pete@octopus.UUCP (Pete Holzmann) (11/23/88)
Here's a quickie COMDEX report, for what it's worth:
Interesting stuff seen: Canon digital color laser copier- scans an original
(paper, slide or negative) and copies it. You can zoom in on anything you
like, merge multiple originals ("put this ad copy over here on the page,
then put that picture in the box over there".... all digitally, no cut&paste,
no enlarging needed), make a wall-sized poster (it spits out as many copies
as needed, all ready to attach into an NxN mosaic that make up a giant
enlargement), fix the colors, etc. When you blow things up really big, it
digitally smooths all the lines so you don't get any blocky pixel effects.
It's basically an instant color photo lab in a copier! Prints cost about 0.40
each, including maintenance costs. And a computer interface is in the works.
I think we're going to see major changes in the photo industry soon...
Language translation software: first, a word processor that takes what you
type in one language, and returns it to you translated into another. Not a
'polished' job, but workable. Second, one that takes continuous voice input
and *speaks* in the translated language (a company named 'voice'... I don't
remember the name of the first company at the moment).
Digital audio tape is here now for lots of bucks ($7000 list for 2.5 GB
drives). It will be late summer '89 before the cheaper versions become
available ($1200 for 1.2G on 4mm DAT). Oh well...
Cheap VGA is here. $95 for an enhanced VGA card without RAM. 256K of RAM
brings that up to about $175.
I saw a few places with 386SX daughter cards that plug into a '286 socket.
For now they are simply selling the whole mother board as a 386SX upgrade
for XT users. But they should be marketing the daughter cards on their own
within a month or two as a stand alone '286 upgrade.
Fastest machines: SIA has a cached 32.5 MHz machine that runs 0 wait state
most of the time. Somebody else (lots of paper still in my suitcase) has
a 25MHz machine running 0 wait states without cache by using fast static
RAM. Costs a bundle, but it outruns the 32MHz machine under some conditions!
Then again, neither one outruns the 8086 mainframe that Datavue showed last
year: it was an ECL implementation of an 8086 (discrete logic on a set of
boards filling an XT case) that ran at 150 MHz (30MFlop/16Mwhetstone floating
point processor built in)! Only $13000.... that one was wierd!
Hard disk technology is moving right along... Maxtor showed their 1.2G full
height 5.25" ESDI/SCSI drive. Micropolis announced half height 5.25" drives
with 160 or 330MB ESDI. The latter will be under $1000 (medium quantity OEM
purchases/discount stores). 160 available now, 330 in a couple of months.
Everyone has a cheap 2400 baud modem. Almost everyone has announced V.32
modems. Nobody is willing to make any claims of good V.32 performance on
noisy lines. I picked up literature from a company that has implemented
MNP level 5 in software as a communications software package. This allows
*any* modem to have MNP level 5 data compression! They are working on the
higher MNP levels too...
Sharp had a dazzling full color LCD display showing. Not in a machine for
at least 6 months. They also showed a wonderful black-on-white VGA LCD
display. It will be in a new line of laptops in 2 months, and in a new
multisync computer-to-overhead-transparency device.
Club AT has broken a pricing barrier on laptops: around $2000 for a '286
battery powered laptop with hard disk. Not bad! (12 MHz, etc... a useful
machine)
There's a pretty cheap ($189 list) Disk Doubler board that implements a really
good data compression algorithm transparently on any hard disk. It does
its work on the fly, so any files you use get stored in compressed form.
can save lots of space with big data bases, source code, etc.
Gazelle (?- the ones who make carousel, qubit, etc) has a new disk utility
that's a combination of a disk optimizer and a SpinRite: defrags your drive,
finds bad areas, fixes interleave, etc all in one program. I'm sure there
will be several of these very soon.
There is finally a reasonably priced scanned-text recognition system that
really works. Calera sells a board+S/W for 2500 (3500 for more speed and
landscape font recognition. It autodetects all text and graphics on the
page, including any fonts from 6-28 points, including bold, italic,
underlining, etc. Columns, tables, etc. *Any* font. Typed, printed, typeset.
Puts it into the word processor and graphics file format(s) of your choice.
Pretty amazing stuff! Just put a sheet of paper in a scanner and in a
minute or so you've got a completely formatted word processing document
file, including all formatting parameters correctly set. No hassles.
Enough already. I've got to clean up all this mail waiting for me!
If you send email asking questions like "did you see xxxx" or "what about
yyyy", I'll put together another posting with more summries. I spent a
pretty intensive week at COMDEX, so I might as well give y'all a good report.
Pete
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