Our World

Sabtu, 25 April 2009

History Of MS-DOS

MS-DOS (pronounced /ˌɛmɛsˈdɒs/, em-es-dos; short for Microsoft Disk Operating System) is an operating system commercialized by Microsoft. It was the most commonly used member of the DOS family of operating systems and was the main operating system for personal computers during the 1980s. It was preceded by M-DOS (also call MIDAS), designed and copyrighted by Microsoft in 1979. MSDOS was based on the Intel 8086 family of microprocessors, particularly the IBM PC and compatibles. It was gradually replaced on consumer desktop computers by operating systems offering a graphical user interface (GUI), in particular by various generations of the Microsoft Windows operating system and Linux. MS-DOS was known before as QDOS (Quick and Dirty Operating System) and 86-DOS.[1] MS-DOS development originally started in 1981, and was first released in 1982 as MS-DOS 1.0. Several versions were released under different names for different hardware. MS-DOS had eight major versions released before Microsoft stopped development in 2000. It was the key product in Microsoft's growth from a programming languages company to a diverse software development firm, providing the company with essential revenue and marketing resources. It was also the underlying basic operating system on which early versions of Windows ran as a GUI. History MS-DOS was a renamed form of 86-DOS (informally known as the Quick-and-Dirty Operating System or Q-DOS) owned by Seattle Computer Products, written by Tim Paterson.[2] Microsoft needed an operating system for the then-new Intel 8086 but it had none available, so it licensed 86-DOS and released a version of it as MS-DOS 1.0.[2] Development started in 1981, and MS-DOS 1.0 was released with the IBM PC in 1982.[2] Tim Paterson is considered the original author of DOS and he is called "The Father of DOS".[2][n 1] Worried by possible legal problems, in June 1981 Microsoft made an offer to Rod Brock, the owner of Seattle Computer, to buy the rights for 86-DOS. An agreement to release all rights to the software was signed in June 1981. The total cost was $75,000.[3][n 2] Originally MS-DOS was designed to be an operating system that could run on any 8086-family computer. Each computer would have its own distinct hardware and its own version of MS-DOS. The greater speed attainable by direct control of hardware was of particular importance when running computer games. IBM-compatible architecture then became the goal. Soon all 8086-family computers closely emulated IBM's hardware, and a single version of MS-DOS was all that was needed for the market. While MS-DOS appeared on PC clones, true IBM computers used PC DOS, a re branded form of MS-DOS. Incidentally, the dependence on IBM-compatible hardware caused major problems for the computer industry when the original design had to be changed. For example, the original design could support no more than 640 kilobytes of memory. Manufacturers had to develop complicated schemes to access additional memory. This would not have been a limitation if the original idea of interfacing with hardware through MS-DOS had endured. Versions Main article: Comparison of x86 DOS operating systems Microsoft licensed or released versions of MS-DOS under different names like SB-DOS or Z-DOS.[3] Competitors released unlicensed clones such as DR-DOS and PTS-DOS. Competition On microcomputers based on the Intel 8086 and 8088 processors, including the IBM PC and clones, the initial competition to the PC DOS/MS-DOS line came from Digital Research, whose CP/M operating system had inspired MS-DOS. Digital Research released CP/M-86 a few months after MS-DOS, and it was offered as an alternative to MS-DOS and Microsoft's licensing requirements, but at a higher price. Executable programs for CP/M-86 and MS-DOS were not interchangeable with each other; much applications software was sold in both MS-DOS and CP/M-86 versions until MS-DOS became preponderant (later Digital Research operating systems could run both MS-DOS and CP/M-86 software). MS-DOS supported the simple .COM and the more advanced relocatable .EXE executable file formats; CP/M-86 a relocatable format using the file extension .CMD. In the later days of MS-DOS, once the IBM-compatible platform was chosen, one could buy any PC clone, and install any copy of MS-DOS (or IBM-branded MS-DOS, i.e., PC DOS). Many people do not realize that in the early days one chose an IBM PC, a Sirius, a Kaypro, or an Apricot, or other make; these machines all had different architecture and did not even accept the same expansion cards; many of them were not limited to a maximum of 640 kilobytes of system memory, unlike the PC and clones. Then the decision whether to use MS-DOS or CP/M-86 had to be taken, and the appropriate one had to be acquired from the computer manufacturer; it was not possible to use versions of MS-DOS, or PC DOS, interchangeably. One was then tied to using software for the operating system chosen (or, funds permitting, having floppy disks for both, and booting the appropriate one). In the business world the 808x-based machines that MS-DOS was tied to faced competition from the Unix operating system which ran on many different hardware architectures. Microsoft itself sold a version of Unix for the PC called Xenix. In the emerging world of home users, a variety of other computers based on various other processors were in serious competition with the IBM PC: the Apple II, early Apple Macintosh, the Commodore 64 and others did not use the 808x processor; many 808x machines of different architectures used custom versions of MS-DOS. At first all these machines were in competition. In time the IBM PC hardware configuration became dominant in the 808x market as software written to communicate directly with the PC hardware without using standard operating system calls ran much faster, but on true PC-compatibles only. Non-PC-compatible 808x machines were too small a market to have fast software written for them alone, and the market remained open only for IBM PCs and machines that closely imitated their architecture, all running either a single version of MS-DOS compatible only with PCs, or the equivalent IBM PC DOS. Most clones cost much less than IBM-branded machines of similar performance, and became widely used by home users, while IBM PCs had a large share of the business computer market. Microsoft and IBM together began what was intended as the follow-on to MS/PC DOS, called OS/2. When OS/2 was released in 1987, Microsoft began an advertising campaign announcing that "DOS is Dead" and stating that version 4 was the last full release. MS-DOS had grown in spurts, with many significant features being taken (or duplicated) from other products and operating systems, as well as incorporating the functionality of tools and utilities developed by independent companies to improve the functionality of MS-DOS, including Norton Utilities, PC Tools (Microsoft Anti-Virus), QEMM expanded memory manager, DOS/4GW (a 32-bit DOS extender), Stacker disk compression, and others. OS/2 was designed for efficient multitasking—an IBM speciality derived from deep experience with mainframe operating systems—and offered a number of advanced features that had been designed together with similar look and feel; it was seen as the legitimate heir to the "kludgy" DOS platform. During the period when Digital Research was competing in the operating system market some computers, like Amstrad PC-1512, were sold with floppy disks for two operating systems (only one of which could be used at a time), MS-DOS and CP-M86 or a derivative of it. Digital Research produced DOS Plus, which was compatible with MS-DOS 2.11, supported CP/M-86 programs, had additional features including multi-tasking, and could read and write disks in CP/M and MS-DOS format. While OS/2 was under protracted development, Digital Research released the MS-DOS compatible DR-DOS 5, which included features only available as third-party add-ons for MS-DOS (and still maintained considerable internal CP/M-86 compatibility). Unwilling to lose any portion of the market, Microsoft responded by announcing the "pending" release of MS-DOS 5.0 in May 1990. This effectively killed most DR-DOS sales until the actual release of MS-DOS 5.0 in June 1991. Digital Research brought out DR-DOS 6, which sold well until the "pre-announcement" of MS-DOS 6.0 again stifled the sales of DR-DOS. Microsoft has been accused of carefully orchestrating leaks about future versions of MS-DOS in an attempt to create what in the industry is called FUD (fear, uncertainty, and doubt) regarding DR-DOS. For example, in October 1990, shortly after the release of DR-DOS 5.0, and long before the eventual June 1991 release of MS-DOS 5.0, stories on feature enhancements in MS-DOS started to appear in InfoWorld and PC Week. Brad Silverberg, Vice President of Systems Software at Microsoft and General Manager of its Windows and MS-DOS Business Unit, wrote a forceful letter to PC Week (November 5, 1990), denying that Microsoft was engaged in FUD tactics ("to serve our customers better, we decided to be more forthcoming about version 5.0") and denying that Microsoft copied features from DR-DOS: "The feature enhancements of MS-DOS version 5.0 were decided and development was begun long before we heard about DR-DOS 5.0. There will be some similar features. With 50 million MS-DOS users, it shouldn't be surprising that DRI has heard some of the same requests from customers that we have." – (Schulman et al. 1994). The pact between Microsoft and IBM to promote OS/2 began to fall apart in 1990 when Windows 3.0 became a marketplace success. Much of Microsoft's further contributions to OS/2 also went in to creating a third GUI replacement for DOS, Windows NT. IBM, which had already been developing the next version of OS/2, carried on development of the platform without Microsoft and sold it as the alternative to DOS and Windows. End of MS-DOS MS-DOS lingers in Windows Vista. MS-DOS has effectively ceased to exist as a platform for desktop computing. Since the releases of Windows 9x, it was integrated as a full product mostly used for bootstrapping, and no longer officially released as a standalone DOS, although at first DOS 7 (which was the DOS part included in Windows 95) had been developed as a standalone OS[citation needed]. It was still available, but became increasingly irrelevant as development shifted to the Windows API. Windows XP contains a copy of the core MS-DOS 8 files from Windows Millennium, accessible only by formatting a floppy as an "MS-DOS startup disk". Attempting to run COMMAND.COM from such a disk under the NTVDM results in the message "Incorrect MS-DOS version" (Note that the DOS boot disk created by Windows XP is even more stripped-down than that created in Windows 98, as it does not include CD-ROM support.) With Windows Vista the files on the startup disk are dated 18th April 2005 but are otherwise unchanged, including the string "MS-DOS Version 8 (C) Copyright 1981-1999 Microsoft Corp" inside COMMAND.COM. However the only versions of DOS currently recognized as stand-alone OSs, and supported as such by the Microsoft Corporation are DOS 6.0 and 6.22, both of which remain available for download via their MSDN, volume license, and OEM license partner websites, for customers with valid login credentials. Today, DOS is still used in embedded x86 systems due to its simple architecture, and minimal memory and processor requirements. The command line interpreter of NT-based versions of Windows, cmd.exe, maintains most of the same commands and some compatibility with DOS batch files. Legal issues As a response to Digital Research's DR-DOS 6.0, which bundled SuperStor disk compression, Microsoft opened negotiations with Stac Electronics, vendor of the most popular DOS disk compression tool, Stacker. In the due diligence process, Stac engineers had shown Microsoft part of the Stacker source code. Stac was unwilling to meet Microsoft's terms for licensing Stacker and withdrew from the negotiations. Microsoft chose to license Vertisoft's DoubleDisk, using it as the core for its DoubleSpace disk compression.[5] MS-DOS 6.0 and 6.20 were released in 1993, both including the Microsoft DoubleSpace disk compression utility program. Stac successfully sued Microsoft for patent infringement regarding the compression algorithm used in DoubleSpace. This resulted in the 1994 release of MS-DOS 6.21, which had disk-compression removed. Shortly afterwards came version 6.22, with a new version of the disk compression system, DriveSpace, which had a different compression algorithm to avoid the infringing code. Prior to 1995, Microsoft licensed MS-DOS (and Windows) to computer manufacturers under three types of agreement: per-processor (a fee for each system the company sold), per-system (a fee for each system of a particular model), or per-copy (a fee for each copy of MS-DOS installed). The largest manufacturers used the per-processor arrangement, which had the lowest fee. This arrangement made it expensive for the large manufacturers to migrate to any other operating system, such as DR-DOS. In 1991 the U.S. government Federal Trade Commission began investigating Microsoft's licensing procedures, resulting in a 1994 settlement agreement limiting Microsoft to per-copy licensing. Digital Research did not gain by this settlement, and years later its successor in interest, Caldera, sued Microsoft for damages. This lawsuit was settled with a monetary payment of $150 million. Microsoft also used a variety of tactics in MS-DOS and several of their applications and development tools that, while operating perfectly when running on genuine MS-DOS (and PC DOS), would break when run on another vendor's implementation of DOS. Notable examples of this practice included: • Microsoft QuickC v2.5, a.k.a. Programmer's Workbench and Microsoft C v6.0, modified the program's Program Segment Prefix using undocumented DOS functions, and then checked whether or not the associated value changed in a fixed position within the DOS data segment (also undocumented). • The (once infamous) AARD code, a block of code in the Windows 3.1 beta installer. It was XOR encrypted, self-modifying, and deliberately obfuscated, using various undocumented DOS structures and functions to determine whether or not Windows really was running on MS-DOS. [4] • Interrupt routines called by Windows to inform MS-DOS that Windows is starting/exiting, information that MS-DOS retained in an IN_WINDOWS flag, in spite of the fact that MS-DOS and Windows were supposed to be two separate products. [4] The Windows command-line interface All versions of Microsoft Windows have had an MS-DOS like command-line interface (CLI). Versions of Windows (up to 3.11) ran as a Graphical User Interface(GUI) running under MS-DOS. Windows 95 and 98 had an MS-DOS prompt which behaved very much like MS-DOS, with added facilities for such features as long file names. The true 32-bit versions of Windows, from Windows NT, are not based on DOS but provide a command-line interface similar to MS-DOS's character-mode interface known as the console. This is provided by a native executable, cmd.exe. Many Windows console applications are incorrectly referred to as DOS applications. However, in reality they are Windows applications, using Windows system calls, using the text console for input and output rather than a graphical interface. Both true MS-DOS programs and Windows console programs can be run from the command line in the same console window. 32-bit Windows can run MS-DOS programs through the use of the NTVDM (NT Virtual DOS Machine), and the 16-bit command.com interpreter which is still included to maintain application compatibility with programs that require it. Recent versions of Windows for x64 architectures, including Windows XP Professional x64 Edition, Windows Server 2003 x64 and Windows Vista x64, no longer include the NTVDM and can therefore no longer natively run MS-DOS or 16-bit Windows applications. For MS-DOS and Windows 3.11 or earlier programs, however, there exist alternatives in the form of emulators such as Microsoft's own Virtual PC, Bochs, DOSBox, etc. Legacy compatibility From 1983 onwards, various companies have worked on graphical user interfaces (GUIs) capable of running on PC hardware. With DOS being the dominant operating system several companies released alternate shells, e.g. Microsoft Word for DOS, XTree, and the Norton Shell. However, this required duplication of effort and did not provide much consistency in interface design (even between products from the same company). Later, in 1985, Microsoft Windows was released as Microsoft's first attempt at providing a consistent user interface (for applications). The early versions of Windows ran on top of MS-DOS and its clones. At first Windows met with little success, but this was also true for most other companies' efforts as well, for example GEM. After version 3.0 (1990), Windows gained market acceptance. Later versions (Windows 95, Windows 98 and Windows Me) used the DOS boot process to launch itself into protected mode. Basic features related to the file system, such as long file names, were only available to DOS when running as a subsystem of Windows. Windows NT ran independently of DOS but included a DOS subsystem so applications could run in a virtual machine under the new OS. With the latest Windows releases, even dual-booting MS-DOS is problematic as DOS may not be able to read the basic file system. Related systems Single-user Several similar products were produced by other companies. In the case of PC DOS and DR-DOS, it is common but incorrect to call these "clones". Given that Microsoft manufactured PC DOS for IBM, PC DOS and MS-DOS were (to continue the genetic analogy) "identical twins" that diverged only in adulthood and eventually became quite different products. Although DR-DOS is regarded as a clone of MS-DOS, the DR-DOS versions appeared months and years before Microsoft's products. (For example, MS-DOS 4, released in July 1988, was followed by DR-DOS 5 in May 1990. MS-DOS 5 came in April 1991, with DR-DOS 6 being released the following June. MS-DOS 6 did not arrive until April 1993, with Novell DOS 7, DR-DOS' successor, following the next month.) What made the difference in the end was Microsoft's desire to make DOS a better platform for running Windows. Both IBM (DOS 5.02) and DRI (DOS 6 update) had to release interim releases for new undocumented Windows functionality. • PC DOS • DR-DOS, • Novell DOS, and • OpenDOS • FreeDOS, • FreeDOS 32, and • GNU/DOS • PTS-DOS These products are collectively referred to as DOS. However, MS-DOS can be a generic reference to DOS on IBM-PC compatible computers.
posted by Our World at 07.00 0 comments

Jumat, 24 April 2009

NASA gears up for its last mission to Hubble

After a six-month delay, the final preparations are now underway for the last mission to service the Hubble Space Telescope. If all goes well, the space shuttle Atlantis will launch on the mission a day early, on 11 May.

Ground crews finished installing the last equipment, which includes 180 tools needed to manipulate parts of the telescope, into the shuttle's payload bay on Wednesday, according to Tracy Young of NASA's Kennedy Space Center.

Now mission managers are looking to see how much time can be shaved off final preparations and are hoping to launch a day before the current launch target of 12 May.

They want to provide as many days as possible to launch the shuttle before 14 May, when there's a black-out window for shuttle launches that will last until 22 May. During that time, an Air Force facility needed to track shuttle launches will be used for military operations instead.

Flying backwards

During a press briefing on Thursday, NASA officials discussed some of the safety concerns for the mission. Despite initial worries, they said the debris from an unprecedented collision between two satellites in February should not pose a significant risk to the shuttle, even though it will fly at a higher orbit – which lies closer to the debris – than typical shuttle missions to the International Space Station.

Initial estimates put the risk of a catastrophic impact with orbital debris at 1 in 185. But further analysis suggests the mean risk is now 1 in 221, deputy space shuttle programme manager LeRoy Cain told reporters. That risk level is lower than a limit of 1 in 200, above which special approval for the mission would be required by top officials.

The shuttle Atlantis will drop down to a lower orbit after the spacewalks, which will reduce the risk of a collision with orbital debris. The shuttle will also spend as much time as possible flying with its tail forward and its payload bay pointed at Earth, an orientation that protects vulnerable parts, like the shuttle's nose cap.

Top of its game

The 11-day shuttle mission will be the last to visit the iconic telescope. Over the course of five consecutive spacewalks, astronauts will install six new gyroscopes that help the telescope stabilise itself, six new batteries, two new science instruments and repair two others.

The mission is expected to extend Hubble's life until 2014 and provide it with its best vision yet (see Pimp my scope: Revamping Hubble). After the mission, "Hubble will be at the apex of its abilities," Hubble senior project scientist David Leckrone of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center said at the briefing.

The servicing mission was originally set to fly in October 2008, but was delayed weeks before launch after a problem was discovered in a unit that relays commands and images to and from the telescope's instruments. The delay allowed the Hubble team to prepare a spare unit.

posted by Our World at 04.44 0 comments

MICROSOFT EXCEL

Microsoft Excel Microsoft Excel (full name Microsoft Office Excel) is a spreadsheet-application written and distributed by Microsoft for Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X. It features calculation, graphing tools, pivot tables and a macro programming language called VBA (Visual Basic for Applications). It has been the most widely used spreadsheet application available for these platforms since version 5 in 1993[citation needed]. Excel is part of Microsoft Office. History Microsoft originally marketed a spreadsheet program called Multiplan in 1982, which became very popular on CP/M systems, but on MS-DOS systems it lost popularity to Lotus 1-2-3. Microsoft released the first version of Excel for the Mac in 1985, and the first Windows version (numbered 2.05 to line up with the Mac and bundled with a run-time Windows environment) in November 1987. Lotus was slow to bring 1-2-3 to Windows and by 1988 Excel had started to outsell 1-2-3 and helped Microsoft achieve the position of leading PC software developer. This accomplishment, dethroning the king of the software world, solidified Microsoft as a valid competitor and showed its future of developing GUI software. Microsoft pushed its advantage with regular new releases, every two years or so. The current version for the Windows platform is Excel 12, also called Microsoft Office Excel 2007. The current version for the Mac OS X platform is Microsoft Excel 2008. Microsoft Excel 2.1 included a runtime version of Windows 2.1 Early in 1993, Excel became the target of a trademark lawsuit by another company already selling a software package named "Excel" in the finance industry. As the result of the dispute Microsoft was required to refer to the program as "Microsoft Excel" in all of its formal press releases and legal documents. However, over time this practice has been ignored, and Microsoft cleared up the issue permanently when they purchased the trademark of the other program.[citation needed] Microsoft also encouraged the use of the letters XL as shorthand for the program; while this is no longer common, the program's icon on Windows still consists of a stylized combination of the two letters, and the file extension of the default Excel format is .xls. Excel offers many user interface tweaks over the earliest electronic spreadsheets; however, the essence remains the same as in the original spreadsheet, VisiCalc: the program displays cells organized in rows and columns, and each cell contains data or a formula, with relative or absolute references to other cells. Excel was the first spreadsheet that allowed the user to define the appearance of spreadsheets (fonts, character attributes and cell appearance). It also introduced intelligent cell recomputation, where only cells dependent on the cell being modified are updated (previous spreadsheet programs recomputed everything all the time or waited for a specific user command). Excel has extensive graphing capabilities, and enables users to perform mail merge. When Microsoft first bundled Microsoft Word and Microsoft PowerPoint into Microsoft Office in 1993, those applications had their GUIs redesigned for consistency with Excel,[citation needed] the killer app on the PC at the time. Since 1993, Excel has included Visual Basic for Applications (VBA), a programming language based on Visual Basic which adds the ability to automate tasksa in Excel and to provide user defined functions (UDF) for use in worksheets. VBA is a powerful addition to the application which, in later versions, includes a fully featured integrated development environment (IDE). Macro recording can produce VBA code replicating user actions, thus allowing simple automation of regular tasks. VBA allows the creation of forms and in-worksheet controls to communicate with the user. The language supports use (but not creation) of ActiveX (COM) DLL's; later versions add support for class modules allowing the use of basic object-oriented programming techniques. The automation functionality provided by VBA has caused Excel to become a target for macro viruses. This was a serious problem in the corporate world until antivirus products began to detect these viruses. Microsoft belatedly took steps to prevent the misuse by adding the ability to disable macros completely, to enable macros when opening a workbook or to trust all macros signed using a trusted certificate. Versions 5.0 to 9.0 of Excel contain various Easter eggs, although since version 10 Microsoft has taken measures to eliminate such undocumented features from their products.[1]
posted by Our World at 04.26 0 comments

Senin, 20 April 2009

BERMUDA TRIANGLE

The Bermuda Triangle, also known as the Devil's Triangle, is a region of the northwestern Atlantic Ocean in which a number of aircraft and surface vessels are alleged to have disappeared in mysterious circumstances which fall beyond the boundaries of human error, pirates, equipment failure, or natural disaster. Popular culture has attributed some of these disappearances to the paranormal, a suspension of the laws of physics, or activity by extraterrestrial beings.

A substantial body of documentation exists showing numerous incidents to have been inaccurately reported or embellished by later authors, and numerous official agencies have gone on record as stating that the number and nature of disappearances is similar to any other area of ocean, however proponents of paranormal phenomena claim that many incidents remain unexplained despite considerable investigation.

The Triangle area

The area of the Triangle varies by author

The boundaries of the Triangle vary with the author; some stating its shape is akin to a trapezoid covering the Straits of Florida, the Bahamas and the entire Caribbean island area and the Atlantic east to the Azores; others add to it the Gulf of Mexico. The more familiar triangular boundary in most written works has as its points somewhere on the Atlantic coast of Florida; San Juan, Puerto Rico; and the mid-Atlantic island of Bermuda, with most of the accidents concentrated along the southern boundary around the Bahamas and the Florida Straits.

The area is one of the most heavily-sailed shipping lanes in the world, with ships crossing through it daily for ports in the Americas, Europe, and the Caribbean Islands. Cruise ships are also plentiful, and pleasure craft regularly go back and forth between Florida and the islands. It is also a heavily flown route for commercial and private aircraft heading towards Florida, the Caribbean, and South America from points north.

History of the Triangle story

Origins

The first article of any kind in which the legend of the Triangle began appeared in newspapers by E.V.W. Jones on September 16, 1950, through the Associated Press. Two years later, Fate magazine published "Sea Mystery At Our Back Door", a short article by George X. Sand covering the loss of several planes and ships, including the loss of Flight 19, a group of five U.S. Navy TBM Avenger bombers on a training mission. Sand's article was the first to lay out the now-familiar triangular area where the losses took place. Flight 19 alone would be covered in the April 1962 issue of American Legion Magazine. It was claimed that the flight leader had been heard saying "We are entering white water, nothing seems right. We don't know where we are, the water is green, no white." It was also claimed that officials at the Navy board of inquiry stated that the planes "flew off to Mars." This was the first article to connect the supernatural to Flight 19, but it would take another author, Vincent Gaddis, writing in the February 1964 Argosy magazine to take Flight 19 together with other mysterious disappearances and place it under the umbrella of a new catchy name: "The Deadly Bermuda Triangle"; he would build on that article with a more detailed book, Invisible Horizons, the next year. Others would follow with their own works: John Wallace Spencer (Limbo of the Lost, 1969, repr. 1973); Charles Berlitz (The Bermuda Triangle, 1974);[11] Richard Winer (The Devil's Triangle, 1974),[12] and many others, all keeping to some of the same supernatural elements outlined by Eckert.[13]

Kusche's research

Lawrence David Kusche, a research librarian from Arizona State University and author of The Bermuda Triangle Mystery: Solved (1975) has challenged this trend. Kusche's research revealed a number of inaccuracies and inconsistencies between Berlitz's accounts and statements from eyewitnesses, participants, and others involved in the initial incidents. He noted cases where pertinent information went unreported, such as the disappearance of round-the-world yachtsman Donald Crowhurst, which Berlitz had presented as a mystery, despite clear evidence to the contrary. Another example was the ore-carrier Berlitz recounted as lost without trace three days out of an Atlantic port when it had been lost three days out of a port with the same name in the Pacific Ocean. Kusche also argued that a large percentage of the incidents which have sparked the Triangle's mysterious influence actually occurred well outside it. Often his research was surprisingly simple: he would go over period newspapers and see items like weather reports that were never mentioned in the stories.

Kusche came to a conclusion:

  • The number of ships and aircraft reported missing in the area was not significantly greater, proportionally speaking, than in any other part of the ocean.
  • In an area frequented by tropical storms, the number of disappearances that did occur were, for the most part, neither disproportionate, unlikely, nor mysterious; furthermore, Berlitz and other writers would often fail to mention such storms.
  • The numbers themselves had been exaggerated by sloppy research. A boat listed as missing would be reported, but its eventual (if belated) return to port may not have been reported.
  • Some disappearances had in fact, never happened. One plane crash was said to have taken place in 1937 off Daytona Beach, Florida, in front of hundreds of witnesses; a check of the local papers revealed nothing.

Kusche concluded that:

The Legend of the Bermuda Triangle is a manufactured mystery… perpetuated by writers who either purposely or unknowingly made use of misconceptions, faulty reasoning, and sensationalism.

Further responses

When the UK Channel 4 television program "The Bermuda Triangle" (c. 1992) was being produced by John Simmons of Geofilms for the Equinox Programme, the marine insurer Lloyd's of London was asked if an unusually large number of ships had sunk in the Bermuda Triangle area. Lloyd's of London determined that large numbers of ships had not sunk there.

United States Coast Guard records confirm their conclusion. In fact, the number of supposed disappearances is relatively insignificant considering the number of ships and aircraft which pass through on a regular basis.

The Coast Guard is also officially skeptical of the Triangle, noting that they collect and publish, through their inquiries, much documentation contradicting many of the incidents written about by the Triangle authors. In one such incident involving the 1972 explosion and sinking of the tanker V.A. Fogg in the Gulf of Mexico, the Coast Guard photographed the wreck and recovered several bodies, in contrast with one Triangle author's claim that all the bodies had vanished, with the exception of the captain, who was found sitting in his cabin at his desk, clutching a coffee cup.

The NOVA / Horizon episode The Case of the Bermuda Triangle (1976-06-27) was highly critical, stating that "When we've gone back to the original sources or the people involved, the mystery evaporates. Science does not have to answer questions about the Triangle because those questions are not valid in the first place. ... Ships and planes behave in the Triangle the same way they behave everywhere else in the world."

Skeptical researchers, such as Ernest Taves and Barry Singer, have noted how mysteries and the paranormal are very popular and profitable. This has led to the production of vast amounts of material on topics such as the Bermuda Triangle. They were able to show that some of the pro-paranormal material is often misleading or inaccurate, but its producers continue to market it. Accordingly, they have claimed that the market is biased in favour of books, TV specials, etc. which support the Triangle mystery, and against well-researched material if it espouses a skeptical viewpoint.

Finally, if the Triangle is assumed to cross land, such as parts of Puerto Rico, the Bahamas, or Bermuda itself, there is no evidence for the disappearance of any land-based vehicles or persons. The city of Freeport, located inside the Triangle, operates a major shipyard and an airport which annually handles 50,000 flights, and is visited by over a million tourists a year.

Supernatural explanations

Triangle writers have used a number of supernatural concepts to explain the events. One explanation pins the blame on leftover technology from the mythical lost continent of Atlantis. Sometimes connected to the Atlantis story is the submerged rock formation known as the Bimini Road off the island of Bimini in the Bahamas, which is in the Triangle by some definitions. Followers of the purported psychic Edgar Cayce take his prediction that evidence of Atlantis would be found in 1968 as referring to the discovery of the Bimini Road. Believers describe the formation as a road, wall, or other structure, though geologists consider it to be of natural origin.

Other writers attribute the events to UFOs. This idea was used by Steven Spielberg for his science fiction film Close Encounters of the Third Kind, which features the lost Flight 19 as alien abductees.

Charles Berlitz, grandson of a distinguished linguist and author of various additional books on anomalous phenomena, has kept in line with this extraordinary explanation, and attributed the losses in the Triangle to anomalous or unexplained forces.

It has also been thought that the Bermuda Triangle is a wormhole, (a gap in space and time).

Natural explanations

Compass variations

Compass problems are one of the cited phrases in many Triangle incidents. While some have theorized that unusual local magnetic anomalies may exist in the area, such anomalies have not been shown to exist. It should also be remembered that compasses have natural magnetic variations in relation to the Magnetic poles. For example, in the United States the only places where magnetic (compass) north and geographic (true) north are exactly the same are on a line running from Wisconsin to the Gulf of Mexico. Navigators have known this for centuries. But the public may not be as informed, and think there is something mysterious about a compass "changing" across an area as large as the Triangle, which it naturally will.

Deliberate acts of destruction

Deliberate acts of destruction can fall into two categories: acts of war, and acts of piracy. Records in enemy files have been checked for numerous losses; while many sinkings have been attributed to surface raiders or submarines during the World Wars and documented in the various command log books, many others which have been suspected as falling in that category have not been proven. It is suspected that the loss of USS Cyclops in 1918, as well as her sister ships Proteus and Nereus in World War II, were attributed to submarines, but no such link has been found in the German records.

Piracy, as defined by the taking of a ship or small boat on the high seas, is an act which continues to this day. While piracy for cargo theft is more common in the western Pacific and Indian oceans, drug smugglers do steal pleasure boats for smuggling operations, and may have been involved in crew and yacht disappearances in the Caribbean. Piracy in the Caribbean was common from about 1560 to the 1760s, and famous pirates included Edward Teach (Blackbeard) and Jean Lafitte. Lafitte is sometimes said to be a Triangle victim himself.

False-color image of the Gulf Stream flowing north through the western Atlantic Ocean. (NASA)

Gulf Stream

The Gulf Stream is an ocean current that originates in the Gulf of Mexico, and then through the Straits of Florida, into the North Atlantic. In essence, it is a river within an ocean, and like a river, it can and does carry floating objects. It has a surface velocity of up to about 2.5 metres per second (5.6 mph). A small plane making a water landing or a boat having engine trouble will be carried away from its reported position by the current, as happened to the cabin cruiser Witchcraft on December 22, 1967, when it reported engine trouble near the Miami buoy marker one mile (1.6 km) from shore, but was not there when a Coast Guard cutter arrived.

Human error

One of the most cited explanations in official inquiries as to the loss of any aircraft or vessel is human error. Whether deliberate or accidental, humans have been known to make mistakes resulting in catastrophe, and losses within the Bermuda Triangle are no exception. For example, the Coast Guard cited a lack of proper training for the cleaning of volatile benzene residue as a reason for the loss of the tanker V.A. Fogg in 1972. Human stubbornness may have caused businessman Harvey Conover to lose his sailing yacht, the Revonoc, as he sailed into the teeth of a storm south of Florida on January 1, 1958. Many losses remain inconclusive due to the lack of wreckage which could be studied, a fact cited on many official reports.

Hurricanes

Hurricanes are powerful storms which are spawned in tropical waters, and have historically been responsible for thousands of lives lost and billions of dollars in damage. The sinking of Francisco de Bobadilla's Spanish fleet in 1502 was the first recorded instance of a destructive hurricane. These storms have in the past caused a number of incidents related to the Triangle.

Methane hydrates

Worldwide distribution of confirmed or inferred offshore gas hydrate-bearing sediments, 1996.

An explanation for some of the disappearances has focused on the presence of vast fields of methane hydrates on the continental shelves. Laboratory experiments carried out in Australia have proven that bubbles can, indeed, sink a scale model ship by decreasing the density of the water; any wreckage consequently rising to the surface would be rapidly dispersed by the Gulf Stream. It has been hypothesized that periodic methane eruptions (sometimes called "mud volcanoes") may produce regions of frothy water that are no longer capable of providing adequate buoyancy for ships. If this were the case, such an area forming around a ship could cause it to sink very rapidly and without warning.

A white paper was published in 1981 by the United States Geological Survey about the appearance of hydrates in the Blake Ridge area, off the southeastern United States coast. However, according to a USGS web page, no large releases of gas hydrates are believed to have occurred in the Bermuda Triangle for the past 15,000 years.

Rogue waves

In various oceans around the world, rogue waves have caused ships to sink and oil platforms to topple. These waves are considered to be a mystery and until recently were believed to be a myth. However, rogue waves don't account for the missing aircraft.

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