
From: Frances &/or Richard Clee <cleechez@tamcotec.com>
Subject: Accessing net chats

The big obstacle is that I'm running Windows 3.1 and Netscape
3.02, and the finicky chat program wants Netscape 4.05 (preferably
Communicator, I gather) and maybe Windows 95. I have plans to put 
in 95 and get Communicator, but I have a life outside computers 
(not much, but some) and that hasn't made its way to the top of 
the action heap yet - among other things I want the 386 and/or 
486 back up and running before I crash the main computer again 
while trying to install software, and the 386 won't talk to the 
hard disc and the 486 won't talk to its monitor. So I have just
a "few little" problems to solve before I can join the gang. I do
want to, I will, but not just yet. I reckon a few of the others 
are in the same boat. - Rich Clee

----------------------------------------------------------------

From:  Joe Blenkle > INTERNET:jblenkle@calweb.com
Subj:  RE: chat

At 11:48 PM 5/25/1998, you (Rich Clee) wrote:
>The big obstacle is that I'm running Windows 3.1 and Netscape
3.02, and the finicky chat program wants Netscape 4.05 (prefer-
ably Communicator......   

Actually, Netscape 3.04 works (at least the W95 version) as does
4.05 and Microsoft Internet Explorer 3.02 ....I have all those 
on my system.

---------------------------------------------------------------

To: ronaldm <ronaldm@mars.ark.com>
From: Dave or Audrie Sands <sands@nanaimo.ark.com>
Subject: Re: what's going on?

At 08:03 AM 5/27/98 -0700, ronaldm wrote:

(mucho snipped)
>I've said it before, and I'll say it again.... we should all be
using ADAMs. It was a much simpler time, a better time... a 
nostalgic time. :) :)
>Ron

    I remember those times, too, although of course with proper
respect to my elders as represented by ronaldm and Rich Clee :-}
ronaldm is of course much younger than me, by several generations 
at least. Rich, I understand, played among the continental ice 
caps as a youth. :-} All of us used ADAMs in the heyday of 8-bit 
computing; but that was then, this is now. I don't remember 
things being that much simpler; ADAM's 'cannot access this file' 
was as hard to deal with as the 'blue screen of death' of Windows;
either way we were in deep. 
   *If* we were all using ADAMs, we wouldn't be using the 'net or
email or whatever, we might be dialing up BBS's at 300 baud, we 
might be filling 160K disks with files, or still running data-
packs,...I don't think I'm nostalgic for the ADAM; for the fun 
and good times, the sense of possibilities, the learning 
experience, yeah, for that I could get a little maudlin.
   I have my original ADAM; what I don't have is the time to set 
it up and use it, on account of I'm retired, and I have too much 
to do. (Most retired people would agree, while most working 
ones will wonder what the heck this guy is talking about.) 
Volunteer work finds you like second hand smoke--you get it 
whether you want it or not. 
  I did find out that I needed a different browser to use a chat
room, and I'm trying to get that one to work so that I can find 
out what there is to all this 'chat ' stuff. If I am to believe 
the media, its prime use is for the seduction of innocents. I 
guess I could try some of that :-}.
No one has tried to seduce me for too darn long. If ronaldm and 
Rich have the same complaint, maybe there's something in the 
water.:-} 
     I'll try to join you; if I'm not there, it's because I am
involved in the adventure of trying to get the @#!%^&!* program 
to work.  SmartBASIC was like that, too.       Regards, Dave
        
----------------------------------------------------------------

To: sands@nanaimo.ark.com
From: Frances &/or Richard Clee <cleechez@tamcotec.com>
Subject: what's going on?

Aw come on, Dave; the Adam days weren't that bad. The first 
product built by the Henry Ford Co. didn't do much for the 
founder, but the company has been around ever since and still 
prospers mightily under its new name.  Especially in the computer 
industry, if an idea is good to start with and folks will stick 
with it, it can be kept current and still be an attractive
proposition. Let's compare some of the stuff you were complaining
about and see.
I/O - we still wouldn't be using datapacks. Adam advanced to the
point under Coleco where you could buy disc drives. Mark Gordon 
proved you could upgrade the disc drives to current state of the 
art - 360K, 720K, 1.44M, and probably would have made 1.2M 
available too if there had been any demand. And Adam will 
support a hard disc.  When I plug more than one disc drive into 
my Adam, I have to configure the cables in a certain way. I am 
told I can daisy-chain up to 16 in certain circumstances. All 
just plug and play. My IBMs seem to assume that I'll really only 
want one floppy but will grudgingly allow me a second provided
I plug it into the right place on the cable. Depending on model,
I may have to buy a separate disc controller for the IBM too. 
Mark set up the Adam hard disc again more or less as plug and
play, although it did require a boot prom or boot disc. Now if 
only my 386 were so simple! I took the hard disc out of it 
because it was a SCSI and I wanted to use the controller card 
in my K6 166MMX. So I put in an IDE, reconfigured the CMOS, and 
when I turned it on it wouldn't boot.  To get into it I had to 
use a floppy system disc - still do. Once I/m booted I can
type c: and win and use the hard disc, but that ain't the way
it's supposed to work, and it ain't the way it was working when 
it was pulled out of my daughter's computer to be replaced with 
a larger disc I gave her.  So far none of my gurus have been 
able to come up with an explanation. Yeah, let's hear it for 
the DOSbox! I also tried installing another IDE hard disc that
had been working fine, although the vendor (well known to me) 
had FDISKed it to remove confidential information. With this, 
I not only got "Hard disc controller failure" on POST, but when 
I booted from floppy and  typed c: got the message "Invalid 
drive". Yes, the cable's OK, I got the drive specs by 'net from 
the maker's URL and entered them in the CMOS properly. Darn
machine knows there's something there, because it sniffs around
on boot - I can see the hard disc light winking. Adam never 
gave me hassles like this!  Then there's the 486 on which I've 
done nothing. I upgraded the video card in the 386 and moved the 
old card to the 486. Guess what? The same monitor, switched bet-
ween the machines, won't produce a picture. So of course I
can't even get to the point where I get on-screen messages to
tell me what's wrong. If I ever failed to get a picture on the 
Adam, the reason was usually obvious and the solution straight-
forward. Yeah, let's hear it for the DOSbox!  Can't use the 
Adam on the Internet?   Ron does - it's his backup when the
nice modern system decides to get the sulks. Sure there are
limitations.  Adam has an internal serial bus that runs at 19.2kb
- the same as my 386 and 486 and maybe K6, and Frances' Amiga 
3000.   Adam faded before anyone had got around to working out 
how to get the screen to keep up. But had Adam had the production
lifetime of some others, want to bet someone wouldn't have found 
a way to, for example, upgrade the video chip and use a TIGA
screen that could hack it? Adam's own modem was plug and play, so
effectively was  my Sydmodem (1200) and I gather that either the
MicroInnovations or Orphanware srials ports will allow external
modems to 19.2, the limitation being screen failure. Wasn't Dale 
Wick in fact using an Adam at 14.4 on the 'net at Adamcon 07?
So Adam kept saying "cannot access this file". Hey, that's why
Tony and Guy wrote File Manager and Disc Doctor. The point is, 
guys like Tony and Guy could and did write programs like that, 
and sell them at a pitifuly low price, and even a putzer like 
me could understand and use them.  But what the heck am I  
supposed to make of "General Protection Fault in Winsock.dll
at 0845:CD36", with a notice that I can either close the program
on my own or ignore the message in which case the program will 
crash. What did I do wrong, if anything? Is the same thing going
to happen again?  (Yes) How do I track down what the message 
refers to? I could learn to deal with most Adam software problems,
at least in BASIC, fairly quickly and easily.  On the DOSboxes 
or Amiga, there isn't even a clue as to where to start, and 
unless I'm willing to invest four years in an engineering degree,
nothing I'm going to understand anyway. I think Bill Gates is a 
malevolent sorcerer who keeps DOSboxes going by magic. And crashes
them every time he gets the hiccups.

But getting down to the real point - every once in a while I do
stop rambling and do so. Adam was pretty well state of the art 
of its time.  Presumably had Coleco not been so bloody-minded 
greedy and generally incompetent, it would have continued to 
advance. Maybe there would have been Zilog Z88 and Z86 and Z286 
and Z386 and Z486 and Z586 CPUs developed too, and fitted to it.
But that was not to be.  But - Adam still has probably the best 
implementation of the Xerox PARC interface yet. What DOS programs
show the values of the variable function keys right up on the 
screen, and keeps them current? Sure beats a keyboard overlay! 
It doesn't take all eternity to boot and become useful - I can
boot the Adam, get into the word processing program (hey, BUILT
IN!), type out the address for an envelope, print it out and exit
in the time it takes the DOSbox to get to the c: prompt. And I 
don't have to ask Adam's permission to shut it down, either. I 
use the dedicated function keys a lot more on Adam than their 
equivalents on the DOSbox. The keyboard is smaller and at least 
as comfy to use, too.   Reliability? the jury is still out; my
Adam has performed faultlessly for 15 years; I have no clue how
long the DOSbox will last but I'm not optimistic.
In terms of real work I can and do do anything serious on the
Adam - word processing, databasing, and spreadsheeting. (Yes, 
Frances still makes up the income tax template for use with 
Adamcalc every year, and uses it, and makes it available as PD). 
It meets my modest needs and is more comfortable and reliable. 
The DOSboxes are toys.    Glorious toys - I love cruising the
'net (Adam could cope with e-mail and probably chat if pushed,
but the DOS programs have evolved to be more functional in 
today's terms) and playing the odd game and generally fiddling 
about. The current DOSbox is an unbelievable bargain and one I 
hope to live long enough to really seriously exploit - consider-
ing the powers built in, that means I'd like to outlive  
Methusulah. It just does so much so cheaply I'm unable to resist
it. But it's a toy, like Frances' Amiga, which caters to her 
fascination with graphics. We don't use them as tools.  In the 
latest issue of Road & Track, Peter Egan tells the story of a new
car that suddenly wouldn't go. The diagnosis was easy - Peter's a
vehicle builder/restorer himself, he was in a group of seven with 
over 200 collective years of mechanical experience among them, 
and it was just a matter of there being no spark. But finding the
root of the trouble, and getting the car going again, took the 
combined efforts of his crew, a local garage, a second garage 
with tens of thousands of dollars of diagnostic equipment, the 
company's zone office, two hauls on flatbed trucks, three days 
and a $1000 part.   As Adamcon habitues know, I turn up driving 
a 1973 car. It's old and crude with many design deficiencies and 
deprives me of the benefits of a quarter-century of really 
meaningful automotive technological progress. A carburetor, for 
heaven's sake. Drum rear brakes, and no ABS.   Little standard 
square headlights with historic halogen design that stay off in
daylight. Coil and distributor ignition. No airbags anywhere.
Haven't even put on air conditioning or a radio.  But - it gets 
me to Adamcons wherever they may be - Orlando or Salt Lake
City or Indiana or Cleveland, and lets me bring along a trailer
for touristing before and after - even if there's a few mountain
ranges in the way. And I'll get there even if something breaks, 
because it's so simple it's reliable, and when something does go 
bang any shadetree mechanic can figure out the problem bare-eye
balled, and find the part to fix it cheap and fast. And if it 
goes bang in a bad place, it can be plain towed (what a concept!)
Do I need to enlarge on this?

Maybe, Dave, you did have some uncomfortable experiences with the
Adam. And maybe you've got a DOSbox that has never given you any 
kind of hassle.  You've formed your opinion, but there is some-
thing that I cannot buy at any price on the current market (not 
that I'd say no if someone wanted to hand me a new XK8), I still 
find use and value in my Adam for what it does for me and does 
better - in terms meaningful to me - than any of the newer
computers.  We who stick with the Adam do so for our own reasons,
reasons that make sense to us. May I suggest that a little less 
disrespect is in order? -
Rich Clee

----------------------------------------------------------------
From:  Shawn > INTERNET:srapp@sinbad.net
Subj:  Re: what's going on?

ronaldm wrote:
> You're point sir, is well taken. If sort of becomes a question
 of "How  ya gonna keep 'em down on the farm......"    Ron>


 Simple... Drop them off downtown east LA and leave them there
for 8 hours.  By the time you get back they will be begging to 
stay on the farm.  That's if they are not dead by then.  hmmm...
in some pathetic way what I just said kinda sums up what we were
talking about.  The 'new' technologies get deaper and more 
complex till eventually everyone is screaming for something that
doesn't rely on 15 billion ANSI, IEEE, and so on standards to do 
the simplest effects. No open standards, no protocals, no multi-
layered topology API systems, no DLL or anyother tweaked out 
memory interface.  Just you, machine, and a lots of asm code.
truely computers today have be come like are metropoltan cities,
big, bustling, and cluttered... It's really nice to be able to 
turn to the ADAM on the weekends...it's like going to the ole' 
fishing hole in the rural outback.   Also keep in mind all week 
long I program fortran on controller computers for a oil company
.....to me any system that isn't connected to 50 + devices
is relaxing.  I find bugging with my unix box's on sunday to be
like taking a bubble bath.  ahhhhhh.... ;-)  The ADAM is just 
total ZEN!  I feel so mentally refreshed after a good session on 
it.


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