February 26, 1989

STANDARD AFIRE: Every week or so, another computer vendor touts yet another slick (proprietary) graphical user interface. But X Window, a public domain protocol developed by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is flying in the face of all that. X Window is licensed to whomever wants it for a nominal fee. That makes X Window a kind of lawsuit-proof, Macintosh-like display. As a result, it seems like everybody wants to make their products work with X Window.

Stacey’s Books in Palo Alto, one of the Valley’s best sources for technical publications, devoted a whole display to a slew of new X Window books. “They’re selling like hotcakes,” says Mark DeZutti of Stacey’s. “The last time something like this happened was when (Danny Goodman’s) HyperCard book first came out.”

X Window even spawned a whole new market niche, dubbed X terminals. At next week’s Uniforum trade show in San Francisco, Visual Technology — an X terminal maker in Massachusetts — is hosting the “first industrywide forum,” called X Panel ‘89. Visual didn’t invite competitors, such as Acer Technologies and Network Computing Devices (NCD), but it did score panelists such as Robert Scheifler, director of MIT’s X Consortium, Bill Joy of Sun Microsystems and display specialist Eileen O’Brien of International Data Corp.

NCD, Visual and Acer realized they could make money selling products that would only run the display side of X Window. Before they came along, if you wanted to run X you had to buy a work station for $5,000 or a PC with a lot of expensive hardware.

But an “X terminal” costs from $1,000 to $3,000. “It’s a dedicated device,” said Judy Estrin, co-founder and executive vice president of NCD. “It allows the display to be on one side of the network (where the terminal is) and the application to be on the other. When you write an application, you just write it to the X protocol. You don’t need to know where the display is. You just write it to the X protocol.”

IN YOUR INTERFACE: Losing sleep over what IBM is doing with its license to use Steve Jobs’ NextStep interface? Jobs’ deal with IBM was one of the hot rumors back when, but no one knew what Big Blue would do with its hot new property. This week’s InformationWEEK (Feb. 20) says that an IBM employee, attending a small Orlando seminar for DB2 (IBM’s mainframe relational database product), confirmed that IBM is developing a PC version of DB2 which will incorporate the whizzy NextStep interface.

“The person I talked to was in product development,” says Michael Puttre, who wrote the story. “That’s how I know it’s true. If it was somebody in sales, it would be difficult to confirm the fact that they were working on it at all.”

VIRUS DETECTOR: A security consultant in Nashville is selling PC-compatible computers that he claims are virus proof. Winn Schwartau, president of American Computer Security Industries (ASCI), announced the Immune System ($2,995) this month. He says it can stop almost any computer invasion, from virus to human.

One of its many features is a secure kernel which prevents a virus from altering the system software. All security measures are based on DES, a government-standard encryption protocol. “We did not build the box to be a high-performance engine,” Schwartau says. “We built it to fill a specific need, where information is sensitive enough to warrant concern.”

This guy means business. ASCI does a lot of government work and, as a result, it’s listed as a manufacturer of weapons systems, not computers. Schwartau says the Dept. of Munitions Control has to remove “certain of our product features before they can be sold” outside the United States.

SHOW ‘N’ TELL: For some reason, chip vendors seem to be abandoning Wescon and Electro, once pre-eminent trade shows for working engineers, to display their wares at Comdex, a trade show for PC dealers which (coincidentally?) keeps falling on the same dates as Wescon/Electro. The overlap is a problem, but why do chip vendors even bother with Comdex?

Alexis Rasevich, marketing manager for Electronic Conventions (which organizes Wescon and Electro) says the shows started having problems in 1985 when the chip industry went south. Chip firms started “going along for the ride” with computer vendors who displayed at Comdex.

Japanese chipsters, however, still have a presence at Wescon. As a result, says Rasevich, U.S. chip companies are “giving their business to the Japanese” by not being at the shows, which cater to working engineers.

Motorola is displaying its wares at Electro in April, though it still may need convincing to be at Wescon in November. “I’m assuming that Motorola is saying, “We ought to be talking to engineers, since that who buys our products,” Rasevich says.