csfred@violet.berkeley.edu (Frederick A. Huxham) (08/20/86)
Someone asked for a summary of what was at the Boston MacWorld Expo, so here goes. I arrived at the expo Thursday morning after a wonderful week in New York. The show was very large, with all the major vendors there. I don't have names and addresses of all the stuff I'm going to talk about but maybe others can fill in the parts I leave out. Apple announced the APDA, (Apple Programmers and Developers Association), which, as was mentioned in an earlier posting, will handle the sales and distribution of all programmer type stuff. This includes Tech Notes, Software Supplements, MPW, MDS, Third party compilers, books (they didn't have mine available yet...argghhh), just about anything that could be remotely related to software development. The membership is $20, which at the show included a copy of Scott Knaster's book "How to write Macintosh Software", (which by the way is an awsome book), a poster, a catalog, and a newsletter. You can order the beta version of MPW from APDA, $100 for the shell and assembler, $75 for the C Compiler, $75 for the Pascal Compiler, and $50 for MacApp. There is NO upgrade path to the finished version however. There's also a new version of Smalltalk, version 0.3, for the MacPlus...$50. The address for APDA is: Apple Programmer's & Developer's Association 290 SW 43rd Street Renton, WA 98055 (206) 251-6548 There was dBase for the Mac by Ashton Tate. I know nothing about IBM dBase so I can't say if it is similar or not. It did however, have a nice normal Mac Interface. Big bucks..$495. LightSpeed Pascal was there, list $125, ComputerWare had it for $89. It almost makes me want to go back to Pascal. Tremendous debugging facilities. The little hand tracing through your code, a la MacPascal, as well as a low level debugger like TMON. The object code is not compatable with LS C. The next version of the C compiler will be available sometime in September. There were two companies at the show selling large external screens. MegaScreen from Micrographics Images lists for $2995, E Screen from E Machines Inc lists for $1995. I liked the E screen better, it didn't have the flicker the MegaScreen had. There was also a third company showing a monitor to a few people at their hotel room, it is perhaps the best of all the monitors and will be announced at the Seybold Desktop Publishing Conference in early September. The U.S. company that was writing MacAuthor, which got purchased by Next Inc., was showing their word processor, (now called WriteNow I think), at the T/Maker booth. It won't be available until October, but it looks like, (from what I've seen), the best of the new word processors. Better than Multi-Write, MacAuthor (UK), HabaWord, WordHandler, etc... Andy Hertzfeld gave a talk and demonstrated "Servant", a program that will replace the finder, switcher, resource editor, font/da mover, and who knows what else. This program has so many features (in only 40K of code), it's disgusting. I won't even try and describe it here, you just have the see it. At the show he sort of gave out version .79 by putting it on one of the hard disks in the hands-on area. I don't know if its ok to post it or not....I'll look into it. One funny thing about the .79 version is that at midnight on Halloween, the program will self destruct and turn into a pumpkin. Honest. His reason for doing so is that by that time, there will be a new improved version available, and he wants people to use the latest version. Consulair had version 5.0 available. It allows you to declard Pascal functions, and supposedly compiles twice as fast. Aztec was showing their source level debugger, which will be available sometime later this year. Zillions of SCSI hard disks and tape backups. Hyperdrive had an external SCSI - $1195. It supports disk tags. SuperMac's dataframe also supposedly supports disk tags as well. The only two hard disks beside Apple's. Farallon computing had wired up a bunch of the booths with Phone-Net before the show began. During the show, Centram had Tops running over the Phone-Net between Macs, PC's, and Unix machines. It was pretty impressive. BMUG and MacroMind threw big parties every night, throughout the suite were a bunch of Macs, all phone-netted together so that people could play MacroMind's new game: "Maze Wars Plus". It was a lot of fun. InfoSphere was showing "LaserServe", a print spooler for Mac and LaserWriter. There was a company showing a flat-screen Mac called "DynaMac". The company apparently puts a 512K mother board in a new case with a built in drive, modem, 2 or 4 megs, and an electro luminescent orange screen. Some of my friend thought it was neat, I thought it was horrible. Decide for yourself. I can't think of anything more right now, the products I mentioned above were the "neat" new things. I'd be happy to try and answer any questions people might have about the show. Fred A. Huxham
baron@runx.OZ (Jason Haines) (08/29/86)
Fred, Could you PLEASE post Servant0.79 ?? Thanks in advance, Jason