jvance@bonnie.ics.uci.edu (Joachim Patrick Vance) (11/16/89)
Could some kind soul please tell us what has been going on at
COMDEX and specifically what the Atari community is showing. I'm sure
all us information mongers on the Net would like a short summary as to
what has been going on. Thanks.
--
Joachim
jvance%bonnie@ics.uci.edu
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
| What do my .sig and UCI have in common? -- |david@bdt.UUCP (David Beckemeyer) (11/18/89)
I didn't see any other replies, so I'll post briefly what I saw.
The booth is in the West Hall; it seems like it's near where past
Atari booths have been. It's not huge, but it was pretty good
sized.
I didn't see everything, but here are the things that stick out:
* Spectre GCR, running on a Moniterm Viking monitor. Very nice.
It also was running from a removable cartridge. This is the
area in the Atari booth that seemed to attract the most
attention.
* There were a number of TT systems, running simple demos mostly.
(It reminded me of those early days of the 520 before there were
any real programs). The CPU portion was a small flat type box,
with some humps on it. They all had color monitors, many of
which were really blurry. The package isn't as ugly as I had
heard; it looks OK. It was hard to tell the real performance
with just the demos running.
* A European company was showing an "Industrial Mega". They
have basically put a Mega on a couple of small boards and
packaged it for an industrial card cage. The guy said that
it costs about $2000.
* There was a demo of PageStream. The output looked nice, but
I really don't know too much about the program.
* An assortment of CAD programs were shown, nothing that really
stood out. They had a pen plotter hooked to one of them.
* A few DTP programs. Usual stuff.
* Turbo16. Fast.
* SGSnet. A MIDI based network. I have this now. It looks
pretty real. MIDI isn't very fast, but it does seem to work
pretty well. It uses BNC type cables between nodes and has
a box at each node which connects to MIDI. $169 for 2-user
and $109 for each addl. node.
* JRI was showing GenLock and other boards. John now has
a board with GenLock, 4096 colors, and some other stuff
all in one. He was also showing a setup for GenLock
directly on your color Atari monitor. This looked really
nice.
* Some games were also shown. I didn't look that close.
One was another F16, one was a Ferarri driving game.
* MIDI stuff - the usual as far as I could tell.
The general mood regarding Atari around the show was sort
of glum. It's hard to describe. It seemed like a lot of
people were looking at the Atari booth as if they were looking
at somebody lying in a hospital bed with a terminal disease.
There was a get together put on by Atari Wednesday night.
I must say it was very nice. They have a new guy (well
actually a couple of new guys) - big surprise huh?
One of the new guys is handling Developer support. He
gave a speach saying how he knows things are bad and that
they are going to be better in the future. The thing is,
it was a little different than some of the similar speaches
made in the past. They mentioned specific things they
are going to do and the new guy Charles Cherry seemed a
lot more sincere than Sig ever did. I will still wait for
actions to back up these words - but I must say I am a
little bit encouraged by what he said.
--
David Beckemeyer (david@bdt.UUCP) | "Lester Moore - Four slugs from a .44
Beckemeyer Development Tools | no Les, no more."
478 Santa Clara Ave. Oakland, CA 94610 | - Headstone at Boot Hill
UUCP: {uunet,ucbvax}!unisoft!bdt!david | Tombstone, AZkbad@atari.UUCP (Ken Badertscher) (11/21/89)
david@bdt.UUCP (David Beckemeyer) writes: | * There were a number of TT systems, running simple demos mostly. | (It reminded me of those early days of the 520 before there were | any real programs). I find this really amazing. I've seen this statement in three places now, and I guess it means that Atari succeeded in making the TT ST compatible. So compatible, in fact, that nobody could tell a TT when they saw one! There was _one_ TT running demos at the show, and _four_ running application software: Atari's DeskSet II, and 3 third party programs: DynaCadd, Cyber series software from Antic (including a beta version of their new Cyber Motion - a really neat program), and LDW Power. People used to the feel of the above programs on ST were amazed at the TT performance. The author of Cyber Motion was really excited about it, because he was afraid that his beta version with its rough edges would look too slow at the show. He was real happy with the TT. I guess the point was to show that the TT is a big win with the existing ST software base. I guess it's unfortunate that people came away with the impression that the only TT's at COMDEX were showing demos, and didn't notice the compatibility. -- ||| Ken Badertscher (ames!atari!kbad) ||| Atari R&D System Software Engine / | \ #include <disclaimer>