eugene@ames.UUCP (Eugene Miya) (01/24/85)
Channel 48, San Jose [and other stations I am certain] broadcast the
Apple Shareholders meeting. Interesting.
If you have not heard, the Lisa 2/10 has been renamed the Mac XL.
It is Job's hypothesis that IBM and Apple's dominance of the micro
market is in part due to memory size: the II was dominant because
it had 64K when others had 16K [applications program writers flocked
to it], the PC was dominant because it had 256K, and the 512K Mac has
applications writer flocking to it [twice the number anticipated (now 300)].
Apple wants to establish a leadership position thru innovation,
product development and have an impact on society. A Clip was shown of
Reagan saying, "When I was going to school, and apple was a thing we
took to the teacher, now....."
The next step in innovation will be to establish >10,000 LANs.
The problem with LANs in the past has been a chicken and egg problem of
getting LANs established. Enter the concept of the Work Group.
[There will be a progression to larger communities and organizations in the
future.] It appears, however, that Apple is fully cognizant that software
is more important that hardware in the long run, so they have approached
100 software vendors to accomodate distributed systems.
Next, Jobs extended the hand of Detente to IBM [they had a repeat of
Apple Super 85 ad at the start]. Slide showing Jobs and one of the
Soviet leaders with Detente as a newspaper caption. Apple wants
coexistence. See PC card mentioned below.
Product announcements: Appletalk, a LAN with up to 32 nodes, easy to install,
cost $50 per node and integrated with software applications [expect new
versions of MacWrite and Mac*. A Disk server. A Laser Printer ($7000)
and one less node on your net [12 MHz, 68000, 2 MB memory of which 1 MB is
for image. With Appletalk will be an Apple card insertable into the IBM PC
and accompanying software to enable to have systems communicate.
1985 will be a year of getting this stuff to market. Expect
new products in 1986. 1987, they felt, would be the rebirth of computing.
Speculation: there will probably be the need for gateway hardware.
Expect a larger Mac in the smaller box without the hard disk (XL).
The presentation was a lot of multi-media show. Appletalk demo shows a
letter icon inserted into an envelope icon and being past between two Macs.
Laserwriter demo had a transparency printed on the stage. [Chariots
of Fire theme music].
--eugene miya
NASA Ames Research Center
{hplabs,ihnp4,dual,hao,vortex}!ames!aurora!eugene
emiya@ames-vmsb.ARPAtim@cmu-cs-k.ARPA (Tim Maroney) (01/26/85)
Thank you for the summary of Mac and Appletalk (does this mean all my AppleBus manuals are obsolete? :-) strategies. One thing: Your speculation on gateway/routing hardware has been an issue for some time, not only here at C-MU, but at Stanford, Dartmouth, and other places as well. Product announcements may be distant, but deployment and testing ought to be done this year. Some products at other places may be nearing completion. A 68000-based router (not a Mac, although possibly downloadable from one) with an AppleBus interface as well as others of various kinds seems like the best idea. The big loser is the single Macintosh to other network hookup given current designs. Clusters are more the idea. A single Ethernet card for the Mac is not in the works here, although there is a box for Lisa. I don't know about compatibility with "Mac XL" or what model Lisa it works with -- anyone used one of these boxes? I just have the Apple doc for it. (And that's not here at home.) -=- Tim Maroney, Carnegie-Mellon University Computation Center ARPA: Tim.Maroney@CMU-CS-K uucp: seismo!cmu-cs-k!tim CompuServe: 74176,1360 audio: shout "Hey, Tim!" "Remember all ye that existence is pure joy; that all the sorrows are but as shadows; they pass & are done; but there is that which remains." Liber AL, II:9.