Sewall@UConnVM.BITNET (Murph Sewall) (01/28/91)
VAPORWARE
Murphy Sewall
From the February 1991 APPLE PULP
H.U.G.E. Apple Club (E. Hartford) News Letter
$15/year U.S. - $18/year Canadian
P.O. Box 18027
East Hartford, CT 06118
Call the "Bit Bucket" (203) 569-8739
Permission is granted redistribute with the above citation
These are rumors folks;
we reserve the right to be dead wrong!
Fearless Forecasts for 1991.
Apple: System 7 (finally) of course, a true notebook Mac, a
68030 version of the LC and a 68040 replacement for the IIfx
at nearly the same prices as current models.
IBM: A competitive notebook system (see below), a disk array
system for the PS/2 line, a 127 Mbyte 3.5 inch rewriteable
optical disk drive for about $1,500 (in March), the Model
30-386SX (AT bus), a 50 MHz i486 upgrade board for the Model
90 and Model 95 (late summer), OS/2 Extended Edition 2.0,
and doubling the bandwidth of the Micro Channel Architecture
bus.
Compaq: A new version of the Extended Industry Standard
Architecture bus with greater bandwidth.
Peripherals: 16 page per minute laser printers with list
prices under $5,000 and color printers with greater
performance and lower prices (some as soon as March).
- InfoWorld 7 Jan and PC Week 24/31 Dec and 7 Jan
PhotoYCC.
Kodak has proposed a universal digital-color standard called
PhotoYCC. The company plans to publish their color
interchange specification by year end. According to Kodak,
PhotoYCC has been designed to minimize the number of
computations needed to retrieve digitized colors for RGB
(computer displays), NTSC and PAL (television standards), or
CMYK (color printing). The specification will also be
compatible with high definition television, and according to
John Warnock, chairman of Adobe, PhotoYCC will be supported
in PostScript Level 2 devices. - MacWorld February
PS/2 Notebook 55.
The long-awaited IBM 386SX laptop should be introduced this
month. At 7 pounds, the 20 MHz CPU, 2 Mbyte RAM, 60 Mbyte
hard drive portable will be priced between $5,000 and
$5,500. Other features include a full-sized, slant-down
keyboard and a VGA compatible, monochrome liquid crystal
display. - PC Week 14 January
Apple's Five Year Plan.
Apple's management is said to believe that the Japanese
rather than IBM or Compaq will become the company's chief
competitive threat. Without abandoning the high-end,
workstation approach, Apple will expand their range of
products and move newer models to the market more quickly
than in the past. The company's 20 percent market share
goal will require more models at lower prices.
- PC Week 7 January
Big Blue Shuns Multiprocessing.
Citing a lack of both software and customer enthusiasm, IBM
has decided not to join Compaq, Netframe, and DEC in the
effort to develop multiple processor personal computers, at
least for the time being. IBM is content to upgrade the
power of the PS/2 line as Intel introduces more powerful
CPUs. - InfoWorld 24/31 December
Mac Compatibility.
Hydra Systems may already be shipping a $995 board designed
to provide PCs, ATs, and EISA PCs with Macintosh
compatibility. The Hydra board has a 16 MHz 68000 CPU, two
SCSI ports and an AppleTalk port. Users must supply their
own Mac ROMs (512E or later) and Mac system software.
According to Hydra, a future version of the board featuring
its own clone ROM is planned. - InfoWorld 14 January
Ballpoint.
Microsoft is readying a half-moon shaped two button and
trackball device which can clamp to either side of laptop
computers. Priced comparable to $125 Microsoft Mouse, the
Ballpoint device takes the place of the mouse where there
isn't room or a proper surface to use a mouse.
- PC Week 7 January
Transportable Mac II.
In Focus Systems plans to ship a $2,500 thin panel LCD
display before April's showers. The 10.5 inch 5000M can
display nearly 5,000 colors on screen and is intended, in
part, to make Mac IIs more transportable. The refresh rate
of this lightweight screen is about 14 frames per second
which can lead to "ghosting" of a fast moving cursor. The
company expects future models to refresh at approximately 30
frames per second. - MacWorld February
60 MIP SparcStation.
Texas Instruments may already have announced a new
superscalar RISC CPU capable of executing more than one
instruction per clock cycle. Sun Microsystems plans to
market a work station based on the TI processor known as the
Viking Sparc chip, within six months of Texas Instrument's
announcement. Meanwhile, the major supplier of SparcStation
clone logic boards, LSI Logic, is said to be developing its
own superscalar CPU, known as the Lightning, with a planned
80 MIP performance rating. Sample quantities of the Viking
are planned for May with mass production anticipated for the
third quarter. - InfoWorld 24/31 December
HP Shifting to RISC.
Hewlett-Packard will soon announce more powerful but less
expensive workstations based on the company's own RISC
Precision Architecture. The new systems which will cost
between $12,000 and $15,000 are anticipated to perform at 50
MIPS and 12 Mflops. HP's decision to move to its own RISC
processor leaves Apple as the "only significant vendor"
still committed to the Motorola 68000 family according to
one industry analyst (who clearly doesn't regard NeXT as a
significant vendor). - PC Week 14 January
Sony RISC portable.
The Sony News 3250 Laptop Workstation is based on the 17
MIPS and 1.8 Mflops R3000 RISC processor from MIPS. The
nearly 18 pound portable offers 8 Mbytes or RAM and a 240
Mbyte internal drive along with a 1,120 by 780 pixel
resolution on its 11 inch LCD. The $9,900 workstation
bundled with Unix System V, Release IV, X-Windows, TCP/IP,
and a C compiler with associated libraries should be
delivered in March. - InfoWorld 14 January
New Printers.
Hewlett-Packard will introduce its 16 page per minute
LaserJet with PCL 6 printer control language at the Seybold
Show in March. Apple is expected to introduce new 8 page
and 4 page per minute LaserWriters with True Type fonts at
the same show. Apple also has been selling off ImageWriter
inventory at deep discount (three for the price of one to
educational customers). Look for an Apple 300 dpi, low cost
bubble jet printer in March at close to the ImageWriter's
list price. - InfoWorld 24/31 December
Lower Cost Color Thermal Printers.
Tektronics has announced a new line of 300 dpi color thermal
printers. The Phaser II SX which is due to ship this month
is priced at less than $5,000 ($4,995) with 1 Mbyte of RAM
and Adobe Type Manager compatibility but no PostScript
support. The more expensive ($7,995) Phaser II PX does
include PostScript and Hewlett-Packard's HPGL format along
with 6 Mbytes of RAM. The II PX also features automatic
switching between serial, parallel, and AppleTalk ports.
- PC Week 14 January
Pen Windows.
Microsoft's Pen Windows (formerly Windows H) has the
advantage of being compatible with Windows applications, but
it does not support true character recognition. Unlike Go
Corporations pen-input system (due to ship to developers
later this month), Pen Windows is not optimized for pen
input. Microsoft chairman William Gates predicts that "A
lot of hardware vendors will be shipping Pen Windows by the
end of 1991" (almost as many as were shipping Windows by the
end of 1984?). - InfoWorld 7 January and PC Week 14 January
Air Mouse.
SelecTech Ltd. plans to ship a wireless infrared pointing
device for either the Macintosh or PC by the end of the
first quarter. The Air Mouse will retail for between $450
and $500. - MacWorld February
Win 32.
Microsoft is holding briefings for developers on the 32-bit
version of Windows (known as Windows 3.2 or Win 32) which is
planned for mid-1992. This version of Windows will deliver
many of OS/2's high-end features including multiple threads,
superior graphics, and a mechanism which will permit
applications to communicate over a network. Win 32 will run
with MS-DOS 3.1 or higher or on top of OS/2 3.0. A
developer kit will not be available until after mid-1991.
- PC Week 24/31 December
Not Making Waves.
Only about half of the two dozen applications listed in the
1989 NewWave catalog are available today. Among the missing
is New Wave Excel which Microsoft promised to deliver 16
months ago. Excel, Word Perfect, and several other
applications currently are expected in March (subject to
further postponements).
- PC Week and InfoWorld 24/31 December
PageMaker 4.0 for Windows.
Aldus has announced PageMaker 4.0 for Windows with dozens of
new features including those already in the Macintosh
version. The $795 program is in beta test and is expected
to ship later this quarter.
- PC Week 7 and 14 January and InfoWorld 14 January
Latest About Macintosh System 7.
The often delayed Macintosh system revision now is
anticipated for May. Microsoft has Excel 3 and a new
version of Word ready as soon as System 7 is. In addition,
Claris plans to enter the spreadsheet market using Wingz
technology licensed from Informix. - InfoWorld 14 January
MacDraw Pro.
Claris adds 32-bit color, XTND file exchange technology and
over 100 new features including advanced text and drawing
tools to the update to MacDraw II which will be released in
late spring. The $399 program (upgrade $99; no charge to
users who purchased MacDraw after 1 December 90) will run on
the MacPlus through the Mac II series. Users with 8-bit
(256 color) displays will be able to use more than 2,000
colors with MacDraw Pro's automatic dithering.
- PC Week 7 January
/s Murph <Sewall%UConnVM.BITNET@CUNYVM.CUNY.Edu> [Internet]
or ...{psuvax1 or mcvax}!uconnvm.bitnet!sewall [UUCP]
+ Standard disclaimer applies ("The opinions expressed are my own" etc.)