Sewall@UCONNVM.BITNET (Murph Sewall) (06/28/90)
VAPORWARE
Murphy Sewall
From the July 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
Analysts say that technology currently under development
will make most of the products on display at this June's
Comdex (many of which are not yet available for sale)
obsolete within three years. - CNN 5 June
Laser, Scanner, FAX, Modem.
National Semiconductor has introduced the NS32GX320
Imaging/Signal processor which can allow a single peripheral
to print, scan, send and receive FAXes and function as a
modem. Printer-FAX-copiers that include the new chip are
expected as early as next fall's Comdex. Ed Pullen, an
analyst at San Jose market research firm InfoCorp, predicts
an 8 page per minute unit will cost about $2,400.
- PC Week 28 May
"What If?" Graphics.
Bell Atlantic plans an August release of a Windows 3.0
program called Thinx which allows users to draw or import
images, attach numeric values or other attributes to them,
and then do "what if" analysis by manipulating the images.
Bell Atlantic product manager, Jack Coppley, says Thinx
blends drawing tools with database and spreadsheet
capabilities. The proposed retail price is $495.
- PC Week 11 June
Fall Colors.
Dauphin Technologies and Sharp Electronics both demonstrated
color laptop computers at last month's Comdex. Dauphin's
president, Alan Yong, says a 386-based slim screen LCD
portable will ship in September for about $10,000. Sharp's
active-matrix flat-panel color model is expected to be on
sale in the U.S. by the end of the year.
- InfoWorld 11 June
HP 50 MHz Workstations.
Hewlett-Packard's new line of 50 MHz workstations based on
the Motorola 68030 CPU was originally intended to be
introduced as a 68040 line of workstations. Motorola's
delay in shipping production quantities of the more powerful
CPU forced HP to change its plans, but the company will
offer "attractively priced" upgrades to the 68040 later this
year. - PC Week 11 June
Fall Radio Shack Catalog Item.
Advertising proof pages for this Fall's Radio Shack catalog
show a 20 MHz 80386SX model designated the 4020SX for
$2,199. - PC Week 11 June
Macintosh IIgs?
Maybe John Sculley's reference to a Macintosh IIgs, at
AppleVision '90 back in April, wasn't a "Freudian slip."
Word from Germany is that Apple dealers are telling their
salesmen not to turn away customers asking about the Apple
II. Instead the salesman are told to promote the Mac II
line which "can be upgraded to the Macintosh IIgs early next
year!" - found in my electronic mailbox
Low End Macs.
John Sculley is quoted as telling a developers conference
recently "We clearly underestimated the market importance
for new low-end and laptop Macs. We will catch up by
offering both low-end and laptop Macs over the next 12 to 15
months." The long awaited, modular color K-12 Macintosh may
be offered as early as October, but the "no compromises"
(does that really mean IIgs?) Apple II emulation card may
not be ready until next spring (sources say it has existed
in one form or another for more than two years, but
production cost remains a problem).
- InfoWorld 4 June, A2-Central June,
and my electronic mailbox
Low End LaserWriters.
Apple plans to introduce two new "personal" LaserWriters
this month in response to low cost competition from Hewlett
Packard, Canon, and others. The $2,300 Personal LaserWriter
SC will have 1 Mbyte of memory and include a driver that
generates graphics from QuickDraw. The $3,300 Personal
LaserWriter NT with 2 Mbytes of memory will include
PostScript. Both printers support 300 dots per inch and are
rated at 4 pages per minute. - PC Week 11 June
Color PostScript.
Seiko plans to ship a PostScript compatible color thermal
printer in August for $7,000. The printer will work on a
network and will offer Centronics, RS-232, and Appletalk
ports. - InfoWorld 28 May
Apple Demos System 7.
Apple engineer Chris Espinosa demonstrated the alpha version
of System 7 for the Macintosh at MacAdemia in Rochester, New
York at the end of May. The new operating system will,
without question require 2 Mbytes of RAM and a hard disk for
every machine running it. Apple engineers emphatically deny
any plans to make a "cut-down" version for smaller machine
(Does that say something about the memory of the K-12
Mac?). Espinosa was quite clear, it will run the Finder and
at least one application on a Mac with only 2 Mbytes of
RAM. He also is anticipating that Apple may bundle SIMMS
with "a good price" (but for less than already is available
by mail order). Apple will make System 7 the operating
system bundled with every machine and will run on every
machine within a year or so after introduction.
- found in my electronic mailbox
MS DOS Data on Macs.
Insignia Solutions, maker of Soft PC emulation software for
the Macintosh, is scheduled to release a program code-named
"Wizard" on July 15. The $89.95 package will compete
directly with Dayna Communications' DOS Mounter. The
Insignia product will mount a DOS disk up to 30 times faster
than DOS Mounter and will work with a wider range of drives
and files received over a network. The Insignia program
also does not need to write Macintosh desktop information
onto disks that are being read; thus, copy protected disks
can be read without becoming corrupted. - InfoWorld 28 May
Micro Channel Extensions.
Sixty-four bit and even 128 bit extensions of IBM's Micro
Channel Architecture are under development. When these
buses become available, desktop systems will approach the
I/O channel capacity of mainframes. - InfoWorld 11 June
MS-DOS 5?
Microsoft Windows product manager, Russ Werner, has been
heard to say that "a new release of DOS will provide
significantly more memory for DOS applications".
- InfoWorld 4 June
PM Lite Lives.
Cyco International and GeoWorks continue to work toward
Presentation Manager interfaces for DOS even though IBM
abandoned the idea last fall. Cyco will begin shipping
Autobase, a graphical database system that includes a PM
interface in August. GeoDOS from GeoWorks, a multitasking
graphic environment that runs in as little as 512K, is
scheduled for this Fall (yes, that is the same company that
offered a graphic user interface for the Commodore 64 back
in antediluvian times - nearly five years ago).
- PC Week 11 June
OS/2 in the Future.
Insiders say the OS/2 version 2.0 will be the last that
supports the 80286 processor. Bill Gates has predicted a
multiprocessor version of OS/2 by the first quarter of
1992. - PC Week and InfoWorld 11 June
PM Programming Difficulties.
Programming in the Presentation Manager environment is said
to be so difficult that IBM is hastily porting Motif to OS/2
to keep the Defense Department happy. Motif will permit X
Window applications to run under OS/2. - PC Week 11 June
Desqview/X.
Quarterdeck Office Systems will begin sending beta copies of
Desqview/X to developers in August. This new version of the
popular character-based multitasking environment will
integrate the X Windows graphical user interface and permit
PC users to run DOS and X Windows applications
simultaneously within on-screen windows. Desqview/X will
support OSF's Motif or AT&T's Open Look for X Windows
applications. The finished product is scheduled for the
fourth quarter. - InfoWorld 21 May and PC Week 22 May
Word Perfect for Windows.
Word Perfect vice president Pete Peterson says that a
version of his company's popular word processor for Windows
3.0 has a target date of next January. The Presentation
Manager version won't be ready until next March. The
greater sales volume of DOS compared to OS/2 is given as the
reason for giving the Windows version priority.
- InfoWorld 4 June
IBM in Your Lap.
There must be something to the IBM laptop rumors because
hardly a month goes by without a new version (see the last
two month's columns). The latest version says the "me too"
80286, 80386SX, and 80386 models will be offered in the
interest of having a complete line, but the real winner is
expected to be a 10 pound i486 little color beauty with a
100 Mbyte hard drive. - PC Week 28 May and 4 June
Palmtops.
Sony displayed a $1,320 Palmtop computer at Comdex. The
Sony PTC-500 uses a stylus entry system and has no
keyboard. Peripherals include a 2-inch disk drive, modem,
64K memory expansion, and a printer. - InfoWorld 28 May
Data Diskman.
Sony says they have no immediate plans to export the
palm-sized CD ROM reader debuted at the Tokyo Business Show
in May. The $400 CD ROM reader was designed as a portable
database and contains on-board retrieval software as well as
an output port for a television or video recorder. Software
disks under development at several Japanese companies are
expected to cost between $19 and $132 per disk.
- InfoWorld 28 May
Laptop Printer.
Computer Product Plus has a 3.6 pound (including the
batteries), 11.5 by 6.75 by 1.125 inch 24 pin thermal
printer which prints full width (8.5 inch) paper. The
WSP-200 printer is scheduled to ship in August for $349.95.
Output quality is said to be comparable with many 24-pin
impact printers. Future plans call for the addition of FAX
and scanning capabilities. - InfoWorld 21 May
If You Can't Lick 'Em, Join 'Em.
Adobe is joining the growing number of vendors offering
PostScript cartridges for Hewlett-Packard printers. Adobe's
cartridge for the LaserJet II will include 35 outline fonts
and accept downloaded PostScript fonts (while requiring the
LaserJet's memory to be expanded to at least 1.5 Mbytes).
The Adobe PostScript Cartridge will retail for $495.
- PC Week 4 June
Flash (continued).
There's some dispute about how many Macintosh programmers
remain working at Beagle Brothers (see last month's
column). The original author of Flash has departed, but
someone fixed a few bugs and made enough improvements to
create version 1.1 (a free upgrade to registered Flash
owners). Does building HyperCard stacks count as Mac
programming, or must one Think C (4.0)? We'll find out if a
substantially enhanced version 2.0 makes it to market "later
this year," and if Flash continues to be a "quick, easy,
fun, and inexpensive" utility even after System 7.0 is
released. - found in my electronic mailbox
Automatic, Continuous Backup.
Golden Triangle will offer an accelerated SCSI card and
Macintosh software that simultaneously writes files to two
hard drives as early as this month. The product named Disk
Twin is expected to have a "street price" on the order of
$500. Robert R. Tillman, a consultant to Golden Triangle,
points out that, due to the falling price of hard drives, a
user may be able to acquire Disk Twin and two 100 Mbyte
drives for about $2,000. - InfoWorld 4 June
Pocket FAX.
Seen at Comdex - a FAX attachment for your Sharp Wizard
(pocket personal schedular). The ideal Christmas present
for the executive who has everything.
- Science & Technology Today (CNN) 6 June
Multimate for Windows.
Ashton-Tate plans to release a graphic version of its
Multimate word processor by the first quarter of next year.
Multimate Executive for Windows will include all the
functionality of Multimate 4.0. Ashton-Tate also plans a
Windows version of dBase and its Applause presentations
graphics program. - PC Week 11 June
A Year's Notice.
Word Perfect will accommodate customers who complain about
too frequent upgrades by not releasing the next MS-DOS
version of its word processor until at least July 1991.
- InfoWorld 28 May
Missed Planned Ship Dates.
XyQuest's major upgrade, XyWrite IV, originally scheduled
for last February won't occur until the fourth quarter. The
delay is said to be tied to a variety of font issues.
Paradox SQL (System Query Language) missed its due date of
the first half of the year, but will be out "soon" according
to Borland's vice president and general manager of the
database unit, Rob Dickerson.
- PC Week and InfoWorld 11 June
/s Murph <Sewall%UConnVM.BITNET@CUNYVM.CUNY.Edu> [Internet]
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+ Standard disclaimer applies ("The opinions expressed are my own" etc.)