If the Intel Corp. hadn't livened things things up by producing 4 million high-end Pentium chips that flunked sixth-grade math, 1994 would have gone down as a pretty dull year in the PC business.
A dull year doesn't necessarily mean a bad year. Computers became faster, more powerful and at least somewhat easier to use, not through any great leap of technology, but through the natural development of trends that had been percolating along for years.
Cheap machines that finally were fast enough to run Microsoft Windows flooded the market, and the public responded by buying millions of them. The most important development for these new users was the blossoming of the CD-ROM market.
Combined with sound cards in multimedia packages, these special compact disc players ushered in a new era of flashy and exciting educational, entertainment and reference programs, thanks to the CD's capacity of up to 550 megabytes of data. By year's end, about 80 percent of the games and educational programs that came in the door were on CDs, and a surprising number of them were good.
Because the CD format is one of the few things that IBM-compatibles and Apple Macintosh computers have in common, educational publishers were increasingly willing to put versions of programs for both computers on a single disk.
We'll also remember 1994 as the year people got connected. With modems standard on most home PCs, enrollment in on-line services such as Prodigy and CompuServe soared. Likewise, millions of new users found their way to the Internet, the huge, crazy-quilt network of networks that links 20 to 30 million people around the world.
With all the major services developing Internet links, it suddenly became possible to send e-mail to almost anybody logged on to any system anywhere. This result was not only a revolution in communications, but also a revival of the lost art of written correspondence. The down side was the proliferation of junk e-mail, but you take the good with the bad.
Meanwhile, local telephone companies, long-distance carriers, cable companies, newspapers and entertainment conglomerates worked themselves into a feeding frenzy of deal-making and deal-breaking as they jockeyed for position on the Information Highway, which will be built soon if we can figure out what it's supposed to look like, where it's supposed to go and who's going to pay for it.
No one knows whether your on-ramp will be your PC or a gadget that sits on your television set. I'd bet on the cable companies if they weren't so universally hated by everyone who ever had to deal with them. Stay tuned.
As for 1995, I'll resolve to get my office cleaned up if some of the folks who make software and hardware will clean up their acts, too.
First and foremost, I'd like game publishers to get a little closer to reality. The last high-tech, multimedia adventure game I fired up began by presenting me with a menu of DMA and IRQ choices for my sound board, then promptly told me it wouldn't run because I didn't have any EMS or enough conventional memory.
After I spent 20 minutes messing with my CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT files to get the memory it needed, the game promptly crashed and burned before it got past the title screen. This happened on two different computers, with different processors, sound boards, CD-ROM drives and video adapters.
The idea, guys, is that games should be fun. Either figure out a way to make these things work under Windows, which takes care of all this garbage, or design them to run without requiring the average user to have a computer science Ph.D.
And now that I have your attention, how about distributing more business applications on CD-ROM? While a word processor, spreadsheet or graphics program doesn't need the full capacity of a CD for its program files, CDs only cost a buck or so to produce. Instead of sitting there for 45 minutes and swapping 22 floppy disks to install a program, why can't I just pop a CD in the drive, hit the install button and let the computer do the work?
You don't even need separate CD and floppy disk versions for people who don't have CD-ROMs. Just include both in the package. I'd pay a buck or two more.
Here's another one. Why can't we have more nice little one-disk programs? Not every task demands a CD or 25 floppy disks. Why can't we have more programs like Borland's Sidekick for Windows? It's a well-conceived little database, address book, calendar, phone dialer and note pad and it comes on one (count 'em) floppy.
Speaking whereof, does anybody know why I have to write about floppy disks and compact discs? One of the eternal mysteries of the English language.
Another thing -- why do half the Windows programs set themselves up with a command called "install" and the other half use a command called "setup?" Why do they package CDs in shrink-wrap that's impossible to get off when they come in a box that's already shrink-wrapped? And why do I sound more and more like Andy Rooney?
Now for some good news about a problem solved. My New Year's gift to you comes from Mac McBride, president of Scandinavian PC Systems, which naturally is located in Baton Rouge, La.
Among other things, Mac publishes an excellent little book known as the PC Crash Course and Survival Guide for Windows. While it covers almost everything you need to get started on your PC, it does not cover one of those little problems that bedevils everyone who has ever tried to save trees by using a laser printer on both sides of a piece of paper. If the humidity is high and the paper has absorbed water from the air, it curls, wrinkles and jams when you flip it over.
Living in Baton Rouge, where humidity is close to a religion, Mac has struggled with this problem for years. "I couldn't find anything," he complained. "I looked for containers and paper safes that would dehumidify the stuff, but there's nothing around. The closest thing I could find was a wine safe, but that actually adds humidity."
The other day he was heating up a cold cup of coffee in his microwave oven when inspiration struck. If moisture in the paper was making it curl, maybe he could nuke the water out of it.
He took half a ream of paper (keeping the wrapper on but opened to let the moisture out) and zapped it on high for 90 seconds -- which is, coincidentally, the same amount of time it takes to heat up the coffee. It came out warm and dry and went through the laser printer on both sides as smooth as silk.
"Just remember not to cook it too long or it'll start to curl," he said.
Have a Happy New Year, Mac.
L Michael J. Himowitz is a staff writer for The Baltimore Sun.