HFISCHER@USC-ECLB@sri-unix.UUCP (09/01/83)
The (First) IBM PC Faire took place on August 26-28, 1983 at the Civic Auditorium and Brooks Hall, San Francisco. The opening Friday was a mob scene with mostly business types while Sunday had a younger, non-professional crowd. The quantity of products was incredible. The Faire emphasis clearly highlighted software over hardware, although some "hot" new hardware items were both displayed and marketed. A number of discounters had long lines of eager buyers for heavily discounted software items and PC add-on hardware items. Typical sales prices seemed to be as low as half of retail, particularly for multifunction boards, and DBASE/LOTUS sales. An event that most of the Friday professional crowd attended was the plenary session "Trends in Personal Computing" by Don Estridge, now the President of the Boca Raton, FL, IBM division that designed and produces the PC. The most important items which he presented were, to the best of the authors' memory: - There have already been over 2.2M IBM PCs sold. [This corrects the second author's earlier incorrect statement.] The closest competitor is Tandy with about 800K and Apple only has 600K. - A number of hints concerning the new "Peanut" product were dropped. This product is to take its place along side every home's TV set. For the families with computer widows, the Peanut will, as the home's second machine, be IBM's solution to that problem. Estridge implied that new IBM products (e.g., this machine) will be "compatible" across IBM's product line. The variety of software at the conference was mind boggling. The following sample classes of programs were available with the indicated volume ranking: 1. Copy programs: Booths selling products to copy "protected" disks seemed to be doing gold-rush business. 2. Word processors and editors: Editors were abundant in every isle and cranny. Their capability was as varied as the prices. One editor (Quicksoft) was priced for only $10 with an on-disk 98 page reference manual -- and the disk label encourages copying the program and disseminating it to others. Most other editing packages were protected by elaborate licensing agreements and legal language. 3. Business support software: A large number of database support programs, command shells for business, database/spreadsheet integrators, and the like were evidenced. 4. Networking software and products: Products for local area networking and support were abundant. While a large number of non-local networking interconnect protocols were available (inter-PC and PC-to-host communications), there was no presence of KERMIT at the fair. Some interesting software items included: - Spelling checkers: some for under $30 and some quite expensive. - Products for specific professions: Applications packages configured for doctors, lawyers, and accountants were seen (even Price Waterhouse was there). - Publishers: Book sellers seem to be doing well in the computer marketplace. It is interesting to note that a number of successful products were derivations of programs that were ported from larger machines. One editing system, Word Perfect by Satelite Business Systems, was a port from a DG machine. The price range for products varied from $10 for the small editor that a one man company was trying to boost to thousands of dollars for profession-specific products such as the doctor's records system. Since the specific-profession software does not have a very large market, only authoring firms were marketing them. However, for the more generic word processing and spread sheets, there were a number of discounters selling the programs. They were also selling accessories such as memory boards, diskette storage containers, and so on. These re-sale booths were literally one-stop suppliers of all the fundamental components for the PC. 4 HARDWARE Hardware displayed included: - PC clone computers: Eagle had a big booth with many machines available for people to play with and try out. - Portable PCs: a number of manufacturers had portable PCs that were running apparently-standard IBM software. These varied from Osborne-style packaged clones, and an outfit repackaging IBM's boards, to the Compass Grid briefcase computer. - Back end data base hardware: used to speed up large scale data base work especially when there are multiple users sharing local area network workstations. - Mice: There were at least 3 different mice being demonstrated, two of which simulated commands typed in from the keyboard. These units have an active Tee connector (black box) between the keyboard, computer, and mouse. These active Tee connectors generate programmer-defined character sequences so that these devices may be used with all cursor-directed full-screen interactive programs on the market. One company, Trillion, showed a PC-DOS "shell" package used with a mouse, which has menus in the style of the Apple Lisa and Xerox Star, thus making the mouse more than just an applications-specific device. New users will find the mouse and the Trillion software a very pleasant method to interact with a PC. As with most specialized products, some tailoring is required with standard products for use with mouse-driven menus, making the consumer dependent on a single source supplier of software. The other style of mouse prevalent uses an asynchronous port or special card for mouse interfacing. These styles of mice appear to be not as general as the style using the active Tee keyboard interface. The authors' purpose in attending the fair was to review products. Certain products deserved additional examination (as evident by the authors' infatuation) and caused impulse buys: 1. A Logitech mouse (not the newest version that they still have not yet released). This one has a round top and an active Tee keyboard connection as described above. The authors paid $268. Upon returning to Los Angeles the device was D.O.A. Removing the cover from the active Tee connector, we found that the ROM type device was plugged in backwards. We telephoned Logitech and with great embarrassment they Federal Expressed a replacement which was received one day later. The firm seemed very responsive to this problem, although they certainly lack QC. (The mouse successfully works with every full-screen program tried so far: BLUE, Professional Editor, Perfect Writer, Lotus, IBM's APL, and unfortunately, the Microsoft Flight Simulator. It was difficult to recover the PC upon returning from lunch.) 2. The editor, BLUE. This $150 product from Symmetric Software, Newport Beach (moving to Anaheim), was exhibited with fancy, multi-colored windows and command selection by several different mice. The program was produced by a five man company which obviously know a lot about user-friendly editing systems. The system very nicely hides windows that are not currently being worked on and lets you easily switch between any of the eight possible file buffers. We ran into a bit of difficulty however again when we got back to Los Angeles, since the version that we had carried back turned out to not be the same as that demonstrated and was not mouse compatible. Again, we contacted the firm and under pressure they Federal Expressed the version we thought we bought the next day. 3. A $10 editor called PC Write that has a 98 page manual. It was written by Bob Wallace of Quicksoft, which he founded after leaving Microsoft. We were shown a color version of the editor, but arrived home to find our disk only containing the black and white version. A follow-up call to the author solved the color problem; changes to the editor (since its document was written) eliminated the need to distribute two separate versions. This editor seems impressively fast. When the author of the editor was asked why he sells it so inexpensively, he responds "to gain market share". Having sold over 300 copies at the show, he claims to have covered his expenses. 4. Spell-it by Berzerk Systems, Berkeley is a spelling checker that cost $29 and has a 41,000 word dictionary. The program is well documented. It can be configured to run with a variety of different word processors. This report was checked by this speller. Behaving like the EMACS correct spelling command, the program will give the user ten choices for each of his misspelled words, or the option to retype a word, add to a selected dictionary, and so forth. Unlike EMACS on a DEC 20, the program is very slow but it more user friendly than the EMACS spelling correction feature. Users should be able to tolerate its slowness if they are as bad at spelling as the second author, and too lazy to use a real dictionary. A caveat then from the above experience: Try out any product you buy at a faire. Be triply sure it is the product that is being exhibited and not an earlier version or demonstration prototype. IBM was exhibiting the Logo Systems Limited (Canada) Logo which they will market "soon". This is not the DR Logo product. The printer's proof of the manual was reviewed. This Logo seems to support large workspaces, up to 256 K bytes, and should be well received by "list hackers". A quick scan of the document could find no restriction on "object" or list size, such as the 32 K byte limitations on objects in IBM's APL and other PC products. The manual was thick and robust, in the normal IBM PC manual tradition. STSC had a large booth exhibiting their APL. Since their product, at about $500, is significantly more expensive than the IBM APL (at about $160, discounted), it was examined. The product seems to have about the same features as IBM's, with perhaps more library routines furnished or available. (It is annoyingly difficult to be unable to get IBM's help with difficulties in their APL. Perhaps dealing with a private company is worth all that extra money.) Relative performance statistics (in seconds) are interesting: IBM STSC 3032 PC PC VS Function APL APL APL Looping (100) 1.5 1.72 .010 Primes (10) .22 .21 .003 Primes (100) 17.5 5.8 .094 Eratosthenes(10) .17 .16 .004 Eratosthenes(1000) 6.1 4.0 .062 STSC does not appear to support the shared variable concept as enthusiastically as IBM (or as the Japanese 5th Generation Prolog versions), though that is probably of little consequence to businessmen. The faire had such enthusiasm, that there is already another one planned for next year: October 26-28, 1984, also at the Civic Auditorium and Brooks Hall, San Francisco. Almost all of the exhibitor space is already sold out at $18 per square foot. Daniel H. Miller and Herman Fischer Litton Data Systems Van Nuys, CA 91409