The Mysteries of Monkey Island by Nicolas Deneschau - Book Review

Ah, the Point and Click Adventure. A genre I've loved ever since the days of my Amiga 500, a genre I still love to this day (my 12th P&C adventure review for Fusion is in issue 61 and there's a couple more on the way for them too, demonstrating how vibrant the form is to this day, especially amongst Indie developers), and one where my first steps were taken on Melee Island. This is where Nicolas Deneschau's 300-plus page opus from Third Editions comes in. 

If you've ever wanted to know the history of the seminal series in one place, then this is the book for you. You'll first notice the high quality of the book itself - a hefty tome with a clean presentation and well spaced text. There are few illustrations, but those that are included are top notch and fit the subject perfectly, and a foreword is provided by Larry Ahern, co-director of Curse of Monkey Island.

The layout of the tale is pretty straightforward, gently easing the reader in with a potted history of Lucasfilm Games, the move to point and click adventures, and the creation of the SCUMM engine. From there, each title is detailed in chronological order, with cursive text boxouts offering Guybrush's diary of what occurred in each release. 

From the beginning, there is very much a personal angle from the author, and as a long time M.I. player, that approach resonated highly with me. This isn't just a history of the games themselves, but also of the state of gaming at the time, how people played games back then (disk swapping, urghhh), and how the market changed as the series evolved. 

Much research has been carried out and there are numerous footnotes pointing you to original sources. The author also uses footnotes to relate personal experiences and commentary. Many of these are funny, if not down right hilarious and adds greatly to the overall personality permeating the writing. 

There is plenty to learn here, especially about the movie adaptation that was once mooted, and of course the story doesn't end with the third game, Curse of Monkey Island. No, from there we move on to the Telltale Games entries and beyond, finishing with the most recent of the series, Return to Monkey Island. All the while, the narrative is interwoven with quotes and amusing bon mots, and it's almost a shame when you reach the last of the main chapters, as you realise that you've more than enjoyed the company of Nicholas. That also draws attention to the quality of the translation: it is superb!

Four appendices finish proceedings off: the first details the insult fighting replies from the first game, the second offers potted biographies of key individuals, the third lists the classic adventure games from LucasArts, and the fourth contains the lyrics to "Plank of Love".

This was the first book from Third Editions that I'd heard of, courtesy of a tweet from Konstantinos Dimopoulos of Virtual Cities fame. Having checked out the other titles from the publisher list at the back of this volume, and having enjoyed this one so much, is it any surprise that I ordered another book from them, this one heading for Uncharted territory...

You can pick up a copy of this and other Third Edition books from Amazon. Bear in mind that as a UK customer, there is a bit of a wait between ordering and delivery but such is the way of things, and it would be a shame for anyone to miss out on such a well written, heartening narrative of one of the best games series ever created. You can also follow the author on X - @Nicozilla_FR.

A review of this recent arrival will also be coming soon (well, as soon as I've read it...).

Magazines of Yesteryear - The Mac - Volume 5 Number 1 - January 1997

Mac Kit to Die For??? Maybe, but given this issue of The Mac hit the streets in early December 1996, maybe it should have read "Mac Kit Apple is dying from!" You'll understand why once we get to the ads...

The news pages lead with the triumphant announcement that Apple had returned to the black in its final quarter of the 1996 financial year. The piece states a $25m profit against expectations, which when you consider the Q2 loss of $700m, combined with a Q3 loss of $34m, any positive number was a good thing. CEO Gil Amelio had previously boasted that Apple would by out of the red by Q2 '97, so they were early achieving that. However, revenues were collapsing and the 1996 as a whole would see losses totalling $816m. That, gentle reader, was just a taster. It's no great spoiler that Apple's '97 expectations were hammered with a loss of over $1bn, before a turnaround in '98 with a $309m profit. Fear not, fans of fruit based computing, they made a profit of $96.995bn in 2023. As Mr Watson warbled, "It's been a long road..."

Also in the news was Apple's desire to double growth (uh-oh...), as well as ongoing confusion of Apple's OS issues. Apple had also cut 65% of its authorised reseller network which shocked no one as there were plans for Apple to open its own retail stores. That didn't pan out (you can guess why), with the first Apple Store only opening in the US in 2001. The UK got its first Apple Store in 2004. 

Internet Explorer 3.0 (those were really not the days, my friends, I'm glad they did end), was now available to Mac users, as was the link kit to connect Palm Pilots to Macs. Having written about Palm PDA's both here and in Pixel Addict, all I can reiterate is that they were brilliant devices for their time. Meanwhile, Iomega were planning a new compact storage format that could fit a 20Mb on a 5cm by 5cm cartridge. Heady tech for the time (seriously), this product was crying out for a cross-marketing campaign about N*Sync-ing your data via your N*Hand cart. My talents are wasted, honestly...

Reviews next and first up we have FreeHand 7, rated "the best drawing tool available", which probably validated its price tags of £450 and £646.25, depending on which add-on it was bundled with. 

Apple's latest Power Mac, the 4400 comes under the spotlight and come just over the grand mark (£1,056 inclusive of VAT, £899 ex). A score of 4/5 is pretty good, and for the time that was a reasonable ask. As technology advanced to new generations of processors, the asking price of a decent machine rose. By late 1996, the idea of a general home computer for less than £500 was having a rest as the rise of advanced new processors (Pentium, PowerPC and StrongARM) meant that new desktops had settled around the £1,000 mark, albeit temporarily as the latter half of the decade saw prices (in the Windows world at least) tumble - all helped by the tussle between AMD and Intel. 

More Apple kits gets the once over with what appear to be advanced looks at the MessagePad 2000 and the eMate 300. Let's get this clear: by this point, the Newton had matured into a reasonably capable platform if you wanted to have computing on the go without the bulk of a laptop. Sure, smartphone users today will fall about laughing at the size of the revised PDA but for the time, this was serious kit. The StrongARM SA-110 was a powerful leg up for processing power, and the software offering was in a much better place compared to the original Newton. That being said, with an expected price of around £750, it was still a ton (or several) of money for something that merely acted as an extension of the desktop/laptop experience. 

Not so the eMate 300, and I have to admit that this piece of portable tech was something I really wanted to get my hands on back in the day. Effectively placing a Newton into a laptop style case, the idea was sound, even if the size of it was off-putting for school use. Compare the eMate to the Alphasmart range of devices. The latter were smaller, lighter, lasted longer and were more suited to being mishandled by children. They were also cheaper, an important consideration when it comes to bulk buying. Still, the eMate was a sexy bit of kit and its failure was not down to the concept. The execution was ok, but Apple, being Apple, decided it was for education only and missed an opportunity to widen the user base. But hey, this was mid-90's Apple, it was a shit show anyway...

Games reviews kick off with Actua Soccer for footie fans, and Marathon Infinity from Bungie. Considered flawed and the weakest of the Marathon trilogy, Bungie would move on to other things, including an eventually un-released real time strategy title codenamed Monkey Nuts, eventually morphing into the original Xbox launch title (and all-round classic, Halo: Combat Evolved). 

There's also a review of Avara, an online multiplayer shooter that, whilst looking basic, appears to have neatly given gamers a taste of fighting the world. Well, as long as you had at least a 28.8kps modem. 14.4kps was a tad slow, and even the higher speed option could struggle with lots of players! Early days, people, early days. 

Zork Nemesis would keep adventure fans happy, and MechWarrior 2 proves that ports from DOS can work on the Mac, and be the better for it. 

An end of year issue is never the same without the Reader's Awards section and it's no surprise that Apple win the Mac Manufacturer of the Year award. Ok, that sounded sassy, but the clones were beginning to make themselves known on the market and, as noted above, would not help keep Apple afloat. Demon Internet (remember them? Ah, the good old days) won Internet Service Provider of the Year, Netscape Navigator best Internet Software, and the Iomega Zip for Best Storage Device. 

There is a "How to buy a Mac" guide that is a time capsule of how things used to be when buying a computer, though the near-traditional advice of "use a credit card if you can" still rings true to this day.

A round up of 17-inch monitors is guaranteed to take your breath away, and not only for the prices (the Applevision 1710 at £830 inc VAT was cheap for a Trinitron tube, but expensive in this round up), but also for their weight. The 1710 came in at 49lbs (22.2Kg) for a tube that could give you 1280x1024 at 75Hz. Good spec and picture quality, but this was not something you moved around much. The 1710 takes away the Not So Cheapo Editor's Award, whilst the £527 CTX 1765D snags the El Cheapo prize. 

A proper "how quaint" moment now with coverage of the DVD (Digital Versatile Disc) format. Very early days here for the wonder disc format but it would prove successful. I can still remember popping into Dixons in Kingston Upon Thames in 1997 and seeing a player for sale with five movies (the only five at the time, I think), with naff all change from a grand. As an impoverished student (who'd blown a fair chunk of his student loan on an N64 and Turok!), all I could do was gaze in wonder. 

The how to guides section gives us advice on Self Assessment completion for your tax concerns (yay?), and how to sort your travel plans on The Net. Such a charming term, The Net, redolent of dial up modems and eye-shrivelling website design. There's even a box out on finding your search engine first: Alta Vista was apparently the fastest, but Yahoo and Lycos were easier to use. Compare and contrast to the absolute shit show that is Google these days... Yeah, if there was ever yet another example of how the drive for greater revenues fucked things up, Google search is up there with the most egregious. 

e.Zone takes a look at the online goings on, the highlight being an interview with William Gibson. There's chat around his then-new book, Idoru, and his love on the Mac, although he believes his next Mac would be a clone. It might have been, but the next one after that would have been a Cupertino original. 

A guide on how to succeed at Warcraft II is followed by some Q&A pages, before the buyers guide takes up pretty much the rest of the remaining pages. As is decreed in the ancient by-laws of computing magazines, the final page is a humorous look at the year just gone, and rather funny it is too. 

(Deep breath)

So..... Apple wasn't in great shape as the count down clock to Millenium Armageddon hit 36 months, and if you want a reason why, I give you this page from Apple dealer, Gordon Harwood:

Can you see what I mean? Which model? Which spec? 

Let's say you have £1,500 to spend on a Mac, and yes, I know, that was a lot of money in 1996/7, but the nature of computing had pushed prices up between 1994 and 1997 as new processor tech and add-ons like CD-ROM drives, graphics cards and modems arrived. Every format saw spec/cost inflation in the middle of the decade, and £1,000 seemed to become the de facto entry point. For this example, you have £1,500 which, as a consumer, meant £1,275 before VAT. 

Now let's check out what GH could offer. That Performa 5320 with a 15" built-in monitor looks decent, although the printer bundle would take you just over your budget. But wait! The Performa 6320 doesn't include a monitor as standard, but the bundle with a 15' doofer (minus the multimedia TV shenanigans) was yours for £1,280 and you got a keyboard with it. More RAM too, but no modem, but you still had cash to spare. Why the emphasis on the keyboard inclusion? Look closely, and you'll see that the very cheapest of each of the Performa ranges (5320 excluded) do not include a tactile terror. Nor a monitor, come to think of it, so yeah, the initial price looks cheap for a Mac, but to actually buy a usable desktop? That 6320, starting at just £799 ex VAT. Nope. That'd be £1,089 ex for something you could use out of the box, and to be honest, you'd spend the extra forty odd quid on the 15" option. 

You could argue that Apple were merely catering for all possible users, so upgrading peeps might already have a monitor and keyboard. You could also say that they were nickel and diming the customer in order for their good to appear cheaper. A mix of both maybe? Not that it matters now, but it does hark back slightly to PC box builders in the first half of that decade advertising machines without an OS. It knocked anywhere between £50 and £100 off the headline price and was only noted in the "optional extras" section. An operating system... optional...? That practice soon ended. However, if they could make "A.I." optional in modern OS's, that would be just great, thanks. Unless they can make it genuinely useful and not just some data slurping funny picture generating boondoggle. Alas, I fear not. 

A Powerbook was just within reach - ok, maybe a couple of quid over, but a Power Mac was also just about do-able if you took the very base option, as you didn't get a keyboard or a mouse. Going back a couple of paragraphs: really, who the actual fuck ships a grand and half computer without a f-ing keyboard? 

Anyway, on to Computer Warehouse and the really damning evidence of why Apple was two steps away from Destination F*cked. The first two pages concentrate on the top of the range clones from Power Computing. These were often as not as expensive as the equivalent Apple product, but they were also often faster and offered greater expansion opportunities. Not see the threat yet?

How about mid-range, and the Power Center 132MHz 604, 16MB RAM, 1GB hard drive and 4x CD drive. No monitor or keyboard, but yours for £1,499 ex. A couple of pages on, Dabs Direct had Apple's equivalent, the Power Mac 7600/132 (1.2GB drive and 8x CD) for £1,649 ex. That £150 could go a long way, even with the slightly lower storage and slower CD drive. And yes, it gets worse. 

Switching to Dabs Direct, the full Mac range from Apple is here, as are the clones from Umax. If money was really tight, then Umax could do you proud with it's range, starting at £799 ex. You could argue semantics about value and mandatory add-ons, but the point here is that Apple, whose bread and butter was computing at the time, was in direct competition with box builders who could sell roughly the same kit but cheaper. 

There was another fly in the ointment: confusion. Check out MacLine. On the page to your left, a goodly selection of Mac models, bundles and offers - but only a selection. On the right, the Umax offering. ALL OF THEM. Two ranges, three models a piece, offering six separate price points, each easily discernible from the others. Now look back at what Apple were trying to hoof out of the door. It's a mess. You had ads featuring the Performa 5200 5260, 5300, 5320, 5400, 6320, 6400, and as for the Power Macs, there were the 4400, 7200, 7600, 8200, 8500, and 9500 models. Never mind the different configs per model, the number of models was mind-boggling. 

Just to hammer the point home, even the buyer's guide notes how great the value is with the clones. In the sub-£2,000 bracket, clones outnumber Apple machines by 9 to 5, it's evens in the £2-3k range, and Apple are dwarfed by 10 to 2 in the £3k plus spectrum. In each area, Apple was having to fight to retain any semblance of value for money, especially against Umax, and that's not what the clones were meant to do.

It wasn't all hardware though, with MacGold Direct sorting you out for software, including a rather impressive range of games and entertainment titles. 

And that's it for The Mac in 1996. Bit of a weird one, and not just because of the fashion on show (or the full page ad for Maxim magazine...), given that on the surface it looked like things were getting better for Mac users, but in actual fact, the platform was close to dying simply because the host organism was unable to do the one job it really had to do. It would take a year or two and a lot of red ink, but Apple would turn things around, surprisingly so. But that never happened for the format I'll cover in the next MOYY. 

The more tame section of mid-90's fashion.

A Guide to Movie Based Video Games 2001 onwards by Christopher Carton - Book Review

It's been just over a year since I looked at the first volume of this movie based video games duo, and it's still a go to reference when I'm looking for gaming inspiration. A few weeks back, part two was released, picking up the subject of movie tie-ins from 2001 onwards. And times they were a changing. 

This is evident as soon as you look at the page count: just shy of 270 compared to the first volume's 200. A sure sign that a) corporate bods realised that there was money in them there reels and b) you were no longer restricted to a console or computer in order to shell out. That's right, kids, mobile phone gaming had arrived. 

Before we get to that though, check out the contents page:

As you can see, there's a good array of groupings, and although some of the titles featured in each group are linked only tenuously (I'd argue including Alexander in "Is this the Real Life?" section pushes the boundary of what could be called fantasy, ignoring the casting choices, anyway), nothing quite severs the connection completely.  

A cynic (moi, darling?) could think that this book should have been called "The complete guide to 21st Century Disney gaming", replete as it is with literally every franchise the Hoose of Moose had/has going, and you can't argue that the C-Suite MBA's don't know their stuff when it came to revenue generation. I mean, I'm not saying Star Wars as a franchise (and I hate that word) is dead, but sometimes less is definitely more. In this book, however, you get 37 titles over 23 pages! Thirty Seven! And that's not including Star Wars Jedi: Survivor due to publishing deadlines nor the five LEGO games. All told, that's equivalent to over two per year during the period covered by this book. 

It doesn't end there though, as a couple of chapters on you have "Disney Domination", featuring nine Pirates of the Caribbean games. But wait! There's more! "To Infinity" puts the spotlight on Pixar-related games, and guess who distributed Pixar movies before buying the company up? Yep, the Moose! Ok, I get it that Disney might not have owned Pixar for the first quarter of this 20 plus year focus, but if you look at the aforementioned series as well as the 20th Century Fox IP that also fills many of the pages, there is no escaping the juggernaut of the rodent-headlined behemoth. 

Still, there's plenty of room for the likes of Bond (9 titles), Harry Potter (15), Top Gun (9!) and... Days of Thunder? Yeah, I didn't know about that last one, a 2011 release coinciding with the "classic" film's 20th anniversary. The author's words, not mine, and grounds to request an intervention me thinks. Seriously, Mr Carton, a "classic"? Sheesh!

If anyone asks, here's how you milk dinosaurs...

Sarcasm aside, there is a lot to get your teeth into here and although some entries get quite the write up and a screen shot, others warrant just a quick note. That doesn't happen often, and I am sure the fans of The Fast and The Furious: Drift arcade game will be peeved at it receiving such short shrift, but space definitely feels at a premium here, so appreciate even this small gift (OK, I'll stop now). Where such brevity does occur, however, it never feels disrespectful. 

I usually say that tomes such as this are informative, and it is no less true here. Not only have I discovered the author's questionable definition of classic movies (that would make a fun discussion over a pint or two...), but I am now also aware of "gems" such as Beverly Hills Cop on the PS2. The write up is so good that I jumped onto YouTube to check it out and, yeah, it's, ermmm, a game. Definitely one of them. And if I can ever find a copy in passing, I might just convince myself into playing it, much like the concept behind the excellent French horror film, Martyrs, when pain and suffering could show you heaven. And just like that, we're (tortuously!) back to Days of Thunder...

... before screeching into the topic of video games as art. I believe they are, so reading this book, even more so than volume one, got me into a thinking mood (and that is always a good thing when you've read a book). Regardless of the approach by the actual developers and companies who created the titles featured within the pages of AGTMBVG 2001 onwards, the game's initial conception was more than likely the result of realising the quarterly revenue generation possibilities from both home console and mobile phone users - it's all about bringing in the Benjamins! Why else would you develop Beverly Hills Cop more than twenty years after its cinematic cousin's release? Unless it's a "classic", of course... True, there were some gems (looking at you, The Warriors), but also plenty of clunkers too. As an aside, given the current state of AAA games development and the huge number of job losses over the last couple of years, I am of the opinion that Indies and smaller scale publishers are the way forward. However, that is a topic that could be discussed ad infinitum. 

In that sense, this book has a greater value than just an enchiridion (ohhh, fancy!) to the movie game genre. It also charts how the games industry changed in the first two decades of this century, and how adapting a film licence was no longer an afterthought (or just a quick side hustle) but a planned exploitation of another art form, strip mining the consumer in the search for ever higher revenues. Not a great thought to finish a book review with, but a surely evidence that the author has written not only a quality guide, but also a thought-provoking one. 

You can pick up a copy of A Guide to Movie Based Video Games 2001 onwards direct from the publisher here, but also from the usual physical and online bookstores. You can also follow the author on X @chriscarton89

An 80's Naval S.A.G.A (Surface Action Group Affair).

The last Saturday in August saw another semi-regular gathering of the TWATS and in a sublime case of history repeating itself, I was in the chair for a game of Shipwreck and once again taking advantage of Steve's collection of Cold War floaty boats. If we do the same thing for the last Saturday in August next year, this could become a tradition. 

Iiiiiiin the Red corner!!!

There were five in attendance so I'd come up with an asymmetric scenario of four British destroyers and frigates against a lone Soviet cruiser. I had not counted on Steve being busy with his brushes and bring the Americans to the table. Oh well, best laid plans and all that.

Aaaaaand in the Blue corner!

Instead, we had a straight forward slug-fest, albeit it with a little room for tactical shenanigans. Andy and Shaun took control of the Soviet surface group made up of a Kirov-class battlecruiser, two Sovremmeny-class destroyers, an Udaloy-class destroyer and a Krivak II-class frigate. Paul and Steve had the American fleet, centred around an Iowa-class battleship, two Ticonderoga-class cruisers, a California-class cruiser and a Perry-class frigate. Yep, each side has a sacrificial target, but would they use them wisely?

In the middle of the area of operations were two small islands and each side basically had to get past the other. There were no aircraft to get in the way of the ship to ship combat. 

The Krivak in the distance looks kinda lonely.

The early turns were a selection of single and double moves to eat up the distance between the two forces, with the Americans switching on the Iowa's surface search radar but neither finding anything nor being detected itself. During this period, the Americans stayed in formation whilst the Soviets pushed the plucky little Krivak II out in front and eventually warmed up its radar, yet still detecting nothing. Someone had been thinking...

Turn 9 (these were very quick movement turns at this stage of the game) saw the Americans detect the Krivak's emissions and loft four speculative Harpoons from the Iowa. This led to the first combat phase, and with the Krivak beam on to the approaching US ships, it was able to use both its SA-N-4 mounts to take down the quarrelsome quartet in two combat turns (CT's). 

Back to the movement and the US go to flank speed. The Krivak got a radar fix the US's port wing consisting of a Tico and the OHP, yet still the US still hadn't picked up a hard lock on the Krivak. Even so, more missiles went a-flying. 

A pair a piece from the Iowa, port Tico and the OHP should have been enough, yet some deft Soviet missile fire (and some absolutely cracking dice rolls from Shaun) saw the last of the Harpoons downed without too much sweat, whilst the Soviet return of four SS-N-14's at the port Tico did raise eyebrows as the last of them was taken out by the cruiser's Phalanx. 

Vampires ahoy! (and guess who can't count!)

It was time for the gloves to come off, and with a good data link back to the main fleet, the Krivak did what it was supposed to do and let the gang know exactly where the Iowa, port Tico and OHP were. Each of the Soveremmeny's fired all eight of their SS-N-22's, one octet at the port Tico, the other at the OHP (overkill, I know, right?). The Kirov, having none of this "which is better?" bollocks, rippled all 20(!) of its SS-N-19's (no nukes in game, btw) at the Iowa.

Our American friends decided that the Krivak had lasted long enough, tasking the OHP to fire the last of its Harpoons at the offending frigate. Since they had not detected the main Soviet fleet, that was their only possible response. This began that last CT phase. 

The eight Harpoons were whittled away by the Krivak's dwindling supply of SAMs, with all but one of the SSM's succumbing to defensive missiles. It was at this point that the fortunate frigate ran-afoul of the flurry of fire, and some duff chaff dice rolling led to a single hit, bad enough to cripple the ship, yet not destroy it. Heroes of the Soviet Union medals all round me thinks. A tally of the remaining SAM rounds revealed a total of 2 remaining for the front mount - it was that close. 

Hard right turn, Clyde!

The American's were too busy to celebrate their first (and only) win as they had to deal with the incoming horde of SSM's. Both Tico's got in on the act, with the port ship proving the most capable as expected as they were an actual target, and it was never really in doubt that they wouldn't avoid some Sunburn issues. 

However, as the port Tico was busy saving itself, that left the OHP on their own, and that single arm launcher counted against it. They managed to down four of their Sunburn's, yet ineffective Phalanx and chaff dice rolls meant that it took four direct hits. The Krivak had been more than avenged as the Soviet claimed the first sinking of the game. Yet the game wasn't over yet...

Vampires ahoy! (With the right count now!)

There were still the issue of twenty "Shipwrecks" (not 22 according to one photo... oops! That was corrected before anything important happened though), and despite some truly fantastic AEGIS directed defensive shooting, nine still made it to CIWS range on the Iowa. Phalanx accounted for two of those, as did chaff, but the remaining five found their mark. Even with "on the fly" amendments for the presence of an armoured hull, there were too many well rolled hits and the Iowa was gone. And with that, the two fleets parted to lick their wounds, with the Soviets definitely the better off. 

Oh, Heavens Preserve us!

This was another fun game using Shipwreck and the addition of Steve's naval know-how demonstrated the benefit of having an umpire and players who know their stuff. Tis a game more than just about dice rolling. 

That being said, your humble umpire did offer both sides the opportunity to expand the game (to either or both side's benefit) via the liberal application of a fine single malt (there were several behind the bar) to the umpire, yet neither side did. Has there ever been a more fitting example of fair play from two competing sides? Probably, but hey, if you don't offer, you'll never know! Also, damn them!

A tough little ship, that one!

One thing that was was quite clear was that when the vampires were loose, there was a lot going on and much to keep track of, leading to my muttered comment of "Next time, can we do f-ing muskets?" 

I might return to the asymmetric scenario for our next naval game, but that'll be a while off yet (next August bank holiday weekend, gents?), as there are many more periods we can play with before a return to Cold War naval is warranted, and a benefit of being in such a varied group of TWATS.

Magazines of Yesteryear - Personal Computer Magazine - Issue 65 - June 1993

Five Years Later...

If 1988 was the year of talking up OS/2 as the next step(!) in PC operating systems, by 1993 the conversation had settled firmly on the future with Windows NT, and this issue of Personal Computer Magazine handily deals with that in their Pentium/Alpha face off given that DEC's new super chip could run Microsoft's power OS. If you want to know more about how NT came about, give Showstopper! by G. Pascal Zachary a read. It's a simple tale of folk being absolutely pummelled for the promise of stock options and pay outs whilst their personal lives are shredded all for the cause of "achievement." Yeah, well, that's a rant for another time...

Anyway, the news:

Compaq might have asked Intel to embargo all Pentium-related announcements until Compaq's own motherboard for the chip was ready for the prime time. Such shenanigans were denied but given that everyone else was having to use Intel-produced boards and Compaq wanted to shift boxes...

The battle for networking control was heating up with Novell Netware's pricing undercutting Microsoft's own Windows NT Advanced Server package, as well as PINning their hopes (you'll see) with their Processor Independent Netware (See!!!) initiative, which hoped to put Netware 4.0 on Alpha, PA-RISC and Sparc processors, as well as the then current Intel offering. Hey, it seemed to work out for the rest of the decade...

Meanwhile, AMD were spaffing 486 chips left, right and centre, handy since the 486 was the CPU of choice in the market. A court win against Intel regarding microcode infraction was also a plus point. At the same time, Intel were still litigating against all and sundry who tried to use AMD or Cyrix processors, with Twinhead (a prolific notebook manufacturer at the time), the latest victim of Intel's lawyerly legions. 

Apple were planning to move the "look and feel" of the Mac GUI to Unix workstations in an attempt to... well, it wasn't exactly clear what they were doing. Fighting Microsoft in the Unix sphere? Attempting to garner support for their forthcoming PowerPC-based machines? Piss around because at this point the wheels are starting to wobble? Speaking of wheels, they had fallen off the MJN Technology bandwagon, with the direct PC seller's fall leaving 70 people out of work. The brand would rise again as part of the Granville Technology Group, alongside brands such as Colossus, Time and Tiny. Yep, them!

Coreldraw 4.0 was winging its way to UK users for the princely sum of £395, with Coreldraw 3 dropping to £149! Ah, kids, serious software used to cost serious money back in the day. Also costing real money was IBM's PS/1 Multimedia System - a 25MHz 386 rocking an 85Mb hard drive, Philips CD-ROM, Audio Spectrum 16 soundcard and a 256-colour SVGA display. The £1,340 they were asking for it included DOS, Windows, Works for Windows, and a tutorial CD-ROM. Canny shoppers could get a similar spec a little cheaper, and it was arguable whether a 386 would cut the mustard for much longer. 

Word 6.0 (for DOS) was also due to meet the public, helping the marketing bods by matching version numbers with long time rival Wordperfect. Also due out by year end would be Word 6.0 for Windows, as well as a Mac version too. In more surprising news, Virgin (yes, them!) were planning to get into the PC hardware market, albeit using third party kit with a badge slapped on the box. And no, that's didn't work out either, pretty much in line with the commentary piece on page 47 - entering a mature market and thrashing the competition first time??? I mean, they had form, but this wasn't the airline market.

News analysis sections this month offered thoughts on possible competition for Microsoft as other companies try to leverage Windows applications with Unix and Macintosh - very much a storm in a teacup. VESA Local Bus standards were up next, or not as was then the case, with varying interpretations of what VL-bus actually meant doing the rounds. Another teacup-sized forecast as PCI was already fermenting nicely over at Intel, and that would prove far better suited to Pentium processors as they found their footing in 1994.

A proper 90's fascination up next and yes, it's the "what the fuck were they thinking" collision of the personal computer and television. Bill Gates had been demo-ing some marketing bollocks about tech permitting greater PC/TV integration and, well, it was a piss poor idea at the time, and truly didn't evolve until online connectivity could keep up with even basic video encoding standards. Given the current state of television and the streaming market, it's still ended up being a piss poor idea for those who create the content, as well as those who consume it. 

Speaking of which, here comes the D! (Not that, you filthy minded buggers!). No, we're talking about ISDN (Integrated Services Digital Network), a way of guaranteeing two 64Kbps channels (and potential for up to 30 of them), at a time when your standard modem was giving 14.4Kbps, with forthcoming 19.2Kbps and 28.8Kbps specs and even (spoken in hushed tones), 56.5Kbps!!! You had to be there, kids, as well as being very patient. Although you could say the same today as you wait for the Satan-bating combination of cookie consent pop-ups and adverts to interrupt even the fastest of connections. The article does talk about ISDN's D channel (for flow control and error reporting, the B channels being the main data pipes), and also mentions the possibility of Broadband and 100Mbps. Fantasy for 1993 users, and maybe for more than a few 2024 ones as well, but the future looked bright, even if the then-present offering was still an expensive luxury - £400 for Basic Rate ISDN 2 (so 128Kbps) installation plus £84 per quarter line rental, but £3,025 for Primary Rate ISDN30 installation and £33.87 per quarter per channel line rental - and remember, you could have up to 30(!) channels! Now we know where Virgin Media get their pricing model from!

On to the reviews and before we get to the kit being covered, just a shout out to the headers for each piece. They are quite funny and I'll include them as I go. Hewlett Packard had a printer (Quite.a brainy type) that could do you 17 pages per minute at 600 dots per inch for £2,999 in the form of the Laserjet 4Si. For network use, the 4Si MX was yours for £4,449 with included Ethernet and Local talk cards, as well as Postscript, compatibility with ten networks OS's, optional Token Ring, and a parallel port for single user types. PCM declared this should become the standard in network printing. 

Dell placed their new Dimension 486/25S on the line (Dell to be different), and priced at £1,025 for a 25Mhz 486, 8Mb of RAM, a 120Mb hard drive and local bus graphics, it was a rather nice machine. The £30 delivery charge gets a call out, and when you consider that equates to just over £60 in today's money, they're not wrong. 

Microsoft wanted you to use their Mouse 2.0 (New moose in the hoose) but for £69 then, that was a lot of readies for your rodent, Quicken 2 for Windows (The Quicken wakes - one for Wyndham fans there) offered an excellent financial package for £59.95, and Norton Utilities 7.0 (Beautility and the beast) was another winner, both as a package and a title. 

NEC's latest colour laptop, the Ultralite Versa 25C (Your Versa-tile friend) gained points for future-proofing, with a degree of modularity that would have been used to justify its £3,195 price tag. That and the lovely (for the time) 9.5" 256-colour TFT screen. Finally, low-cost document image processing software, Watermark Discovery (That's the OLE point), harks back to functionality that has long been subsumed into more general packages. 

The cover stars are next and it's definitely more Pentium than Alpha-based. You get a long and highly detailed background as to why the Pentium chip is the Pentium, as well as the technology behind it. It's pieces like this that make these old magazines well worth reading, and it was certainly a school day after finishing those paragraphs. PCI is touched upon briefly (see above for my prior comment), as is whatever the P24T upgrade malarkey was (marketing tripe, mostly it seems, as people just upgraded the whole box as it would become clear that by 1994, a dedicated Pentium machine was the future), before we get to the high-end server products that Intel's latest was aimed at. 

ICL's Teamserver F5 started at £7,500 for a good tower option, whereas Viglen's EX Pentium was a much more affordable server/desktop at ££4,949 as tested. Elonex went straight to the simple "Pentium" moniker, and for £8,100 as tested, they could keep it. DEC's Alpha-equipped AXP proved a competitive offering, at least spec wise, as no pricing was mentioned. Benchmarks are a pleasant surprise and the general feeling is that DEC have a capable machine on their hands. The final question about whether they could leverage Windows NT on their new box was soon answered - the market said "Meh," and stayed with Intel. 

For those who have an accounting thing (Hey, I just test financial databases and associated logic! Those six years in finance were an aberration!), a round up of interviews with corporate types and how they handled LAN-based high-end DOS accounting packages could be of historical interest. As someone whose career has revolved around IBM i, there are some interesting connections here but it's a tad too dry, even for me.

A very definite period piece on the dangers of leasing equipment is an "oh, really?" read, given that times have changed, but the next sixteen pages really do confirm that the past is a different country: hard disks - what they are, how they work, and what to do when you run out of space, as well as other storage options. All that spinning rust... 

The main group test gives word processors for both DOS and Windows a run out, and there are some truly memory-raking names present and correct, all the more so after I've just read this wonderful article on The Register about WordStar 7. Yes, I'm going to be trying that out ASAP! Back in '93, Lotus Ami Pro received the best in show gong for Windows, whilst Wordperfect 5.1 clinched it for DOS, although honourable mentions were given to Starwriter and WordStar. 

The Platforms section, covering Unix, OS/2 and cross-platform issues takes a gander at NeXT's Intel port of NeXTSTEP. The pre-release version was handled by some loaned hardware that really missed the boat for the average user: 486DX2 66MHz, 16Mb RAM, 240Mb SCSI hard drive, and a 2Mb VRAM graphics adaptor - £3,500 plus £900 for the developer release of the OS. Even then, that didn't meet the suggested developer release spec from NeXT, which apparently needed 24Mb of RAM and 330Mb of drive space. It's an informative read but the conclusion does state that NeXT was competing at the high end of the workstation market, whilst also noting that some have said its real opponents are (the several years away) Microsoft's Cairo and IBM/Apple/HP's Taligent collaboration. As it turned out, Cairo never shipped although some elements appeared in Windows 95 (which won the consumer OS race with surprising ease), and Taligent fell apart. Our fruity friends then shat the bed with Copland and ended up buying NeXT in 1997, thus taking the "next step" on the journey to financial recovery. 

Back into the real world and the first part (of two) of a series detailing networking Netware LANs to Unix does provoke a slight yawn from me (apologies), before Bob Walder casts a gimlet eye on the release version of Netware 4.0, comparing it as he does so to Microsoft's LAN Manager 2.2 and Banyan Vines 5.5. Do I need to spell out the conclusion, or can the 90's veterans in the room guess? Yep, Netware is the best, LAN Manager is good and improving, especially if you're already using Windows for Workgroups, and Vines 5.5 has issues with complexity and a monumentally crappy copy protection system (a dongle that proved "troublesome"), so loses any chance of a recommendation. As noted in the news section, Novell retaliated by dropping its prices, but as end users were increasingly becoming equipped with machines running Windows for Workgroups, the buy in was simple enough for Microsoft to leverage. 

Back up options get a group test before we get to the tail end (a round up of Desktop Publishing books, anyone), but also this absolute classic from Richard Sarson under the training banner. Companies were being "delayered" of management, and this should bring about a change in recruiting practices as well as a move away from the idea of 40 years of progression before you get your pension. What makes this a fun commentary is the distance of thirty years and how much things haven't changed. You can see the full article ablve, but from actual experience, whatever "flat, competence-driven" structure companies might aim for, I can attest from my experience that deeds have not matched words, and that the vertical management culture is alive and well. 

It's the adverts and we begin at the beginning, with Apricot tying to convince potential shoppers that they were good value. As much as I loved the Xen desktop case design (we had a one at Tanfield Comp for the careers advisor to use), I don't believe £949 ex VAT for a diskless 33MHz 386 was good value, network security or no. And £1,299 for a 25MHz 486 was, as we shall see, a tad over the odds too. 

Now here's something more than a little strange! Apple with multi-page adverts! Indeed! This was at a point where the fruity fiends were pushing what was left of the 680x0-series range before the big move to PowerPC, and more importantly, highlight the benefits of using a Macintosh over Windows (something that the arrival of Windows 95 would begin to change very quickly). Much like logic puzzles beloved by adventure games and films, Apple poses this as a three part process: Macs weren't affordable, Macs were only for graphics, and Macs were not compatible. Here's their guide (with commentary) to the answers.

The Mac isn't affordable:

The LCIII 4/80 was only £1,150 ex VAT! A bargain! Well, for a Mac, pretty much. Three years prior, and that amount wouldn't have gotten you the box, never mind a display! That LCIII rocked a 25MHz 68030 and could also be found in its civilian guise as the Performa 450. But check out that Classic II - £695 ex VAT! It also had a 68030 but clocked at a lower 16MHz and on a cheaper/slower 16-bit bus. Still, the 4/80 configuration was a good budget option, yet one can't help but feel that the 9-inch 512x342 display was a step too far down the ladder. There were added benefits (networking and audio), so arguably, Apple weren't horribly wrong here, except maybe asking if you should buy one for the office, or the home, or both? That's a lot of saving up, and they didn't even have the benefit of cancelling Netflix subs to help out back then...

The Mac is only for graphics:

There's lots of professional packages for Mac users, and you can easily do whatever you can on a PC but also on a Mac. And no, that's not sarcasm. What should be noted is the focus on their being a Mac for whatever purpose. In all, 17 models. Now, let's be clear, that was quite restrained compared to what would happen over the next four years - Apple spattered the market with conflicting ranges and multiple configurations within those ranges. Just a quick check of a 1996 Mac mag makes for migraine inducing complexity, so maybe the next MoYY post will check that out. But as for 1993, there were (just) 17, which was still a worrying sign of things to come. 

The Mac isn't compatible:

Fair play, they were good for network connectivity, they could read MS-DOS floppies, and they could run MS-DOS programs via an emulator. Job done!

But not quite: there's some summer specials (four, on top of the 17 models mentioned above), and it's here that the messaging stumbles slightly. The only "special" that received coverage in the previous pages was the LCIII at that £1,150 price point. The cheapest option was the LCII at £850, which sounds good until you realise the model had been discontinued a couple of months earlier. A great upselling chance for the LCIII, perchance? That Centris 610 with a Personal Laserwriter NTR as a package for £2,795... What was that about affordable? The last "special" is a doozy, and also one of the most desirable combo's ever created (IMHO). The Powerbook Duo, all in for £2,495. Effectively an LCIII in portable form, the concept was neat but very expensive for the benefits it offered. 

Bless them, but IBM were trying with the aid of the Pink Panther. Here's an NEC ad from a few pages prior, and you can see the asking price for their 25MHz 486 was competitive, and to be honest, of the two, I prefer the aesthetic of the PS/ValuePoint range, but horses for courses. 

Nicely placed following the Alpha/Pentium dust up, this DEC advert targets the server end of the market, and I'm sorry, but adding "just" before those prices is an... interesting choice.

P&P were a dealer who were gunning for Compaq fans with these two offers, and that ProLinea for £999 ex is really good for the time, as is that bundle price including Microsoft's best offerings. 

Time Computer Systems Ltd. next and some duality there. That colour Amstrad laptop was good value at that price, but compared to the latest offerings from other manufacturers, was bulky, so definitely belonging to the previous generation of portable technology, whilst that IBM bundle is another good value option, though that 386 model for under a grand was an exercise in false economy - the 486 was at the grand-ish level and would only get cheaper. 

Not that that would stop the likes of Wearnes, whose 386SX-25 at £649 ex VAT was more for the budget conscious rather than anyone looking ahead a year or two. Good price on the 486SX-25 mind...

Nationwide Direct were slinging out 386 and 486's from IBM, Compaq and, yep, Alan, and Gawd help them, still trying to flog both the 7000-series and the Mega PC. The 7386 would do you a reasonable if un-expandable desktop, but trying to flog the 7286, even with that games pack? No. No, no, no! Same would go for the Mega PC. At least their dealer price for the IBM ValuePoint range makes them even more attractive, the 486 mentioned above was only £899 ex!

The Pen Pad: pointless, but I still wanted one.

Last, but not least, is Thripplewoods with some intriguing goods for sale. First up has to be Amstrad's Pen Pad PDA 600, the lower cost option for those who couldn't reach the heady heights (or public humiliation) of Apple's Newton. I've never seen on in the flesh but contemporary reviews were lukewarm at best, and those of a social climbing nature would probably have been better off with a Newton!

Another pointless piece of kit, still wanted one.

Moving passed the sextet of fax machines (you have to be of an age...), it's the MagicNote that steals the show. A word processor in a laptop form, it's something that would have appealed to my gadget freak side even though it was pricey for something Amstrad's own NC100/200 range of portables could have achieved. But hey, considering these days Freewrite ask for around £400 for effectively an e-ink typewriter...

Next time, the return of The Mac (that's a hint, that is...)