Trip report on IBM PC Faire
HFISCHER@USC-ECLB@sri-unix.uucp
Auditorium and Brooks Hall, San Francisco. The opening Friday was a
mob scene with mostly business types while Sunday had a younger,
non-professional crowd.
The quantity of products was incredible. The Faire emphasis clearly
highlighted software over hardware, although some "hot" new hardware
items were both displayed and marketed. A number of discounters had
long lines of eager buyers for heavily discounted software items and
PC add-on hardware items. Typical sales prices seemed to be as low as
half of retail, particularly for multifunction boards, and DBASE/LOTUS
sales.
An event that most of the Friday professional crowd attended was the
plenary session "Trends in Personal Computing" by Don Estridge, now
the President of the Boca Raton, FL, IBM division that designed and
produces the PC. The most important items which he presented were, to
the best of the authors' memory:
- There have already been over 2.2M IBM PCs sold. [This corrects the
second author's earlier incorrect statement.] The closest competitor
is Tandy with about 800K and Apple only has 600K.
- A number of hints concerning the new "Peanut" product were dropped.
This product is to take its place along side every home's TV set.
For the families with computer widows, the Peanut will, as the home's
second machine, be IBM's solution to that problem. Estridge implied
that new IBM products (e.g., this machine) will be "compatible"
across IBM's product line.
The variety of software at the conference was mind boggling. The
following sample classes of programs were available with the indicated
volume ranking:
1. Copy programs: Booths selling products to copy "protected" disks
seemed to be doing gold-rush business.
2. Word processors and editors: Editors were abundant in every isle
and cranny. Their capability was as varied as the prices. One
editor (Quicksoft) was priced for only $10 with an on-disk 98 page
reference manual -- and the disk label encourages copying the
program and disseminating it to others. Most other editing packages
were protected by elaborate licensing agreements and legal language.
3. Business support software: A large number of database support
programs, command shells for business, database/spreadsheet
integrators, and the like were evidenced.
4. Networking software and products: Products for local area
networking and support were abundant. While a large number of
non-local networking interconnect protocols were available (inter-PC
and PC-to-host communications), there was no presence of KERMIT at
the fair.
Some interesting software items included:
- Spelling checkers: some for under $30 and some quite expensive.
- Products for specific professions: Applications packages configured
for doctors, lawyers, and accountants were seen (even Price
Waterhouse was there).
- Publishers: Book sellers seem to be doing well in the computer
marketplace.
It is interesting to note that a number of successful products were
derivations of programs that were ported from larger machines. One
editing system, Word Perfect by Satelite Business Systems, was a port
from a DG machine. The price range for products varied from $10 for
the small editor that a one man company was trying to boost to
thousands of dollars for profession-specific products such as the
doctor's records system. Since the specific-profession software does
not have a very large market, only authoring firms were marketing
them. However, for the more generic word processing and spread
sheets, there were a number of discounters selling the programs. They
were also selling accessories such as memory boards, diskette storage
containers, and so on. These re-sale booths were literally one-stop
suppliers of all the fundamental components for the PC.
4 HARDWARE
Hardware displayed included:
- PC clone computers: Eagle had a big booth with many machines
available for people to play with and try out.
- Portable PCs: a number of manufacturers had portable PCs that were
running apparently-standard IBM software. These varied from
Osborne-style packaged clones, and an outfit repackaging IBM's
boards, to the Compass Grid briefcase computer.
- Back end data base hardware: used to speed up large scale data base
work especially when there are multiple users sharing local area
network workstations.
- Mice: There were at least 3 different mice being demonstrated, two
of which simulated commands typed in from the keyboard. These units
have an active Tee connector (black box) between the keyboard,
computer, and mouse. These active Tee connectors generate
programmer-defined character sequences so that these devices may be
used with all cursor-directed full-screen interactive programs on the
market. One company, Trillion, showed a PC-DOS "shell" package used
with a mouse, which has menus in the style of the Apple Lisa and
Xerox Star, thus making the mouse more than just an
applications-specific device. New users will find the mouse and the
Trillion software a very pleasant method to interact with a PC. As
with most specialized products, some tailoring is required with
standard products for use with mouse-driven menus, making the
consumer dependent on a single source supplier of software. The
other style of mouse prevalent uses an asynchronous port or special
card for mouse interfacing. These styles of mice appear to be not as
general as the style using the active Tee keyboard interface.
The authors' purpose in attending the fair was to review products.
Certain products deserved additional examination (as evident by the
authors' infatuation) and caused impulse buys:
1. A Logitech mouse (not the newest version that they still have not
yet released). This one has a round top and an active Tee keyboard
connection as described above. The authors paid $268. Upon
returning to Los Angeles the device was D.O.A. Removing the cover
from the active Tee connector, we found that the ROM type device was
plugged in backwards. We telephoned Logitech and with great
embarrassment they Federal Expressed a replacement which was
received one day later. The firm seemed very responsive to this
problem, although they certainly lack QC. (The mouse successfully
works with every full-screen program tried so far: BLUE,
Professional Editor, Perfect Writer, Lotus, IBM's APL, and
unfortunately, the Microsoft Flight Simulator. It was difficult to
recover the PC upon returning from lunch.)
2. The editor, BLUE. This $150 product from Symmetric Software, Newport
Beach (moving to Anaheim), was exhibited with fancy, multi-colored
windows and command selection by several different mice. The
program was produced by a five man company which obviously know a
lot about user-friendly editing systems. The system very nicely
hides windows that are not currently being worked on and lets you
easily switch between any of the eight possible file buffers. We
ran into a bit of difficulty however again when we got back to Los
Angeles, since the version that we had carried back turned out to
not be the same as that demonstrated and was not mouse compatible.
Again, we contacted the firm and under pressure they Federal
Expressed the version we thought we bought the next day.
3. A $10 editor called PC Write that has a 98 page manual. It was
written by Bob Wallace of Quicksoft, which he founded after leaving
Microsoft. We were shown a color version of the editor, but arrived
home to find our disk only containing the black and white version.
A follow-up call to the author solved the color problem; changes to
the editor (since its document was written) eliminated the need to
distribute two separate versions. This editor seems impressively
fast. When the author of the editor was asked why he sells it so
inexpensively, he responds "to gain market share". Having sold over
300 copies at the show, he claims to have covered his expenses.
4. Spell-it by Berzerk Systems, Berkeley is a spelling checker that
cost $29 and has a 41,000 word dictionary. The program is well
documented. It can be configured to run with a variety of different
word processors. This report was checked by this speller. Behaving
like the EMACS correct spelling command, the program will give the
user ten choices for each of his misspelled words, or the option to
retype a word, add to a selected dictionary, and so forth. Unlike
EMACS on a DEC 20, the program is very slow but it more user
friendly than the EMACS spelling correction feature. Users should
be able to tolerate its slowness if they are as bad at spelling as
the second author, and too lazy to use a real dictionary.
A caveat then from the above experience:
Try out any product you buy at a faire. Be triply sure it is the
product that is being exhibited and not an earlier version or
demonstration prototype.
IBM was exhibiting the Logo Systems Limited (Canada) Logo which they
will market "soon". This is not the DR Logo product. The printer's
proof of the manual was reviewed. This Logo seems to support large
workspaces, up to 256 K bytes, and should be well received by "list
hackers". A quick scan of the document could find no restriction on
"object" or list size, such as the 32 K byte limitations on objects in
IBM's APL and other PC products. The manual was thick and robust, in
the normal IBM PC manual tradition.
STSC had a large booth exhibiting their APL. Since their product, at
about $500, is significantly more expensive than the IBM APL (at about
$160, discounted), it was examined. The product seems to have about
the same features as IBM's, with perhaps more library routines
furnished or available. (It is annoyingly difficult to be unable to
get IBM's help with difficulties in their APL. Perhaps dealing with a
private company is worth all that extra money.)
Relative performance statistics (in seconds) are interesting:
IBM STSC 3032
PC PC VS
Function APL APL APL
Looping (100) 1.5 1.72 .010
Primes (10) .22 .21 .003
Primes (100) 17.5 5.8 .094
Eratosthenes(10) .17 .16 .004
Eratosthenes(1000) 6.1 4.0 .062
STSC does not appear to support the shared variable concept as
enthusiastically as IBM (or as the Japanese 5th Generation Prolog
versions), though that is probably of little consequence to
businessmen.
The faire had such enthusiasm, that there is already another one
planned for next year: October 26-28, 1984, also at the Civic
Auditorium and Brooks Hall, San Francisco. Almost all of the
exhibitor space is already sold out at $18 per square foot.
Daniel H. Miller and Herman Fischer
Litton Data Systems
Van Nuys, CA 91409