gary@eddie.MIT.EDU (Gary Samad) (06/10/87)
Well, just back from COMDEX I thought I'd give a mini-review of the show. My review will cover the Commodore booth only because 1) I was displaying my product (plug: The Microfiche Filer) there and didn't get around the rest of the show much and 2) who wants to hear about rows upon rows of PeeCee and ExTee Clones? Commodore's booth was 40'x40' (maybe 50'x50'?) feet or so and just crammed full of rows of computers and people, mostly 3rd party developers showing their wares. To their credit, we were all running on 2000s and 500s with a couple of exceptions. Also, virtually all of the machines had a MINIMUM of 3 megs! On the hardware side, I saw the Pal Jr. from Byte-by-byte (one of the few companies using a 1000 because, of course, their box works with the current 1000), Ameristar had their network running on a couple of nodes, and, of course, there were plenty of video cameras and VCRs running with Genlock. Newtek was showing Digiview, of course, and on a machine running continuously was "Maxine Headroom"! This was a female talking head completely digitized with Digiview with synchronized sound, hicups and jitters, just like Max! They were also showing Digipaint, the HAM painting program. Well, sort of a painting program, but you don't paint like you do in Dpaint, you sort of describe to Digipaint what you want to do by making "brushstrokes" then wait for Digipaint to rescan the image doing "pixel averaging" in HAM mode. You don't have the instant feedback that you do in Dpaint because everything you do takes several seconds to complete but this is a residual effect of HAM. Anyway, the effects can be stunning if you have the patience. To be released soon. Byte-by-byte was showing Sculpt 3d, the program that brought you the Juggler! This is a 3d HAM ray-tracing program that renders these images fairly quickly (at least with the demo images that they used it seemed to take only a minute or two to ray-trace a moderately complex image). This is going to be a hot one! To be released soon. Not wanting to be too self-serving, I'll not really dwell on this but a lot of interest was being generated by The Microfiche Filer as the first database that actually allows you to look for records based on pictures in the database. Since these pictures are displayed side-by-side on a single screen, a picture can be found almost instantly by simply scrolling around, not by waiting while the pics are brought up one at a time off of the disk in a slide show. Shipping now. By the way, the term "desktop video" seems to be in vogue and, at this point in time, it seems to apply only to the Amiga! Let's capitalize on this one folks!!! There were at least 3 desktop publishing programs being shown, but I must confess that I didn't really look into them. They were: Professional Page (successor to Pagemaker), Publisher 1000, and City Desk (beta). Oh, yeah, Mimetics was there showing Soundscape, a DYNAMITE music program! They were generating some great music with synthesizers controlled by the Amiga. Shipping now (I think). Bear in mind that these were my subjective observations and the aforementioned products were the ones that really caught my attention. Gary
page@ulowell.UUCP (06/15/87)
gary@eddie.MIT.EDU (Gary Samad) wrote: >"Maxine Headroom"! Hmm. Maybe shoulda been Amy Headroom? >Professional Page (successor to Pagemaker) I assume this is the same as PageSetter Pro, successor to PageSetter? ..Bob -- Bob Page, U of Lowell CS Dept. page@ulowell.{uucp,edu,csnet}