SEWALL@UCONNVM.BITNET (Murph Sewall) (04/29/88)
VAPORWARE Murphy Sewall From the May 1988 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 Picking Up Speed. Intel and Motorola both have announced faster versions of their 32-bit processors. Motorola will offer a 33MHz version of the 68020 processor (currently running at 25MHz) used in the Mac II and a 16MHz version of the 68000 CPU used in other Macs (which now run at 12.5MHz). Motorola also will offer a low-power consumption 16MHz 68HC00 CMOS chip that is expected to find a home in Apple's planned LapMac. It may be 6 months to a year before Apple announces upgraded Macintoshes using the new chips. Although the new 33MHz 68020 has a faster clock rate than the more advanced 68030 (at 20MHz), the 68030 remains more powerful because it contains the 68851 memory management functions internally and is "pipelined" (capable of carrying out more than one of some operations in a clock cycle). Meanwhile, Intel is about to begin shipping 25MHz versions of the 80386 processor and companion 80387 math coprocessor. - InfoWorld 4 April and PC Week 5 April Virtual PC-AT. A major difference between Intel's forthcoming 80486 processor (see last March's and last July's columns) and the current 80386, besides a 3 to 4 times increase in speed, will be the new chip's 80286 virtual-mode capability. The 80386 has a virtual 8086 mode that will allow it to run multiple sessions of MS-DOS. The 80486's virtual 80286 will allow it to run multiple sessions of OS/2 with each session capable of running multiple applications. The 80386 permits each session to access up to 1M-byte of memory in 64K-byte pages; the 80486 will allow each session to access 16M-bytes of memory in 640K pages (much less memory swapping). - PC Week 5 April For The Power Users. Even before Motorola's official mid-April announcement of their powerful new 88000 RISC processor family (see last month's column), Tektronix Inc. announced an intention to offer a color graphics workstation built around the new chip by the end of the year. The price is expected to compare with the company's present $25,000 high-end graphic workstation. Roger Ross, manager of Motorola's Advanced Microprocessor Operations, says a typical configuration with 32 Mbytes of RAM (yes, that's 32 Mbytes) and a 380 Mbyte hard disk will be cost around $68,000 to $85,000. However, he expects the cost to come down rapidly to under $20,000 by the end of the decade and less than $10,000 in the early 90's. - PC Week 22 March and InfoWorld 28 March MIPS Claims Most MIPS. MIPS Computer Systems of Sunnyvale, California will offer a RISC (Reduced Instruction Set CPU) microprocessor with performance specs even faster than the recently announced Motorola 88000 family (see above). The R3000 microprocessor with its companion R3010 math coprocessor is capable of sustained performance 20 times that of a VAX 11/780 (still the "workhorse" mainframe of many colleges). MIPS claims the CPU alone offers four to six times the performance of Intel's 80386 or Motorola's 68030. - InfoWorld 4 April New Mac System Features. Software designers at Apple are saying that Mac System 6.0 and Finder 6.0 could be released by mid June. Major new features include: MacroMaker - a keystroke recorder designed to work with popular Macware such as Microsoft's Works, QuickerGraf - Andy Hertzfeld acceleration of QuickDraw that should improve display of color images on the Mac II, and Notification Manager - a program to tell users when a background task running under MultiFinder has been completed. The Notification Manager will have three response options - "polite," "audible," and "alert." New software drivers for the ImageWriter LQ and PostScript compatible laser printers also will be added. - PC Week 12 April Price Multipliers. Apple 2 programs running on individual computers will be able to access server-based data on an AppleTalk network, but programs stored on and run from the server won't work unless they are "share-aware." Numerous companies, including Beagle Bros, Claris (surprise), Pinpoint, Roger Wagner, Sensible Software, Stone Edge, Styleware, the TML, have announced plans for Apple 2 share-aware software. Software announced so far appears priced to encourage continued purchases of single CPU versions. For example, Claris has priced AppleWorks/Network at $1,616 per server, and Beagle Bros' TimeOut packages that go with AppleWorks/Network will carry prices ranging from $249 to $445 per server. Stone Edge's DB Master V/Multiuser looks like a comparative bargain at $500 per server. - Open Apple April Mac Vapor Thickens. Lotus Development has announced a two-month delay in the shipping date of Modern Jazz (an enhancement to the the ballyhooed but disappointing Jazz program introduced in 1985). Originally scheduled to ship in late March, Lotus now hopes to deliver in late May. As an integrated software package, Modern Jazz's prime competitor is Microsost's Works. Modern Jazz will offer one major feature lacking in Works: off-line macro recording which automates complex tasks. Meanwhile, Apple spin-off, Claris, has announced its initial line of software (not inherited from Apple), the Smartform Designer and Smartform Manager won't ship until the end of the year instead of in June as originally announced. - InfoWorld 4 and 11 April and PC Week 12 April PC Vapor Too. In an embarrassing vapor double, Lotus also announced that the announced mid-summer delivery of 1-2-3 Release 3.0 will not occur; an end of year debut now is envisioned. Sources close to the dBase IV development effort say they doubt that debugging will produce a program clean enough to meet the scheduled July 31 delivery date; official Ashton-Tate spokesmen continue to describe the program as on schedule. IBM's Presentation Manager may yet make the announced October delivery, but 206 bugs have been documented thus bar in the latest beta version. Meanwhile, Migent Software's network database foundation, Emerald Bay, announced with great fanfare in late 1986 appears seriously behind schedule. Emerald Bay is not a single product but a concept involving several distinct elements. As the original shipping date passed, beta-test copies of the program still do not contain the much discussed memory-resident "server engine" designed to transparently shuttle database requests between user applications and a network data base. - PC Week 29 March and 12 April Mac II Graphics Coprocessor. Apple is expected to release a 32-bit graphics coprocessor card for the Mac II early next year. Graphics coprocessors work in parallel with a computer's CPU, freeing the CPU for image processing. Users of the card on a Mac II will experience an up to 200% improvement in throughput. Industry sources expect Radius to introduce (a less expensive) 8-bit graphics coprocessor for the Mac II later this year. - PC Week 5 April Forthcoming (Maybe) Macware. Nashoba Systems has announced plans to release an enhanced version of its best-selling file-management software FileMaker Plus by the end of May. The new features include electronic-forms and database-report generation, ability to perform computations within fields of text, support for color on the Mac II, and compatibility with Quickdraw-based laser printers and the AppleShare local area network. Preliminary marketing literature refers to the new program as FileMaker4 with a list price of $296 (the same as for the current version). Revisions of Mac Write, Mac Paint, and Mac Project already are in stores, and Mac Draw 2.0 which is undergoing major revisions is on schedule for June. More 2.0, from Living Video Text, which is being touted as not only an outline processor but also as a full function desktop presentation program with sophisticated word processing is expected (but not yet officially announced) later in the summer. - PC Week 29 March and InfoWorld 4 and 11 April An All-in-One Clone? Although Commodore's Amiga has been popular with hobbyists and individuals, the company is struggling financially. Rumor has it that Commodore will try to restore profitability with a new line of powerful business computers featuring both Intel 80386 and Motorola 68020 (maybe even 68030) coprocessors. - PC Week 5 April FRAM Memory. A new form of memory device is being developed by Ramtron Corp., Krysalsis Corp. and a few others. The new devices are based on the "ferroelectric effect." FRAMs (Ferroelectric Random Access Memory) will be made of special ceramic materials imprinted in silicon or gallium arsenide. Application of a current to these magnetic ceramics changes their polarity. Unlike today's dynamic RAM chips (DRAMs), FRAMs are nonvolatile. That is, whatever data is stored on them until the memory is rewritten or erased. - InfoWorld 21 March You Only Thought it Wasn't Vaporware. It appears that programmer job security is an undocumented feature of Microsoft's OS/2. The next release of the OS/2 Software Development Kit (SDK) will introduce changes in the operating system that may require source code changes in application programs that already have been written for release 1.0 of OS/2. - PC Week 29 March More Than You'll Ever Want to Know. Microsoft's documentation for OS/2 Extended Edition (with the Presentation Manager) matches the gargantuan size of 15 Mbytes of code, and 3 Mbytes of RAM (see last month's and last February's columns). The "docs" fill four feet of shelf space and weighs 125 pounds (remember when it was called "micro" computing?). - InfoWorld 21 March Unvaporware. Hewlett-Packard executives are said to be thrilled with the publicity for New Wave that has occurred since Apple filed a lawsuit against Microsoft and HP. Even though the operating system was introduced last fall, it might as well have been vaporware for all the attention it received until it was named in Apple's litigation. - InfoWorld 28 March When You're Hot, You're Hot! From the Freedom of Information Fact File: In the early 50's there was a nuclear test code-named "Apple II" in which scientists set up mannequins in the "survival evaluation" test town on the edge of the blast zone in "sexually compromising positions" (you could tell if you looked through the Windows - version 2.03 no doubt). - InfoWorld 4 April Japanese PostScript. Adobe is said to be developing a kanji version of PostScript that will allow laser printers to output Japanese ideographic characters. - PC Week 29 March --------------------- Disclaimer: The "look and feel" of this message is exclusively MINE! (subject to change without notice; void where prohibited) ARPA: sewall%uconnvm.bitnet@mitvma.mit.edu Murphy A. Sewall BITNET: SEWALL@UCONNVM School of Business Admin. UUCP: ...ihnp4!psuvax1!UCONNVM.BITNET!SEWALL University of Connecticut