These days I use my Sony Ericsson P900 for note-taking. But this "PC Plus" column from 1993 reminds me that I once had a much faster and better way of taking electronic notes. The MicroWriter AgendA was about the size of your hand, with a small mono LCD screen and fingerpads that you pressed as chords to create the different letters of the alphabet (the Wikipedia entry "Chorded Keyboard" explains this).
I see I've been rather kind to the Apple Newton here. The truth is its so-called "character recognition" was not just "less than plausible" -- it was pure bloody infuriation on a stick. The Psion Series 3a, on the other hand, worked out rather better than I hint at here. I did learn more or less to touch type on it. A firm resting surface was essential, yes, but you also needed a wad of Blutak, otherwise you'd end up chasing the the Series 3a around the desk.
But the AgendA really was King. On one occasion I even used it to write my column while walking down the Strip to a press conference, where I transferred it to a colleague's portable computer so he could relay it back to the UK office. Come to think of it, this might even be that column...
[Future 20: The PDA][PCP][1 Dec 93][chb]
Comdex Fall is an exciting place to be, but it isn't the place to see the future. Well, not if you want to live to tell the tale. What goes into the booths at the Las Vegas Exhibition Center and at the Hilton, the Sands and at Bally's Casino Resort are all the things you knew were going to happen anyway, at least if you're a regular reader of PC Plus. The fact that PowerPC was the hottest news at Comdex, or that Bill Gates publicly unveiled Chicago, came as no surprise to any of you out there.
What goes on *behind* the booths is another matter. The manufacturers have tiny back rooms concealed behind their show stages, or will send a long black limo to cruise you off to a distant hotel suite, or will corner you at one of the many midnight chilli fests around some moon-reflecting swimming pool. That's where the veil is lifted on tomorrow's secrets. Unfortunately they *are* secret, and before you see any of it or discuss it with them they make you put your autograph on a “Non-Disclosure Agreement”, and you sign away any right to pass the news on to your readers. They're also not necessarily very interesting secrets -- things like a new SCSI adaptor, same as last year's but smaller and a bit faster.
A bit pointless, really. Well, I thought so, and this year mostly stayed out of the secret circle. But when you pass up the chance to hunt for news that dare not speak its name, the sheer incongruous vastness of Comdex out front is enough to confuse the poor old journalistic brain. If you're going to come back from Las Vegas with more than just an extra suitcase of brochures, you need some kind of a theme to hold it all together.
I stumbled across my theme on the Sunday before the show started. I'd collected my heavy as a brick Program and Exhibits Guide from the registration tent, and was headed back on foot towards the teeming lobby of my hotel to check, without much hope, whether they'd managed to find my registration. You can see the huge terra cotta tristar of the Treasure Island from the Exhibition Center, but in trying to make a bee-line for it I became entangled in maze of brick walls. Negotiating the last of these tumbled me down into the street right at the feet of a passing Englishman, who turned out to be an old acquaintence of mine, David Viewing, MD of Ranger Computers. Years ago David started Husky, a company that in the early ‘80's arguably was first on the scene with a portable small and rugged enough to qualify as what we now call a Personal Digital Assistant.
Over non-stop cups of coffee at a nearby “7 & Eleven” David and I fell to arguing about paradigm shifts and The Big Picture. He managed to convince me that the one issue worth watching out for was the evolution of the PDA. “It's not a matter of getting the underlying technology right -- that's more or less in place. It's how you do the interface. Whoever gets that interface right will open the door to the next era of computing.” The catch is that nobody will know they've got it right until a couple of million people get a chance to try it. A chicken and egg situation, fraught with probable failure, but somewhere in Comdex, if you knew where to look, there may be a product that embodies the essentials and opens the door to the new way of thinking we'll need.
Well, I have a problem with this, as regular readers of this column will know. I found the PDA of tomorrow back in 1989 -- the MicroWriter AgendA. It has a tiny, 20 character by 4 line mono screen, and for input uses a set of seven keys on which you play “chords” to create all the letters of the alphabet. It fits in my inside jacket pocket, and I carry it with me everywhere as my diary, phone book, and notebook. The chordal keyboard is a lot less weird than it sounds, it really does only take half an hour to learn, and it's the only machine I know of that you can write with one handed while walking round an exhibition. The catch is, the public has tried it and rejected it. Last year the company that designed it went out of business.
With the Viewing Plan in mind I set about scouring Comdex for the next face of computing. I came up with three candidates: The Apple Newton, the new Psion Series 3a, and the IBM/SouthWest Bell Simon. Two of these have made it back to my office for extended experimentation. The Simon, alas, is a US only product.
You know the Newton already, of course -- a manageably small pen computer with a convincing battery life. You probably know the Psion Series 3 too. The new 3a widens the screen without changing the neat shirt-pocket size, adds a “Digital Audio System” with the rather limited ability to record a sound or two, and now very usefully includes a spreadsheet in its built-in suite of Windows-like multitasking software. That's two very different paradigms: the pen and paper notebook, or the scaled down typewriter. Neither quite does the job for me. The Newton seems to have a less than plausible handwriting recognition interface. The tiny keyboard of the Psion Series 3a is a faster way of getting data in, but is too small to touch type, and really needs to be set up on a desk.
The Simon comes at this from a completely different angle. Its paradigm is the portable telephone, but where you would expect to find the buttons the designers have put an LCD touch sensitive screen. The screen lets the machine double as a telephone and a PDA, with the advantage of giving you a built-in wireless data connection along the lines of the Cognito Messager was talked about in this column a couple of months ago.
So that's three new volume products to watch. None of them really does the job the way you know you need it done: the big question is whether they will deliver enough in the way of customer satisfaction to get used and stay in business until the technology catches up. Two years ago at Comdex the new pen computers were out in force, and you might have predicted then that by the end of 1993 visitors to the exhibition would be routinely using the things to take notes as they move from stand to stand. But no, among the 170,000 visitors this year the only high tech mobile note taking you were likely to see was me and my faithful AgendA.
10 May 2006
09 May 2006
Surviving Big Blue
In the early '80s technology manufacture seemed to be thriving here in the UK, particularly among the smaller startups that as an IT journalist I spent a lot of time talking to.
But by the time I wrote this sadly prophetic piece for "Which Computer?" in 1985 the impact of US manufacturers was already beginning to take its toll. The reference to the woes of ICL is particularly poignant for me, even today. In the late '70s I'd been researching an industrial film for ICL, and happened to mention "micros" (as PCs were called back then). I was impressed by the advent of the Apple II, and warned, in my smart-arse newbie way, that this "revolution" would prove a threat to ICL's business. How the rotund, stripe-suited mainframe salesmen chortled. "Mere toys," they said. Hmmm...
Sir Clive's QL gets a mention here. I had one to play with, but never used it seriously. But my successor as script editor of "Doctor Who", Eric Saward, bought one and I understand made good professional use of it for years after. I also reviewed the ICL spin-off from the QL, the One-per-desk. It was quite the most depressing piece of hardware ever to visit my office.
(Incidentally, the @string format headers remind me that I was probably composing this in Perfect Writer, and running it through a formatting program before printing it out for my editor.)
PS: I see I even manage to slip in a quote from "Hamlet" here. How classy is that?
[Surviving Big Blue][wc?][25-Mar-85][chb]
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In the twenties it was wireless sets, the fifties, tape recorders, the sixties, high fidelity. For the small and not-so-small technological entrepreneur, prepared to manufacture, import or add value here in Britain, each phase has opened up a booming market ... and within a few years, slammed it shut again as the heavy international operators loomed onto the scene. The mushrooming of micro manufacturing at the turn of the decade repeated the cycle. 1982 brought IBM and its Personal Computer decisively into the game, and the casualties have been mounting ever since.
In the UK three things happened over the next few years. Companies like Keen, with a heavy commitment to outright if indifferent alternatives to the IBM philosophy found their market eaten away; others, like Almarc Data Systems, in developing and manufacturing IBM-lookalikes, diverted too much of their resources from their tried-and-tested stable product. Keen, Almarc and many others are now just memories.
The third thing that happened was that, remarkably, some UK computer companies survived.
The larger internationals -- Olivetti, Sperry, Burroughs, Ericsson et al -- that began with micros of their own design have been steered by diminishing sales returns into the production of '100% compatibles'. All of them promise, and most deliver, some technical superiority over the distinctly dull IBM product, but the design constraints limit the possibilities.
Wang is an exception: it continues to rely on a machine using the same processor family and operating system as the PC, but unable to run standard IBM software that addresses the hardware directly (as most of the Top Pop packages like Lotus do). Instead it offers innovative industrial design, and special goodies like TV image capture.
Meanwhile in another part of the forest, Apple plows its own distinct and costly furrow with the Macintosh.
Let's call these three strategies stringalong, stayclose and stayaway. The same options are open to the UK survivors, although most lack the considerable marketing muscle to stringalong, and stayclose is increasingly dangerous for both manufacturers and importers as it appears to be the ground picked by Japanese manufacturers like Sanyo for a pile-'em-high export drive.
Cifer, the mid-seventies VDU company turned micro manufacturer, long ago formulated the theory that in a world of intense competition for the low and mid micro markets, where economies of scale virtually guarantee the eventual domination of the Japanese and the Americans, there would always be room for excellence. The philosopy has made them stayaway survivors... but only just. Following heavy sackings last year at its worksite in Melksham, Wiltshire, Cifer, has now made further cutbacks of a third of its workforce, accompanied by major managerial reorganisation.
What went wrong? Physically their Series 9000 is a highly tuned, superbly designed computer that draws inspiration from the Hewlett-Packard range. But the company put all its eggs in the single basket of Unix, the operating system that is tipped (at least by AT&T, its proprietors) to take the micro world by storm once sufficiently advanced micro-processors are available.
However Unix has yet to prove itself a commercial success. Critics argue variously that it is far too advanced for business users, or alternatively, too old and clumsy to cope with the sort of pictorial interfaces customers are rapidly coming to expect.
For its often fanatical adherents in the academic and scientific worlds, Unix is a philosophical adventure, and a sublime environment for the development of software. Even they would concede it takes time and trouble to install on new microcomputer hardware, and when up and running steals so much of the processor's power for its own internal ruminations that some have dubbed it 'the octopus in your tank'. While Cifer convalesces from its wrestling match with the octopus, doubts are bound to deepen as to whether the world is ready for Unix, or Unix for the world.
Cifer's level of commitment to Unix may be a misreading of the undoubted market interest in the product. "I get asked for Unix a lot," says Trevor Crotch-Harvey, Marketing Manager of TDI, another company involved in 68000-based machines. "A few customers need it specifically -- the other ninety percent only need the assurance of its availability. Unix becomes a sort of general indicator that the our Pinnacle and Stride machines aren't going to be left behind".
For that reason TDI are currently porting Unix System V, although few of their customers show signs of using it "They just need to know you've got it on your box. We don't expect to sell too many Unix machines -- but we expect to sell more machines because we've got Unix!"
TDI is an exemplary exponent of the stayaway strategy. The company began life as a time-sharing bureau, an activity that now accounts for only 5% of its business. Hardware and software distribution in equal parts make up the rest -- the Pinnacle and Stride micros on the one hand, and systems software and development tools on the other.
In 1982 the Stride, then known as the Sage, was the first 68000 multi-user micro introduced into this country. TDI are sole UK distributors for these Nevada-made micros, but the company's relationship with the more powerful Pinnacle, another 68000 machine, is closer still, with TDI sharing ownership. So far manufacturing is confined to Dallas, Texas, but most of the systems software was developed here in the UK.
Crotch-Harvey doesn't remember ever making a conscious decision to stay away from Big Blue. "When the IBM PC came out we already had a machine that was miles ahead of it technically. You might call it naivety, but it never occurred to us to take the backward step of offering anything similar."
This isn't just marketing hype. The central processor that the TDI machines share with Cifer's Series 9000, the Motorola 68000, dubbed 'the programmer's pet' is a high powered, true 16-bit engine, with 32-bit internal resources far beyond the 8088 that drives the IBM PC. But, as IBM knew all along, and others have since learnt, raw power means nothing to the mainsteam end user, who looks for a stable and rapidly expanding software base.
How does TDI stay away from IBM without staying away from customers? "The most important thing is to have some major compensation for incompatibility," says Crotch-Harvey. Micros like the Pinnacle allow users to run heavy number-crunching programs hitherto unthinkable outside a mainframe. Porting such applications is often surprisingly simple -- the source code is usually in Fortran and all that is needed is an efficient Fortran compiler on the target machine.
The result is a very price-competitive alternative in a number of specialised applications, like the simulation of complex real-life situations. One example increasingly used by designers and architects before the first brick is laid, is analysis of the flow of customers and goods around the checkout counters of a supermarket.
Since the early seventies there have been mainframe packages that animate the effects of random peaking and bottlenecks, but the massive repetitious calculations they require run far too slowly on the standard office micro, and threaten to seize too much of the resources of shared mainframes. Porting them to high-powered micros like the Pinnacle that may become dedicated simulation machines can be the ideal solution. And often at something like a twentieth of the traditional cost.
TDI's micros also have a part to play in the corporate office, where they can be found running the BOSS business-oriented operating system as fast multi-user machines. The initial cost of the central processing unit is a little under £7,000, but adding users is simply a matter of plugging in additional terminals. A typical six user system will run to around £11,000, less than £2,000 per user, with all the benefits of shared resources like hard disks, printers, and of course communal data.
Local government particularly offers scope for suppliers of non-IBM multi-user micros. John MacGivern is Sales Director of Casu, a stayaway company specialising in this field. "We keep well away from compatibility with the PC and specialise multi-user systems. For most of our customers these are cheaper than stand-alone micros. Typically they write their own applications, so not being able to run ready-made packages isn't a problem. In any case, operating systems like Concurrent CP/M and Boss are a far richer environment for developing software".
HM Systems, a small London company that operates under the broad umbrella of the Grand Metropolitan Group, believes that multi-user systems should be multi-processor too. Their Minstrel micro differs from a normal multi-user system by dedicating a separate processor, with associated memory, to each user. In effect the Minstrel is a network of separate micros in a single chassis with the connection made down a fast and physically short parallel bus system housed within the machine.
This arrangement appears further from the IBM PC than any of the stayaways so far described, but for existing IBM PC users there's a have@|-your@|-cake@|-and@|-eat@|-it angle. "We don't ignore IBM," says John Kelly of HM Systems. "Our operating system, TurboDos, is compatible with a lot of IBM gear. In fact we have a facility called TurboDos PC which links any MSDOS or PC-DOS machine into the Minstrel network."
This means that the Minstrel can operate as a fast file server for IBM PC's, although Kelly prefers to put the emphasis firmly on his own machine. "In a network like that you've got a real computer for doing multiple access accounts work and archiving, with your dedicated baby IBM-style workstation attached to handle executive toys like Symphony and Lotus 1-2-3."
A stayaway approach in price as well as technology is exemplified by Sir Clive Sinclair, who used expertise acquired in bringing the toy-sized Spectrum to market to produce the cheapest possible 'serious' computer. Built around the 68008, a close relative of the 68000 that cuts costs by working with slower cheaper components, the QL offers a complete system for an incredibly cheap #600, including colour monitor and bundled business software.
Unfortunately 'incredible' became the key word during a premature release of the product. Its innovative storage system, a pair of 100K continuous loop tape cartridge called 'microdrives', became notorious for their unreliability. Since then a group venture with ICL has brought twenty years of mainframe manufacturing experience to bear on the problem. ICL's high speed photography of the tape loops in action suggested modifications that have now produced a cheap, reliable machine of real utility.
A serious threat to IBM's continued expansion in the business market? If the product itself were the only factor, the answer would be a defiant yes. Except that initial mis-marketing and an appallingly bad press have taken their toll in sales. More recently, rumours of a serious attack of cold feet on the part of Sinclair's private shareholders threaten the QL's future, and casts doubts on Sir Clive's next venture, a 'no compromise' lap-top portable.
Meanwhile ICL, brought by recent troubles into the ownership of STC, continue to push forward against IBM's domination of the PC market on two fronts. The group venture with Sinclair has sired the One-Per-Desk, a re-engineered QL with a phone. Bred to be the middle manager's Shetland workhorse, combining the communication skills of ICL and STC with Sinclair's cost-engineering expertise, the OPD has so far turned out to be the proverbial camel designed by a committee -- and a committee that seems not to have met very often. Not least among its shortcomings is an internal communications problem that prohibits text transmitted and received down the telephone line from being edited by the built-in word processor.
ICL's up-market thrust, the ICL-PC, is a classic stayclose product, but their choice of central processing chip opens up a new possibility. On the cards is nothing less than a stringalong-stayclose-stayaway machine that may solve everybody's problems -- even ICL's.
Before the arrival of the 80286, manufacturers who wanted compatibility with the IBM PC had to copy its physical architecture. The fly in the ointment is Lotus 1-2-3 and programs like it that by-pass the operating system in order to achieve more speed and to give copy protection. In the colourful jargon of the systems developers, such programs 'hit the hardware directly'. If the hardware is not as the program expects, it will crash.
Bill Gates, youthful mastermind behind MSDOS, the operating system common to IBM-PC's, stringalongs and staycloses, calls programs that include such extra-curricular activities 'badly-behaved'. This is the factor that makes an MSDOS machine like ACT's Apricot unable to run the standard versions of IBM-based software.
The 80286 can do everything that the 8088 of the IBM PC can do and more. In particular it offers the opportunity to catch these direct hardware hits and allow them to be specially treated by the operating system -- in effect mimicking the IBM PC hardware by software emulation.
Paul Bailey of Digital Research keenly promotes this approach; it is his company that is supplying ICL and others with Concurrent Dos-286. This chameleon operating system allows ICL and other 80286 manufacturers to build machines that will be able to cope with all the existing body of IBM-PC software -- and at the same time promise multi-tasking, windowing and true concurrency, three features that together allow a single micro to do several things at once.
ACT is another stayclose company that may be hoping to outflank IBM in the same way. Their current Apricot and F1 ranges are built around the 8086, an 8088-compatible chip that gives more speed at a higher cost. But this and other technical advantages, like the use of the latest 3-1/2 inch disk drives, are only too easily seen in the marketplace as purposes mistook, fallen on the inventors heads. One new IBM-PC package arrives on the market every day, and purchasers of the classy ACT machines quickly become conscious of the tantalising proximity of a growing volume of software they can't run.
The fact of not being able to put a standard IBM-PC 5-1/4 inch disk into an Apricot slot is estimated already to have cost ACT millions of pounds in software conversion fees. More is involved than copying the programs to a compatible disk of course, because intricate modifications have to made to the ill-behaved sections of code.
Despite this unwelcome overhead, ACT's flamboyant marketing, imaginative management and technically superior products have put it on equal footing with the IBM in the UK, giving each 30% of the market. The balance, though, is perilous: while IBM PCs have largely found homes in corporate offices whose occupants will remain brand-loyal into the next generation of products and beyond, ACT's distribution has sought out the nooks and crannies of the one and two man businesses, like solicitors and estate agents offices where the cost of sales are high, and customers are easily wooed away by price-cutting competitors.
Although no firm announcements have been made, it seems certain that by the end of the year ACT will be offering a Concurrent CP/M 286 machine to fuel its drive into the corporate market. But by this time it will have to contend with IBM's own 80286 office micro, the PC/AT. Announced in the States last year, the arrival over here of the AT has been delayed by chip shortages and what IBM-watchers suggest may be a wrangle between IBM UK and the American mother-ship, but nobody doubts it will soon be tangible presence.
IBM also have a software product in the offing that could pull the rug out from under the Concurrent contenders. Some 180K in size, TopView is a program for IBM PC's and AT's that beefs up the operating system to provide windowing facilities for existing 'well behaved' standard packages. Badly behaved applications have only restricted freedom under TopView, but specially written packages that take the TopView environment into account get a bonus -- a measure of integration and data exchange.
The result is something that looks very like Digital Research's concurrency. But the arrangement to share the processor is too rough and ready to support the real-time demands of, for example, a communications program running in the background.
TopView has been available in the States since the US launch of the PC/AT in August of last year. But when the machine arrived in the UK a month later, TopView failed to accompany it across the Atlantic. IBM UK won't say why, or when it will be launched over here.
Reports suggest that US customers are intrigued by the product, and may even want to buy it when IBM can explain what it's for. Digital Research are watching the muted sales of TopView with mixed feelings: if customers can't perceive the benefits of pseudo-concurrency, how do you sell them the real thing?
There are no easy conclusions to be drawn about a safe path for UK manufacturers. Optimism seems to be most justified among the smaller stayaway companies that have secured niches for themselves in specialist sectors like government and scientific establishments. At least for the moment. But the computer by definition is a general-purpose device, and as the mainstream micro technology exemplified by IBM becomes faster and more powerful, even exotic applications begin to fall into its domain.
The stayclose companies are more immediately vulnerable. If TopView and the PC/AT threaten to make waves for the UK survivors, the latest informed rumours of a brand new IBM machine could swamp the landscape. How would you like a genuine IBM lap portable with an 80286 processor, a hard disk and a 3 1/4 inch floppy (like the Apricots) for some 20% less than the current PC price?
You would? Then you'd better think what to do with those old ICL and ACT micros. And with old ICL and ACT, for that matter.
But by the time I wrote this sadly prophetic piece for "Which Computer?" in 1985 the impact of US manufacturers was already beginning to take its toll. The reference to the woes of ICL is particularly poignant for me, even today. In the late '70s I'd been researching an industrial film for ICL, and happened to mention "micros" (as PCs were called back then). I was impressed by the advent of the Apple II, and warned, in my smart-arse newbie way, that this "revolution" would prove a threat to ICL's business. How the rotund, stripe-suited mainframe salesmen chortled. "Mere toys," they said. Hmmm...
Sir Clive's QL gets a mention here. I had one to play with, but never used it seriously. But my successor as script editor of "Doctor Who", Eric Saward, bought one and I understand made good professional use of it for years after. I also reviewed the ICL spin-off from the QL, the One-per-desk. It was quite the most depressing piece of hardware ever to visit my office.
(Incidentally, the @string format headers remind me that I was probably composing this in Perfect Writer, and running it through a formatting program before printing it out for my editor.)
PS: I see I even manage to slip in a quote from "Hamlet" here. How classy is that?
[Surviving Big Blue][wc?][25-Mar-85][chb]
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@string(ShortTitle = "Survivors")
@string(ArticleTitle = "Surviving Big Blue")
@string(filename = 'BigBlue.WCH')
@string(header = "article")
@string(subpage = "")
@include(a:general.hed)
In the twenties it was wireless sets, the fifties, tape recorders, the sixties, high fidelity. For the small and not-so-small technological entrepreneur, prepared to manufacture, import or add value here in Britain, each phase has opened up a booming market ... and within a few years, slammed it shut again as the heavy international operators loomed onto the scene. The mushrooming of micro manufacturing at the turn of the decade repeated the cycle. 1982 brought IBM and its Personal Computer decisively into the game, and the casualties have been mounting ever since.
In the UK three things happened over the next few years. Companies like Keen, with a heavy commitment to outright if indifferent alternatives to the IBM philosophy found their market eaten away; others, like Almarc Data Systems, in developing and manufacturing IBM-lookalikes, diverted too much of their resources from their tried-and-tested stable product. Keen, Almarc and many others are now just memories.
The third thing that happened was that, remarkably, some UK computer companies survived.
The larger internationals -- Olivetti, Sperry, Burroughs, Ericsson et al -- that began with micros of their own design have been steered by diminishing sales returns into the production of '100% compatibles'. All of them promise, and most deliver, some technical superiority over the distinctly dull IBM product, but the design constraints limit the possibilities.
Wang is an exception: it continues to rely on a machine using the same processor family and operating system as the PC, but unable to run standard IBM software that addresses the hardware directly (as most of the Top Pop packages like Lotus do). Instead it offers innovative industrial design, and special goodies like TV image capture.
Meanwhile in another part of the forest, Apple plows its own distinct and costly furrow with the Macintosh.
Let's call these three strategies stringalong, stayclose and stayaway. The same options are open to the UK survivors, although most lack the considerable marketing muscle to stringalong, and stayclose is increasingly dangerous for both manufacturers and importers as it appears to be the ground picked by Japanese manufacturers like Sanyo for a pile-'em-high export drive.
Cifer, the mid-seventies VDU company turned micro manufacturer, long ago formulated the theory that in a world of intense competition for the low and mid micro markets, where economies of scale virtually guarantee the eventual domination of the Japanese and the Americans, there would always be room for excellence. The philosopy has made them stayaway survivors... but only just. Following heavy sackings last year at its worksite in Melksham, Wiltshire, Cifer, has now made further cutbacks of a third of its workforce, accompanied by major managerial reorganisation.
What went wrong? Physically their Series 9000 is a highly tuned, superbly designed computer that draws inspiration from the Hewlett-Packard range. But the company put all its eggs in the single basket of Unix, the operating system that is tipped (at least by AT&T, its proprietors) to take the micro world by storm once sufficiently advanced micro-processors are available.
However Unix has yet to prove itself a commercial success. Critics argue variously that it is far too advanced for business users, or alternatively, too old and clumsy to cope with the sort of pictorial interfaces customers are rapidly coming to expect.
For its often fanatical adherents in the academic and scientific worlds, Unix is a philosophical adventure, and a sublime environment for the development of software. Even they would concede it takes time and trouble to install on new microcomputer hardware, and when up and running steals so much of the processor's power for its own internal ruminations that some have dubbed it 'the octopus in your tank'. While Cifer convalesces from its wrestling match with the octopus, doubts are bound to deepen as to whether the world is ready for Unix, or Unix for the world.
Cifer's level of commitment to Unix may be a misreading of the undoubted market interest in the product. "I get asked for Unix a lot," says Trevor Crotch-Harvey, Marketing Manager of TDI, another company involved in 68000-based machines. "A few customers need it specifically -- the other ninety percent only need the assurance of its availability. Unix becomes a sort of general indicator that the our Pinnacle and Stride machines aren't going to be left behind".
For that reason TDI are currently porting Unix System V, although few of their customers show signs of using it "They just need to know you've got it on your box. We don't expect to sell too many Unix machines -- but we expect to sell more machines because we've got Unix!"
TDI is an exemplary exponent of the stayaway strategy. The company began life as a time-sharing bureau, an activity that now accounts for only 5% of its business. Hardware and software distribution in equal parts make up the rest -- the Pinnacle and Stride micros on the one hand, and systems software and development tools on the other.
In 1982 the Stride, then known as the Sage, was the first 68000 multi-user micro introduced into this country. TDI are sole UK distributors for these Nevada-made micros, but the company's relationship with the more powerful Pinnacle, another 68000 machine, is closer still, with TDI sharing ownership. So far manufacturing is confined to Dallas, Texas, but most of the systems software was developed here in the UK.
Crotch-Harvey doesn't remember ever making a conscious decision to stay away from Big Blue. "When the IBM PC came out we already had a machine that was miles ahead of it technically. You might call it naivety, but it never occurred to us to take the backward step of offering anything similar."
This isn't just marketing hype. The central processor that the TDI machines share with Cifer's Series 9000, the Motorola 68000, dubbed 'the programmer's pet' is a high powered, true 16-bit engine, with 32-bit internal resources far beyond the 8088 that drives the IBM PC. But, as IBM knew all along, and others have since learnt, raw power means nothing to the mainsteam end user, who looks for a stable and rapidly expanding software base.
How does TDI stay away from IBM without staying away from customers? "The most important thing is to have some major compensation for incompatibility," says Crotch-Harvey. Micros like the Pinnacle allow users to run heavy number-crunching programs hitherto unthinkable outside a mainframe. Porting such applications is often surprisingly simple -- the source code is usually in Fortran and all that is needed is an efficient Fortran compiler on the target machine.
The result is a very price-competitive alternative in a number of specialised applications, like the simulation of complex real-life situations. One example increasingly used by designers and architects before the first brick is laid, is analysis of the flow of customers and goods around the checkout counters of a supermarket.
Since the early seventies there have been mainframe packages that animate the effects of random peaking and bottlenecks, but the massive repetitious calculations they require run far too slowly on the standard office micro, and threaten to seize too much of the resources of shared mainframes. Porting them to high-powered micros like the Pinnacle that may become dedicated simulation machines can be the ideal solution. And often at something like a twentieth of the traditional cost.
TDI's micros also have a part to play in the corporate office, where they can be found running the BOSS business-oriented operating system as fast multi-user machines. The initial cost of the central processing unit is a little under £7,000, but adding users is simply a matter of plugging in additional terminals. A typical six user system will run to around £11,000, less than £2,000 per user, with all the benefits of shared resources like hard disks, printers, and of course communal data.
Local government particularly offers scope for suppliers of non-IBM multi-user micros. John MacGivern is Sales Director of Casu, a stayaway company specialising in this field. "We keep well away from compatibility with the PC and specialise multi-user systems. For most of our customers these are cheaper than stand-alone micros. Typically they write their own applications, so not being able to run ready-made packages isn't a problem. In any case, operating systems like Concurrent CP/M and Boss are a far richer environment for developing software".
HM Systems, a small London company that operates under the broad umbrella of the Grand Metropolitan Group, believes that multi-user systems should be multi-processor too. Their Minstrel micro differs from a normal multi-user system by dedicating a separate processor, with associated memory, to each user. In effect the Minstrel is a network of separate micros in a single chassis with the connection made down a fast and physically short parallel bus system housed within the machine.
This arrangement appears further from the IBM PC than any of the stayaways so far described, but for existing IBM PC users there's a have@|-your@|-cake@|-and@|-eat@|-it angle. "We don't ignore IBM," says John Kelly of HM Systems. "Our operating system, TurboDos, is compatible with a lot of IBM gear. In fact we have a facility called TurboDos PC which links any MSDOS or PC-DOS machine into the Minstrel network."
This means that the Minstrel can operate as a fast file server for IBM PC's, although Kelly prefers to put the emphasis firmly on his own machine. "In a network like that you've got a real computer for doing multiple access accounts work and archiving, with your dedicated baby IBM-style workstation attached to handle executive toys like Symphony and Lotus 1-2-3."
A stayaway approach in price as well as technology is exemplified by Sir Clive Sinclair, who used expertise acquired in bringing the toy-sized Spectrum to market to produce the cheapest possible 'serious' computer. Built around the 68008, a close relative of the 68000 that cuts costs by working with slower cheaper components, the QL offers a complete system for an incredibly cheap #600, including colour monitor and bundled business software.
Unfortunately 'incredible' became the key word during a premature release of the product. Its innovative storage system, a pair of 100K continuous loop tape cartridge called 'microdrives', became notorious for their unreliability. Since then a group venture with ICL has brought twenty years of mainframe manufacturing experience to bear on the problem. ICL's high speed photography of the tape loops in action suggested modifications that have now produced a cheap, reliable machine of real utility.
A serious threat to IBM's continued expansion in the business market? If the product itself were the only factor, the answer would be a defiant yes. Except that initial mis-marketing and an appallingly bad press have taken their toll in sales. More recently, rumours of a serious attack of cold feet on the part of Sinclair's private shareholders threaten the QL's future, and casts doubts on Sir Clive's next venture, a 'no compromise' lap-top portable.
Meanwhile ICL, brought by recent troubles into the ownership of STC, continue to push forward against IBM's domination of the PC market on two fronts. The group venture with Sinclair has sired the One-Per-Desk, a re-engineered QL with a phone. Bred to be the middle manager's Shetland workhorse, combining the communication skills of ICL and STC with Sinclair's cost-engineering expertise, the OPD has so far turned out to be the proverbial camel designed by a committee -- and a committee that seems not to have met very often. Not least among its shortcomings is an internal communications problem that prohibits text transmitted and received down the telephone line from being edited by the built-in word processor.
ICL's up-market thrust, the ICL-PC, is a classic stayclose product, but their choice of central processing chip opens up a new possibility. On the cards is nothing less than a stringalong-stayclose-stayaway machine that may solve everybody's problems -- even ICL's.
Before the arrival of the 80286, manufacturers who wanted compatibility with the IBM PC had to copy its physical architecture. The fly in the ointment is Lotus 1-2-3 and programs like it that by-pass the operating system in order to achieve more speed and to give copy protection. In the colourful jargon of the systems developers, such programs 'hit the hardware directly'. If the hardware is not as the program expects, it will crash.
Bill Gates, youthful mastermind behind MSDOS, the operating system common to IBM-PC's, stringalongs and staycloses, calls programs that include such extra-curricular activities 'badly-behaved'. This is the factor that makes an MSDOS machine like ACT's Apricot unable to run the standard versions of IBM-based software.
The 80286 can do everything that the 8088 of the IBM PC can do and more. In particular it offers the opportunity to catch these direct hardware hits and allow them to be specially treated by the operating system -- in effect mimicking the IBM PC hardware by software emulation.
Paul Bailey of Digital Research keenly promotes this approach; it is his company that is supplying ICL and others with Concurrent Dos-286. This chameleon operating system allows ICL and other 80286 manufacturers to build machines that will be able to cope with all the existing body of IBM-PC software -- and at the same time promise multi-tasking, windowing and true concurrency, three features that together allow a single micro to do several things at once.
ACT is another stayclose company that may be hoping to outflank IBM in the same way. Their current Apricot and F1 ranges are built around the 8086, an 8088-compatible chip that gives more speed at a higher cost. But this and other technical advantages, like the use of the latest 3-1/2 inch disk drives, are only too easily seen in the marketplace as purposes mistook, fallen on the inventors heads. One new IBM-PC package arrives on the market every day, and purchasers of the classy ACT machines quickly become conscious of the tantalising proximity of a growing volume of software they can't run.
The fact of not being able to put a standard IBM-PC 5-1/4 inch disk into an Apricot slot is estimated already to have cost ACT millions of pounds in software conversion fees. More is involved than copying the programs to a compatible disk of course, because intricate modifications have to made to the ill-behaved sections of code.
Despite this unwelcome overhead, ACT's flamboyant marketing, imaginative management and technically superior products have put it on equal footing with the IBM in the UK, giving each 30% of the market. The balance, though, is perilous: while IBM PCs have largely found homes in corporate offices whose occupants will remain brand-loyal into the next generation of products and beyond, ACT's distribution has sought out the nooks and crannies of the one and two man businesses, like solicitors and estate agents offices where the cost of sales are high, and customers are easily wooed away by price-cutting competitors.
Although no firm announcements have been made, it seems certain that by the end of the year ACT will be offering a Concurrent CP/M 286 machine to fuel its drive into the corporate market. But by this time it will have to contend with IBM's own 80286 office micro, the PC/AT. Announced in the States last year, the arrival over here of the AT has been delayed by chip shortages and what IBM-watchers suggest may be a wrangle between IBM UK and the American mother-ship, but nobody doubts it will soon be tangible presence.
IBM also have a software product in the offing that could pull the rug out from under the Concurrent contenders. Some 180K in size, TopView is a program for IBM PC's and AT's that beefs up the operating system to provide windowing facilities for existing 'well behaved' standard packages. Badly behaved applications have only restricted freedom under TopView, but specially written packages that take the TopView environment into account get a bonus -- a measure of integration and data exchange.
The result is something that looks very like Digital Research's concurrency. But the arrangement to share the processor is too rough and ready to support the real-time demands of, for example, a communications program running in the background.
TopView has been available in the States since the US launch of the PC/AT in August of last year. But when the machine arrived in the UK a month later, TopView failed to accompany it across the Atlantic. IBM UK won't say why, or when it will be launched over here.
Reports suggest that US customers are intrigued by the product, and may even want to buy it when IBM can explain what it's for. Digital Research are watching the muted sales of TopView with mixed feelings: if customers can't perceive the benefits of pseudo-concurrency, how do you sell them the real thing?
There are no easy conclusions to be drawn about a safe path for UK manufacturers. Optimism seems to be most justified among the smaller stayaway companies that have secured niches for themselves in specialist sectors like government and scientific establishments. At least for the moment. But the computer by definition is a general-purpose device, and as the mainstream micro technology exemplified by IBM becomes faster and more powerful, even exotic applications begin to fall into its domain.
The stayclose companies are more immediately vulnerable. If TopView and the PC/AT threaten to make waves for the UK survivors, the latest informed rumours of a brand new IBM machine could swamp the landscape. How would you like a genuine IBM lap portable with an 80286 processor, a hard disk and a 3 1/4 inch floppy (like the Apricots) for some 20% less than the current PC price?
You would? Then you'd better think what to do with those old ICL and ACT micros. And with old ICL and ACT, for that matter.
08 May 2006
Z88: A Real Portable Computer
Clive Sinclair's Z88 was a genuine breakthrough -- the first portable computer I could confidently carry around in my briefcase without having to worry about the state of my batteries. It also let me sit out in the garden writing in strong sunlight, something I can't do on my ThinkPad today. Thanks, Clive.
[The Cambridge Computer Z88][wc?][27 Aug 88][chb]
In our issue of March this year we ran an exclusive hands-on preview of a new portable destined to arrive on the market the following month at a price ofjust under 200 pounds. The machine came from the stable of Clive Sinclair, and perhaps because of this its announcement was welcomed with affection by some, but also greeted with a good deal of cynicism by those who remembered the unfortunate launch history of the much delayed QL. It would be late, they predicted, and it would be technically disappointing.
The cynics were half right. There has been a dribble of machines out of the Cambridge Computer mail order depot, but in practice the product only became widely available during the early days of September -- five months behind schedule. And as an added sting it is now priced at 250 pounds -- a 25 percent increase.
But the cynics were also half wrong. Our brief hands-on encounter with the machine five months ago and extensive talks with the backroom team suggested that if the finished product met only 50 percent of its design goals it would still be a useful tool for most people who need a computer -- portable or not. The Z88 has met its design goals, and in our opinion deserves to be a realwinner.
To recap briefly on our March preview, the main intentions of the designers were:
An affordable, highly portable light-weight A4-sized computer that fits in a briefcase -- along with all the other stuff you would normally carry.
A full-sized keyboard that would be not unduly disconcert a professional typist, but which would be unobtrusive if used for note-taking in, say, seminars and board-meetings.
Bundled software that takes care of word-processing and spreadsheeting needs, includes a universal programmable language, as well as diary, calendar, calculator and file transfer facilities. DOS compatibility is not required, but data must be easily transferrable to and from industry standard desktopcomputers.
Memory expansibility without clumsy external add-ons or any change in the size.
To dispense with battery-consuming disk or tape drives, but offer an easy to use solid-state filing and archiving system that works as a reasonable substitute.
Similarly to dispense with a power-hungry CRT or back-lit display, but provide a screen that is easily legible in ordinary light.
To run all this through a sophisticated context-switching operating system that allows you to move easily between activities, suspending them and returning to them exactly as you left them.
With any machine as novel as the Z88 the reviewer has the problem of making a thorough assessment that is not based on the prejudice of experience with very different systems. We settled on a "soak test" and determined to carry the machine everywhere for six weeks and transfer as much work to it as seemed feasible.
At first blush there were shortcomings we feared might be difficult to live with. The screen and the characters it displays are small, although remarkably legible, and the almost silent rubber keyboard is unnerving after the clack-clack of the traditional desktop equivalent. Being used to large hard disk desktops with multi-megabytes of storage we were not sure how we would take to the old beginning-of-the-decade limitations of 32K of RAM.
To make matters worse, our early, pre-production version of the machine exhibited an unendearing tendency to lock up mysteriously at odd intervals. Happily this was completely cured when the 128K internal ROM that holds the operating system and the application programs was replaced by version 2.2, used in the production model.
What won us over -- quite quickly, in fact -- was the sheer portability of the hardware combined with the remarkable level of sophistication of the software. Weighing less than 2 pounds, we found that the Z88 really is a machine that you take with you "in case" rather than "because".
The Z88 is only physically "a lightweight", and surprising levels of sophistication can be uncovered below the relatively simple user interface for those inclined to explore. For example, the software includes a very respectable and fast implementation of BBC Basic -- which many wordprocessing and spreadsheeting users may never need to disturb from its slumbers in the ROM. But those who do will discover sooner or later (it is barely mentioned in the manual) that embedded in the Basic is an assembly language that allows programmers into the very lowest level of the machine. In effect the Z88 comes with a built-in, fully-fledged program development system!
You do not need to tunnel to these depths to discover the subtlety of the software. Initially you will probably be interested in using the machine to write a one document at a time, or work on a spreadsheet.
Both applications are taken care of by the combined wordprocessor and spreadsheet, Pipedream. Pipedream is complemented by a combined Diary and Calendar program, a clock, a calculator, a file manager, a terminal emulatorand an export/import facility for swapping files with an IBM PC or similar desktop machine. Pipedream and the diary have to be loaded like ordinary programs (although they will remain loaded when you switch off). The other utilities, known as "pop-downs" can be pulled into view and dismissed again rather like the Desk Accessories of the Macintosh.
One key feature of OZ, the Z88 operating system, is the ability to load a selection of applications into memory at the same time and switch quickly between them. You can also load Pipedream as many times as memory will allow, so that you can switch, say, between a letter, a report, a spreadsheet and a set of rough notes. All of these run under the same single copy of Pipedream in the ROM, which insures that the program itself makes no (or strictly speaking very little) additional demands on memory, and as much RAM space as possible remains for data.
Some minimal task switching is possible on the unenhanced machine, but to explore the full possibilities you really need to increase the memory. Three empty slots are provided under the keyboard for you to plug in what Cambridge Computer calls "cards". These are square black chip containers about the size of a book of matches, and are available at present with either 32K or128K capacity. The latter are more expensive, of course, but are the ones to go for if you can, as they actually drain the battery less than the smaller capacity cards.
The way in which Pipedream combines the duties of spreadsheet and wordprocessor is not difficult to grasp in simple terms. Most modern spreadsheets allow text entered into a cell to extend across into the screenspace that would otherwise be occupied by adjacent cells to the right, provided those cells are not being used.
Pipedream behaves similarly, but a Pipedream cell, known as a slot, has in addition to its physical width on the screen, a property known as the wrapwidth. When text entered from the keyboard reaches the wrap width it will break at the nearest convenient space and begin spilling into the next slot below in the current column. So the software appears to behave like an ordinary word processor, but the underlying slot structure remains, with some useful, and some less felicitous side effects.
Slots let Pipedream handle multi-column text, a surprising talent in such a small machine. You can do this easily by, for example, setting the screen width of column A to 30 and the wrap width to 25. At any time hitting the tab key will take you across to column B. Now the text you enter will wrap that the wrap width set for that column and return to the left hand margin of column B each time it does so. This produces side by side columns of the kind used in laying out lists and tables.
Text can also be emboldened or underlined (or both at once) with results that show on the screen -- again, quite an achievement for a machine of this size. Italics are depicted as small letters, and other enhancements like sub- and super-scripting can be indicated, although they remain on the screen as leading and trailing codes.
The main problem posed by the underlying slot structure of Pipedream is the inability to mark, move copy or delete blocks of text in any other way than by whole slots at a time. Pipedream will respond happily if you want to delete, say, lines 24 through 33 because each line occupies a slot. But if, as is more likely, you want to operate on words or sentences, which in the untidy nature of text will begin and end in the middle of the physical lines on the screen, the block marker mechanism can't cope.
There is a way round this, but it introduces an additional step. A command is provided to split the text at the cursor and flow it into the slot immediately below. Once this is done the line break corresponds to the text break you want to make. Perform a similar operation to set the end marker ofthe block and you are ready to carry out the block manoevre. Once this has been done you will probably need to reformat the text to flow evenly to the right margin, but this can be accomplished with a couple of keystokes.
With a 32K or 128K card in slot 1 you can easily load several documents into memory at the same time, and switch between them using the Index key on the bottom left hand corner of the keyboard. Although all the data you create or load into the system lives in RAM, the memory is allocated between file space (which behaves like a disk drive) and the "activity area", which corresponds roughly with the transient program area (TPA) of a DOS-based system -- with the important difference that application programs never have to be loaded into it as they run in the ROM.
This distinction between two types of memory is not essential in a machine of this kind, and adds somewhat to the complexity, although it has advantages when it comes to conveying data in and out of the system. It also allows for a very flexible way of organising information, in nesting sub-directories like those used in MSDOS.
As with the Microsoft operating system, files are automatically marked with the time and date of their creation and last revision. By using the Filer utility they can be listed, copied between devices, renamed, deleted and even transferred onto a permanent storage device called an EPROM (erasable programmable read only memory) which can optionally be installed in the third card slot. The EPROM is erased for reuse by bathing it in ultraviolet light, and a device to do this is available as an extra.
One shortcoming of the filing system is the inability to copy a number of files distinguished by an ambiguious filename. DOS allows constructs like"COPY *.DAT C:". Oz understands ambiguous filenames, but a copy command along those lines would result in all the files being appended in one large file.
The import/export utility works well in conjuction with additional software supplied for the IBM PC and clones, and we had no difficulty in translating material generated by WordStar into and out of PipeDream format and transferring files between the two machines. Features like underlining and emboldening are carried over automatically.
If WordStar is not your favorite word processor, it is very easy to transfer files as pure text. For this purpose you can substitute any standard comms package for the DOS utilities provided by Cambridge Computer.
Translating PipeDream in and out of Lotus format is a trickier proposition because the Z88 application does not pretend to duplicate all the 1-2-3 features, and has several special features of its own. Ordinary spreadsheets involving simple arithmetic, dates, most trig functions and the CHOOSE and INDEX functions are converted, but named ranges and macros are not carried over.
The diary is eminently useable, although very simple in concept. An unlimited area of text space is provided for each day, but what you don't use doesn't take up memory. The day of the week, month day, month and year appear in a box on the right hand side of the screen, leaving you with an 80 col by 8 line scrolling text area that behaves very like Pipedream, but without the multicolumn facility or the ability to create enhanced text. As withPipeDream blocks of text can be marked and moved, copied, deleted or written to disk. You can use the cursor keys to move from day to day, and choose whether you take notice of or ignore empty days.
At any stage you can pop up the calendar, to move to another day of another month, and then return to the diary to find yourself in the newly selected day.
Simple free-form text searching allows you to go quickly to particular days, so that if you are meeting Sir Clive Sinclair some time next month but you can't remember when, entering "Sinclair" in response to the "String to search for" screen will take you directly to the day.
Diary entries can be cut and pasted like ordinary text, streamlining the recurrent problem of rearranging appointments -- something not always easy todo with electronic diaries.
The calculator is unfortunately limited to elementary arithmetic, and unit conversion between English and metric systems, although if you want trigfunctions, Pipedream and Basic provide them. Surprisingly the design doesn't allow you to transfer the results of calculations into PipeDream.
@begin(verdict)
The most valuable feature of the whole machine is its sheer portability. It is designed for the briefcase, and we found it small and light enough that it can be carried everywhere without having to make a decision whether to take it with you or not.
The small screen is highly legible and scrolls fast enough to take you around a large document quickly.
We don't see the Z88 as a competitor against DOS portables like the Toshiba 1000 -- if DOS compatibility is really what you need. But it might be worth considering whether you can get by without it -- and gain real portablity in the process.
The Oz operating system offers rich possibilities to independent software developers. If sales of the machine through outlets like Dixons and Comet go as expected, the handful of third party software manufacturers already developing application may well become a bandwaggon. But initial sales will depend on what the machine has to offer on its own, and in our opinion that is a great deal.
@end(verdict)
[The Cambridge Computer Z88][wc?][27 Aug 88][chb]
In our issue of March this year we ran an exclusive hands-on preview of a new portable destined to arrive on the market the following month at a price ofjust under 200 pounds. The machine came from the stable of Clive Sinclair, and perhaps because of this its announcement was welcomed with affection by some, but also greeted with a good deal of cynicism by those who remembered the unfortunate launch history of the much delayed QL. It would be late, they predicted, and it would be technically disappointing.
The cynics were half right. There has been a dribble of machines out of the Cambridge Computer mail order depot, but in practice the product only became widely available during the early days of September -- five months behind schedule. And as an added sting it is now priced at 250 pounds -- a 25 percent increase.
But the cynics were also half wrong. Our brief hands-on encounter with the machine five months ago and extensive talks with the backroom team suggested that if the finished product met only 50 percent of its design goals it would still be a useful tool for most people who need a computer -- portable or not. The Z88 has met its design goals, and in our opinion deserves to be a realwinner.
To recap briefly on our March preview, the main intentions of the designers were:
An affordable, highly portable light-weight A4-sized computer that fits in a briefcase -- along with all the other stuff you would normally carry.
A full-sized keyboard that would be not unduly disconcert a professional typist, but which would be unobtrusive if used for note-taking in, say, seminars and board-meetings.
Bundled software that takes care of word-processing and spreadsheeting needs, includes a universal programmable language, as well as diary, calendar, calculator and file transfer facilities. DOS compatibility is not required, but data must be easily transferrable to and from industry standard desktopcomputers.
Memory expansibility without clumsy external add-ons or any change in the size.
To dispense with battery-consuming disk or tape drives, but offer an easy to use solid-state filing and archiving system that works as a reasonable substitute.
Similarly to dispense with a power-hungry CRT or back-lit display, but provide a screen that is easily legible in ordinary light.
To run all this through a sophisticated context-switching operating system that allows you to move easily between activities, suspending them and returning to them exactly as you left them.
With any machine as novel as the Z88 the reviewer has the problem of making a thorough assessment that is not based on the prejudice of experience with very different systems. We settled on a "soak test" and determined to carry the machine everywhere for six weeks and transfer as much work to it as seemed feasible.
At first blush there were shortcomings we feared might be difficult to live with. The screen and the characters it displays are small, although remarkably legible, and the almost silent rubber keyboard is unnerving after the clack-clack of the traditional desktop equivalent. Being used to large hard disk desktops with multi-megabytes of storage we were not sure how we would take to the old beginning-of-the-decade limitations of 32K of RAM.
To make matters worse, our early, pre-production version of the machine exhibited an unendearing tendency to lock up mysteriously at odd intervals. Happily this was completely cured when the 128K internal ROM that holds the operating system and the application programs was replaced by version 2.2, used in the production model.
What won us over -- quite quickly, in fact -- was the sheer portability of the hardware combined with the remarkable level of sophistication of the software. Weighing less than 2 pounds, we found that the Z88 really is a machine that you take with you "in case" rather than "because".
The Z88 is only physically "a lightweight", and surprising levels of sophistication can be uncovered below the relatively simple user interface for those inclined to explore. For example, the software includes a very respectable and fast implementation of BBC Basic -- which many wordprocessing and spreadsheeting users may never need to disturb from its slumbers in the ROM. But those who do will discover sooner or later (it is barely mentioned in the manual) that embedded in the Basic is an assembly language that allows programmers into the very lowest level of the machine. In effect the Z88 comes with a built-in, fully-fledged program development system!
You do not need to tunnel to these depths to discover the subtlety of the software. Initially you will probably be interested in using the machine to write a one document at a time, or work on a spreadsheet.
Both applications are taken care of by the combined wordprocessor and spreadsheet, Pipedream. Pipedream is complemented by a combined Diary and Calendar program, a clock, a calculator, a file manager, a terminal emulatorand an export/import facility for swapping files with an IBM PC or similar desktop machine. Pipedream and the diary have to be loaded like ordinary programs (although they will remain loaded when you switch off). The other utilities, known as "pop-downs" can be pulled into view and dismissed again rather like the Desk Accessories of the Macintosh.
One key feature of OZ, the Z88 operating system, is the ability to load a selection of applications into memory at the same time and switch quickly between them. You can also load Pipedream as many times as memory will allow, so that you can switch, say, between a letter, a report, a spreadsheet and a set of rough notes. All of these run under the same single copy of Pipedream in the ROM, which insures that the program itself makes no (or strictly speaking very little) additional demands on memory, and as much RAM space as possible remains for data.
Some minimal task switching is possible on the unenhanced machine, but to explore the full possibilities you really need to increase the memory. Three empty slots are provided under the keyboard for you to plug in what Cambridge Computer calls "cards". These are square black chip containers about the size of a book of matches, and are available at present with either 32K or128K capacity. The latter are more expensive, of course, but are the ones to go for if you can, as they actually drain the battery less than the smaller capacity cards.
The way in which Pipedream combines the duties of spreadsheet and wordprocessor is not difficult to grasp in simple terms. Most modern spreadsheets allow text entered into a cell to extend across into the screenspace that would otherwise be occupied by adjacent cells to the right, provided those cells are not being used.
Pipedream behaves similarly, but a Pipedream cell, known as a slot, has in addition to its physical width on the screen, a property known as the wrapwidth. When text entered from the keyboard reaches the wrap width it will break at the nearest convenient space and begin spilling into the next slot below in the current column. So the software appears to behave like an ordinary word processor, but the underlying slot structure remains, with some useful, and some less felicitous side effects.
Slots let Pipedream handle multi-column text, a surprising talent in such a small machine. You can do this easily by, for example, setting the screen width of column A to 30 and the wrap width to 25. At any time hitting the tab key will take you across to column B. Now the text you enter will wrap that the wrap width set for that column and return to the left hand margin of column B each time it does so. This produces side by side columns of the kind used in laying out lists and tables.
Text can also be emboldened or underlined (or both at once) with results that show on the screen -- again, quite an achievement for a machine of this size. Italics are depicted as small letters, and other enhancements like sub- and super-scripting can be indicated, although they remain on the screen as leading and trailing codes.
The main problem posed by the underlying slot structure of Pipedream is the inability to mark, move copy or delete blocks of text in any other way than by whole slots at a time. Pipedream will respond happily if you want to delete, say, lines 24 through 33 because each line occupies a slot. But if, as is more likely, you want to operate on words or sentences, which in the untidy nature of text will begin and end in the middle of the physical lines on the screen, the block marker mechanism can't cope.
There is a way round this, but it introduces an additional step. A command is provided to split the text at the cursor and flow it into the slot immediately below. Once this is done the line break corresponds to the text break you want to make. Perform a similar operation to set the end marker ofthe block and you are ready to carry out the block manoevre. Once this has been done you will probably need to reformat the text to flow evenly to the right margin, but this can be accomplished with a couple of keystokes.
With a 32K or 128K card in slot 1 you can easily load several documents into memory at the same time, and switch between them using the Index key on the bottom left hand corner of the keyboard. Although all the data you create or load into the system lives in RAM, the memory is allocated between file space (which behaves like a disk drive) and the "activity area", which corresponds roughly with the transient program area (TPA) of a DOS-based system -- with the important difference that application programs never have to be loaded into it as they run in the ROM.
This distinction between two types of memory is not essential in a machine of this kind, and adds somewhat to the complexity, although it has advantages when it comes to conveying data in and out of the system. It also allows for a very flexible way of organising information, in nesting sub-directories like those used in MSDOS.
As with the Microsoft operating system, files are automatically marked with the time and date of their creation and last revision. By using the Filer utility they can be listed, copied between devices, renamed, deleted and even transferred onto a permanent storage device called an EPROM (erasable programmable read only memory) which can optionally be installed in the third card slot. The EPROM is erased for reuse by bathing it in ultraviolet light, and a device to do this is available as an extra.
One shortcoming of the filing system is the inability to copy a number of files distinguished by an ambiguious filename. DOS allows constructs like"COPY *.DAT C:". Oz understands ambiguous filenames, but a copy command along those lines would result in all the files being appended in one large file.
The import/export utility works well in conjuction with additional software supplied for the IBM PC and clones, and we had no difficulty in translating material generated by WordStar into and out of PipeDream format and transferring files between the two machines. Features like underlining and emboldening are carried over automatically.
If WordStar is not your favorite word processor, it is very easy to transfer files as pure text. For this purpose you can substitute any standard comms package for the DOS utilities provided by Cambridge Computer.
Translating PipeDream in and out of Lotus format is a trickier proposition because the Z88 application does not pretend to duplicate all the 1-2-3 features, and has several special features of its own. Ordinary spreadsheets involving simple arithmetic, dates, most trig functions and the CHOOSE and INDEX functions are converted, but named ranges and macros are not carried over.
The diary is eminently useable, although very simple in concept. An unlimited area of text space is provided for each day, but what you don't use doesn't take up memory. The day of the week, month day, month and year appear in a box on the right hand side of the screen, leaving you with an 80 col by 8 line scrolling text area that behaves very like Pipedream, but without the multicolumn facility or the ability to create enhanced text. As withPipeDream blocks of text can be marked and moved, copied, deleted or written to disk. You can use the cursor keys to move from day to day, and choose whether you take notice of or ignore empty days.
At any stage you can pop up the calendar, to move to another day of another month, and then return to the diary to find yourself in the newly selected day.
Simple free-form text searching allows you to go quickly to particular days, so that if you are meeting Sir Clive Sinclair some time next month but you can't remember when, entering "Sinclair" in response to the "String to search for" screen will take you directly to the day.
Diary entries can be cut and pasted like ordinary text, streamlining the recurrent problem of rearranging appointments -- something not always easy todo with electronic diaries.
The calculator is unfortunately limited to elementary arithmetic, and unit conversion between English and metric systems, although if you want trigfunctions, Pipedream and Basic provide them. Surprisingly the design doesn't allow you to transfer the results of calculations into PipeDream.
@begin(verdict)
The most valuable feature of the whole machine is its sheer portability. It is designed for the briefcase, and we found it small and light enough that it can be carried everywhere without having to make a decision whether to take it with you or not.
The small screen is highly legible and scrolls fast enough to take you around a large document quickly.
We don't see the Z88 as a competitor against DOS portables like the Toshiba 1000 -- if DOS compatibility is really what you need. But it might be worth considering whether you can get by without it -- and gain real portablity in the process.
The Oz operating system offers rich possibilities to independent software developers. If sales of the machine through outlets like Dixons and Comet go as expected, the handful of third party software manufacturers already developing application may well become a bandwaggon. But initial sales will depend on what the machine has to offer on its own, and in our opinion that is a great deal.
@end(verdict)
Dying Dreams, Rising Hopes
In 1997 I was having to think about saying goodbye to OS/2. But the good news was that my other favorite operating system, NeXTStep -- long thought to be dying -- had just been bought by Apple, although it still wasn't clear what they intended to do with it...
[Future 64: Prelude to Rhapsody][PCPlus][4 Oct 97][chb]
This column is about the future of computing. But from time to time I find it necessary to indulge in a little breast-beating, as the present catches up with the future, and predictions made here fail to come true. Two such failures that have become horribly evident are my confident assertions in these pages about the the OS/2 and Taligent operating systems. I did not say that either of them would take over the world, but I predicted that as they came to be adopted by users we would find ourselves entering into a new era of computing.
Well, OS/2 was taken up by some users, but the earth did not move for them, and many are back on the Microsoft trail. Even IBM seems to be edging its way out of commitment to its operating system, and is currently caught up by a sudden enthusiasm for Windows NT. As for Taligent -- that costly development that was nurtured for five years by Apple under the name of Pink, and ripened for another three years in a cooperative venture between Apple and IBM -- it simply never happened. IBM will tell you that its valuable technologies continue under the covers in such products as VisualAge for Java, but if pressed even they will admit that Taligent was a costly failure.
IBM's message when I attended the company's Technical Interchange at St Louis this year was that the magic no longer lies in the operating system. Java and the kind of thin-client we were talking about here last month is IBM's preferred solution for the desktop. But what you run there really doesn't matter, says IBM, because at the other end of the network is the real magic -- a pot-pourri of old so-called "legacy" applications, new applications, and new "glue" software that encapsulates them into an organic whole and delivers that across the network. This is the model IBM is unfolding for its corporate customers. Ultimately I think Big Blue would like to see all of us sitting at thin "Network Computers", with IBM in charge of the real computing system at the other end of the wire.
But the "PC" in the title of this magazine will continue to stand for "Personal Computer" for a good few years yet. That should mean that we all get to choose what we run on our own machines, but lately the options seem to have been closing down around whatever Microsoft cares to offer us. For me the positive part of the IBM scenario is the message that "what you run on the desktop doesn't matter". It promises an escape from the tyranny of the "standard desktop operating system".
As the millions of Linux users world-wide know, there is at least one very viable alternative to Microsoft Windows. Linus Torvelds' "home-made" operating system has grown up over the seven years of this decade to become a plug'n'play modern UNIX that can be easily installed on any of the machines you're likely to be running today or in the future. At the moment I'm sitting at the Seimens-Nixdorf Scenic Mobile laptop I mentioned last month, writing this on Caldera's version of Linux. The machine is set up to dual-boot between Windows 95 and Linux, mostly to demonstrate to friends that you can have your cake and eat it. Ah, but what about the applications, they ask. A couple of years ago that used to fox me. Although Linux did everything I needed, there were no equivalents to Microsoft Office. Today there are at least two, and one of these, StarOffice, is freely downloadable for private use. And whereas two years ago Linux had to develop an emulator environment to be able to run the many applications written for SCO Unix, today the boot is on the other foot -- SCO has just come out with a Linux emulator!
There's one other desktop operating system contender in the pipeline that, for the last seven years at least, I never thought I would be mentioning in the context of "future computing". It's a bit like saying that airships will make a comeback (by no means an impossibility, by the way, but that's another story). I'm referring to the extraordinary renaissance of NeXTStep, the operating system devised by Steve Jobs ten years ago, adopted by IBM in 1990 (and dropped again immediately afterwards), and purchased by Apple towards the end of last year.
NeXT was founded by Steve Jobs following his acrimonious departure from Apple. Four years ago it attempted to overcome market indifference by dispensing with hardware manufacture and porting its operating system onto more popular platforms, notably Intel. But there was no rush of customers to take up the product -- in part because the complete development system cost around $5000, and in part because all eyes were focussed on the upcoming wonder from Microsoft, Windows NT. And the Intel hardware needed to run the NeXTStep operating system at the time was far from standard -- 32 Mb of RAM, a 500 Mb hard disk and a 20 inch monitor to make the most of the high definition Display PostScript graphical user interface.
The move out of hardware didn't help much. This time last year Steve Jobs's company, NeXT, was in the doldrums. As an addicted NeXTStep user myself I might have been forgiven for feeling depressed too. But far from it -- there was still plenty of NeXTStep freeware and shareware in circulation (mostly because the environment is so delightful and so easy to develop applications for), and as an Internet machine my NeXTStep Canon object.station couldn't be bettered (the World Wide Web was originally developed under NeXTStep). If, heaven forfend, Microsoft died tomorrow, we'd all be lost without the next upgrade, and the fixes to that upgrade (and the fixes to the fixes). Life as a NeXTStep user is much less exciting. I would be sorry to see NeXT go, but everything else, including my own NeXTStep system, was ready to carry on happily for at least the next five years.
And then, astonishingly, Apple stepped in and bought the company. Suddenly I was faced with the prospect of the orphan operating system that was working so well for me, actually coming to the rescue of millions of other users world wide (to say nothing of rescuing Apple from its own impending fate). For months afterwards my thoughts about this were confused and rambling -- and so evidently were Apple's, because not long afterwards the chief technical officer who recommended buying NeXT quit Apple, and the CEO who made the decision was sacked shortly afterwards. Perhaps this is why the test version of NeXTStep released to developers was given a comic opera name, "Prelude to Rhapsody".
It seems to me that the Apple-NeXTStep saga is still a laughable mess today. But Microsoft is not laughing. It took the opportunity of buying into Apple, I believe because Bill Gates sees in NeXTStep much the same huge potential that I do. Next month I'll be spelling out in detail exactly what I think that potential is.
[Future 64: Prelude to Rhapsody][PCPlus][4 Oct 97][chb]
This column is about the future of computing. But from time to time I find it necessary to indulge in a little breast-beating, as the present catches up with the future, and predictions made here fail to come true. Two such failures that have become horribly evident are my confident assertions in these pages about the the OS/2 and Taligent operating systems. I did not say that either of them would take over the world, but I predicted that as they came to be adopted by users we would find ourselves entering into a new era of computing.
Well, OS/2 was taken up by some users, but the earth did not move for them, and many are back on the Microsoft trail. Even IBM seems to be edging its way out of commitment to its operating system, and is currently caught up by a sudden enthusiasm for Windows NT. As for Taligent -- that costly development that was nurtured for five years by Apple under the name of Pink, and ripened for another three years in a cooperative venture between Apple and IBM -- it simply never happened. IBM will tell you that its valuable technologies continue under the covers in such products as VisualAge for Java, but if pressed even they will admit that Taligent was a costly failure.
IBM's message when I attended the company's Technical Interchange at St Louis this year was that the magic no longer lies in the operating system. Java and the kind of thin-client we were talking about here last month is IBM's preferred solution for the desktop. But what you run there really doesn't matter, says IBM, because at the other end of the network is the real magic -- a pot-pourri of old so-called "legacy" applications, new applications, and new "glue" software that encapsulates them into an organic whole and delivers that across the network. This is the model IBM is unfolding for its corporate customers. Ultimately I think Big Blue would like to see all of us sitting at thin "Network Computers", with IBM in charge of the real computing system at the other end of the wire.
But the "PC" in the title of this magazine will continue to stand for "Personal Computer" for a good few years yet. That should mean that we all get to choose what we run on our own machines, but lately the options seem to have been closing down around whatever Microsoft cares to offer us. For me the positive part of the IBM scenario is the message that "what you run on the desktop doesn't matter". It promises an escape from the tyranny of the "standard desktop operating system".
As the millions of Linux users world-wide know, there is at least one very viable alternative to Microsoft Windows. Linus Torvelds' "home-made" operating system has grown up over the seven years of this decade to become a plug'n'play modern UNIX that can be easily installed on any of the machines you're likely to be running today or in the future. At the moment I'm sitting at the Seimens-Nixdorf Scenic Mobile laptop I mentioned last month, writing this on Caldera's version of Linux. The machine is set up to dual-boot between Windows 95 and Linux, mostly to demonstrate to friends that you can have your cake and eat it. Ah, but what about the applications, they ask. A couple of years ago that used to fox me. Although Linux did everything I needed, there were no equivalents to Microsoft Office. Today there are at least two, and one of these, StarOffice, is freely downloadable for private use. And whereas two years ago Linux had to develop an emulator environment to be able to run the many applications written for SCO Unix, today the boot is on the other foot -- SCO has just come out with a Linux emulator!
There's one other desktop operating system contender in the pipeline that, for the last seven years at least, I never thought I would be mentioning in the context of "future computing". It's a bit like saying that airships will make a comeback (by no means an impossibility, by the way, but that's another story). I'm referring to the extraordinary renaissance of NeXTStep, the operating system devised by Steve Jobs ten years ago, adopted by IBM in 1990 (and dropped again immediately afterwards), and purchased by Apple towards the end of last year.
NeXT was founded by Steve Jobs following his acrimonious departure from Apple. Four years ago it attempted to overcome market indifference by dispensing with hardware manufacture and porting its operating system onto more popular platforms, notably Intel. But there was no rush of customers to take up the product -- in part because the complete development system cost around $5000, and in part because all eyes were focussed on the upcoming wonder from Microsoft, Windows NT. And the Intel hardware needed to run the NeXTStep operating system at the time was far from standard -- 32 Mb of RAM, a 500 Mb hard disk and a 20 inch monitor to make the most of the high definition Display PostScript graphical user interface.
The move out of hardware didn't help much. This time last year Steve Jobs's company, NeXT, was in the doldrums. As an addicted NeXTStep user myself I might have been forgiven for feeling depressed too. But far from it -- there was still plenty of NeXTStep freeware and shareware in circulation (mostly because the environment is so delightful and so easy to develop applications for), and as an Internet machine my NeXTStep Canon object.station couldn't be bettered (the World Wide Web was originally developed under NeXTStep). If, heaven forfend, Microsoft died tomorrow, we'd all be lost without the next upgrade, and the fixes to that upgrade (and the fixes to the fixes). Life as a NeXTStep user is much less exciting. I would be sorry to see NeXT go, but everything else, including my own NeXTStep system, was ready to carry on happily for at least the next five years.
And then, astonishingly, Apple stepped in and bought the company. Suddenly I was faced with the prospect of the orphan operating system that was working so well for me, actually coming to the rescue of millions of other users world wide (to say nothing of rescuing Apple from its own impending fate). For months afterwards my thoughts about this were confused and rambling -- and so evidently were Apple's, because not long afterwards the chief technical officer who recommended buying NeXT quit Apple, and the CEO who made the decision was sacked shortly afterwards. Perhaps this is why the test version of NeXTStep released to developers was given a comic opera name, "Prelude to Rhapsody".
It seems to me that the Apple-NeXTStep saga is still a laughable mess today. But Microsoft is not laughing. It took the opportunity of buying into Apple, I believe because Bill Gates sees in NeXTStep much the same huge potential that I do. Next month I'll be spelling out in detail exactly what I think that potential is.
Sculley at the Helm...
What strikes me in retrospect is that, despite a hideously convoluted company chronology in which Apple's much vaunted early '80s ideals were sold out, abandoned and reinvented, the company and its products today (May 2006) bear a remarkable resemblence to the original "Dream" that Sculley is still talking about here.
Following the launch of the first Mac in 1984, Apple was on a rising curve, but trying to figure out how to extend the success of the company in the personal computer market into the corporate arena. In 1983 Steve Jobs had hired PepsiCo's John Sculley for just this reason; Sculley's response was to persuade Apple to ditch Jobs.
I manage to make the following report on Apple's 1986 Cambridge Conference for "Which Computer?" look like a personal interview with Sculley. Most probably it was just a write-up of a Sculley keynote address.
[Report on AUC][wc?][7 Apr 86][chb]
"Apple is very serious about business," John Sculley would like it to be known. The forty-eight year old chief executive was over in this country to address the Apple University Consortium (AUC) Conference at Cambridge shortly before Easter. The AUC is a select group of academic customers world-wide whose influential position as today's buyers of technology and as trainers of tomorrow's potential customers, gives them special leverage. Discounts of up to 60% on Apple Macintoshes are only part of the story; probably more important still are the channels of communication and support that Apple encourage and help finance.
The three-day AUC Conference at Cambridge University was a one example of this support. Three hundred delegates from 27 countries gathered around Queen's College at Apple's expense to exchange ideas and software, and hear about Apple's plans for the future.
Sculley, a veteran marketeer who was called in from the Pepsi-Cola corporation to help pull Apple out of the industry slump, likes to quote Bill Gates, his counterpart in MicroSoft and more than fifteen years his junior. "Bill says there are only two architectures worth considering: IBM and Apple. And there is no room for any more."
Sculley is voicing Apple's official response to the suggestion that the company needs to guard its back against Atari and Commodore, games and home computer companies that are each making a push for the low-end business market. The Atari ST range of machines, and Commodore's new Amiga are based on the same 68000 processor used in the Apple Macintosh, and draw heavily on the easy to use icon-and-mouse human interface that is the Mac's main selling point over the older generation of IBM PC-style computers.
Industry commentators agree that the Amiga's hardware is superior to the Macintosh, and that Atari's sub-$1000 ST range of machines leave the $2000-plus Macintosh standing in the value-for-money stakes -- if the cost of the box is your criterion. But Sculley justifies his confidence by pointing out that purchase based on hardware price is naive. "You have to look at availability of software, what the growth path and reliability of the company is going to be -- is the company going to be around three or five years from now?"
He doesn't like to be reminded that measured by these criteria, Apple comes a very long second to IBM. With 750,000 sold world-wide, around half of those into education, the Macintosh's penetration of the corporate scene has so far been almost insignificant, despite an enormously expensive advertising campaign in 1984. The recent redesign to the faster and smoother Macintosh Plus has now got sales moving, but it is too early to the effect.
"The question isn't whether we are as large as IBM," says Sculley, shifting ground disarmingly, "but is our technology appropriate? Are we becoming market-driven enough that we can deliver the solutions that will develop those markets?"
"Market-driven" is now a key phrase at Apple, as they try to live down the image of a gee-whizz, garage-based company more concerned with tuning the technology than finding out what the customers need. Sculley's own dedication to this principle resulted in a break with company founder Steve Jobs and a massive reorganisation of personnel and attitudes. "This time we had to demonstrate that we cannot only build remarkable computers, but that we could manage a company in the light of an industry that no longer had 50 - 60 - 70% growth per year."
The industry has changed -- and so, says Sculley, Apple had to change. "I'm very pleased that our organization was able to introduce greater discipline, more accountability... at the same time not to lose its culture and the things that made it exciting in the past. Because of these efforts I think all of us realise that if Apple wasn't successful then a lot of the Dream would never happen."
Despite the new toughness, "the Dream" remains another of Apple's key phrases -- a workstation based around the creative needs of the individual rather than the workaday uniformity of the IBM PC. But Sculley has undoubtedly given the Dream real substance -- for the first time Apple has a business strategy and the muscle to back it in the
shape of half a billion dollars in the bank.
The reserves give Apple two things. "We are financially strong enough that we have the resources to invest in product development. And cash in the bank engenders confidence in the business market place that we
will be a reliable vendor over time."
Apple's aggressive selling into the educational market has given the Macintosh a significant foothold in American universities, and many others throughout the world. As Macintosh-trained graduates leave and go into business, Apple's next goal is to become a major player in the corporations. "Apple began in the '70's by creating an emerging
market, and that's what we'll do again. We're not going head on against IBM and saying we need to take some of your market away from you in order to exist. There are things we can do with our technology that haven't been done before -- things which we think can be as pervasive in business as they have been for the enthusiasts and in
education."
Connectivity is one strategy they hope will get them into the corporations. Apple interpret the word to mean that individuals should be allowed to choose their workstation to suit themselves, as long as its output is compatible in protocol and structure with what the rest of the network is doing. Apple's own AppleTalk is a well-designed,
modern network that is easy to install and easy to convert to other non-proprietory standards like TCPIP, but fitting it in cleanly with vendor-specific networks is not a trivial task, and at the moment connectivity is more part of the Dream than the reality.
Heading Apple's list of 'things which haven't been done before' is desktop publishing. Sculley hopes to step neatly round corporate IBM-only policy by offering a package that falls outside the catagory of personal computer: one or more Macintosh workstations bundled with Apple's own LaserWriter and software like Aldus PageMaker.
"The biggest philosophical change Apple had to go through was to recognise that it takes more than making the technology exciting if we are to succeed in the business world, because frankly business doesn't care if the technology is exciting. What they care about is does it solve problems -- can I be more productive? Can I do something for less, or can I get more for the investment that I'm making."
For Sculley, desktop publishing is just such a real-world solution. "Business has said 'this has value', and it's doing exceptionally well.
You should expect to see similar solutions-driven efforts from Apple in the future. We're now saying 'Let's define what the user wants and then we'll use technology to fulfill the need', as opposed to 'Let's create the product and then figure out how to sell it!' It's a radical change in this young industry. If we are successful then we will be
able to demonstrate over the coming years that desktop publishing may be as pervasive in the last years of the nineteen eighties as xerography was in the 1960's."
As chairman of Pepsi-Cola until April of '83, Sculley achieved the considerable feat of putting Pepsi first over Coca-Cola in the the Neilsen market ratings. He has no illusions about doing the same thing for Apple against IBM. Not immediately. But in the meantime he sees his new company -- and would like you to see it too -- as the only viable alternative to Big Blue in the PC stakes.
Following the launch of the first Mac in 1984, Apple was on a rising curve, but trying to figure out how to extend the success of the company in the personal computer market into the corporate arena. In 1983 Steve Jobs had hired PepsiCo's John Sculley for just this reason; Sculley's response was to persuade Apple to ditch Jobs.
I manage to make the following report on Apple's 1986 Cambridge Conference for "Which Computer?" look like a personal interview with Sculley. Most probably it was just a write-up of a Sculley keynote address.
[Report on AUC][wc?][7 Apr 86][chb]
"Apple is very serious about business," John Sculley would like it to be known. The forty-eight year old chief executive was over in this country to address the Apple University Consortium (AUC) Conference at Cambridge shortly before Easter. The AUC is a select group of academic customers world-wide whose influential position as today's buyers of technology and as trainers of tomorrow's potential customers, gives them special leverage. Discounts of up to 60% on Apple Macintoshes are only part of the story; probably more important still are the channels of communication and support that Apple encourage and help finance.
The three-day AUC Conference at Cambridge University was a one example of this support. Three hundred delegates from 27 countries gathered around Queen's College at Apple's expense to exchange ideas and software, and hear about Apple's plans for the future.
Sculley, a veteran marketeer who was called in from the Pepsi-Cola corporation to help pull Apple out of the industry slump, likes to quote Bill Gates, his counterpart in MicroSoft and more than fifteen years his junior. "Bill says there are only two architectures worth considering: IBM and Apple. And there is no room for any more."
Sculley is voicing Apple's official response to the suggestion that the company needs to guard its back against Atari and Commodore, games and home computer companies that are each making a push for the low-end business market. The Atari ST range of machines, and Commodore's new Amiga are based on the same 68000 processor used in the Apple Macintosh, and draw heavily on the easy to use icon-and-mouse human interface that is the Mac's main selling point over the older generation of IBM PC-style computers.
Industry commentators agree that the Amiga's hardware is superior to the Macintosh, and that Atari's sub-$1000 ST range of machines leave the $2000-plus Macintosh standing in the value-for-money stakes -- if the cost of the box is your criterion. But Sculley justifies his confidence by pointing out that purchase based on hardware price is naive. "You have to look at availability of software, what the growth path and reliability of the company is going to be -- is the company going to be around three or five years from now?"
He doesn't like to be reminded that measured by these criteria, Apple comes a very long second to IBM. With 750,000 sold world-wide, around half of those into education, the Macintosh's penetration of the corporate scene has so far been almost insignificant, despite an enormously expensive advertising campaign in 1984. The recent redesign to the faster and smoother Macintosh Plus has now got sales moving, but it is too early to the effect.
"The question isn't whether we are as large as IBM," says Sculley, shifting ground disarmingly, "but is our technology appropriate? Are we becoming market-driven enough that we can deliver the solutions that will develop those markets?"
"Market-driven" is now a key phrase at Apple, as they try to live down the image of a gee-whizz, garage-based company more concerned with tuning the technology than finding out what the customers need. Sculley's own dedication to this principle resulted in a break with company founder Steve Jobs and a massive reorganisation of personnel and attitudes. "This time we had to demonstrate that we cannot only build remarkable computers, but that we could manage a company in the light of an industry that no longer had 50 - 60 - 70% growth per year."
The industry has changed -- and so, says Sculley, Apple had to change. "I'm very pleased that our organization was able to introduce greater discipline, more accountability... at the same time not to lose its culture and the things that made it exciting in the past. Because of these efforts I think all of us realise that if Apple wasn't successful then a lot of the Dream would never happen."
Despite the new toughness, "the Dream" remains another of Apple's key phrases -- a workstation based around the creative needs of the individual rather than the workaday uniformity of the IBM PC. But Sculley has undoubtedly given the Dream real substance -- for the first time Apple has a business strategy and the muscle to back it in the
shape of half a billion dollars in the bank.
The reserves give Apple two things. "We are financially strong enough that we have the resources to invest in product development. And cash in the bank engenders confidence in the business market place that we
will be a reliable vendor over time."
Apple's aggressive selling into the educational market has given the Macintosh a significant foothold in American universities, and many others throughout the world. As Macintosh-trained graduates leave and go into business, Apple's next goal is to become a major player in the corporations. "Apple began in the '70's by creating an emerging
market, and that's what we'll do again. We're not going head on against IBM and saying we need to take some of your market away from you in order to exist. There are things we can do with our technology that haven't been done before -- things which we think can be as pervasive in business as they have been for the enthusiasts and in
education."
Connectivity is one strategy they hope will get them into the corporations. Apple interpret the word to mean that individuals should be allowed to choose their workstation to suit themselves, as long as its output is compatible in protocol and structure with what the rest of the network is doing. Apple's own AppleTalk is a well-designed,
modern network that is easy to install and easy to convert to other non-proprietory standards like TCPIP, but fitting it in cleanly with vendor-specific networks is not a trivial task, and at the moment connectivity is more part of the Dream than the reality.
Heading Apple's list of 'things which haven't been done before' is desktop publishing. Sculley hopes to step neatly round corporate IBM-only policy by offering a package that falls outside the catagory of personal computer: one or more Macintosh workstations bundled with Apple's own LaserWriter and software like Aldus PageMaker.
"The biggest philosophical change Apple had to go through was to recognise that it takes more than making the technology exciting if we are to succeed in the business world, because frankly business doesn't care if the technology is exciting. What they care about is does it solve problems -- can I be more productive? Can I do something for less, or can I get more for the investment that I'm making."
For Sculley, desktop publishing is just such a real-world solution. "Business has said 'this has value', and it's doing exceptionally well.
You should expect to see similar solutions-driven efforts from Apple in the future. We're now saying 'Let's define what the user wants and then we'll use technology to fulfill the need', as opposed to 'Let's create the product and then figure out how to sell it!' It's a radical change in this young industry. If we are successful then we will be
able to demonstrate over the coming years that desktop publishing may be as pervasive in the last years of the nineteen eighties as xerography was in the 1960's."
As chairman of Pepsi-Cola until April of '83, Sculley achieved the considerable feat of putting Pepsi first over Coca-Cola in the the Neilsen market ratings. He has no illusions about doing the same thing for Apple against IBM. Not immediately. But in the meantime he sees his new company -- and would like you to see it too -- as the only viable alternative to Big Blue in the PC stakes.
Excel Arrives on Windows
It was by no means clear, back in 1988, that Microsoft's dominance of the PC operating system market would be translatable into the application arena. Microsoft's original Multiplan 1982 spreadsheet had been more or less wiped out by Lotus 1-2-3. The graphical spreadsheet Excel, originally developed for the Mac in the mid '80s, gave Microsoft its chance to leapfrog Lotus.
A couple of things strike me straight away about this piece for "Which Computer?". The first is the sheer luxury of being able to write 2,000 words on a single software product in a printed magazine. Yup, you get that space on the Web these days, but print product reviews have shrunk to thumbnail sketches.
The second point is the nightmare of klugery we had to live with during that painful evolution from character-based to graphical screens. The hardware groaned under the burden. Drivers worked for some apps but not for others -- and as you'll see here, that went for fonts too.
You'll notice, too, that back in 1988 OS/2 is discussed in terms of being "the next Windows".
[EXCEL][wc?][jan 88][chb]
Early in October, Microsoft announced a new spreadsheet product, claimed to be the first to make use of the full power of 80286/80386-based computers. Microsoft says Excel can do more, looks better and can be more fully customised than any of its rivals.
None of this will come as a surprise to Macintosh users. Excel has been available in the Macintosh environment for a long time, and is the reason why many Apple devotees bought their machines in the first place.
The new version carries over the revolution to the world of the IBM PC, MSDOS, adding a number of enhancements on the way. Perhaps not to the whole of the MSDOS world, for only the up- market IBM PC AT end, with 80286 or 80386 processors and high- resolution graphics is properly equipped to make full use of the program.
But the bad news about Excel is that the Windows graphics interface makes heavy demands on the hardware. We were able to run the product on the Epson PC+ in a useable way, but the 8086 processor and the 80ms hard disk were clearly labouring. The chances are if your work demands Excel you're probably too busy to want to wait for sluggish hardware.
An 8MHz PC AT is our minimum recommendation and even then power users will need a little patience. Those who want to manipulate Excel with the speed of character-based Lotus 1-2-3 will probably need to invest in a 80386-based machine. Most of our trials were carried out on the excellent Dell 386 equipped with an EGA (Enhanced Graphics Adaptor) and 3MB of RAM.
The Windows interface makes possible several features not found in conventional spreadsheets. You work with a mouse, which with practice allows fast, precise positioning even when moving around the largest spreadsheet. The new version of Windows, as adapted to the needs of IBM's new software environment SAA (Systems Application Architecture) also makes it easy to manipulate the Windows interface from the keyboard.
Inside Excel you can operate on more than one sheet at the same time and save the list of sheets as a single file to ensure you can recall the precise mix next time you run the program. Not all the sheets are spreadsheets: the Windows interface caters for scaleable, multiple graphics sheets as well and some of your sheets may be exclusively reserved for macros (more of that later).
Thanks to the DDE (Dynamic Data Exchange) feature of Windows, data can be moved easily between sheets, either by screen cut- and-paste, or under program control.
Excel will only run under Microsoft Windows 2.0 or Windows/386, so your existing version of Windows will need to be upgraded if you want to take advantage of the multi-tasking aspect of the product. Alternatively, you can use Excel with its own cut-down runtime version of Windows 2.0, but this will prevent you running other programs at the same time.
Incidentally, as Windows 2.0 and Windows/386 have exactly the "look and feel" of Microsoft's operating system OS/2 with the IBM interface Presentation Manager, finding your way around Excel is also an introduction to the next generation of computing, Microsoft style.
Or will be when the odd bugs are sorted out. At the time of writing, both Windows 2.0 and Windows/386 are in beta test (technical jargon for "Not Quite Ready").
This resulted in problems with the clipboard and some minor bugs in the way Windows/386 handles printers introduced slight glitches into the colour charts produced on our Oki Microline 393C colour printer.
We also came across an unpleasant interaction with Aldus' desktop publishing package Pagemaker. Windows supplies its own fonts, but can also take advantage of special character sets installed by the application programs it runs. Obviously, it should be able to administer these additional fonts without getting them mixed up, but the special fonts Aldus Pagemaker introduces on installation pre-empt the standard font set.
On our setup this resulted in a completely inappropriate display of Excel's "Help" pages, using tiny characters that were almost completely illegible.
The solution is to erase the Pagemaker fonts from the Windows directory, remembering to restore them again next time you want to run Pagemaker - hardly the synergistic applications environment promised us by the Windows and OS/2 publicity. We gather that Microsoft is on to this problem and future versions of Aldus Pagemaker will come with fonts that are properly behaved.
Over the course of six weeks we received several pre-launch versions of Excel. It is not unusual for beta copies to have bugs and these early versions of Excel were true to form in this respect. Following the formal launch of the product we received the full package with handsomely printed manuals and five disks, but the problems were by no means behind us. The disks and the package were marked "Preview Edition", which seems to indicate that at the time of writing the product is not yet in a finished state.
Evidently it had been put together in something of a hurry. At first we were unable to install it, until we discovered that two of the disks had their labels interchanged.
Probably the most important features for existing spreadsheet users is the compatiblity with Lotus 1-2-3. Many spreadsheet products claim this, but we don't know of any that delivers quite the degree of Lotus compatibility that Excel manages. Besides directly reading and writing WKS, WK1 and WRK (Symphony) files as if they were its native format, Excel also translates Lotus macros.
The result is an efficient bridge from Lotus to Excel to move your expertise out of the character-based world of 1-2-3 into the bright tomorrow of the graphics interface - although power users should not expect to carry their entire investment of spreadsheets over without a certain amount of tweaking.
An Excel macro works in much the same way as the equivalent in Lotus, but is structurally very different. Initially a simple way of emulating keyboard input from within the spreadsheet itself, so that repetitive series of similar actions could be carried out automatically, the concept of macros developed in version 2 of Lotus 1-2-3 into BASIC-like language in its own right that could be used to create menus, take "IF...ELSE" decisions and read and write files. With Symphony the same idea was extended to record keystrokes as they were entered, greatly simplifying some apects of macro creation.
Despite these second generation sophistications, there are two central problems with 1-2-3 and Symphony macros. To the extent that the language deals with the keystrokes themselves, rather than the actions those keystrokes trigger, it is hard to read and understand. And the program material is stored in the same spreadsheet as the data; it is all too easy to damage the macro while making interactive adjustments to the information it manipulates.
If data and program are stored in the spreadsheet side by side, however well distanced, the deletion of a data line also removes a line from the macro with potentially disastrous results.
Excel remedies both these problems very effectively. Excel macros, whether created directly from the keyboard by switching on the "Record" mode, or by writing them explicitly, are always stored in a separate special macro sheet. Several macros can be stored on a single sheet, to form a "macro library" that provides general purpose utilities or tailors Excel to your special needs. One key advantage over Lotus is that Excel macros are made up of English-like command words that should be more or less comprehensible to any reader, whether familiar with the intricacies of Excel or not.
The work of converting existing Lotus macros is done by a secondary program called the Macro Translation Assistant and, as the name implies, it doesn't do the whole job unaided. Straightforward keystroke macros will translate directly, but others may present problems. Lotus 1-2-3 allows you to create macros that edit or write formulae, or modify themselves as they run, although this is not particularly good programming practice. Excel has trouble coping with these, as it does with macros that use Lotus commands like "{MenuBranch}" or "{Pause}" for which it has no direct equivalents. Large Lotus 1-2-3 macros are also liable to create problems.
To call up the Macro Translation Assistant you evoke "Run" from the main Windows bar in the top left hand corner of the Excel window, the option used to activate programs external to Excel. The design of the Macro Translator seems to suggest that eventually Microsoft will be adding modules to translate macros from spreadsheets other than Lotus, but currently only Lotus 1-2- 3 translation is available.
A menu lets you choose which of the currently active spreadsheets you want to operate on, and then provides you with a list of named areas within the Lotus sheet so that you can choose your macro.
The Macro Translation Assistant then leaps into action, converting your macro and automatically copying the result to a new macro sheet. In order to work it requires a second macro sheet called "Trans123.xlm" and there is a risk of running into mysterious difficulties if Excel is unable to find this in the currently selected directory.
Excel comes with a built-in tutorial, complete with graphics illustrations and for Lotus users a special "1-2-3 Help" facility (there's similar help for MultiPlan devotees). Excel can't deal with Lotus commands directly, but if you type a familiar 1-2-3 sequence into the special Lotus Help box the program displays the corresponding section in the Microsoft Excel help file.
For example, if you enter "/FR", the Lotus key sequence to retrieve a new file, Excel responds by showing you the help page that shows you how to choose the "File Open" command from the menu bar. Ideally, Excel should be able to cope with Lotus key sequences directly but the arrangement certainly helps to level out the learning curve.
When it comes to the creation of graphics, Excel really shows its power. The 44 types of charts produced are configurable inside the program, so that you can, for instance, alter the colour or patterning of an individual bar in a bar chart, lift out the slice of a pie by moving it with the mouse pointer, or add arrows to any part of the picture. Text can either be attached to specific parts of the chart, or entered free-hand.
Creating a chart could hardly be easier. If you highlight a range of numbers immediately before opening a new chart sheet, the highlighted figures are automatically entered and a chart is built instantly. The type of the chart depends on the default you have chosen, but you can change this by selecting a different type from the "Gallery". Charts are dynamically linked to the spreadsheets that contain their data, so if you subsequently change the spreadsheet figures, the chart will alter accordingly.
In theory, you should be able to transfer the chart into other Windows graphics packages like InaVision by cutting and pasting through the Clipboard, but both the run-time and our beta test 386 version of Windows were not up to this. Running under Windows/386, the Clipboard presented the message "Not Enough Memory" on the 3MB Dell and refused to allow us to proceed, or go back to Excel. The only recourse was to reboot the machine.
Function for function, Excel may not appear to be overwhelmingly more powerful than 1-2-3, but there are some subtle variations that in practice make a great deal of difference. For instance, like its predecessor on the Macintosh, Excel can deal with arrays, rectangular groups of cells that share the same formula. This is not the same as copying a formula to a named group of cells, which results in a variant of the formula being inserted into every cell in the range.
Using arrays, a single formula can be used, for example, to add one range of cells to another and put the results in a third range. Apart from speeding calculations and reducing the amount of memory used by your worksheet, array formulae can greatly clarify the logic of your model.
Verdict
* Microsoft Excel is justifiably heralded as "the new generation of spreadsheet software". It is genuinely innovative, powerful and easy to use; used with the appropriate output devices it can produce stunning hard copy of both spreadsheets and graphics.
* Its macro system is a tremendous improvement on Lotus 1-2-3, making it easy to develop applications within the Excel environment. Thanks to DDE these can be "real time"; that is to say, can be made to respond to changes in external data (like stock prices) as it happens.
* The software is still not complete and the full system will not be available until the underlying Windows interface is fully developed.
* Users of 8088 and 8086-based machines will be able to run Excel, but only the most patient will judge its performance satisfactory. The product really requires a PC AT, and preferably a 80386-based machine equipped with a fast (35ms and upwards) hard disk.
A couple of things strike me straight away about this piece for "Which Computer?". The first is the sheer luxury of being able to write 2,000 words on a single software product in a printed magazine. Yup, you get that space on the Web these days, but print product reviews have shrunk to thumbnail sketches.
The second point is the nightmare of klugery we had to live with during that painful evolution from character-based to graphical screens. The hardware groaned under the burden. Drivers worked for some apps but not for others -- and as you'll see here, that went for fonts too.
You'll notice, too, that back in 1988 OS/2 is discussed in terms of being "the next Windows".
[EXCEL][wc?][jan 88][chb]
Early in October, Microsoft announced a new spreadsheet product, claimed to be the first to make use of the full power of 80286/80386-based computers. Microsoft says Excel can do more, looks better and can be more fully customised than any of its rivals.
None of this will come as a surprise to Macintosh users. Excel has been available in the Macintosh environment for a long time, and is the reason why many Apple devotees bought their machines in the first place.
The new version carries over the revolution to the world of the IBM PC, MSDOS, adding a number of enhancements on the way. Perhaps not to the whole of the MSDOS world, for only the up- market IBM PC AT end, with 80286 or 80386 processors and high- resolution graphics is properly equipped to make full use of the program.
But the bad news about Excel is that the Windows graphics interface makes heavy demands on the hardware. We were able to run the product on the Epson PC+ in a useable way, but the 8086 processor and the 80ms hard disk were clearly labouring. The chances are if your work demands Excel you're probably too busy to want to wait for sluggish hardware.
An 8MHz PC AT is our minimum recommendation and even then power users will need a little patience. Those who want to manipulate Excel with the speed of character-based Lotus 1-2-3 will probably need to invest in a 80386-based machine. Most of our trials were carried out on the excellent Dell 386 equipped with an EGA (Enhanced Graphics Adaptor) and 3MB of RAM.
The Windows interface makes possible several features not found in conventional spreadsheets. You work with a mouse, which with practice allows fast, precise positioning even when moving around the largest spreadsheet. The new version of Windows, as adapted to the needs of IBM's new software environment SAA (Systems Application Architecture) also makes it easy to manipulate the Windows interface from the keyboard.
Inside Excel you can operate on more than one sheet at the same time and save the list of sheets as a single file to ensure you can recall the precise mix next time you run the program. Not all the sheets are spreadsheets: the Windows interface caters for scaleable, multiple graphics sheets as well and some of your sheets may be exclusively reserved for macros (more of that later).
Thanks to the DDE (Dynamic Data Exchange) feature of Windows, data can be moved easily between sheets, either by screen cut- and-paste, or under program control.
Excel will only run under Microsoft Windows 2.0 or Windows/386, so your existing version of Windows will need to be upgraded if you want to take advantage of the multi-tasking aspect of the product. Alternatively, you can use Excel with its own cut-down runtime version of Windows 2.0, but this will prevent you running other programs at the same time.
Incidentally, as Windows 2.0 and Windows/386 have exactly the "look and feel" of Microsoft's operating system OS/2 with the IBM interface Presentation Manager, finding your way around Excel is also an introduction to the next generation of computing, Microsoft style.
Or will be when the odd bugs are sorted out. At the time of writing, both Windows 2.0 and Windows/386 are in beta test (technical jargon for "Not Quite Ready").
This resulted in problems with the clipboard and some minor bugs in the way Windows/386 handles printers introduced slight glitches into the colour charts produced on our Oki Microline 393C colour printer.
We also came across an unpleasant interaction with Aldus' desktop publishing package Pagemaker. Windows supplies its own fonts, but can also take advantage of special character sets installed by the application programs it runs. Obviously, it should be able to administer these additional fonts without getting them mixed up, but the special fonts Aldus Pagemaker introduces on installation pre-empt the standard font set.
On our setup this resulted in a completely inappropriate display of Excel's "Help" pages, using tiny characters that were almost completely illegible.
The solution is to erase the Pagemaker fonts from the Windows directory, remembering to restore them again next time you want to run Pagemaker - hardly the synergistic applications environment promised us by the Windows and OS/2 publicity. We gather that Microsoft is on to this problem and future versions of Aldus Pagemaker will come with fonts that are properly behaved.
Over the course of six weeks we received several pre-launch versions of Excel. It is not unusual for beta copies to have bugs and these early versions of Excel were true to form in this respect. Following the formal launch of the product we received the full package with handsomely printed manuals and five disks, but the problems were by no means behind us. The disks and the package were marked "Preview Edition", which seems to indicate that at the time of writing the product is not yet in a finished state.
Evidently it had been put together in something of a hurry. At first we were unable to install it, until we discovered that two of the disks had their labels interchanged.
Probably the most important features for existing spreadsheet users is the compatiblity with Lotus 1-2-3. Many spreadsheet products claim this, but we don't know of any that delivers quite the degree of Lotus compatibility that Excel manages. Besides directly reading and writing WKS, WK1 and WRK (Symphony) files as if they were its native format, Excel also translates Lotus macros.
The result is an efficient bridge from Lotus to Excel to move your expertise out of the character-based world of 1-2-3 into the bright tomorrow of the graphics interface - although power users should not expect to carry their entire investment of spreadsheets over without a certain amount of tweaking.
An Excel macro works in much the same way as the equivalent in Lotus, but is structurally very different. Initially a simple way of emulating keyboard input from within the spreadsheet itself, so that repetitive series of similar actions could be carried out automatically, the concept of macros developed in version 2 of Lotus 1-2-3 into BASIC-like language in its own right that could be used to create menus, take "IF...ELSE" decisions and read and write files. With Symphony the same idea was extended to record keystrokes as they were entered, greatly simplifying some apects of macro creation.
Despite these second generation sophistications, there are two central problems with 1-2-3 and Symphony macros. To the extent that the language deals with the keystrokes themselves, rather than the actions those keystrokes trigger, it is hard to read and understand. And the program material is stored in the same spreadsheet as the data; it is all too easy to damage the macro while making interactive adjustments to the information it manipulates.
If data and program are stored in the spreadsheet side by side, however well distanced, the deletion of a data line also removes a line from the macro with potentially disastrous results.
Excel remedies both these problems very effectively. Excel macros, whether created directly from the keyboard by switching on the "Record" mode, or by writing them explicitly, are always stored in a separate special macro sheet. Several macros can be stored on a single sheet, to form a "macro library" that provides general purpose utilities or tailors Excel to your special needs. One key advantage over Lotus is that Excel macros are made up of English-like command words that should be more or less comprehensible to any reader, whether familiar with the intricacies of Excel or not.
The work of converting existing Lotus macros is done by a secondary program called the Macro Translation Assistant and, as the name implies, it doesn't do the whole job unaided. Straightforward keystroke macros will translate directly, but others may present problems. Lotus 1-2-3 allows you to create macros that edit or write formulae, or modify themselves as they run, although this is not particularly good programming practice. Excel has trouble coping with these, as it does with macros that use Lotus commands like "{MenuBranch}" or "{Pause}" for which it has no direct equivalents. Large Lotus 1-2-3 macros are also liable to create problems.
To call up the Macro Translation Assistant you evoke "Run" from the main Windows bar in the top left hand corner of the Excel window, the option used to activate programs external to Excel. The design of the Macro Translator seems to suggest that eventually Microsoft will be adding modules to translate macros from spreadsheets other than Lotus, but currently only Lotus 1-2- 3 translation is available.
A menu lets you choose which of the currently active spreadsheets you want to operate on, and then provides you with a list of named areas within the Lotus sheet so that you can choose your macro.
The Macro Translation Assistant then leaps into action, converting your macro and automatically copying the result to a new macro sheet. In order to work it requires a second macro sheet called "Trans123.xlm" and there is a risk of running into mysterious difficulties if Excel is unable to find this in the currently selected directory.
Excel comes with a built-in tutorial, complete with graphics illustrations and for Lotus users a special "1-2-3 Help" facility (there's similar help for MultiPlan devotees). Excel can't deal with Lotus commands directly, but if you type a familiar 1-2-3 sequence into the special Lotus Help box the program displays the corresponding section in the Microsoft Excel help file.
For example, if you enter "/FR", the Lotus key sequence to retrieve a new file, Excel responds by showing you the help page that shows you how to choose the "File Open" command from the menu bar. Ideally, Excel should be able to cope with Lotus key sequences directly but the arrangement certainly helps to level out the learning curve.
When it comes to the creation of graphics, Excel really shows its power. The 44 types of charts produced are configurable inside the program, so that you can, for instance, alter the colour or patterning of an individual bar in a bar chart, lift out the slice of a pie by moving it with the mouse pointer, or add arrows to any part of the picture. Text can either be attached to specific parts of the chart, or entered free-hand.
Creating a chart could hardly be easier. If you highlight a range of numbers immediately before opening a new chart sheet, the highlighted figures are automatically entered and a chart is built instantly. The type of the chart depends on the default you have chosen, but you can change this by selecting a different type from the "Gallery". Charts are dynamically linked to the spreadsheets that contain their data, so if you subsequently change the spreadsheet figures, the chart will alter accordingly.
In theory, you should be able to transfer the chart into other Windows graphics packages like InaVision by cutting and pasting through the Clipboard, but both the run-time and our beta test 386 version of Windows were not up to this. Running under Windows/386, the Clipboard presented the message "Not Enough Memory" on the 3MB Dell and refused to allow us to proceed, or go back to Excel. The only recourse was to reboot the machine.
Function for function, Excel may not appear to be overwhelmingly more powerful than 1-2-3, but there are some subtle variations that in practice make a great deal of difference. For instance, like its predecessor on the Macintosh, Excel can deal with arrays, rectangular groups of cells that share the same formula. This is not the same as copying a formula to a named group of cells, which results in a variant of the formula being inserted into every cell in the range.
Using arrays, a single formula can be used, for example, to add one range of cells to another and put the results in a third range. Apart from speeding calculations and reducing the amount of memory used by your worksheet, array formulae can greatly clarify the logic of your model.
Verdict
* Microsoft Excel is justifiably heralded as "the new generation of spreadsheet software". It is genuinely innovative, powerful and easy to use; used with the appropriate output devices it can produce stunning hard copy of both spreadsheets and graphics.
* Its macro system is a tremendous improvement on Lotus 1-2-3, making it easy to develop applications within the Excel environment. Thanks to DDE these can be "real time"; that is to say, can be made to respond to changes in external data (like stock prices) as it happens.
* The software is still not complete and the full system will not be available until the underlying Windows interface is fully developed.
* Users of 8088 and 8086-based machines will be able to run Excel, but only the most patient will judge its performance satisfactory. The product really requires a PC AT, and preferably a 80386-based machine equipped with a fast (35ms and upwards) hard disk.
Taligent, RIP
This is the very first column I wrote for PC Plus, back in May of 1992. The PC had been going for just over a decade, and in the mid-80s had become almost useful, if you were prepared to meet it on its own terms.
But then some terrible things happened -- PC software became wildly over ambitious (remember dBase IV?) and with the arrival of the first version of Windows we lurched into the era of the flakey graphical user interface, teetering pretentiously atop a version of character-based DOS that really hadn't changed since the first PC. IBM and Microsoft had allied awkwardly in the mid-80s to address these problems with OS/2, but by 1990 that alliance had disintegrated.
Customers had to choose between OS/2 and Windows NT. I chose OS/2, and so had a personal interest in IBM's road map, which marched in the direction of a magical new operating system called Taligent. Now read on...
Future 01: Taligent][pcp][8 May 92][chb]
It was one of those formal dinners where the stiff suits from the heavier end of the industry talk about "issues" and "give you their perspective on SAA" without managing to say very much. Not very promising during the aperitif phase, but things began to look up at the dinner table. Mercifully the formal placing put me next to someone who didn't say "Not my product area -- you need to talk to ..." at every turn. He was a Brit, but based out in Austin, Texas. Someone who had ideas of his own and was only too happy to answer my questions directly as best he could. Surprisingly he worked for IBM, and had done for 21 years. And -- miracle upon miracle -- he turned out to be IBM's interface to the Taligent project.
Taligent, as everybody must know by now, is the spin-off company formed from the unholy alliance between Apple and IBM. I knew, of course, that Taligent was working on a new operating system -- object-oriented operating environment would be a better term -- based on a secret Apple project called Pink. Despite the storm of publicity surrounding the coming together of Apple and IBM, very little still is known about what Taligent is setting out to do, and how it's going to do it. The convergence of OS/2 and the Mac operating system? The death knell of Windows and NT? In a landscape of vapourware, Taligent is so far a distant will-o-the-wisp somewhere on the four year horizon.
What I hadn't appreciated was that Taligent is pretty well an independent force these days, with minimal interference from either Apple or IBM. People have been worrying about how on earth the two computer manufacturers, so antithetical in their approach, could possibly stay in bed together long enough to start a new family.
"We worried about that too," says IBMer Cliff Reeves. He was guarded about detail, but was able to put me in the general picture. "Apart from the question of temperament, the Apple people had some very firm technical ideas, some of them conflicting with ours." So rather than try to manage a mix of oil and water, IBM has agreed to leave well alone, at least as far as the user interface and the immediately underlying layers are concerned. IBM's chief contribution will go into the microkernel, the clockwork at the heart of the operating system.
Most of the Taligent programmers are Apple people. "And we've set it up in a way that makes the company very much their own. They have personal vested interest in how it pans out," says Reeves.
Widely tipped to head the project at its inception was David Liddle, ex-president of Metaphor, the object-oriented company IBM bought a couple of years ago. To everyone's puzzlement Liddle didn't get the job. Taligent was originally promoted as a fusion of Pink with the Metaphor work, but it seems clear now that the heritage from Metaphor will be minimal. Over the steak I probed Reeves on this point, hoping to draw him out on some of the finer points of Taligent. "David Liddle was a technical guy," says Reeves, "and there would have been friction if the Apple tecchies felt he was leaning on them too much."
The technical issue was another stumbling block. Metaphor's approach to o-o was "medium-grained", whereas Pink took the more purist "fine-grained" route, something, I was able to gather from Reeves, that will be carried over to Taligent.
"Granularity" refers to the size you choose to make your objects. If you think of a traditional desktop operating system running, say, a wordprocessor that is handling a document, the wordprocessor/document combination can loosely be thought of as a single very large object taking up the whole operating environment. On the other hand, a purist's object-oriented environment would do away with applications altogether, providing instead a kind of primordial soup of small, primitive, objects that can be fitted together on the fly to create working systems that emulate real-world activity. Between these two extremes lies a spectrum of granularity.
The thing about what we call a "software application" is that you climb inside it, and once there play by its rules. A multi-tasking operating system can switch applications, but you're still inside each one, so the whole system becomes highly modal. You're in Excel mode, or Ami Pro mode or whatever.... Medium-grain o-o systems retain something of this modality, although the enveloping environment can reach in to each application to carry out data transfers and other manipulations.
Hewlett-Packard's excellent NewWave 4.0 is about as good an example of medium-grain object orientation as you're likely to find on the open market today. It sits on top of Windows on top of DOS, so cruelly you could call it a kludge upon a kludge upon a kludge. But it works surprisingly well, wrapping together applications and data and setting them out on a Mac-like desktop that, unlike Windows, allows folders within folders. A key difference from the Mac is that the icons representing the objects are isolated from the filing system, so that you never have to bother about which drive and what directory your apps or data are in. Another feature that lifts it out of the earthbound domain of Windows, the Mac and OS/2, is NewWave's provision for a unifying processing language. The Agent Language, as H-P calls it, can manipulate objects on the desktop and glue them together, giving you to opportunity to build workflow systems that are more than just a collection of applications.
NewWave offers a glimpse of what Taligent will be pitching for. Four years is a very long time in this business, and the new round of technology that includes NT and SunSoft's Solaris should be well in place by then. But Cliff Reeves doesn't think Taligent will have missed its window of opportunity because it will be a revolution. Not, like the Microsoft formula, the same as before but more so. Instead a completely fresh start, designed to pull in the great mass of people who so far have been put off by the sheer computerness of computers.
You've heard all this before, of course -- back in 1984 Steve Jobs called the Mac "the computer for the rest of us". Just over ten years after the Mac, Taligent will be going for a second bite at this particular cherry. Maybe this time we really will escape from the stiff suits and their "SAA perspectives"...
But then some terrible things happened -- PC software became wildly over ambitious (remember dBase IV?) and with the arrival of the first version of Windows we lurched into the era of the flakey graphical user interface, teetering pretentiously atop a version of character-based DOS that really hadn't changed since the first PC. IBM and Microsoft had allied awkwardly in the mid-80s to address these problems with OS/2, but by 1990 that alliance had disintegrated.
Customers had to choose between OS/2 and Windows NT. I chose OS/2, and so had a personal interest in IBM's road map, which marched in the direction of a magical new operating system called Taligent. Now read on...
Future 01: Taligent][pcp][8 May 92][chb]
It was one of those formal dinners where the stiff suits from the heavier end of the industry talk about "issues" and "give you their perspective on SAA" without managing to say very much. Not very promising during the aperitif phase, but things began to look up at the dinner table. Mercifully the formal placing put me next to someone who didn't say "Not my product area -- you need to talk to ..." at every turn. He was a Brit, but based out in Austin, Texas. Someone who had ideas of his own and was only too happy to answer my questions directly as best he could. Surprisingly he worked for IBM, and had done for 21 years. And -- miracle upon miracle -- he turned out to be IBM's interface to the Taligent project.
Taligent, as everybody must know by now, is the spin-off company formed from the unholy alliance between Apple and IBM. I knew, of course, that Taligent was working on a new operating system -- object-oriented operating environment would be a better term -- based on a secret Apple project called Pink. Despite the storm of publicity surrounding the coming together of Apple and IBM, very little still is known about what Taligent is setting out to do, and how it's going to do it. The convergence of OS/2 and the Mac operating system? The death knell of Windows and NT? In a landscape of vapourware, Taligent is so far a distant will-o-the-wisp somewhere on the four year horizon.
What I hadn't appreciated was that Taligent is pretty well an independent force these days, with minimal interference from either Apple or IBM. People have been worrying about how on earth the two computer manufacturers, so antithetical in their approach, could possibly stay in bed together long enough to start a new family.
"We worried about that too," says IBMer Cliff Reeves. He was guarded about detail, but was able to put me in the general picture. "Apart from the question of temperament, the Apple people had some very firm technical ideas, some of them conflicting with ours." So rather than try to manage a mix of oil and water, IBM has agreed to leave well alone, at least as far as the user interface and the immediately underlying layers are concerned. IBM's chief contribution will go into the microkernel, the clockwork at the heart of the operating system.
Most of the Taligent programmers are Apple people. "And we've set it up in a way that makes the company very much their own. They have personal vested interest in how it pans out," says Reeves.
Widely tipped to head the project at its inception was David Liddle, ex-president of Metaphor, the object-oriented company IBM bought a couple of years ago. To everyone's puzzlement Liddle didn't get the job. Taligent was originally promoted as a fusion of Pink with the Metaphor work, but it seems clear now that the heritage from Metaphor will be minimal. Over the steak I probed Reeves on this point, hoping to draw him out on some of the finer points of Taligent. "David Liddle was a technical guy," says Reeves, "and there would have been friction if the Apple tecchies felt he was leaning on them too much."
The technical issue was another stumbling block. Metaphor's approach to o-o was "medium-grained", whereas Pink took the more purist "fine-grained" route, something, I was able to gather from Reeves, that will be carried over to Taligent.
"Granularity" refers to the size you choose to make your objects. If you think of a traditional desktop operating system running, say, a wordprocessor that is handling a document, the wordprocessor/document combination can loosely be thought of as a single very large object taking up the whole operating environment. On the other hand, a purist's object-oriented environment would do away with applications altogether, providing instead a kind of primordial soup of small, primitive, objects that can be fitted together on the fly to create working systems that emulate real-world activity. Between these two extremes lies a spectrum of granularity.
The thing about what we call a "software application" is that you climb inside it, and once there play by its rules. A multi-tasking operating system can switch applications, but you're still inside each one, so the whole system becomes highly modal. You're in Excel mode, or Ami Pro mode or whatever.... Medium-grain o-o systems retain something of this modality, although the enveloping environment can reach in to each application to carry out data transfers and other manipulations.
Hewlett-Packard's excellent NewWave 4.0 is about as good an example of medium-grain object orientation as you're likely to find on the open market today. It sits on top of Windows on top of DOS, so cruelly you could call it a kludge upon a kludge upon a kludge. But it works surprisingly well, wrapping together applications and data and setting them out on a Mac-like desktop that, unlike Windows, allows folders within folders. A key difference from the Mac is that the icons representing the objects are isolated from the filing system, so that you never have to bother about which drive and what directory your apps or data are in. Another feature that lifts it out of the earthbound domain of Windows, the Mac and OS/2, is NewWave's provision for a unifying processing language. The Agent Language, as H-P calls it, can manipulate objects on the desktop and glue them together, giving you to opportunity to build workflow systems that are more than just a collection of applications.
NewWave offers a glimpse of what Taligent will be pitching for. Four years is a very long time in this business, and the new round of technology that includes NT and SunSoft's Solaris should be well in place by then. But Cliff Reeves doesn't think Taligent will have missed its window of opportunity because it will be a revolution. Not, like the Microsoft formula, the same as before but more so. Instead a completely fresh start, designed to pull in the great mass of people who so far have been put off by the sheer computerness of computers.
You've heard all this before, of course -- back in 1984 Steve Jobs called the Mac "the computer for the rest of us". Just over ten years after the Mac, Taligent will be going for a second bite at this particular cherry. Maybe this time we really will escape from the stiff suits and their "SAA perspectives"...
That Was the Web, That Was...
I was late onto the Web -- I think I'd only just got a graphical browser going around the time I wrote this piece in January of 1996. I was writing a "32-bit Computing" column for PCW at the time, and a couple of years earlier readers had been pestering me to take a look at this new thing called Linux. I started writing about Linux in 1994 -- I seem to remember it took something like 10 floppy disks to load it and the accompanying GNU software onto my laptop -- and for the first year I didn't even install X on top of it, and so was running in character-based mode.
But I didn't care. I was just besotted with the fun of getting to grips again with what was essentially a free and democratic UNIX -- an operating system I had for a long time gone round telling anybody who would listen was "the greatest intellectual adventure of the 20th Century".
Bottom line: when colleagues started urging me in the direction of this new graphical World Wide Web browser called Mosaic, I was still on Planet Charbase. That changed with the arrival on my desk of an Intel ObjectStation running NeXTStep (the operating system Tim Berners-Lee had used to develop the first World Wide Web software), by which time I had also managed to get X running on Linux.
I didn't like anything about Uri Geller. In 1980 my job as script editor on Doctor Who had been to chase the magic out of the show and put the science back in (well, that's shorthand for a rather more complicated task I was charged with, but it'll do in this current context). So I wasn't thrilled to come across Geller's magical nonsense on the Web. Perhaps too I still hadn't got to grips with the idea that this newly discovered Web of mine was "out there". In those early days I may still have been under the illusion that everything on my screen was somehow inside my computer. And I didn't welcome hosting Geller in any shape or form.
James Randi, however, is a great guy. Check him out on the Wikipedia.
MSC002: Spoonwatch on the Web][mscop][22 Jan 96][chb]
I see Uri Geller has discovered the World Wide Web. On a page called Uri Geller's Psychic City he offers visitors a chance to "participate in an online experiment in psychokinesis" and win a million dollars. He is going to lock a spoon up in a safe where it will be under constant scrutiny from a video camera. What you do is go on line, watch the video, and concentrate on the spoon until you get it to bend. Then you send in your invoice.
Well, not quite. Mr Geller wants to be perfectly fair about this: if the cutlery curves while you're watching it who's to say it isn't someone else's mental muscle at work. So everybody electronically present at the moment the silverware succumbs will be invited to "take part in a series of psychic tests with Uri Geller to determine the winner". Oh, and the experiment hasn't quite started yet, because Mr Geller is still looking for a sponsor.
Uri Geller arrived in this country in the early '70's, and the moment he stepped off the plane he thrilled the respected science correspondent of the Observer -- Brian Inglis, if I remember correctly -- by causing a dagger-shaped paper knife to bend mysteriously in front of his eyes. But there were a few details in the series of photos accompanying Brian Inglis' uncritical story that had apparantly escaped his attention. I used a piece of string to measure the knife in the photo-sequence and noticed that it wasn't only bending, it was also getting longer. It crossed my uncharitable mind that this is what you'd see if the blade were already bent and initially presented with its concave face direct to the camera. Geller would then just need to gently rotate the knife... The shifting position of the hilt and Geller's fingers in the sequence of shots seemed to prove the point.
But steady on. As Mr Geller is strenuously litiginous in defence of his psychic powers, I'm advised by my solicitor to offer a more rational explanation. The clues I thought I saw were probably telepathically imprinted on my mind by some malign anti-Geller magician. Indeed there was and is such a person, "The Amazing Randi". All through the '70's and '80's, while Mr Geller graced the world with a series of phenomenal feats, James Randi, a brash, bearded American, lowered the tone by replicating every one of the Geller miracles using only his skills as a professional prestidigitator.
The wonder of the Internet is that it brings all sorts of old junk floating to the surface. But its biggest strength is that it puts you in touch with people. People like the redoubtable James Randi himself. He got to the Internet long before Uri Geller -- he's been there since 1992, and in his mail list archive you can read about the debilitating financial effect on Randi of being pursued through the courts by Mr Geller. Last year Randi emerged legally victorious, and now Mr Geller is stuck with a bill for tens of thousands of dollars. I used a telepathic extension of my personality known as email to ask Randi whether the series of courtroom sagas had made him cautious about any future debunking of the spoonbender. Randi's reply came back swift as thought itself.
"Chris: Don't ever let your mind wander to the possibility that my "sting has been drawn"! Never! [But] my activities hardly involve him any more. He's old news.
"Re the Geller WWW page, it's laughable... How silly can people get? Mind you, I think I can see Geller's plan here. If he's as cunning as I think he is, he'll suddenly announce that the spoon-in-a-safe became bent, and now he's calling in all those who were trying at that moment, to give them the Acid Test. And, quel dommage!, they will all fail and will not be paid the million! Drat!
"Now that his star has faded, Geller's looking for ANYTHING that will bring in money, and this is a pretty feeble effort! It's fascinating to watch U.G. going down the drain slowly. I warned him, years ago, that this would inevitably happen, but it appears that he has undiminished faith in the gullibility of the human race. Hmmmm. In that, he may be right."
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