Expo Booths
Since I'm wearing an HSD T-shirt Jack Renoylds gave me, they get first shot. Obviously, they had way cool demos of Scan-X and Scan-X Color, as well as the incredibly cool FaxMaster 24/96 MNP 5 modem bundled with OCR Servant. And there were previews of OCR Servant Professional, which does all the whizyy automatic-recognize graphics, multicolumn recognition the Mac/PC high-end products do.
Beyond question though, they had the unbelievably coolest demo of all Expo there, and it overshadowed the rest of the activity in their rather large booth. The demo was of.. umm, I'll read it off my T-shirt.. Simon Says... "Why type it when you can say it?" Yes, the "secret utility" from the conference guide was in fact the NeXT's first cheap, commercial voice-recognition technology. You train it on various tokens, so it's speaker-dependent, but language-independent, and each phrase triggers one of five types of macros: a keypress, text pasting, dropping a .SND file, launching a UNIX shell script, or launch a Mail Send window with a template. In a quiet room, the bezel mic works like a charm. No more mousing over to the dock to change apps.. just say "TurdPerfect", and there it is. All for the low EXPO-only price of... (drum roll) $149. Don't worry, you can't get that price anymore; it'll be double after it ships "on or before March 17" Believe me, it is SLICK! A lady from Alain Pinel Realtors dropped her Gold Card on the table and bought ten on the spot. Now, for the downside: not everything can be automated at this stage. Since NeXT (even in Release 3) has no scripting language, and HSD (rightfully) doesn't want to deal with the trouble of implementing some kludgy mouse-tracking macro interface like QuicKeys 2 for the Mac, you can't do anything that can only be done with a mouse, like "select paragraph", or "curve tool". Nevertheless, it is a cool utility... and it's nearest work-alike is Voice Navigator for the Mac, which needs its own DSP, and retails for $495 & up.
Since these are in random order, this was the next piece of literature on my stack. ESL was the integrator that made the sales to the CIA and other federal sites, and now has over 20 NeXT programmers on staff, and also provides on-site support. The cool stuff, though, were some of the custom apps they were showing off. One was HyperNotes, a sort of hyper-linked SYBASE-backend killer-PIM. The other that particularly appeals to the backstabbing publish-or-perish academic in me, was ARGUS. Now, you go down to your campus library, and login to whatever vt-100 or 3270 setup they have around, and you will surely encounter one of several obscenely expensive online abstract databases, like ISI or Dialog. ARGUS eats this stuff up and crams it into a SYBASE database, along with dozens of other types of indexes, curriculum vitae, Who's Who, etc. and then lets you sit down, type in a research topic, and see every related abstract. Then total the view and watch the leaders in the field bubble to the top of the list. Double click and pull up a list of papers, by author or co-author. Pull up a timeline of the person's work. Cross-index the original subject and see at a glance what fields are hot and what's not. The academic's best weapon. Not yet available for public consumption, it must come in real handy for Principal Investigators at DARPA, or indexing the National Intelligence Estimate down in McLean.
Frisbee, yo-yo, and NeXT handkerchief sets went for approx $70
Paul Rand's logo study for NeXT went for approx $300-400
Two NeXT logo watches from Germany (tiny cube on the second-hand, and black, of course) were ~$450 ea.
1/2 price coupon on a NeXT system went for ~$4000
Dinner with Steve: $500, $750, $1000 were the three winning bids.
They also had 20 defective 68040 with lids that popped open, and 100 ED diskettes, etc.
Obviously, PaperSight. They also had a monster 90-ppm OCR system. They are also about to ship a commercial version of real speech recognition, a SpeechKit based on Carnegie-Mellon's SPHINX technology. As opposed to Simon Says which is simply sound matching, this is real speaker-independent voice recognition. Needs no training, will handle any gender, any accent, and continuous speech. Currently has ~1000 word grammar.
All I could find was a stack of envelopes on a table, inviting beta testers for their product. But from the invitation and the Third-Party Catalog, the Pebble, Boulder, CornerStone SYBASE-backed accounting system will be a serious package. It is completely non-modular and incredibly flexible in account entry, management, and reporting. This is serious stuff. Official release will be this year. Oh, and they're from Alberta. Which reminds me, that unlike other computers that sell worldwide, like Mac, SUN, and IBM, this computer is developed worldwide. As much truly neat stuff comes hot-off-the presses from Europe and Japan as from the US. Axsys's Fiscal Dimension also portends to offer Quicken-like accounting for the rest of us, but I didn't sight it on the floor, either.
A real calculator. RPN and the wholeworks. Not much use for net.folk, but people who just have to pay for software now have a real alternative.
Jayson Adams (Mr. NewsGrazer, and does he have some *real* SEF-stories!) took a leave of absence from NeXT to found ASW. His first two products are Engage, the ultimate dock, where each icon has controls in the margin to make a mini-dock of its own, and also frees users from the tyranny of the right-hand-side dock, and NewsExplorer, a NewsGrazer on steroids that does let you browse, but more importantly handle real-time searching of live news feeds like Reuters, Dow Jones (a particularly nicer interface than what the Dow Jones folks themselves had at their booth (which was a screen full of Terminals)), and ClariNet. BTW, Engage (at its low, low Expo price), was also picked up by a couple of sites at the show.
A NeXTBus board with 8 100KHz 12-bit A/D channels and a ultra-neato LabKit for programming it visually. Not a threat to LabWindows on the Mac or PC, but it's a start.
VISA- a $95 one-way translator that converts .DXF files to PostScript, Illustrator, or TIFF. If you know what DXF is, it's probably useful. If not, don't worry.
A $60 sound editor. Basic effects, cut/copy/paste, simple mixing.
Just what NUGs need to eat up bandwith: a graphical BBS. Graphics are PC-compatible too.
I saw only bits of the demo, but the brochure describes a kick-butt hypermedia scripting/authoring environment. Objects can be fleshed out in CraftMan, and it makes an even better prototyper than IB. Built-in flat file database, color drawing, animaton support, CraftScript language, user palettes, IAC, a runtime engine and debugger. Apparently, objects can be subclassed and programmed in CraftScript rather than down-and-dirty ObjC. Sweden.
It's getting harder to unload OD's these days, but Sam's working on the SCSI box with Canon. And a word for the Net: though he may be hard to locate, Sam's a decent guy.
I mention this to point out that the era of Mission-Critical-NeXT-Consultants has dawned; the field includes nice startup guys like Paradigm from Vancouver, to Marble Associates (who had some beautiful whitepapers and case studies about a 1000+ slab-site's downsizing experiences), to giants like Booz Allen, & Hamilton and TRW.
1. Color Laser Printer. The real thing. None of this bubbleject crap, a real $30K color laser driven by a NeXT.
2. 2.1J. Showed off a prototype Kanji-English translator using a Japanese-English CD-ROM
3. Voice Synthesis. Apparently the job is much easier with Kanji input, since the language is so well defined phonetically. Sounded real good to me, at least better than my TI 99/4A speech synthesizer running Parsec.
4. SuperAuthor. A Japanese multimedia presentation builder, sequencer, and player. Real slick running-loop demo.
5. Still video floppy disc drive.
6. NeXT-based ISDN FAX server, Group IV
12-disc clip sounds at a reasonable price. CD-quality, has a Percussion and Effects package.
Two years after the "Square" brochure heralded the 56001 as a software fax/data modem, it has finally materialized. Mix is a completely integrated software voice-mail, answering, FAX, data, muzak, e-mail solution, and possibly a 16-bit digital mic running off the DSP. There's still a hardware box to handle the wiring, but it's a nice package. Not so nice at the German price of ~$700, but they are working on a better price point for the US market.
Jiro Nakamura and Arthur Kyle team up to produce inexpensive bimonthly novice-level NeXT newsletter.
was there. They had the usual: Document Manager, Contact Manager, etc.
Both companies were showing X servers under NeXTstep. Cub'X also offered a mode to make the NeXT entirely X -- no NeXTstep at all. Ah, the French. My mind boggles with the utility of running an X-only session on a NeXT.
Now that Release 3.0 Extended Edition (note that NeXT dropped Extended in favor the IBM-ish Extended Edition) will be only on CD-ROM, plunk down the $35 and become a BaNGoid-- and get a free copy of Sex, Lies, and CD-ROM, also scheduled for Q2 release. BTW, NeXT will also ship a 3rd-party demo disc with each CD-ROM drive.
The usual - TypeView, LockScreen, Portfolio, Rulers, LaunchPad, and the entire Adobe font line. And the unusual- PasteUp, which is truly a Best-of-Breed, and that too against Pagemaker 4.2 and Quark 3 in Beta! Also, there's a great story to be told under #23.
They had a really cool bright-paint-and-raw-aluminum mural as a backdrop to demo Who's Calling, and LiveWire, which is probably the coolest multi-user "talk" I could imagine. The neat thing is that for other apps to use the LiveWire protocol means simply adding a lock requestor to a select: message, and it's immediately multiuser! So the story goes that the Adamses and Glenn got together at a Berkeley ice-cream parlor one afternoon, and Glenn walked out with an interactive multiuser PasteUp!
Create... now has text along a path. Otherwise the same ridiculously cool app it was under 1.0
DataPhile... When Steve puts your app under his microscope (e.g. Improv), he will hound you like a demon possessed to make it perfect... and then sell the socks off it. Steve even sold it in his keynote, showing off the Third-Party Catalog in this "best-of-breed" app.
Pixel Magician -- a graphics converter that actually manages to be more versatile than Adobe PhotoShop.
Wingz 1.1 Ho-Hum. The only reason it was resucitated was for the LA Sheriff's department. The most interesting tidbit was hidden away at Uniforum: a blurb that the Sheriffs' bought 1,000 copies -- implying a slightly-larger than expected NeXT installation.
They had TouchType and the Display PostScript SDK. Also had the Purple book on sale Thursday. I bought one; looks neat, and a great companion to Reid's Thinking in PostScript. The Purple Book evolved out of Adobe's work on porting Illustrator.
Ultra-Wicked fast IRCAM dual i860 board and Quint-Processor. Also had the DM-N digital mic, and the ProPort for Serious A/D.
Color Digital Eye. Sound Works.
Illustrator looks like Play-Doh compared with Virtuoso. I always preferred FreeHand on the Mac, and I went gaga over Virtuoso (not to mention the marketing babe...). You name it, it does it. It's not as much "fun" as Create, but it really is much more useful for true mission-critical artwork. (Like Apple sticking Desktop in front of everything, I've suddenly become posessed to make my life mission-critical (and the mission... why to promote black commercial workstations, of course1 ;-)). Also, they showed off Metamorphosis Mac's ability to transmogrify PS Type1 fonts into NeXT-mungeable format.
32. Lighthouse Design
Concurrence is a perfect example of an app that's 100% better than the competition on any other platform. Not many people realize that Lighthouse's launch capital came from a committment to write this app for the benefit of a large Chicago trading firm. As their flagship app, it truly does show "there's more creativity on the NeXT than in all of MS-DOS land." Also, Diagram 2.0 is underway, and VOID is still selling.
33. Appsoft
Last and very possibly least, Appsoft had a giant-size booth to demo WriteNow, Draw (TopDraw), Image (Pixelist), and graciously hosted other 3rd party developers in their theater. All three work, look nice, and will probably sell like the Dickens.
UNIFORUM
It's simply amazing what MIS will do to avoid entering the 1980's. Get this: an entire X11R4 server for ASCII terminals. Hopefully the next release will support X-windows for teletype.
A few months ahead of schedule, their PowerStation 220 already has the POWER architecture down to a single chip. They shipped more units last year than NeXT has in 3. They were also giving away truly useful IBM hardware - AIX yo-yos! Of course this wasn't as good as new-found ally Apple's paperclip dispenser. I guess that's the most advanced "connectivity solution" Apple has!
They had some really cool pins: "Sex, Drugs, and UNIX", "Every Man's a 10. It depends what base you're counting on", etc. The only island of humor in a self-absorbed world of Open Systems Executives prowing the floor with pocket cellular phones in search of Lois Lane and Super Ingres DataBaseMan!
4. Quorum
Yes, I saved the best for last.
Now, Abacus R&D (ARDI) took the route of emulating every ROM toolbox call to create ROMLib. It will work, but it's still a few quarters behind this company. Quorum, a $2 million, 20-programmer startup hit the ground running and is now ready to ship Quorum Latitude, a package, like Micrografx's Mirrors for OS/2, provides a porting layer for Mac apps in source form. It remaps toolbox calls to X calls, or NeWS calls, or to whatever native GUI is available. The rest of the code gets recompiled to RISC instructions (they demo'd this with Aldus Persuasion). By July they will have Quorum Equal shipping on a half-dozen platforms, which will take Mac binaries and run them on a 68K emulator at IIsi speeds, with full color System 7 support, with Appletalk and printing. This is Hot Stuff. And perhaps ARDI should be a bit worried. Because sixth on their list is "NeXT".