Sewall@UConnVM.BITNET (Murph Sewall) (10/29/90)
VAPORWARE
Murphy Sewall
From the November 1990 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 granted to copy with the above citation
"We will learn to walk and chew gum" - Michael Spindler,
chief operating officer, Apple Computer.
The Latest Word.
A little known research and development company has
announced a major breakthrough in speech recognition
software. Emerson & Stern's "Soliloquy" uses a method based
on the way the human vocal tract produces spoken words.
With this new approach, Soliloquy can recognize voices of
children and people with accents or colds. The method is
CPU and RAM intensive, and Emerson & Stern recommend the
minimum processor should be a 68040 running at 25 MHz. The
demonstration code is in the form of C routines written for
the Macintosh. On a Macintosh IIci the software has a
vocabulary of about 200 words. Experts say that a
vocabulary of 1,000 words would be sufficient for 95 percent
of most people's everyday conversation and 2,000 words would
be adequate for 99 percent of ordinary conversation.
Soliloquy offers a real possibility of conversing naturally
with computers within a few years. - PC Week 1 October
128 Mbyte 3.5 inch Drive.
Most Inc., a subsidiary of Nakamichi Peripherals, will
market a $2,500 magnito-optical disk drive sometime during
the Winter. The rewritable 3.5 inch media is expected to
sell for about $128. The drive's average seek time is 35
milliseconds and average data access time is 47
milliseconds. The drive will be fully compatible with the
emerging ANSI standard and future versions are planed with a
capacity of up to 512 Mbytes. - InfoWorld 24 September
True "Notebook" Computing.
NCR will bring a four pound pen-based notebook PC to Fall
Comdex for private showings. The pen-based system promises
to automate such paper intensive tasks as field data
collection and inventory management. NCR's active digitizer
is said to be more "paperlike" than the glass surface used
by the Grid pen-based system. If NCR decides to put their
"Handwriter" into production, it should be shipping by
Spring Comdex. - PC Week 8 October
Flash Cards.
Volume quantities of Intel's one and four Mbyte non-volatile
Flash Memory IC cards should be shipping by Christmas. The
cards can revise and store applications and sequential
files. At present, the cards cannot rewrite data at the
file level (one file per card; revising requires rewriting
the entire file). The cards should be a boon to laptop
users; no battery backup is required for code retention.
- InfoWorld 8 October
Apple II Compatibility.
The "no compromises" Apple II card for the Macintosh
promised by John Sculley appears to represent a substantial
compromise. The under $200 NuBus board has been announced
as an Apple //e card which will not support recent Apple
IIgs applications. The card isn't expected to ship until
next March and will have a connector on the back for a 5.25
inch disk drive. - PC Week 1 October
50 MHz i486.
Intel expects volume production of the 50 MHz version of the
i486 CPU sometime in the second quarter of 1991. The speedy
processor will be offered in a highly integrated module that
will include an internal 256K static RAM cache with a cache
controller. Performance is expected to exceed that of the
33 MHz version of the i486 by as much as 50 percent.
Anticipated prices for most 50 MHz i486 systems are expected
to be in the $8,000 range. - PC Week 1 October
Don't PS/1 It!
In a letter to corporate customers, IBM has indicated it
will void the warranty on any PS/1 with a Token Ring board
installed (IBM alleges the PS/1 is only a home computer).
- InfoWorld 24 September and PC Week 8 October
All 386 PS/2's.
The 80286-based PS/2 Model 30 will soon be replaced by the
Model 40SX with a 80386SX CPU. This model will continue to
be distinguished by an AT (not Micro Channel) bus.
- PC Week 24 September and InfoWorld 1 October
New Windows.
An upgrade to Microsoft Windows 3.0 may ship during the
first half next year (recall that this product, first
announced in 1984, helped to popularize the term
"vaporware"). Windows 3.1 will feature True Type scalable
fonts, but difficulty developing this technology have been
reported. Version 3.1 will also have shell improvements,
greater network support, and "richer imaging." Chairman
Bill Gates predicts more than 1,500 applications developed
for Window's graphic environment by next year.
- PC Week 1 October and InfoWorld 8 October
Macintosh System 7 Delayed Again (What Else is New?).
The good news is that System has gone from alpha to beta.
The bad news is that beta testing typically takes six
months. Apple has announced another postponement of the
product until "the first half of next year." It appears the
product will miss it's originally planned shipping date
(last summer) by about a year.
- PC Week and InfoWorld 24 September
Windows Under OS/2
OS/2 eventually will run Windows applications code without
modification using a binary compatibility layer to map
Window's into Presentation Manager. The extra layer of
software will cause some loss of performance. OS/2 version
3 will be designed to run Windows applications directly from
OS/2 without performance degradation (which raises the
question - is PM necessary?). Microsoft chairman, Bill
Gates, also says that the plan is to include both Adobe Type
Manager and True Type in OS/2. Also in the works is
"portable" OS/2 (also known as OS/2 "New Technology") which
will be designed to port to multiple processors including
Motorola 68000 and 88000 families (OS/2 on a Mac?).
- InfoWorld 1 October
DOS 5.0.
The latest beta version of Microsoft's DOS 5.0 includes task
switching similar to the capability provided by SoftLogic
Solutions' Carrousel. Microsoft is expected to release DOS
5.0 by the middle of 1991. - PC Week 24 September
Productive Pricing.
Microsoft is said to be offering Project for Windows for $99
at Windows 3.0 seminars. However, at Engineering
Productivity Seminars, Microsoft asks $199 for the same
software. - PC Week 8 October
Full UNIX System V, Release 4 Implementation.
While the mainframes and minis are still waiting for AT&T's
UNIX V.4, freshman at Virginia Tech are busy running this
latest release on their UNIX system of choice -- the Amiga
3000! - InfoWorld 8 October
Look Ma, No Windows.
Microsoft Word 5.5 for MS-DOS will feature pull-down menus
similar to the interface used in Word for Windows. The
choices will be represented in text, not graphics. The
upgrade will be announced this month and ship by the end of
the year - PC Week 15 October
Need Persuasion?
Aldus will release it's $595 Persuasion 2.0 for Windows by
the end of the year. It will be bundled with Adobe Type
Manager. - PC Week 15 October
Delivery Postponed.
Oracle has previewed version 7.0 of their fully distributed,
portable relational-database management system at the
company's annual user conference but also pushed back
release until next year. - PC Week 1 October
SAS for NeXT.
SAS Institute plans to port its entire line of decision
support and data analysis applications to the new Motorola
68040-based NeXT system. SAS/Insight which is not yet
available on the PC platform will be available on the NeXT
workstation. SAS/Insight is a data analysis program which
provides three dimensional charting tools and permits users
to analyze data graphically. - PC Week 17 September
SPARCs Are Flying.
Opus Systems and CompuAdd both plan to announce new Sun
SPARC compatible systems. Look for demonstrations at
Comdex. - PC Week 15 October
Poqet Clone.
Toshiba will show a one-pound, palmtop PC code-named the PC
Companion at Comdex. The computer bears a marked
resemblance to the similar sized Poqet. - PC Week 1 October
HyperActive.
The new HyperCard 2.0 for the Macintosh may not be announced
officially until mid-November, but user groups received
copies of the disks during the first week of October. Maybe
printing the documentation is taking an extra six weeks?
- I have the disks but not the docs
Bailouts (Forever Vaporware).
Borland International will not develop any more versions of
its Sprint word processor. Applications technical support
manager Mark Williams says the firm will devote their
resources to their core Paradox, Quattro, and language
products. Banyan Systems is cancelling development of
network server hardware and will focus attention on its
VINES networking software. - PC Week 15 October
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