As usual, our luncheon will be at Sinbad's just south of the Ferry Building on the Embarcadero near the foot of Mission St. We meet at 11:30 and are seated at 12:30. To make reservations call Paul Black at 925-827-9511 and leave a message on his machine.

George's designs were based on the CP/M operating system and while he did move over to DOS it was too late to save the business. He sold a DOS based laptop design to Zenith, which bought him about 6 months more but by 1986 he was in bankruptcy.

I'd often run into George at the hatching point for some of the great ideas in PC design, Bill Godbout's office. Bill was behind Mike Quinns surplus store at the Oakland Airport. Bill had a desk that sat in the corner of a room and up in the corner was a massive spider web. The sanctity of that web became sort of a local legend. Whenever geeks met and the subject of Bill's office and those cerebral coffee clatches came up, one always asked: "Is the web still there?"

George believed that the computer needed something akin to the novel, which was what made printing take off. Are we there yet?

The box is easy to use. The picture quality is exceptional. The recording quality options that let one decrease the amount of storage don't impact most TV shows other than in motion artifacts during a quick move. No, I haven't checked basketball games. Things like pushing pause while watching a live TV show and coming back later and releasing pause without missing anything is God's gift to the bladder challenged. Recording a show while playing one back is another neat trick.

While you might quibble about paying the monthly fee to be connected to the TIVO database, consider that the database contains the channel line-up for your cable system. How many times have you entered the channel translations for VCR+ codes for your VCR after the cable company altered their channel lineup?

The monthly fee is $12.95 or you can pay a one time fee of $299. The fee covers just your unique box. The bet is that after 23 months, you'll still be using the same box and go beyond the break even point versus the monthly fee.

TIVO does a lot of internal housekeeping and will even record shows on its own based upon your viewing patterns, if you tell it to do so.

As a guy who started out in 1959 to make the world safe for 12AU7s, my only consistent trait has been to drop old technology like a hot rock when the time comes to do so.

Roy also posts the current newsletter at home.earthlink.net/~rhtrumbull but the posting is without links.