Path: utzoo!yunexus!ists!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!cs.utexas.edu!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!ucbvax!unisoft!bdt!david From: david@bdt.UUCP (David Beckemeyer) Newsgroups: comp.sys.atari.st Subject: Re: What's going on at COMDEX??? Message-ID: <177@bdt.UUCP> Date: 17 Nov 89 21:28:53 GMT Article-I.D.: bdt.177 References: <1989Nov15.122118.18472@paris.ics.uci.edu> Reply-To: david@bdt.UUCP (David Beckemeyer) Organization: Beckemeyer Development Tools, Oakland, CA Lines: 77 I didn't see any other replies, so I'll post briefly what I saw. The booth is in the West Hall; it seems like it's near where past Atari booths have been. It's not huge, but it was pretty good sized. I didn't see everything, but here are the things that stick out: * Spectre GCR, running on a Moniterm Viking monitor. Very nice. It also was running from a removable cartridge. This is the area in the Atari booth that seemed to attract the most attention. * There were a number of TT systems, running simple demos mostly. (It reminded me of those early days of the 520 before there were any real programs). The CPU portion was a small flat type box, with some humps on it. They all had color monitors, many of which were really blurry. The package isn't as ugly as I had heard; it looks OK. It was hard to tell the real performance with just the demos running. * A European company was showing an "Industrial Mega". They have basically put a Mega on a couple of small boards and packaged it for an industrial card cage. The guy said that it costs about $2000. * There was a demo of PageStream. The output looked nice, but I really don't know too much about the program. * An assortment of CAD programs were shown, nothing that really stood out. They had a pen plotter hooked to one of them. * A few DTP programs. Usual stuff. * Turbo16. Fast. * SGSnet. A MIDI based network. I have this now. It looks pretty real. MIDI isn't very fast, but it does seem to work pretty well. It uses BNC type cables between nodes and has a box at each node which connects to MIDI. $169 for 2-user and $109 for each addl. node. * JRI was showing GenLock and other boards. John now has a board with GenLock, 4096 colors, and some other stuff all in one. He was also showing a setup for GenLock directly on your color Atari monitor. This looked really nice. * Some games were also shown. I didn't look that close. One was another F16, one was a Ferarri driving game. * MIDI stuff - the usual as far as I could tell. The general mood regarding Atari around the show was sort of glum. It's hard to describe. It seemed like a lot of people were looking at the Atari booth as if they were looking at somebody lying in a hospital bed with a terminal disease. There was a get together put on by Atari Wednesday night. I must say it was very nice. They have a new guy (well actually a couple of new guys) - big surprise huh? One of the new guys is handling Developer support. He gave a speach saying how he knows things are bad and that they are going to be better in the future. The thing is, it was a little different than some of the similar speaches made in the past. They mentioned specific things they are going to do and the new guy Charles Cherry seemed a lot more sincere than Sig ever did. I will still wait for actions to back up these words - but I must say I am a little bit encouraged by what he said. -- David Beckemeyer (david@bdt.UUCP) | "Lester Moore - Four slugs from a .44 Beckemeyer Development Tools | no Les, no more." 478 Santa Clara Ave. Oakland, CA 94610 | - Headstone at Boot Hill UUCP: {uunet,ucbvax}!unisoft!bdt!david | Tombstone, AZ