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PC Notes #90               07/31/92           copr. 1992, Dave Williams
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  BIX: 'dave2'      RIME at ->CHAOS    dave.williams@chaos.lrk.ar.us
  CIS: 72571,3542   The Courts of Chaos BBS, (501)985-0059
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 Intel will ship their 33/66mHz 486 August 10.  Prices are expected to
be between $600 and $700.  Interesting.  Where's the *real* 66mHz chip?
For that matter, where are the 80 and 100mHz 386 chips Intel promised,
way back in 1986?

 Get on the bus, Gus:  Intel has announced Yet Another Bus.  The new
Peripheral Component Interconnect (PCI) bus is reportedly endorsed by
IBM and Compaq.  The PCI is a local bus, for "graphics, SCSI,
networking, and motion video" according to Intel.  Gee, that's pretty
much what people plug into their regular bus.

 Just for the record, the following buses are in common use:

        XT      (8-bit)
        AT      (now called ISA, or Industry Standard Architecture)
        MCA     (IBM's Micro Channel - and there are several different
                 types of Micro Channel slots, plus MCA-2, which sort
                 of complicates things, wot?)
        EISA    (Extended ISA, 32-bit)
        local   (most local bus video conforms to the VESA spec)
        SCSI    (thankfully used only for peripherals)

 Got all that?

 The following, er, missed the bus (har, har):  Tandy's proprietary
and semi-proprietary slots, Intel 32-bit slots, Micronics 32-bit
slots, Phoenix' 32-bit proposal, various backplane systems, AST's
FastSlots, the PCjr/IBM JX bus, a couple of laptop bus proposals,
and others lost in the mists of time.

 Anyway, if the proposed 10-slot local bus makes it in the marketplace,
so much the better.  It seems local bus video has taken off; EISA
seems to be frozen in time; and I sure could use ten fast 32-bit
slots.  Maybe the PC of the future will look like an Amiga 2000, with
a weird combination of IBM and proprietary slots.

 Qtronix has decided mice don't need to be institutional beige.  They
now sell red, white, blue, and black mice.

 Microsoft and Apple are working together to develop a cross-compiler
which will allow Windows apps to be moved to Apple's System 7.0.  This
is very strange, considering Apple's System 7 is a direct competitor
to Microsoft's Windows.

 IBM's second-quarter earnings are up 9.9%.  Yearly revenues to June 30
were $30,300,000,000.  Remember that next time someone claims Microsoft
will "put IBM out of business."

 Apple's profits are also up.  Their third quarter gross was
$1,740,000,000.  Informix earnings are up 500%, Stac Electronics
209%.

 Lotus lost a 25,000 installation account when Price Waterhouse
converted from 123 to Quattro Pro.

 Remember Unicode?  Well, don't worry about it.  It's gone, merged
with ISO 10646.  The New Improved Unicode is now Unicode 1.1.

 Hayes is running some sleazy ads slamming other modem manufacturers.
They better get while the getting is good - their patents won't last
forever.

 Chips & Technologies got a $10 million cash infusion and a $13 million
line of credit.  There are rumors it may merge with AMD.

 ANSI adopted Cabletron's FDDI spec.

 Adaptec is running several different ads advertising the SCSI cards.
They conveniently don't tell you that Adaptec itself doesn't sell,
support, or service their cards - if you aren't an Adaptec dealer,
they don't want to talk to you.  And they get *nasty* on the phone.

 NeXT's NeXTstep/486 missed its shipping date and is now behind
schedule.  I'm sure both potential customers are anxious.

 Novell has announced they will be licensing parts of Netware's kernel
to other companies.  Microsoft is reputedly quite interested.

 Lex Computing and Management claims to own a patent covering the
representation of video clips as icons.  They're trying to bleed money
from Adobe and AT&T.

 Lotus' earnings are down.  They say it's due to weak international
economies and cut-rate competition.

 DEC's much-publicized Alpha chip hasn't drawn any commitments from
other computer makers.  Perhaps they're worried about depending on a
competitor for their processors.  I'd be concerned, anyway, considering
DEC reported an operating loss of $1.8 billion last quarter, for a
total of $2.79 billion for the year.

 Prime Computer went out of business. RIP.

 Novell/DRI has been advertising Novell Lite as a network package with
DRDOS 6 bundled in.  Since thousands of copies of Lite are reportedly
languishing in inventory, their new packaging proclaims DRDOS 6.0 with
"free" Novell Lite.  Six of one, half a dozen of the other...

 WordStar International is buying ZSoft, the PC Paintbrush people.
ZSoft is valued at $12 to $14 million.  Interesting, considering WI
looked like a candidate for bankruptcy a few months ago.

 Gammalink created the first PC FAX board.  The first is now in the
Smithsonian.

 An article in Infoworld briefly mentioned the Mediamaster Sound
Standard, "codeveloped by Integrated Circuit Systems Inc. and Advanced
Strategies Corp."  Does anyone have any further information or
addresses for this?

 Stewart Alsop of InfoWorld seems to have fairly loose ties with
reality.  His July 27 editorial states, "Simply stated, there isn't
much juice left in the basic DOS standard of 1985.  The power of the
PC BIOS, MS-DOS, Intel 8088 instruction set combination is dissolving."
He goes on to explain how buyers want performance, even if it means
buying incompatible hardware.  Sorry, Stewart.  If you'd been right
we would have all switched to Unix on 68000 boxes long, long ago.

 I've raved about my unnatural lust for one of Everex' StepCube cases
before.  Alas, they're not available separately.  Uniq (510-226-9988)
evidently liked the cube too.  Their new 486 machine has a similar
cubical shape, 400 watt power supply, 8 EISA slots, 4 ISA slots, and
various configurations of guts.  Unfortunately, the only color scheme
seems to be off-white with a Sun-esque stippled finish, but a can of
black spray paint would fix it just fine.

 Storage Dimensions will be releasing OS/2 2.0 multithreaded SCSI-2
drivers, but the article I read implied it they would be for CD-ROMs,
WORMs, and similar devices, not hard disks.

 Speaking of OS/2 2.0, Gammatech (405-359-1219) sells a disk optimizer
for hpfs drives.  A friend of mine bought the package and says it
works as advertised.

 The latest scare rumor is that Microsoft will not guarantee Windows
NT will be fully compatible with existing DOS and Windows apps.
Interesting, since they have access to OS/2 2.0's code, and OS/2 2.0
is reasonably compatible.  The official word from Microsoft is that
allowing some types of programs (backup software, hard disk utilities,
and other programs nobody ever uses) direct access to the hardware
would compromise the security of the system, and Microsoft is hoping
to get some sort of Federal security approval from the government.
But will users be willing to ditch their old software in the interest
of security?  Maybe Stewart Alsop thinks so...

 Microsoft has been talking about bundling DOS and Windows for at least
four years.  Somehow it hasn't ever happened.  Now, a 2-page ad in the
July 27 issue of PC Week offers Windows 3.1 and DOS 5 in a single box
for $149.95.... "specifically designed for the IBM PS/2."  Duh?  Wha?
Oh, and it comes with a $19.95 coupon for Qualitas' BlueMAX memory
manager too.  DOS, Windows, and MAX for $170 is a pretty darned good
deal... but it looks like the kind of deal only someone buying a new
computer would want.  A new PS/2, that is.  Arf, arf.  Actually, I
can't think of any reason you couldn't run everything on a conventional
clone; BlueMax is downward-compatible with regular 386-to-the-Max.

 Another caching IDE controller has popped up: Boffin Limited, 612-
894-0595, in various configurations up to 16Mb.

 Datamation is one of the older of the computer weeklies.  Oddly, it
seems to depend heavily on quotes from InfoWorld, PC Week, Computer
Reseller News, Computerworld, and Information Week.  With thousands
of PR dweebs deforesting counties to pile junk on their desks, they
have to raid other publications for newsbites?  Heavily weird.

 Datamation had a semi-serious article about Microsoft's  "Windows
Open Services Architecture."  This concept, which seldom fails to
get howls of laughter from the Unix magazines, seems to boil down to
"network-aware Windows."  Ri-ight.

 Novell has finally officially announced their OS/2 2.0 network
requester.  Big deal.  I have a big capital investment in two
LANtastic networks.  Artisoft says they have no intention of ever
supporting OS/2 2.0.  They apparently have no intention of ever fixing
their compatibility problem with DESQview either.

 A couple of the weeklies have talked some more about the new V.fast
standard, which is supposed to give you 56kbps over standard lines,
as opposed to v.32bis' paltry 14.4 or v.32's 9.6.  Unfortunately, none
of my sources has printed a real description of what V.fast is or does,
but I'll pass it on when I find it.

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 Dave Williams is a writer and programmer based in an undisclosed state
in the central USA.  When not behind the keyboard, he builds and rides
severely fast turbocharged motorcycles, races SCCA Solo II autocross,
collects and shoots exotic firearms, or reads science fiction.  He is
frequently seen wearing a T-shirt that says, "I Beat Anorexia."
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