April 24, 1988

GOOD FOR A LAP: Craig Culver, Woodside inventor, has spent the past four years perfecting a replacement for the now-ubiquitous electronic mouse — and his garage obsession may be about to hit pay dirt.

Mice demand space on the desktop, the cord’s always getting caught under something, and you have to take your hands off the keyboard to use them. But Culver’s Isopoint claims to solve those problems.

Culver’s working prototype is on a Macintosh, sitting in the center front of the keyboard. It’s a thin horizontal cylinder mounted in a sliding bar. You, gentle user, use your thumb or finger to rotate or slide the cylinder to move the cursor up, down or diagonally.

Culver says several equipment makers already have licensed the Isopoint and built 10 or 12 models for their own machines. He won’t say who, but he did say there’s “a big push” for Isopoint in laptop computers, since there’s not much room for a mouse on an airplane or in a car.

He’s also working deals with mass marketers to find a way to hook up Isopoint to existing computers. None other than Doug Englebart, who still holds patents on the original mouse device, “was very impressed,” Culver claims.

NOT PRETTY: A copy of the new top-secret HyperCard documentation showed up in my mailbox the other day. The upgrade is code-named Mary Kay. Pink Cadillac drivers will be happy to note that I, like many, think cosmetics when I hear that name. Does that mean that HyperCard Version 1.2b18 is mostly cosmetic changes?

HyperCard author and Apple fellow Bill Atkinson sounds a resounding, “No!” — as do others who’ve seen the program. So why did they call it that? “I don’t know anything about code names,” Atkinson says. And marketing types wonder why techies don’t trust them.

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TOO GOOD TO BE TRUE: Just in case you read Business Week and were wondering if you’d missed something, Sun Microsystems did NOT transmogrify into a “computer software and services” shop since last we met. B-Week, simply put, screwed up. On page 274 in its Business Week 1000 extravaganza, it listed Sun as having a bit less market value than Lotus Development and a bit more than Seagate Technology. A Sun representative assures that Sun does, indeed, still make computers.

WOLF WHISTLES: Andrew Wolf, who still considers himself a partner in HyperAge mag despite his legal fray with editor and co-publisher Jan Lewis, called to tell me that the second issue of the hypermedia mag will not only come out, it’s at the printer now and will be mailed by May 6. It’ll be on the newsstand by then as well, he says.

Wolf, who publishes a small newspaper in New York, New York called Computer Living, says it’s unfortunate that he and Lewis are at odds because “we put together a damned good magazine.” He, as well as Lewis, is hoping the dispute will be settled out of court. Convinced that the duo could never work together again, Wolf says Lewis will either have to buy him out or vice versa.

PARIS AD-VENTURE: My faithful readers may remember a story some months back about Dan Cochran, the Apple Computer manager of development tools who got a chance to goof around with Billy Idol during a trip to Barbados. Well, Cochran’s off on another adventure: he’s moving his family to Paris — the creep — for a couple years to evangelize systems integrators in Europe. There, systems integrators are consultants who do custom programming and have great pull over buying decisions of large corporations, Cochran says.

Cochran is part of an apparent exodus of long-timers from Apple Cupertino. Another, former director of application product management Ed Colby, is off to head Apple’s R&D center in Paris. And it looks like a few more shoes will drop.
“Apple International is a chance for (us) old-timers to get back into the chaos and intimacy of a startup,” says Cochran. “We’re going to make as big a noise over there as we did here in 1984,” when the Macintosh was introduced.

SUCCESS POTENTIOMETER: Donal O’Shea , president and CEO of Emeryville-based UniSoft, invented just the tool for us poor mortals who have to figure out what the venture capitalists in the Valley hath wrought with some of the bizarre startups they fund. He calls it a success potentiometer. “The thickness of the carpet is inversely proportional to the company’s potential,” O’Shea says.