Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc.misc
Subject: PC Notes #91
From: dave.williams@chaos.lrk.ar.us (Dave Williams) 
Date: 9 Sep 92 21:55:00 GMT
Reply-To: dave.williams@chaos.lrk.ar.us (Dave Williams) 
Distribution: world
Organization: The Courts of Chaos * Jacksonville AR USA * 501-985-0059


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PC Notes #91               08/24/92           copr. 1992, Dave Williams
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  BIX: 'dave2'      CIS: 72571,3542      dave.williams@chaos.lrk.ar.us
                The Courts of Chaos BBS, (501)985-0059
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 Whenever the temperature drops under 90 degrees, I'm usually out
building my new 3-car garage.  I'm relatively confident I have the
only garage in the state with built-in compressed air lines, single
phase and three phase power, two different phone circuits, intercom,
natural gas line, cable TV coax, and both thin Ethernet and twisted
pair LAN lines.

 MS-DOS 6.0:  Is it real, or is it vaporware?  I haven't been able to
find out for sure, and I'm not sure anyone really cares.  Between
DOS+Windows, OS/2, the promise of NT, and the capabilities of MS-DOS
5.0 and DRDOS 6.0, DOS 6 will have to be a major step up for anyone to
work up much enthusiasm for the product.

 Heathkit has finally phased out their electronics kits.  They'll be
pushing educational materials now.

 Microsoft is developing their own sound board.  It's supposed to cost
"less than $300" and be available in October.  Unless it's discounted
heavily or does some incredible tricks, it'll have a hard time
competing with entrenched designs at the $125 mark.

 PC World did a test of 17-inch monitors in their Aug 3 issue.  Their
statistics charts listed such incredibly important information as the
date the monitor first shipped and the weight, but not trivial details
like the actual picture size.  Some "17 inch" monitors measure out to
as little as 13.9 real inches.  When you're buying for Windows, CAD,
or OS/2, that diagonal feature is pretty much all you're concerned
about.  One raspberry for PC World, coming up.

 According to Service News, Artisoft is offering documentation,
technical bulletins, and compatibility guides for LANtastic on
diskette.  BTW, Artisoft's net sales are up 79% and net income up
101% over 1991.

 Legal convulsions:  Boiled down from many sources, it looks like
Cyrix has prevailed against Intel's 386 cloning suit, and Lotus has
triumphed over Borland in the 123 "look and feel" suit.
Unfortunately, things get complicated rapidly from there.

 Z-Nix has filed a countersuit against Microsoft's copyright
infringement suit, alleging violation of the Sherman Antitrust Act,
abuse of judicial process, slander, trespass, breach of contract,
failure to negotiate in good faith, and unfair, unlawful, and
fraudulent business practices.  Perhaps someone should issue pugil
sticks to the litigants and let them work it out themselves...

 Hayes' "time bomb" ads have annoyed a lot of people, including the
competition.  Sierra Semiconductor filed against Hayes, alleging
trade libel, false and misleading advertising, and unfair competition.
They're also asking for an injunction to stop Hayes' ads.

 Chips and Technologies' fiscal 1992 (corporations can start their
fiscal year whenever they want) closed out with a $57.4 million
loss.  Their 1991 figures showed a loss of $9.6M.  C&T also
announced they won't be developing any further microprocessors,
though they'll continue making their 386 clones.

  Zeos laid off 93 people, reported a loss of $11.1M.  Aldus laid
off 11% of its US workforce.  Tandon and Everex are still laying off
workers.

 Pentop maker Momenta bit the dust altogether, showing that, no
matter what kind of rave reviews you get from Byte and PC Mag, you
finally have to ship some product or die.  Industry pundits are
still picking at the bones, but few seem to want to admit the
machines' two main problems - they were too expensive, and few real
users want to grub around with a pen interface, no matter how many
oohs and ahhs it got at trade shows.

 In August 17's InfoWorld Peer to Peer column, Douglas E. Welch raves
that floppies are dead and the removable 40Mb hard disk should be a
good replacement.  Brawwk.  The first time a software upgrade price
increased by the price of a removable hard disk to put it on, that'd
be the end of THAT idea.  CD-ROM, my man.  CD-ROM.  You can get 5000
copies of a disc for $3 each, or less than the price of professionally
duping and labeling a mere two high density floppies.  The Unix world
has been moving to CD-ROM en masse, and Microsoft has been following
right along with NT and Borland with TC++ on CD-ROM.  Of course,
CD-ROMs aren't writable, which is why tape has become the favored way
to transfer megabytes of data.

 Maxtor revenues were up 47%,

 Born in the USA:  Remember Club American Computers?  The FBI raided
them and arrested three company officials on charges of defrauding
the government on the sale of more than $1M of PCs.  The exact charge:
Club claimed the machines were made in the USA.  The FBI doesn't think
so.  This is grounds for arrest?

 Quarterdeck's QEMM product does not support DPMI, a lack that has
cost them some business.  They've release their new DPMI Host package
to graft DPMI support on to QEMM.

 Netware Light's performance has been widely sneered at.  Novell
claims NWL 1.1 is "as much as 300% faster" than 1.0.

 Weitek's new Power 9000 GUI accelerator chip runs at 132 mHz.

 PDA. PDA. PDA.  The magazines are babbling about it.  Unfortunately,
I must've missed the explanation about what a PDA was.  What's a PDA?
A program that turns a $1500 laptop into a DayTimer and alarm clock.
Big deal.

 What good is a LAN?  Do you really need one to share files with
coworkers?  From my survey, file sharing is way down on the list.  How
about groupware, whatever that is?  Zilch.  What's the "killer app"
for LANs?  How about plain old E-mail?  Companies like the simplicity
of E-mail compared to some employee spending two days getting a
20-line memo "just right" in Ventura, than hand-carrying copies around.
I've always promoted LANs as inexpensive ways to ensure all computers
were backed up.  Alas, most people don't care about backup.

 Remember the "Microsoft DOS & Windows Package for PS/2?"  Now you can
buy it for generic clones as well.  Price:  $199.95, MSRP.

 Netware - is it a network or an operating system?  To further blur
things, Gupta's SQLBase is available as an NLM, and Lotus announced it
is considering a version of 123 to run as a Netware Loadable Module.

 Intel is licensing the 80386 to VLSI Research.  The chips will be made
in Intel plants, but marketed by VLSI.  Suuure...  On the other
manipulator, IBM also owns full rights to the 386, since Intel
developed it when IBM owned a big chunk of Intel.  IBM has been
building their own in the US and Israel, but now is entering the
chip market.  They're selling their own modified SX-cache chip to
Reply and are seeking other OEMs.

 The VESA Local Bus appears to have taken off.  Now there's a push to
revamp the semi-defunct EISA standard.  EISA bombed in the marketplace
when vendors wanted 50% or more penalties for buying EISA machines.
Maybe they'll reconsider things next time.

 DTC (408-942-4000) now has a 32-bit EISA paddle card for IDE drives.
Supports drives to 32Gb, 4 hard/4 floppy (including 2.88) and
duplexing/mirroring under Netware 386.

 Quarterdeck has evidently stopped advertising DESQview.  There are a
dew QEMM ads, but mostly ads for DV/X, the program almost nobody wants.

 IBM is moving all its notebook, handheld, and PC groups into one
division.

 After a four year buying spree, Symantec had to pay the piper.
During a "restructuring" a few weeks ago, they closed two sites and
laid off some employees.

=======================================================================
 Dave Williams is a writer and programmer based in an undisclosed state
in the central USA.  He is frequently seen wearing a T-shirt that says,
"I Beat Anorexia."
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Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc.misc