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- Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc.misc
- Subject: PC Notes #91
- Message-ID: <6224.79.uupcb@chaos.lrk.ar.us>
- From: dave.williams@chaos.lrk.ar.us (Dave Williams)
- Date: 9 Sep 92 21:55:00 GMT
- Reply-To: dave.williams@chaos.lrk.ar.us (Dave Williams)
- Distribution: world
- Organization: The Courts of Chaos * Jacksonville AR USA * 501-985-0059
- Lines: 160
-
-
- =======================================================================
- PC Notes #91 08/24/92 copr. 1992, Dave Williams
- -----------------------------------------------------------------------
- BIX: 'dave2' CIS: 72571,3542 dave.williams@chaos.lrk.ar.us
- The Courts of Chaos BBS, (501)985-0059
- =======================================================================
-
- Whenever the temperature drops under 90 degrees, I'm usually out
- building my new 3-car garage. I'm relatively confident I have the
- only garage in the state with built-in compressed air lines, single
- phase and three phase power, two different phone circuits, intercom,
- natural gas line, cable TV coax, and both thin Ethernet and twisted
- pair LAN lines.
-
- MS-DOS 6.0: Is it real, or is it vaporware? I haven't been able to
- find out for sure, and I'm not sure anyone really cares. Between
- DOS+Windows, OS/2, the promise of NT, and the capabilities of MS-DOS
- 5.0 and DRDOS 6.0, DOS 6 will have to be a major step up for anyone to
- work up much enthusiasm for the product.
-
- Heathkit has finally phased out their electronics kits. They'll be
- pushing educational materials now.
-
- Microsoft is developing their own sound board. It's supposed to cost
- "less than $300" and be available in October. Unless it's discounted
- heavily or does some incredible tricks, it'll have a hard time
- competing with entrenched designs at the $125 mark.
-
- PC World did a test of 17-inch monitors in their Aug 3 issue. Their
- statistics charts listed such incredibly important information as the
- date the monitor first shipped and the weight, but not trivial details
- like the actual picture size. Some "17 inch" monitors measure out to
- as little as 13.9 real inches. When you're buying for Windows, CAD,
- or OS/2, that diagonal feature is pretty much all you're concerned
- about. One raspberry for PC World, coming up.
-
- According to Service News, Artisoft is offering documentation,
- technical bulletins, and compatibility guides for LANtastic on
- diskette. BTW, Artisoft's net sales are up 79% and net income up
- 101% over 1991.
-
- Legal convulsions: Boiled down from many sources, it looks like
- Cyrix has prevailed against Intel's 386 cloning suit, and Lotus has
- triumphed over Borland in the 123 "look and feel" suit.
- Unfortunately, things get complicated rapidly from there.
-
- Z-Nix has filed a countersuit against Microsoft's copyright
- infringement suit, alleging violation of the Sherman Antitrust Act,
- abuse of judicial process, slander, trespass, breach of contract,
- failure to negotiate in good faith, and unfair, unlawful, and
- fraudulent business practices. Perhaps someone should issue pugil
- sticks to the litigants and let them work it out themselves...
-
- Hayes' "time bomb" ads have annoyed a lot of people, including the
- competition. Sierra Semiconductor filed against Hayes, alleging
- trade libel, false and misleading advertising, and unfair competition.
- They're also asking for an injunction to stop Hayes' ads.
-
- Chips and Technologies' fiscal 1992 (corporations can start their
- fiscal year whenever they want) closed out with a $57.4 million
- loss. Their 1991 figures showed a loss of $9.6M. C&T also
- announced they won't be developing any further microprocessors,
- though they'll continue making their 386 clones.
-
- Zeos laid off 93 people, reported a loss of $11.1M. Aldus laid
- off 11% of its US workforce. Tandon and Everex are still laying off
- workers.
-
- Pentop maker Momenta bit the dust altogether, showing that, no
- matter what kind of rave reviews you get from Byte and PC Mag, you
- finally have to ship some product or die. Industry pundits are
- still picking at the bones, but few seem to want to admit the
- machines' two main problems - they were too expensive, and few real
- users want to grub around with a pen interface, no matter how many
- oohs and ahhs it got at trade shows.
-
- In August 17's InfoWorld Peer to Peer column, Douglas E. Welch raves
- that floppies are dead and the removable 40Mb hard disk should be a
- good replacement. Brawwk. The first time a software upgrade price
- increased by the price of a removable hard disk to put it on, that'd
- be the end of THAT idea. CD-ROM, my man. CD-ROM. You can get 5000
- copies of a disc for $3 each, or less than the price of professionally
- duping and labeling a mere two high density floppies. The Unix world
- has been moving to CD-ROM en masse, and Microsoft has been following
- right along with NT and Borland with TC++ on CD-ROM. Of course,
- CD-ROMs aren't writable, which is why tape has become the favored way
- to transfer megabytes of data.
-
- Maxtor revenues were up 47%,
-
- Born in the USA: Remember Club American Computers? The FBI raided
- them and arrested three company officials on charges of defrauding
- the government on the sale of more than $1M of PCs. The exact charge:
- Club claimed the machines were made in the USA. The FBI doesn't think
- so. This is grounds for arrest?
-
- Quarterdeck's QEMM product does not support DPMI, a lack that has
- cost them some business. They've release their new DPMI Host package
- to graft DPMI support on to QEMM.
-
- Netware Light's performance has been widely sneered at. Novell
- claims NWL 1.1 is "as much as 300% faster" than 1.0.
-
- Weitek's new Power 9000 GUI accelerator chip runs at 132 mHz.
-
- PDA. PDA. PDA. The magazines are babbling about it. Unfortunately,
- I must've missed the explanation about what a PDA was. What's a PDA?
- A program that turns a $1500 laptop into a DayTimer and alarm clock.
- Big deal.
-
- What good is a LAN? Do you really need one to share files with
- coworkers? From my survey, file sharing is way down on the list. How
- about groupware, whatever that is? Zilch. What's the "killer app"
- for LANs? How about plain old E-mail? Companies like the simplicity
- of E-mail compared to some employee spending two days getting a
- 20-line memo "just right" in Ventura, than hand-carrying copies around.
- I've always promoted LANs as inexpensive ways to ensure all computers
- were backed up. Alas, most people don't care about backup.
-
- Remember the "Microsoft DOS & Windows Package for PS/2?" Now you can
- buy it for generic clones as well. Price: $199.95, MSRP.
-
- Netware - is it a network or an operating system? To further blur
- things, Gupta's SQLBase is available as an NLM, and Lotus announced it
- is considering a version of 123 to run as a Netware Loadable Module.
-
- Intel is licensing the 80386 to VLSI Research. The chips will be made
- in Intel plants, but marketed by VLSI. Suuure... On the other
- manipulator, IBM also owns full rights to the 386, since Intel
- developed it when IBM owned a big chunk of Intel. IBM has been
- building their own in the US and Israel, but now is entering the
- chip market. They're selling their own modified SX-cache chip to
- Reply and are seeking other OEMs.
-
- The VESA Local Bus appears to have taken off. Now there's a push to
- revamp the semi-defunct EISA standard. EISA bombed in the marketplace
- when vendors wanted 50% or more penalties for buying EISA machines.
- Maybe they'll reconsider things next time.
-
- DTC (408-942-4000) now has a 32-bit EISA paddle card for IDE drives.
- Supports drives to 32Gb, 4 hard/4 floppy (including 2.88) and
- duplexing/mirroring under Netware 386.
-
- Quarterdeck has evidently stopped advertising DESQview. There are a
- dew QEMM ads, but mostly ads for DV/X, the program almost nobody wants.
-
- IBM is moving all its notebook, handheld, and PC groups into one
- division.
-
- After a four year buying spree, Symantec had to pay the piper.
- During a "restructuring" a few weeks ago, they closed two sites and
- laid off some employees.
-
- =======================================================================
- Dave Williams is a writer and programmer based in an undisclosed state
- in the central USA. He is frequently seen wearing a T-shirt that says,
- "I Beat Anorexia."
- =======================================================================
-
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