Bits and pieces

Press, 15 April 1986, Page 33

Bits and pieces

Panasonic’s latest portable computer for the New Zealand market, the Panasonic Exec. Partner, will sell for $5995.

The Exec. Partner has a gas plasma display and a built-in thermal printer. Based on an 8086 microprocessor, the new portable comes with two inch disc drives and 256 K bytes of memory. It is said to be completely compatible with software for the IBM PC.

With a world-wide boom in sales for its VAX computers, Digital Equipment Corporation is one of the few big computer suppliers able to boast about its finanical performance. The company’s share price in the United States has risen 40 per cent in the last three months. It recently announced a two for one stock split in the form of a 100 per cent stock dividend.

The New Zealand Racing Conference will put together a large database of information relating to more than 100,000 racing and breeding horses and several thousand jockeys and trainers. Hardware worth $250,000 and software worth $150,000 will be needed for the project and will be supplied by AWA Computers and the Sydney software company, Applied Thought. By using the AWA fourth generation software system, ALL, Applied Thought expects to accomplish in 16 man months the equivalent of 80 to 100 man months of development in a third generation language.

For those users of IBM PCs who want a higher resolution image on their screen there is now a 1280 by 800 pixel resolution screen from Wyse that is completely compatible with the IBM PC, PC XT and PC AT. The $3700 monochrome system comes with a bitmapped graphics board. It is aimed at computeraided design applications and users of the new graphics-based environment packages such as GEM and Windows.

Canon has aimed at being compact in two products released recently on the New Zealand market. The Canon NP-115 is a new photocopier about the size of a typewriter, and the Canon Fax-220 desk top facsimile machine is said to be about half the size of most machines in its class. An A4-sized document can be transmitted by the Fax--220 in about 15 seconds.

IBM’s PC AT personal computer has been chosen by “Your Computer" magazine in Australia as the personal computer of the year. Of the eight finalists for the award, six were portable personal computers. The other finalists were the Data General One, Hewlett-Packard Integral Kaypro 2000, Morrow Pivot, Sharp PC7OOO, Texas Instruments Businesspro and Toshiba TUOO.

Symantecs Q and A, a combined database and word processing package, was named software product of the year. It allows plain English commands to interrogate the database.