SEWALL@UCONNVM.BITNET (01/29/88)
VAPORWARE Murphy Sewall From the December 1987 APPLE PULP H.U.G.E. Apple Club (E. Hartford) News Letter $15/year P.O. Box 18027 East Hartford, CT 06118 Call the "Bit Bucket" (203) 569-8739 Permission granted to copy with the above citation Steve's Revenge? Finally, a Macintosh clone appears imminent. Former Commodore and current Atari boss, Jack Tramiel, is readying a pair of 68020 machines that will run Macintosh software as well as ST programs. Supposedly, the machines are products of a collaboration between Atari and NeXt. - InfoWorld 11 January 16.8 Million Colors. The Palette Manager, the programming resource within the Macintosh operating system that will control colors in the Mac II, still isn't finished. The Mac II was released with an incomplete version. Although the QuickDraw routines can write up to 48 bits of color data per pixel, Apple's current operating system supports only eight. Third party developers are hard at work trying to bring the promise of 16.8 million colors to life. Both Supermac Technology and Rasterops Corporation have already shown 24 bit per pixel color devices that are likely to be on the market (for about $3,000) before Apple completes the Palette Manager. Meanwhile, Orchid Technologies expects to begin shipping a color card for the Mac SE later this month. The card will support sixteen colors from a palette of 4,096 colors and retail for $695 ($1,000 to $1,300 bundled with a color monitor.) - InfoWorld 21 December, 4 and 18 January and PC Week 12 January Will the II Talk? An Apple II AppleTalk card (for the IIgs anyway) is rumored for later this year. It's targeted at the education market that appears increasingly restive about their inability to create their own local networks. Best guess on the price is $300 per card (plus a Mac II to act as a file server). - Comp.Sys.Apple (Internet Apple Newsgroup) 5 January IIgs Office System (Continued from Last Month). Spinnaker is in the process of porting its MS-DOS productivity package "8 in 1" to the IIgs. A IIgs translation of MECA's Managing Your Money also will be available soon. - InCider February Trade Bill. Apple owners should be happy to hear that the 1,000 page trade bill is bogged down in Congressional committees because of its complexity. That bill contains a proposal to punish Toshiba for selling advanced technology to the Soviet Union by prohibiting the company from doing business with American firms. However, Toshiba is the sole source of the popular ImageWriter printer. - A+ February Two Macs; No Mice. When Apple finally announces their own laptop Macintosh later this year (see last September's column) there will be two versions. One will have a backlit LCD screen and the second will have an even better display (best guess: gas plasma). Neither machine will have a mouse; they have trackballs on the sides of their keyboards. - InfoWorld 11 January Have a Really Big Spreadsheet Application? Within the next five months Smart Software plans to begin shipping a robust 32,767 by 32,767 cell spreadsheet program with sophisticated 3-dimensional graphics and word processing modules. Code-named "Wingz," the program which will run under either Apple Unix (A/Ux) or the native Mac operating system will retail for under $500. - InfoWorld 4 January and PC Week 5 January Speedier dBase Mac and Other New Macware. Ashton-Tate is said to have plans for a whole series of Macintosh products in 1988. Among them are a faster version of dBase Mac this Spring and a revised version of the, as yet unreleased in the first version, GraphSheet Mac integrated spreadsheet and chart program (by the end of the year). Meanwhile Lotus will try again with Modern Jazz ($395), a much enhanced product which will be available to purchasers of Jazz and Jazz 1A for $95. Modern Jazz includes a command language compatible with the one in 1-2-3 and Symphony. Innovative Data Design, publishers of Mac Draft, will ship Dreams, a high-end, color drawing tool for architects, engineers, and graphic artists in July. Dreams will be $500 (upgrade from Mac Draft for $200). Acius' 4th Dimension will become five to six times faster and offer a built-in script manager for foreign language support with the release of version 1.1 in April or May. Acius already is planning version 2.0 which might be ready by Christmas. That version will contain improvements for performance at the level of Foxbase, the speedy dBase work-alike. Finally, Word Perfect, embarrassed by the lateness of their program for the Mac, has introduced a $99 beta version of the program for a limited time (the final version will be priced at $395, but will be sent to betaware buyers at no charge). As users find bugs in the beta version, they will be able to return disks with a documented problem and receive a replacement. - PC Week 22/29 December, 19 January and InfoWorld 18 January Who Needs Applications? Most future Macintosh applications software will run without modifications under A/Ux as well as the native operating system. Apple's Unix is so large that it will require 70 Mac disks to hold it all (40 Mbytes of code). A/Ux actually will be the first piece of software distributed primarily by hard disk - an 80 Mbyte drive pluggable into the Mac II (the price for A/Ux alone is expected to be just under $1,500). Surely an operating system that massive must already include nearly every application any user could want (and everything else is on stackware no doubt). - PC Week 5 January All New Macintosh OS. At a conference of financial analysts, Apple President John Sculley, said that a complete rewrite of the Macintosh operating system is underway. The purpose is to provide greater support for multitasking and a robust environment for connectivity in a multivendor environment. He indicted that the task is expected to take three or four years to complete and upward compatibility with the present operating system will be maintained. - InfoWorld 14 December and PC Week 15 December Return of Kaypro. Before Independence Day, Kaypro may become the first vendor to actually market a PS/2 compatible. David Kay says that his firm's forthcoming release will be "in the same genre" as IBM's PS/2 Models 50 and 60 (80286 based) and will be compatible with Micro Channel architecture. Kaypro is expected to announce a licensing agreement for PS/2 technology when the machine is introduced. Kaypro also plans a springtime introduction of a 20 MHz 80386 based laptop (not PS/2 compatible). - PC Week 5 and 12 January Macintosh Screen Projection. Eastman Kodak has unveiled a LCD display system allowing overhead projection of Mac SE and Mac+ displays at 512 by 432 pixel resolution. The product, the Datashow HR, should be ready to ship by April at a list of $1,595 (a $99 video adapter also will be needed). A cooling fan (with cleanable filter) is part of the package and Showmaker II software (for less than $100) will be offered as an option. - InfoWorld 18 January Slow, Memory Hog. If you're appalled that it takes 1.5 Mbytes of memory just to load the OS/2 operating system, wait until you have a look at IBM's Extended Edition 1.0 due out in July. It will require 3 Mbytes of RAM. Software applications will require additional memory (512K no doubt). In addition, benchmark tests by Neal Nelson & Associates indicates that some multitasking operations under OS/2 run up to seven times slower than Xenix, Release 5.2.2 from Santa Cruz Operations. - InfoWorld 4 January and PC Week 5 January All the Script That's Fit to Print. CCS Labs of Irvine, California plans to offer a Postscript compatible (CSS Labs' own clone) printer built around and Inmos T-414 Transputer chip. That's a 7.5 MIP processor (see Vaporware from May '86 and November '87) capable of delivering output at 40 pages per minute. For the present, a laser engine in the planned price range (target list is $2,800) faster than 8 pages per minute isn't available, but buyers will be able to upgrade the engine later without changing controllers. - InfoWorld 14 December Just the Thing to Backup Your Hard Drive. Sharp has announced a new optical-magneto disk drive that can erase and rewrite on 5.25 inch (optical) disks. Each disk can hold 422 megabytes (yes, 422 Mbytes). - Random Access 3 January Planned Obsolescence. Owners of Radio Shack Model 4's (the last of the TRS-80 series) were surprised to discover that the current TRS-DOS 6.02 is not programmed to recognize years past 1987. The story is that TRS-DOS 6.02 accesses the system clock on bootup and has refused to proceed since 1988 began. That certainly tops the glitch in older versions of Apple II ProDOS that, when used with some clock cards, insists that 1988 is really 1982. - InfoWorld 11 January --------------------- Disclaimer: My employer often is appalled by my opinions, and my facts may be only vaguely right <slippery when wet>. ARPA: sewall%uconnvm.bitnet@cunyvm.cuny.edu Murphy A. Sewall BITNET: SEWALL@UCONNVM School of Business Admin. UUCP: ...ihnp4!psuvax1!UCONNVM.BITNET!SEWALL University of Connecticut