Weathering the storm

Press, 28 January 1986, Page 24

Weathering the storm

Apple’s announcement

this month of the Macintosh Plus computer is the first of a number of enhancements and modifications by the United States computer company. This is to keep up the impetus of the surge that has taken it back into the profit area and onwards and upwards to its normal position of pre-eminence in the personal computer field.

(Apple’s income in the first quarter of its finan-

cial year ending on December 27, was more than SUSS2 million, up 13 per cent on the same quarter a year ago.) The improved profits came from cost reductions. To stimulate growth in sales, Apple is announcing a strong line of new products. There are many changes in the Macintosh Plus, but the most important and excellent news is that all current Macintoshes can be upgraded to the new standard, albeit at a price. • A substantial percentage of the operating system, including all of the Finder, has been removed from the disc and into read only memory. This is a move of immense importance and removes, in one fell swoop, the biggest complaint against the Macintosh, its slowness in booting programs. About 68K will disappear off any program start-up disc (they were never, of course, on data discs). At the same time, one of the type fonts comes off the disc and goes into the read only memory — probably Monaco in nine point. How much faster the discs will boot because of these changes will depend on the program, but look for, at least, a doubling of the speed of loading, in some cases considerably more.

• The built-in disc drive becomes 800 K double-sided, double-den-sity, thus doubling the disc memory. This will mean programs will be able to offer far more. Take as an example The Word by Microsoft. This is beyond peradventure the most sophisticated word processing program for the Macintosh. Now, on the one disc, you will be able to have the full power of The Word plus a very capacious dictionary — probably 80,000 words or more — plus a Thesaurus for looking up words you had on the tip of your tongue only a moment ago. For saving data, you will be able to hold about 120,000 words on each disc, and save graphics created by MacPaint in reasonable abundance. • The back of the Macintosh has been totally remodelled to give, if not open architecture, at least a radical departure from, the closed architecture syndrome, and a move towards the Wozniak/ Sculley open architecture style. The first, and most important, addition is a bus which is a connector allowing a wide variety of peripherals to be connected to the Macintosh. No longer will hard disc drives be choked down by having to work through the serial port or through the floppy disc drive connector. This bus allows almost for the first time, any hard disc drive to use the full speed of the Motorola 68000 chip utilising all of its 32/16-bit capability. Expect a flood, a deluge, an inundation of peripherals from the independents to take full-ad-vantage of this greg| improvement

• There is a video out port which portends some amazing possibilities for the future. The official word is that Apple is staying away from the idea of a colour Macintosh — certainly for this year. Within the new system, incorporated into the read only memory, there is a grey scale of an extent which is totally unwarranted for a black and white screen. The only possible reason for this is to allow the use of full colour, of a quality and definition rarely seen before on a computer. • There is an upgrade in memory size. From next month the 128 K Macintosh will be no more. In truth, it will not be completely dead because there, will still be some call for its use as an intelligent/dumb terminal on networks in universities, colleges and schools.

The new Macintosh starts with one megabyte of memory. This is fully addressable memory. A program will be able to use all of the memory available providing the software is suitably written. And most of the software will be suitably written because the information on the modifications required has been available for some time.

• Finally, there is a new keyboard which addresses some, but not all, of the standard computer keyboard problems. It incorporates a numeric keypad and the dual-control keys have been replaced by a single one. The result is a keyboard which, if not the state of the art, is a keyboard which will find tremendous acceptance in the corporate marketplace. And that is precisely the area at which Apple in the United States has set its sights. With this new improved Macintosh, it is difficult to see how it can fail.

On August 14, Apple will launch the Macintosh H. This machine will not replace the Macintosh Plus; it will supplement it. The first and most important change will be that it will use the Motorola 68020 as its central processing unit This is an upgrade on the standard Motorola 68000. The 68020 is a true 32bit chip working, internally and externally at 32 bits and is also capable of parallel processing. This will take the quite substantial speed improvements of the Apple Plus and carry them a step further. There will be very few computers commercially available that will challenge it as far as computational speed Is concerned. And none that will remotely approach it for combined speed of use and ease of use.

The biggest apparent change on the Macintosh II will be the screen. This will be a dual-format screen. You will be able to use it as an upright oblong if you are using the Macintosh for word processing. , , For

spreadsheets, you will be able to spin it round into a horizontal position, thus giving you the best of both worlds.

Will this screen be available in colour? Probably not in August, but almost certainly by August next year, if not from Apple, from a producer of peripherals.

Does this mean we are going to see two separate lines of Macintoshes? No.

Apple’s corporate thinking is that if it makes too many drastic changes to the Macintosh too soon, it will lose the loyalty of its existing users. By introducing what appears to be a different model for a different purpose, Apple keeps its existing users happy while opening up a whole new market. It will probably position the Macintosh II as being the machine for the professional market and the Macintosh Plus being more suited for the home user. Once it has all the major improvements in place it would be folly to have two different models in a line doing almost the same job. Having got all the improvements on to the market without upsetting what the trade lovingly call the “installed user base,” Apple will meld the two Macintosh models back together again.

There is no doubt that Apple is acutely conscious of the attitude of the vast majority of business buyers. It believes that if something says “IBM” it must be good. And in truth, there is no doubt that most of the time this is indeed the case. Apple is willing to go part of the way and make it simple to transfer data created on a Macintosh to an IBM and vice versa. But what it is not willing or intending to do is to bog down its Macintosh so that it will run the current IBM MSDOS system which is based on the Intel 8088 chip. It will not do this simply because it is certain that IBM will move to a new standard soon.

The move will probably be to the new Intel 80826. This will mean that all the computers, which are now sold as what the trade so coyly refers to as “industry standard,” will be instantly outdated. There is little point in Apple modifying technology in order to get into step with IBM when Big Blue is about to change step and throw everyone into confusion.

If that is the news on the Macintosh front what is happening with the Apple II? To understand that, you need to consider, for the moment, the re-

cent history at headquarters in California. Steve Jobs was obsessed by the Macintosh, and, while he was there, the Apple II push did not have much of a look in. As a result, Steve Wozniak left, simply because the love of his life, the Apple II series, was on a shelf even though it provided the majority of profit for Apple.

Now the situation has changed.

While the future belongs to the Macintosh, there is still plenty of life, and profits, to be found in the old warhorse, Apple 11, on which the company was founded. What is more important is that two of the movers and shakers at Apple headquarters, Delbert Yocam and Jean Louis Gassee, are Apple II devotees from way back.

Therefore in a few months, probably in May, a new Apple II will be announced.

• The keyboard will be separate. The reason for this is simple. In more and more European countries, machines where the keyboard is an Integral part of the computer are simply not acceptable to business or to industry.

• There will be a change to the CMOS 16-bit version of the 6502 chip. This will still allow compatibility with most of the software already available, but will also allow greater speed of working and faster access of enlarged Random Access Memory without bank switching. •Finally, the Apple II is going to become “moused” (if there is such a word and, if there is not, there soon will be). The reason for this is simple to follow. Although the mouse has been available for the Apple II for some time it needs a board, therefore fills a slot, and is therefore not wildly popular. But the programs which are nearest to Gassee’s heart are those written by Luc Barthelet, the young French genius, and they are all, without exception, mouse driven. To give this software a chance on the international markets, it undoubtedly needs a mouse built into the Apple II as standard equipment.

What will the machine be called? Wozniak always used to refer to it as the Apple lIX. But that was its code name within the organisation. No doubt, Apple will think of something snappier and more salesworthy when it releases it to the world outside.

i As long as it does not call it Apple 111.