The Cole Digest, July 12, 1995

Gentle Reader,

In a world where the Macintosh faithful have a major trade show to attend every six months, it might seem a little outdated to talk about MacWorld Expo San Francisco (which happened last January) when MacWorld Expo Boston is to be with us shortly (Aug. 8-11).

But think of this and next week's reports from George Powell (a longtime correspondent to The Cole Papers and the production manager of the San Francisco Examiner Sunday Magazine) as preludes to the Boston festivities.

A rundown of selected items seen in San Francisco, old and new:

*Storage solutions came in the form of bigger, faster hard disks, SyQuest removable, magneto-optical, CD-ROM, Raid technology (not the bug spray, but Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks). The prices of all these technologies are coming down, way down. Consider: In 1986, a 20-megabyte hard disk cost around $600, but at this show, specials from various suppliers had one gigabyte (1000 megabyte) hard drives for less than $1000.

Connor Peripherals, right down the road in San Jose and in the marketplace since 1987, like many other manufacturers was touting its new four gigabyte external and internal drives, which all comply with Apple's newest SCSI manager 4.3 and the latest SCSI-2 interface. Stick these speed demons in a top-of-the line Macintosh 8100 for plenty of speed and storage space for a mere $2695, with $100 more for an external version.

Heading into the future, various hard disk arrays from a variety of manufacturers are beginning to inch toward the terrabyte mark (1000 gigabytes), a long way from a 400 kilobyte floppy disk the first Macintosh used.

*In the case of an old Mac IIci, everything old is new again with the Turbo 601 card from DayStar Digital Inc. of Flowery Branch, Ga. This veteran maker of Macintosh accelerators -- it's been at it since 1988 -- has breathed life into those serviceable IIcis.

Preliminary tests show that these cards make a IIci run as much as 11 times faster than an unaccelerated model. But at $1499 for a 75 MHz version, the price is nearly as much as a new Power Macintosh 6100.

*Another new use for old hardware comes from SimmSaver Technology of Wichita, Kan. Old 30-pin Simms can be turned into new 72-pin SIMMs with the SIMM Saver. This ingenious device converts four 30-pin SIMMs into one 72-pin SIMM, enabling older memory to be used in the new Power Macs. And for those who want to load up with memory, the company also announced the availability of 64 megabyte SIMMs for the Quadra and Power Macs, which can actually double the memory capacity of these high-end machines.

*Repetitive strain injury is not a new problem, but with the release of the Power Macintoshes, Articulate Systems has come up with a Macintosh-based speech recognition package that can let the user dictate a story at 40 to 50 words per minute. It can run only on Power and AV-Class Macs, and needs an add-on NuBus sound card to run on Quadra models.

It can also run on the new 500 series PowerBooks, but all machines should be equipped with at least 20 megs of memory, and 25 megs of hard disk space for the first user. Each additional user will take up 5 more megs of disk space.

A user trains the software to recognize his or her voice by repeating a series of phrases. An added bonus is the control that this application, Power Secretary, gives the user over all Mac commands and menus. Basically, the entire Mac is under a user's voice control.

A boon to those afflicted with RSI, the software package isn't cheap at a list price of $2495 for a single Macintosh, with site licenses available. This Massachusetts company could hit the really big time with this important addition to Mac software.

Next week: Powell looks at ergonomic keyboards, Zip drives and new page layout software.

Onward.

\dmc

[THE COLE DIGEST is written by consultant David M. Cole, editor and publisher of the industry newsletter THE COLE PAPERS. The DIGEST is made available to PressLink subscribers every Wednesday at no extra charge. Send comments by e-mail to cole@plink.geis.com. The COLE DIGEST is the property of The Cole Group, a California sole proprietorship. Reproduction in whole or in part without the written permission of The Cole Group is prohibited. Copyright (C) 1995, The Cole Group. Opinions expressed are those of The Cole Group, unless otherwise noted.

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