April 17, 1988

IBM’S END RUN: Anyone who thinks the rivalry between Apple Computer and IBM isn’t real should know that high-level Apple execs are already planning damage control for an announcement that’s going to be made by IBM Monday in New York.

Here’s the haps: IBM will announce a software technology exchange with Mountain View-based Metaphor Computer Systems for Metaphor’s “data interpretation system,” according to a well-placed industry source. Though Metaphor already sells Motorola-based hardware, the agreement — not to mention the minority interest IBM is buying in the company — allows Big Blue to sell Metaphor’s entire system under the IBM label for its PS/2 80386-based computers.

Metaphor’s products are used by marketing and financial types in industries like pharmaceuticals and financial services. They retrieve data from all kinds of unrelated sources, then join it in various and sundry ways for analysis and what’s known as “decision support.”

Why might Apple be nervous about this? Well, Metaphor’s system is icon-based — a.k.a. Macintosh-like — meaning that IBM may have just made an end-run around Apple’s look-and-feel lawsuit by legally getting its hands on some hot user interface technology. And since David Liddle, chairman of Metaphor, sprang from the loins of Xerox PARC (like everyone else these days), the legal angle is pretty well covered. “You’re talking about the only guy in town with an undisputed clean windowing environment,” said an industry-watcher familiar with Metaphor.

AIN’T PUBLISHING GRAND: Jan Lewis, industry analyst and newsletter author-turned-hypermedia maven, is finding out the hard way about magazine publishing. She and former co-publisher Andrew Wolf started distributing their new magazine, HyperAge, at Macworld Expo in January, to capitalize on what they hoped would be a fast-growing market for HyperCard and similar products.
But the second issue is not yet out, and I hear that despite great interest in the publication by its readers, the money isn’t there to get it out.

A partial answer to the “why” is that Lewis has sued Wolf, for “fraud, breach of contract and dissolution of partnership,” among other things. She’s in “active negotiations” to settle the suit, which was filed March 18 in Santa Clara Superior Court.

Though a little reluctant to comment, Lewis did say that she’s actively looking for buyers and is “talking to more than one at the moment.”

WHEW: Larry Wright, spokesman for the Internal Revenue Service’s Western Region, called to let me know “how bad (my) source was” who’d claimed to hit the IRS’s computer system. “The only way into the IRS computer system is on a dedicated line,” says Wright. “So the concept of someone sitting at home with a PC and a modem is completely fallacious. When there’s conversation going on between a keyboard and the IRS computer, the dedicated line is constantly being verified so that if there’s any kind of interruption or any kind of third party device coming in, it terminates the connection.”

Wright told many stories about how the IRS keeps tax records secure, but there’s not space to go into them all. “We even have people full-time to check up on legitimate inside use,” he says. “If a curious IRS employee tries to pull up Ronald Reagan’s return, for example, if they didn’t have a need to know, they’ll be out on the street in nothing flat.”

YER BASIC TANGLED WEB: If the whole AT&T/Sun Microsystems/Apple/Xerox scenario isn’t bizarre enough for you, check this out: I hear that AT&T is hawking its dormant RISC project, dubbed CRISP, to none other than Apple. “(AT&T’s) really in deep with Apple, pitching the thing,” says my source. It’s well known that Apple’s been investigating RISC technology. Jean-Louis Gasse, head of Apple R&D, wouldn’t comment on the rumor except to say that Apple’s looked at many architectures and hasn’t made any decisions.

CRISP was supposedly shelved when Sun and AT&T cut their SPARC deal. Could this be Apple’s stab at getting early access to the “new” UNIX — or maybe to Open Look? Or is it a way for AT&T to cut its R&D losses on the project? Operators are standing by….

Enough with the press releases. Send some tips! Write to Denise Caruso, Business Desk, San Francisco Examiner, P.O. Box 7260, San Francisco, CA 94120. Or contact her by computer using MCI Mail (Denise Caruso).