🚀 go-pugleaf

The MacWorld show is over (thank God!), and none too soon.  Another day
and I'm certain my feet would have given out.  But enough of these complaints
and on to the show itself...

The Good:

	Centrams Tops products.  They were linked to PC's and 4.3BSD machines.
	Knetics Ethernet/AppleTalk bridge.  Centram was using it.
	Hayes & their interbridge product.  Centram was using it.
	Farralon & their appletalk alternative.  Centram was using it too!
	Think Technologies, and the four products they were showing,
	  including LightSpeedC ver. 2.01 (which I purchased at the show),
	  and their network print spooler.
	Adobe and their Illustrator program (very nice for PostScript
	  graphics).
	MicroSoft and their new Word.  Very nice.
	SuperMac, and their new drives.  Also a very old drive that
	  had survived a train wreck, and was still running (and on display).
	CricketDraw, which is a hot program.  I hear that it's a bit
	  buggy, but haven't had any first hand experience with it.
	Studio session, which HAS to be heard to be believed.
	Various and sundry big screens, all of which really want to be
	  sitting on my desk, really they do!
	Pagemaker 2.0.  Very clean, with many MANY new features.  This
	  one blows the others away quite nicely (in my opinion).
	MacMemmory & their pretty cheap turbo board--16Mhz 68000 & 1.5 Meg
	  for $1,500 or so.  Their Hundya Excel display was tacky though...
	The McIntosh apples that MacWorld was handing out free.  Best
	  I've ever tasted--really.

The Not so Good:
	
	InfoWorld & their 'informant' booth.  Tacky tacky tacky.
	LetraSet & their 11th hour product switch.  Tacky tacky tacky.
	Ann Arbor and FullWord.  I'm not saying that it's a bad product,
	  or that they market bad products.  But all that hype and boasting
	  over a product that they weren't really even demoing is just
	  a little tacky.  However, I DO look forward to seeing what they
	  come up with--they've a very good reputation thus far.
	Some of the prices a couple of the User's groups were charging
	  for shareware collections.  BMUG was very good ($2/disk), but
	  some of the others weren't.
	The conferences, which were not very well miked, and also
	  plagued (at least the ones I went to) with lighting and 
	  video problems.
	The prices for food.

The worthy of mention:

	Write Now & MindWrite, both of which are good products.  The mac
	  is FINALLY getting some competition in the word processing mkt.
	The many hard drives shown.  Some good, some not so good.  All
	  getting fairly competitive (not necessarily at the retail price
	  level, but at the 'what it's sold at' level).
	Print spoolers are comming for the LW.  Think had one, and 
	  SuperMac will be shipping one any time now (I'll let you know
	  how the copy they gave me works out).
	The sheer number of folks in business suits there.  Nobody
	  can say that the business community isn't taking the machine
	  seriously.
	APDA, the Apple Programmers & Developers Association, which will
	  be distributing MPW, documentation, and some third party stuff
	  at pretty good prices (though not the lowest available).
	Excel, which is still the best spreadsheet available, though
	  many have challenged it (including a new one, Trapeze).
	The very few companies with games stuff (only MindScape & the
	  folks who came out with the Challenger simulator, as near
	  as I can recall).
	
An interesting rumor:

	Overheard at the Levco booth:  The 68020 can supposedly be
	  microcoded so as to run identically to a 80386.  Someone
	  even suggested that at 25 Mhz 68020 would do such at 3 MIPS.
	  Any comments from the hardware experts out there as to
	  how hard/easy this would be to do?


All for now folks.  I've a long night ahead of me (LightSpeedC's a calling).

Peter
-----						  
Peter "Arrgh" Korn		         Hacker?  Me?  A hacker?  No, actually
korn@ucbvax.Berkeley.EDU			 I'm a mac-er.  All's we do is
{decvax,dual,hplabs,sdcsvax,ulysses}!ucbvax!korn            make library calls.