Updated July 27, 1997. There's a lotta new stuff down toward the bottom, I left it in a smaller typeface so it'd be easy to find... check it out!

The bicycle industry has thousands of manufacturers and suppliers, so almost no bicycle shop can have access to all the industry has to offer. I used to keep a set of catalogs almost twelve feet long just for the suppliers I regularly dealt with! A few years back, a universal catalog system called Bike'alog became available. I subscribed to it early and kept the subscription since then till the present. It listed most or all of the bicycles, parts, and accessories the industry had available, and what supplier had them and how much each wanted.

When Bike'alog was first published, it was in printed form. Each month, one of the set of six master catalogs was updated. Originally, the stack of six catalogs that comprised the whole set was about four inches thick. The system worked fairly well, as the set was completely updated twice a year. Several problems eventually became obvious, though.

The stack reached a thickness of over a foot for a full set that would cover one year. At the same time, paper costs were rising, and of course, printing costs weren't falling. Just to make things more complicated, the economy was bouncing up and down so rapidly no one could keep prices stable for more than a month or two at at time. Then the smart folks that ran Bike'alog had a brilliant idea. They were already compiling the whole system on computer. Why not make it available in a directly usable computer format, on floppy disk? 

Not long after that, they released some beta versions of "Bike'alog on disk" to some of their more computer-oriented customers. After a short time, they'd worked out enough of the bugs to offer it to any dealer that wanted it instead of the printed version. Although I wasn't into computers at the time, a lot of bike dealers were, so sales of the Bike'alog On Disk (Now known to the entire bicycle industry as BOD) took off quickly. The biggest advantage was that every month, they could update all the listings and prices, with just a few floppy disks. That meant no more waiting to see the next six-month update of a particular part of the catalog. As long as the suppliers kept them updated, Bike'alog could keep all the dealers up to date on a monthly basis of who had what, and how much it would cost them from any given supplier.

A few keystrokes would bring up any listed item on the computer screen, with a list of which suppliers carried it, in the order of least to most expensive. It's impossible to compare that to going through catalog after catalog, searching for an item, and then trying to compare each supplier's price to all the others. In fact, a lot of the higher-priced suppliers refused to give any information to Bike'alog. Too bad for them!

Less than a year later, the disk version had become so popular that the few printed catalogs they were still selling became too expensive to produce. Those of us still receiving it got the word: "You'll have to get a computer, or, well, sorry about that.. we can't afford to keep you as a customer." 

Well, I really didn't want to, but I wanted to keep using Bike'alog, so I braced myself, looked the Bike'alog system over at the Chicago Area Bicycle Dealers' Association (CABDA) Trade Show that fall, and bought a copy of it. Then it was home, and looking around for an affordable computer. Remember, this was the fall of '92. The 486's had begun to take over the market in the spring of that year. But memory upgrades were still $100+ a meg, and a 100-meg hard drive was $250.

Since I was about as broke as I usually am during the off-season, I couldn't run out and buy a newest-latest-greatest-hottest system. I had to be content with something that would run Bike'alog. As a computer ignoramus, my first stop was at Radio Shack (or Ratsnack, or Radio Snack, or whatever you want to call it.. hehehe.. ).

They, of course, had all sorts of 486 systems with bells and whistles and stuff... for a lot more money than I could afford. They also, however, had two different 386 systems on closeout! Hmm... I like closeouts! One was I think $699, the other was $799. Naturally, being somewhat impoverished and a cheapskate to boot, I was leaning heavily towards the $699 system. The guy at RatSnack kept pushing me toward the more expensive one, though. I finally asked him why, because both systems were about the same on paper. He patiently explained to me that it was a matter of upgradeability. Although the systems both were about equally capable, he explained, the cheaper one would be expensive to upgrade, because it had to have Radio Shack cables, upgrade cards, memory, etc. The more expensive one was completely generic IBM-PC compatible. This, of course, was Greek to me.. remember, I had no experience with modern computers.

So, I told him I'd think about it, took the specifications of their computers, and checked with all the other local dealers. Hmm... no one could match the specs for less than $1200! In fact, one place said it'd take nearly $2000 to supply the specs I was quoting. That impressed me! When I told them what Radio Snack had to offer for $800, they laughed.. "Haha.. a Tandy.. Trash comp!" Then they explained to me that Tandy Computers couldn't run regular software, and had to have special expensive hardware to upgrade. When I told them the guy at the store had told me the one I was looking at was fully compatible and upgradeable with standard parts, they laughed more.. "Go ahead, be a sucker, you'll be sorry!"

Well, I ended up at the Tandy store, where the helpful sales clerks installed Bike'alog in the display computer (The only one they had of that model, the $800 one), and it ran just fine. After assuring me that it wouldn't be any problem to upgrade later, they gleefully took my money and sent me out the door with the machine that would start me off into this digital maze I LIVE in nowadays..

This thing was a 386 SX-25, which meant nothing to me, with a 52 MB hard drive and 1 meg of onboard RAM. It had two slots for RAM upgrades, a big socket to plug a math co-processor (Huh? Whuzzat?) into, a VGA monitor with the vid card built into the motherboard, and also a built-in Tandy sound system. It had DOS 5.0 installed (Of course, a slightly custom version for Tandy, but no problem) and although it didn't have Windows, it had a Tandy Wannabe program called Deskmate, that was ok till I discovered Windows. I couldn't complain. It did what it was supposed to do, and did it well. It ran Bike'alog, and had a decent word processor for writing letters and making signs (I bought a used nine-pin printer soon after I got it), and had a handy home inventory program that actually got used by me and my ex (a long time before she became my ex).

Well, to make a long story a tiny bit shorter, that particular computer was still in use by me till a couple days ago. It finally met its end.. a victim of a two-year old male cat named Sanford deciding to mark his territory (Cat Spray... One of the most corrosive substances known to modern man!). I may be able to get it up and running again, but it seems pretty doubtful. I'm going to miss it. In its final configuration, it had a math co-processor, 9 megs of memory, a 420 meg hard drive, a SCSI external 2x CDROM drive, a B&W hand scanner, a USR 14.4 Sportster modem, DOS 6.22, Windows, Netscape 3, and a mess of other programs, all of which it ran quite well. In fact, it was able to run a lot of stuff that said "Don't bother unless you have a 486, ok?"

As far as all the warnings and precautions from all the other computer stores, they were ignorant or liars. That thing ran perfectly with all IBM software, and I never bought a specific Tandy upgrade part for it. All standard generic stuff, worked just fine.

I used that machine to learn DOS, and then to learn a lot about Windows. I loved the help files in DOS, learned to make batch files, etc. I still use a lot of the ones I wrote then, handy utilities to clean junk files out of the hard drive, etc. When I moved up to DOS 6 and beyond, I learned to compress the hard drive, and had room for nearly anything I wanted to do.

Of course, once I had the fever, I had to get something hotter. So for home use, still totally on the cheap, a 386 DX40 got built. It had lots more memory, and a lot bigger hard drive (1.2 Gigabyte!) and was lots faster and could do a lot more stuff. Ex was the secretary for the local chapter of the Jaycees then, and used it with WordPerfect for Windows 6.1a to make up club newsletters that won several state awards!

When she left, she wanted to take it with her. That was when I got this thing I call Frankenputer, which, of course, is hopelessly out of date now. It's a Cyrix (Not Intel)-based 686.. a step beyond Pentium, that for all the warnings and precautions I was given, has had no problems whatever with Win95 running all sorts of 32-bit programs. One of these days, maybe I'll upgrade the CPU, it's only a 133MHZ.. meaning it's only a little faster than a P175.. Gee! Just dragging it's lil electronic tail all over the place.. haha..

Hmm.. right now I've got 14 different Netscape editing windows running.. along with WordPerfect, and about 12 other programs.. system claims it still has 85% of its resources available.. awful.. I feel like I'm driving my old rusty Buick station wagon to a fashion show.. "Giggle".

I have this beastie named FrankenPuter at my house now, and for my shop.. well..

I had a case and power supply, and a lot of msc. used parts. Someone walked into my shop one day, a couple months ago, and said "Here, I found this in a dumpster downtown. Looks like computer stuff to me. Do you want to play with it?" I said Sure, it was a Motherboard and CPU. I took it home, hooked all the parts together all over the kitchen table, used memory chips, old hard drive, a floppy drive another friend retrieved out of a dumpster in Grand Rapids behind Memorex-Telex, a throway SVGA card, a dumpster IDE I/O card, and a few other parts.. it's a 486-DX33, runs just fine, so that's the current shop machine. Put it all together, set it up, works just fine, running Win95 on it right now. I call it DumpsterPuter.. Heehee.

Well, I have to get offa here for now, got some chores to do. OK?

And that's where it all started. More later. 

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