October 2, 1988

PARIS — At this very moment, I’m sitting in an apartment once occupied by Napoleon Bonaparte’s sister Eliza. I”m drinking some tasty cafe au lait that”s so strong it could dissolve steel.

I’m in Paris again this year for Apple Expo, and got to town early enough to catch Apple’s first pan-European developers conference as well. Even though I’m depressed that I didn’t make good my promise to be fluent in French for my return, I find it both reassuring and alarming that I can fly 10,000 miles and do the same kind of schmoozing I do in the States.

For example: There were maybe five people who spoke English at the launch of Ziff Davis’ new French publication (SVM Macintosh). But I managed to hook up with Daniel Gallic, an English-speaking journalist for Le Point who not only is a friend of Steve Jobs, but who knew that my last name means “boy” in Sicilian.

Gallic became friends with Jobs in the early days of Apple, and saw the Mac long before it was released. In fact, he says he owned the very first Mac in France. But lately he hasn’t been able to get Jobs to return his calls — no surprise since Steve’s probably a little busy at the moment, with Oct. 12 drawing ever nigh.

But Gallic was adamant that I send a public message and here it is: Steve, seriously, take a break and call Daniel.

One thing I love about the French is their delight in finding inventive uses for technology. During the developer’s conference, I sat next to Frederic Levy. He told me about his company’s test launch of a product called PIAF — Parcmetre Individuel a Fente — in the town of Saint Brieux. As you might guess by the name, it’s a personal parking meter.

PIAF uses a computerized meter about the size of a hand-held calculator, and a smart card (credit-card size, it has a chip and some storage on board). Drivers get meters from the city and keep them in their cars. They buy smart cards worth about 100 francs each at bookstores, gas stations or wherever.

The idea is that when you park, you stick your card in the meter and off you go. You don’t have to worry about change. When you come back, you pull out the card and the proper amount is deducted. The meter is programmed to know time limits for zones, and knows about holidays, too.

In Saint Brieuc, for example, drivers get the first 20 minutes free, with a time limit of two hours. To avoid meter-feeding, you have to wait a full five minutes after you’ve pulled the card before you can insert it again.

Pretty slick, and it doesn’t eliminate any jobs — someone still has to write the tickets.

Levy’s company is called Hello Informatique. That”s a coincidence, because last year in Paris I interviewed Hello’s founder, Roland Moreno, who invented the smart card.

Later during the developer’s conference, someone asked if I had heard Mike Spindler’s talk early Tuesday morning. The taxi driver I approached had no idea where I needed to go, so I was late and missed it. Spindler, now the president of Apple Europe, seems to have caught a case of chauvinism. While talking about Apple’s version of Unix (A/UX), he said, “A/UX is something your wife — or even my wife — could use.” Aaaack.

Aside from all that stuff, I did manage to get an actual scoop out of this trip. Farallon, the Berkeley company that sells PhoneNet and MacRecorder and a bunch of software sound tools, made the first public showing of its new Sound Toolkit to enraptured developers at the conference.

It includes a spectrogram (using either color or gray scale, it’s a sound analyzer that’s particularly useful to speech pathologists) and time domain harmonic scaling (it’s a pitch adjustment that lets you play back sounds at twice the speed without sounding like Alvin and the Chipmunks). Those are features that were previously available only on machines costing scads of money, according to Tom Rielly, Farallon marketing director.

What else can I say? I made a quick pre-deadline trip to Apple Expo, which started Wednesday, and saw John Sculley with his entire entourage. After launching the French translation of his book on Tuesday (called, “De Pepsi A Apple,” or “From Pepsi to Apple”), he gave the opening speech at the Expo.

Later, upstairs in the press room, he said he went to dinner with a gaggle of French intellectuals on Tuesday night and the experience exhilarated him. “They like to talk about theories,” he said. “Things that would just go right over the heads of business people in the United States.”