Sewall@UConnVM.BITNET (Murph Sewall) (05/27/91)
VAPORWARE Murphy Sewall From the June 1991 APPLE PULP H.U.G.E. Apple Club (E. Hartford) News Letter $15/year U.S. - $18/year Canadian 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 ------------- TidBITS from Penguin Things Software is a weekly Macintosh HyperCard stack edited by Adam C. Engst and Tonya Byard. TidBITS is currently available for anonymous FTP at sumex-aim.stanford.edu, rascal.ics.utexas.edu, America Online, CompuServe, Genie, and from the Memory Alpha BBS in Ithaca, NY at 607-257-5822.