March 5, 1989

OPEN, SCHMOPEN: If I hear of one more bloody Unix consortium in the works, I’m going to scream. Last week’s UniForum trade show should have called itself “Obfuscation Central” and been done with it. Even though Unix runs on less than 10 percent of the computers in the world, no less than four consortiums are madly lining up vendors to “stand behind” their version of the AT&T computer operating system. And each wants theirs to be The Only True Unix.

But not a single user I talked to at the show — and I talked to a few — thought these consortiums had done anything to further the cause of a cohesive Unix standard. One Unix insider says the concept has backfired. “We’re back to the same old pissing matches of two years ago,” he said. “They’re just on a different level.”

To make matters worse, there’s a whole new level of noise. Now everyone’s worried that Unix without a graphic interface is like a day without sunshine, so new interfaces are springing up like weeds — we’ve got Open Desktop, Open Look, New Wave, Next Step, X Window, Motif, Metaphor, DEC Windows, Apple’s A/UX.

Dave Burdick, vice president and director of the industrial automation group at Dataquest Inc., the San Jose market research firm, shakes his head over the whole deal. “I’d really like to see the profit-and-loss impact of these consortiums on companies,” he said. “It costs most of them $100,000 a year to have voting power, the industry is more splintered than ever, and users still don’t have compatibility between machines.”

YOUR DAUGHTER MAY BE INSIDE: “Profit Technology is demoing (as in demonstrating) Genesis in a large van parked at Jefferson and Mason near Fisherman’s Wharf (across from the Wax Museum),” said the release from eclectic PR maven Wes Thomas. Genesis, he said, is a stress reduction tool, and a new way to “talk” to computers.

The van was custom-built for the $56,000 machine, which itself was built at company headquarters in Eatontown, N.J. The inside of the van has a table that is wired to record the waves the body emits, a set of 10-plus speakers mounted above and below the bed, a rack of sound equipment and boards, and a personal computer running Profit’s software.

When I was on the table a Vivaldi concerto was playing and I was emitting “biostatic” energy, said Orest Bedrij Jr.CQ, one of Profit’s principals. Profit’s software lets me actually “play” the music I’m hearing — it reads my acceptance or rejection of certain sounds, and my response turns up the parts I like (in my case, the violins).

It is incredibly relaxing. “It’s the simple pleasure principle,” Bedrij said. “It’s like a chef at my table, watching what I eat and giving me more of what I like.”

Bedrij has a Genesis unit installed at a hospital pain center in Pennsylvania, as well as in “high-end sports clubs and fitness centers.” Profit wants to sell the product to corporations, especially into Silicon Valley which deals with a staggering number of over stressed employees. And studies are under way to see whether Genesis encourages endorphin release, which Profit believes it does. (Endorphins are natural pain desensitizers produced by the brain during certain pleasurable experiences like sex.)

ONE DAY AT UNIFORUM: One spy on the show floor said that IBM is preparing an entry-level Macintosh killer. It’s said to have an optical disk drive, and will ship with Microsoft’s graphical interface, Windows, as well as DOS. Windows will include some graphics standard called GPI that allows it to use PostScript fonts .Ž.Ž. VPL Research’s founder/CEO Jaron Lanier said his Redwood City company (which brought us the amazing data glove, among other things) is working on “a new kind of beast,” a true visual programming language that’s going to “blow away Unix.” … At Intel’s i860 announcement, Bernie Cole, longtime semiconductor editor for Electronics magazine (which Dutch publisher VNU is selling), asked me to print a rumor — untrue — that Japanese publisher Nikkei Electronics was trying to buy his magazine. “Maybe they’ll actually do it,” Cole said. “There’s been a war and the Japanese have won. At least they have the long term view. They don’t try to nickel-and-dime their way to market domination. That’s the basic problem with American industry generally.” Somebody out there want to prove him wrong?

BLOOM OFF THE LOTUS: None too soon, Lotus Development shipped out a paltry 70 beta-test versions of its hideously late upgrade to 1-2-3, Version 3. A local author, Carolyn Jorgensen of Microtouch Computer Training in San Francisco, was lucky enough to receive one. Jorgensen wouldn’t comment, but word is that last time a beta version was shipped, 500 bugs per week were reported by beta sites.