The World's Fastest Pc Star Of Dazzling Show
Sydney Morning Herald
Sunday April 15, 1990
WALKING down San Francisco's Third Avenue on a brisk spring morning last week was rather like going to a football grand final.
From everywhere came the fans ... out of the alleys and off the trolleys and cable cars and up from the Bay Area Rapid Transit trains, babbling with excitement as they surged toward their goal.
By 10 o'clock there were close to 60,000 people heading for the grey fortress of the Moscone Exhibition Centre.
The Apple Macintosh faithful were gathering for the biggest event of their year, the San Francisco Macworld Expo.
With more than 1,000 exhibitors, the four-day expo has to be spread between two exhibition centres several kilometres apart.
The Mac itself was star of the show as the fans tried the blinding speed of the new IIfx model, for the moment the fastest personal computer on the market.
It was a welcome diversion at a troubling time in Apple's history. With Apple Computer in turmoil following a sales downturn and an executive reshuffle, and with the rival IBM world rushing to embrace lookalike point-and-click interfaces, there is an uneasy feeling abroad that the Mac may be losing some of its edge.
That perception has Apple worried. In a bid to rally the troops, Apple Computer took a two-page ad in the latest issue of US Macworld - a 500-page opus handed out free to the expo attendees - devoted to a "personal letter to the Macintosh community" written by chief executive officer John Sculley .
Mr Sculley sought to reassure the community that it didn't really matter that the IBMs were increasingly spouting Mac-style mice, windows and icons.
"More and more, the Macintosh advantage will be in the driving experience, not just in the visual appearance of our dashboard," he said. "They like motoring metaphors in California."
Mr Sculley himself took the wheel to demonstrate the new driving experience in his keynote address at Macworld, titled Toward the 21st Century.
All Mac users, he predicted, would soon find themselves communicating via new "multimedia" applications, with sound, moving pictures and animation to back up the Mac's familiar graphics and text. IBM and the others, he implied, would have to plant the foot if they wanted to catch up.
It was pure bad luck that when he tried to drive the lesson home by sending a voice-mail message from one Macintosh to another in front of an audience of 3,000, the receiving Mac stayed stubbornly silent.
Multimedia applications were certainly everywhere this year. Plug-in cards that allow users to mix sound, video and animated graphics were being promoted for use in training, business presentations or advertising.
Sound, like graphics, is one area where the Macintosh retains an advantage over its rivals - notwithstanding Mr Sculley's little demo problem. Sound circuits and speakers are built into every Mac, but remain relatively rare in the PC world. Voice-mail is just one possible application. Microsoft announced it was now building voice messaging capabilities into its Microsoft Mail package for users on AppleTalk networks.
You can send a quick voice-only message, or one that includes both text and voice to add emphasis. For instance, suggests Microsoft, the boss may type out the agenda for a meeting, send it off to appropriate employees - then add a voice message pointing out that it is crucial for the recipients to attend.
Mainstay of California announced it had added sound to its MarcoPolo program, an application for archiving documents.
Users can add comments or sounds (the mind boggles) to written documents before they compress them and store them on floppy discs or other storage devices.
MarcoPolo and Microsoft Mail both use the MacRecorder device developed by San Francisco's Farallon Computing. This is a digitiser that records, edits and plays back live or pre-recorded sounds on any Macintosh computer, and it is rapidly becoming an essential item for anyone interested in multimedia.
Farallon itself makes good use of the device in MediaTracks, a new software application for training and educational purposes which allows users to "tape"a Macintosh session, edit it, add sound, annotate it and play it back in a variety of ways.
Dove Computer of Iowa showed off a natty little fax modem which can turn any Mac into a facsimile machine capable of sending and receiving while you simultaneously work on other projects.
Not much bigger than a cigarette packet, it was selling at the show for only $US279 and comes with nifty software which is said to reduce the steps needed to send a fax.
An Australian release is expected as soon as official approval can be gained.
In software, the eye was caught by FlexiGraphs from Three Star Inc of Santa Barbara: a piece of statistical forecasting software that seems to have been designed for these times of rubbery figures.
Instead of entering figures into the computer and seeing a graph drawn on the screen, FlexiGraphs reverses the process. You draw a chart the way you would like it to look and the program then works out the right numbers and displays them in a spreadsheet.
"It really is a super program," a Honolulu businessman was quoted as saying. "It lets you plot projections without really worrying about the numbers." Send a copy to Paul Keating, Three Star - he'll love it.
© 1990 Sydney Morning Herald
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