Article 19645 (11 more) in comp.sys.apple2: From: bazyar@ernie.cs.uiuc.edu (Jawaid Bazyar) Subject: KansasFest Compleat! Message-ID: <1991Jul22.114229.28706@m.cs.uiuc.edu> Date: 22 Jul 91 11:42:29 GMT Sender: news@m.cs.uiuc.edu (News Database (admin-Mike Schwager)) Organization: Mutation Testing Facility, University of Illinois Lines: 298 Nntp-Posting-Host: ernie.cs.uiuc.edu ======================================================================== The Canonical Guide to KansasFest '91 Or, what the hell we did for two days at the Apple Central Expo Copyright 1991, Jawaid Bazyar (inventor of the von Neumann architecture, patent pending) Free distribution allowed as long as this notice remains Typos courtesy of sleep deprivation experiment #2 (required to recover from excessive sleep the night before). ======================================================================== Well, Tim Meekins, Derek Taubert, and myself just got back from KansasFest (evidently, only the second ones to arrive home and not instantly pass out). We saw some mighty impressive stuff there. We'll go booth by booth (at least those we attended with enthusiasm). TMS Peripherals TMS Peripherals was selling the RAMfast 2.01 upgrade ROMs. If you don't already have these, get them, they're incredible. The ROM config program is now mouse based, and MUCH easier to use. They were showing off their cassette-cartridge (same size, different material) tape backup systems. VERY nice. 60megs in 15 minutes is nothing at all to sneeze at. Compare to Copy ][+ (what, 4 days or something?) Seven Hills Software Seven Hills software was demoing a really nice heavy-duty equation editor, which will import into AppleWorks GS desktop publishing and most other stuff (most like GraphicWriter III, which was shown right next to it). It's called FormEdit, but they're looking for a more marketable name (someone give'm a call!) Rumor has it that a Mathematica GS exists and has been offered up for publishing. We're going to check into this one. Apple Apple was absolutely tremendous- not their booth, which was pretty darn boring, but their staff - Matt Deatherage, Dave Lyons, Andy Nicholas, Greg Branche- who all took time out to give us (Procyon, Inc) tech support at the show. Thumbs up, hugs and kisses and a hearty hurrah (gotta stop hanging around Linda!) to all these guys! (BTW, Linda, where's those pictures?) I won't describe SS6.0, as we didn't see too much of it and others have already done a fine job of it. Oh, they also had the latest DTS CD-ROM, "Gorillas in the Disc". Three-Sixty Pacific We saw Lane Roath here, chatted with him for a bit- really nice guy. He was selling Dark Castle, Warlock, and some other stuff. But what blew us away was that he had Dark Castle source code for $50. Way to go! We can use as much idea sharing as possible to get people back into the spirit. Unfortunately, he also said he hadn't started an Armor Alley port, but he's got all the source and it could be done (hinted that he'd start soon). Claris Coroporation After having been missing from the last couple Apple II shows, Claris finally shows up- with no Apple II software whatsoever. However, they left their booth empty for several minutes, and this oversight did not go unnoticed- someone sucked in the spirit in the air and prominently displayed (on a Mac screen) a "Apple II Forever! Mac sucks!". An appropriate message. Bravo! DreamWorld Software DreamGrafix looked incredible- it's still in beta, but the improvements from previous demos and betas are astounding. It looked better than most paints I've seen on the Amiga, Mac, and STs combined. Keep it up Jason and Steve! inCider (and to our right, in booth #3...) We talked to Paul Statt about a few things, most notably the ASIC. He got to play with it for a week after I sent it back to Tony. Paul was also very nice... he gave away an AMAZING number of magazines... Interplay Bill Heineman is God. Well, if not THE God, then at least a member of the Greek pantheon. No doubt about it. He came over to our booth first thing in the morning Saturday- he was our first victim.. He recognized Tim's Z-demo ("Say... I know *that* [pointing]") right off and they had a good chat for 20 minutes or so. He came over later to talk to me about the ASIC some more, and explained to me what Tony Fadell has to do to make it really crank. I was stunned. The guy knows everything. He wasn't ever in his booth, as far as I know, but who cares! Bill H. was there! LRO/New Concepts Larry O'Connor was very nice and supportive of the GNO project. Also supportive was Scott Gentry, who gets his name carved in granite at our forthcoming corporate headquarters for being the first person to buy a copy of GNO. Hats off to you (BTW, keep the original stuff- it may be worth a lot of money someday!) Pete Snowberg handed out a flyer on the DSP card- it looks really impressive! I'll try to talk him into uploading the specs to the net and GEnie. He said it was going to support virtual memory, but not memory protection, until I started asking him some questions and making some suggestions- and an idea hit him. Voila, memory protection was listed on the flyer the next day. GNO is one step closer to being a true Unix. Tim and Derek both bought TWGS 32k cache upgrades, and did the upgrade on our table at the 'Fest. Dhrystone test went from 632 without to 672 after the upgrade- all at 7MHz. Graphics applications seem MUCH faster than this (ZLaunch scrolling was reportedly twice as fast). (That's okay, my Zip is still cool as an icicle- Tim's GS was topless the whole time due to heat problems) SSSi, Inc. These guys (who Bryan Zak was there with in spirit, if not in flesh- seems he found out Friday night he was an SSSi employee :-) had a number of products for demo- Edit16, which seems to be the best available programmer's editor available; a beta of a new set of NDAs which were incredibly professional looking, very classy stuff (late summer release hopefully); Genesys isn't 2.0 yet, but it's looking 'much better now' (anyone remember Harry's father, the lunatic (no offense! :-) 'Buddy' on Night Court?). Byte Works, Inc. Talked to Mike Westerfield- yet another great guy at the show. He had info on Orca 2.0 (which we lost! :-( ) and it looked rather impressive. Complete support for GS/OS in Orca; a new Integer BASIC compiler (with source, part of a package to help teach programming and compiler theory); gno news on a gnu C (although he told me earlier he'd be working on it soon); oh, and he's still looking for a DOS 3.2 FST. :-) Computer Covers Unlimited (Next Door Neighbors, booth #1) These folks had an interesting display whereupon they poured kool-aid onto a keyboard for hours on end (protected of course with a keyboard condom). They didn't have a IIgs keyboard to demo the GS version of the cover, so Tim's IIgs was used several times for demos (which, by the looks of his keyboard, could use a cover or, say, a small thermonuclear blast). They seemed to move an awful lot of merchandise. Econ Technologies Nice ladies. Internal (power supply replacement) SCSI hard drives. You can even buy just the power supply case (although for a horribly hefty $299). Their drive combos are also somewhat on the expensive side. They seem to be going for the 'BMW' approach to marketing. Micol Systems Besides Micol BASIC (no comment), they were showing off their new 1.6MB drive. Too bad Apple has announced the SWIM card (only 1.4, but it's a standard). PC Globe Lots of folks who had a nice GS program and loud sweatshirts. Really, I looked at the program a little bit and it seemed to do the same stuff the PC/Mac versions did, only with more style :-) (Might've been the machine it was running on, I'm not sure.) Resource Central We talked to Randy Brandt (what a NICE guy!- where's that ROSE update? :-). *SAW* Tom Weisshar, YATG (yet another II god). I didn't have the nerve to talk to him- what would say to Tom Weisshar? I didn't think bowing and kissing his shoes would be appropriate in public- maybe I can make an appointment. Roger Wagner Publishing Had HyperStudio demos running in SEVERAL booths which had been conglomerated into one Super-Booth (Sam Walton watch out). We happened to be in the bug-busting room when a fellow from Roger Wagner was debugging HyperStudio 3.0 with Dave Lyons- I don't know much about HS, but the title screen looked incredible! 3200 colors, and HS3.0 supports it! Too bad it was in the bug room, but Dave was working on it so it'll probably be out next week :-) Sunset Laboratory (across from us in booth #14) We had fun stepping in front of the light sensor hooked up to his data acquisition system on a //e :-) He also had a Casio SK-1 sampling keyboard with a mike going into a GS. Zip Technologies They had some suits who spent lots of time hard-selling folks. I don't mind, they gave me an "EAT MY DUST Mac..." sign which went as follows: Hyperspeed for $149 GS+ Magazine This Apple IIgs is running 3 times faster than the average IIgs. Faster than most Macintosh computers. Thanks to the Zip GS What a company! They also said they're coming out with a line of low-cost hard drives which they claim will be the fastest available for the IIgs. Knowing that last part to be pure marketing hype, I played along, but their strategy is good- they should do good in the void left by Ingenuity. Applied Engineering No booth but they had a roving tech-hermit. GS-RAM III is out in a half-card format, takes 4 megs (1megx4 chips) and is of course fully DMA compatible. Tim says it looks like an old Language card. The rep also promised Derek they'd fix his Vulcan-40 "this" time- they've almost insultingly blown him off four times (once sending it in, and three times on their lovely 900 number) (See LRO for info on the cache upgrade). InSync Also in the "no-show" category was InSync. So just exactly where is this bug fix? Not like it matters to me or anything... Procyon, Inc. Last but gnot least, we demonstrated our gnifty gnew GNO multitasking environment for the IIGS. We got lots of support from the Apple guys, and several reps from users groups all over the country. We made some incredible contacts, and a lot of friends. KansasFest was the second-best exerience I've ever had in my life ;-) We can't wait until gnext year! An official press release detailing the GNO system will follow in a few days on all the grooviest on-line services. Memorable Quotes --- "I support the IIgs!" Scott Gentry - New Concepts, author of Allison "So what is this?" "It's a multitasking shell" --- "Crazy!" Tracy Poe (Hardware forum leader on AOL) --- "kill -9" [followed by a system crash] Matt Deatherage, Apple II DTS --- "I was born on the 16th, 17th, and 18th and my mother still walks funny" Matt Deatherage "So you like [the IIgs] the best?" --- "Yeah" Matt Deatherage --- "I don't use a debugger, I don't make any mistakes." Barbara Allred, quoted by Mike Westerfield in reference to a phone conversation when she was asked what debugger she used --- "... Here's your GS/OS stack call patch code... ahh, it's not reentrant." Dave Lyons, Apple II DTS [after 10 seconds with a complete disassembly of the GNO taskswitching code with NiftyList] --- "SHOW US YOUR TITS" Displayed on two IIgs monitors in New York, 96pt (sitting in the back of a custom van obviously driven by a maniac). --- "Oh, you're the guys with all the error messages on the screen" Matt Deatherage, being his usual charming self in reference to GNO. Ya gotta love this guy. :-) --- "Three men were driving in a car in the desert, ..." Deranged joke session after 60 hours of sleep deprivation at a Pizza Hut in Nowheresville, IL. --- "I'm gonna play basketball tonight, how about you guys?" Andy Nicholas, Apple II System Software [ as we looked in disbelief having not slept nor eaten in near two days ] --- "How do we open this stupid beer?" Matthew Gudermuth, Procyon Inc. [ many of us stared at the crowd trying to see if anyone else had managed to open the Michelob Dry. Kudos to the anonymous savior with the Swiss Army Knife! ] --- "Apple's throwing a party tonight at 6:30pm, you're invited" --- "You're in trouble, you were supposed to be set up yesterday." Andi Ehrens, Event Specialists (expo coordinators) Stories ------- We were all in the bug busting room, when a naughty nasty wasp began harassing us- how could we call ourselves debuggers with this going on? A heroic unknown soldier from Apple took up the challenge and busted the bug all over the wall. The cheers continued for many minutes and drowned out the noisy Mac SEs in the back. [See Claris Story, above] Having only worked three months on the GNO system, Derek, Tim and myself talked Matt Gudermuth (the kind soul responsible for making our trip possible) into taking the floating battleship van to the Fest. This was an $80,000 conversion that had a 120 volt generator, fluorescent lights, wall to wall carpeting, and turbo air conditioning. We loaded up our GSs onto a deep shelf that covered the generator, and fired up the machines as soon as we hit the highway. We hacked and they purged, and we purged and they hacked, and somehow the program got fixed. Along we way we pulled into a MacDonald's with the GS's still blaring through the smoked glass side windows of the "Mobile NORAD", right next to two unsuspecting young women in a car. As we opened the side of the van and hopped out, we noticed a look of complete astonishment and confusion, as if they had just seen a UFO land and green bubbly-eyed dog-boys from Mars emerge. Matt was describing this to a fellow at the show, but used bad phrasing: "The girl almost choked to death on a french fry, it was so funny" (the gentleman had a look of consternation on his face, and replied "was she hurt?" Matt cleared up the issue immediately). Five minutes before we were supposed to be set up, we were doing the final build of the system as we pulled into the parking lot. The Mariott was very nice- we couldn't make the key card work. It took a linebacker from the KC Chiefs (or a good lookalike) to push the card improbably far into the lock to get the door open. One thing we'd like annoying as Matt Deatherage expected me to be) dogs into Mariotts? And, does anyone know how to patch bullet holes in wood doors? I don't usually read this feed, so please send any replies directly to my email address. :-) --------------------------------------------------------------------------- p.s. If someone in a blue suit walks up to you on the street and offers you some IBM, just say GNO! -- Jawaid Bazyar | Who needs a stinking job? I've got the Graduated!/Comp Engineering | Dark Side (tm) of the Force (tm) on my team! bazyar@cs.uiuc.edu | (Dath Varder, 1991) The entire universe Apple II Forever! | is a (c) figment of George Lucas (tm).