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VAPORWARE
Murphy Sewall
From the April 1990 APPLE PULP
H.U.G.E. Apple Club (E. Hartford) News Letter
$15/year
P.O. Box 18027
East Hartford, CT 06118
Call the "Bit Bucket" (203) 569-8739
Permission granted to copy with the above citation
Whatever OS You Like.
DEC's next generation of RISC stations are designed to run
MS-DOS, OS/2 with 80387 extensions at 80386 speed, and
Macintosh software at 68030 speed as well as Unix System V.
Downloadable microcode makes emulating virtually any
operating system possible. RISC engineering manager, Tom
Furlong, has been quoted as saying "By the time IBM is
actually shipping the new RS/6000's we will have announced
and shipped our new generation of machines."
- PC Week 12 March and InfoWorld 19 February
Motorola 68040 Computers are NeXT.
Not one but three new models are expected soon from NeXT
(see last October's and November's columns). A 32-bit color
and two monochrome models will be built around Motorola's 33
MHz 68040 CPU and will have a new Canon erasable optical
disk with a 20 millisecond access time (much faster than the
present, very slow, optical drive). NeXT may become the
first manufacturer to offer more models than there are
applications. - PC Week 12 March
Entry Level Mainframe.
Engineers at IBM's Boeblingen, West Germany laboratories
have designed a 370 mainframe processing chip set. Only
five one half inch by one half inch CMOS chips are needed to
deliver over 30 MIPS. Luis Arzubi, director of the Essex
Junction, Vermont laboratory where preproduction samples are
being manufactured and tested is quoted as saying "We will
try to move it into a product as soon as possible."
- InfoWorld 19 February
More IBM Hardware.
Introduction of a notebook PC designed (and perhaps
manufactured) for IBM by Ricoh is said to be imminent. Big
Blue plans to ship a new high end graphics accelerator card
to use with Windows 3.0 or OS/2's Presentation Manager next
year. PS/2 users will have to upgrade to a future PS/2
model or wait for add-on products for current systems if
they want to take advantage of the extended Micro Channel
functions introduced on the RS/6000 RISC computers (see
February's column). If a 27 MIP RS/6000 isn't fast enough
you'll soon be able to double performance simply by
replacing the 25 MHz CPU with a 50 MHz one (no other changes
required!). - PC Week 19 March and InfoWorld 5 March
HP LaserWriter Clone.
HP will ship a Macintosh compatible Laserjet III by the
beginning of summer. The $2,395 (list) Laserjet III with 2
Mbytes of memory plus $695 Postscript cartridge and $275
Appletalk interface will cost about $1,000 less than Apple's
LaserWriter NT. - InfoWorld 26 February
Window's 3.0 - Another Month, Another Delay.
Developers of new software designed to run under Windows 3.0
are starting to get a bit testy (see last November,
December, February, and March columns). Microsoft now
promises delivery by May 22. Sources in Redmond also are
hinting that the end-user version of OS/2 version 2.0, the
long awaited 32-bit operating system (see last September's
column), won't make it out the door until next year.
- InfoWorld 12 and 19 March
Navigating Around a Hard Disk.
Beta testers are favorably impressed with Lotus
Development's new version (2.0) of Magellan which is
scheduled to ship this month. Customizability is the most
noteworthy improvement. Users can rearrange function keys
and design their own control menus, dialog and message
boxes. Other new features include Zip data compression from
Pkware, an ASCII editor, and 23 additional file viewers
(including five which support graphics -- PIC, GIF, TIFF,
PCX, and DRW formats). - InfoWorld 19 March
Over the Speed Limit.
In spite of the fact that Intel doesn't plan to ship a 20
MHz version of its hybrid 80386SX CPU for several months,
several PC makers already achieve 20 MHz by pushing 16 MHz
chips beyond their certified clock rate. On the one hand,
Intel cautions that performance can't be guaranteed beyond
the certified clock rate. Intel's product marketing
manager, Jim Chapman, notes that some chips may tolerate the
higher temperatures associated with increasing the clock
rate, but 16 MHz chips "do not perform consistently at 20
MHz." On the other hand, users report few problems, and
standard benchmark software indicates performance comparable
to the 25 MHz Model 70 A21. - PC Week 5 March
Microsoft C Version 6.0 Lacks C++ Compliance.
Microsoft will replace C Version 5.1 with 6.0 by the time
April's showers bring May flowers. Version 6.0 provides a
programmer's workbench (8 Mbytes of hard disk space are
recommended) but still lacks C++ compliance and 32-bit
support. A new Unix derived "make" facility automates most
program building tasks, and compiler optimization has been
enhanced. - InfoWorld 19 March
Hidden Apple 2 Clone?
The custom I/O chips in the new Mac IIfx are rumored to be
literally Apple //c's on a chip complete with a 65C02 and
DMA controller. - InfoWorld 12 March
Apple IIgs Meets IBM Display.
At least two firms are developing VGA display cards for the
Apple IIgs. One has lots of fancy graphics features, but is
expensive, the other won't cost nearly as much but does
little more than permit VGA monitors to be used with a
IIgs. - found in my electronic mailbox
Higher Net Speed.
The National Science Foundation partnership demonstrated
their new 44.736 mbs (million bits per second) wide area
network technology at Net '90 last month. Traffic on the
NSF-Net backbone has increased from 194 million packets in
August 1988 to 2.5 billion packets last February. Growth
continues at a rate of nearly 15 percent per month. The
44.736 mbs (also known as "T3") links will replace the
current 1.544 mbs (T1) backbone later this year. An
increase to one gigabits per second is planned for 1992 (see
last October's column), and initial planning for a terrabit
(that's a trillion bits per second) backbone is underway.
- InfoWorld 19 March
R.I.P. PC-DOS.
By summer's end, IBM will have withdrawn as co-developer of
the DOS operating system. All future versions will be
solely MS-DOS (versions shipped with IBM hardware may
continue to be labeled "PC-DOS"), and IBM's PC-systems
programmers will devote their exclusive attention to OS/2.
- PC Week 19 March