SEWALL@UCONNVM.BITNET (Murph Sewall) (09/29/88)
VAPORWARE
Murphy Sewall
From the October 1988 APPLE PULP
H.U.G.E. Apple Club (E. Hartford) News Letter
$15/year
P.O. Box 18027
East Hartford, CT 06118
Permission granted to copy with the above citation
Call the "Bit Bucket" (203) 569-8739
Floptical Follow-up.
Insite's president Jim Abkisson says that the 20.8 Mbyte
floptical drive (see last month's column) which will ship in
January doesn't approach the ultimate capacity of new
materials for disk media. Mr. Abkisson predicts a 100 Mbyte
3.5 inch floppy disk within two years. Also, reports
indicate that the price of the floptical disks for the 20.8
Mbyte drive will be between $10 and $20 each.
- InfoWorld 12 September and PC Week 5 September
Rapidly Growing Mass Storage.
Storage Dimensions of San Jose, California has unveiled two
5.25 inch, 651 Mbyte hard drives which use the Enhanced
Small Device Interface (ESDI) with a 15 Megabit per second
transfer rate. Industry analyst Jay Bretzmann at
International Data Corporation says that 1 gigabyte hard
drives will be shown at the Fall Comdex in November.
- PC Week 29 August
Which Bus to Take.
Forty companies, led by Compaq, have endorsed the 32-bit
Extended Industry Standard Architecture (EISA) which is
compatible with both 8-bit XT and 16-bit AT expansion boards
as an alternative to IBM's Micro Channel Architecture
(MCA). In addition to compatibility with existing expansion
products, the EISA will support multiple processors (as MCA
does) and burst-mode direct memory access as fast as
33-megabytes per second. The new bus will be centered
around Intel's 82350 chip set and will automatically
configure systems and expansion boards, doing away for the
need for dip switches. From IBM's competitor's point of
view a major attraction is that it is an "open" standard
which will not require the payment of royalties.
- InfoWorld 12 September and PC Week 5 September
MCA Clowns, er Clones.
Apricot Computers of Birmingham, UK may be the first to
deliver an MCA clone. Apricot plans to ship fully MCA
compatible 80386SX (16 MHz) to 80386 (25 MHz) clones later
this month. Two vendors who had announced PS/2 compatibles
for this Fall, Dell and Tandy have announced indefinite
delays in shipments. Dell which has been plagued by
management problems and financial stress from having become
over-extended blames "lack of demand." Tandy says "chip
problems" are responsible for their delay.
- Random Access 10 September and InfoWorld 5 September
Micro Channel 2.
IBM expected MCA clones to be on the market by now and has a
second generation Micro Channel (the Family II bus) awaiting
introduction. The new bus may be needed for the promised
PS/2 RT line (see last month's column) and definitely for
the the 80486-based machines. Rumors say that IBM's
engineers loaded one of the RT prototypes with 8 processors
and achieved a performance rating of 200 MIPS! That speed
has raised more than a little concern in IBM's mainframe
division and may explain why Big Blue is reluctant to put
this new bus on the market (especially since they aren't
being pressed by MCA clones).
- InfoWorld 29 August and PC Week 12 September
Beating IBM to the 486.
UNISYS plans to be the first on the market by introducing
80486-based workstations (columns of July '87 and March '88)
before the end of 1989. UNISYS is busy acquiring Convergent
Technologies, which has expertise in Intel chip
architecture, to support the introduction. Expect a UNIX
operating system. - Random Access 10 September
Pocket Computer.
A 2 to 4 pound 286 MS-DOS computer barely larger than its
3.5 inch disk drive will be introduced by NEC about the time
this column appears. The Private Eye from Reflection
Technologies (see last month's column) can make this a truly
personal computer small enough to fit inside a jacket
pocket. Expect a retail price of around $2,500. Meanwhile,
Traveling Software is planning a specialized, 8 ounce,
vest-pocket PC that can do expense reports and office memos
as well as maintaining a busy executive's calendar and
telephone and address files. However, the ultimate in
hand-held computing may be the "Voice Computer" due this
month from Advanced Products and Technologies. That company
claims to have solved the problem of speech pattern
recognition and promises a PC with special chips and
software that will use the human voice as its primary input
device.
- InfoWorld 5 September, PC Week 29 August, and
Random Access 17 September
Is This NeXt Month?
Steve Jobs has sent out 4,000 invitations for an October 12
intro party of his new computer (last July and January
columns). The features of the $5,995+ machine include a 25
MHz Motorola 68030 processor, 4 Mbyes of RAM, a 300 Mbyte
erasable Sony optical drive, a built in 9600 baud modem, and
4 32-bit slots. The standard monitor is a monochrome
gray-scale display with 1,280 by 960 pixel resolution and
the operating system is "Mach," a Unix variant. The user
interface uses Adobe's Display Postscript and the X-Window
protocol. An ironic note is the report that Jobs has
concluded a deal licensing the NeXt interface to IBM (see
August's column) for use with the AIX-based PC RT's (last
month's column). Believe it when you see it; industry wags
are saying Jobs may yet send "regrets only."
- InfoWorld 12 and 19 September and PC Week 19 September
Lateware.
Ashton-Tate's dBase IV (last May and July's columns) may (or
may not) actually be shipping by the time this column
appears in print. Lotus still anticipates shipping the
several times delayed 1-2-3 Release 3.0 by Christmas (last
May's column), but you needn't wait to buy. Lotus has
announced that if you purchase version 2.01 between now and
30 days after Release 3.0 is shipped you'll get the upgrade
free. Before being purchased by Claris, Styleware planned
to release GS Works (since renamed AppleWorks GS) this
month. However, Claris's integrating and enhancing has
delayed shipments (no new date, just "coming soon").
- InfoWorld 12 September, PC Week 5 September, and
a nod, wink, and groan from an Apple Developer
[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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