March 12, 1989

IN THE PLEXUS: After a rather stormy eight or so years, venture capital firms Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Technology Ventures finally pulled their financial life preserver from Plexus Computers of San Jose. Kevin Burr of Plexus says the firm laid off 150 of its remaining 200 employees on Tuesday, and the 40 remaining engineers are trying to keep the company afloat as a software house. Those laid off on Tuesday didn’t get severance pay or reimbursement for back expenses.

Founded in 1980 to sell supermicro computers based on Unix, Plexus eventually couldn’t compete in what had become a commodity market. In 1987, the company changed direction and started selling an image processing system that was priced at about $500,000. Burr says Plexus is one of the top three suppliers to that market (the others are Wang and FileNet).

Plexus now hopes to sell only the Unix-based software to other vendors to ship with their systems, thereby avoiding filing for the dreaded Chapter 11 protection under the federal Bankruptcy Code.

THERE’S A PLACE FOR US: At last, Silicon Valley engineers who feel the yuppie lifestyle magazines have passed them by have one of their own: Select Communications of Los Altos began publishing “Silicon Valley Engineer” last month. The magazine is free to engineers who receive it at their home addresses.

Each issue profiles a Silicon Valley engineer. The Feb/Mar issue cover was Barney Oliver, head of NASA’s Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence project. It also contained a fascinating story about life as an engineer in the Soviet Union and a column by psychologist Jean Hollands, author of a couples counseling book called “The Silicon Syndrome.”

“Engineers have been bashed for too long,” says associate publisher Richard Pidgeon. “We wanted to do something that wasn’t high-tech, something for and about engineers and scientists, their avocations, likes and dislikes.”

At the same time, he says, he and editor/publisher Paul Nyberg saw the pages upon pages of ads for engineers in Sunday papers. “So we skewed the mag ad-wise to recruitment in the Valley,” he says.

Happily, the magazine makes a point of including women as part of its target readership. It targets Silicon Valley-based electrical, electronic, mechanical, optical and biotech engineers and scientists, but Pidgeon says those in related fields can get a free subscription.

PLUS NO MORE: In case anyone needed proof that the Apple II’s days are numbered, A-Plus, the award-winning Ziff-Davis publication that covered the Apple II market for the last six years, has been sold to IDG in Peterborough, N.H. The May issue will be the last. The name and subscriber list will merge with Incider, IDG’s Apple II mag, and the mag will be renamed Incider A-Plus, says Marty Mazner, former publisher of A-Plus. The 18 or so staffers are being absorbed into other Z-D publications.

Mazner wouldn’t say what the loss of A-Plus means to the Apple II. But word is that Apple II won’t make it until Christmas, despite annual sales of $6 million to $7 million. Insiders say Apple’s internal disdain for the product makes software vendors leery of developing for it. Voila! a self-fulfilling prophecy.

AMAZING STORIES: The best piece of mail I got this week was a Whole Earth Catalog called “The Fringes of Reason.” It’s subtitled “a field guide to new age frontiers, unusual beliefs & eccentric sciences.” I had more fun in the 20 minutes I was reading it than I had all week, believe me.

Some sample topics: Spontaneous human combustion, the myth/reality of flying saucers, lightning balls, the Church of the Sub Genius, and cryptozoology.

HOLLYWOOD PLAYERS: Looks like the Software Publishers Association Excellence in Software awards have become the industry’s equivalent of the Oscars. Award nominees are into it in a big way, killing entire forests to print and mail pleas for votes.

“Dear SPA member,” says one from Lucasfilm Games. “If you’ve ever fantasized about chucking your career to become a reporter for one of those supermarket tabloids, you’ll know immediately why Zak McKracken and the Alien Mindbenders is such a hoot… ”

“Some will call us bold,” says Smart Software. “But we ask for your vote for our new product, SmartForecasts II, the BATCH Processing Editor…”

And last but not least, Breakthrough Productions sends a sappy letter it got from a customer — “it’s every software developer’s dream” — and wishes it could get a similar letter every week about its Market Master Manager software. Well if it’s so hot, why AIN’T they gettin’ one every week? That’s all I wanna know.