April 23, 1989

A DIFFERENT LAPTOP: After last week’s abundance of redundancy — those 95 million PC clones at Comdex — it’s nice to report that someone has come along with Something Really Different. Within a week, you’ll be hearing about a state-of-the-art laptop computer. The project, I hear, is the brainchild of Kamran Elahian, senior vice president of strategic operations at custom chip house Cirrus Logic Inc. in Milpitas, who’s going to “entrepreneur” once more.

My sources say Elahian is talking to many of the Valley’s best and brightest, although it is not certain if he will actually form a new company. The list includes George Morrow, a well-known Silicon Valley pundit who designed what some people say was the best laptop ever, the sleek black Morrow Pivot. Probably to his never-ending chagrin, Morrow sold the design to Zenith Data Systems, which turned it gray and made a fortune selling it to the U.S. government.

One of Elahian’s backers is said to be Jim Guzy, who among other things, is chairman of NTX Communications Group of Menlo Park and on the board of Intel Corp. Elahian refused to comment on the speculation, and Guzy didn’t return calls by press time.

Morrow, of course, was in perfect form. “Suppose that you were baking something in the oven, and some friend came along and opened the oven too soon?” Then he added, “However, it would be nice if something like that were true, because I need a hit.”

I hear the laptop will actually use some non-mainstream technology: instead of a keyboard, it will have an electronic slate that recognizes handwriting.

JUST A LITTLE JOKE: Workstation vendors, who I guess don’t like people to sneak up on them from behind, are still volleying bitchy (though amusing) comments about the surprise purchase of Apollo Computer Inc. by Hewlett-Packard Co.

Usenet, a widely used electronic mail network, is generally where this brand of wicked engineer’s humor flies fastest.

Usenet readers last week found the text to a fake ad, describing a harried H-P executive driving on Highway 101, unable to get his mind off work. He swerves off to a pay phone, punches in a number and starts spewing a bunch of “what if” scenarios to pull the company out of the doldrums. Finally he says, “What if we bought Apollo to gain market share?” The punchline: “Financial solutions to scientific problems.”

Another comment heard in the workstation world was that Mentor Graphics Corp., Apollo’s biggest customer, was “definitely shopping” for another computer vendor before the deal was announced. I even heard Mentor might have had something to do with the H-P deal, but I couldn’t get confirmation. And whether it changed its mind about switching vendors as a result of the deal isn’t known.

HIT THE DECK: Stunning the PC industry last week, Quarterdeck Office Systems of Santa Monica announced a patent award for its multitasking and windowing technology. Its first product, Desq (now Desqview 2.2), was built around the technology. Way back in 1984, Desq users were able to load their off-the-shelf software (like WordStar or Lotus 1-2-3) into the Desqview environment and run them all at once, inside windows, without altering their structure.

It was revolutionary stuff back then, especially since the Mac had just been introduced and Microsoft hadn’t even announced its Windows operating environment, which took years to ship.

Press and pundits, an excitable lot, speculated wildly about whether Quarterdeck was going to start making infringement noises at Microsoft, which is betting the farm on its own PC operating environments, Windows and Presentation Manager.

But Quarterdeck’s patent only covers off-the-shelf software applications.

“I think the patent’s important, but one of the articles I read made it sound like all DOS programs in any operating environment are going to have to pay licensing fees,” says Quarterdeck President and co-founder Terry Myers. “It’s not a patent on windowing or on multitasking. This has been blown out of proportion.”

Maybe everyone’s just trying to make up for the fact that they have been predicting the demise of Quarterdeck since 1984, when Microsoft entered the fray. Desqview, once considered kind of a “cult” product, now has almost 1.1 million users, Myers said. “We were pretty much always fighting the thing, “You aren’t going to be around very long,’” she said. “So we went out and got the innovators and now we’re the standard environment for (many) large corporations.”