It is for such times as these in the computing industry that circus metaphors are made. There is so much going on, it is almost impossible to keep up with all of the spectacles being offered for your attention. It’s even more difficult to stay on top of the exhibitions that compete for your attention when your primary job is supposed to be sweeping up after the elephants.

In December, I decided that exposing the increasingly polarized nature of the computer industry was in order. Now that we’ve got the political and social angles out of the way (at least until the DOJ/Microsoft sideshow wraps), I want to launch this year off properly with a review of the greatest hardware on earth.

I finally feel a vindicated about Universal Serial Bus (USB.) For a while, I didn’t think it would overcome the reluctance of vendors to move away from serial devices and for Microsoft to get off it’s dead duff and ship the appropriate drivers. When Windows 98 shipped last fall with USB support, the infrastructure of the PC began moving irrevocably toward its next evolutionary step.

USB, for those of you who don’t frequent my column, is a physical and logical bus type that allows up to 127 devices to be plugged daisy chain style into one computer. The devices are hot-swappable (you don’t have to reboot your computer to connect or disconnect them) and cover a broad range of categories: keyboards, mice, monitors, scanners, video cameras, etc. While USB does all of these things (and does them VERY well), the USB port is available only on recently constructed computers. Some companies plan to set up aftermarket retrofits for existing mainboards that don’t offer USB, but don’t bite on that bait. For the cost of the upgrade, you can usually buy a new mainboard WITH USB.

USB is not simply a groovy add-on to the existing diversity of bus and port types available for the PC, it is merely the tip of a very big iceberg called PC99. PC99 is the system specification that is being created by industry leaders like Intel, Microsoft, and friends. It seeks to raise the bar on what the minimum hardware will be to run industry standard applications. USB is simply one of the prerequisites.

According to PC99, the minimum speed for any desktop computer is as follows: 300Mhz x86 processor with 128K of L2 cache. Traditional serial devices are tolerated (barely) with a strong suggestion that manufacturers move the devices to a USB or Firewire port instead. (Firewire is USB’s big brother, capable of transfer speeds that won’t fit on this page. Suffice it to say, it is very fast.)

One of the things that you won’t see in the New World Order are ISA slots. You read that right: Industry Standard Architecture has been relegated to the trash heap. My tip for the savvy system owner is to start jettisoning your ISA devices before the end of 1999. After that, they will only be a curiosity to the mainstream computing world. Don’t believe me? Find me an ISA based TV Tuner card that you can still get drivers for that WORKS under Windows 98. To my knowledge, they’re all gone.

The death of ISA is a mixed blessing. ISA devices could be plugged into 100% of the PC’s ever made, but offered a deathly slow bus speed (8 or 16 bit) to work with. Slow but ubiquitous. Consumers will miss it for it’s omnipresence, but manufacturers will be glad to be rid of it for reverse engineering reasons.

You’ll notice part of the minimum specification for the PC99 is an x86 processor, not a "Pentium" or "Slot 1 compliant" processor. This is significant, seeing how heavily Intel is impacting the decisions involved in this definition. Two factors weight into this ecumenically worded terminology: 1) Intel finally has some serious competition from rivals AMD and Cyrix and 2) Intel has been watching Microsoft get the stuffings kicked out of it in court for overtly monopolistic practices and dirty market manipulation. While we are still waiting to see if Janet Reno can get the Federal flypaper to stick to Bill Gates, the scrutiny that Intel and Microsoft’s behavior have generated is finally starting to make a different in how they do business.

It is no great surprise that Intel is finally getting some competition worth having: The "Anybody But Microsoft" crowd has been gaining friends in the "Anybody But Intel" crowd and the marriage is rattling the foundations of both companies’ dominance. The forthcoming offerings from AMD and Cyrix bear a complete treatment. Watch this space for more inside information in the next few months. Two words apply: Fast and Faster.

I’ve always been a proponent of balancing the speed of a processor and the speed of the peripherals. There are two new technologies on the horizon, one that significantly increases data reads on traditional CD-ROM and DVD media, as well as one (called HD-ROM) that will increase the data storage of five inch media 100x beyond it’s present best.

The DVD/CD-ROM compatible product, TrueX, is a created of the Zen Research company and the technology makes track to track access times dive to around 80 milliseconds as well as increasing bandwidth by moving from a Constant Angular Velocity (CAV) to a Constant Linear Velocity (CLV) model and improving the way the data is extracted from the disc.

The tradition of CD-based data extraction technique is worth reviewing here. Since the CD-ROM’s introduction in 1991, the data read model hasn’t really changed: A diode laser pointed at the face of the disc fires its beam at the disc surface. The beam is sent through an objective lens, reflects off the disc and then back down to a detector. The flashing on/off patterns, caused by pits in the surface of the Mylar whizzing through the beam, make up the binary data. Since the CD-ROM drive CAV model means that the disc rotation speed is varied to make the pits pass through the beam at the same speed no matter what band of the disc is being played, acceleration of the drive (as denoted by the X number) is a variable, not a constant as the advertising campaigns would have us believe. The only way that CD-ROM drives have been accelerated over the original 1X speed is to increase the rotation speed. Once a drive passes the 16X mark, there is almost no increase in read speeds because the media begins to wobble or deflect, thus changing it’s focal distance from the read lens causing the drive to refocus the lens.

In the TrueX model, Zen has increased the bandwidth significantly by the innovative use of diffraction grating and beam splitting. The single diode laser fires at the disc’s surface, but is filtered through a diffraction grating that splits the single beam into 7 beams. Those beams then go on through a 45 degree beam splitter (that allows the beams to pass through unaltered) and then hit a collimator lens before striking the objective lens on their way to the disc. What hits the lenses and the disc is not one beam, but seven, significantly increasing the total throughput from the device without increasing the disc RPM. The reflected beams then return through the lenses, but are diverted perpendicular to the outgoing beams by the beam splitter which feeds them into a detector. Six of the beams are used from data transfer, the seventh is for error checking.

The practical outworking of this design means that overall performance increases, and reliability can be improved by lowering the disc RPM which stabilizes the disc leading to less refocusing of the objective lens. Actual numbers look good, too: DVD speeds are as high as 20X for burst reads, and traditional CD-ROM speeds will soar to 60-80X after the technology makes its debut this month in a 40X drive from Kenwood. Wow. All this, and the design should be more reliable (slow the disc down, you get less failures) as well as more accurate (via the built in error checking.)

The second technology is still in the finishing stages, but get ready to see it take off in 2000. Called HD-ROM (High Density Read Only Memory), it’s capacity for storage literally boggles the mind. We used to think that CD-ROM’s capacity of 660 MB was pretty hefty, but then the Hard Drives got much bigger and we weren’t so impressed. DVD makes the promise of 4.7 Gigabytes per side, but again, the average Hard Drive has surpassed this.

HD-ROM will offer the storage capacity of 165 GIGABYTES, with a read speed better than today’s DVD drives.

While you gather your jaw up off of the floor, let me explain how this virtual compression miracle works: CD-ROM optics produce a beam about the diameter of a human hair (approximately 800 nanometers); pretty pudgy in the world of laser optics. DVD was supposed to be the big step forward, but the infighting among content distributors and manufacturers has meant that the 1998 introduction of DVD was a celebration of two year old technology. Though DVD lasers decrease the beam diameter to 350nm (thus making it possible to pack more pits on the disc), DVD suffers from being introduced already behind the technology curve.

Enter the Norsam Technologies HD-ROM, which blows all the competition away by using a focused beam of Gallium (Ga+1) ion particles to achieve pits of only 150nm. Obviously, this isn’t your mom’s laser anymore. I can just see my relatives start to worry when I inform them that I have a particle accelerator in the spare bedroom.

To add insult to the already grievous mound of injury against the competition, HD-ROM will (once production versions mature) write on multiple planes, each plane being worth and additional 165 MB. HD-ROM is impervious to electromagnetic disturbances (as magnetic tapes is) and has the ability, where needed, to store data on materials (such as very hard metals) that are extremely durable and resistant to abrasion, atmospheric contamination, heat and other types of physical deterioration. The plastic coating of CDs and DVDs wouldn’t have a chance in these environments. It will also be possible to create different types of HDs for different purposes: cheap plastic ones for give away and promotion, metal ones for archiving.

For obvious reasons , I am ecstatic about the potential HD-ROM offers in the furtherance of archival backups. This also fills the gap that has been sorely missing from consumer storage technologies (See October 1998 Webwalker) and makes it possible to actually keep ALL of your data. Imagine the entire textual contents of the Library of Congress on a series of HD-ROMs in your backpack. The idea boggles boggles the mind.

And that is what the circus is supposed to do: boggle the mind and stretch the imagination. Mine’s feeling pretty stretched now, so I’m going to duck out of the big tent and go play cards with the gorilla lady of Borneo.

Peace on Earth,

WebWalker