🚀 go-pugleaf

On Saturday, I went to the MacWorld show at the Bayside Expo Center in
Boston (well, Dorchester, but who's counting?).  I was impressed.
I wasn't impressed by the hordes of undistinguished disk drives (internal
and external, hard disks and floppies) or the flood of drawing software.
I wasn't even as impressed as I thought I would be by the speedup boards,
such as Levco's Prodigy 4.  I certainly wasn't impressed with memory
expansion kits.

But I was completely blown away by *large screens.*  E-Machines
(7945 S.W. Mohawk St., Tualatin, Oregon 97062, 503-692-6656) was
demonstrating a 1024x808 pixel 17" screen.  $1595 show price (until
October 31, with coupon), $1995 otherwise.  Another company, whose
name escapes me, was showing a similar product for about $2995.  (They're
mentioned in the September MacWorld.  Extra price is due to greater
modularity, choice of output signals, ...)

The "Big Picture" (E-Machines' product) consists of a monitor, cabling
(runs through security slot), and a clip-on piggyback board.  The board
contains 128K of high-speed RAM so that CPU access to video memory is
full speed, not delayed by interleaving.  They claim about 20% improvement
in drawing speed.  You also get a set of INITs which make the system
switch from the normal screen over to theirs during bootup.  To run
without their screen, just boot from an unmodified system.  Their
patches include hooks to over-ride brain-damaged programs that have the
standard Mac screen size hard-coded.  If you hold the option key while
growing a window, their patch replaces the program-supplied bounds with
the real screen bounds.  So, even recalcitrant programs can be coaxed
to produce more-than-full-page windows.  You can read more than a page
in MacWrite, 132 columns in MacTerminal, huge areas in MacDraw.  I 
didn't see FullPaint on this screen, but I imagine it's worth seeing.

For the truly extravagant, it's worth noting that the Big Picture is
Prodigy 4 compatible.  Let's see: Prodigy 4 = $6995, Big Picture = $1595
(show price), Mac Plus = $1299 (developer's price).  So, for less than $10K,
you could blow your mind completely.  Oh, but you'd probably want a SCSI disk
or two...

Downside: The folks at E-Machines' booth did not know of any debugger
which handles non-standard screens correctly.  The next release of TMON
is supposed to.  Macsbug works until the first debugger screen is full,
then it blows the scrolling.

Ephraim Vishniac
decvax!wanginst!wang!ephraim

Disclaimer:  I have no business connection with Levco, E-Machines, or
MacWorld, although I fervently hope to become a customer of E-Machines.