June 26, 1988

IF YOU CAN’T STAND THE HEAT: Usually people are afraid to walk the streets at night in New York City, but I was far more terrified to go out at 3 in the afternoon. I picked the earliest heat wave in years to go to PC Expo, the volume buyers’ show at the Javits Center. I felt as if I’d been wrapped in a hot wet beach towel for four days.

Worst, the show like the weather was stultifying. Everyone seemed to be looking for that perfect spreadsheet add-on. Zzzz.

Why were these people so glum? “Volume buyers get in trouble if they make a bad decision, so they can’t afford to get excited about anything,” said one exhibitor who usually sells Macintosh products.

I actually saw 60 Minutes’ Andy Rooney at Javits on Tuesday. God knows what he was doing at a PC buyers show. But CBS must have been in the stars this year — Dan Rather and the CBS News team crashed InfoWorld’s party on Wednesday night. Harry Reasoner was having an engagement party for his daughter at the Tavern-on-the-Green, and all the big guns stumbled in by accident, then turned around and left.

HEAR IT HERE FIRST: Also heard some interesting poop from a fellow reporter. Seems she and her hacker husband were getting audited by the Internal Revenue Service when the auditor’s Zenith Data Systems laptop broke down.

Hacker hubby saved the day and fixed the machine, but the auditor said he wouldn’t have the Zenith to kick around for long.

He says the IRS was planning to ditch the Zenith portables, and was about to start a pilot test program using the expensive, extremely whizzy Grid portables. Government contracts made Zenith rich and put the industry on warning that laptops were Big Business.

Note to Zenith: You deserve this for having those two horrible excuses for stand-up comics working in your booth. The long-suffering PC Expo employee who had to listen to them scream unfunny jokes at each other for three days told me she tried to bribe an electrician to cut their microphone cords.

THAT’S NOT FUNNY, PART II: Also at PC Expo were a matched pair of boy-girl body-sculpting champions, an (unfortunately) effective way for Computerland of New York to draw attention to its “flexware” leasing program. Body-builders, flexware, get it? Yuk yuk.

There’s nothing more bizarre than seeing hulks of over-pumped flesh standing in the middle of a trade-show floor almost naked. The women just stood there aghast, while the men just nodded and clapped.

EYEWARE: Laugh if you want, but don’t laugh too long if you work in front of a computer all day. At PC Expo, a former Taiwanese maker of sunglasses (now based in New York City) introduced a line of glasses for VDT wearers called CompuScope. Prosun International Corp.’s president Min Y. Wang says the company has been working on the product for two years. It’s a patented combination of plastic and polymer coatings that he says does a few things: It filters out 100 percent of emitted ultraviolet rays, has different color lenses for different screens to increase contrast, filters out 30 percent of glaring, eye-straining blue light, and allows 70 percent of the normal, ambient light around the computer to come in.

“Blue light is bad because you can’t focus on it,” says Ben Lin, a manager at Prosun. In addition, the company says it has a polarizing plate built into the lenses that helps stabilize flicker. The product’s not being distributed yet, but you can call the company to order them. Clip-on models are $10 retail, and glasses range from $20 to $50. Denise-Bob says check it out.

SAD, BUT TRUE: “ACA 36 is dead! Long live ACA 36!” was the battle cry from supporters of the Electronic Bill of Rights, ACA 36, which didn’t make it through the California Senate Judiciary Committee last week. The proposed amendment to the state Constitution wanted to make it clear to legislators and police-types that electronic communication and data are protected and private under the law. “This is not the year” for this kind of legislation, said long-time proponent Bob Jacobson. He works with Assemblywoman Gwen Moore, who wrote the bill. Let’s hope that people worried about this make themselves heard a bit better next time.

CLEARLY BIASED JOKE: Q: How many IBM engineers does it take to change a light bulb? A: 100. Ten to screw it in and 90 to write the documentation. Q: How many Macintosh engineers does it take to change a light bulb? A: Only one — she holds the bulb and the world turns around her.