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- VAPORWARE
- Murphy Sewall
- From the March 1993 APPLE PULP
- H.U.G.E. Apple Club (E. Hartford) News Letter
- $24/year
- P.O. Box 380027
- East Hartford, CT 06138-0027
- Call the "Bit Bucket" (203) 257-9588
- Permission granted to redistribute with the above citation
-
- ** SPECIAL NOTICE **
- Next month (April) will mark the conclusion of nine years of this
- column. Both my personal and professional life are undergoing
- substantial changes, and nine years strikes me as an appropriate end
- point. The April 1993 column will be the final column in the series. I
- really do appreciate the encouragement and support (especially the juicy
- rumors) that many of the regular readers of this column have offered
- over the years. It's been great fun, but meeting the monthly deadline
- has become a burden, and I've discovered new directions for personal
- growth. Naturally, I will continue to take an interest in forthcoming
- wares; so you can expect me to contribute to discussions about what's
- new from time to time.
-
- Gigadrive.
- IBM's Adstar business unit in San Jose is rumored to be well into
- development of a peripheral that can store a gigabyte of data per square
- inch. The direct access storage device, possibly using technology
- patented by Urshan Research Corporation (see last June's column), is
- expected to retail for about $500 and have an access time of 2
- milliseconds. Insiders say the device can be scaled up to a terabyte
- (1,000 gigabytes) of storage. - PC Week 8 February
-
- Less Expensive Flat-Panel Displays.
- Canon has already released its new ferroelectric liquid crystal color
- display (FLCD) in Japan to compete with Fujitsu's color plasma display
- panel (PDP, due in April), and the current thin film transistor (TFT)
- flat panels. Competition among these technologies is expected to lead
- to rapidly declining display prices. - InfoWorld 8 February
-
- Cube Kaput.
- NeXT Computer will cease production of its workstation line and
- transform itself into a software company. The official announcement
- says that hardware operations will be sold to Canon Computer Systems
- which owns nearly 18 percent of NeXT. NeXT computers made by Canon will
- be based on the Intel 486 and later CPUs. A beta version of NeXTStep
- 486 with everything except a complete set of device drivers is scheduled
- for release to developers at NeXTWorld Expo on May 25. The device
- drivers are due before October. Because NeXTStep 486 and the original
- are interoperable, users will be able to share data a files across the
- old and new platforms. - InfoWorld 8 and 15 February
-
- Twice the RISC.
- IBM expects to introduce a new RISC design for the next generation of
- RS/6000 workstations this summer. The processor, known as the RIOS 2,
- will have the capability of executing as many as six instructions per
- clock cycle and is expected to double the performance of the current IBM
- RISC CPU. The PowerPC development team already plans to incorporate
- portions of the new technology in the second generation PowerPC
- processors that are anticipated for 1994. - InfoWorld 15 February
-
- Waiting For Pentium.
- The great Pentium announcement is scheduled for March 22, but full
- shipments of PC's with the new CPU won't begin until May. Final prices
- may not be available until then either. The Pentium SX chips, which
- have a 32-bit bus, won't be available this spring as promised earlier;
- expect to wait until 1994. Most applications will have to be recompiled
- specifically for the Pentium before users will notice much of a
- performance increase over current i486 hardware. - InfoWorld 1 and 15
- February and PC Week 8 February
-
- Intel 486DX3 (Clock Tripler).
- This fall, Intel is expected to deliver a clock-tripling i486 chip,
- currently codenamed the P24C, that will run at an internal speed of 100
- MHz. The chip will operate at 3.3 volts and use in built-in power
- management to reduce heat. Systems based on this chip will be able to
- accept the P24T Pentium overdrive chip when it is released next year.
- The Pentium overdrive will disable the original CPU and take over its
- function. - PC Week 8 February
-
- LaserJets--Faster and Cheaper.
- The 17 page per minute, 600 dot per inch networkable HP LaserJet 4si
- will ship for $3,600 in April. The PostScript 2, 4 page per minute, 300
- dpi LaserJet 4L and 4ML (for the Macintosh) will be offered in May for
- $700 and $999. - InfoWorld and MacWeek 15 February
-
- Netware 4.0.
- Novell's next generation networking software is scheduled to ship this
- month. Netware 4.0 includes a redesigned, powerful directory service,
- improved security, and support for up to 1,000 users. The new directory
- service is designed to support objects over multiple servers. - PC Week
- 25 January
-
- Taligent Ahead of Schedule.
- Hard as it is to believe, Taligent's development team is ahead of
- schedule and may begin delivering key pieces of its object-oriented
- operating system this year. The full Taligent environment still isn't
- expected until 1995, but low level class libraries are expected for OS/2
- and AIX later this year and for PowerOpen and the Macintosh OS as soon
- as the PowerPC ships, probably early next year. - MacWeek 25 January
-
- HyperCard Development Returns to Apple.
- Claris employees were said to have been taken by surprise by the
- announcement that development, marketing, and support for HyperCard is
- being returned to Apple. Those employees must not have been among those
- startled by the report in last November's Vaporware column--a scoop the
- industry's usual pundits seems to have missed. As reported here last
- November, Apple plans to integrate Hypercard with AppleScript. -
- MacWeek 1 February
-
- Macs by Mail.
- Plans to market a line of Motorola 68030 Macintoshes by mail under
- vendor labels are still alive. You may be able to order one by
- Christmas. - MacWeek 8 February
-
- Microsoft PDA.
- Microsoft is said to be developing a completely new personal digital
- assistant (PDA) operating system for a hand-held device made under
- contract by an Asian manufacturer. - PC Week 18 January and MacWeek 25
- January
-
- System 7.1 Updater.
- Apple reportedly will soon release a system update extension for System
- 7.1 similar to the TuneUps released for version 7.0. The update will
- improve serial communications, system clock accuracy, ejection of floppy
- disks during shutdown, and system performance under low memory
- conditions. The updater is recommended for most Macintosh models but
- not for the Performa series. - MacWeek 8 February
-
- PC-DOS 6.0 is not MS-DOS 6.0.
- Big Blue plans to ship its own version of DOS 6.0 with it's own set of
- compression, backup, and other utilities. IBM's version reportedly has
- faster file I/O and much faster video. As a result, Microsoft's Windows
- runs noticeably faster under PC-DOS 6.0 than MS-DOS 6.0. - InfoWorld 1
- February
-
- Bedrock by Year's End.
- In spite of doubts cast by last month's rumors, Bedrock, the
- cross-platform, object-oriented application framework being codeveloped
- by Symantec and Apple (see last August's column), is on schedule for
- year end delivery according to both companies. - MacWeek 8 February
-
- New Generation Macintosh.
- The Macintosh Cyclones (see last month's and last July's columns) will
- incorporate an entirely new, true 32-bit bus architecture. The
- differences are so large that the new machines, due this summer, have
- been dubbed the "Mac III's." - MacWeek 8 February
-
- OS/2 Stacker.
- A version of Stac Technology's popular drive level compression utility
- for OS/2 should ship this month. An average compression of 2.2 to 1 is
- claimed. - InfoWorld 25 January
-
- Microsoft's Mac Plans.
- The next versions of Microsoft Word, Excel, and Office will offer nearly
- identical menus at the top of the screen. According to chairman Bill
- Gates, the programs will be equipped with workgroup features such as
- group authoring and annotation and will use the same dictionary
- currently included in PowerPoint. Mr. Bill also says Microsoft is
- putting the finishing touches on a compiler that will be used internally
- to generate application for the PowerPC. - PC Week 25 January
-
- WordPerfect for Windows and OS/2 Delayed.
- Word Perfect 6.0 for Windows and OS/2 will not ship this Spring as
- originally intended (see last December's column). The DOS version is
- expected to begin beta testing momentarily but isn't expected to ship
- until summer. The Windows and OS/2 version 6.0 probably won't be ready
- until the end of the year. However, the interim version 5.2 will be
- offered for both Windows and OS/2 soon. - PC Week 25 January
-
- Eight Rockets.
- Radius's media server (see last January's column) is codenamed "SkyLab"
- and will be designed for eight 50 MHz Motorola 68040s. The server will
- be announced this spring, but the shipping date will depend on when
- Motorola can deliver the 50 MHz version of the 68040. - MacWeek 18
- January
-
- RIP Lotus 1-2-3 version 2.x.
- The next major upgrade of Lotus's venerable 1-2-3 spreadsheet due in
- early 1994 will be based on version 3.x code and is likely to require at
- least 2 MBytes of RAM. Further upgrades of the less memory intensive
- 2.x series will consist only of device drivers for new printers and
- other peripherals. - PC Week 18 January
-
- Forthcoming.
- Excel 5.0 for Windows with database technology based on Microsoft Access
- will ship this fall. Claris has quietly terminated development on
- future versions of its Resolve spreadsheet, based on Informix Wingz
- technology. Think C 6.0, due this spring, will include a C++ compiler
- and support for Bedrock, the Symantec-Apple cross-platform application
- framework. - InfoWorld and MacWeek 15 February
-