPS-801 printer, PS for 1571/1581 drives, mouse, joystick, cables and manuals. Make offer to John Nagel at 610-566-6919. (2) BOOK WANTED: looking for, at least a loan, of the following book: Compute's Commodore Fun & Games, Vol. 2 (I think the Compute books part is right but am not certain). I'm looking for the item (on p.155, apparently) about the ENIGMA machine simulation. Emil Volcheck, 610-388-1581. (3) FOR SALE: SUPER 128 system, flat 128 with RamLink w/ 4megs of ram, RTC, battery backup; FD-4000 3.2 meg disk drive, (2) 1571 disk drive (1 has RAM board, 1 has JiffyDos), 1541-II Disk drive, 1080 Monitor, SwiftLink, Boca 14.4 modem, 1750 REU 512K, an EX-3 Expander, Super Grafix printer interface Star Gemini II printer, M3 Mouse + Joysticks, all cables to connect all hardware. All the above is in good working order. Most items have manuals. Plus many extra parts and backup items. Price $450 (OBO). Also available Panasonic KX-P2123 Color 24 pin printer PLEASE E-MAIL strause@enter.net (3) FOR SALE: C-128 w 1701 monitor, 1541 & 1571 disk drives, Gemini 10X printer, & books, manuals and some software. BO. Call Jean Costello, 610-459-4315. (3) FOR SALE: MLCUG has a lot of hardware that is available for purchase by MLCUG members and at attractive prices! 2 computer - C-64 w/PS $25 2 disk drive 1541 - clone $20 15 disk drive 1541 - various $20 1 disk drive 1541 - 8/9 sw. $25 1 disk drive 1541-II $30 1 interface - Cardco $ 5 1 interface - MSD $ 5 6 joystick $ 2 1 modem - Panasonic 1200 bps $10 1 monitor - amber - Panasonic $10 1 monitor - screen filter $ 5 1 plotter - Commodore 1520 $10 2 printer - Commodore 1525 $10 2 printer - Commodore 803 $10 2 printer - color - Okimate 10 $10 2 printer - Okimate 120 $20 1 printer - Star Gemini II $25 2 computer - VIC-20 TBD 1 64K RAM/video for VIC-20 TBD 1 computer - Plus4 $25 Also, we have quite a bit of software, for bargain prices (typically $2). You can contact Charles Curran to check on any items of interest (610-446-5239). *************************** 64/128 MEETING *************************** The April meeting was our second successful one in the new meeting room. Charles Curran rigged up a monitor cable arrangement to allow us to run a pair of 40/80 column monitors - one at the front of the room and one about halfway back. This worked out very nicely and the attendees had a good look at the offering by our main presenter, member Dennis Krall. SUPERCPU+RAMLINK Well, if you missed this demo, you REALLY MISSED a good one! Dennis brought his battery-backed up 16 MB RAMlink (which remembered all its contents) and coupled that with the 20 MHz SuperCPU 64. This made a dynamite combination..... Most of Dennis' demos started from the MENUETTE 64 menu utility program on the CMD utilities disk. This allowed him to show off that collection of utility programs, move around the contents of his RAMlink, find files and manipulate the RL and FD DOS systems that control the RAMlink and the FD-4000 disk drive. The piece de resistance' came when he fired up GEOS running essentially from the RAMlink. Everything moved like greased lightning. When he switched to the "TopDesk" desktop, he had a system that behaved very much like the Windows OS on a PC. Also, the system performed at least as fast as a modern Windows PC (note that the 64 has a lot less stuff to do and a lot less video to manipulate) - you did not have to wait!!! The RAMlink is normally a very fast beast by itself, but the SuperCPU manages to speed it up by several fold - a quite remarkable achievement! I think it is safe to say that all the attendees were impressed with the versatility and speed and wished they all had one at home!!! Our special thanks to Dennis for the demo and hauling in his outfit (and risking the loss of the RAMlink data!). He brought his 64, the SuperCPU, the RAMlink, 1750 REU, an FD-4000, 1541, 1571, CMD Trackball and an Icontroller joystick. Now let's hope we'll see a SuperCPU128 one of these days! :-) *************************** AMIGA USER HAPPENINGS By John Deker, AMIGA SIG Leader [continued from p.1] meeting to continue to discuss issues concerning other platform emulations. If there's interest, we'll also take a brief look at the latest versions of Final Writer, Photogenics, PCTask, PCx and IBrowse. Though not necessarily new and time permitting, we'll take a look at Audio Thunder and Main Actor. THE MAIN PRESENTATION: AMIGA PERFORMANCE TUNING At our April meeting we discussed over half a dozen commands and system software patches and tools which we as Amiga users can use to enhance and measure the performance of our Amigas. Here is an abbreviated summary of that presentation. Built-in System Commands - ========================== ADDBUFFERS -- Addbuffers is an Amiga OS command right out of the C: directory. Essentially this command enhances disk performance by using RAM to buffer disk data transfer. For each buffer allocated by this command about 512 bytes of memory will be set aside for utilization. Besides using this command in your STARTUP-SEQUENCE and USER-STARTUP and MountList files to set aside buffers, HDToolBox or other hard drive utilities can be used to allocate buffers through the RDB (Rigid Disk Block). The number of buffers used can drastically affect the performance of Hard Disk Files used with emulators like PCTask and ShapeShifter. For such applications it is not unusual to use as many as 1000 or 2000 buffers! (NOTE: 2000 buffers calculates out to 1 megabyte of RAM being used!) CPU -- CPU is another Amiga OS command found in the C: directory. Like almost all commands, the CPU command can use many different arguments, but the one we discussed was the CPU FASTROM command. If you own an accelerated Amiga and have Fast RAM to spare, using the FASTROM argument will move an image (copy) of the Amiga's ROM into Fast RAM where execution of ROM commands will be many times faster. The ROM image for OS2.+ machines will occupy 512 kilobytes of memory! Performance Measuring Tools - ============================= Two tools I like to use to measure Amiga performance are SYSINFO and MEMSPEED. Both of these are PD pieces of software and are available on our club's BBS. SYSINFO provides a quick way of measuring your Amiga's overall performance. MEMSPEED is a lot more specific in what it measures. It measures the speed of Fast RAM and Chip RAM read, write, and copy functions. In addition, MEMSPEED measures the speed of ROM reads. In this last capacity, MEMSPEED is very useful for measuring the performance improvement from the CPU FASTROM command. System Software Patches - ========================= The name of one programmer stands out when I think of Amiga Operating System patches. And that name is Arthur Hagen. Though there are many other programmers who have developed specific patch enhancements for the Amiga Operating System, none of them have been as consistent and prolific in their efforts. Therefore, our meeting presentation about system patches focused on Arthur Hagen's work. Here is a brief description of some of his software. Most, if not all, of these patches are available in the BBS SIG Library section. ARTSER.DEVICE -- Just a debugged and optimized version of the C= serial.device 37.4. All functions should be identical, but this one should be somewhat faster and safer (the original contained code that trashed a byte when closing the device). To use this program, place it in your devs: directory, and select artser.device instead of serial.device in your comms program. COPYMEMQUICKER -- Just another small thingy to put in your Amiga's S:Startup-Sequence. This one will patch the exec.library functions CopyMem and CopyMemQuick to become faster than the regular ones. These functions are two of the cornerstone functions of the operating system, so most programs should benefit from this patch. Should work with all versions of the O/S from KickStart 1.2 upto and including 3.1, and with all processors from the 68000 upto and including the 68040. (Editor's NOTE: I disabled this patch on my Blizzard 68060.) EXECPATCH -- Requires KickStart 36.xx or greater. Should work with all processor types / FPU-configurations. Requires a few hundred bytes of FAST-mem (not slow Fast-mem as on unmodified A501 memory boards) to be present. (Editor's NOTE: I disabled this patch on my Blizzard 68060.) The Amiga is a multitasking machine (no kidding!), and will happily switch its CPU use between several tasks and processes too fast for the user really to notice. This task switching system is the whole basis for the Amiga's multitasking capabilities, and has, naturally, been coded in efficient assembly to reduce overhead as much as possible. Even so, several of the basic multitasking functions of the system could be optimized even further, thus speeding up the machine when several tasks are running simultaneously, and/or the CPU use is high. FBL -- This tiny program will speed up blitter processes just like FastBlit, for any Amiga running 2.0 or above. Should work for all Amiga's with ECS/AGA and AmigaDOS 2.0 or above. Among things that should be noticeably faster with fbl installed is menu browsing, WB updating, text scrolling and benchmark programs that tests the gfx capabilities (like AIBB). (Editor's NOTE: This patch works best on accelerated Amigas with true Fast RAM.) VBRMOVE -- If you have an Amiga with a 680xx (xx >= 10) processor, as well as fast-memory, you might take advantage of the processors ability to have the vector base set anywhere in memory instead of just at address zero. On the Amiga, address 0 and upwards is defined as chip- memory, which is slower than fast-mem. By setting the Vector Base Register (VBR), the interrupt-vectors could be located anywhere in memory, and by moving them to fast-mem, all routines that uses interrupts or similar will be speeded up marginally. VBRMove will allocate 1k in TRUE fast-mem (not slow-mem) if possible, copy the old frame and set the VBR to point there. Just include VBRMove in your startup-sequence (or similar) to take advantage of this. VBRMove is both reentrant and relocatable, which means that it is both pure and romable. VBRMOVE WARNING! Some programs (and viruses) set the interrupt vectors directly in the lowest 1k of your memory without neither testing the VBR first nor using the system routines, and if you have run VBRMove or any similar program first, these vectors will never be called. So, if you want 110% compatibility with all code, DON'T run VBRMove or any similar program. Other System Software Patches - =============================== FASTMATH LIBRARIES -- This set of libraries is a replacement for the original libraries by Commodore. They are written in highly optimized assembler code using the 68881/68882 FPU chips and the 68040 FPU directly without any emulation or compatibility overhead. So they are much faster, much smaller, and still 100% compatible. SOFTWARE OF THE MONTH Though we had copies of the performance software available to members, we have also made a point of installing copies of their archives on the BBS for members to download. And I do mean MEMBERS. This is because I've installed the software in the BBS SIG Library section which can only be accessed by club members. FUTURE MEETINGS If you have either software or hardware for your Amiga that has taken your fancy, please bring it to our attention. I'm sure your specific interests will be of interest to others. Let me know if this is the case at the next meeting, or leave me email on our BBS. Remember, a user group is only as rewarding as the sum of the efforts of its individual members. --------------- COMPUTER BIG LIE #2 - "This will save you time". Maybe in the long run computers save time and money; but, in the short run, they will rob you of hours and hours as you - and your employees - learn how the system works.