Mac confirmed as alternative

Press, 26 January 1988, Page 26

Mac confirmed as alternative

The Macworld Expo in San Francisco showed, beyond any debate, that Apple with the Macintosh has established an alternative standard for the world of personal computing. From the second it opened — in fact, from some hours before — until the second it closed, it was jam-packed bedlam. There were so many press people that dozens were locked out of the opening ceremony where Apple boss-cocky, John Sculley, spoke. At the expo, Apple announced a series of enhancements, modifications and additions to the Macintosh line. These immediately follow the most successful year in Apple’s history, when sales and profits soared. Apple is now one of the most cashed-up computer companies in the business, with over SUSS6S million in reserve. Net sales for the year ended September 25, 1987, were 40 per cent up, to $2.66 billion, with international sales ac-

counting for 29 per cent of the total, up from 26 per .cent. There is strong evidence to suggest that the figures for the last quarter of 1987 will turn out to be the best in the history of Apple — by a very long chalk.

A sum of SUSI92M, 7.2 per cent of sales, was spent on research and development. The new -products announced at the Mac World Expo are a direct result of that and earlier research and development. Introducing the new products, John Sculley, Apple’s chairman and chief executive officer, said: “Apple is adopting industry standards for networking and communications products that the market is demanding. However, we are continuing to differentiate ourselves and add value with our own technology.” These are the new products. First, three new laser printers. They extend and amplify the highly successful Laser Writer and Laser Writer Plus. All three look the same and the printing engine is, in each case, identical. Where they differ is in the electronics, and these can easily be changed to upgrade a machine simply by substituting an electronics board. The three models have in common a new Canon laser • printer engine, the LBP-SX — working at 300 dots per linear inch and giving a 25 per cent increase in pages produced per cartridge. The input tray holds 200 pages and the machine can operate at eight pages per minute at its highest rate. This speed limitation is inher-

ent in the Canon engine. Complex pages can, of course, take a lot longer, depending on the processor used in the printer to sort out the digital information. Minimum expected life of the printer is now 300,000 pages. Those who have had experience with the Laser Writer will know that estimates of expected life on these machines are extremely conservative. The lowest price of the three machines is the lISC, which is intended for normal office use as a high quality, and silent letter printer with some limited desktop publishing capabilities. Price in Australia will be sAusts99s. It comes with a Motorola 68000 central processing unit to drive it and a megabyte of random access- memory. It will normally work with Times, Helvetica, Courier, and Symbol (interestingly, the type selections on the original Laser Writer) in common sizes from nine to 24 point. These are not, repeat not, Post Script fonts but are bit mapped. In fact, they are created in the Macintosh using the standard Quick Draw routines scaled up to four times the chosen size and then reduced by the printer. This takes the fullest advantage of the 300 dots per second resolution of the laser. The end result is of a high quality and perfectly acceptable for office correspondence but definitely not suited to desktop publishing. Possibly, probably, these are the best bit-mapped graphics available on laser printers today — but not quite the article for DTP. One step up is the Laser Writer lINT, which also has a 68000 engine but has two megabytes of random access memory, a megabyte of read-only memory, offers the same 11 typefaces as the current Laser Writer and works with Post Script to give desktop publishing quality. This is a direct replacement for the current Laser Writer Plus. The price will be sAust949s — somewhat cheaper than the Laser Writer it replaces. (Apple’s official American press release refers mysteriously to 35 typefaces being standard in this laser printer. However, when I surreptitiously and very naughtily checked the machine after the press conference, I could only find 11 — Courier, Helvetica, Helvetica Narrow, Bookman, Avant Garde, Zapf Chancery, Zapf Dingbats, New Century Schoolbook, Palatino, Symbol and the everblessed Times. Perhaps Apple executives count fonts in a different way

from me.) The top end model is the NTX which uses a 68020 engine running at 16 mega Hertz, which makes it. much quicker with complex documents — about four times compared with the original Laser Writer — although a page every eight seconds is still the maximum speed. It has two megabytes of random access memory, expandable to a mind-boggling and totally superfluous 12 megabytes. Again, Apple in the United States claims 35 typefaces and I could only count 11. But this is no problem, as a hard disc drive — pretty much any Macintosh compatible hard disc drive — can be. plugged in to hold further typefaces. These are automatically and quickly accessed whenever needed. According to my calculations, you should be able to get 800 complete families of typefaces on an 80megabyte hard disk. There is also a spare slot into which a card can be fitted to increase the number of resident fonts. It is perfectly feasible to create your own fonts, save them on an Eprom — an erasable, programmable read-only

memory chip, if you will pardon the expression — and clip that in. For those of you who are wondering what the initials stand for, the SC in the low end model refers to the SCSI interface through which it can be driven, the NT refers to networking capabilities and the NTX to networking and expansion capabilities. At least, this is what Apple’s PR in Cupertino insists is the case.