DTACK GROUNDED Newsletter

CACKLE TIME : A MicroAge retail computer store just one mile from us received an AT&T UNIX PC (nee AT&T 7300) on the day the machine was announced. The other day that store was not able to demo the unit. It seems that some naughty person came in and changed the password on the unit, and since they do not know the NEW password, they can no longer turn it on and run it! (They may not know the SUPERUSER password, but THAT can be changed, too!) Scenario: small company purchases a UNIX PC and over nearly a year's time gets lots of business records on the hard disk, including all current accounts receivable. Then naughty miscreant ...

SAFARI TIME: It appears definite that AT&T's cheap UNIX/68010 machine, the model 7300 (code-named SAFARI ) will be introduced on 25 March. Unfortunately, this issue should be pasted (actually waxed) up that morning and turned over to the printers after lunch. So we can't cover that model in this issue. APRIL FOOL! Yes, it's that time again. But we won't have any 'April Fool' stuff in this issue because our technician, Ray S., who first worked with us 'way back in 1962, threatened to quit after reading the first half of the first column on the front page of LAST year's April issue. (Does anybody out...

BOY! DO WE GET MAIL! After the very tactful reminder which led off the last issue, we received lots of checks. We also received quite a few notes and letters with many of those checks, so we have a greatly expanded mail section this time. After filling 8 pages, we decided to postpone until the next issue a missive from New Zealand. Some of our horse-whip wounds may have healed by then. DRAM PRICES PLUMMET: 64K DRAM prices have dropped like a runaway freight elevator, and we have adjusted our prices to match (p.22). We are now selling 150nsec DRAM at the incremental price of $64/128K. Lots of other companies are still selling their me...

IT'S CHECKBOOK TIME ! This issue is the LAST issue which about 500 of our 700+ subscribers are going to receive. So YOU are probably included in that group. Look for a number 38 on your mailing label - there it is, right? What that means is, we will not mail the next issue, #39, to you unless you send us a negotiable token of your esteem. (Let's see: if all 500 of you re-up, 500 times $15 plus a few $25 checks is, ummm... lots and lots of Heineken Special Dark!) THE LATEST FARM REPORT: (You may remember Luigi and his donkey wagon loaded with leeks and garlic (front page of issue #21, Jul '83). Well, Lulgi is once again intere...

BILLY BATSON ? Yes, Billy Batson. Some of you may have thought we went overboard on the front page of the last issue with the 60-foot white ape and the magical acronym ' TANSTAAFL ' but there really was a reason behind it. All of us have our heroes (at least, us lucky ones do) and many of those heroes are fictional or mythical. Fictional or mythical heroes tend to be acquired at a very young age. In our youth, we were voluntarily exposed to two sets of competing heroes. One set was Achilles and Hector. Achilles was the mightiest warrior of the Greeks and Hector was his equivalent amongst the Trojans. This pair we met in a book on...

WATCH THIS, SNOOPY! "It was a dark and stormy night, with miles to go before I sleep. So I leaped upon my gallant steed and galloped off in all directions!" It seems that newsletter editors (and other technical writers) are adopting lurid writing styles such as the above these days. That sort of stuff originated with headline writers for the National Denouncer and then leaked into the editorial pages of CAR and PAYMENT magazine. If you are running into that "miles to go before I sleep" line too often, it does not mean that technical writers are either cultured or even that they have taken up reading poetry. In the old Charles Bronson mov...

POTBOILER PROTOTYPE: Our POTBOILER medium resolution graphics board production prototype is pictured below. One of five production prototypes, actually - we had a lot of confidence that the first version would work with the usual cuts and jumpers and it did. We modified the artwork to fix the cuts and jumpers and placed an order for the first fifty production boards on 22 Aug. With the usual lead time for circuit boards and our outside wave soldering, we should begin shipments around the middle of Oct. The POTBOILER pictured below is a version configured for a certain CADD house. Their case requires a video connector at the upper left as...

UNDER A CURSE? Over one and a half centuries ago, a small trading vessel (a sailboat, naturally) was trying to round the Cape of Good Hope from east to west. Well, the prevailing winds are always against such passage but on this occasion they were fiercer than usual. It seemed that the small trading vessel was, at times, making more progress backward than forward. The First Mate suggested that perhaps it would be best to seek a safe harbor and wait out the blow. The Captain - van der Decken by name - instead swore to press onward ' even though God Himself may oppose us! '. This single impious outburst apparently caught Someone...

NON-MYTHICAL CASE: Yep. Illustrated below is one of the first 25 cases (of an order for 100). Genuine stainless steel. But what do we call it? "The case" seems, well, inadequate. Suggestions? We should have the other 75 cases by the time you read this, and line filters a week after that. Because we don't have the line filters (except a couple of samples) yet, we cannot truthfully say that we have complete cases-cum-power supplies yet. You want the empty case? We got one - right now! You want an empty case, send us $60 and we will send you the disassembled case with the plastic coating still (mostly) in place. We will add the hardware...

TIME TO RAILROAD: Someone - we don't know who - once observed that 'when it is time to railroad, railroads will appear'. Meaning that when the time for a particular technology is ripe, that technology will appear. On Monday, May 14th we attended an amazing seminar presented by Weitek here in Santa Ana at the Saddleback Inn, an inconvenient 0.9 miles from Digital Acoustics. We learned more about 'Wonderful Weitek's' 32-bit floating point chip set and its applications AND we learned that the support provided for that chip set is CONSIDERABLY more extensive than we had realized. We also learned to our great surprise ...