August 7, 1988

ACQUISITION FU: If Xerox Corp. hadn’t acquired Datacopy of Mountain View a few months back, development might be well under way for a joint project between Milpitas scanner maker Dest Corp. and Xerox.

Some interesting documents crossed my desk last week detailing a sophisticated project called Scrapper that would have yielded facsimile boards for both the IBM PC and the Macintosh. Here’s some genealogy: Gulfstream Micro Systems of Boca Raton, Fla., known for a powerful PC product called EZ Fax, was bought by Dest earlier this year. After the merger and before he resigned, company founder Greg Friedman developed initial product specs for Scrapper. Meanwhile, Xerox bought Datacopy, a Dest competitor.

“We did enter discussions with Xerox about a new fax board for a future Xerox product,” says Michael O’Leary, vice president of international OEM sales for Dest. “Now we’re redesigning the product,” perhaps for later introduction under the Dest label. Despite the Datacopy acquisition, discussions with Xerox haven’t been totally scrapped, he says, just tabled. Stay tuned.

SAY IT AIN’T SO: OK, it ain’t so. Don’t expect to see Apple Computer introduce a Motorola 68030-based workstation next week at MacWorld Expo in Boston. A rumor reported in a couple of places last week said such a thing might happen, but my sources say uh-uh. Chairman John Sculley has been chanting the “no new CPUs in 1988″ mantra all year. If he let one out the door now, reporters would forever quote him about future product dates, then say in the next sentence, “But last time he said that, he was lying.”

Instead, expect to see Apple finally introduce its own scanner in Boston. Supposedly it’s shipping with HyperCard creator Bill Atkinson’s HyperScan software for gray-scale rendering — which, I hear, could put high-end gray-scale software programs like Image Studio and Digital Darkroom out to pasture.

THIRD WORLD RULES: Politically correct fans of Balance of Power, by premier gamester Chris Crawford, will be happy to know that a new “1990 edition” of the game will include what’s being billed as a “multipolar option.” In other words, when you finally get to the fourth level, Third World countries will actually be able to pursue their own foreign policies — cause wars, stuff like that — which until now were privileges left only to big guys like us and Russia and a few others.

The database for the Mindscape program has also been updated, due to popular demand, including 80 countries instead of 62. The update, Crawford says, took about 10 minutes.

“What’s happened in four years?” he says. “There was a revolution in the Philippines. That’s about it. The Russians were still in Afghanistan, there are still civil wars everywhere, the contras are still killing Sandinistas — it’s the same bloody situation we had four years ago.” He adds with a snicker, “The Reagan administration can lay claim to having brought stability to the world scene.”

THAT’S WHAT WE GET: Anyone who didn’t feel like traipsing to Atlanta for Siggraph last week missed “Film Night,” especially Pixar’s work-in-progress and (I predict) next Academy Award winner. Called “Tin Toy,” it’s another story of an object coming “alive.” While the toy is banging away on itself (it’s a little drum), a baby barrels toward it and the toy, terrified for its life, starts running toward its box. The audience comes unglued, I hear, when the baby starts to drool. State of the art, animation-wise.

MONEY MONEY MONEY: You probably already heard that the Cole Gilburne Fund, a venture capital group whose roster includes local industry luminary Nat Goldhaber (new father of triplets) and David Cole (former chairman/president of Ashton-Tate/Ziff-Davis), just invested in Shiva, a Massachusetts telecom company. But I hear the company also just dumped a few million bucks into two other technology companies: Imagine of Fairfax in Marin County and MacroMind of Chicago.

Imagine’s first project was a multiuser calendar program. It now may be the first commercially available Macintosh groupware product (Perfect Timing), and it’s being announced at Macworld Expo.

Interest in MacroMind likely comes from Cole Gilburne partner Miles Gilburne, a Hollywood intellectual properties attorney. MacroMind founder Marc Canter is a Hollywood kind of guy himself, who sells the hot animation program VideoWorks II.