blob@apple.com (Brian Bechtel) (04/11/90)
Yesterday, April 11, was "Industry day" at the San Francisco MacWorld Expo. There were far too many things to see, so I'm just giving some highlights that I found interesting in my own twisted way... The hot items this time seemed to be hard disks, printers, and encryption software. I'm overwhelmed. My eyes glaze over. Please, somebody else post better reviews. Four portables were widely shown: Apple, Colby, Dynamac, and Outbound. Colby didn't have a booth, but they were on display at many other booths. Both Colby and Dynamac are roughly the same size as the Apple Portable, but contain an SE or SE/30 board. The SE/30 based portables are pretty nice, but heavy. 415-941-9090, FAX: 415-949-1019. Dynamac sells both Apple and Dynamac portables along with supporting hardware and software. Dynamac's machine is not battery operated. 800-234-2349 or 303-296-0606, FAX: 303-296-9540. Outbound's booth was crowded. Outbound's machine is okay; the screen is a regular LCD scren, with all the advantages and disadvantages thereof, they have their own pointing device, and battery life is claimed to be 2 hours. Someone needs to do a more extensive review than I could do with 5 minutes of playing on it. 800-444-4607. Wayzata Technology is shipping "The Best of MacTutor" CD-ROM; source code for volumes 1-5 of MacTutor, cross-indexed with a program called TextWare. 800-735-7321 or 612-460-8438. They are shipping lots of other CD-ROMs as well. Lotus & Novell have announced they plan to merge. Novell has announced that they are licensing FastPath to Shiva Corporation; Shiva FastPath is the new name, and Shiva takes over everything. Lotus was showing MicroDialects Announced version 3.0 of (mu)ASM, their family of cross macro assemblers for the Mac. MDI@applelink.apple.com for more information. Attention Jasmine Customers: Premier Computer Corp. fixes Jasmine and 130 other brands of hard disks. One year warranty with repair. 800-326-DISK or 612-835-2586. QLTech had three CD-ROMs for sale: Mega-ROM, 350 Mbytes of things (what I viciously call "virusware") for $49. The Right Stuffed for $99; an entire CD-ROM in StuffIt format, designed so that a BBS can have everything online by mounting this CD-ROM. CD7, 700 Mbytes of things for $99. Show special prices were a lot cheaper. They also released a press release praising their pressing facility (Nimbus Info Systems of Arlington, VA) and slamming Apple for dust-related hardware problems and finder desktop limitations. 305-446-2477 FAX 305-447-0745. iDS Systems, Inc. were showing some *tiny* hard disks; some were smaller than the Apple 800K external floppy drive. Several pull power directly from the Mac, so all you need is a SCSI cable. Capacities from 20-200 Mb. 800-733-0078 or 408-441-0500, FAX 408-441-0533. NCL America showed a handheld color scanner, plus 200 dpi and 400 dpi handheld scanners. 408-734-1006. MacTech Quarterly magazine handed out fans with a dogcow saying "Boo Woo." Nice try, folks. Dogcows do *not* say "Boo woo." 206-232-2480. Peter Norton Computing was demonstrating the Norton Utilties for the Macintosh. Spiffy user interface, and it seemed clean. Available April 22nd, they say. 213-319-2000, FAX 213-458-2048. Another disk repair product was MacTools Deluxe from Central Point Software. Better than PC Tools for the Mac. 503-690-8090. Everyone and their brother is shipping a hard disk. I don't envy the marketing intelligence people who have to keep up with the hard disk market. HP, Toshiba, and several smaller companies announced various printers for the Macintosh. HP has 5 new printers, including a localtalk-equipped color inkjet. Toshiba has a high quality dot matrix printer, the 321SL. GDT Softworks of Burnaby, Canada has a bunch of printer drivers for various other printers. GDT is at 604-291-9121, FAX 604-291-9689, or GDT.MKT@applelink.apple.com. Hayden Books has a new book titled "Macintosh Repair & Upgrade Secrets" by Larry Pina. It's designed for the 1-piece Macs. Dan Allen's new book, "On Macintosh Programming: Advanced Techniques" was almost sold out on the first half of the first day (Addison-Wesley is the publisher). Micron and DayStar Digital have cache cards for the Mac IIci. DayStar's is $995, Micron's is $795. DayStar: 800-962-2077 or 404-967-2077, FAX 404-967-3018. Micron: 800-642-7661 or 208-368-3800, FAX: 208-368-4431. Practical Solutions has an infared mouse plus something called a "Power Strip" which attaches in-line with your ADB keyboard and lets you use the power-on button to turn on your Mac and all its peripherals. Press twice and everything shuts off. 602-322-6100, FAX 602-322-9271. Bureau of Electronic Publishing sells more CD-ROM stuff than you can shake a stick at. They seem to have the widest selection of drives, titles, and software for both Mac and MS-DOS CD-ROMs 800-828-4766 or 201-808-2700, FAX 201-808-2676. DDRI has a nice little booklet called the CD-ROM Shopper's Guide. They also publish a free (controlled-circulation) magazine called CD-ROM End User. 800-688-DDRI or 703-237-0682. Disclaimers: All trademarks are owned by their respective owners. Apple Computer, Inc. thinks all of these products are wonderful, and you should go out and buy them all. Any other opinions expressed are mine, not Apple's. --Brian Bechtel blob@apple.com "My opinion, not Apple's"
rkm@PacBell.COM (Richard Mossman) (04/12/90)
It's funny, I didn't really notice most of the things you noticed (although
it is obvious that no one can effectively cover all of both Moscone and
Brooks Hall in one day and probably not in two).
What I noticed was all the video stuff. Almost every booth had a Canon
Xapshot hooked up to a frame grabber. MacroMind announced version 2.0 of
Director yesterday. NuVista was showing off their video enhancement/control
systems. There were so many flashy full motion video demos going on it was
pathetic. I guess what was most pathetic was that I can't afford most of
them (read that as nearly ALL of them).
It renewed my faith in the Mac as a system for the people (as long as the
people can afford it).
ARE YOU LISTENING OUT THERE, APPLE?
--
Richard K. Mossman {bellcore,sun,ames,pyramid}!pacbell!rkm
Work: 415/823-0974 Home: 415/754-6032
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The worst day skiing ... is always made better by discount lift tickets.ric@netcom.UUCP (Richard Bretscheider) (04/13/90)
I don't know Brian. Don't you think it was all so much more exciting when we weren't sure it would be around the next year? The little glimmers of brilliance I saw at the first three MacWorlds were so much more elegant than the blazing searchlights of industry blinding me this week. I miss the t-shirts too, the ones that were worn rather than stuffed into MacWeak bags. Ah well. (You can't tell, but my tounge is in my cheek right now ;-) -- Richard A. Bretschneider These are my words. My employer's Ric Bret words are often spoken in haste, and RAB rarely resemble my compassionate prose.