From: hyc@hanauma.jpl.nasa.gov (Howard Chu)
Subject: Re: How's Things At COMDEX?
Organization: SAR Systems Development & Processing, JPL
Date: Thu, 19 Nov 1992 20:44:36 GMT

In article <1egf17INNb5@usenet.INS.CWRU.Edu> aa399@cleveland.Freenet.Edu (Len Stys) writes:
>It is really embarassing that nobody from the net went to COMDEX.
>
>You'd think that SOMEONE went.
>
>Though, I heard that there weren't any new systems announced.

I was there Monday and Tuesday, it was a pretty good show. Sorry I didn't take
many notes. The Atari booth is in the Sands conference center, they have the
largest booth there. (I guess the Sands facility is 2nd or 3rd compared to the
main exhibits in the Las Vegas Convention Center...) Plenty of Falcons there,
all running TOS 4.01 in ROM. No new systems were announced while I was there.
There was a corner showing music applications, with a good MIDI setup and
various other stuff, the main emphasis seemed to be on the D2D direct-to-disk
digital recorder. Hisoft was there in the applications corner showing off their
product line on a pair of TTs. There were a couple other companies whose names
I don't recall right this moment, showing some word processing and other stuff.
One Falcon was setup with a JRI Genlock box and a video camera, scrolling
graphics text over a live view of the passersby. The Kodak PhotoCD system was
being demoed as well, showing PhotoCD images in 768x512 resolution on an SC1224
equivalent as well as a larger (20" or so?) TV. There was another kiosk for
graphics apps, which I didn't spend too much time at. At the productivity booth
they were showing a Falcon-controlled loom/weaving machine or whatever you
call it. It was pretty slick, the guy had a scanner to scan in an image, and
then with the control program you could do stitch-pattern fills on regions of
the image, and then the machine would go and weave the image on your target
form. This machine was setup with baseball caps, doing multi-color Atari logos
and other such.

My company [Digital-Optical-Analog] is showing our voice-mail system at the
telecommunications kiosk, which is a single-line multi-user voice-mail/
automated-response system for the Falcon. After a bit of discussion it looks
like we will start work on a multi-line unit as well, but the single-line
system is operating nicely at the show. On the other side, there was an STFax
setup as well as some other terminal program and such. At another corner there
was a large screen TV showing a true-color video and live audio demo, and at
the opposite corner they had their Targa slideshow program running on another
TV. Last but not least, there was a kiosk with a couple Falcons running various
game demos, and a bunch of portfolios on the opposite side.

John Nagy and John Tarpinian from AtariUser were there Monday, so you can
expect a more detailed report from them in the next issue.

There was another company that was supposed to be showing a text-to-speech
system next to our setup, but their English version wasn't ready so they
opted not to setup at all. Too bad, they said their French and German
systems were quite good, and it probably would have been worthwhile to set
that up regardless.

I managed to break away from our booth and get to the main convention hall
for about an hour, that was somewhat interesting. I stopped in at the Motorola
booth to try and get info on the 68060 but no info was available. They did
have two Falcons on display as well as a Commodore Amiga 4000 and various
Apple Quadras.

Monday was a pretty slow day, things were busier on Tuesday, and apparently
Wednesday is the peak day for the show but I had to get back to my day job
by then so I missed out. The booth is pretty well situated though, we had a lot
of traffic coming by doing double-takes ("Voicemail on a PC?") and tripletakes
("voicemail on an Atari??") and a lot of folks were stopping to ask questions,
and they all seemed suitably impressed by the voicemail system. (If I do say
so myself...) Sam Tramiel brought a number of prospective distributors by our
setup to show off the system, so I'm pretty optimistic about having drummed up
some good business there. He also brought Jack by a couple times, which was
rather a gratifying experience.

Other folks I can still identify by name... Bob Brodie (of course), J Patton,
Bill Rehbock, Mike Fulton... hm. Art Pruszynski, who was head of the Atari
Unix project and is now head of the US Marketing effort. I had quite a few
excellent conversations with him, talking about what happened to the TT Unix
project, some other stuff. Apparently the TT Unix was complete as a product,
but they felt that its performance was too lackluster to justify marketing it
(and the cost of support that would entail). It seems to me that another
company could easily approach Atari about buying the rights to the product
and distributing it themselves, if you're really set on seeing it appear on
the TT. I was tempted to volunteer our company right on the spot but I don't
think we have the manpower at the moment nor is it really in the company's
focus. (Oh well.) At any rate, the development effort there isn't going to
go completely wasted, they'll revive the project when they have a fast enough
system to run it on. I'd expect to hear more rumblings about a 68040 machine
by early next year, but definitely nothing by the end of '92.

Kind of a jumbled report, but I think you get the idea. (Mebbe the jumbled
recollection is a result of my slightly questionable mental state at the time,
I'd been up 4 days straight getting our demo together...)
-- 
  -- Howard Chu @ Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, CA

All true wisdom is conveyed in one-line witticisms.
Newsgroups: comp.sys.atari.st