46216,08,04/22/93,BILL MATTSON,ERIC BOHLMAN
R/68000,
Yeh...It's the presentation box that really makes it. Consider a trade?
Just kidding. We sure have come a long way since the 1-mhz 8080. Actually
my first was a .5-mhz Signetics 2650 that only addressed 32K, nice
instruction set, though. Built it myself from bare boards. It kind of
troubles me to see all the for-fee BBS's that popped up later on, consid-
ering that the cost of iron has steadily declined...but then we never
contemplated storing gaggabytes of 6-megabyte word processors with built
in harness race handicapping TSR's did we???	Regards.
46217,29,04/24/93,MICHAEL SHARTIAG,ALL
IDE SPEED/TIMING/LAPTOPS,
I have been working on updating a Toshiba 1600 from a 20Meg disk to a
120 Meg disk now for several months.  I have left several messages
concerning what I have found out.  I hope that this info may help others
who want to do this, and maybe someone will even have a solution now
that I can define the problem.
	This laptop and many of the first several generations produced
all used 20 or 40 meg drives (usually Conner's becasue they had the 1"
packaging first).  These were first generation IDE drives (all
manufacturers, which basically combined the ST-506 drive with the
Western digitial controller technology.  What is important here is
that: 1) there was no ANSI standard for IDE as there is today;
and 2) the drives used the inerleave value of 3:1
	Today there is a standard and the drives are 1:1 and can not be
reformatted to any other value.  The controllers simply ignore these
parameters.
	What ties all of this together are ther BIOS issues regarding
timing on the IDE bus controller. Prior to 1989-90 depending on the
company, the BIOS's did not have to concern themselves with this timing
problem becasue drives were slow.  On desktops you can simply
upgrade the BIOS and be done.
	The laptop vendors have gone with cusomized BIOS's that it seems
none of the 3rd party companies have touched.  They further have not made
the necessary changes themselves.  What is occuring is that with 1:1
interleave and burst mode transfers, the data is coming in from the drive
faster then the laptop's BIOS is prepared to handle it, and at some point
they miss handshakes; the computer waiting for the next acknowledgement,
while the drive has already sent it and waiting for the next request: the
result is a lockup. (which sometimes will retry in 90 seconds or so at the
DOS level sometimes.
46316,05,06/09/93,KEN STOX,ALL
R/COMPUTER CHRONICLES,
I heard another humorous tidbit from the trivia game, the question
asked was what is the current winning entry from the obfuscated C
coding contest. Apparently, one of the folks from apple immediately
responded, "Windows/NT." Everyone had a good chuckle, except the
MC, Bill Gates.
46317,05,06/10/93,NORB DEMBINSKI,WARD CHRISTENSEN
R/AUDIO SOLUTIONS BOARD,
Ward:

     I will give it and my FAX a try.

Thanx
46416,08,08/12/93,WARD CHRISTENSEN,MICHAEL SHARTIAG
R/THE WRITTEN RECORD,
   Gee, did they even spell my name right?
   I was talking to a lady friend the other "year" and she had just
started working at Microsoft, and said they had this cool huge database
they could search.  "OH, lets look you up in it!".  I suggested "No, lets
not, lets look up a WRONG spelling, like "Christiansen" or something.  Sure
enough, found 2 hits, on XMODEM.  Heh.
  I DO admit I do occasionally look in a book - looked in "computer Jargon"
the other day, it had Xmodem, but no derivation.
46417,06,08/13/93,MICHAEL SHARTIAG,ALL
SCSI TAPE SOFTWARE,
I have recently come into a nice SCSI based tape backup unit.  I have
even found several manufacturers that sem to use this drive.  The problem
is that I don't really want to spend $800 or so for the software !!!
Is there a generic type program out there that will let me use this ?
   Central points product Back-it-up (or something) works with all
QIC 40/ 80 tapes.  Is there a product out there that supports SCSI ??
46516,05,11/24/93,STEVE FARMILANT,ALL
CPM BASIC TO DOS BASIC?,KILL
Anyone out there know a way to convert an MBASIC program file so that
it can be read and executed by DOS's GWBASIC???  I've got a great program
that I currently use with 22NICE, but it's too time consuming etc. to
use the program this way...
Any info would be greatly appreciated...
46517,01,11/25/93,PETER ZELCHENKO,STEVE FARMILANT
R/CPM BASIC TO DOS BASIC?,
Say, are you any relation to Janine Farmilant?
sometimes.
46316,05,06/09/93,KEN STOX,ALL
R/COMPUTER CHRONI