June 1988 MAGazine Volume 4 Number 6

Calender of Events for June

Saturday, June 11, 1988 - 1:00 PM - The June general meeting will be held in Jenning's hall in Room J-2 located on the campus of State Technical Institute of Memphis. Our president will tell us about a contest announced by Commodore. We also have a tape produced by Aegis Development. We should have a few demo's also. --- SEE YOU AT THE MEETING ---

Thanks!!! To Tim Burford for his excellent LOGO design.

FARE

Thanks!!! To all the members how participated in the FAIR. If you were unable to attend you missed a good one. There was a lot better attendance from all of the user's groups and I think there was some Value Added dealers there also. Be sure and read an in depth report of the FAIR by our new Vice President Todd Rooks.

C.A.S.E.

by Editor/ED

I don't like to criticize anyone's efforts, but the C.A.S.E. show I attended in Nashville last month was a real let down for me. My expectations may have been to high or maybe my idea of what a computer show should be, differs from there's, whatever my problem is I don't think I'll ever go again. After driving 200 miles and paying $10.00 to get in, I wanted to see something beside's a bunch of dealer's hacking there wares. If it were not for an enjoyable meal with Ron and Audrey and a talk given by R.J. Mical it would have been a complete waste of time and money.

MAGazine

MAGazine
Memphis Amiga Group,br /> Box 381462
Memphis, TN 38183-1462

MAGazine is published monthly by the Memphis Amiga Group (MAG), a nonprofit organization offering assistance to fellow Amiga owners and those interested in the Amiga. Membership in the Memphis Amiga Group is available for an annual fee of $20 per family. Memphis Amiga Group Officers for 1988 are:

President
Dr. Alan Schwartz
(901) 755-6622

Vice President
Todd Rooks
(901) 373-0198

Secretary/Treasurer
Scott Hudson
(901) 794-8914

Librarian
David Head
(901) 377-7568

MAGazine Editor
Edward Bilson
(901) 794-2936

WELCOME!

Welcome to our new Members
TIMOTHY G. SMART
FREDDIE L. ANDREWS
WILLIAM BOWERS
TODD ROOKS
Todd is also are new V.P.

A First Look at the HP DeskJet Printer

By Charles Williams

The HP DeskJet is a black-and-white ink jet printer. Tiny dots of ink are squirted onto the paper at a resolution of 300 dots per inch. Lets take a look at the major good points first. The DeskJet is quiet, the printing is VERY black and it's fairly fast at 240 characters per second in draft mode and 120 characters per second in letter quality mode. It has a built in cut sheet feeder and it prints on regular photocopy paper. The ink cartridges ($18.95 retail) last a long time and are easy to install and remove. When you change ink cartridges you also, in effect, change to a new print head.

The DeskJet has two slots for a wide variety of font cartridges. There are also memory expansion cartridges for downloading soft fonts and even an Epson FX-80 emulation cartridge, although you lose some resolution in this mode. There is a DeskJet printer driver on the new 1.3 version of AmigaDOS, which will probably make the Epson emulation unnecessary for the most part.

When I got my DeskJet printer, I also ordered the two ASCII font cartridges. One is Helvetica in point sizes from 4 to 14 point. The other is Times Roman in the same range of font sizes. Both are proportional fonts. Both font cartridges can be installed at the same time and fonts on both, plus the internal fonts, are all accessible by either control codes or by push button on the printer control panel.

These capabilities do come at a cost, though. The DeskJet retails for just under $1000, but I have seen it advertised in Computer Shopper magazine for as low as $875. I paid 20% list for mine at the Computer Shoppe (I didn't see the lower mail-order price until the month after I bought mine). The two font cartridges I bought were also purchased through the Computer Shoppe at a 20% discount. That's 20% off the list price of $125 for each cartridge. I did call a few mail-order companies and check on prices and availability before I paid the Computer Shoppe $100 for each cartridge.

I think that the font cartridges are important because the internal fonts in the DeskJet are limited to draft and letter quality versions of Courier in 10 pitch (10 characters per 8 inch line), 16.67 pitch (132 characters per 8 inch line) and 20 pitch (for spreadsheets, I assume). These fonts may also be printed in 6 point heights (about half the height of normal type), but only through the use of imbedded control codes.

I use WordPerfect word processing software and have had some frustrating times getting WP to work with the DeskJet. At first there was no printer driver for the DeskJet with WordPerfect, and now they have what's called a limited support driver, but it doesn't make use of my Times Roman and Helvetica font cartridges. In between calling WordPerfect about once a week to motivate them into writing a full featured printer driver for the DeskJet and trying to set something up myself with WP's Print Def (printer driver definition) Program, David Head told me about a WP printer driver for the DeskJet he saw on People Link. I downloaded it and have been experimenting with it for a few weeks. This article is a result of some of that experimentation. I'm using the Helvetica font in the 8 point size. The heading is Helvetica in the 14 point size. This set of 3 DeskJet printer driver configurations from People Link was translated from the IBM driver codes by Charles Tyson and they take advantage of the font cartridges that I have plus the internal fonts on the DeskJet. It isn't perfect, but its better than the one WordPerfect has.

Graphics printing and screen dumps are good and not too slow (I think some of it may be due to the yet to be officially released 1.3 driver), but still only as good as the screen resolution. This is not a PostScript printer.

I really wanted a PostScript laser printer but couldn't afford the roughly $4000 price tag and was/am sure that when the 450 dot per inch models hit the market and when the cheaper to produce LED PostScript printers (like the NEC LC890) are in mass production, prices are likely to come down. In the mean time, I was looking at good 24 pin dot matrix printers in Byte magazine and saw this wonderful preview of the HP DeskJet. It seemed like a sort of super dot matrix printer to me and since I'm sometimes an impulsive buyer, I snapped one up.

By the way, the graphics on this page were done separately, space was left for them and they were pasted in place. They were printed on the DeskJet, though. I am really interested in seeing how a graphics oriented word processor will do on the DeskJet; something like ProWhite. I know that the fonts would not look as god, but there would be better coordination with text and graphics.

A COMDEX report by Oran Sands.......

May 12, 1988

Assuming you're holding your breath waiting for the latest scoop on everything that was at ComDex I've whipped up this little summary of what I remember since returning. This text is broken into several sections more or less as I saw it. The sections are as follows:

COMDEX overview
Commodore Booth
Commodore dealers meeting
Amiga Software Gallery
Anything else I forgot...

COMDEX Overview

For anyone that hasnt been to one Comdex is a HUGE exhibition of computer equipment, software etc. that simply beggars the imagination. It took the biggest part of a day to take in the WEST hall only! That left the EAST hall and the Atlanta Apparral Mart. The show mostly featured IBM compatible stuff. In fact, I'm glad I have no interest in IBM-type things because I can't imagine having to actually LOOK at everything there was to see. There was much interest in providing support for the new IBM systems as well as the new 386 clones. Everybody was screaming "WE HAVE THE FASTEST 386 MACHINE!". Frankly I didnt care. Graphics were really "in" at this show with everyone running slideshow demos of EGA and VGA graphics. INterestingly enough, many used Amiga graphics! One even went so far as to have a screen that announced "This is not and Amiga". Geez, we can't get no respect! Apple was conspicuously absent from the show. No idea as to why. Atari was there with a booth the same size as Commodore's but it was sparsely attended and curiously dull. It didn't occur to me until I left the booth that I saw almost no programs in color! Later when I returned to it I checked and sure enough there were darn near no color displays running. It was suggested that they were trying to shake their game machine image. The only graphics slideshow they had running consisted of 30% Amiga images. I even heard others in the booth recognize the fact so I think this probably backfired on them.

Commodore Booth

Well, there was certainly no lack of action at the Commodore booth! It was swamped every time I was there. And that includes the pre-opening times when only exhibitors could get in! I'm not saying it was the hit of the show but it was definitely well received. Commodore was also trying to shake the "game" machine image and laid down the law to the exhibitors in the booth. They were to be manned at all times, everyone was to be dressed appropriately, spend no more than 3 minutes with a guest then move them on...etc. The booth itself was tastefully done in light gray with each alcove hosting several "applications" of the Amiga. Here's a list of those present in the booth...

Hardware in use:

Personnel in attendance were just about anyone from the administration or sales area of the company, including Irving Gould, Max Toy, Rich Macintyre & Dr. Henri Rubin.

Almost every booth had a 3 meg A2000 with a hard drive. There was even one A2500UX running Unix as a task under Amiga DOS. This puppy was so fast it hurt! No one was allowed to demo anything that wasn't "real" or going to be within a couple weeks. Which means F-18 Interceptor is due out may 27th (give or take a week), Library is due in 3 weeks (assuming it passes internal testing), Digi-View 3.0 is about 3 weeks away and Professional Page 1.1 is already shipping. The biggest draw in the booth seemed to be Heidi Turnipseed of MicroIllusion doing demos of Photon Paint. They had a Tektronix color printer churning out prints as fast as people could steal them. No one seemed to believe what it could do. NewTek's booth always had a large draw as well. Evidently the crowd had never seen anyone use a tv camera for image capture. The actual images they were making were pretty bad compared to what you and I have gotten used to but the crowd seemed to like it. Next to NewTek was Gold Disk and they were showing their new capability of doing color separations. In fact the color brochure they were handing out was completely created with Pro Page 1.1. Progressive Peripherals and Software were using SuperBase Professional and the personnel file demo that comes with it. Since this form allows you to not only record data about a person but place their photo on the data sheet they worked up a new wrinkle. They would first enter your data then using the FrameGrabber, punch a key & Bingo! your mug appeared in the form. A really neat and useful application! For the most part the other displays were ok but certainly not the best of what's out there. I.E. Scuplt 3D showed the Boing Machine demo as opposed to Boing Throws. The Pro Video Plus demo wasn't used but something put together by Paul HigginBottom that was short and not very creative. He seemed to be more fascinated by the Magni genlock's ability to fade to black at the touch of a button. Really! It takes only 5 bucks of parts to do that! Not to mention it's a standard thing in tv equipment these days.

All in all I found the Commodore booth to be quite professional in appearance and conduct which was their intent I'm sure. Judging from the reception they got I say they succeeded!

DEALER'S Meeting

Commodore held a special meeting for it's dealers in a separate ballroom. The hall was packed and probably seated at least 500 people. After the lights dropped the crowd was entertained by what sounded to be a large rock band. In reality it was a keyboard player and a saxophonist. And an Amiga 500! You might keep hearing what a computer driven synthesizer system can do but you really need to hear it to believe it. After they finished to overwhelming applause several speakers addressed the audience outlining Commodore's plans for marketing, service and dealer support. Ken Weber, new to Commodore (from IBM) admitted "Its nice to belong to a company with a REAL multi-tasking system!" Rick MacIntyre used Amiga produced 35mm slides for his presentation but they kept getting screwed up. One wonders if this wasn't intentional since Dr Henri Rubin's speak used all live Amiga graphics. At one point we noticed that the demos were screaming. The reason became apparent as it was revelaed that the A2500UX was running them. They opened TWO Maxiplan screens at once which drew a breath from the audience. Talk about tempting fate! Then they "clipped" numbers from the Lotus 1.2.3 into the maxiplan screens. Then they loaded up UNIX. OMIGOD.... is this sucker fast. They had it multitasking and a text scroll in the background literally went by so fast that it wasw unreadable. They showed the new A2350 broadcast quality, framegrabbing, genlocking, video adaptor (it's two boards). They could grab an image in real time and freeze it but it was truly broadcast quality.

The upshot of all this meeting was that Commodore isn't going to let the Amiga fall down. In fact it became quite clear that the AMIGA is Commodore's ace in the hole. They are counting on it 100% for keeping the company alive. The 64 and 128 were NEVER actually mentioned by name (although refered to once by slide). Add to that fact that there were no 8 bit machines at the booth an no 8 bit software was shown and it's obvious that the Amiga IS Commodore at this point. I think that's good news for all of us!

After the meeting there was an adjoining ballroom filled with Amigas and running software and hardware. Over 110 different titles were shown and this time there were no rules about release dates (as far as I could tell). So there were a number of items that I hadn't seen yet. Let me dig thru my literature to see what was there.....

Perry K. of ASDG showed a new board for the 2000 that acts as a host to IEEE 959 modules. This would allow the user to develop his own applications without having to develop the special hardware as well. A good idea if you ask me!

Brown-Wagh publishing was represented by Steve Wagh and Dick Brown themselves. Their big product to show was Excellence! the new word processor. It loos as if this program is what everyone expected Shakespear to be and more. It has Postscript support too. Should be shipping in a month.

C Ltd. was showing several items, A SCSI scanner for inputting images and a new personal laser printer. The scanner worked quite well and so did the printer. What got my attention was the new SCSI software that would work with the new Fast Filing System of the 1.3 and create a speed demon drive. THis new software using the same drive as a 2090 controller ran at 360 KiloBytes/Sec compared to the normal 190. Since I use the SCSI I'll let you know how it works. Out soon to registered users.

Minetics was showing 3-Demon their new 3d modeling program. It seemed easy to use and simple. I didnt hear a release date. They also had literature on their FrameBuffer unit but I didnt see it or hear of its real yet.

CSA was showing their speed-up cards and 32 bit memories.

Inner Connection was showing their Bernoulli drive units for the 2000. It is the IOMEGA unit and uses 20 Megabyte cartridges.

I picked up announcement of a new product called ZOETROPE. Its an new animation system by Jim Kent (author of Animator) Its from ANTIC software the Atari people. This is thier first Amiga product I believe.

VideoScape 2.0 was showing but I couldnt find anyone to ask about it.

John Foust was using his Interchange software. He's got a new module for Turbo Silver due out soon and VideoScape 2.0 later this summer. He's got some other products cooking but you'll have to wait for later to find out about them.

MicroIllusions was demoing everything they had it seemed. And of course Heidi was drawing the crowds again.

Obviously this wasn't all that was there. Every game you could imagine was shown if it was new. Turbo as a ONE ON ONE series was there. Crystal Hammer was a real product for sale.

F-18 Interceptor was VERY impressive. It was smooth and fast and pretty. Although there is no modem play you have several scenarios you must play. Good sound. You can actually bomb the EA headquaters building in th San Mateo!

Looking back on the gallery it was evident that what was here barely scratched the surface. No software shortage anymore!

ANYTHING ELSE....

Leesee...

Commodore announced the following items:

Commodore will be sponsoring Computer Learning Month, Sep. 88. In fact Commodore will be making a big push into the educational market. Other vertical markets will be addressed as well. Home video is one of them. Possibility of MTV tie-in for marketing.

ASDG's Satellite Disk processor is dead. With the new Fast file routines and C Ltd.'s SCSI spped up there is no longer enough speed up to warrant a $1000 cost.

Most boring Amiga booth award goes to the one using a camera on a microscope showing bacteria and by using a genlock they would use Dpaint or such to draw circles around it. Yawnnnn

Plinkers I met at the show:

There was also a touch screen setup based on the Amiga. You buy the adaptor and modify your 1080 or 1084 monitor with a touch screen. Other hardware then lets your finger touch the screen and emulate the Mouse. It worked very well. Many great posibilities with this.

Thats about all I can remember. I'm afraid I suffered from Info overload and tired feet at the same time. Any questions leave me a notice. I'll try to find the answers!

...............Oran......

Membership list of the Memphis Amiga Group as of June 4, 1988

PLEASE PAY DUES BY THE SECOND SATURDAY OF THE MONTH ON YOUR EXPIRE DATE**

LAST NAME FIRST NAME CITY ST ZIP EXPIRE M#
Akey Brian Sycamore IL 60178 AUG 88 32
Andrews Freddie L. Memphis TN 38128 MAY 89 61
Barr Marc J. Memphis TN 38104 NOV 88 41
Bilson Edward Memphis TN 38115 JAN 89 19
Bowers William Memphis TN 38104 MAY 89 62
Broughton Kevin W. New York NY 09223-5366 JAN 89 55
Burford Tim Memphis TN 38118 FEB 89 23
Burns Keith Cordova TN 38018 SEP 88 12
Cervetti Michael Memphis TN 38117 JAN 89 58
Davidson Al Memphis TN 38125 AUG 88 5
Doss Leonard Memphis TN 38119 AUG 88 9
Echols Steve Memphis TN 38116 DEC 88 49
Eifert Todd Memphis TN 38152 AUG 88 2
Gray Bobby,Vickie,Terre Brighten TN 38011 FEB 90 24
Grimes Tim McLemoresville TN 38235 NOV 88 46
Harris Mike Millington TN 38053 AUG 88 6
Harvey Eugene Memphis TN 38126 NOV 88 47
Head David Memphis TN 38134 JAN 89 21
Hollingsworth Jim Memphis TN 38115 SEP 88 33
Hooker Bill Memphis TN 38134 NOV 88 42
Hoover J. Michael Bartlett TN 38134 DEC 88 52
Hudson ******** Scott ************* Memphis TN 38115 JUN 88 30
Jefferson Tom Barlett TN 38134 NOV 88 45
Jennings Ron Carson CA 90746 MAR 89 27
Johnson Richard Memphis TN 38127 SEP 88 38
Jones Tom Memphis TN 38128 AUG 88 8
Karpov Victor Memphis TN 38115 OCT 88 39
Kiss Sean & John Memphis TN 38118 FEB 89 25
Kligel Joe Memphis TN 38128 SEP 88 11
Lendennie Dianne Colliervile TN 38017 DEC 88 50
Lingle ******* Garry ************* Memphis TN 38115 JUN 88 31
Lloyd William D. Memphis TN 38116 NOV 88 40
Lockard Don Alamo TN 38001 AUG 88 7
McCalla Ron & Audrey Hoover AL 35226 AUG 88 1
Michael Stephen Cordova TN 38018 APR 88 28
Nichols Steve Memphis TN 38115 NOV 88 44
Norton Gene Cookeville TN 38501 AUG 88 4
Oglesby Gary Blytheville AR 72315 JAN 89 59
Presley Daniel Southaven MS 38671 JAN 89 56
Reese Warren E. Smyrna TN 37167 DEC 88 48
Robbins James Bartlett TN 38134 JAN 89 57
Rooks Todd TN MAY 89 64
Thomas Roland Millington TN 38053 APR 89 60
Schechter Robert Bethlehem PA 18017 SEP 88 36
Schwartz Dr. Alan Memphis TN 38187 AUG 88 3
Smart Timothy G. Memphis TN 38111 MAY 89 63
Stewart Jerry Paris TN 38242 SEP 88 34
Stockton Mark Cordova TN 38018 DEC 88 51
Thomason Tom Millington TN 38053 NOV 88 43
Vineyard Charles W. Memphis TN 38118 AUG 88 10
Wade Norman Memphis TN 38104 SEP 88 13
Wallace Michael S. Marion AR 72364 SEP 88 35
Walp Len Memphis TN 38128 DEC 88 53
Weatherall Broadus & JoAnne Memphis TN 38111 JAN 89 22
Williams Charles Wilson AR 72395 AUG 88 37
Witt Patt Memphis TN 38111 JAN 89 54

MAG OFFICERS FOR 1988

Dr. Alan Schwartz President
Todd Rooks Vice President
Scott Hudson Secretary/Treasurer
Ed Bilson MAGazine Editor
David Head Librarian

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