Articles worth noting July‐December 1995
| Date | 01 January 1996 |
| Pages | 74-86 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/eb047985 |
| Published date | 01 January 1996 |
| Author | Walt Crawford |
| Subject Matter | Information & knowledge management,Library & information science |
Comp
Lit
Articles Worth Noting
July-December
1995
Walt Crawford
Crawford
is
senior analyst
in the
Access Services Group
and the De-
velopment Division of The Research
Libraries Group, Inc. (RLG),
and is
the
1995
winner of
the
LITA/Library
Hi Tech Award.
Want to keep up with personal com-
puting periodicals? It's not easy.
One
look
at the
magazine racks
in any
good bookstore will show
you
that
there
are too
many
PC
magazines out
mere
for any
sane person
to
follow
in their entirety. That's particularly
true if you're
a
librarian or otherwise
have
a
life.
You can't just ignore the PC mag-
azines,
at
least
not if
you're buying
hardware
and
software.
The key
reviews appear
in
PC magazines,
as
do articles on
how to use the
technol-
ogy. Good group reviews show how
the field
is
evolving,
and
such
re-
views continue
to be
useful four
to
six months after they appear.
The articles
I
will write
for
"Comp
Lit" will highlight some
of
those
articles from the
PC
magazines that
might
be
worth checking, with
key
results from group reviews highlight-
ed.
I'll
occasionally offer some
comments
on the
literature
itself, or
some notes
on
current trends
in PC
periodicals.
For those
of you not new to Li-
brary
Hi
Tech, "Comp
Lit" is a
continuation
of the
"Notes
on the
Literature" portion
of
"The
Trailing
Edge"—but separated from those
articles.
I
don't read everything
in the
field;
neither
do
I claim any special author-
ity.
I
do read way too much, current-
ly including 11 monthly magazines,
one fortnightly,
and a
weekly.
This first "Comp
Lit"
includes
articles published between July
and
December 1995, with some
of
those
dated January
1996. In
July
and
August
we had
lengthy "final pre-
view" articles
on
what Windows
95
would
include.
Beginning in Septem-
ber, extraordinary amounts
of
space
were devoted
to the
actual shipping
version, which
was
described
in
excruciating detail.
If I had
to
summarize
the
hundreds
of pages devoted
to
Windows
95, it
would
be "it's
new,
it
works,
and it
really doesn't require
all
this expla-
nation."
I
have rarely seen
so
much
pointless verbiage
in the
field—and
I can't imagine
why
you'd
go
back
to look
at any of
those articles.
Fall 1995 marked the abandonment
of 486-based desktop systems
by
major vendors
and the
introduction
of the Pentium
Pro, the "P6." And
what
an
introduction
it
was:
150MHz
Pentium Pro systems didn't perform
as well as 133MHz Pentium systems
on typical Windows
3.1 and
Win-
dows
95
tasks. There's
a
reason:
Intel believed
we'd all
be using pure
32-bit operating
systems
and applica-
tions
by now, and the
Pentium
Pro
is heavily optimized
for
32-bit code.
You might say that
the
ghost of OS/2
is having
one
last laugh.
74 LIBRARY HI TECH
— WALT CRAWFORD
—
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