NetNews Usenet Archive 1992 #16/NN_1992_16.iso/spool/comp/sys/misc/604

Internet Message Format | 1992-07-27 | 12.5 KB

Path: sparky!uunet!cis.ohio-state.edu!ucbvax!UCONNVM.UCONN.EDU!Sewall
From: [e-mail] (Murph Sewall)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.misc
Subject: Murph's VAPORWARE Column for August 1992
Message-ID: <[e-mail]>
Date: 27 Jul 92 20:14:43 GMT
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                              VAPORWARE
                            Murphy Sewall
                   From the August 1992 APPLE PULP
           H.U.G.E. Apple Club (E. Hartford) News Letter
                              $24/year
                           P.O. Box 18027
                        East Hartford, CT 06118
                 Call the "Bit Bucket" [phone]
      Permission granted to redistribute with the above citation

                       These are rumors folks;
                we reserve the right to be dead wrong!

New Affordable Printing Technology.
Photon Imaging of Plainfield, New Jersey has announced a new printing
technology that integrates laser and fiber-optics.  Glass fibers
arranged in a Fiber Array Network (FAN) are the secret to Laserfan
printers which will deliver 900 to 1,200 dots per inch (5,000 dpi in
film recorders) at a retail price of $1,000 to $3,000.  Laserfan
printers should begin shipping sometime next year.  Even before the
Laserfan hits the market, Hewlett-Packard will introduce an under $2,000
8 ppm LaserJet IV based on the new 600 dpi BX engine (which also will
appear in QMS printers)  - InfoWorld 29 June and MacWeek 13 July

Want to Beta Test Windows NT?
Microsoft is making the Windows 32-bit applications software developers
kit available through Compuserve's Win32 forum for only $69.  The kit
includes a beta version of Windows NT.  No nondisclosure agreement is
required, so if you get a copy, you can tell all.  - InfoWorld 13 July

Storm Track.
Apple's Cyclone (see last month's column) will spin off a Hurricane and
a Tornado (no sign of a Typhoon yet).  So far, there's no detail about
the hardware that goes with the codewords (other than at least one is
RISC-based).  One of them may (or may not) refer to the Macintosh IIfx
upgrade that is under serious consideration for the Fall.  If Apple
decides to revitalize the six slot form factor, look for an all-out
multimedia configuration with stereo in as well as out, built in DSP
(Digital Signal Processing), and ISDN as well as video in and out.  The
beta configuration also has the International Meta System's programmable
coprocessor technology (see last September's column) to support 3D
Quickdraw GX (see January's column) and El Kabong (see April's column).
- found in my electronic mailbox

But Will It Do Windows?
Microsoft has denied any plan to sabotage OS/2 (see last month's
column), but an official has acknowledged that some crucial Windows
code, specifically the 32-bit applications programming interface
libraries, may not ship with DOS Windows until after the October 1993
expiration of the licensing agreement.  Windows NT technology is
specifically excluded from the agreement--IBM will simply be one of many
NT original equipment manufacturers.  - InfoWorld 6 July

Windows on a Mac.
Insignia Solutions, authors or the Macintosh SoftPC MS-DOS emulator,
will ship a Windows emulation product for the Macintosh early in the
fall.  - MacWeek 13 July

A/UX 4.0 aka PowerOpen.
Not only is the PowerPC CPU project running ahead of schedule (see last
month's column), but the merger of IBM's AIX and Apple's A/UX into A/UX
4.0 (also known as PowerOpen) also is so far ahead of schedule that it
too may be ready by the end of this year.  The implementation based on
the Open System Foundation (OSF/1) microkernel will run on current
RS/6000 workstations.  An interesting implication is that one might be
able to run PowerOpen, and hence Apple's System 7 interface (or
OSF/Motif) on IBM's PowerPC hardware before January 1993, well in
advance of Apple's own RISC machine introduction.
- found in my electronic mailbox and MacWeek 13 July

PowerPC Family.
Pretty soon, it may be as hard to tell PowerPC CPUs apart as it is to
tell x86 CPUs from one another.  The first version will be the PowerPC
601 (coming in an IBM box by the end of the year).  While the 601 should
be three times as fast as a Mac Quadra (or 4 times as fast as a 50 MHz
486DX running Windows), power users will wait for the 100 MHz PowerPC
604 (1994), described as "Alpha-like" (see the March column).  The 604
will deliver something like 14 times the performance of a Mac Quadra.
If the proposed (believe it when you see it) $3,000 system price becomes
a reality, look for the PPC 604 to become the desktop workhorse of the
late 90's.  The oxymoron "low power PowerPC" will be the model 603 for
notebook computers (at least as powerful as the PPC 601).  Servers (and
show-offs) will have PowerPC 620-based systems.  - MacWeek 13 July

More About Newton.
Apple already is planning to follow the original Newton PDA (see last
month's column) with a Newton LC (if "LC" for a Macintosh is "Low-cost,
Color" could it be the same for a Newton?) and the Newton fx ("f" for
fast and "x" for extra features--voice and cursive handwriting
recognition).  Perhaps Santa will stuff one in your 1993 stocking.
- found in my electronic mailbox

Newton Wannabe.
AT&T lost the competition to provide the RISC processor for Apple's
Newton to Advanced RISC Machines.  Undaunted, AT&T and Go Corporation
will market their own PDA using the Hobbit RISC chip that Apple spurned.
Because GO's OS is almost ready to go, it's likely that the AT&T brand
PDA will reach the market before Apple's more widely publicized Newton.
- MacWeek 13 July

PowerBook Meets Newton.
Apple has been showing consumer focus groups a diskless (no floppy, no
hard disk) two pound 68030 Macintosh which uses the same type of
personal computer memory cards as Newton.  The credit card sized devices
can be configured to act as modems, packet radio devices, and hard
drives.  Possible configurations for the as yet unnamed Macs include
optional network connections, external 80 MB hard drive, or internal 40
MByte drive in place of one of the two memory card slots.  If Apple
moves forward with this concept, the plan would be to offer the new
ultra small computers, which will have supertwist reflective displays,
next summer for between $700 and $1,700.  It's not known whether the
design will make it possible for all Newton memory cards to work in
these new Macs as well.  - MacWeek 29 June

Newton Meets CD ROM.
Apple and Toshiba have agreed to market portable multimedia players
which will combine Newton's PDA technology with a CD ROM player.  Sweet
Pea is the codename for the device which is scheduled to ship next
summer for under $1,000.  The first generation models will have small
black and white displays but also will have NTSC video out that can be
hooked to standard televisions and monitors.  - MacWeek 29 June

All Day Notebook Battery.
A Russian startup, OPLUS Company, says they have a rechargeable lithium
battery that has a capacity 900 percent greater than that of the best
rechargeable nickel-cadmium batteries.  The company claims their RPS1004
battery has operated an 80286 notebook for 20.4 hours compared to only
2.3 hours for a nickel-cadmium battery of the same weight (500 grams).
The expected service life of the RPS1004 is at least 200 cycles.
-  The Internet's Info-Micro Digest 23 June

Sleeping Desktop Systems.
Eight leading computer manufacturers have pledged to reduce power
consumption of their systems by signing an agreement with the
Environmental Protection Agency to engineer future CPUs to power down
when they are left idle. When in idle, the units will consume a maximum
of 30 watts.  - MacWeek 22 June

MacApp Rests on Bedrock.
Apple and Symantec have consummated a deal to include Apple's MacApp
object-oriented cross-platform development technology into Symantec's
forthcoming Bedrock multiplatform development environment.  Bedrock for
Macintosh and Windows is expected to ship next Spring.  Unix and OS/2
versions will follow.  This agreement will not only allow for easy
porting of Macintosh applications to Windows, OS/2, and Unix, but also
for porting of Windows applications to the Mac with equal facility.
- MacWeek 22 June and InfoWorld 29 June

Another Programming Language.
Apple's Advanced Technology Group-East and M.I.T. recently announced a
new multiplatform programming language known as Dylan (derived from
"dynamic language").  Dylan is a descendant of LISP, a favored language
for programming artificial intelligence applications.  Dylan permits
small parts of applications to be swapped in and out of memory as needed
by multiple programs.  Dylan may gain favor because its programs will
run on Newton PDAs as well as Macintoshes and Unix workstations.
- MacWeek 22 June

QuickTime 2.0.
A new version of Apple's Quicktime multimedia technology should ship in
the fall with improved compression and support for both MIDI and 68000
CPUs.  - found in my electronic mailbox

i586 Not.
Intel's senior vice president for corporate strategy, David House, says
that the company's 64-bit superscalar CPU with two 32-bit data paths,
currently codenamed P5, probably won't be designated a 586 (see April's
column).  Intel wants to avoid adding to the confusion about CPU
identities caused by the proliferation of 386 (SX, DX, SLC) and 486 (SX,
DX, DX2) versions along with a legal decision letting clone makers use
the 386 designation as well.  - InfoWorld 6 July

A Few More System 7.1 Details.
Apple's forthcoming OS update (see the June column) will come in a
number ofdifferent versions (with a number of "pay to play" options).
Two extensions for the consumer version are "How to" (see May's column)
which lets a user ask the machine "how to" do some action and the
machine explains the steps required, and "Tiny Tunes," probably by a
different name, (see April's column) which limits the user interface for
children, new users, or special purpose applications.  Apple also will
be offering an extension called the Translation Manager allowing
developers to support Claris XTND technology without modifying their
application source code.  - found in my electronic mailbox

Higher Speed Networking From Home.
Bellcore, the joint research subsidiary of the regional Bell operating
companies, estimates that at least 55.6 percent of all telephone lines
will be able to support Integrated Services Digital Networks (ISDN) by
1994.  In addition to providing much faster communication than today's
fastest modems, ISDN permits simultaneous voice and data transmission
over ordinary twisted pair telephone lines.  - InfoWorld 6 July

Another Name-Brand Laser Printer.
Compaq Computer Corporation is on the verge of introducing a line of
laser printers.  Recently issued patents indicate that Compaq plans to
develop a completely new design, including the laser engine.  However,
initial models will be 15 to 20 page network printers built around the
Fuji-Xerox engine.  - InfoWorld 6 July

Object Oriented Database.
Microsoft expects to have programmer's development kits for its Cairo
object-oriented user interface and query language (see February's
column) ready in the first quarter of 1993.  The utility itself, which
permits users to integrate text, graphics, sounds, spreadsheet cells,
charts, and database fields from many documents into a single report, is
currently scheduled for 1994.  - InfoWorld 13 July

Forthcoming.
This month, Autodesk will ship a new low cost ($249 retail)
three-dimensional design program for Windows.  Autodesk 3D is file
compatible with AutoCAD DXF and Generic CADD.  Newer Technologies should
introduce its $349 Quadra 700 accelerator, Overdriver (a ROM slot board
permitting up to a 33 MHz clock rate), within weeks.  MS-DOS 6.0, the
32-bit incarnation, planned for next spring is likely to be bundled with
Norton Backup and Disk Optimizer and Central Point's Antivirus and
Stacker.  Fifth Generation's newly acquired Salient division is
developing CopyDoubler, a Macintosh control panel which will speed
Finder copies by three times or more in most cases.  CopyDoubler will be
bundled with the forthcoming AutoDoubler 2.0 upgrade.  IBM will deliver
at least five "value" (aggressively priced) PS/2 models with AT bus and
IDE-compatible disks (instead of SCSI) in the fall.  Big Blue also will
introduce more than 10 new portable and notebook systems and is
seriously considering build-to-order (custom configuration) selling.
Apple will begin marketing the PowerBook 100 4/40 exclusivley through
San Diego's Price Club as a test of consumer electronics outlets for
low-end models.
- MacWeek 29 June and 13 July and InfoWorld 22 June and 6 July