August 11, 1989

I EXHORTED a boycott of Macworld Expo, held each year in Boston, after last year’s debacle of heat wave/humidity (try breathing through a hot, wet washcloth) and organizational idiocy. The sheer mass of people here, just one day into the official show, goes to show who listens to me.
PRIVATE SHOWING: NEC Electronics was giving off-floor showings of its portable, $600 CD-ROM drive. The full-size version costs a thou now, and Apple Computer is selling its own for more than $1,200. The portable — three pounds with battery — runs about two-thirds slower than the full size. The reason, NEC execs say, is because a different kind of reader head (like a turntable needle) was required to keep it stable on the road. The IBM interface to the drive, they say, will ship in early September, with IBM/Mac coming “in the fourth quarter.”
FOLLOW THAT LIGHT: Wandering the show boothless was Rob Cook, author of the highly regarded Renderman photorealism package from Pixar in San Rafael. Many don’t know that Cook has jumped ship and is president of Light Source in Mill Valley, working on some mysterious software that he doesn’t want to talk much about. What’s public is that Light Source, only three months old, has already licensed some of its technology to Aldus Corp., famous for PageMaker and Freehand, an illustration program.

Check out Light Source’s founder lineup: photojournalist Rick Smolan, who recently sold his baby, the “Day in the Life of …” series of books, to Rupert Murdoch, is serving as an “evangelist” of sorts at Light source. Former Esquire Magazine owner/president/etc. Phillip Moffitt is chairman. And Ty Roberts, formerly of Bogas Productions, is director of advanced technology. Roberts wrote Jam Session and Studio Session, the first music production programs for the Mac and used by prodigious talents like rocker/hacker Todd Rundgren. Keep an eye on these guys.

BUSHNELL IS BACK: Until recently, Nolan Bushnell’s been low profile, but those days are likely over. His new Aapps Corp. in Mountain View was the talk of the show because of its new product, a $400 video-grabber board called MicroVideo that pipes a video or television signal into a 1˜-inch by 1¾-inch window on Mac II computers. The TV tuner doesn’t do much else for the moment — Aapps says it will let software developers do all the whizzy tricks with the technology since the cost is about a quarter the cost of most video grabbers, which sell for around $2,000.

Chairman Bushnell says the low price is the result of his die-hard consumer mentality from his days in the video game business. In fact, he says, he wanted the board to be even cheaper. “I feel like I left some money on the table,” he says, but he succumbed to his marketeers.

SMALL ASIDE: Bushnell, you may remember, just hired David Ramsey, who many think was wrongly fired from Apple’s system group for supposedly spilling some company beans on CompuServe Information Service. Turns out that Russ Wetmore, Aapps director of product development, worked in Apple’s system software group. When he heard Ramsey was “available,”the deed was quickly done. See? Everything always works out.

CARD TRICKS: HyperCard junkies will be happy to hear that Mike Swaine, co-author of “Fire in the Valley” and long-time technoscribe, is spinning off his MacUser column called Card Tricks (it’s about stuff you can do with HyperCard) into a newsletter-and-disk publication called Mike Swaine’s Card Tricks.

Swaine has done everything in this business, from senior editor at InfoWorld (in the old days), to editor-in-chief of high-zoot hacker mag Dr. Dobbs Journal, to freelancer/columnist, and now — finally! — an entrepreneur. He is based in Santa Cruz, if you’re interested. (That means don’t call me to get his phone number.)

RAW RUMORS: I heard that Adam Green, long-time dBASE guru (Ashton-Tate’s database, the standard in the PC world), is doing consultant work for Ashton-Tate. Hopefully he’s consulting about Mac products, since A-T pulled dBASE Mac off the market a few months back. … Ran into Apple Product President Jean-Louis Gassee in the lobby of the World Trade Center. The joke was that Gassee’s remodeling job on his Palo Alto mansion would “ship,” as they say, before the long-anticipated Mac portable (people have stopped calling it a laptop), code-named Riviera. He was amused that escrow on his old house actually does close the day of the announcement. Of course he wouldn’t say when that was, but a bunch of my sources say we’ll see the Riviera on Sept. 20 at the Universal Amphitheater in Los Angeles.