info-mac@uw-beaver (04/16/85)
From: Moderator John Mark Agosta <INFO-MAC-REQUEST@SUMEX-AIM.ARPA>
INFO-MAC Digest Tuesday, 16 Apr 1985 Volume 2 : Issue 31
Today's Topics:
The official announcement from Apple
MacFair
re: floating point...
New Macintosh/MacTerminal termcap
MacDraw to Impress
Mac DNA program
LaserJet driver for Macintosh
SHUGART EXTERNAL DRIVE FOR THE MAC.
req. for SWITCH (not Switcher)
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: Sat 13 Apr 85 22:53:42-PST
From: Gustavo Fernandez <FERNANDEZ@SU-SCORE.ARPA>
Subject: The official announcement from Apple
This morning at the A32 Meeting, a representative from Apple said that
a new system disk has been produced and will be a free upgrade from
dealers within a couple of weeks. The disk contains...
MacWrite 4.5
MacPaint 1.5
Finder 4.1
System with new standard file
Standard file update program
New font mover which also handles desk accessories
Gus Fernandez
------------------------------
Date: 14 Apr 85 23:35:00 EST
From: Kevin.Dowling@CMU-RI-ROVER
Subject: MacFair
Last Thursday, I received my copy of Macazine and noticed a blurb for
Drexel's MacFair to held Saturday on their campus. So Saturday, I
headed for Philly with Jennifer from CMU's Computer Store to check
this out.
It was very well organized and went well. There were over 30 booths
from different software manufacturers, Talk and seminars by many
people including Susan Kare and Andy Hertzfeld. There were several
thousand people there, and all seminars and talks were packed.
I was impressed by some products like the Omnis 3 DBS which allow
creation of menus and buttons for configuring and managing your own
DB. The digitizers were always big attractions. I picked up the latest
version of New Imaging Technologies Magic software. (V 1.1) for my
Magic hardware and Drexel supplied whole rooms of macs for public
domain software copying (30+ disks). All the big lecture halls and
many classrooms have large screen projections for the Macs and enabled
talks using the mac to be very effective. Ann Arbor softworks is
promising a new version of their animation program that will be 4x
faster than there current one.
Lotus still wasn't letting people touch Jazz. I was disappointed in
the continuing lack of AppleTalk products, although at the Apple booth
they said LaserWriters are shipping in limited quantities.
[As an aside, InfoWorld had a short article on 3rd party vendors for
the AppleTalk stuff. No addresses were listed for the 20+ vendors
listed although I had a few of their adresses and numbers already. One
was Lutzky-Baird Associates. Has anyone a number or an address for
them??]
I attended Susan Kare's (Graphics Designer for the Mac team) talk and
it was a fairly interesting discussion of the design and use of the
Mac for graphic design. She is the fastest and most versatile user of
MacPaint i have ever seen! (Maybe Atkinson is faster, I dunno) Quote
highlight: "FatBits is for sissy's!" Well she didn't really mean that
and said that she used it occasionally. She showed some neat
techniques with MacPaint and demoed MacDraw and then demonstrated
PageMaker, a page layout program that looked easy to use and powerful.
She had a LaserWriter and printed several items on it that she was
drawing during the talk and had them passed around.
Anyway, Hertzfeld's talk was definitely the high point. He's an
enthusiastic speaker and a lot fun to listen to. He showed the first
demo program for the mac that was written ("The Flashdance demo for
the stockholders") The Switcher, Thunderscan, the new Finder and also
a long Q&A period which ranged from technical questions to
philosophies of Hertzfeld's.
Gleaned from the talk, though stuff you may have already heard may be
in here:
Q: What do you think of the Atari ST?
A: I've played with one at one of the ComDex shows...
If you like the Commodore 64 you'll like the ST!
Enhanced MacTerminal this summer, and MacBasic.
This fall it seems that there will be a series of enhancements
for the Mac. New ROM that may have some File system utilties built in.
In the original design an extra address line was put in so a 512Kbit
ROM can be put in. Double sided drives were talked about.
Latest version of the finder is 4.0
Latest version of MacPaint (according to Klare) is 1.48
Switcher 2.0 is what Hertzfeld was using.
He's real keen on About Boxes and the one for the Switcher and
Thunderscan are pretty interesting. He's placed the Switcher on Maug
because with 500 programs on the market there's no way he can test
lots of combinations of programs and the Switcher himself. So he
would really appreciate bug reports on the Switcher.
One neat thing he demonstrated with the switcher was that if one of
the program crashes (System Error Bomb or something) and you have
valuable things in other application in memory, all is not lost!
Cmd-option-shift- period will get you back to the Switcher. The
Switcher is definitely going to be distributed by Apple as part of the
Finder etc. It is not Public Domain. It is copyrighted and is being
distributed by Apple! This is a big distinction.
He showed Thunderscan and the various things you could do with it. And
mentioned the possibility (that he's working on) of distributing
software with it. That is, a kind of character recognition but use a
well defined set of chars and have programs be on a piece of paper and
read by the Thunder Scan. TS has a few neat features that I wish
MacPaint had. Atkinson is writing something called PaintMover though,
no details on that.
One thing Andy revealed was that the switcher doesn't work yet with
Thunderscan!!! (Over the howls of laughter he shouted "but I know
what's wrong, and will fix it!!!) He also said that he believes the
main use for the switcher might be in the office to hide games when
the boss comes around!
He has a Hyperdrive in his mac and is very happy with it.
He said several times to hold off until fall before having third
parties open your mac and change things because Apple will be having
some of these enhancements come fall and may not let hacked (by
others) Macs be worked on. Hmmmm....
I'd like to hear from 3rd party hardware houses about there reaction
to this. The price of RAM's is about $5.00 now so a MassTech upgrade
for example would be about $230 now. A substantial saving over the
Apple upgrade.
Later this month a Lisa 2-chip ECO is being released to change the
aspect ratio to 1:1 Although there is a company called LisaVision that
currently has a product to do that and change between Lisa Software
and MacWork aspect rations by a button.
Macazine and MacTutor were giving away issues of their respective
magazines and MacTutor is well worth it as is Macazine. MacTutor is
slanted towards the Mac hacker with articles on programs dealing with
different programming languages.
nivek
Aka : Kevin Dowling Bell: (412) 578-8830 Arpa: nivek@cmu-ri-rover
Mail: Robotics Institute
Schenley Park
Pgh, PA 15213
------------------------------
Date: Mon, 15 Apr 85 09:57:50 pst
From: Bill Croft <croft@safe>
Subject: re: floating point...
Chris,
Until recently, all the Mac compilers required that you manually
translate floating expressions into direct calls on the SANE package.
This is true for SUMACC as well. You have to use the typedefs setup
by the sane header files (NOT 'float' or 'double').
Probably the easiest route for you to take is to get a standalone
compiler that has really implemented floating point. In that case the
compiler takes your expressions and turns them into sane calls. I
believe Megamax does this (and soon Consulair).
------------------------------
Subject: New Macintosh/MacTerminal termcap
Date: 15 Apr 85 08:49:10 EST (Mon)
From: Steven B. Munson <sbm@Purdue.ARPA>
I have modified the termcap entry posted to info-mac earlier by
Chris Kent@Purdue. I added a little more padding to the add line and
insert character capabilities, and removed the padding from the delete
character capability. Delete character works fine now on mine at 1200
baud; I never get a chance to test it at higher rates (some day I will
buy a carrying case and bring it into school). I would be interested
in hearing how it does at 9600 baud.
There are still little glitches in extreme cases, though. If I
am in vi at the beginning of a line half full of text and type
"30ix<ESC>" to insert 30 x's rapidly, it works pretty well, but if I
type "50ix<ESC>", there are errors when the line wraps around. I am
not sure where to start to fix that problem; if anyone fixes it or has
expert advice on how to go about it, I would like to hear about it.
This termcap entry works very well for my purposes, though (I don't
use vi anyway), and here it is.
Steve Munson
sbm@purdue.ARPA
sbm@purdue.CSNET
Am|Macintosh|mac|Apple Macintosh running MacTerminal:\
:al=3*\E[L:am:bl=^G:bs:cd=\E[J:ce=\E[K:cl=\E[;H\E[2J:cm=\E[%i%d;%dH:\
:co#80:cr=^M:dc=\E[P:dl=\E[M:dN#0:do=\E[B:ho=\E[H:\
:ic=13\E[@:ip=5:kb=^H:kd=\E[B:kh=\E[H:\
:kl=\E[D:kn#4:kr=\E[C:ku=\E[A:k1=\EOP:k2=\EOQ:k3=\EOR:k4=\EOS:\
:le=\E[D:li#24:nd=\E[C:nl=^J:pt:se=\E[m:sf=\ED:so=\E[7m:sr=\EM:\
:ue=\E[m:up=\E[A:us=\E[1;4m:xn:
[ I'm keeping a copy of this, message and all in unix-termcap.txt -jma
]
------------------------------
Date: Mon 15 Apr 85 08:38:59-PST
From: Allan Weber <WEBER@USC-ECLC.ARPA>
Subject: MacDraw to Impress
If anybody is interested, I have a very preliminary version of a
MacDraw to Impress translator. There are a number of things that it
doesn't yet translate but I would be willing to send what I have done
so far to anybody that wants to play with it. If somebody can find a
more complete translator, please let me know so I can stop working on
this one.
The program is in C and runs fine on a 4.2 system. The Impress output
is currently intended for an 8/300 but should work on other
resolutions with only minor changes. It seems to handle the all the
standard objects pretty well with the notable exception of text, which
is not yet supported. Also, no clipping of objects is done for
objects that cross the boundaries of the 8x10 inch pages. Only
outputs objects which are completely contained on a page. Other
things that are not yet supported include arrowheads on vectors and
smoothing of polygons.
Allan Weber
Weber@USC-ECLC
(213) 743-5519
------------------------------
Date: Mon, 15 Apr 85 12:27:24 PST
From: babcock@NWC-143B
Subject: Mac DNA program
There was a request for Macintosh DNA programs recently. The
publication Apple puts out called "Macintosh Product Availability
List" dated 4/15/85 lists the following: The DNA Inspector from
Textco at (603)643-1471
------------------------------
Date: 10 April 85 09:15-PST
From: DAVEG%SLACVM.bitnet@stanford
Subject: LaserJet driver for Macintosh
Our working group is buying a LaserJet for the IBM PC and I am
interested in LaserJet drivers for the Macintosh since we have one
also. If so, I suspect the IBM will not be used for any word
processing. In any case, the latest (early for May!) MacWorld has two
ads for drivers for the LaserJet. ProPrint is one and another is by a
company called SoftStyle. The second's ad say's "spectacular graphics
and laser quality text". We will get information about this product
from the distributer (and I will be happy to post it) but in the
meantime does anyone have any experience with either product? If so
could they do a short review of it? Thanks, David Gelphman
DAVEG@SLACVM.BITNET
------------------------------
Date: 9 April 1985, 11:07:35 PST
From: JQB%SLACVM@stanford
Subject: SHUGART EXTERNAL DRIVE FOR THE MAC.
In reply to Scott Comer <wert@rice.ARPA>. The Shugart drive model#
3302 was made for the Macintosh.
Performance Specification:
Access time,
Track to track 6ms min.
Average 158ms
Settle time 15ms max.
Motor start time 500ms max.
Functional Specification
Rotational speed Varible speed
Track Density 135 TPI
Tracks 80
Encoding method MGCR
Physical Specification
DC Voltage Requirements
+ 12v @ 0.2A 1.3A max
+ 5v @ 0.5A 0.7A max
Power Dissipation
4.9 watts operating
3.0 watts standby
The Shugart drive is a little longer than the Apple drive, but
about the same width and hight. The drive is in a metal case, and
makes more noise than the apple when running. The head is moved by a
solinoid and when it moves the extra power causes the Mac screen to
flicker a little.
More than 5000 drives were made, and a two side up grade was in
test, and ready for sale when Xerox said it would close Shugart. It is
said that some one may pick up this line of drives and sell them.
Xerox said that they would continue to service all Shugart products.
Haba Systems Inc. Was marketing this drive as their Habadisk
bundeled with their software for about $325, and others may have a
supply. I would think that they should be available on closeout for
about $150 after the Xerox story is settled and no company picks up
the product. I would have no objections to using the drive if the
price is right.
I have no relation to Xerox, Shugart, Haba Systems ect.
------------------------------
Date: Mon, 15 Apr 85 11:25:11 PST
From: "Dr. Terry Gray" <gray@UCLA-LOCUS.ARPA>
Subject: req. for SWITCH (not Switcher)
Someone once referred to a program called SWITCH that caused the
RAMdisk to become the startup volume. Anyone know where I can get it?
--Terry Gray
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End of INFO-MAC Digest
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