
Editorial - A Long Way From The Model T
by Dave Bealer

My 1989 Ford Probe GT is a far cry from the Model T that put Henry on
the map so long ago.  The Probe's top speed of 135 miles per hour
(which envelope I have never pushed the outside of) is four to five
times faster than the original Model T's top end.  Of course little
has actually changed in the past 25 years.  The 1960s produced cars
capable of blowing the doors off my Probe, although the Probe sports
better safety equipment and fuel economy than the original "pony
cars."

The computer industry of the past quarter century has made a few more
quantum leaps forward.  A popular "what if" game involves what cars
would look and perform like if the auto industry had made the same
strides.  It usually goes something like: "If cars had experienced
the same price/performance improvements as computers in the past 25
years, a 1969 Ford Mustang (my first car, purchased second-hand in
1975) that cost $2000 new and could go 120 MPH would have improved to
the point where a 1994 Ford Mustang would cost $4.50 new and go 3500
MPH."

If I can't have that mythical Mustang that could zoom from New York
to Los Angeles in an hour, at least I can have a Pentium.  As
mentioned in the first article specifically written for RAH ("The
Model T Of Personal Computing" - RAH 09/92), my first PC was a XT
that was hopelessly out of date when I assembled it in 1986.  On
09/21/94 I received my new Gateway 2000 P5-90XL machine, which sports
a 90 MHz Pentium CPU.  This new machine is so fast it finishes
executing commands *before* I press the <enter> key.

There are drawbacks, of course.  The 17 inch Crystalscan monitor will
probably burn out my remaining eyesight a few years quicker than the
old 14 inch SVGA monitor.  My pocketbook is already groaning from my
efforts to fill that new gigabyte hard disk with software, none of it
on sale.  And my office is even more of a rat's maze of wires that
would give a county fire inspector a heart attack. 

So if this issue of RAH seems a little harder to read than previous
issues, it may have something to do with it being composed and
assembled on a 90MHz Pentium.  Dr. Hoo and the rest of the Vaporware
Labs crew are working on a utility to slow down the pixels in future
issues for readers who don't themselves have a Pentium.  Stay tuned
for details.
                             - - - -
So the baseball strike spiked the World Series this year.  A squabble
between a few hundred millionaires and a couple dozen billionaires
ruined America's "national pastime."  The real tragedy of all this is
that millions of American men will have one less excuse to avoid
going outside and raking the leaves.  Things could get worse if Mom
and Apple Pie go out on a sympathy strike.
                             - - - -
It has come to my attention that there exists in the United States a
group called Defenders of Defenders of Life.  The members of this
group raise money for the legal defense of people who have murdered
physicians who perform abortions.  Like most Americans I have a very
definite opinion about the abortion issue (which is not germane to
this discussion).  But no matter which side of that particular fence
you're on, the idea of killing your fellow human beings to prove your
dedication to the sanctity of human life is utterly ridiculous.
Anyone whose mind can leap to such a "logical" conclusion desperately
needs a long vacation in a rubber room.
                             - - - -
FLASH: Last minute bad news from the hardware installation front.  My
loft office became a living "hardware hell" the last ten days of
September.  During an attempt to install an EISA Ethernet card in my
old Gateway 486DX/33E the EISA configuration was somehow destroyed,
which rendered the EISA SCSI controller inoperable.  Since all the
RAH material for the issue under development was on the 340MB SCSI
drive attached to this controller, my priorities suddenly changed.
It took most of the final weekend in September to get things restored
to something approaching normal.  The worst part was finding the
original Gateway EISA Utility diskette that accompanied the machine
when it was delivered in January 1992.  As usual, I had not made a
backup copy of the thing.  The old Gateway, she ain't what she used
to be.

Alright, I apologize.  Anyway, the old machine is still not
completely stable, and all this fuss prevented me from completing
the Star Trek TNG parody I had planned for this month.  (Hey, it
sounds better than "the dog ate my homework.")  Look for it next
month, along with Muffy Mandel's long-awaited biography of Vinnie
"The Knife" Calamari.  Muffy is running the piece past the Vaporware
legal department in an attempt to determine how many of Vinnie's
friends and associates will be arrested and/or murdered if it is
published.                                                      {RAH}

