sample shipments of 4-megabit DRAM chips expected first quarter of 1988.
Milestone puts TI in same league as Japanese Mitsuhishi and Matsushita as
leading others in dense memory chip production technology. And TI's use of
advanced stepped trenching technique for both transistor and capacitor, same
as used currently in their 1-megabit chips, speaks well for easily producting
16- and beyond densities. Many companies haven't yet mastered such trenching
technique. Such densities put memory in the non-scarce catogory. What will
our computers be like when 16-megabit chips cost $3 or less each.
National buys Fairchild, seed from which many semiconductor houses grew
from; Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) merge with Monolithic Memories (MMI).
Silicon Valley is dead--long live Silicon Valley!
Software Beat. WordStar v4.0 works fine with NuKey. You have both NuKey's
extensive key re-definition and WS's shorthand macros, all under Z-System.
WS's ^\ or <esc> functions clear screen after using NuKey's define and display
re-definition functions. Order your copy of WordStar from us at discount
price of $195, Item 68. Multi-colored documentation is something to behold.
Set of manuals, over 500 pages, makes easy the learning of ends and outs of
this high-feature word processor. Become a registered WS owner--order from
Echelon. NuKey is priced $39.95, Item 44, requires IOP segment be installed.
Z-News 702-1 discribes NuKey's many features.
We haven't tried to confirm this but we heard that the company that
produces MS-DOS WordPerfect word processor may be coming out with some CP/M
products. Could it be they are using the same logic that prompted MicroPro to
upgrade WordStar? Time tells...
In Other Words. The more you use a computer the more you want responsiveness.
An inexpensive hard disk is initially a seemingly significant improvement over
a double-sided 8 incher floppy, and especially over a similar 5.25 incher. As
you gain experience, you wish for instant response to your commands. We have
spoken of RAMdisk, a drive consisting of semiconductor memory instead of
magnetic, as being a wave of the future. File fragmentation problems with
hard disks make RAMdisk so attractive. Speed differences make so much dif-
ference with complex aliases and other situations requiring many disk accesses èto get job done. Anything that slows us down, acts as barrier to or distracts
our thinking process is something we work to remove. Think SemiDisk DT42...
