SEWALL@UCONNVM.BITNET (Murph Sewall) (10/30/89)
VAPORWARE
Murphy Sewall
From the November 1989 APPLE PULP
H.U.G.E. Apple Club (E. Hartford) News Letter
$15/year
P.O. Box 18027
East Hartford, CT 06118
Call the "Bit Bucket" (203) 569-8739
Permission granted to copy with the above citation
Comdex Fall '89.
November is Comdex month. Among the announcements expected
are: a bevy of i486 EISA computers, including a system from
Grid, the Sharp PC 8000 color laptop (prematurely announced
in an accidental press release at PC Expo in Chicago last
month), the Zenith 386SX-based color laptop with 1 Mbyte of
RAM and VGA graphics listing at $2,995, and several PC
HyperCard clones, among them Plus for Presentation Manager
from Spinnaker Software.
- MacWeek 19 September, PC Week 9 October,
and InfoWorld 9 October
Merry Christmas From Big Bluegrass.
Once again IBM plans a foray into the home market with a
line of low-cost home computers starting at $700. Code-named
Bluegrass, the line will have two more expensive models and
a variety of memory, speed, and hard drive options.
- PC Week 9 October
SCAT.
Chips & Technologies has announced the 82C235 Single Chip AT
(SCAT) which will allow manufacturers to build an AT
compatible motherboard using as few as 14 components plus
memory. The SCAT is available at 8, 10, 12.5 and 16 MHz and
can drive up to four expansion slots. The chip will be
available in sample quantities this month.
- InfoWorld 9 October
Apple, Microsoft Font Alliance.
Apple and Microsoft have announced a cross-license agreement
which gives Microsoft Apple's outline font technology,
code-named Royal, for use in the OS/2 Presentation Manager
in return for Microsoft's PostScript-clone technology for
use in future Apple printers. Rumors of the agreement
precipitated a decline in Adobe stock from $23 to a 52-week
low of $15 5/8. Adobe announced plans to buy back up to $15
million worth of common stock (about 4.8% of outstanding
shares).
- InfoWorld 25 September and MacWeek 19 and 26 September
Widening and Extending the Micro Channel.
IBM announced that later this year they will make public
technical specifications on how board makers and MCA system
manufacturers can quadruple the current 20 Mbyte per second
transfer rate. Entry Systems vice president Robert Carberry
emphasized that the specifications are not a change in the
MCA architecture. IBM also announced plans to extend the
Micro Channel beyond PS/2s to scientific workstations and
select System/370 mainframes.
- PC Week 2 October and InfoWorld 2 October
HP's EISA i486 Tower.
Hewlett-Packard has announced the Vectra 486 PC, a
tower-style PC based on Micro Channel rival Extended
Industry Standard Architecture (EISA), for shipment in
January. The 25 MHz computer offers hard disks ranging in
size from 84 Mbytes to 670 Mbytes with announced prices of
less than $14,000 to around $17,000. - PC Week 16 October
Second Generation RISC Chip.
Although operating system problems have delayed the
announcement of IBM's new RT-3 line (see the September and
October columns), Big Blue has officially divulged details
of their new, second generation RISC processor in three
technical papers presented at last month's IEEE conference
in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Among other attributes, the
new chip is able to execute multiple instructions
simultaneously, a capability critical to multiprocessing.
- PC Week 16 October
RISC Workstation Running OS/2.
Microsoft and DEC are said to have the OS/2 kernel up and
running on a workstation built around the Motorola 88000
RISC CPU. - PC Week 9 October
Intel i960 Doubles RISC Performance.
Intel has announced the 32-bit i960 RISC chip which is
capable of 66 MIPS at it's 33 MHz clock speed (two
instructions per cycle and nearly four times as fast as the
33 MHz i486). The i960 was developed for real-time and
embedded systems applications and can increase the speed of
page publishing printers by as much as six times. According
to Intel the i960 will be available in the second quarter of
1990. - InfoWorld 18 September
Open Systems Foundation Switches to Mach.
The Open Systems Foundation has told its members that it may
swap out the IBM AIX kernel from its operating system and
replace it with Carnegie Mellon University's Mach. The
reason for the move is the superior multiprocessing
capability and security of Mach. Industry analysts doubt
that OSF/1 can meet the announced July 1990 availability
date after such a dramatic change in the operating system's
contents. - InfoWorld 2 October
What NeXT?
Although more than 50 vendors have announced plans to
introduce products for Steve Job's NeXT computer, only a
handful will be available by the end of this year. Graphics
and publishing professionals are eagerly awaiting a color
display, but Steve Jobs has indicated that one won't be
available until NeXT, er next, year. NeXT plans to by-pass
eight-bit color and introduce a full 32-bit color display.
In order to assure adequate performance, the company is
developing a custom video chip and accelerator for
manipulating 24-bit color images. - NeXTWeek 19 October
IIgs Laptop.
Although the LapMac finally has been announced, it may be
several months before it is readily available. Rumor has it
that Apple has a project code-named "Malibu" to use the
matrix display and battery pack developed for the LapMac in
a laptop IIgs. It would be nice if they'd sell the display
all by itself for all those //c owners who have never had a
monitor as portable as their computer.
- Thanks to Lynda Botez for passing this along from the
Cupertino NewsNet
Splashy Product Rollout Scheduled for March.
Apple has booked the hall for a major product announcement
in March. Details of exactly what's planned remain sketchy,
but the best guess at this point is that it will be the long
rumored Mac-Tower and a new family of QuickDraw laser
printers. - MacWeek 3 October
Better Laptop Battery.
Moltech Corporation is developing a new battery for laptop
and notebook computers that will have five times greater
storage capacity than current nickel-cadmium or lead-acid
batteries. The new "thin-film" batteries use solid polymer
electrolytes. Polymer batteries also are less expensive to
manufacture, but they are likely to be sold for higher
prices initially because of their reduced size and weight
and increased usable lifetime. - Random Access 23 September
3-D, Full-Color Animation.
Electic Image is set to ship Spotlight, a 32-bit color 3-D
rendering and animation program, in January 1990. The
$7,495 program requires a Mac II family computer with a
minimum of 2 Mbytes of RAM and a large capacity hard disk or
optical storage system. Spotlight brings broadcast quality
3-D animation to the Macintosh. - MacWeek 3 October
Cache a Faster Mac IIci.
Apple plans to announce a cache board for the Macintosh IIci
later this year. One already is available from Daystar
Digital for $995. The board produces an up to 40% increase
in speed according to Andrew Lewis, president of Daystar.
Mr Lewis also said that cache boards increase speed less
expensively than accelerator boards. Daystar makes 33, 40,
and 50 MHz accelerators for the Mac II and IIcx, and is
expected to announce accelerators for the IIci by the time
this column appears in print. - InfoWorld 2 October
Serious Video Game.
Nintendo plans to start an online financial service to be
run by Fidelity Investments of Boston. The service will use
a standard Nintendo game unit as a terminal. Software and
hardware for connecting to a telephone line are due in
1990. - Random Access 14 October
But Will It Bag 'Em?
Prodigy, the telecommunications joint venture between IBM
and Sears, is test marketing grocery shopping by
telecomputing in three cities. Prodigy expects its basic
service to be available to 40% of American homes by the end
of this year. - Random Access 14 October
Macintosh System 7.0 On-Schedule?
Apple executives are cautiously optimistic about progress on
the announced new Macintosh operating system software. Last
May, Apple indicated developers would begin receiving seed
modules of the new system in the fall. Ed Birss, Apple vice
president of product engineering, now says "Developers will
begin getting code before the end of the year." Apple had
planned on shipping System 7.0 in the first quarter of 1990,
but officials now acknowledge that not all of the core
technologies announced last spring will be ready to ship at
the same time. One problem which remains to be dealt with
is the system's size. Developers recently assembled and
linked an alpha version and consumed 1.2 Mbytes!
- MacWeek 3 October and InfoWorld 9 October
Word For Windows.
Microsoft has not announced nor shown developers its Windows
version of Word, but those who have seen the beta software
say that it is an entirely new product with more differences
than similarities to the DOS product.
- InfoWorld 2 October
Deja Vu.
The vast delay between the originally announced release and
delivery dates of Microsoft's Windows brought the word
"vaporware" out of the realm of jargon and into general
use. Hence, it should be no surprise that Microsoft cannot
ship Windows 3.0 (see last February's and July's columns) by
year's end as originally planned. "Immature source code"
and the lack of a full set of device drivers will keep
Windows 3.0 at home in Redmond until March or later. When
the program finally is available, users will find that many
of their Windows 2.1 applications will not run in protected
mode; while those applications can run in real mode, they
will be restricted to 640K. An obvious problem is that both
Lotus 1-2-3 Version 3 and dBase IV rely on Rational Systems'
DOS extender, but Windows 3.0 will be ir-Rational.
- PC Week 17 September and 16 October
and InfoWorld 16 October
dBase for Windows.
Two versions of dBase IV for Windows have been shown to
developers in recent months. Ashton-Tate programmers are
working on a "core program" that can be rapidly ported to a
wide range of environments including Windows, X Window,
Motif, Presentation Manager, and Macintosh.
- InfoWorld 16 October
Lotus 1-2-3 Update.
The graphic 1-2-3/G for the Presentation Manager (see last
August's column) now has a scheduled delivery date of 23
March 1990. Macintosh 1-2-3 is slated for March 1991.
- PC Week 16 October
Plans for Excel.
Microsoft's product manager for Excel, Susanne Foels, said
the next version of Excel will permit users to mix graphics
and worksheets on the same page and also will contain three
dimensional charting. - InfoWorld 16 October
___________________________________________________________
(~~~~) / \
( 0 0 ) | (Prof) Murph Sewall <Sewall@UConnVM.BITNET> |
(| > |) ___/ Marketing Department <Sewall%UConnVM.BITNET@CUNYVM.CUNY.Edu>|
( \__/ ) <___ School of Business ...psuvax1!uconnvm.bitnet!sewall |
(____) \_ U. of Connecticut *standard disclaimer applies* /
\__________________________________________________________/
(This .sig "borrowed" from Johnson Earls <Jearls@Polyslo.CalPoly.Edu> Thanx!)
"Studies show 80 percent of all Americans know about home computers. That's
higher than the percentage of Americans who know about sex."