Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Path: utzoo!mnetor!seismo!rutgers!ames!ucbcad!ucbvax!jade!mica!korn From: korn@mica.BERKELEY.EDU Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac Subject: MacWorld Expo Message-ID: <2171@jade.BERKELEY.EDU> Date: Sun, 11-Jan-87 21:23:00 EST Article-I.D.: jade.2171 Posted: Sun Jan 11 21:23:00 1987 Date-Received: Mon, 12-Jan-87 18:47:11 EST Sender: usenet@jade.BERKELEY.EDU Reply-To: korn@mica.BERKELEY.EDU () Organization: University of California, Berkeley Lines: 86 Keywords: Good, Bad, Worth Mention, Rumor Summary: my comments on the show 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.