The following "vapourware" announcements are from Znet ST Report and ST Informer. There must be a grain of truth in there somewhere. - Ed] ATARI CD ROM ~~~~~~~~~~~~ According to ST Format, the English magazine, Atari will market an add on CD-I drive for the entire ST range. The new CD ROM to supercede Atari's CDAR will be able to transfer data at twice the speed of the fastest hard disk drive - read speed 170 Kbytes per second. With 12mm single sided optical disks, and 650 Mbytes capacity the CD-I will play conventional audio CD's, as well as video. The encoding logorithm used is claimed to surpass S-VHS, at 25 to 30 frames per second. ==================== In a recent interview to ST Format, Sam Tramiel reveals some very interesting tidbits: - We will have a new joystick (analog Joy) - The AJAX processor will handle 2 MB floppy drives - A new TT with a 68040 will appear early in 1992 - The multitasking version of TOS will be available in MARCH 92 -- One Gigabit Chip Technology Now Available NIT claims to be the first in the industry to have developed the fun- damental technology that can be used to create a 1 gigabit (1 billion bit) memory chip. NTT was also the first to have established the technology to make a 16-megabit and a 64-megabit chip. Comdex information - from Randy Bush (Intersect Software) on CIS... COMDEX NEWS Atari is releasing (SOON ) a CDROM external drive. I believe them this time as it's a CHINON drive in an Atari case/power supply. They don't even have an ASCSI interface on the back, it's straight SCSI. This means that they don't have to do anything that just repackage the SCSI CHINON drive. This has benefits that Atari dealers will soon realize. It's the BEST (350 MS), least expensive external CDROM drive available and will work with a PC or MAC as well as straight out of the box with a TT030 or Mega STE. ALL new Atari machines will have SCSI ports on them, ASCSI is being phased out as NON-PROFESSIONAL. Price for the CD-ROM is $385.00 RETAIL!!!!!!!******!!!!!! Third parties are already gearing up to produce a ASCI to SCSI box for this CD-ROM drive (for those of you with ASCSI only ports.) ----------------------------------------------------------------- -- Apple & IBM to Cooperate and Compete Apple and IBM, two long-term rivals, this week officially outlined five future joint ventures. First, the Taligent's operating system will be able to run applications written for IBM's OS/2 and AIX as well as Apple's System 7. Second, Kaleida will be a joint venture that will promote standards for multimedia. Engineers from Apple and IBM will be seconded to Kaleida to work on multimedia development. Kaleida will then make its technology available to other vendors. Third, Power PC is a new PC hardware architecture based on IBM's RISC System/6000 technology. IBM and Motorola will work together to develop and build the Power PC chips, then Motorola will offer these chips to other vendors, while both IBM and Apple will build systems around them. Fourth is PowerOpen, a Unix-based operating system that will run on Power PC-based systems. Power Open will bring together Apple's A/UX version of Unix and IBM's AIX. Fifth will be an effort to simplify networking between Apple and IBM systems. The two companies will license each other's networking tech- nologies (Apple's AppleTalk and IBM's Token Ring) and develop products to help their PCs work together. -- Toshiba and IBM Japan Develope Active Matrix LCD IBM Japan and Toshiba Corp. have jointly developed a 13.8" active matrix liquid crystal display (LCD) for engineering workstations. Active matrix LCDs achieve a high picture resolution on a flat screen by using thin film transistors (TFTs) to switch on and off individual points of light. The new displays will use a total of over three million TFTs for over one million points of light. -- Intel Faces New Challenge Chips & Technologies introduced seven microprocessors in a direct chal- lenge to industry leader Intel Corp in an attempt to make money after a loss of $9.6 million in fiscal year 1991, ended June 30. Unlike Advanced Micro Devices Inc., which introduced an Intel 386 chip clone last April, the Chips & Technologies microprocessor doesn't dup- licate Intel's design. The company is said to have spent four years and $50 million developing its own Intel-compatible architecture.