Info-IBMPC@WSMR-SIMTEL20.ARMY.MIL ("Info-IBMPC Digest") (06/04/91)
Info-IBMPC Digest Mon, 3 Jun 91 Volume 91 : Issue 137
Today's Editor:
Gregory Hicks - Rota Spain <GHICKS@WSMR-Simtel20.Army.Mil>
Today's Topics:
Murph's VAPORWARE Column for June 1991
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Date: Sat, 27 May 1991 09:42:46 EST
From: Murph Sewall <Sewall%UCONNVM.BITNET@YALEVM.YCC.Yale.Edu>
Subject: Murph's VAPORWARE Column for June 1991
VAPORWARE
Murphy Sewall
From the June 1991 APPLE PULP
H.U.G.E. Apple Club (E. Hartford) News Letter
P.O. Box 18027
East Hartford, CT 06118
Call the "Bit Bucket" (203) 569-8739
Permission granted to redistribute with the above citation
These are rumors folks;
we reserve the right to be dead wrong!
Significant PC Upgrades.
Intel has announced a $495 "snap-in" 20 MHz 80386SX board with cache
for 80286 systems. AOX Inc. of Waltham, Massachusetts also is expected
to announce 16 MHz and 20 MHz versions of a similar product. The 20
MHz AOX board is expected to sell for less than $400.
Both upgrades, about 1.5 inches square, will snap into existing 80286
CPU sockets and support an 80287 math coprocessor. Power supplies will
not be adversely affected, and upgrades to faster memory and disk
drives will not be required. Also, Weitek has announced a Windows
accelerator chip for use on AT-bus systems.
The Weitek User Interface Controller will be a $150 board that will at
least double Windows' speed. The chip acts as a graphics coprocessor
intercepting pixel-block moving and line drawing calls. Pixel block
moves will be improved by as much as 25 times and line drawing by four
or five times according to tim Propek, Weitek's vice president of
marketing. The Weitek accelerator should be shipping by the fourth
quarter. Talks between Weitek and Apple's design engineers about
building a similar accelerator for the Macintosh are in early stages.
Finally, DOS 5.0 (see January's and last month's columns) will be
selling as an upgrade through retail outlets (less than $99) by
mid-June. - InfoWorld 6 May
OS/2 in Your Future?
IBM has announced aggressive price cuts and unbundled OS/2 Extended
Edition. In addition to permitting Extended Edition to run on
competitors' platforms, Big Blue is improving its capability to work
with Microsoft Windows 3.0. IBM chairman John Akers has told large
corporate customers that "OS/2 is absolutely critical to IBM's future.
We're going to devote all resources of the corporation to it, sometimes
to the detriment of other business units." IBM is building a new, more
intuitive (more like a Macintosh?), user interface for OS/2 version
2.0. Among the added features of the "Workplace Shell" will be "drag
and drop" manipulation of icons. - InfoWorld 22 April and PC Week 6
May
Windows 3.1.
Microsoft has moved its first upgrade of Windows 3 into limited beta
testing suggesting that the next release (version 3.1) could ship by
the end of this year (about 12 months later than the original plan).
Microsoft has decided against including Net DDE and other network
enhancements in this version. The major new feature will be TrueType
outline technology. The File Manager also has been redesigned;
otherwise, the update is a minimal maintenance upgrade. - PC Week 22
April and InfoWorld 29 April
Another "Standard" That Wasn't.
IBM appears ready to put SAA (Standard Applications Architecture) to
rest in favor of Open Systems Architecture (OSA). SAA has failed to
meet its goal of giving users the same look and feel across all IBM
hardware platforms. So, it appears SAA is about to join TopView and
Presentation Manager as once ballyhooed ideas whose time refused to
come. Big Blue now plans to devote significant research and
development resources over the next three years to OSA in hopes that it
will prove more successful in achieving a uniform, cross-platform user
interface. - InfoWorld 13 May
Eight-in-One.
Spinnaker should ship its eight module integrated PFS:WindowWorks by
the end of June. The $199 product includes word processing, mail
merge, page layout, spreadsheet, dBase compatible flat-file database,
report generator, charting, and Hayes-compatible communications. -
InfoWorld 6 May
Color Touch Screen.
IBM has been privately demonstrating a prototype of a color touch
screen for portables. A study commissioned by IBM predicts that the
overall portable category will account for 37 percent of worldwide PC
sales by 1994. - InfoWorld 22 April
ROM Cleaning.
For owners of older Macintosh SE/30's and II's which do not have the
32-bit clean ROMs necessary for full System 7 functionality, Connectix,
the people who make Virtual and Maxima, are going to release a utility
called MODE32. Connectix will price the utility which provides 32-bit
cleanliness via software at $169. Other rumors suggest that Apple is
working on a ROM upgrade based on the 32-bit clean IIsi ROMs. Such an
upgrade may take until the end of the year, though, in part because
Apple is adding features as well as cleaning up the ROMs. A report on
CompuServe quoted Charlie Oppenheimer, Apple's Product Development
Manager, as saying Apple was hoping the MODE32 would help solve the
32-bit ROM problem (suggesting Apple won't be ready anytime soon). -
Tidbits 6 May 91
Mac Classic/30.
If all the rumors prove true, Apple is going to have a busy summer and
Fall. The success of the Macintosh Classic has been so spectacular,
that Apple plans to replace its last remaining "SE," the SE/30, with a
Classic/30 (with 32-bit clean ROM, no doubt) in the Fall. - PC Week 22
April
Photorealistic.
Edsun Labs has been sending boatloads of their continuous-edge graphics
(CEG) chips to Apple. The chips are said to produce breathtakingly
TV-like displays. Could they be intended for Apple's new CPU's (see
last month's column)? - PC Week 13 May
Let Me Borrow a Few CPU Cycles.
Apple, through its Advanced Technology Group and university research
fund (or whatever it's called), has been working with a group at the
StatLab in Heidelberg on a project called NetWork. It's objective is to
permit distributed processing over an AppleTalk network. - TidBITS 29
April
Wireless LAN.
IBM is testing two wireless LAN prototypes. One provides one million
bits per second by radio at low power in a band which will not require
FCC licensing. The other transmits ten megabits per second in the
infrared spectrum. Big Blue is targeting a maximum 10 megabits per
second for the radio frequency technology and 100 megabits per second
for the infrared. The wireless technology is seen as a convenient way
to provide LAN services to laptop computers. - PC Week 6 May
Blinding Speed.
Intel may do a 200 MHz version of the i486 chip if i586 development
(see January's column) continues to slip. Meanwhile, IBM is readying a
pair of 50 MHz Models 90 and 95 for release this summer. - PC Week
22 and 29 April
Harvard Graphics for Windows.
Software Publishing Corporation plans to ship Harvard Graphics for
Windows by the end of September and the OS/2 version by the end of the
year. - InfoWorld 22 April
New Spreedsheets.
Resolve, a Macintosh spreadsheet based on Infomix's Wingz technology,
should be shipping from Claris by mid-summer. Resolve will supports
System 7's Object Linking and Embedding capabilities but also will run
under System 6. MacProject II version 2.5 with direct links to Resolve
and enhanced multiuser productivity should ship in the third quarter.
Meanwhile, Lotus has "resolved" to make 1-2-3 Mac a success after its
earlier failures with Jazz and Modern Jazz (which didn't even ship).
1-2-3 Mac should ship in the Fall; its strongest selling feature is
expected to be cross-platform capability with the MS-DOS version. - PC
Week 29 April and 6 May
Flatpack holds 64 MBits of SRAM.
White Technology (Phoenix, AZ) developed a very-dense SRAM chip. It has
selectable configurations (8Mx8, 4Mx16, 2Mx32) and has the ability to
talk to 2 processors at once (one in 8-bit mode, the other in 16 or 32
bit mode). It has a maximum read-write time on 150 nanoseconds, draws
120 milliamps at 5 MHz, 1 milliamps in data retention mode. $8,000
each, in small quantities. (no that isn't a misprint). - found in my
electronic mailbox
New Nonvolatile RAM.
The memory world has two other new storage technologies, one from IBM
and one from SHRAM. IBM showed the "Lightning" SRAM (static RAM) chip
at the IEEE conference in February. The chip holds up to 512K of
information and can send and receive eight billion bits per second, a
feat achieved by having the chip carry out read and write operations
simultaneously. SHRAM announced Sheet RAM, which is composed of a
ferromagnetic layer on top of a neutral substrate. Sheet RAM resembles
core memory in that it stores bits by changing magnetic polarity.
Since Sheet RAM is nonvolatile and probably relatively easy to produce,
it could become an excellent form of fast, permanent storage. -
Tidbits 15 April
PS/2 Removable Mass Storage.
IBM may have a 50 MByte (one rumor says 100 MBytes) floptical drive
(see January's column) available with any PS/2 in October. The 3.5
inch drive also will format, read, and write current 720K and 1.44
MByte formats (to get the multiple megabytes special floptical disks
are necessary). - InfoWorld 13 May
Mass Storage System Capacity Soars, Size Shrinks.
Fujitsu has developed a 5.25" Winchester drive that packs 2.0 gigabytes
per unit (3.3" by 5.7" by 8.0" package). It seeks in 11 ms; you can get
an "evaluation unit" for $5995. Aquidneck Systems has come up with an
optical disk storage system for archiving purposes that is supposed to
work on IBM 3090 mainframes. It can hold up to 100 optical disks (any
standard size) and changes them just like a jukebox for a storage
density of up to 1,000 gigabytes. Starting at $100,000. - found in my
electronic mailbox
Terabit in a Sugar Cube.
California scientist say they have developed a 3-D computer memory
system that can store the contents of 400,000 books or 3,000 personal
computer disks on a piece of plastic smaller than a sugar cube. Peter
Rentzepis, a chemistry professor at the University of California,
Irvine, announced the Pentagon-financed development of a prototype
"memory cube" at the Materials Research Society's spring meeting in
Anaheim.
So far, researchers have used laser beams to store only 1000 bits
inside the prototype, but the memory cube ultimately could store 1
trillion bits of data, Rentzepis said in an interview. However, years
of work are required to improve the new memory system before it can be
commercially available in computers.
The prototype memory device is a polymer plastic cube. A material that
chemically reacts to laser light is uniformly dispersed throughout the
cube. To store data in the cube, a laser beam is split in 2 parts,
which enter the cube from different directions. At the point where the
2 beams intersect, the light is absorbed, changing the material at that
point in the cube from clear to blue. To make the memory cube live up
to its potential, scientist must find a way to prevent the data from
erasing itself at room temperature, as it does now, Rentzepis said. -
Lee Siegel, Associated Press
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End of Info-IBMPC Digest V91 #137
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