SEWALL@UCONNVM.BITNET (Murph Sewall) (12/27/88)
VAPORWARE
Murphy Sewall
From the January 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
Apple's Year of the CPU.
Apple CEO John Sculley has repeatedly referred to 1989 as
the "Year of the CPU." Most of the Macintosh line (the
exceptions are the "LapMac," if it ever comes out of hiding,
and the under $1,000 Mac Plus especially targeted for the
K-12 market) will convert to the Motorola 68030 beginning
with a new 20 MHz Mac SE at MacWorld Expo this month. The
new SE will have the same high density "Superdrive" (which
also reads the IBM 1.44 Mbyte format) as the Mac IIx. The
standard system will have 2 Mbytes of RAM and a 40 Mbyte
internal hard drive. Before the end of August Apple will
release a 25 MHz upgrade of the Mac IIx with a $7,769 price
tag and a $11,000, high performance, Mac "tower." The tower
will be "fully expandable," meaning users will be able to
upgrade the machine with motherboards from future
Macintoshes. The laptop Macintosh, presently targeted for
October, may not make it in 1989. The SE compatible, 16 MHz
68HC000 CMOS portable has had problems with production
yields of it's extremely high contrast active matrix display
and suffered from Apple's inability to find a lightweight
battery with an adequate uselife. A new version of Apple
Unix which will support X-Windows will be along shortly, but
a native Mac operating system that will really take
advantage of the 68030's virtual memory capabilties won't be
delivered completely until 1991 (pieces may start appearing
as early as this year).
- InfoWorld 28 November and 5 and 12 December and
PC Week 28 November
New Apple II Too.
The long awaited Apple IIgs+ should arrive by Christmas, but
it won't be the one you read about on your local BBS (maybe
last April's column had it right after all?). And, it is
rumored that there will soon be a Macintosh Card that will
allow the IIgs (or IIgs+) to run many Macintosh (Mac Plus?)
applications.
- InCider January and Diablo Valley Apple Press October
IBM's Year of the CPU.
Big Blue plans to open 1989 with an Intel 80386SX (32 bit
processor, 16 bit bus) Model 30 with 1 Mbyte of memory and
the "Family II" (that is AT) bus. The 386 Model 30 is
little more than an upgrade to the existing Model 30-286.
IBM has a Model 30 version with Micro Channel Architecture
in the lab (scheduled for introduction at the end of the
year), but the machine may not appear unless production
costs can be lowered. By the second quarter, IBM will begin
introducing improved versions of the Model 70 and 80 with an
8514/A graphics chip in the motherboard (capable of 1,280 by
1,024 pixel resolution), and the new 80386I CPU (could that
be the rumored IBM-proprietary 80386?) operating at up to 33
MHz. Meanwhile, IBM's "Model 70 in a briefcase" continues
to flunk the FCC's Class B radio emissions tests.
Introduction of the laptop-70 has been delayed from last
October to "early in 1989?"
- PC Week 14 and 28 November and InfoWorld 5 December
Year of the MCA Clones.
IBM finally has become a little more reasonable about
licensing, and several producers are poised to begin
offering PS/2 clones during the first quarter (see
November's column) Apricot of the United Kingdom, Taiwan's
Mitec, Normerel of France, Singapore owned Advanced Logic
Research, and Dutch owned Memorex Telex have all announced
plans to market MCA PC's in the U.S. Normerel USA has set a
retail price of $7,013 for its NS 70 (guess what model it's
meant to clone) with 4 Mbytes of RAM, a 70 Mbyte hard disk
and a color monitor. - InfoWorld 21 November
Mac Clone.
Atari showed the Spectre 128, a Macintosh emulator for the
Atari ST at Comdex. The program runs HyperCard and even
AppleTalk (as well as the more run-of-the-mill Macware).
- InfoWorld 21 November
CPU's of 1990.
Intel vice president David House has been quoted as saying
the 80486XA (Extended Architecture) family of chips and
associated software will be announced and delivered to
original equipment manufacturers in 1989. The 80486 borrows
techniques from RISC architecture to redo the microcode for
frequently used instructions and achieves results that are
"dramatically faster than the 386" (see columns from March
and July of 1987 and May 1988). IBM already has begun
talking about Micro Channel follow-ons (MCA2 and MCA3) for
this new CPU family. MCA2 and MCA3 will use "reserved
lines" of the current MCA standard so that older PS/2 cards
will be transferable to the next generation of IBM "personal
systems." Meanwhile Apple's labs contain a "RISC Mac"
prototype (presumably built around the Motorola 88000).
- InfoWorld 21 and 28 November
Maccessories.
An erasable optical drive for the Macintosh that stores up
to 650 Mbytes will be shipped by Pinnacle Micro, Inc. later
this month. The REO-650 has a list price of $5,995 with
disks at $230 (per 650 Mbytes). The drive has an average
seek time of 90 milliseconds and a 7.4 megabit per second
transfer rate. A 4 Mbyte memory cache card also will be
offered for $1,995. Mitsuba is scheduled to introduce a 16
color 640 by 480 display card for the Mac SE priced at only
$995 by the time this column appears.
- InfoWorld 21 and 28 November
Another Floptical Drive.
Hardly had Insight president Jim Abkisson said that 20
Mbytes doesn't approach the capacity of the floptical drive
technology (see last September and October's columns) than
subsidiary Briar Technology of San Jose, California
announced the 43.2 Mbyte Flextra II which will begin
shipping to manufacturers by mid-year for less than $450.
The drive features an average access of 29 milliseconds and
is equipped with an embedded SCSI interface.
- PC Week 21 November
Memory in a Flash
Digipro of Huntsville, Alabama has shown a prototype of
solid-state (no moving parts) "disk drive" that is 3,000
time (yes, three thousand times) faster than today's
quickest hard disk. A 2 Mbyte commercial version of the
EEPROM (Electrically Erasable and Programmable Read Only
Memory) technology Flashdisk AT-compatible board is planned
for early summer. Keith Suggs, Digipro's founder, says 80
to 100 Mbyte Flashdisks will become possible once 1-megabit
EEPROM chips become available next year. No battery is
required to retain the chips' memory for approximately 100
years (long enough?). The major weakness of the technology
is that a whole chip (up to 256 Kbytes) is erased before new
data is stored no matter how small a change is made. There
is a "window of vulnerability" should there be a power
fluctuation during the instant before data is written to the
Flashdisk. Xicor, Inc., a Digipro competitor already is
developing a chip that can be changed by the bit or page of
memory. - InfoWorld 12 December
Hyperpad.
Although Microsoft passed (see last month's column), Lotus
Development, Ashton-Tate, Symantec, Oracle Corporation,
Compaq, and even IBM all have shown an interest in marketing
Brightbill-Robert's "Hyperpad." The program combines
features of Apple's Hypercard and character-based text
search programs with the ability to formulate direct links
between different "card" forms which can be retrieved in an
intuitive fashion. A scripting language similar to
Hypertalk is included. Look for the program before the
crocus bloom.
- PC Week 21 November and InfoWorld 21 November
Hypercard Compatibles.
Format Software of Cologne, West Germany and Silicon Beach
Software of San Diego are working on Hypercard-like
programs, Plus and Supercard respectively, that add
functions not available in Hypercard. The most notable
improvements are support for color, use of the full screen,
and multiple resizable windows. Format's Plus will permit
users to define new objects that can be implemented in the
program. Both companies will demonstrate their programs at
January's MacWorld Expo and release them in the second
quarter. The expected price for Plus is $295, no price
information has been released for Supercard.
- InfoWorld 5 and 12 December
Inexpensive 9600 Baud Modem
AISI Research, a Canadian research and development firm, has
developed a 9,600-bps modem chip inexpensive enough to
result in high speed modems for under $200.
- InfoWorld 12 December
Epson and Zenith may not be the first to market color laptop
computers (see last month's column). Hitachi and NEC
already have demonstrated working prototypes. Hitachi
appears to be the closest to reaching the market. A version
of the HL 400 equipped with an active matrix LCD color
screen has been submitted for approval by the FCC. Because
of production problems, active matrix screens currently
support a resolution of only 640 by 200 (CGA quality
level). NEC has indicated the company will wait until the
technology evolves to 640 by 320 resolution (EGA quality) or
higher before offering a color laptop. Meanwhile, Sharp is
developing a color screen based on double supertwist
technology that has 640 by 480 resolution in 512 colors but
requires much higher backlighting and is about 2.5 inches
thick in prototype (too thick for a practical laptop).
- PC Week 21 November
[The Far Side shall return (I hope)]
Murph Sewall Sewall@UCONNVM.BITNET
Business School sewall%uconnvm.bitnet@mitvma.mit.edu [INTERNET]
U of Connecticut {rutgers psuvax1 ucbvax & in Europe - mcvax}
!UCONNVM.BITNET!SEWALL [UUCP]
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(subject to change without notice; void where prohibited)
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