Friesen@PCO-MULTICS.HBI.HONEYWELL.COM (04/24/89)
The show was very crowded. I heard an estimated 4,000 people attended. It was difficult to move between the booths due to all of the people. The Spectre GCR was on display and I met its famous creator Dave Small. This booth was always crowded, and at least once a minute you heard some one say, 'WOW!' Dave Small really deserves credit for developing some real winner software here. This was the first time I actually got to use a Mac emulator, and I think I like it better than the Mac itself! The only thing that it cannot do now is MIDI. There are some trouble with sounds however (or at least they haven't been fully tested/the sound handling routines are considered to be in beta version), a program was being run that played audio digitized sounds very nicely. It will load Mac format disks faster than the Mac now with no additional hardware such as Translator 1. Now there is no reason for anyone (except heavy sound/MIDI users) to buy a Mac! I saw a monitor that was made to run all resolutions, but it was rather dissapointing. It retails for $800. It has no Horz. width adjustment, and the picture did not take up the whole sides of the screen. The low and med. resolutions looked ok, but high resolution was blurry (I wouldn't be able to do word processing on it). JRI was selling their genlocking device. This looked very good. They also were showing a small add on that gave the ST 4096 colors on the screen at one time. It came with a program to modify NeoPaint to support the colors. They feel that they have opened a new market and many software packedges will be written for it...we'll see. This color upgrade does not work with the genlocking device although they assured me they would have it working soon. FAST Technology was showing their 16MHz upgrade. This was pretty incredible. It really worked. They were running Flight Simulator II to show its speed. With this upgrade the screen refreshes had hardly any pause (except when preforming a trick monuver such as a barrel roll). This is supposed to work better than any other upgrade because he has caching. His socket goes under the 16MHz 68000. Someone wanted to run a fractal program in forth on the computer but it wouldn't work. I'm not going to buy this until I know how compatible it is. PC-Ditto II was on disply. WOW!!! He was running Flight Simulator 3( I think), and it was pretty fast. PC-Ditto now comes with a hardware upgrade, costs $300, and runs IBM software at above 10MHz. Migraph had a large booth. They were showing DTP of course. They were handing out fliers about their new handheld scanner. I didn't see it there, but as I said the booth was crowded and I could have missed it. Michtron was demoing some games and Fleet Street publisher. This publishing system dosen't have the best output, and seemed somewhat cheap. There was a corner of the room with one large booth (about the size of three normal ones) that belonged to Atari. In it they were displaying DTP stuff. They had the large screen monitor 1000+ by 1000+ pixals. With it they were using a powerful page editing program (I can't remember the name). They also were showing Calamus (WOW!!!) I NEED this program. This is by far the best DTP package on the market! The only thing it lacked (in my opinion) was rotation of graphics, but they said that they were going to release a Calamus+ that would have that feature amung others. They had a few other things such as Ultrascript (I saw this around every corner, it seems to be a hit) which I really didn't see. There were also many local dealers there and I made some real good deals on software. The thing that was really missing was Atari! They didn't have a booth for their new products. They were going to show their laptop at the concert (which I couldn't go to), and they never showed their ATW! Atari said... I overheard an Atari executive (who shall remain nameless) say to someone, "Why doesn't Apple just buy Atari?"--as if they were willing to sell?!?! I hope this was just some casual statement. As far as TOS 1.4, it seemed as if everyone there was running it off of disks. Atari implied that it would be 6 months to a year before the roms will be ready. The pocket PC should be shipping by the end of June. And although I find it hard to believe, I think I remember them saying the Stacy (laptop) will be shipping by fall, and tentativly priced at $1,800 with 2 drives and 1 meg. Aric Friesen Addresses: Genie: A.FRIESEN ARPA: Friesen%PCO@BCO-MULTICS.ARPA "Hypnotism; the programming language for people."