September 4, 1988

ANOTHER THING TO WORRY ABOUT: Can you trust the computerized controls in your spanky new car? Anyone with doubts who read the latest Electrical Noise and Interference Control quarterly (somebody’s gotta do it) may be worried. Headlined, “Another EMI incident?” a lurid picture shows a car smashing through a guard rail into a lake, with an antenna sitting on a nearby hilltop emitting radio waves.

Inside, a short blurb says that microchip controls in new cars — which handle brakes, acceleration and engine control — have “dramatically increased” their vulnerability to EMI, or electromagnetic interference. Big EMI wipes out your radio signal when you drive past the radio towers on the Dumbarton Bridge; littler EMI comes from hair dryers and vacuum cleaners that screw up your TV reception. The question is: Can it wipe out the programming on your car’s computer, too?

Yikes! I promptly called Roger McCarthy, president of Failure Analysis Associates in Palo Alto. McCarthy, whose company runs what he says is the “largest vehicle test facility outside the automotive industry itself,” had been quoted in the piece as saying that the danger of EMI affecting the computer controls in cars was growing.
“The danger hasn’t increased dramatically, but it has increased some,” he says. “A hydraulic braking system, for example, is mechanical and has absolutely no vulnerability to EMI. So if a new system has any vulnerability to EMI, it has to be more than before.”

McCarthy recalls the big Audi scare a while back.

“Let’s say some unknown genie got hold of your braking system,” he says. “No one has been able to duplicate any Audi runaways by bombarding the engine computer with EMI. Forget the engine — given (federal motor vehicle standards), your brakes have to be more powerful than your car’s engine. In the worst situation, a fully runaway engine, your brakes will fully stop your car.” (Yeah, but what if the brake chip goes out, too? Sorry.)

McCarthy says that high voltage in ignition wires, for example, introduces a highly intense magnetic radiation under the hood that you don’t get from your wall outlet. “But our ability to build electronics that are immune to EMI is better now than it was five years ago,” he says. “You’ll find that computers are going to increase the safety of the automotive fleet.”

WELL, OOPS: The faxes flew late last month when both PC Week and PC Magazine published reviews stating that Dell Computers’ System 220 was the fastest Intel 286-based PC in its class.

Nuh-uh, said Northgate Computer Systems of Plymouth, Minn. It was working on its own 286 machine and had bought a System 220 to tear apart “like Ford buys Chevys,” says Northgate Chairman Arthur Lazere. And Northgate’s benchmarks showed Dell’s System 220 ran “a ballpark 30-35 percent slower” than the magazine’s data showed.

Phone calls zipped between Plymouth, PC Week’s offices in Boston and Dell’s headquarters in Austin. To make a long story short, Dell had sent both mags a nonstandard configuration of the machine. According to Dell, standard configurations ran slower because of a bug in the ROM BIOS. The situation was “a little bit embarrassing,” says Dell spokesman John Ellett.

Did Lazere think that Dell was sending “juiced” machines to reviewers? “I would never ever accuse Michael Dell of doing that — (of) pulling it over on someone,” says Lazere. “(What happened) is an interesting coincidence, but what his intent is, I have no idea.”

So how about all you guys who bought one-megabyte System 220s with bugs in the ROM? Ellett says you’ll be getting a software fix in the mail. New machines, he says, will have the faulty ROM replaced.

SUCH A TEASE: ComputerWorld senior editor Glenn Rifkin and features editor George Harrar’s book on Digital Equipment Corp. and its founder Kenneth Olsen hasn’t even hit the bookstores yet, but it’s already getting plenty o’ media attention. First mention of “The Ultimate Entrepreneur” was in Business Week back in January, when Olsen, founder of DEC, sent a memo commanding executives not to cooperate with the duo’s research.

Next mention came last week in the Boston Globe. Someone got hold of the chapter revealing that not once, but twice, AT&T tried to buy DEC.

“There’s also a good story in there on DEC and Apple,” says Rifkin. “There’s always been a legendary story that Steve Jobs at one point visited Olsen at The Mill (DEC’s HQ) and told Olsen that DEC would be buried by Apple in the PC business. Jobs (the story goes) threw his boots up on Olsen’s desk, got really nasty, and from then on Olsen vowed he’d beat Apple at the PC game.

“Now don’t forget, that’s the legend,” Rifkin adds. “The true story is really in the book,” which will be published in early October by Contemporary Books in Chicago.

AN EPOCH ENDS: Evelyn Richards, technology editor at the San Jose Mercury-News, is leaving us for points East — namely the Washington Post. Among her many legendary scoops is Steve Jobs’ abdication from Apple and founding of Next. (She found out who was involved by driving out to Jobs’ Woodside mansion and tracing the license plate numbers of the parked cars.)

Chalk up her departure to a case of seven-year itch, since that’s how long she’s been employed at the Merc. “It’s time for a new challenge,” says Richards. “(The Post) is an opportunity to write to a much broader audience that’s not made up of people inside the industry.”