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Subject: TWL: Computer versus dedicated systems.
From: Arild Jensen (elnav@XXX.XXX)
Date: Tue Jan 01 2002 - 13:43:05 EST
This may be a bit like preaching to the converted or else trying to
tempt choir boys.
Maptech was one of the early companies to produce charting software.
They had a really good system running under DOS.
The program had all the essentials and a few nifty featuers I have not
seen in later version by any company.
I could run it on my 386 with 8Mb of ram and a 40 Mb hard drive. The
computer clock speed was some ridiculous figuer like 12 Mhz
A Pentium I with a 450 Mb hard drive should be blazingly fast running
that same program.
But Maptech decided that they should bow to popular demand and come out
with a Windows version.
I became one of their beta testers and for over a year I would test each
reiteration as they developed it.
Regrettably I would find the system would crash, lock up or otherwise
fail within half an hour of me starting to test it.
I wasn't even trying to crash ot. I would try to use it in the same way
that I had used the DOs version.
Start up. select the chart, plot a route and save it. Then try and run
the simulator along the route.
The Windows version always ran a lot slower, caused more grief etc. I
could not crash the DOS version even when I tried.
The worst problem had to do with how they indexed the chart numbering.
NOAA charts were okay but Canadian charts caused a few hiccups.
From a navigator's point of view, I could not care less what the
technology inside the computer was.
I wanted a chart display that showed my vessel position in real time.
updated one per second, and allowed me to bring up additional charts for
planning future routes, not just the chart of present locality.
Somehow we have all been snowed by the computer guru's into accepting
that all computers should multi task and be flexible.
WHY??
If you can buy a used 486 laptop running an older O/S for only a few
hunderd bucks and have the installer configuer that computer to work as
a stand alone instrument which starts up fast at a single keypress and
always recover from a power outage without data loss; why would you
insist on it doing all sorts of other things.
You don't expect the echo sounder to make coffee or the radar to make
toast so why expect the chart plotter to do . . . whatever?
Just my $0.02 Cdn worth
Cheers
Arild
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