Subject: Anyone have any good Amiga rumors (An Amiga 68030 perhaps)??
VAPORWARE
Murphy Sewall
From the October 1988 APPLE PULP
H.U.G.E. Apple Club (E. Hartford) News Letter
$15/year
P.O. Box 18027
East Hartford, CT 06118
Permission granted to copy with the above citation
Call the "Bit Bucket" (203) 569-8739
Floptical Follow-up.
Insite's president Jim Abkisson says that the 20.8 Mbyte floptical drive (see last month's column) which will ship in January doesn't approach the ultimate capacity of new materials for disk media. Mr. Abkisson predicts a 100 Mbyte 3.5 inch floppy disk within two years. Also, reports indicate that the price of the floptical disks for the 20.8 Mbyte drive will be between $10 and $20 each.
- InfoWorld 12 September and PC Week 5 September
Rapidly Growing Mass Storage.
Storage Dimensions of San Jose, California has unveiled two 5.25 inch, 651 Mbyte hard drives which use the Enhanced Small Device Interface (ESDI) with a 15 Megabit per second transfer rate. Industry analyst Jay Bretzmann at International Data Corporation says that 1 gigabyte hard drives will be shown at the Fall Comdex in November.
- PC Week 29 August
Which Bus to Take.
Forty companies, led by Compaq, have endorsed the 32-bit Extended Industry Standard Architecture (EISA) which is compatible with both 8-bit XT and 16-bit AT expansion boards as an alternative to IBM's Micro Channel Architecture (MCA). In addition to compatibility with existing expansion products, the EISA will support multiple processors (as MCA does) and burst-mode direct memory access as fast as 33-megabytes per second. The new bus will be centered around Intel's 82350 chip set and will automatically configure systems and expansion boards, doing away for the need for dip switches. From IBM's competitor's point of view a major attraction is that it is an "open" standard which will not require the payment of royalties.
- InfoWorld 12 September and PC Week 5 September
MCA Clowns, er Clones.
Apricot Computers of Birmingham, UK may be the first to deliver an MCA clone. Apricot plans to ship fully MCA compatible 80386SX (16 MHz) to 80386 (25 MHz) clones later this month. Two vendors who had announced PS/2 compatibles for this Fall, Dell and Tandy have announced indefinite delays in shipments. Dell which has been plagued by management problems and financial stress from having become over-extended blames "lack of demand." Tandy says "chip problems" are responsible for their delay.
- Random Access 10 September and InfoWorld 5 September
Micro Channel 2.
IBM expected MCA clones to be on the market by now and has a second generation Micro Channel (the Family II bus) awaiting introduction. The new bus may be needed for the promised PS/2 RT line (see last month's column) and definitely for the the 80486-based machines. Rumors say that IBM's engineers loaded one of the RT prototypes with 8 processors and achieved a performance rating of 200 MIPS! That speed has raised more than a little concern in IBM's mainframe division and may explain why Big Blue is reluctant to put this new bus on the market (especially since they aren't being pressed by MCA clones).
- InfoWorld 29 August and PC Week 12 September
Beating IBM to the 486.
UNISYS plans to be the first on the market by introducing 80486-based workstations (columns of July '87 and March '88) before the end of 1989. UNISYS is busy acquiring Convergent Technologies, which has expertise in Intel chip architecture, to support the introduction. Expect a UNIX operating system.
- Random Access 10 September
Pocket Computer.
A 2 to 4 pound 286 MS-DOS computer barely larger than its 3.5 inch disk drive will be introduced by NEC about the time this column appears. The Private Eye from Reflection Technologies (see last month's column) can make this a truly personal computer small enough to fit inside a jacket pocket. Expect a retail price of around $2,500. Meanwhile, Traveling Software is planning a specialized, 8 ounce, vest-pocket PC that can do expense reports and office memos as well as maintaining a busy executive's calendar and telephone and address files. However, the ultimate in hand-held computing may be the "Voice Computer" due this month from Advanced Products and Technologies. That company claims to have solved the problem of speech pattern recognition and promises a PC with special chips and software that will use the human voice as its primary input device.
- InfoWorld 5 September, PC Week 29 August, and
Random Access 17 September
Is This NeXt Month?
Steve Jobs has sent out 4,000 invitations for an October 12 intro party of his new computer (last July and January columns). The features of the $5,995+ machine include a 25 MHz Motorola 68030 processor, 4 Mbyes of RAM, a 300 Mbyte erasable Sony optical drive, a built in 9600 baud modem, and 4 32-bit slots. The standard monitor is a monochrome gray-scale display with 1,280 by 960 pixel resolution and the operating system is "Mach," a Unix variant. The user interface uses Adobe's Display Postscript and the X-Window protocol. An ironic note is the report that Jobs has concluded a deal licensing the NeXt interface to IBM (see August's column) for use with the AIX-based PC RT's (last month's column). Believe it when you see it; industry wags are saying Jobs may yet send "regrets only."
- InfoWorld 12 and 19 September and PC Week 19 September
Lateware.
Ashton-Tate's dBase IV (last May and July's columns) may (or may not) actually be shipping by the time this column appears in print. Lotus still anticipates shipping the several times delayed 1-2-3 Release 3.0 by Christmas (last May's column), but you needn't wait to buy. Lotus has announced that if you purchase version 2.01 between now and 30 days after Release 3.0 is shipped you'll get the upgrade free. Before being purchased by Claris, Styleware planned to release GS Works (since renamed AppleWorks GS) this month. However, Claris's integrating and enhancing has delayed shipments (no new date, just "coming soon").
- InfoWorld 12 September, PC Week 5 September, and
a nod, wink, and groan from an Apple Developer
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Date: Fri, 30 Sep 88 22:17 AST
From: Stan Armstrong <ARMSTRONG%STMARYS.BITNET@Forsythe.Stanford.EDU>
Subject: ImageWriter: What you see is not what you get.
For those of you who may be doing page makeup with only an Imagewriter for an output device, here is a problem I ran across recently together with a solution. Pagemaker supports the ImageWriter as an afterthought. The result is that unless you are willing to settle for "Tall Adjusted" mode--with its 72 dpi (dots per inch), fat characters, all your copy shrinks 10% horizontally when you print it with normal 80 dpi mode.
You could use a word processor like Microsoft Word to lay out the page. Word knows the difference between the two modes, and scales the ruler when you have not check "Tall Adjusted." The result is that the scaled ruler indicates the actual printed size at 80 dpi. But Word is not a page makeup program, and even simple two column layouts are awkward to do with it. Unfortunately Pagemaker has a different strategy for implementing WYSIWYG (What you see is what you get) for the two different dot pitches used by the ImageWriter. At 72 dpi ("Tall Adjusted" checked), the printed copy is exactly what you see on the screen (or the same thing refined to 144 dpi when you use "Best" mode). When you choose 80 dpi (deselect "Tall Adjusted)," Pagemaker does not scale the screen. Instead, it tries to keep every word in the same position of the page as it appears on the screen. The result is that every line has the same actual length on printed page as it does on the screen. However, in order to do this Pagemaker borrows a trick from the "Draft" mode of the Imagewriter driver. It puts variable amounts of space between the words. Some WYSIWYG! Some "best" quality!
If you abandon Pagemaker, there is a solution which will work with other programs. Scale everything--text, margins, and paper sized manually. Make all of your horizontal measurements 80/72 = 11.1111% larger. Then when the printer driver shrinks the text by printing it at 80 dpi (or 160 dpi in "Best" mode), the copy will be printed out at the originally intended size. The trouble here is that most programs use the standard Imagewriter driver which does not allow you to specify special paper widths. You might get away with using an 8 1/2" page. However, if your text is wide, you may not have room to scale it up on an 8 1/2" page. Even if you do have room, you will have problems if your left and right (inner and outer) margins are not equal.
The answer is to change the paper size of one of the unused size choice in the ImageWriter driver. There is a public domain program written by Daniel Smith called Page Setup Customizer which will let you do just that. The exact size to use for the scaled page width will depend upon how your program handles margins. FullWrite Professional uses absolute page margins (it does not scale them for 80 dpi); therefore for .75" margins, the correct size is 1.1111 * (8.5" - 1.5") + 1.5" = 9.27778". This is a pain, becauseyou must set a different paper size for each margin width you use. If your program does scale the whole page, then the correct page width is 1.1111 * 8.5 = 9.4444".
I have used this technique with perfect success with FullWrite Professional. I do not have access to other programs, but these principles should be enough to let you discover whether the ImageWriter is suitable for the program of your choice.
