Murph's VAPORWARE Column for March 1993

[Sewall@UCONNVM.UCONN.EDU (Murph Sewall)]

                              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

/s Murph Sewall <Sewall@UConnVM.UConn.Edu>