FOSE Roundup By David Alsberg Special to Corel Magazine The big story from FOSE 93 is that instead of new features,vendors are hacking through the compatibility webs preventing customers from using the peripherals, packages and platforms of their choice. The message shows up in systems, storage devices, software and printers this year. New product introductions were rarer here, since FOSE is aimed at one customer who prefers certified products to bleeding edge; moreover, the Seybold Seminars in Boston at the same time were a better place to grab press. Vendors may change strategies at future FOSEs, since many of them were hard-pressed to deal with the unusually high ratios of corporate to Federal attendees this year. This could well turn into another corporate show. Microsoft used the show for announcements of various alliances: system management tools for NT from Computer Associates (the first alliance between the two largest software vendors in the world), and Intel and Compaq on the Plug-and-Play specification to create lower-cost, more easily configured MPC compliant machines. There was lots of DOS 6 action at their booth, and NT was visible at several places around the whole show (NEC was showing it both on Intel and RISC systems). Gates must have been a happy camper. For all the press on Plug-and-Play, the systems to blow your socks off may be the NEC Image boxes. NEC has put SCSI II on the motherboard to avoid conflicts with the IDE disk drives (no more integration nightmares). High-speed SCSI is the current interface of choice for high-speed removable storage devices such as new-generation CD-ROM drives and removable cartridge systems. The NEC Image local-bus graphics uses a Tseng ET4000 and a BitBlt accelerator along with a meg of 60ns video DRAM upgradable to 2 MB for fast graphics action in high-color. It also automatically optimizes the sync rate when used with a NEC Multisync monitor. Suggested retail price starts at $2500 without monitor. In the graphics software arena, Adobe was the most aggressive player, with their new PhotoShop for Windows (identical to the Mac version, but faster) drawing major crowds to which Adobe also gave a preview of their expansion of the Display Postscript technology, Acrobat. Corel Draw for the Mac is waiting for Apple to release their System 7 upgrade with support for QuickDraw GX, so Corel doesn't expect to ship before the end of the year. According to Corel staffers, the product is "in the can," and will ship immediately after the Apple upgrade needed to run it. As to how the Mac version so long waiting in the wings would compare with the forthcoming Windows version, 4.0, the answer was "no comment." Aldus had a demo of Pagemaker 5.0 on the Mac (multiple document editing, drag and drop across documents), but is looking for a launch of both the Windows and Mac versions later this quarter. Micrografx, rolling out Picture Publisher 4.0 at Seybold at the same time, wasn't even showing it at FOSE. Company representatives were avidly telling anyone who would listen that reports of the demise of their OS/2 efforts were greatly exaggerated, showing a memo from CEO Paul Grayson as evidence. Altsys's new Fontographer 4.0 is very nice, with over 200 improvements, including path clean-up, autospacing, autokerning, and expanding undos to 101 levels. It's Mac only, though they're now working on a Windows version. QMS was showing its new color printer with Ethernet networking built in, but the most widely used color printer on the floor was the Tektronix 200i (now down to the $3300 SRP price level). Xante had their new 1200 dpi 8100 model at $6600 handling paper up to 11x17 in a fairly remote area of the floor, so there was much less visibility for it. ViewSonic was showing a nice 20" 1600x1280 monitor, with a similar color adjustment interface to the NEC FG line; their double astigmatic correction made clear, crisp pictures. They claim it runs fine with the standard highend video drivers. 17" 1280x1024 multisyncing monitors are beginning to look like commodities at the $1,600 level, with entries including Mitsubishi's Diamond Pro, ViewSonic's 17", and NEC's 5FG all showing at that level. Cost-cutters are showing up even among major vendors; NEC is now shipping its 5FGe, offering 1024x768 resolution without color adjustment, in a 17" format, for $1,400. You pays your money and you takes your choice. Removable storage vendors are trying to cover all the possible user bets. On the erasable media front, Valitek was showing portable magneto-optical disk drives with a parallel port interface and easy daisy chaining; their 3.5" 128 MB floppies have a 40 ms seek and go for under $50. As the vendor told a customer, "It'll feel like a Zenith 248 (286-based computer)." Ocean, among others, seems to be focusing more on the 256 MB optical drive with the more traditional custom card. Both are looking at providing compressibility on the media. Syquest now has both 3.5" (105 MB) and 2.5" (42 MB) cartridges available, though only Bondwell and Dauphinare offering the 2.5s currently. Syquest is talking to Toshiba, among others, but the other OEMs seem to be holding off on the smaller drive for notebooks until Syquest has a 90 MB cartridge available later on this year. Iomega was concentrating on 21 MB flopticals, which they described as "a stable product selling all they can make." They're also trying to break into Syquest's service bureau empire by seeding Bernoullis into the bureaus. Time will tell if they'll succeed. On the permanent side, CD-ROM (recordable) is getting cheaper, with the base recorder from Mathematica in Austin at $7995, and the media moving into the $25-30 range. Write time is compressed to half the playback time required; for major distribution, you're still not going to beat pressing CDs at 10 seconds a shot for a buck a platter, but for limited shipping of time sensitive materials, this could make a lot of sense. Approximately 1000 words.