October 23, 1988

RIPPLE EFFECT: A value-added reseller for Digital Equipment Corp. says he’s heard that DEC is planning to delay the introduction of its Mips chip-based RISC workstation until Jan. 10 or thereabouts. Why? “I think they wanted to get Christmas and New Year’s between them and the Next (computer system) introduction; hopefully people will forget about it,” says the custom software developer. “They look pretty blase after that announcement, and they don’t want to go out there all dressed up with nowhere to go.”

A contributing factor, he says, is that DEC has a lot of older MicroVAX equipment in inventory that it would like to sell before the Mips workstation announcement.

Another observer believes the DEC move is the beginning of a trend — Next’s bang for the buck will “stand all the big computer companies on their ears,” quoth he.

Interesting wrinkle is that, according to my DEC source, a big Valley company has had a “Deep Throat” inside Next for quite a while. (No big surprise, since just about every company in the valley has someone in charge of corporate espionage.) This company supposedly has a very un-Next-like computer coming out, also targeted at the education market — a cheap(er) workstation without nearly the functionality of its standard boxes. It has less memory, a floppy disk drive, smaller screen, and is said to be real fast.

TATTERED CLAUSE: I feel a bit like an insect, pinned and wriggling on the wall of mass media during this excruciatingly stupid “presidential campaign.” So I was happy to hear about a grass-roots movement to make high-tech communications more of, by and for the people. West Coast members of the Union for Democratic Communications met in the Santa Cruz Mountains last weekend to create an action agenda for progressive communication and social change in the media and data/telecom.

One UDC founder, Karen Paulsell of Oakland, says UDC believes people should have access to not only read and listen, but to also be able to interact with broadcast media. And, UDC says, democratic communication means we should have much more say in what happens with our phone companies, television networks and media conglomerates. In addition, we-the-people should be provided with some independent means of verifying “facts” we hear in news stories. Rah!

Among many other projects, UDC may also start promoting “video salons,” a kind of Gertrude Stein-type approach retrofitted to the 1990s, where people of like interests “get together and watch good videos,” says Paulsell. “There’s lots of independent video productions out there, on all sorts of relevant topics.”

ALL RIGHT, ALREADY: I got plenty o’ phone calls and e-mail regarding last week’s quote by Will Zachmann of $4,000 for 8 megabytes of random-access memory in the Next machine. Wrong, wrong, wrong, say the multitudes. Michael Murphy, of the California Technology Stock Letter here in San Francisco, says based on market prices, Next is probably buying 8 megs for about $1,080. Bob Abeles says it’s about $1,425. A far cry from $4,000.

‘TIS (ALMOST) THE SEASON: It’s almost time to start thinking about taxes (if Christmas ads are running already, any subject’s fair game), and those of you who have upgraded your PC systems past the low-end clone zone may want to donate them to a worthy local cause.

Glide Memorial United Methodist Church, located in San Francisco’s Tenderloin, has started a computer center/project called “Computers and You.” Program director Larry Murphy is shaping programs for reading and computer literacy, for both adults and children, and he needs equipment, software and whatever else you’ve got that you aren’t using anymore. Right now, says one program sponsor, the center has seven computers. It needs 50. Since the project is part of Glide’s 70 or so different programs, your donations are tax-deductible. Go for it.

DO YOU READ ME: I’ve been waiting for a few weeks for someone to crack about the surprise departure of Bob Ackerman from X/Open, the Unix software consortium. (He was chief marketing officer.) If you know where he is, or care to confirm the story about why he so hastily departed the organization, give me a call. I’d really like to hear it from Ackerman himself, if he’s still around and/or reading me.