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