ts@uwasa.fi (Timo Salmi) (01/01/91)
Mon 31-Dec-90: Now that the year 1990 has gone by it is interesting to take brief a subjective look back at some features from a moderator's vantage point. The number one product of the year on the net seems to have been McAfee's virus scanner which was updated at very frequent intervals throughout the year. (Currently /pc/pd2/scanv72.zip.) Another product that captivated the scene at the beginning half of 1990 was LZEXE from France by Fabrice Bellard. (Currently /pc/pd2/lzexe91.zip). The idea is brilliant in its simplicity. Compress any executable program, and place the code to decompress it at run time into the program. Later PKWare followed suit with its pklite, and will probably dominate in the future because of its well-known brandname and US background. (Not perhaps fair in a sense, but that's the way "the market" stands.) I was pleased to see one of my own packages (currently /pc/ts/tsfaq15.arc) to do particularly well. When I started collecting frequently asked questions from the news, and find answers to them, I didn't quite foresee that it would so quickly become this popular. One of the depressing features I saw repeated many times over in program packages in 1990 was poor testing before releasing. There were several programs which were either very difficult to implement, had poor user interfaces, or simply did not work at all. More than ever before I saw what I call my "ten minute rule" broken. (The rule: If an experienced user is still completely stuck after the first ten minutes, a shareware product is badly done.) The turbulent PC file compression scene earlier dominated by the .arc packing method saw .zip emerge the dominant archiver in 1990. What lies ahead is difficult to say, since this is a volatile and competition prone area. We had repeated gossip of much enhanced versions of .lzh and .zoo archivers throughout the year, but nothing happened. Net connections improved in general during the year, but there were occasional breaks in the overseas link in particular. Another sad feature was that so many parts of comp.binaries.ibm.pc had techincal difficulties in reaching the destinations. This is probably due to the lenght of these packages. Also our site experienced repeated problems in this respect. One of the nice features (and perhaps a sign of maturity) is that no really serious flame wars had to be endured in c.b.i.p.d this year. A Happy New Year from uwasa.fi archives. All the best, Timo ................................................................... Prof. Timo Salmi (Moderating at anon. ftp site 128.214.12.3) School of Business Studies, University of Vaasa, SF-65101, Finland Internet: ts@chyde.uwasa.fi Funet: gado::salmi Bitnet: salmi@finfun