dacs.doc electric

IN LEWIS CARROLL'S Through the Looking Glass, the Red Queen explains it all to Alice. "Now here, you see, it takes all the running you can do to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that." There has never been a better description of the computer industry--hardware or software.

On the hardware side, Tracy Kidder hit it just right in The Soul of a New Machine. The reward for dedicating heart, soul, blood, sweat, and tears to a project is that when it's over and out the door, you get to do it all over again.

For software development, it is meaningless to talk about hours per day or days per week worked, because there just is no differentiation whatsoever between work and personal life. They seamlessly fuse to "the project."

And then we have the software niche market, which would absolutely delight the Red Queen. Just to keep up, you have to run three times as fast as you are possibly able to develop a program that does something great that the operating systems and suites from the big guys don't do. Then when the next version of their product comes out, it has your function and they include it for free. So you start running again.

The October meeting of the Danbury Area Computer Society featured the presentation of a beautiful niche software product by a thoroughly professional and enjoyable presenter, Gene Barlow, Director of User Group Relations for PowerQuest Corp., who told us all about Version 4.0 of Partition Magic.

PowerQuest is a privately held software company started up in Orem, Utah, in 1993, that is doing very well in Software Wonderland with widespread recognition for its rapid growth and technical excellence. The company employs about 200 people and specializes in disk management utilities. It offers several products for the server and LAN market in the higher price bracket, but its main line is the half-dozen disk utility products it markets to the end-user for a street price of about $40 apiece. Of these, Partition Magic is the flagship product.

Gene was the kind of presenter we always hope for--a consummate professional and excellent communicator. He has worked with user groups for many years, the past five with PowerQuest, and IBM before that. The level of Gene's presentation was exactly right for our DACS audience as evidenced by the frequent questions. His answers were concise, complete, and informative.

Gene started with a longer description of his personal background than we usually hear, and it established the bond with the audience that he intended. He was comfortable with us, and that made us comfortable with him. As he went through the features of PM, he mixed tutorial with pitch so that it was a well-spent evening for all of us whether we'll ever use the product or not.

Partition Magic is designed for the way present-day operating systems work. The operating system organizes data storage on the hard disk into fixed-size areas called "clusters," the size of which depends on the size of the hard drive. This ranges from 4K for small drives to 32K or even 64K for the newer multigigabyte drives. Data files may use more than one cluster, but every new data file must start on an unused cluster. This means that if the data file does not fill up the cluster, the rest of that area on the disk is not used. A small data file such an e-mail message of only a few hundred bytes can take up an entire 32K of disk space. A file that spills just a few bytes over the cluster size will take up another whole cluster. As much as 40% disk space can be lost in this way.

Partition Magic reorganizes the disk into multiple partitions, which use smaller cluster sizes. This makes disk storage more efficient and users happy. What makes users even more happy is the way Partition Magic does it. A well-designed set of window icons invoke Wizards to do all the reorganization and direct the appropriate options. The effectiveness and friendliness of PM is what makes it the popular success that it is.

Bundled with PM is Boot Magic, which directs disk partitioning in a way that cleanly supports multiple operating systems on your disk. This is technically possible with most current operating systems, but the hassles can be overwhelming. Boot Magic takes care of the system considerations that would invariably stymie us if we tried to install multiple OS's on our own.

The October meeting was a very good one, the reason why we keep going to DACS meetings We learned a lot about disk management. The presentation was technically sharp, but warm and friendly. PowerQuest made copies of Partition Magic available to us at an excellent User Group price, and DACS members grabbed up every copy available.

PowerQuest and others provide the niche service to the computer user community that is needed and appreciated by all of us. They live in a business environment, however, that could only be considered normal in Alice's Wonderland. The big guys make the opportunities for the innovators, and they also take them away. But the PowerQuests of the world adapt, hustle, and thrive. They sometimes get rich. But what really matters is the excitement of being where the action is and participating. If you've been there, you can never give it up.