Tempting Parade of New Gadgets
There probably will be no end to the number and variety of gadgets to tempt you to upgrade your old PC. It seems that no sooner do you get something new than along comes another improvement to either add to what you’ve already got or make what you’ve got obsolete.
Take modems, for instance. I’m talking plain, old-fashioned 1200 baud modems. Once upon a time, they were simple black boxes, little larger than a portable cassette recorder, that plugged into the back of your computer and cost about $600.
Then they became circuit boards to stick inside your computer. Prices ranged from less than $150 to $550.
Now you can buy a 1,200 baud “smart” modem, small enough and rugged enough to carry in your coat pocket, that can dial your telephone or answer it. You can use it on any computer that has a serial port for the purpose.
Called the Pocket Modem, it’s sold for $259 by Migent Inc., P.O. Box 6062, Incline Village, Nev., 89450, (702) 832-3700.
The attractive, miniature red plastic package comes with a small plug-in power supply to use in place of the nine-volt radio battery you can put inside the unit for portable use. Battery life is short because there is no on-off switch. The modem is on and drawing power whenever your computer is turned on and the modem is plugged into the serial port.
Except for the lack of a speaker with which to hear the progress of your call, the modem operates identically to Hayes modems.
It plugs directly into 25-pin PC or XT standard serial ports. But it also comes with short cables to connect either to a 25-pin socket or the AT-style nine-pin socket. The Pocket Modem comes with communications software, as well.
Disk drives are something else we used to take for granted that no longer can be ignored. Even before IBM went to the 3 1/2-inch floppy disk in its new Personal System/2 line of computers, many laptop models had used the smaller, plastic-encased disks.
The result is often an urgent need to transfer programs and data files from 5-inch to 3 1/2-inch disks. Short of having both sizes in the same computer, one of the slickest methods is the Brooklyn Bridge, a $129.95 combination of software and serial connector cable from White Crane Systems, 6889 Peachtree Industrial Blvd., Norcross, Ga., 30092, (404) 454-7911.
Speed is what gives Brooklyn Bridge a strong advantage over other transfer methods. It runs at a sizzling 115,200 baud through standard serial ports. That works out to 10,000 bytes a second.
It works by making one computer a slave to the other. For instance, if your desktop machine has a hard disk as drive C and you make a two-drive laptop the slave unit, your desktop will behave as if it has two additional drives named D and E. Then you simply copy files back and forth between the drives with the normal COPY command.
My only complaint is the difficulty of turning the software connection between the two machines on and off. In most cases, all you want is a short, temporary connection. Undoing the software instructions is a bit cumbersome, especially if you’re not very experienced in using the MS-DOS operating system. The results, however, are worth the hassle.
Of course, you also could use it to connect two computers and use each of their files and accessories. For instance, you could connect a dot matrix printer to one and a laser printer to the other and print to either one from either computer. You can’t let the two machines get very far apart, however.
Brooklyn Bridge comes with a well-made serial cable with connectors for either 25-pin or nine-pin sockets and two program disks, one 5-inch and the other 3 1/2-inch.
Probably nothing is as frustrating, or expensive, as trying to keep up with the changes in color video standards for the IBM PC. Just when it seemed that IBM’s Enhanced Graphics Adapter standard was becoming commonplace, the computer giant has introduced two new color graphics standards with even more color and better resolution, the Multi-Color Graphics Array and the Video Graphics Array.
For the moment, however, those new standards are limited to the new IBM series of computers while the EGA standard enjoys ever wider acceptance. It provides 16 simultaneous colors and text quality nearly as good as that of the original IBM monochrome adapter.
Tatung’s Supreme EGA card, $399 from Tatung Co. of America, 2850 El Presidio St., Long Beach, Calif., 90810, (213) 637-2105, allows you to use a variety of monitors with an IBM or compatible computer, from standard monochrome to standard medium resolution RGB (red, green, blue) color units to higher resolution EGA color monitors.
I tried it with all three and liked it best with an EGA monitor. A major advertising point with the Tatung Supreme EGA and the ATI Wonder Card that Tatung appears to mimic is the ability to run EGA color on a standard color graphics monitor.
True enough, you can do it. But I doubt if you’ll want to. You get a lot of flicker, which is very objectionable, especially with light colors, and with the Tatung the picture area is smaller than the screen.
If you want EGA color, be prepared to buy an EGA monitor to go with the card. With that caveat, the Supreme EGA card worked well and has the advantage over a standard EGA card of being able to display the popular Hercules monochrome graphics mode on an EGA monitor (in black and white, of course).
You may want to wait six months or so before buying a replacement video card, however, until cards with the new VGA color standard are available for existing PCs, along with the new monitors they will require.
A word about keyboards. Once again, in the IBM and the IBM-compatible world, IBM set the standards. Thankfully, this time the company hasn’t changed it. Its new computers use the keyboard design they introduced about a year ago, with a dozen function keys in a single row across the top and cursor control keys separated from the 10-key numeric keypad.
Of course, IBM made it so the new keyboards can’t be plugged into older PCs, but that simply opened a market for companies like Data Desk International, 7650 Haskell Ave., Suite A, Van Nuys, Calif., 91406, (818) 780-1673, to build and sell 101-key keyboards for older PCs that look and work like the new IBM units.
The layout is the same, to be sure, but the feel is not. Nobody has copied IBM’s feel, which some people love and others don’t. The Data Desk Turbo 101, which has a suggested retail price of $149.95 and comes bundled with Borland’s spelling software, Turbo Lightning, uses a plastic membrane key switch.
It’s got a pretty good snap to it, with a short stroke and moderately light touch.
If you prefer the older 84-key AT-style keyboard with its 10 function keys on the left, Data Desk offers the $99.95 PC-8700 model, bundled with Borland’s SuperKey keyboard macro software.
What you can’t do is plug the older-style keyboard into IBMs that came with the newer-style design.
