If you can digitize sound and pictures on a Macintosh.
There's no telling what you can do with a computer.
This is Hyper Animator, yet one more fascinating hyper card application,
here at Boston's Macworld Expo.
Today we take you on a guided tour of the biggest ever Macworld Expo,
on this edition of the Computer Chronicles.
♪♪
♪♪
The Computer Chronicles is made possible in part by McGraw-Hill,
publishers of Byte Magazine, and Bix, the Byte Information Exchange.
In print and online, Byte and Bix serve computer professionals worldwide
with detailed information on new hardware, software, and technologies.
Welcome to the Computer Chronicles.
I'm Stuart Shafae, and with me this week at the Macworld Expo here in Boston
is the editor-in-chief of Macworld Magazine, Jerry Burrell.
Jerry, the Americans and the Russians are making progress toward peace.
Warring factions all over the world seem to be settling their differences.
It seems the major war left is between PC users and Mac users.
How's that war going?
One has the impression that the Macworld, if I can borrow that phrase,
has been gaining a lot of ground over the past year.
Well, it's all over the show floor.
We've got hundreds of products, developers from the PC side,
well-known names of all.
The Mac 2 paid off.
Apple gambled properly, and they've allowed developers to come in
and to expand their market for them.
The opening up of the Mac with the Mac 2 in particular.
Exactly. It's been very successful, and we see it here.
The second thing is that while we're making the transition on the PC side
from Windows over into OS 2, PS 2, there are simply no products there,
and they're coming very slowly.
So these new Mac 2 products are taking advantage of the fact
that the IBM market is in somewhat of a disarray.
Jerry, today we'll take a look at all those new Macintosh products
you were talking about as we take you on a guided tour
of this biggest ever Macworld Expo.
Now, as usual at a Macintosh show, one of the big subjects is graphics,
so we'll start out by taking a look at a whole new generation
of graphics software for the Macintosh.
If there were any lingering doubt about the appeal of splashy graphics,
it was not apparent at this year's Boston Macworld Expo.
In almost every aisle of the World Trade Center,
paint, video, and architectural CAD programs were highly promoted and prominent.
Among these, there were a few brand-new packages and a lot of 2.0s.
ABBA software introduced Graphist Paint 2,
a paint package with a hidden stencil layer beneath the work layer.
An artist can etch away sections of the top image
to reveal portions of the underlying image.
Finished images can be rotated, skewed, and distorted or inscribed on a sphere.
Graphist Paint 2 needs at least 2 megabytes of RAM and retails for $495.
Cricut software unveiled Cricut Paint,
a monochrome program with a feature called Fresh Paint.
A bit-mapped drawing can become an object for moving and manipulating.
Deselecting the object turns it back into a bit-mapped image.
Drawing tools can be customized to suit the user's preferences.
Cricut Paint sells for $295.
Well, while everybody else is focusing on the color painting world,
what they've forgotten is there's about a million and a half black-and-white paint users,
and a lot of the materials that are produced in desktop publishing packages
are still being produced on black-and-white devices, such as Postgres.
Deneba software brought out its latest 2.0 version of Canvas,
a color paint package offering an unlimited number of layers.
Images can be viewed either as objects or bitmaps in up to 16 million colors.
Canvas 2.0 also offers gray levels in 1% increments
and drawing precision up to 1 64,000th of an inch.
The release price is $299.
Micro Illusions offered what it called third-generation graphics
in a new paint program called Photon Paint.
With Photon Paint, an artist can tilt, rotate, resize, and map an image onto a 3-D object.
You can also blend colors together smoothly through a process called dithering
onto either transparent or opaque backgrounds.
Photon Paint retails for about $300.
At the Silicon Beach booth, Super Paint 2.0 was on display,
a budget-priced black-and-white image processor
offering new poster, edge, and auto-trace functions.
We've added some strong features to the paint part of the program,
in particular the plug-in modules where somebody can make a custom tool
and add it to a slot in the program and it appears in the tool palette.
The airbrush is really terrific on the paint side.
On the draw side, we've got Bezier curves, the auto-trace,
where it will automatically trace a bitmap image, put it in the draw layer
with object-oriented, including Bezier curves.
And pre-rotation of objects and text, those are the main things.
Silicon Beach also officially released Digital Darkroom,
a program with a set of so-called intelligent tools
for automating most cut-and-paste, select, and fill operations.
Super Paint sells for $199, while Digital Darkroom retails for $395.
AbVent took the wraps off Jonathan Draw,
a two-dimensional drawing program that reads and prints
to the best resolution of your output device,
independently of the screen resolution you are using.
Jonathan Draw also features SnapTools for jumping between different views.
The program will sell for $495.
Apple's software spin-off company, Claris, unveiled the two-dimensional Clariscad,
offering mouse or keyboard entry, automatic dimensioning,
and an adjustable workspace.
The user can adapt or design new fill patterns, pens, dashed lines,
and dimensioning parameters.
Clariscad is expected to ship in December and will retail for $799.
For architectural designers concerned with the insides of a building,
Kump Servco demonstrated Mac Interiors,
a $295 3D interior design tool.
With Mac Interiors, a user can create a room outline,
including doors and windows, create a library of objects
with up to 64 sides each, and then place the objects in the room.
The room and its contents can be viewed from any angle
to any user-defined scale.
Mac Interiors can send output to a laser printer, image writer,
or large-scale plotter.
In the high-end CAD category, Dynaware premiered its Mac 2 version
of Dyna Perspective, a 3D CAD animation package
featuring up to 120 colors, floating point coordinates,
and five different grid units.
To create an animated walkthrough of your drawing,
just select a few views, specify the number of frames in between,
and Dyna Perspective will generate the intervening frames.
The program requires a minimum of 2 megabytes of RAM
and sells for $1,495.
Mac Architryon, a 2D and 3D package for architects from Jimeor,
made its debut at the show, promising an interface
that mimics traditional architectural tools.
Jimeor is marketing the program to professional users
who need to design in real volumetric 3D from start to finish.
A designer can visualize and animate a project in 3D
and create two-dimensional drawings from the same data.
Mac Architryon is priced at around $1,500.
To physically help visualize the increasingly complex graphics on the Mac 2,
eMachines unveiled a new display called the Big Picture Z21.
The 21-inch monochrome monitor can display at four different
viewing resolutions from 30 to 80 dots per inch.
Small format publications can be viewed full size on the screen.
Larger formats, the Z21, offers hardware level panning and zooming.
Maximum resolution is 1280 by 960,
and a grayscale model will display 256 levels of gray.
Prices start at around $2,500.
For users not satisfied with drawing from scratch,
Pixelogic brought out the ProViz Video Digitizer,
a standalone peripheral that connects through the Mac's SCSI port.
The ProViz digitizes images from any video source
and will send the digitized output to a monitor, printer, or a videotape recorder.
The digitizer is available in a monochrome version for $10.95
and a color version for $16.95.
The Macintosh has always been known for its good graphics,
its friendly user interface, things like desktop publishing,
but the real growth for the Mac in the last year
has been the explosion of mainstream business applications.
Just as desktop publishing was the software star a few years ago,
desktop presentation software seemed to be the must-have business application this year,
with a number of familiar names throwing their hats into the ring.
Aldis, better known for originating desktop publishing,
demonstrated a pre-release version of Persuasion,
a presentation package that combines an idea outliner with pre-designed visual templates.
The user enters text into the outliner,
picks one of the auto-templates,
and the program formats the text into a visual presentation.
Persuasion comes with drawing and charting tools,
and the templates can be customized to contain corporate logos and colors.
Persuasion will be available in early 1989 for around $500.
Basically, the differences are this product has a full set of tools in one package,
where most of the other products are missing a major component,
such as charting and graphing or outline processing.
It's a complete set of tools, and the major difference is the auto-template technology,
which is the underlying capability that automatically lays out slides from outline text.
Lectraset stood out with its version of presentation software called Standout,
an integrated package including word processor,
an online design and creation system, and integrated charts and graphs.
Standout comes with a library of templates, or a user can create and save custom designs.
The program offers three levels of viewing magnification
and a group of master frames for placing repeated elements.
The price stands at $295.
Microsoft used the show to introduce several new Mac 2 products.
PowerPoint 2.0 for desktop presentations in living color,
Works 2.0, and Excel version 1.5.
The update to Excel features new macro functions, custom menus and dialog boxes,
and of course color support for the Mac 2.
For users who can't wait, Excel supports Apple's Multifinder multitasking operating system.
Microsoft Works sells for $295, while PowerPoint 2.0 and Excel 1.5 both retail for $395.
Ashton Tate announced shipment of a presentation-oriented spreadsheet called Full Impact.
The package has an integrated text processor, pull-down menus,
and allows up to eight spreadsheets to be opened at once.
Full Impact also features a worksheet to assemble spreadsheet data,
text and charts into a final presentation package.
The suggested retail price is around $400.
What we've done is taken the core spreadsheet functionality,
all the features you'd expect to find in a sophisticated spreadsheet,
and added around that presentation capabilities that you'd associate with desktop publishing,
including some drawing capabilities, text processing capabilities,
and graphics which are incorporated within the spreadsheet and not separate.
Desktop publishing continues to attract an audience at computer shows, and Macworld Expo is no exception.
Springboard Software unveiled Springboard Publisher,
a $200 package that fits in somewhere between Desktop Publisher and Word Processor.
Springboard Publisher integrates page layout, word processor, and graphics
with optional newsletter templates, clip art, and laser fonts.
Expected release date for the Mac 2 version is December.
In the database category, ProView Development introduced Panorama,
a database with a spreadsheet-like structure.
Drawing tools allow the user to create and modify forms and reports,
and to import graphics from other applications.
A feature called Flash Art allows the user to paste artwork into database records
simply by typing the name of a pre-stored image.
♪♪
For years, Macintosh users have had to put up with a lot of snide remarks from PC users
when the subject turned to color.
Well, not anymore.
With the advent of the Mac 2, there are all kinds of software applications here at Macworld Expo
that take advantage of the new color capability of the Macintosh.
Like the laser printer that paved the way to desktop publishing,
the Color Macintosh has attracted a vast range of color software and hardware.
EGES development showed the first module of its future animation workshop
called Showcase FX for color title generation and special effects.
The program can embellish text with three-dimensional effects,
adding border outlines, neon, embossing, an offset edge, and horizontal or vertical spread.
Showcase features a WYSIWYG, or what you see is what you get, display,
and metamorphic fonts that can be stretched, dragged, and skewed to create unique shapes.
The user can animate titles and playback linked sequences.
Showcase FX sells for $395 and needs 2 megabytes of RAM.
Macromind unveiled VideoWorks Professional, a $695 real-time color animation program.
The new version of VideoWorks comes with animation tools to create airbrush speckles,
gradients, cycling, smearing, smudging, and tinting, and can pick up, rotate, and slide images.
Drawings can also be auto-animated.
At some booths, it was difficult to tell if one was looking at a computer monitor or a television screen.
The merging of computer graphics with video images made the video capture board a common, if expensive, peripheral.
TruVizion demonstrated its video capture board called NuVista,
which can display video images in high spatial and high resolution color.
NuVista offers multiple-bit depths, programmable capture, and comes with a 32-bit coprocessor.
Prices start at $4,250 with 2 megabytes of onboard memory.
Mass Microsystems brought out the ColorSpace2 video board, featuring graphics overlay and auto genlock to video signals.
The board can output RGB and American Standard NTSC video simultaneously,
and is also compatible with European PAL television.
Among new paint programs, Electronic Arts premiered Studio 8,
a $495 color paint package with 4 levels of magnification and 9 tool modifiers.
Studio 8 has a special tool to allow any portion of the image to be picked up and used as a paintbrush to create custom effects.
A magnified window can be opened anywhere on the screen, and all tools are usable at both regular and magnified levels.
SuperMac presented Pixel Paint Professional, a $595 program featuring Pantone colors for pre-press preparation.
Users can scan through colors interactively as if thumbing through a book of samples.
Pixel Paint Professional comes with a full set of masking tools, a built-in color separator, and spot color separation keyed to Pantone colors.
I think in 84, people were going ahead and saying the Mac is wonderful because it's got icons and windows.
We're beginning to see those on other machines, and the strength that we're seeing now is the ability to support true color and advanced imaging.
I think that's really going to be the thing that sets it apart.
To help non-artists save time with their paint programs, Image Club unveiled a new clip art library on CD-ROM called Art Room.
For $1,000, you get 70 megabytes of ready-to-print images, including 1,000 encapsulated PostScript images, 100 typefaces, publishing templates, a font juggler, and an image retriever.
Kodak and Photomac were jointly demonstrating a color slide scanning, processing, and printing system.
The Kodak desktop scanner takes about three minutes to scan a color transparency at 2,800 dots per inch and 12 bits per pixel color.
Photomac software retouches and color corrects images, which can then be printed on a Kodak Color Thermal Printer.
The Iconics scanner sells for $8,900. The software is around $700, and the printer costs under $5,000.
For those lacking something to scan, Presentation Technologies was offering the Montage FR-1, a high-resolution film recorder.
The Montage can produce slides for more than 16 million colors, has full bitmap capabilities, and 4,000 lines of resolution.
Montage sells for around $6,000.
A scanner of a different color was Apple's contribution to the show, a flatbed optical image scanner complete with AppleScan and HyperScan software.
The monochrome Apple scanner can process line art, halftones, and grayscale images at up to 300 dots per inch, grayscale at 4 bits or 16 levels per pixel.
The Apple scanner retails for around $1,800.
Also available at the Apple booth was Senior Vice President Jean-Louis Gasset, who offered some thoughts on the status of the OpenMac.
Again, it's a product that the marketplace took over and did things, because we cannot think of everything.
And the charm of a flexible, open, modular product is that if it's flexible, and if you can put the pieces together with enough ease of implementation,
and if you have enough power in the combination, then the people who know something that you don't know will take care of it.
That's what they do in the marketplace.
For a while, the battle was, does Macintosh have software? Certainly that's not a question anymore.
Now you can just pick the finest of the finest, and that's a much better position to be in.
Sharp Electronics introduced a new color scanner, the JX450, a $7,000 desktop machine with 300 dots per inch resolution and 64 shade gradations for each RGB element.
A single charged couple device reads the RGB data and converts it into 8-bit digital data.
The scanner has a color tone capacity of over 260,000 shades.
Almost as rare as color scanners are color printers, but Haltech had one called Pixel Master.
Definitely not for the desktop, the towering Pixel Master boasts an advanced thermal ink process called Thermojet.
The printer has an unusual vertical printhead that squirts liquefied plastic inks onto the paper, which solidify instantly upon contact.
Up to 250,000 different shades are available at 240 dots per inch.
Pixel Master is priced at under $6,000.
Some striking color graphics and animation were on display at the Invention software booth, produced with a package called Professional Programmer's Extender.
The sample application included animated cross-sections of three-dimensional medical data.
Despite the product exclusivity of Macworld Expo, connectivity to the rest of the computer world was offered by a number of vendors.
3Com announced Macintosh support for its multi-vendor 3-plus open architecture, LAN Manager.
Well, in our networks, which are generally on the high end of networks, we sell a series of dedicated network servers.
And in the last six months, we've observed that now more than a third of those servers, which you can connect to IBM PCs and other devices,
more than a third are going out with Macintosh capabilities.
So we now make the Mac software a standard and just put it in all our servers.
One of the most unusual output devices of the show had to be the Poem, a personal and original embroidery machine from Enzen Hoshigumi Company.
Poem is the first of a new group of products for what the company calls desktop embroidery.
From an original sketch or a library of clip art, Poem will embroider a matching design on its tiny sewing machine, one color at a time.
The complete kit sells for under $1,000.
Finally, BrightStar technology showed yet another offbeat application of Apple's HyperCard called HyperAnimator.
BrightStar's animation program records faces and lip movements and recreates them phonetically on screen to create the impression of synchronized speech.
It will convert typed text into a phonetic stream of vaguely human-sounding speech.
HyperCard phonetics can get a copy for $150.
Jerry, as you said at the very beginning of this program, there really are a lot of new Macintosh products here at Macworld Expo.
How would you sort of sum up the show for us? What were the highlights here for you?
Well, by subject area, desktop publishing, color for the Macintosh, graphics, computer-aided design,
and an extension of vertical applications into the business marketplace.
Not just the word processors and spreadsheets and databases, but things like accounting, a lot of new products.
Okay, let me put you on the line now. Specifically, what were the really hot products at this show?
Well, my pick of the show probably should start with Excel 1.5 for color.
Color spreadsheets make life a lot more pleasant.
We've got Iconics and Kodak that have a slide capture, 35mm digitization package and software for display.
Dynoware, an interesting new company from Japan that are showing an architectural CAD, color rendering of computer-aided design.
Aldus' Persuasion had to be the hottest business presentation package on the show floor out here.
Studio 8, an electronics arts package, which is a color paint package for the Macintosh. A lot of fun for that.
The TruVizion cart, 32-bit color, true color for the Macintosh and video. We hope it's NTSC.
Montage, for the first time now we can produce 35mm slides. They're showing it on the floor and it's shipping.
And finally, Avalon prepress software for the publishing industry that allow us to touch up with color.
Jerry, thanks for being here. That's our special show on the Macworld Expo here in Boston.
Hope we'll see you again here next week on the Computer Chronicles.
♪♪♪
In the random access file this week, the NeXT Computer finally made its debut in San Francisco last week,
introduced by NeXT president Steve Jobs. Jobs said the NeXT Computer has mainframe power and will sell for $6,500,
far less than half the price of similar current generation products. Jobs said the machine will be shipped to selected universities
before the end of this year and will generally be available in the second quarter of next year.
The NeXT Computer features a high-resolution 17-inch megapixel display in black and white.
The computer itself is a one-foot black magnesium cube with 8 megabytes of main memory.
The NeXT Computer has built-in transparent networking and multitasking.
The machine comes bundled with a new Unix user interface and other software.
The whole computer is on one board with two main processing chips, including the Motorola 68030 running at 25 MHz.
And as rumored, it features CD-quality sound from a 10 MIPS sound chip and a 256-megabyte internal optical disk drive
with full read, write and erase capabilities. NeXT also unveiled a laser printer with 400 dots per inch resolution
and a price tag under $2,000.
Digital Equipment Corporation is returning to the PC marketplace with a deal to sell Tandy PCs.
DEC will also service Tandy computers owned by DEC customers, and there was a technology trade agreement between the two companies,
which means Tandy will be able to access DEC's networking technology called DECnet.
Digital says it won't sell the Tandy 5000, which uses microchannel architecture.
The Japanese showed off a whole string of new laptops last week.
Toshiba beefed up the high end of its portable line with a new 386 portable called the T5200.
It features a VGA-compatible gas plasma display and a 40-megabyte hard drive. It runs only on AC.
But Toshiba did introduce a new 12-megahertz 286 laptop that does run on batteries.
It comes with a 20-megabyte hard drive, weighs 11 pounds and is priced under $5,000.
NEC was also rolling out laptops this week.
The smallest was a four-pounder called the Ultralight that features 640K and internal 2400-watt modem,
a backlit display and a 2-megabyte RAM drive.
And Sharp has introduced a new 8-ounce handheld computer called the Wizard.
It interfaces with a PC and features the usual personal organizer functions.
Ziff Communications is now shipping its new CD-ROM-based computer reference library.
It features full-text articles from the last year's worth of 10 major computer publications,
plus abstracts of computer-related articles from 120 other technology periodicals.
Finally, the East Coast beat the West Coast in the first-ever Computer Bowl held in Boston last week.
The West Coast team captain, David Bunnell, said it was only because the East Coast team studied.
In the West, he said, we were too busy being successful and making money.
That's it for this week's Chronicles. We'll see you next time.
The Computer Chronicles is made possible in part by McGraw-Hill, publishers of Byte magazine,
and Bix, the Byte Information Exchange. In print and online, Byte and Bix serve computer professionals worldwide
with detailed information on new hardware, software, and technologies.
For a transcript of this week's Computer Chronicles, send $4 to PTV Publications,
Post Office Box 701, Kent, Ohio, 44240. Please indicate program date.
© transcript Emily Beynon