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TidBITS#52/01-Apr-91
====================
Copyright 1990-1992 Adam & Tonya Engst. Non-profit, non-commercial
publications may reprint articles if full credit is given. Other
publications please contact us. We do not guarantee the accuracy
of articles. Publication, product, and company names may be
registered trademarks of their companies. Disk subscriptions and
back issues are available.
For more information send electronic mail to info@tidbits.uucp or
Internet: ace@tidbits.uucp -- CIS: 72511,306 -- AOL: Adam Engst
TidBITS -- 9301 Avondale Rd. NE Q1096 -- Redmond, WA 98052 USA
-----------------------------------------------------------------
Topics:
MailBITS/01-Apr-91
A Whole New Ball Game
Clone Cubed
Piggyback Portable
SentientNET
Reviews/01-Apr-91
MailBITS/01-Apr-91
------------------
Seen on an envelope from MacConnection recently:
"Rush. Dated material. Dated for freshness. Blind dated. Updated.
Open immediately. Open really soon. Open as soon as you can. Open
sesame. Open says a me. Don't fold spindle or mutilate. Many are
called but you were chosen. This is not junk mail. Save for future
use. Save for a rainy day. Save for a sunny day. Save for today.
Live for today. Live for tomorrow. Search for tomorrow. No prize
numbers enclosed. No secret decoder ring enclosed. We know where
you live. Valuable savings inside. Handle with care. Envelopes
love to be opened."
A Whole New Ball Game
---------------------
We've heard that, in an unexpected move, IBM plans to purchase
Lotus Corp. IBM isn't telling how much it will pay, but we're
betting that it will be an obscene amount of money, considering
that Lotus is one of the largest software companies after
Microsoft. Whew! IBM didn't say much else about the deal in true
IBM fashion, but it will certainly shake up the computer world. If
nothing else, who knows what will happen to the 1-2-3 palmtop with
wireless peripheral links that HP and Lotus are working on.
Think of Microsoft. One minute the company is riding high,
controlling a good part of the microcomputer software industry;
the next minute IBM swaggers into town, a six-shooter full of
Lotus software at its hip. Heck, I'd be worried if I were Bill
Gates. And think of the phone call that Jim Manzi would have made
to Bill if he were really childish. "Hi Bill, this is Jim Manzi.
Nyah Nyah. Click." I'm sure Jim Manzi would never do that, though,
so at least some propriety reigns. I wonder what the Federal Trade
Commission (FTC) will think about the deal, since it was worried
about Microsoft before and has had run-ins with IBM in the past.
It certainly sheds some new light on any deals IBM and Microsoft
might have made at some point to divy up the PC operating systems.
IBM will be in the antitrust spotlight again, considering that it
has pushed OS/2 over Windows for some time but has lacked any
software clout to enforce its preference. With the array of
powerful (if currently unconnected) software from Lotus, IBM now
has some of the best software on the market, which it will
undoubtedly port to OS/2 as soon as possible. There was talk
previously of IBM devoting $40 million to marketing OS/2 in direct
competition to Microsoft's $10 million Windows marketing blitz.
Now that makes a bit more sense, since IBM can ensure a decent
software base. Sheesh, for $40 million, IBM could buy a
professional sports team and name it after OS/2.
So long as the FTC doesn't get too antsy (and remember, IBM has
never lost that sort of lawsuit before, though they have settled
out of court on occasion), the deal makes a lot of sense from
IBM's perspective. Like Apple IBM now controls a line of hardware,
an operating system for that hardware, and a line of popular
software for that operating system. IBM has always emphasized
complete solutions in its corporate philosophy, so this fits in
well, although it does mean a bit of retrofitting with SAA
(Systems Application Architecture), IBM's interoperability scheme.
But how many people are buying big computers, even workstations,
in comparison to microcomputers these days? Not that many, and IBM
is bowing to the dollar figures that say the company makes a good
chunk of its profit from microcomputer sales. You can buy bundles
these days that include a PS/2, Windows, Word for Windows, and
Excel. That's all fine and nice, but IBM would far prefer to see
those bundles including OS/2 and 1-2-3 and Ami Professional of
OS/2. Oh, and for those of you who remember's IBM's dismal
microcomputer applications software (like DisplayWrite), those
programs have been dropped in favor of the new Lotus Software
Division's application suite. About time.
To put the words of that wonderful author, L. Frank Baum, into the
mouth of Jim Manzi, "I don't think we're in Cambridge any more,
Toto."
Information from:
IBM & Lotus propaganda
Related articles:
COMMUNICATIONS WEEK -- 25-Mar-91, pg. 16, 38
InfoWorld -- 25-Mar-91, Vol. 13, #12, pg. 8
Clone Cubed
-----------
This is weird. We heard of a new computer from small startup
company in Texas called TechnoWizards. Well, OK, that's not so
weird. What's strange about this particular machine is that it's a
hybrid, which accounts for its name, the Hybrid/3. It can run Mac
software at about the speed of a IIcx, PC software at the speed of
a 33 MHz 386 clones, and it sports its own operating system as
well.
TechnoWizards achieves this compatibility in an interesting way.
Hybrid/3 includes a 16 MHz 68030 CPU (and its associated math
coprocessor) from Motorola and a 33 MHz 80386 from Intel, along
with a custom controller that allows either one to be used
independently (one at a time) or can use both CPUs in tandem. This
gives the machine three basic modes, which you control with a
hardware switch. The first mode addresses only the 68030 and will
use the NuTek chipset for Macintosh compatibility. It's unclear
how well the NuTek chipset will perform as far as compatibility
goes, but it's likely to work with most applications. For those of
you who weren't paying attention when we talked about NuTek a
while ago, that will mean that TechnoWizards will not be able to
ship their machine until well into 1992, since NuTek wasn't going
to release the chipset until late in 1991. TechnoWizards said they
weren't committed to NuTek and could switch to another company's
Macintosh emulation if necessary. It's possible that Apple might
be interested in licensing the MacOS to TechnoWizards by then,
what with Sculley's talk about licensing the ROMs.
Anyway, the second mode addresses the 80386 and uses a Phoenix
BIOS. In that mode, you pretend that you are working on a normal
PC clone. This, being easier than the Mac stuff, already works,
and TechnoWizards says that both Windows and various flavors of
Unix run fine. The third mode is the most interesting by far,
because it uses both chips simultaneously to run both Mac and PC
software in a windowing environment as well as tools specifically
written for the Hybrid/3's native OS. So why wouldn't you always
want to be running in native mode? Since TechnoWizards's own
operating system is completely different from the MacOS and DOS,
there is a noticeable speed hit, and some ill-behaved PC
applications might not appreciate being forced into a window.
Those sort of programs tend not to run well under Windows either.
Hardware-wise (and note that I'm no hardware whiz, so I might get
some of this slightly wrong), the custom controller handles all
the I/O, and a separate graphics chip handles all the screen
displays. Each of the microprocessors, including the custom
controller, lives on a SIMM-like card for easy upgrades, and
TechnoWizards says that the Hybrid/3 will support the 80486 and
68040 at some point. In addition, the Hybrid/3 has a Motorola
56001 digital signal processor (DSP) chip that will aid
telecommunications and sound applications. The Hybrid/3 uses
SCSI-2, so you can add up to seven hard drives, each of which can
be partitioned or combined (into one or more volumes spanning
several physical drives) as you desire. Macintosh and DOS (or Unix
or A/UX) files are stored in the appropriate type of hard SCSI
partitions, which avoids the danger of a soft partitioning scheme
that simulates a volume within a large file. TechnoWizards built
in Ethernet (thin and thick) and included two serial ports and a
parallel port as well. For market compatibility, the company chose
to use Macintosh monitors, so in theory any monitor that works
with the Mac should work fine. For expansion capabilities,
TechnoWizards included both three NuBus slots and three ISA (AT-
bus) slots, though it's unclear if all PC and Mac boards will
indeed work well, especially under the native OS. You never can
tell with strange hardware.
This new operating system, appropriately called NewONS (pronounced
"nuance" - and ONS stands Operating/Network System), is a 32-bit,
object-oriented, windowing environment probably closest to
PenPoint, GO's handwriting recognition operating system. There is
a single "Overseer" that controls all of the various "Projects,"
where a Project is considered to be a data file (but one which can
contain multiple data types) or a stand-alone environment such as
a game. The Overseer provides each Project with the necessary
tools when appropriate, so if you want to create text in a data
file, you call up the text tool and create away. Once the text is
created, the Overseer makes sure that whenever you are in that
area of text, the text tool is available. TechnoWizards intends
the tools to have a very narrow purpose, so a single tool in
NewONS is equivalent what we know as a single tool in a graphics
program. NewONS will ship with a standard set of tools that most
people will want, a text creation/editing tool, a line tool, a
rectangle tool, an ellipse tool, a database tool, a calculation
tool, and a few others. Needless to say, these tools will not be
terribly sophisticated, which leaves room for third parties to
develop more powerful versions, say an ellipse tool that has an
optional modifier to constrain the ellipse into a perfect circle
or a rectangle tool that includes size information as you draw.
The beauty of the way NewONS handles these tools is that you can
put together the functionality of a current program like PageMaker
without having to pay for or store all the parts of PageMaker you
never use, like color printing or the Story Editor. For that
matter, you can use a far more capable set of text tools, like the
sort that Nisus includes, instead of the Story Editor, so you
would get full editing power as well as powerful layout
capabilities. Companies will no doubt break current Macintosh
products down into sets of tools and sell them together, but it's
up to the user to pick which ones to use.
I'm extremely interested in the Hybrid/3 because it seems to play
both sides of the fence quite well. The older standards are
supported along with a new 32-bit operating system. No one loses.
In addition, because the custom controller chip handles all I/O,
interesting new forms of input devices will be easy to hook up and
use in all three modes. I wouldn't be surprised to see devices
like the Gold Brick (the interface controller that allows you to
use Nintendo 3-D controllers) and the BAT chord keyboard show up,
along with even stranger controllers, such as devices that can
read your brain wave to move the cursor and perform simple actions
(more on this in a few weeks). Of course, just being technically
wonderful doesn't mean much these days. After all, I think I've
mused before on how all the world's a marketing scheme.
Related articles:
MacWEEK -- 26-Mar-91, Vol. 5, #12, pg. 1
InfoWorld -- 25-Mar-91, Vol. 13, #12, pg. 5
PC WEEK -- 25-Mar-91, Vol. 8, #12, pg. 6
Piggyback Portable
------------------
We've all been waiting for Apple to announce a 68040 Mac and a
lighter, faster portable. Well, it looks like the wait will soon
be over, but there is an unanticipated twist. Rumour has it that
the top 2 inches of Apple's upcoming 25 MHz 68040 Mac TX will
actually comprise a pop-out 7.2-pound portable Mac. (I don't know
if that weight includes the battery, but the 68040 is probably
less power hungry than the 68030 and a coprocessor, so the battery
will last as least long as the other high end portables that Apple
will release this fall.) The portable contains the CPU for the TX
and one of four memory banks. The two sections of the computer can
share the processor and RAM due to the technology that Apple
purchased from Outbound. A likely configuration for the portable
unit is a 20 MB hard disk and 4 MB of RAM (neither the hard disk
nor the RAM will be expandable, but the tower unit will hold more
memory and additional SCSI devices). The portable's screen will be
similar to the one in the current Mac Portable, active matrix with
backlighting. Also thanks to Outbound, when the portable is not
attached, the TX can still function as an AppleShare server,
though it's useless for desktop work.
The Max TX will also contain new technology from General Magic. We
aren't certain of the details, but wireless Mac networking is
about to become reality (a tremendous relief to everyone who has
dealt with all that tedious wire stripping and untangling). All
the information will now be sent via radio waves as per Apple's
petition with the FCC (the actual speed of the network,
practically speaking, should be about twice that of LocalTalk).
It's still unclear how this will tie into a setup with more than
one building, but third party vendors will certainly provide the
necessary hardware.
So essentially what you've got in the Mac TX is a killer desktop
workstation that can convert to an AppleShare file server and a
small portable computer by removing the portable unit. It might be
pretty pricey, but this will be the perfect machine for a network
administrator or high-powered engineer who has to travel a bit.
While the portable is away, the server will play.
Information from:
Pythaeus
Related articles:
MacWEEK -- 26-Mar-91, Vol. 5, #12, pg. 1
InfoWorld -- 25-Mar-91, Vol. 13, #12, pg. 5
PC WEEK -- 25-Mar-91, Vol. 8, #12, pg. 6
SentientNET
-----------
Most everyone is in favor of networks these days. But current
networks are quite stupid - they're nothing more than pipes
through which information flows. That may change soon with a new
networking application I heard of recently.
It's not an official product yet, but the application, code named
SentientNET, is an interesting collaboration between CE Software
and several Soviet programmers who are part of an organization
called EleKlub. EleKlub isn't exactly a company, since private
companies are still frowned upon in the USSR, but is instead a
club of local programmers in Minsk interested in exchanging ideas
with Western programmers. The application can determine the CPU
load of all Macs on a network (LocalTalk is acceptable, but
EtherTalk is better) and then have local programs execute CODE
resources on an unused remote machine and receive the results
back. The Soviet programmers came up with the basic idea for
SentientNET because powerful computers are extremely rare in the
Soviet Union, and SentientNET allows them to turn a small network
of Macs into the equivalent of a mainframe.
The practical value of SentientNET is that if I've got a
processor-intensive application that would normally bog my Mac
down for an hour, SentientNET would automatically divy up the
workload between all the machines on my network, giving more work
to those that are unused, less to those that are doing something
else. My application would take far less time to run, because all
the other Macs would have done a large proportion of the work and
reported the results back to my machine. SentientNET will create
quite a bit of network traffic and thus prefers a fast network
like EtherTalk. However, because LocalTalk networks are so common
and inexpensive, the programmers plan to make SentientNET self-
configure to the network type, so if you use LocalTalk,
SentientNET will send smaller jobs across the network so as not to
bring down other network applications. If you're still having
trouble visualizing this, think about DataClub from IBS. DataClub
creates a virtual disk that everyone on the network shares.
SentientNET does exactly the same thing, but with CPU cycles
instead of disk space. With DataClub, if you add a hard drive,
you've increased the size of your virtual disk. With SentientNET,
if you add a Mac, particularly a powerful one, you've increased
the power of your virtual CPU. Pretty snazzy!
From what I can tell so far, SentientNET should work over any
AppleTalk network, including the wireless scheme mentioned in the
Piggyback Portable article. I guess the major restriction right
now is that SentientNET can only work within a zone, but that
shouldn't be a big problem for most people. Applications won't
have to be rewritten to work with SentientNET, but it wouldn't
help a good number of current programs because they simply don't
require that much power. Users will retain control over their own
Macs, so SentientNET can be configured to leave your Mac alone
even if the CPU usage is low in case you don't want to run with
even a small slowdown.
As cool as it is, SentientNET isn't a completely new concept.
Recently, IBM, DEC, HP, Groupe Bull, and Siemens-Nixdorf
demonstrated a similar scheme by which an application ran in a
network layer using the processing power of workstations from each
manufacturer. In addition, Apple has an internal program called
SchoolTalk, I think, which allows an instructor to run a program
on a remote Mac over a network. Apparently, the hard part is
executing CODE resources, which programs like Timbuktu and Carbon
Copy can't do. I'm not positive of this, not being a network guru,
but that's what friend who should know claims. SchoolTalk is not
as complete as SentientNET will be, but it's a start, so Apple may
come out with something like at some point too. It's an incredible
selling point for Macintosh networks ("Buy five Macintosh
computers, get one supercomputer.") and would endear Apple to the
power hungry crowd that is thinking about switching to
workstations from NeXT and Sun.
Oh, I just thought I'd mention that everyone should read the
entire "About..." card this week. Cheers!
Information from:
Alexandr Tchlevsky -- adt@eleklub.minsk.su
Related articles:
COMMUNICATIONS WEEK -- 25-Mar-91, pg. 20
Reviews/01-Apr-91
-----------------
* MacWEEK
StyleWriter, pg. 1
MediaMaker, pg. 53
Packet Analyzers, pg. 53
NetMinder LocalTalk
LocalPeek
Image Archivers, pg. 55
Mariah 1.0.4
Multi-Ad Search
CIS*Gallery 1.0.3
* InfoWorld
Ventura Publisher, Macintosh Edition, pg. 79
* PC WEEK
Paint Programs, pg. 85
Adobe Photoshop 1.0.7
Color MacCheese 2.01
Studio/32 1.1
ColorStudio with Shapes 1.1
Oasis 1.0
References:
MacWEEK -- 26-Mar-91, Vol. 5, #12
InfoWorld -- 25-Mar-91, Vol. 13, #12
PC WEEK -- 25-Mar-91, Vol. 8, #12
..
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