declan@portia.Stanford.EDU (Declan/LZ) (07/19/90)
Pascal Chesnais writes: >ZZZZzzzzz..... Can we stop this Mac vs NeXT vs Amiga vs IBM crud? >Anything useful to be said on the subject has been said already. Look >at the archives if you want to waste time, but don't rehash the same >old arguments. Post only if you have something really new to tell the >world. A bit testy, aren't we? "Anything useful...has been said?" Maybe there's nothing left to invent, either. Well, here are some interesting excerpts... ... More Powerful RS/6000s. Industry research analyst Brian Jeffrey of International Technology Group predicts that IBM will effectively double the performance of its RISC workstation line next year. A family of more powerful systems as well as advanced low-cost models are planned to debut next Spring. The new models will drop the chip count from nine to five and the price to as low as $4,000 for a 20 MIPS diskless workstation. - PC Week 25 June ... Legal Clones of Mac ROM Chips. Asian developers have finally succeeded in reverse engineering legitimate clones for Macintosh ROMs. Rumor has it that Apple may participate in a licensing agreement to mass market Mac Plus level computers of Far Eastern manufacture. - PC Week 9 July ... Better Amiga to Macintosh Compatibility. ReadySoft has announced A-MAX II and A-MAX II Plus for the Amiga. The A-MAX II is a software update of the existing A-MAX. The new software supports MAC digitized sound, MAC formatted partitions on Amiga hard drives, and access to MAC SCSI peripherals (scanners, hard drives, and printers) through an Amiga SCSI port. A-MAX II Plus uses the new software and also offers new hardware. The board contains two MAC compatible serial ports and an AppleTalk-compatible port. With the A-MAX II Plus, compatibility with MAC modems and printers is improved, and the Amiga can run MIDI and networking software permitting Amigas to join LANs along with (or in place of) Macintoshes. Prices have not been announced (A-MAX has a list price of $200). The A-MAX II should be available in a few weeks, and the II Plus before Christmas. - Press Release ... Fast Magneto-Optical Drive. Early next year, Ocean Microsystems expects to ship an optical-magneto cartridge drive which claims access speeds comparable to those of most IBM PS/2 hard drives. The Vista 130 will store 128 Mbytes per cartridge and has an average access time of 28 milliseconds and a data transfer rate of 512K per second. The drive will be priced at about $3,000 and cartridges will retail for between $120 and $130 each. - InfoWorld 16 June ... Perhaps a Macintosh emulation card for the NeXT may be on the horizon after all... -Declan ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Olympic Technologies / Registered NeXT Developers \ declan@portia.stanford.edu ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "Windows puts a stake in the heart of OS/2. I don't see OS/2 going anywhere." - Sun Microsystems VP Bill Joy