dseah@wpi.wpi.edu (David I Seah) (05/08/90)
(note: parenthesis after names indicate America Online handles)
Dave's ComputerFest Report
May 6, 1990
ComputerFest took place at the Garden State Exhibition Center, a squat white
building that was like, as Donald McIntosh (AFC Tosh) put it, "a Sears
Automotive Center". It was industrial-park city, dude...lots of prefabricated
buildings nestled in the middle of rural New Jersey. No convenience stores,
some lonely-looking hotels. When Donald and I arrived, we noticed just how
durn QUIET the whole place was! Couldn't find any familiar faces at 11:00PM
Saturday night.
On Sunday, we wandered over to the cozy America Online Forum Leaders' Booth,
where I met Tim Bartwick (AFL TimB, A2 Music & Sound) and Dennis Kneppler (AFL
Dennis, A2 Games & Entertainment). Actual people, not ghosts-in-the-machine!
They had a single IIGS running the AO 16-bit software, with bundles of the
software hidden under a table. This booth seemed to attract quite a few online
personalities. Mike Fischer (AFL Mike, Mac Development) was reclining in a
chair. I was peering at the name tag of this gray-haired dude, who turned out
to be Tom Weishaar (Uncle DOS!). I'm afraid I just gaped at him in awe, mouth
hanging open like an idiot. *sigh* He peered at my name tag ("America Online,
AFC DaveS, Dave Seah"), and said something about joining GEnie (grin). Hearty
laughs all around. :)
On the right of the AO booth was GreenWing Software. GreenWing had three IIGSs
showing off their wares, which consisted of a mixture of public-domain and
original music, graphics, and sound disks. They had some nicely drawn cartoon
art being shown on their slideshow machine. I recognized some files I'd seen
from the Apple II Art & Graphics libraries, most noticably MikeM138's "Cloud
Dragon Godess" picture and one of Scott Gentry's (AFL Scott, A2 Art & Graphics)
excellent digitized girly pics. The center IIGS was running Jim Hentosh's
Ellipsoids II demo, which impressed some people standing next to me with its
speedy animation. The leftmost GS played a variety of DiversiTune and
SoundSmith songs, which included many original arrangements of popular songs.
Their were going for $10 a disk, which is pretty reasonable for non-modem nuts
who don't have access to vast online libraries.
ByteWorks was to the left of the AO booth, right next to Simple Software
Systems Incorporated (SSSI). I bought Orca/C at the show price of $75 from
Patty Westerfield. Mike Westerfield himself was there with his cute little
daughter ("See all these people? They're here to see our programs!"). He was
showing off the Prizm desktop debugging environment, which is a window-based
development environment for the Orca series of languages. The
super-hires-based text scrolling was surprisingly fast, even on a
non-Transwarped machine, although I still like the Orca Shell better. Also
being demoed was a beta version of the Design Master resource compiler, a
utility which allows GS programmers to interactively draw windows, define
menubars and other GS/OS widgets without dealing with obscure initialization
tables. It was a lot like Genesys, another resource-editor being demoed at
SSSI. I *think* SSSI was showing their HyperStudio-based demonstration
version of the software. I haven't dealt a lot with Desktop programming on the
IIGS, so I can't really say whether Design Master is better than Genesys.
Design Master costs about half as much as Genesys (~$150), but Mike noted that
Genesys will allow you to edit resources while Design Master does not at this
time.
The Roger Wagner booth was really busy. They had three TWGS'd IIGSs running
HyperStudio. One was hooked up to a laserdisc player showing off impressive
computer graphics, including scenes from Symbolic's "Stanley & Stella", Abel
Image Research's "The Gold Series" commericials, and some miscellaneous Pixar
films. There were touch screens attached to a few of the machines...people
could go right up to them and poke away at the screen. There was one sour
attendee who was grumbling quite loudly about how lousy the IIGS was, and how
she wanted some other computer at home. At the time, there was a HyperStudio
stack that some little girl had done. Roger (a real nice guy, and superb
salesman) was crouched down low in front of the machine with a throat mike,
showing off this stack to Donald. It was a map of the United States. When you
clicked on a state, the digitized voice of its creator would yell out something
like "THIS IS WASHINGTON!" with a great deal of energy and enthusiasm. I
noticed the cranky lady begin to grunt and chuckle with appreciation after
about five minutes...HyperStudio can really bring out the smiles in people
since it can convey the creative efforts of small children so well. I
overheard that HyperStudio nearly sold out in the major software vender's
booths around the show...yeah! It was EVERYWHERE at the show.
Mike Nuzzi's (Nuzz) Graphic Disk Labeler (GDL) program was being sold on one
end of the RWP booth. I was admittedly skeptical about the appeal of this
program when I first heard of it, but GDL can spit out a really
excellent-looking label on an ImageWriter II (poor Epson-compatible owners like
me are outta luck). The label graphics can be imported from a variety of
super-hires sources, and are printed on extra-sticky labels. You don't want
these things coming loose in your printer, so Mike supplies labels that will
STAY on the backing until it's time to use them.
Thunderware was demoing the LightningScan handscanner on the other side of the
RWP booth. Two tech support dudes were scanning a photograph of some large
cat. The results were in beautiful "16 level" (I'm still skeptical) grayscale.
The scanner head itself is surprisingly light...I always expect $300
peripherals to be heavy or at least packed with chips. The "alignment
attachment" which allows you to use a straightedge to make absolutely straight
scans. There's a roller on the bottom of the scanner that should be able to
help with making straight scans anyway with a bit of practice, but the
edge-alignment thing is a bit of fluff that gives LightningScan an apparent
edge over Vitesse's Quickie (which I missed at the 'Fest). The hardware is
virtually identical...the software is what makes the difference. I'm waiting
to see what happens before I spend my money.
Bill St. Pierre of SYNnovation had the 2nd prototype of the TurboRez GS
graphics board he showed at last year's San Francisco 'Fest. He was running
his demos on a stock (no transwarp!) IIGS with a stock monitor. When I came
up, he was showing some VGA-type images on the screen...absolutely beautiful.
There was the famous TARGA eagle, the clown picture, white mouse...all those
standard pics you see for VGA demos. Quoting from the blurb, TurboRez has a
320 pixels by 256 colors mode, a 640 pixels by 16 color mode, and a "320/640
mixed pixels in 192/8 colors" mode.
There can be 8 groups of 256 colors all onscreen. The color resolution is a
bit higher than that of a stock GS...5 bits of info per RGB component for a
total of 32768 total colors (versus 4096 for current GS and 262144 for VGA).
The video image is put over or under the regular GS video, so SHR graphics can
appear in front of or behind a TurboRez-generated picture. It's programmable.
The frame buffer (512K) is contained on the board itself, and is accessed
through a "window" mapped onto the slot ROM space. There are a bunch of other
goodies...Horizontal Zones (subpalettes on the same scanline) are handled by
the hardware, a 3D glasses interface (LCD shutter type) and interlaced video
are in the works. There will be a conference on America Online in July in AGR.
Price will be in $400-500 range, which would hopefully come down if enough are
initially sold. The makers of ComputerEyes, along with some unnamed game
developers, are interested in the board...it's up to Bill to produce the thing.
Bill struck me as a friendly and really honest guy...I wish him all the luck
in the world.
Commodore had a relatively big booth near the entrance. They had a number of
Amiga 2000s and one Amiga 3000 running WorkBench 2.0 (looks a lot like the
Motif window manager). Strangely enough, they weren't running anything neat.
I think they were trying to promote the Amiga's educational strengths, which
were apparently very uninteresting. I didn't see many IBMs, though Br0derbund
had Prince of Persia running on one. There were a few Macs around, but they
were not being used much. There was a large booth in the middle of the floor
that had several GSs and Mac IIs running various paint programs. We used some
of the GSs (ROM 3) to look at artwork people had brought.
I missed all the conferences. I was dying to hear the new Apple Sound
tools...everyone says it was great. Tim was saying how amazed the crowds were
on Friday and Saturday, and when people asked, "Will that ever be available for
the Mac?", he got to say, "No!" :) I caught some Commodore reps wandering
through the Apple Aisles, where SoundSmith and Nucleus were running. They
seemed a bit impressed (no wonder, judging from their own drab booth). No new
games were announced, except for Katie's Farm (the sequel to McGee). Katie's
Farm had gorgeous graphics...it's like McGee in that a small child can explore
a world with a few clicks of the mouse. There's plenty of digitized sound,
too. When you click on the horse, you get to see it move and hear it snort.
Real slick.
Not much seemed to actually happen on the floor (at least on Sunday). The
give-aways attracted a small hoard of eager scavengers, but the whole show
seemed to be exhibitor-oriented. People were selling stuff all over the place,
but I would have liked to have seen more creative stuff going on right on the
floor instead of in conferences. I enjoyed myself at the show, thought it was
considerably smaller, with no new announcments at all, than the Boston 'Fest.
Apple and Applied Engineering were not around, though their products obviously
were. Commodore flubbed pretty badly. People didn't reach out and grab ya,
you sort-of had to make the first move to find out what you wanted.
You could see the, er, Apple II Spirit. The Apple II is really about the
people who use it. If you don't care about what other people are up to in the
Apple II world and went to AppleFest this year, you probably had a lousy time.
If you talked to the people, you came away feeling good. I owe much thanks to
Andy Nicholas, who got mad at my AppleFest Boston post last May, for alerting
me to the people-oriented approach. I was surprised at how...NICE the
developers were! Mike Westerfield, Bill St. Pierre,
The-Guy-From-HAL-Labs-who-is-working-on-appletalk-games, Roger Wagner...all
really decent people! No chips on their shoulders. Mike Westerfield was even
nice enough to let us grab TS3 from his hard drive so we could boot PaintWorks
Gold on a ROM3 machine. A lesser person (like a particularly obnoxious
Commodore rep) would have told us to farg off. I'm just sorry that I missed
the parties and other developers and the interesting conferences. Check
AppleFest (or ComputerFest) out if you can! It'll be in the Meadowlands next
May!
I apologize for misquotes and mistakes in this informal report. Complain to me
on America Online!
--
Dave Seah | O M N I D Y N E S Y S T E M S - M | "Yargh, cats!"
| User Friendly Killing Machines |
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I-net: dseah@wpi.wpi.edu - America Online: AFC DaveS (Apple II Art & Graphics)