July 3, 1988

NOW THAT’S INTERESTING: From the dark night of rumors circulating about Steve Jobs rises something truly illuminating. Bud Colligan, director of higher education marketing at Apple Computer and former employee of Jobs way back when, told a friend about a conversation he’d had with Jobs about the anxiously awaited Next machine during Wolfram Research’s Mathematica press conference not long ago.

Jobs, says Colligan, told him he was “just trying to get the mother out,” and then, with a twinkle in his eye, added that when Next ships, “it will help sell a lot of Macintoshes.”

Colligan didn’t know what Jobs was referring to. But another source had a clue. My buddy says, “Perhaps up his sleeve, Steve has a little card code named Vanity that will slip into a Macintosh SE and run the Next environment.”

LIFE EXTENDER: It’s hard to know whether Apple smiles or sobs about a new expansion chassis being sold for the Mac Plus by Second Wave in Austin, Texas. By cutting a hole in the plastic case, Second Wave can add four slots onto the Plus, which until now was what they call a “closed box” — i.e., not expandable.

Gregg Johnson of Second Wave says the company also sells an expansion chassis for the Mac SE, and people with SE boards are gladly doing some software modifications to accommodate the differences between the Plus and SE ROM codes.

It’ll retail for $995, and the surgery required is opening the box so the expansion board can clip onto the microprocessor. Second Wave will do the cut, or users can find a brave dealer. Now all Plus owners need is some cheap memory.

EAST IS EAST, AND … west is west. And to cash in on a cheap metaphor, the twain are going to meet on Oct. 7 at the World Trade Center in Boston. The occasion is the first-ever Computer Bowl, a major fund-raiser for the Boston Computer Museum’s education program.

The museum is run by founding president Gwen Bell, wife of Gordon Bell, who headed the VAX design team at Digital Equipment. Big guns will line up to answer questions on subjects ranging from technology to history of the industry, business history, trivia and folklore.

You want names?

West Coast: Bill Joy of Sun Microsystems, Casey Powell of Sequent, Allen Michels of Ardent, David Bunnell of PCW Communications. The fifth is pending.

East Coast: Dick Shaffer of Technologic Partners, Mitch Kapor of GO Corp., Esther Dyson of Rel. 1.0, David Hathaway of Venrock, and Bill Poduska of Stellar.

Even better, says organizer Jan DelSesto, they’re trying to get Mr. Wizard — yes, the Mr. Wizard — to be a judge. And they’re trying hard to get Robin Williams to host. DelSesto hopes the Bowl will help launch a major national junior computer bowl.

“And we’re really playing on the whole American infatuation with sports sponsorships,Ó DelSesto says. “For instance, AMD has the official microprocessor of the Computer Bowl.”

BETTER LATE THAN NEVER ITEM: Despite being heat-addled and besieged by “comics” shilling products, PC Expo-goers in New York were pretty leery of PS/2 and OS/2 operating systems for the new IBM line. The big IBM-Microsoft booth was nearly deserted every time I walked by it.

Word on the show floor was “no real OS/2 applications until 1990″ despite those already running in the booth. “I think they were fake,” said one doubtful observer, who asked to remain nameless.

Others are less than impressed with OS/2, too. Peter Roizen, president of T/Maker Research Co. — brother of T/Maker Co. president Heidi Roizen and a highly regarded programmer — wrote an amusing treatise called “CP/M to OS/2,” about what happened after he ordered a $3,000 OS/2 development system from Microsoft.

So far, Roizen’s received seven UPS shipments with 29 full-sized manuals and more than 130 diskettes. “I’m surprised Microsoft was not thoughtful enough to include a bookcase or mobile home with the package,” wrote Roizen. “I sincerely wonder if they are trying to put small vendors out of business by drastically increasing their storage costs.”

When he “actually mustered the courage to try OS/2,” there was no mouse driver for his truly-blue IBM Model 80 and IBM mouse. “I am able to ‘hang’ OS/2 and force a situation where I must reboot the system after touching only three keys …,” Roizen wrote. “At this rate, by (the year) 2155, you should be able to type a name and short address between each reboot.”