desktop publishing software as it was (1997)
visitors this year: 18 Reviewed by Roger Frost TES, 1997 A railway platform is an unusual place to find a computer that does desktop publishing but the local station has this business card making...
Category: consumer technology of the 1990s
archive of Roger Frost’s newspaper reviews and features about toys, gadgets, software, office equipment and even theme parks.
drawing: Micrografx Draw – Print Studio (1998)
visitors this year: 22 Age range 10-adult. For PC Price £49 or less from computer dealers. Web: www.micrografx.com Reviewed by Roger Frost for TES Micrografx Windows Draw used to be a part of RM’s...
printer & scanner roundup (1998
visitors this year: 45 Reviewed by Roger Frost TES 1998 Printers Our turning point with the computer was the day they bought us a decent printer. We were chuffed – so chuffed as we...
photo quality printing (1997)
visitors this year: 29 A look at a digital camera, scanner and photo printer that radically changed how we do photographs (Roger Frost in the TES 1997) For just a couple of hundred pounds,...
multimedia & the Internet experience (1996)
visitors this year: 12 It’s intriguing how fast the Internet ‘baby’ is developing. Less than three years ago, it was babbling words and pictures on the computer screen, trying to grab our attention. Today,...
fancy some web cookies? (1996)
visitors this year: 10 Coming away from the shopping centre with credit card slips and itemised receipts makes one think about all the data they must store about a professional-type of person. Maybe it’s...
videoconferencing from your desktop (1997)
visitors this year: 15 The day when you can phone someone and see them as you speak to them is soon approaching. If the idea of videoconferencing with distant colleagues seems like a lavish...
censoring the net (1997)
visitors this year: 16 If there is a block to getting the Internet accepted as a multimedia entertainment medium, it is not just to do with bandwidth. There an idea around that the Internet...
web has allusions to broadcasting (1997)
visitors this year: 16 It is a few years since they said that the Internet was a medium alive with sound, pictures and movies ready to take over from broadcast. It may have encouraged...
domestic Internet bliss (1997)
visitors this year: 18 There’s seemingly no end to things going digital. While the toaster in the kitchen has again escaped getting connected to the Internet, looking around the home quite a few things...
it’s easy to DIY your domain name (1998)
visitors this year: 11 So many things on the Internet are as long as a piece of string. With the facts ever changing and numbers growing I lose track of how many things well...
ways of connecting to the net (1998)
visitors this year: 13 Granny used to say that if there are lots of ways to do the same thing, then you can be sure that there’s no best way. If she was right,...
name dropping / satellite delivery (1998)
visitors this year: 11 One way to embarrass the great majority of able, non-techy people is to ask them to look something up on the Internet. While they can dial a number to call...
a new Internet audience for BBC Online? (1998)
visitors this year: 25 If there’s any uncertainty about whether the Internet is the way to go, it’s worth taking a lesson from history. There’s no need to go far back in time, a...
interactives and animation (1998)
visitors this year: 16 The lively, animated website is now a staple feature of the Internet. Whereas once text and pictures from countries far away were enough to ‘wow’ us, today’s Internet feed brings...
strategy for digital TV (1998)
visitors this year: 19 Now digital is upon us and analogue is condemned, the choice is between sink and swim. Broadcasters can either invest in digital or hope to swim, or give up and...
dreaming about more bandwidth – ISDN (1998)
visitors this year: 27 There seems no sense in dreaming if faster ways of connecting to the Internet will arrive tomorrow. Trials of ASDL, the 6Mbits per second technology, are underway but there is...
internet meltdown not imminent (1999)
visitors this year: 21 You can’t avoid stories about imminent Internet meltdowns and last year had its share. There was the one about Kenneth Starr’s Clinton-Lewinsky case where publication of his report on the...
high bandwidth Internet access over ASDL trials by BT (1999)
visitors this year: 15 In the trail of British Telecom offering ISDN as a retail product, a multi million pound trial of high bandwidth Internet access begins in the UK. Dubbed as ‘blisteringly fast’,...
going out to the web with Microsoft Office (1999)
visitors this year: 10 Later this year Microsoft releases another incarnation of its Office suite of applications. It will have been three years since Office 97 appeared and hinted at the ways in which...
y2k – the year 2000 issue (1999)
visitors this year: 15 I have lost track of how many ‘virus alerts’ I’ve received in my email. Countless of them are hoaxes – unknowingly perpetrated by best friends who feel I need looking...
portals and free internet services (1999)
visitors this year: 14 If the thing to have in the TV business is your own TV station, the thing to have on the Internet is a portal. It is a fact you might...
digital rights – selling media on the web (1999)
visitors this year: 16 It was two years ago a pocket audio device appeared that could play MP3 song files downloaded from the Internet. Taking shape as Diamond’s Rio player or ‘webman’ it surely...
the BT Internet payphone (1999)
visitors this year: 19 by Roger Frost A new style telephone box offering Internet access is making its debut at airports, motorway services, and railway stations across the UK. Called Multiphone and developed by...
shopping gene still not found – online shopping (1999)
visitors this year: 21 Anyone counting on the Internet as the singular channel for interactivity and home shopping would have to wake up to the news that high street bank HSBC has started its...
stickiness: researching consumer behaviour on the web (1999)
visitors this year: 18 When MTV and Turner Entertainment Networks wanted to know if the Internet was luring audience away from the TV, they turned to the Internet itself. They placed a questionnaire across...
voice recognition software and solutions – L&H Voice Express (2000)
visitors this year: 35 For decades people have fantasised about talking to machines. Television and film play their part in this, with the talking computer now much a science fiction cliché. It is here...
push technology / beeb.com
visitors this year: 32 There comes a time in a technophile’s life when they stop playing with the controls and start watching the content. The moment has almost come for this technophile too –...
push channels: broadcasting Web pages
visitors this year: 11 Some things will be part of the history of computers. The mouse and Windows will have chunks all to themselves. Quite how many chapters the World Wide Web will take...
making web pages (1996)
visitors this year: 9 There’s a rumour that the information superhighway will be the greatest new technology; that it will change how we live and do business; that it could even be the best...
run old versions of Windows on your machine – Virtual PC for Windows
visitors this year: 27 Reviewed by Roger Frost (for Times Educational Supplement 2000) Better known on Apple machines where it lets Mac devotees run software for Windows, this Virtual PC is a mind-bogglingly useful...
push channels and Internet Explorer 4 (1997)
visitors this year: 18 Were the Internet a TV channel praise would be heaped on it for gaining its huge audience – forty million ‘viewers’ at the last count and in just a few...
electronic mail gets a bit smarter (1998)
visitors this year: 13 Electronic mail is that bit of Internet that they don’t show much to tourists. Being more a courier service than an attraction, it’s easily outshone by the bright lights of...
Microsoft Internet Explorer 4 (1997)
visitors this year: 31 Preview of ‘IE 4’ (TES 1997) Since the Internet became ALL, the rate at which they update software today is close to frightening. It used to be three years from...
is it 1998 already? Windows 98 (1997)
visitors this year: 10 It was an inspired move to start naming software after the date – Windows 95, Office 95, even Lotus 123 – 97 has joined in. When they did likewise with...
meeting on the Net (1997)
visitors this year: 20 If the Internet does anything well it’s that it helps people work together. E-mail – soon to become as passe as the morning post, offers a painless way of dropping...
Microsoft Internet Explorer nudges along a bit (1999)
visitors this year: 18 As Microsoft readies to release Internet Explorer 5 this month, you will of course have no reason to ask why it’s not called IE ’99 or IE 2000. Ask me...
TV and the Internet: when world’s collide – web TV
visitors this year: 17 That comet Halle-Bopp is causing disturbing happenings down on earth. Top PC industry players have been making moves likely to bring about a technology melt-down of Internet, television and desktop...
Microsoft Windows Millennium Edition
visitors this year: 23 Reviewed by Roger Frost for Times Educational Supplement 2000 Buying a PC today brings a choice of Windows 98; Windows Me and Windows 2000. Life used to be straightforward when...
Microsoft’s Office 2000
visitors this year: 8 Roger Frost To say that Office 2000, Microsoft’s all-purpose software, does maths, prints on paper and makes slide shows on the screen, is the shortest of shorthand. Office 2000, which...
