PC Week News for March 27, 1995. Contents Copyright (c) 1995 by Ziff-
Davis Publishing Company, L.P. All rights reserved. Material may not be
reproduced or distributed IN ANY FORM.
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Apple crusade demands large leap of faith, say experts

From PC Week for March 27, 1995 by Jane Morrissey and Rob O'Regan

Apple Computer Inc.'s renewed drive to keep and expand its base of
Macintosh software developers is on the right track, but the company has
a long way to go to win back the trust of the Mac faithful.

After allowing its once-vibrant developer ties to languish for more than
a year, Apple is now trying to right past wrongs by slashing the price
of the Mac OS developers' kit from $2,000 to $299 and launching new
support options over the Internet and on-line services.

"Last year there was some justified criticism on how we treated
developers," said David Nagel, general manager of Apple's AppleSoft
division, in Cupertino, Calif. "We have increased that focus."

Analysts and developers were encouraged by Apple's recent moves,
especially plans to broaden the market through licensing of the Mac
platform to other hardware makers.

Nonetheless, they said Apple's efforts pale in comparison to their
evangelism in the early days of the Mac and the relentless marketing of
the Windows platform by Microsoft Corp. and Intel Corp.

While many developers still believe the Mac is a superior platform, it
will take more than price cuts and promises to revive developer
enthusiasm for releasing products for the Mac first, if at all.

"I don't see the teeth in it or the reality behind it," longtime Mac
developer Dave Winer, president of Userland Software, in Redwood City,
Calif., said of Apple's new evangelism.

Winer, who said he does not want to spend five years learning to develop
for Windows 95, will continue developing for the Mac in spite of ongoing
difficulties with Apple but will have other employees working on Windows
releases.

"Over the last year and a half, Apple lost serious momentum in the
developer community," added Tim Bajarin, president of market researcher
Creative Strategies, in San Jose, Calif. "To buy what Apple is saying
now takes a bit of a leap of faith."

The Mac opportunity is greater than ever, even in the shadow of Windows,
Nagel said. His logic: Microsoft's share of the Windows application
market (about 48 percent) is increasing while its share of the Mac
market is decreasing (to about 31 percent).

Since Microsoft has such a huge slice of the Windows pie, there is less
money for other ISVs, Nagel said.

"It's getting much easier to get venture capital for Mac development
than it was a year ago," he said.

Pieter Hartsook, editor of the Hartsook Letter, in Alameda, Calif., said
there is some validity to that claim. Apple is gaining ground in its
traditional markets, such as the small-office and desktop-publishing
segments.

Although dwarfed by the PC market, Apple's 12 million installed base
still presents a sizable opportunity for developers -- if Apple can
capitalize on it, Hartsook said.

"I'd have a lot of excited, young, knowledgeable people camped out on
the doorstep of every ISV that's even on the borderline of [saying],
`Maybe I should abandon the Mac.'"

================================================================

Are PC users addicted to bad software design?

From PC Week for March 27, 1995 by Peter Coffee

The fact that an application is used, and that users are reluctant to
give it up, must not be confused with proof that it's well-designed.
Users are merely human, and they do many things for predictably
irrational reasons.

Addiction is one of those reasons, and "computers are addictive,"
according to Thomas Landauer, formerly a director of research at
Bellcore and now a professor of psychology at the University of
Colorado.

Landauer compares the frustrated end user to a pigeon pecking at a
lighted key to get a pellet of food. In a famous experiment by
behavioral scientist B.F. Skinner, pellets were originally given for
every correct peck, then gradually reduced to random rewards, averaging
one per 100 pecks. When Skinner stopped giving food entirely, Landauer
reports, "the bird pecked the key 10,000 times before Skinner gave up."

In his forthcoming book, "The Trouble With Computers: Usefulness,
Usability, and Productivity," Landauer attributes users' tolerance for
badly designed software to a similar addictive behavior. "Sometimes a
very simple error defeats you. You try again. Nope. You think you see
why. You try again. Nope. You think of another thing to try. You try
something you've tried before, just in case the computer wasn't paying
attention. Far into the night, you finally succeed. What a wonderful
feeling. Thus is a psycho logical addiction born."

Landauer's book will be published June 5 by MIT Press, and I recommend
it to every human being writing software for other human beings.

When people write software for other people, there are distorting
effects at every step of the process -- beginning with the developer's
own mastery of the computing environment, and continuing through the
user's willingness to blame himself or herself rather than the computer
when things don't seem to go as they should.

Landauer explores some of the distinctive features of developers as a
subspecies. "Star Unix programmers use ... hundreds of convenient
commands, each selected by a chord of two or three keys. ... What will
such people think natural and easy?"

He cites research showing that developers are twice as likely as the
general population to be introverts, and three times as likely to be
classified as "intuitive" thinkers. "It is unlikely," Landauer wryly
notes, that these traits help developers understand users "who would
rather interact with co-workers than computers and who prefer to think
about simple, concrete problems."

If our job, as application developers, is to raise the productivity of
the users whom we support, other studies cited by Landauer suggest that
adding features or even boosting the "ease of use" of the software we
write may be missing the point. For example, one text-editing study
found age and measured cognitive ability to be the strongest predictors
of performance, 20 times more so than the choice of a command-driven
line editor vs. a full-screen interactive tool. Making users smarter has
higher payoffs than building elaborate GUIs.

We should be watching what users do, not playing catch-up with each
other's lists of features. We should be giving users tools that do real-
life tasks reliably, without arbitrary limits, rather than writing help
screens that give the gory details of our failure to do so.

Assuming, that is, that we're trying to impress our users rather than
ourselves.

Peter Coffee can be reached via MCI Mail at 357-1756 or on CompuServe at
72631,113.

================================================================

Suite software has a voracious future

From PC Week for March 27, 1995 by Bill Machrone

Software suites have fundamentally changed the assumptions in business-
software marketing. If you've bought any new systems lately, they've
been bundled with suites. You probably appreciated the instant infusion
of capabilities as you got state-of-the-art word processing,
spreadsheet, presentation graphics, E-mail, and maybe a database
program.

Even if you bought suite software separately from your hardware, you got
a terrific price for an incredible amount of software.

You also got useful combinations of capabilities and a degree of
interoperation that you probably lacked heretofore. OLE may be a memory
hog and it may be slow, but it's reasonably successful at making
applications interoperate. Even without OLE, suites have done a fairly
decent job lately of getting the applications to work tolerably well
together.

The suite software picture looks a little darker when you consider what
it has done to competition and to the underlying economics of the
software business. The big got bigger and the small fry either folded
up, were acquired, or merged into larger companies.

Attempts at building suites from the available products have led to some
strange bedfellows and some outlandish claims (WordPerfect and Quattro
Pro -- perfect together!).

Bundling is a volume game, where machine builders pay a tiny fraction of
the retail per-copy price for the right to install the software on every
box that goes out the door. The software vendor gets a bigger installed
base and the bragging rights that go along with it, and the potential
for future upgrade revenue if you like and use the software.

The question in my mind is whether the revenue prospects are sufficient
for the vendors to devote proper attention to revising and upgrading
their software. Of the major word-processing packages, Word 6.0 is
probably the most bug-ridden, but Ami Pro and WordPerfect certainly have
their share of problems, too.

The software geniuses are terminally bored by the prospect of putting
together a cleanup version or adding a couple of new features. It's far
more exciting to add entire new functions to the suite.

The irony is that the company is more likely to buy the next application
than to program it in-house. Once they've amortized the acquisition
costs, the marginal cost to add more programs to the suite is close to
zero, especially if the documentation is on a CD ROM instead of floppies
or, worse, paper.

Let's think for a moment about what those new applications might be. The
mapping applications are having a nice run of success in the
marketplace, tying into spreadsheets and presentation-graphics programs.
It can't be long before the suites subsume them. Never mind that you'd
rather have a bug fix. Business drawing packages? Too practical. 3-D CAD
would be a brilliant addition to Microsoft's suite. What better way to
keep those upstarts at Autodesk from getting out of hand? Lotus could
counter with educational software. Novell could bundle in the complete
works of Mark Twain and Oscar Wilde, accessible by topic, for those who
need something clever to say.

Seriously, the feature race is over. The vendors won. All the users will
get from this point on is increasing complexity with diminishing
usability and questionable support.

Bill Machrone is Vice President of Technology for Ziff-Davis Publishing
Co. He can be reached via MCI Mail (wmachrone) or CompuServe (72241,15).

================================================================

Will the Meower go furballs over Freaknik?

Rumor Central from PC Week for March 27, 1995 by Spencer F. Katt

Spence was about to hang up on the caller talking about a traffic jam on
the highway. El Gato had figured it was but one more case of a hackneyed
phrasemaker rehacking that tired info highway slop. But no.

The caller was giving Spence a heads-up for Comdex week in Atlanta this
year. Seems there is a group of college-age pranksters (about 100,000
last year) who hold a yearly spring fling dubbed "Freaknik" in Atlanta.
It falls on Comdex week this year. Last year they just about shut the
city down and did close the freeway system. The mayor has sworn that if
they return they will get arrested. They say they are coming back en
force.

"Great, an added torture to Hotlanta's fur-curling humidity and stifling
heat," answered Spence, who was taking the call while affixing one of
the Katt's klassic "Spill Your Guts" bumper stickers to the wall at La
Select in St. Barthelemy. Could it be that in a month Spence would go
from drinking iced beer at the bar where "Cheeseburger in Paradise" was
penned to the back booth at Lulu's Bait Shop while watching CNN coverage
of the highway being shut down?

Well, a lot could happen in a month, figured Spence. Here are a couple
of possibilities:

While Microsoft and Intuit continue to try to romance their marriage
past the federales, Spence hears that Microsoft and Optus Software are
getting cozier and cozier. It appears to be certain that the Optus fax
server will be part of MS BackOffice, and Spence would give it a six on
the open-ended rumormeter that MS will buy Optus.

The latest hardware rumor is that Maxtor will pull the plug on its line
of 1.8-inch rotating drives. People also say that Hyundai, which took a
40 percent stake in the company last year, will go the rest of the way.

Another possibility called in from Spence's Munich, Germany,
rumormeister from the Havana Cafe is that Siemens will once again try to
crack the U.S. PC market -- this time via a big-time acquisition.
Siemens, which always seems ready to give it one more try, is ready to
belly-up big time, sprecht the meister. Maybe even Packard Bell or GW2.
Spence figured it was only the Cuba Libres talking.

Back in the U.S. (although Spence still refuses to believe that Utah is
actually one of the 50), not everyone loves Bob and Tina, the abstract
cartoon mascots of Novell's BrainShare conference. These microcephalic
refugees from a 1940s fashion show lack any facial features except a
single vertical line.

They showed up everywhere at BrainShare, their heads connected by a
giant tube -- presumably the conduit through which they exchange brain
cells.

The stage where Novell executives delivered their keynote speeches was
flanked by 20-foot statues of Bob and Tina. Their constant presence
prompted Novell's chief scientist Drew Major to comment, in his keynote
speech, "I don't like them ... those brain-sucked, slot-faced pinheads."
The comment won resounding applause.

After months of investigation, Spence finally heard why IBM has been
unable to meet demand on the Aptiva line. "We lose too much money on
each sale to build any more," the source explained to Spence in a great
twist of pretzel logic.

Have a tip? Call Rumor Central at (617) 393-3700; On MCI, It's SKATT; on
CompuServe, use 72631,107; on the Internet, it's
SPENCER@PCWEEK.ZIFF.COM; or try ZiffNet'S PC Week Forum on CompuServe,
or FAX the KATT at (617) 393-3795.

================================================================

New ServerBench benchmark measures performance in real C/S environments

From PC Week for March 27, 1995 by David P. Chernicoff

This week marks the introduction of ServerBench 2.0, the next generation
of PC Week Labs' and the Ziff-Davis Benchmark Operation's cross-platform
file and application server performance benchmark.

Version 2.0 of ServerBench is significantly enhanced from Version 1.1.
The benchmark, which measures server performance in a real client/server
environment, has added support for a fourth-base operating system, IBM's
OS/2 2.11, in addition to its support for Novell Inc.'s NetWare 3.12,
Microsoft Corp.'s Windows NT 3.5, and The Santa Cruz Operation Inc.'s
SCO Unix 4.0. The benchmark also supports SCO Unix MPX 3.0, SCO's
multiprocessing operating system, as well as OS/2 for Symmetric
Operating Systems Versi on 2.11.

What's new

ServerBench 2.0 is easier to use than the previous version, and the
results are easier to interpret. All of the client software, both on the
server clients and the controller station, now runs on Windows for
Workgroups 3.11. This simplifies the client configuration and works well
with the only supported TCP/IP stack, FTP Software Inc.'s PC/TCP OnNet
1.1 for DOS/Windows.

The benchmark's installation program adds a ServerBench icon to the
Windows Program Manager. In addition, the spreadsheet files produced
from the test results have been streamlined to make them easier to use.
The spreadsheets also now contain disclosure information on client and
server configuration, which is necessary if a user wants to publish
results of the ServerBench tests.

ServerBench's user interface for the Windows-based controller station
has been upgraded. Help messages are now at the bottom of the screen
during most system operations, and the information in and layout of
windows, menus, and pop-up boxes are more intuitive and easier to use.

To make ServerBench more accurately represent database activity, the
Ziff-Davis Benchmark Operation profiled a number of established
client/server applications, as well as benchmarks such as TPC-B, and
used the results as the model for the transactions that ServerBench
runs.

Modifications to the test suites have also resulted in a reduction in
the time necessary to run the standard overall test mix -- from 9 hours
to 4 hours. In-depth testing has indicated that there is no reduction in
the accuracy of the results relating to server performance because of
the reduced running length of the test suite.

It should be noted that there is no correlation between different
versions of ServerBench -- that is, Version 2.0 results cannot be
compared to results produced by earlier versions of ServerBench.

Test results

PC Week Labs put ServerBench through its paces in a series of tests. We
ran ServerBench on a Compaq Computer Corp. ProLiant 4000 with 128M bytes
of RAM, 6G bytes of hard-disk space, and four Compaq Netflex 2 EISA
Ethernet network interface cards.

We installed each of the supported operating systems and tested them
with one to 60 clients running against the server. A ServerBench client
represents a workload greater than that of a single user in a normal
client/server database environment.

In single-processor tests, the best overall performance was achieved by
SCO Unix MPX.

In contrast, OS/2 2.11 with SMP demonstrated its SMP optimizations in a
negative fashion when run with a single CPU, showing poorer performance
than the non-SMP-capable version of OS/2. The remaining operating
systems produced performance results of 24 to 28 tps (transactions per
second).

In tests of individual operating systems, Windows NT 3.5 and OS/2 SMP
2.11 show excellent scaling as additional processors are added. Windows
NT shows almost linear scaling, with four processors peaking at more
than 100 tps and a single processor peaking at 28 tps. OS/2 peaks at a
point 20 tps lower than Windows NT, but it still shows an advantageous
increase in performance with additional processors.

SCO Unix showed good scalability with small client loads but did not
handle large numbers of clients well -- performance dropped off
significantly when the number of clients exceeded 20.

The current version of SCO MPX does not have a true SMP architecture,
which could account for the drop in performance. SCO MPX runs certain
parts of the operating system, such as the Streams and TCP/IP protocols,
on the first processor, regardless of the number of processors in the
system. As the load increases on one CPU, it is possible, indeed likely,
that the additional processors are running at less-than-significant
utilization. (A redesigned version of SCO Unix that will include an
enhanced SMP architecture is slated for release before the end of this
year.)

SCO has provided excellent optimizations for a dual-processor Pentium
system. The performance drop is significant beyond 12 ServerBench
clients, however.

================================================================

Intel to pay Pentium damages

From PC Week for March 27, 1995 by Steve Kovsky

Intel Corp. tentatively agreed last week to settle a class-action
lawsuit by compensating companies and end users who can document damages
caused by the Pentium floating-point bug.

Under the agreement, which awaits approval by the Santa Clara, Calif.,
County Superior Court, Intel will pay for expenses and losses related to
the use of flawed Pentium processors, according to court papers filed
last week.

Although the suit said the action could cost Intel $1.6 billion or more,
Intel watchers believe any payments will be insignificant for the chip
giant.

"I don't think this is going to have any meaningful financial
implication," said Mark Edelstone, a semiconductor analyst at Prudential
Securities Inc., in San Francisco, who said that Intel holds cash
reserves of $2.5 billion.

Earlier this year, Intel also set aside $475 million to cover the
expenses related to the flawed chips.

Originally filed Dec. 29 by two law firms specializing in class-action
cases, the suit names two companies and 10 individuals seeking
compensation for wages and other expenses incurred in the wake of the
bug controversy.

Intel has agreed to pay for damages such as time and wages spent
rerunning calculations to verify results.

The suit cites one commodity trader that claims incorrect calculations
by flawed Pentium PCs resulted in losses of around $500,000.

The plaintiffs currently include the Purchase, N.Y., accounting firm of
A. Uzzo & Co. and Philadelphia-based Liberty Bell Equipment Corp.

The settlement allows Intel to examine each claim on a case-by-case
basis, with a jointly appointed arbitrator determining the damage
awards.

Intel has also agreed to pay attorneys' fees and expenses to a limit of
$6 million. Intel officials and plaintiffs have agreed not to discuss
the settlement publicly.

If the court approves the agreement, advertisements and announcements
will appear in newspapers, magazines, and on the Internet to attract
other Pentium users to join the plaintiff class. Users who choose to
participate in the settlement cannot sue Intel separately over the
issue.

Some Pentium owners are not eager to join in the class action against
Intel. Randy Dugger, associate IS director for Liposome Technology Inc.,
in Menlo Park, Calif., said Intel and its OEM customers have already
been responsive in swapping out defective Pentiums at his company.

"It's kind of distasteful," Dugger said. "If the vendor will stand up
and replace the parts, why should we get involved in the lawsuit?"

================================================================

Internet sites hang up on phone service

From PC Week for March 27, 1995 by Andy Patrizio

The anti-commercial sentiment of some Internet administrators has
sparked a fracas after several server sites banned a product that allows
users to place phone calls over the information highway.

The battle over VocalTec Inc.'s Internet Phone began earlier this month
when a Massachusetts Institute of Technology operator banished the
product from the school's IRC (Internet Relay Chat) server, claiming
Internet Phone hampers text-based traffic running across its aging
VAXstation server.

"IRC was meant for text-based chatting," said Craig Huegen, operator of
the MIT server in Cambridge, Mass. "I've used Internet Phone and I think
it's an interesting concept and I think it would be great -- if they
form their own servers for it."

Some users said calls to bar products like Internet Phone that are
marketed on-line stem from a bias against the increasing
commercialization of the Internet.

"It's almost like a religious war. You have people who believe these IRC
servers should be kept pure, just for IRC clients," said Jeff Pulver, an
IRC server administrator in New Jersey.

VocalTec officials in Northvale, N.J., said their product uses the IRC
server only to store lists of Internet Phone users who can receive voice
messages. Actual conversations are peer to peer and don't use IRC at
all. Nevertheless, the company will set up workarounds that will allow
users to access its own IRC servers, said Elon Ganor, VocalTec
president.

VocalTec also plans to send registered users of the $49 package an
electronic mail message listing Internet sites that welcome its product
and those that ban it, Ganor said.

Huegen denied that anti-commercial sentiment played a role in his
decision.

Regardless of the motives, Internet Phone users aren't happy.

"The ability for me to communicate with my counterparts in Europe is a
tremendous advantage," said John Ozza, president of Electronic Data
Graphics and Sound Inc., a CD ROM-based publisher in West Milford, N.J.

================================================================

Novell optimizing NetWare for enterprise

From PC Week for March 27, 1995 by Eric Smalley

SALT LAKE CITY -- After two years of striving to make NetWare 4.x
stable, Novell Inc. is turning its attention to optimizing the network
operating system for enterprise networks and updating core protocols,
among other initiatives.

The bulk of the work, which is slated to be done over the next 12 to 18
months, will be released as enhancements and add-ons to NetWare 4.1 and
as key pieces of NetWare 4.2. The plans were outlined last week at
Novell's BrainShare developers' conference held here.

At BrainShare, Novell also shed some light on its next-generation
workgroup architecture, code-named Eclipse, which merges InForms,
GroupWise, and SoftSolutions. The three-tiered structure, which will
begin rolling out at the end of the year, is the first incarnation of
Novell's Collaborative Computing Environment. The highest level of
Eclipse is the desktop layer, which contains a universal in-box for
voice mail, E-mail, and faxes.

Novell's NetWare priorities are finishing the SMP (symmetric
multiprocessing) extension, developing clustering and shared management
between NetWare and UnixWare, expanding the directory, supporting
NetWare services on other platforms, developing a Windows 95-based
application suite, and developing application management facilities,
said Novell CEO Robert Frankenberg.

In NetWare 4.2, Novell will integrate SMP, ease migration and
installation, support native TCP/IP, and expand NetWare Link Services
Protocol to support mobile users, he said.

To allow the NetWare Directory Services database to scale up to large
networks, including the AT&T NetWare Connect Services, Novell is
adapting the message queuing and transaction control technology from its
Tuxedo transaction-processing monitor, according to Drew Major, chief
scientist for the Provo, Utah, company.

Novell is also modifying NCP (NetWare Control Protocol) to be protocol-
independent and message-based, said Major. A message-based NCP lets
multitasking clients make multiple requests to the network before
receiving a response, he explained.

Company officials also outlined the Novell Advanced File Services, which
will consist of the Persistent Storage Subsystem for scaling up file
storage; Distributed Storage Services for location-independent file
names, replication, data migration, and content indexing and searching;
Periodically Connected Storage Services for caching files on
disconnected clients and reconciling them on reconnection; and the
Compound Document Service.

One user expressed concern about automatic file migration on large
networks. "It's a scale issue," said David Farmer III, a technical-staff
member at the University of Minnesota's University Networking Services,
in Minneapolis. The effect of file migration could increase
exponentially to the number of users, he said.

Novell demonstrated its forthcoming Client32 32-bit client on Windows
3.1, Windows 95, Windows NT, OS/2, and the Macintosh. Novell also
demonstrated Mobile IPX, an automated, remote-client upgrade utility.

The BrainShare network included the Novell Application Launcher, a
screen of icons that replaced the Windows File Manager.

Additional reporting by Norvin Leach

================================================================

Compaq to bundle LapLink with Presarios

From PC Week for March 27, 1995 by Lisa DiCarlo

Compaq Computer Corp. next month will start bundling Traveling Software
Inc.'s LapLink for Windows software with its forthcoming Pentium-based
Presario systems.

The software, which has been customized for Presarios, will allow Compaq
support personnel to remotely take over a user's system to diagnose
problems, said officials of both companies.

Initially designed to help Compaq reduce its consumer-support costs, a
more sophisticated version of the software may be implemented on
ProLinea and Deskpro PCs. However, Compaq has no immediate plans to do
that, according to officials with the Houston-based company.

LapLink for Windows features a chat utility that enables real-time
communication between a user and technician. The software can reduce
service and support phone call costs by as much as 50 percent, said
Compaq officials.

First-time buyers may not be familiar with PC terminology, they
explained, and therefore will find it difficult to explain problems over
the phone.

LapLink includes SpeedSync, which speeds up file transfers when updating
current files by comparing old and new files, and sending only the
changes.

Current owners of Presario desktops can purchase LapLink directly from
Compaq for $199.

================================================================

Consortium is NIICE, but IS skeptical

From PC Week for March 27, 1995 by Ted Smalley Bowen

Six leading software developers this week will pledge to work together
to increase interoperability among their products, but many IS managers
doubt the group will spark constructive change any time soon.

At NetWorld+Interop in Las Vegas, Sybase Inc., along with Computer
Associates International Inc., Lotus Development Corp., IBM, Microsoft
Corp., and Novell Inc., will announce the formation of NIICE -- New
Information Industry Cooperative Endeavor.

The goal is to spur vendors to exchange technology and information to
make applications and operating systems compatible across product lines,
said sources close to the initiative.

The group is expected to enlist the help of X/Open Co. Ltd. to arbitrate
license agreements between vendors on a case-by-case basis and act as
mediator for any disputes, sources said.

"I'm glad to see they're interested in this kind of cooperation, but in
terms of progress on the ground level of bytes working with bytes, I'd
say `show me,'" said Wayne Kurtz, lead database administrator at Pep
Boys, in Philadelphia.

NIICE will function primarily as a voluntary forum for developers, one
analyst said. "There's nothing contractual," said Betsy Burton, research
director of the software systems and technology division at Gartner
Group Inc., in Stamford, Conn. "It's a forum for developers to license
code from each other."

To really make a difference, the vendors would have to go beyond simply
licensing each other's code, developers said.

"The biggest problem [in developing and supporting applications from
different vendors] has been the lack of diagnostic tools," said Larry
Runge, chief information officer of Wheels Inc., in Des Plaines, Ill.
"Today, none of the vendors has adequate tools for their own products,
and none spans the whole suite of products, so you spend a lot of time
tracking down performance problems."

One developer cited an interoperability wish list that includes a
standard for distributed database access and a meta-dictionary for
semantic information.

"That's what's needed in the application development process," said Tom
Sanfilippo, chief technologist at Ohio State University, in Columbus.

While officials from the participating companies declined to comment
officially on the initiative, one member, who spoke anonymously, said
the alliance represents more than a symbolic endorsement of open
systems.

"It's much more than a marketing gambit," the official said.

================================================================

SATAN: A blessing for Internet

From PC Week for March 27, 1995 by Eamonn Sullivan and Michael Blakeley

Every organization connected to the Internet has a date with the devil
on April 5, when SATAN is unleashed, but the engagement will likely be
beneficial.

PC Week Labs examined a beta copy of SATAN (System Administrator Tool
for Analyzing Networks), a free Unix-based tool that has touched off
criticism from systems administrators for its ability to examine any
network connected to the Internet and uncover security holes. We found
it a powerful, easy-to-use tool that will likely provide more benefits
than harm to almost any organization.

When SATAN is released on the Internet next week, any Internet user will
be able to find well-known security flaws in any connected network.
Unless a systems administrator wants to be the second person to discover
these flaws, it would behoove the administrator to run SATAN as quickly
as possible.

Written by Dan Farmer, formerly of Silicon Graphics Inc. and CERT (the
Internet's Computer Emergency Response Team), and Wietse Venema of the
Eindhoven University of Technology, in the Netherlands, SATAN scans a
network looking for vulnerabilities. It also provides valuable
information about system configurations, trust relationships between
hosts, and the services that each host on a network provides.

The vulnerabilities SATAN finds include misconfigured anonymous FTP
(File Transfer Protocol), mail gateways, X Window servers, and Network
File System servers. All are well-known problems but are still common on
the Internet.

SATAN does not exploit the holes it finds. What it does do is provide
administrators with detailed information about how to fix those holes.
Although SATAN is not the first tool designed to help administrators
secure their network, it is the easiest one to use that we've found and
provides the most information about how to correct problems.

We installed SATAN on two Sun Microsystems Computer Corp. workstations
running Solaris 2.4 and SunOS 4.1.3. We tested it on a network made up
of a mix of operating systems, including various varieties of Unix,
Windows, and Windows NT.

SATAN recognized most systems, discovered services such as WWW (World-
Wide Web) servers and anonymous FTP, and uncovered security problems --
both those we put in on purpose and a few we didn't know about.

The tool requires Version 5 of Perl (a popular Unix scripting language),
even though most organizations have only Perl 4. Users will also need to
install a WWW browser, which SATAN uses for its user interface.

Once SATAN is installed and compiled, all interaction with the program
is through the WWW browser. We filled out a form to choose our target
hosts and networks and used buttons to set options such as whether to
scan just a particular host or an entire network.

Hosts with vulnerabilities were listed, and each vulnerability was
linked to on-line documentation with detailed recommendations for fixing
the holes.

================================================================

NDS-Tuxedo link addresses security, data distribution

From PC Week for March 27, 1995 by Norvin Leach

SALT LAKE CITY -- Novell Inc. last week detailed plans to integrate
Tuxedo with NDS to ease security headaches and data distribution across
LANs.

The announcement, made here at BrainShare, is part of the company's plan
to port Tuxedo to NetWare. Using NetWare Directory Services as a data-
and-configuration repository will provide consistent, transparent access
to Tuxedo-based applications, officials said.

Consistent access will obviate a security check each time a user is
routed to a different node, said Joe Menard, vice president and general
manager of Novell's Tuxedo system division, in Summit, N.J.

The integration of NDS and Tuxedo will occur later this year, officials
said. Pricing was not disclosed.

The ability to manage all Tuxedo applications via NDS would be a boon,
one IS manager said.

"Leveraging a single management point for security and extending that to
all your activities sounds like something we'd be interested in," said
Jon Christoff, senior network analyst for Rogers Cable Systems Ltd., in
Don Mills, Ontario.

To preserve Tuxedo's performance level, the transaction monitor will
maintain its own high-speed naming cache or bulletin board, in addition
to the hooks into NDS, Menard said. The bulletin board will also share
information with NDS.

================================================================

Microsoft, DirecTV mull PC-satellite links

From PC Week for March 27, 1995 by Mary Jo Foley

Microsoft Corp. and GM Hughes Electronics Corp.'s DirecTV division are
in preliminary talks about developing technology that links PCs running
a version of Windows to DirecTV's direct-broadcast satellite system.

Microsoft has set up a demonstration version of an interactive home PC
linked to a DirecTV dish on its Redmond, Wash., campus, sources said.
The PC includes an add-in board allowing the device to display output
from the dish directly on PCs and large-screen monitors. The DirecTV
satellite system now works with set-top boxes from RCA-Thomson Consumer
Electronics, rather than PCs.

The talks are in the early stages; an announcement of a deal is not
imminent, and technology resulting from a deal would not be delivered
before 1996, the sources said.

"We're talking to a lot of companies, including Microsoft, although
nothing [is] close to final with any of the vendors," said a spokeswoman
for DirecTV, in El Segundo, Calif. "We're keeping all our options open."

Microsoft has been stepping up its hardware-development capacity but is
unlikely to get into the board-manufacturing business, said sources
close to the company. Instead, Microsoft is likely talking to DirecTV
about operating systems, interactive broadband technology, and on-line
content. Sources said direct-broadcast satellite would be a good
wireless medium for delivering The Microsoft Network on-line service.

DirecTV could also provide a delivery mechanism for content that
Microsoft and third parties are building for Microsoft's forthcoming
interactive-broadband network service, which includes audio/video server
technology called Tiger.

"This would give you a very wide-bandwidth channel," said a Microsoft
developer, who requested anonymity. "It would be like having four T-1
lines piped into one place. News-feed services, Internet providers, and
interactive TV players would all be interested in it."

A deal with DirecTV could complicate Microsoft's relationships with
cable TV companies, including Tele-Communications Inc., which has
invested $125 million in MSN. Microsoft officials declined to comment.

================================================================

NetWorld+Interop casts broad communications net

From PC Week for March 27, 1995 by PC Week Staff

NetWorld+Interop this week will sport an eclectic character as it hosts
product rollouts ranging from server-software suites to SNA
interoperability software.

SunSoft Inc., IBM, Hewlett-Packard Co., and Lotus Development Corp. are
among the headliners for the Las Vegas show, which is expected to
attract more than 60,000 attendees.

SunSoft, of Mountain View, Calif., plans to announce a suite of Solaris
X86 server applications designed to ease integration with NetWare
networks. The Solaris X86 Server Suite has three main components:
Application Server, PC Network Administration Server, and Internet
Gateway Server. All three applications can reside on one computer or be
split among two or three machines.

The Application Server is $1,995, the PC Network Administration Server
is $4,245, and the Internet Gateway is $1,595. The first two are
available now from SunSoft resellers and VARs. The Internet Gateway is
due in the summer.

IBM will show a new multiprotocol concentrator for branch-office sites
that lowers the cost of combining SNA/APPN (Systems Network
Architecture/Advanced Peer-to-Peer Network) traffic with LAN-to-LAN
traffic over a single network.

"That sounds ideal for people who have a full SNA backbone and want to
implement some IP and use SNA as the only backbone protocol," said
Michael Zavodsky, communication-systems analyst at United Parcel
Service, in Mahwah, N.J.

The IBM 2217 Nways Multiprotocol Concentrator implements IBM's AnyNet
protocol-conversion technology to transmit IP, IPX, and NetBIOS traffic
across an SNA WAN as SNA/APPN protocol traffic. The 2217 is due by the
end of May; support for APPN's High Performance Routing is due by early
next year.

HP, of Palo Alto, Calif., will announce plans to support Advanced Micro
Devices Inc.'s Magic Packet technology in a network-management
application for its OpenView platform. The software lets network
administrators remotely power-on so-called "green PCs," which power down
when not in use to save energy.

AMD, of Sunnyvale, Calif., plans to add Magic Packet to all its PCnet
Ethernet controllers in the second quarter.

HP will incorporate Magic Packet in its network-ready Vectra PCs later
this year, according to Jacques Clay, general manager of the company's
worldwide PC division in Grenoble, France.

Other announcements include the following:

-- Cheyenne Communications Inc., Lotus, and Artisoft Inc. will announce
a deal to combine Cheyenne's BitWare personal universal communications
in-box software, Lotus' cc:Mail E-mail package, and Artisoft's LANtastic
network operating system for enhanced telephony and E-mail functions,
sources said.

-- ADC Kentrox will demonstrate two ATM (asynchronous transfer mode)
multiplexers that integrate multiple traffic over a single wide-area ATM
link. The Portland, Ore., firm's AAC-3 (ATM Access Concentrator-3)
multiplexes data, video, and voice traffic over private and public ATM
WANs operating at speeds ranging from 64K bps to 155M bps.

The AAC-3 28-port concentrator, which supports ATM and non-ATM traffic
from a variety of sources, ranges from $10,000 to $60,000 and is due in
the fall.

The lower-end, fixed-configuration CellSmart T-1 ATM Access Concentrator
combines ATM cell traffic from several sources onto a single T-1 stream.
The ATM multiplexer is available now in a single-port version for
$4,995. A dual-port version is $5,495.

-- Racal-Datacom Inc., of Sunrise, Fla., will add an ATM interface
module and a Synchronous Optical Network link module to its PremNet
fiber multiplexers.

-- Netscape Communications Corp., also of Mountain View, will introduce
a pair of specialized World-Wide Web servers and four applications for
electronic commerce. Aimed at giving users a soup-to-nuts set of
Internet services, the servers will expand the functionality of
Netscape's basic Web software to include firewall security and access to
Usenet newsgroups.

Reporting by Viki Bernard, Lisa DiCarlo, Anne Knowles, Paula Musich,
Andy Patrizio, and Erica Schroeder

Attention: You are now reading news which is expressly prepared for
ZiffNet members. If you redistribute this file, or any part therein, on
any online service, BBS, LAN, WAN or other electronic or print
distribution mechanism, you are in violation of U.S. copyright laws--and
are subject to subsequent penalties.

================================================================

IBM accelerates revamp of OS/400

From PC Week for March 27, 1995 by Mary Jo Foley

As IBM ships the last of its promised OS/400 Release 3.1 components this
week, it is paving the way for delivery of a completely redesigned,
PowerPC-based OS/400 release later this year.

IBM is revamping the 5-year-old AS/400 operating system at a breakneck
pace, hoping to deter its customers from accepting blandishments from
Microsoft Corp. and Hewlett-Packard Co. to migrate to their respective
server platforms.

The stakes are high. IBM claimed an installed base of 300,000 AS/400s at
the end of 1994, with sales growing by 50,000 units per year. More than
25,000 applications are available for the platform, 3,000 of these being
true client/server applications, IBM officials said.

This week, IBM will ship its OS/2 2.1 client for OS/400 Version 3.1, as
well as new COBOL tools, Ultimedia Mail, and Manageware/400 for the
platform. These will supplement the wave of 3.1 add-ons that IBM rolled
out in February, including LAN Server/400, the Windows 3.1 client, Open
Database Connectivity 2 support, CICS/400, and Ultimedia development
tools.

In the second half of this year, IBM will start a staged rollout of its
next release of OS/400, which will support a new line of PowerPC-based
AS/400 servers, said Dave Sass, manager of technology communications
with IBM's AS/400 division, in Rochester, Minn. OS/400 Version 3.x will
be rebuilt from the ground up to run on these servers.

IBM will rewrite the OS/400 kernel in C++, Sass said. It will add the
Taligent object-oriented application-development frameworks and
integrate support for IBM's System Object Model.

"We'll be building more object-oriented extensions to the [DB2/400]
database, which is integrated into the operating system, and will be
building in more parallelism to support the [symmetric multiprocessing]
capabilities of the chip," Sass added.

But IBM's competitors aren't standing still. Microsoft is aggressively
working to convince OS/400 users to migrate to Windows NT and BackOffice
by sponsoring developer seminars, helping ISVs port OS/400 applications
to NT, and issuing more enterprise development tools and features for
NT.

Version 2.11 of Microsoft's SNA Server, which went into beta earlier
this month, will include improved AS/400 connectivity, officials at the
Redmond, Wash., company said. And SQL Server 6.0, due in the second
quarter, will support improved interoperability with DB2/400, officials
said.

"OS/400 has DB2/400, sophisticated security, and systems-management
tools integrated into a single package," said Jeff Koepke, IS manager
with S.C. Johnson Wax's worldwide professional division, in Racine, Wis.
"This lets us move data between [on-line transaction processing] and our
forthcoming on-line analytical processor to build a data warehouse. To
do this with Unix, you'd have to integrate a lot of different
components. NT is getting there, but OS/400 is still a lot more solid
than NT."

================================================================

Final Win 95 beta: Slick, still buggy

From PC Week for March 27, 1995 by David Berlind

Microsoft Corp.'s final beta release of Windows 95, M8, is not likely to
deliver an impressive out-of-box experience to most corporate
evaluators. Just as improbable as a flawless beta experience will be
Microsoft's ability to guarantee smooth Windows 95 installation and
operation across all Intel-based PCs by August. Microsoft may never be
able to make this assurance, given the operating system's complexity.

Microsoft last week reaffirmed its planned August ship date.

Because Microsoft and IBM cannot exercise the degree of control Apple
Computer Inc. does over its operating system's hardware, compatibility
for 100 percent of Intel-based machines is an impossible task.

Based on PC Week Labs' investigation of M8, users' experiences will fall
within a spectrum: Some will encounter a failed installation requiring
Microsoft's intervention, whereas others will easily get past
installation.

As a result, Microsoft may find itself facing the same rocky launch IBM
had with OS/2 Warp. In fact, Microsoft is probably no more capable of
delivering a sophisticated operating system that accommodates all the
vagaries of the installed base.

Another challenge will be meeting Windows 95's targeted delivery date of
August. Based on bugs encountered by PC Week Labs and those reported in
on-line forums, this goal will be tough to meet without sacrificing
compatibility with some hardware and software.

While Microsoft has fixed major bugs found in earlier betas, it is still
wracked by many nettlesome problems. These include "invalid system disk"
after installation, incompatibilities with graphics accelerators,
inconsistent modem initialization, random juxtaposition of icons in the
Control Panel, and systems that always boot into fail-safe mode.

Even though the initial experience following installation can be
impressive, lifting the hood reveals that interface and networking
issues remain.

When we requested a notebook installation for our IBM 750C ThinkPad,
Dial-Up Networking did not install properly. The prerequisite PCMCIA and
modem drivers, which should have installed automatically, did not.

Once installed, Dial-Up Networking exhibited inconsistent drive-mapping
behavior from one session to the next and, moreover, was mercurial in
the way in which Windows 95 interacted with the network when locally
attached.

Regardless of how we attached to the network, Windows 95 did not
gracefully recover from a disappearing mapped drive, which PC Week Labs
considers an absolute requirement of new-generation operating systems.

Newcomers to Windows 95 will find a radically different and improved
interface compared with prior versions of Windows. The rusty old program
and file managers have been replaced with a better, quicker menuing
system and a desktop metaphor that takes excellent advantage of the
mouse's right button. In addition, the 32-bit characteristics of the
operating system give users access to all of their applications almost
all of the time.

Users, however, will also find that some common operations, such as
copying files, may not be intuitive. This, along with the major UI
changes, will lead many to conclude that a substantial retraining
effort, on the same order as that required of OS/2 Warp, is necessary
before upgrading entire organizations.

Windows 95 performs similarly to OS/2 running 16-bit Windows
applications. In fact, 16-bit applications run slower under M8 than they
did under M7. The PC Week Labs results for both systems were a photo
finish. Microsoft has said it expects performance to change little
between now and the final release of Windows 95.

Differentiating Windows 95 from OS/2 are Microsoft applications and APIs
for messaging, telephony, and networking. Similar APIs and applications
are found in the trendsetting Macintosh.

Throwing the kitchen sink into a first release may come back to haunt
Microsoft. Our tests showed some of these differentiating features
possess design flaws that could be present when the product emerges from
beta in August for the promised general availability.

One flaw is the location management, which is a part of TAPI. By
including the client for MSN (The Microsoft Network) in Windows 95,
Microsoft has blown the opportunity to demonstrate good location
management by failing to permanently assign local MSN access numbers to
each location that the user creates.

About the only noticeable functional difference between M7 and M8 is the
disappearance of Winpad Organizer.

Is Windows 95 still worth examining? Absolutely. Many of the positives
we've identified in earlier coverage stand. But, given that
organizations will eventually have to upgrade systems anyway, we
recommend examining in painstaking detail all the options before
deciding.

================================================================

Fortune 500 ramps up wireless net projects

From PC Week for March 27, 1995 by Michael Moeller

Wireless networking will get a major vote of confidence from corporate
America at NetWorld+Interop in Las Vegas this week as five Fortune 500
companies unveil plans to integrate wireless technology into their IT
strategies.

Hertz Corp., Viacom Inc., and Anheuser-Busch Companies Inc. are among
the corporations starting to roll out wireless programs, based on
KeyWare middleware from Racotek Corp., as a way to streamline customer
service and improve data communications between remote staffs.

KeyWare is enabling these companies, as well as Minneapolis-based
Minnegasco and Overnite Transportation Co., of Raleigh, N.C., to connect
custom mobile applications to corporate network systems over a series of
wireless networks. "Wireless may be advanced for some companies, but it
gives us a real competitive advantage," said David Merritt, a research
and development project leader at Hertz, in Oklahoma City.

These early adopters are taking a risk, as many observers expect that
wireless coverage, pricing, and throughput issues won't be resolved for
at least a year.

"These companies are sticking their necks out a little," said Iain
Gillott, wireless-research manager at Link Resources Inc., in New York.
"But the competitive advantage they'll receive may make it worth the
risk."

Hertz's Merritt agreed. "We've had to work through a number of problems,
but without a doubt the benefits outweigh the headaches," he said.

Hertz began piloting its wireless system in five airports around the
United States, including Boston's Logan International Airport, early
last year. At these airports, Hertz courtesy bus drivers are equipped
with Norand Corp. PenKey handheld computers and wireless modems, which
they use to fulfill customer rental agreements and send the data to the
terminal office over SMR (specialized mobile radio) wireless networks.

The data is received by the Hertz office network, where hard-copy
reservation agreements are generated and waiting for customers upon
being dropped off.

The car-rental giant will officially roll out its first wireless program
next month at Hartsfield International Airport, in Atlanta. At the same
time, it will expand wireless coverage to include support for Cellular
Digital Packet Data, RAM, and Ardis networks. Curbside attendants will
be added to serve customers.

Hertz plans to have the wireless support in more than 20 airports around
the United States by November.

Viacom, a New York-based entertainment conglomerate, will have 87 of its
repair personnel up and running on the Ardis and Nextel SMR networks in
San Francisco within three months, said Richard Johnson, president of
Ubiquinet Corp., the San Ramon, Calif., reseller building the service
for Viacom.

While Anheuser-Busch officials declined to comment about the St. Louis
company's wireless project, sources say the largest U.S. beer maker will
begin testing a system in May for distribution and sales-order entry,
using an application the company is developing in-house.

The pilot plan calls for outfitting Anheuser-Busch's New York-based
salespeople with handheld terminals, which they will use to send sales
and billing information in real time to the company's regional office.

================================================================

120MHz Pentium PCs debut

From PC Week for March 27, 1995 by Lisa DiCarlo

The first crop of 120MHz Pentium desktop PCs, timed to coincide with
Intel Corp.'s rollout of the processor, will begin to trickle out this
week as manufacturers gear up to realign their system lineups.

Dell Computer Corp., Hewlett-Packard Co., Micron Computer Inc., and Zeos
International Inc. will each announce 120MHz Pentium systems, priced
starting at $2,500, using Intel's fastest processor to date.

As with every Intel processor introduction, the arrival of 120MHz
Pentium systems signals the beginning of the end for current processors.

"The 100MHz will be squeezed," said Brad Crooks, senior systems
consultant at Entex Information Services Inc., in Pittsburgh. "The
average user will probably have a 75MHz system as their entry level."

Some PC manufacturers concurred.

"Something is going to be phased out, but it's not clear whether it will
be the 90MHz or the 100MHz [Pentium]," said Boris Ellisman, manager of
desktop marketing for HP, of Palo Alto, Calif.

And with Intel ramping up its Pentium manufacturing, even the latest
120MHz systems may be obsolete by year's end, with the 133MHz Pentium
processor due in the summer.

The 133MHz CPU "will be a more important chip than [the 120MHz Pentium],
which is really much ado about nothing," said an official at a major PC
maker who requested anonymity.

Officials at other OEMs, who also asked not to be named, said the 120MHz
chip does not exactly represent a quantum leap in performance over the
100MHz chip -- but the 133MHz will.

In any case, users will be able to choose from the following 120MHz
systems beginning this week:

-- New versions of Dell's Dimension and OptiPlex PCs, with prices
starting at $2,599 and $2,585, respectively.

OptiPlex, which uses Intel's Triton PCI (Peripheral Component
Interconnect) chip set, features 8M bytes of RAM and up to a 2G-byte SCSI hard
drive. The OptiPlex will also be outfitted with Dell Inspector, a management
application that gives users access to system component information.

The midrange Dimension XPS also features 8M bytes of RAM, the Triton
chip set, and a 128-bit graphics accelerator card.

-- Micron's Millennia PC sports 16M bytes of RAM, a 1.2G-byte hard
drive, a quadruple-speed CD ROM drive, a 16-bit sound card, and a 64-bit
graphics card. Prices start at $3,799.

-- Two 120MHz Pentium PCs, the Vectra VL and Vectra VE, from HP, start
at $2,500 (not including a monitor). HP officials in Palo Alto, Calif.,
said volume shipments to users will not begin before July, when the
chips become more widely available.

-- Zeos will ship the 120MHz Pantera 120, minus the Triton PCI bus,
priced at $3,695 for a model with a 1G-byte hard drive, quad-speed CD
ROM drive, and 16M bytes of RAM, officials from the Minneapolis company
said.

Compaq Computer Corp. and NEC Technologies Inc. are expected to announce
120MHz systems in the third quarter, sources said. Gateway 2000 Inc.
will also begin shipping 120MHz PCs in mid-April.

Some corporate users were encouraged by the price points.

"I have $2,800 to spend on a PC, so I let the market tell me what I can
get," said David Greenberg, director of new systems development at
Orlando Health Care Group, in Orlando, Fla. "Three years ago, it was a
25MHz 486SX. Today, it's a 90MHz [Pentium] with 16M bytes of RAM. I'm
sure the next step will be 120MHz systems."

Other users said they will wait for the price of P120 desktops to fall.

"As soon as the price of a 120MHz comes down to where the 100MHz is,
we're buying," said Mike Ross, CAE coordinator at Eriez Magnetics, in
Erie, Pa.

================================================================

New AST BIOS closes the lid on shoddy notebook dock

From PC Week for March 27, 1995 by Lisa DiCarlo

AST Research Inc. last week released a modified BIOS for its Ascentia
900N and 910N notebook PCs that enables the systems to work inside
docking stations while the lid is closed.

The old BIOS required users to leave the notebook lid open a crack while
in the docking station in order to work.

"It was like telling cabbies to leave the hoods of their cars open in
the summertime to prevent overheating," said Todd Hicks, PC technical
specialist at a major Northeast insurance company. "It's just not the
way docking stations are supposed to work."

Hicks was also frustrated by the lack of notification about the
workaround; he said his notebook simply stopped working after he tried
placing it in the docking station several times with the lid closed.

Notebooks from Compaq Computer Corp., IBM, and most other notebook
vendors work in docking stations when the cover is closed.

Weak solution

AST officials said the original solution -- advising customers to keep
the lid open -- was weak, but necessary.

"We feared that heat buildup would cause damage to the LCD panel," said
Brett Berg, brand manager for mobile computing products at AST, in
Irvine, Calif.

AST modified several lines of boot-up code in the BIOS "so the notebook
lid can be closed and operate normally" when docked, said Berg.

The updated BIOS was posted last week on AST's bulletin-board service.

================================================================

Cache boosts 120MHz Pentium's speed

From PC Week for March 27, 1995 by Michael Caton and Christopher Yates

PC Week Labs' tests of two 120MHz Pentium-based computers show varying
performance gains, with a new cache design helping to get the most out
of Intel Corp.'s latest and fastest chip.

Micron Computer Inc.'s $3,799 P120 Millennia, set to ship next month, is
41 percent faster than the fastest 90MHz Pentium-based system we have
tested, a Micron PCI PowerStation P90. A preproduction model of Hewlett-
Packard Co.'s Vectra VL 5/120, due to ship in July for about $3,300 for
the configuration we tested, ran about 10 percent faster than the 90MHz
Micron.

What enables the Micron Millennia to make the most of the 120MHz chip is
Intel's new Triton PCI (Peripheral Component Interconnect) chip set,
which can take advantage of the system's EDO (Extended Data Out) DRAM
(dynamic RAM) and SyncBurst SRAM (static RAM) cache.

When we replaced the Millennia's EDO DRAM with standard DRAM, overall
system performance dropped less than 2 percent, well within the margin
of error for PC Week Labs' Winstone 95 test. This led us to believe that
the SyncBurst cache provided the boost.

In contrast, the Vectra uses a VLSI PCI chip set, standard DRAM, and
asynchronous SRAM like those found in many 90MHz Pentium systems.

In terms of price vs. performance, the HP machine yields a slight
performance gain for slightly more money: Its expected street price is
22 percent higher than the cost of the $2,699 90MHz Micron PowerStation.
(The price/performance ratio will probably shift before the Vectra
ships.) Premium performance costs more: The Micron Millennia is 31
percent more expensive than the PowerStation.

Both systems were tested with 16M bytes of RAM.

================================================================

Dell servers will have better net links, PCI 2.0

From PC Week for March 27, 1995 by Stephanie LaPolla

NEW YORK -- Dell Computer Corp. last week outlined a server strategy
focused on providing users with integrated network components,
sophisticated systems-management tools, and more processing power to
support mission-critical applications.

Dell will broaden its offerings over the next 18 months, Michael Dell,
chairman and CEO, said at a presentation here last week.

The Austin, Texas, company is currently working on a four-way P6 server
that will debut around the end of the year, Dell said.

Within the next six months, Dell will add an upgrade to Intel Corp.'s
LANDesk Management Suite that includes better support for clients that
comply with the Distributed Management Interface. Company officials
declined to provide pricing for the new server or software offerings.

Systems-management software for servers is becoming increasingly
important, said one user.

"The key to the [network environment] will be bulletproof system
software that can manage any server," said Mark Margevicius, a network
analyst at Key Corp., a PC Week Corporate Partner in Cleveland.

Dell is also forming partnerships to gain expertise in areas such as
networking. Last week, it announced an alliance with 3Com Corp. to
jointly develop and integrate network devices such as interface cards,
hubs, and routers.

Support for Peripheral Component Interconnect 2.0, a bus standard that
doubles internal bandwidth from the current data-transfer rate of 132M
bytes per second, is also on tap for the future, Dell officials said.

The company plans to offer servers with built-in support for Fast/Wide
SCSI interfaces that operate at 20M bytes per second. Fiber channel
links that are necessary for hosting high-speed database applications
are also planned, officials said.

One former Dell customer was skeptical of the company's future plans in
light of its current technical shortcomings.

"We had a Dell box running NT and SQL Server, and there was nothing but
contention between non-supported SCSI controllers," said Arthur Tisi,
chief information officer for a major non-profit organization in New
York, a PC Week Corporate Partner. "Dell has a problem keeping
peripherals up to the standards supported under NT."

Dell stressed last week that his company is working closely with
Microsoft Corp. to ensure compatibility with NT.

================================================================

Breaking News

From PC Week for March 27, 1995 by PC Week Staff

Security Flaw Pops Up in Test of 486 Chips

By Steve Kovsky

The discovery of a widespread but largely innocuous security bug in 486
chips appears to be making Intel Corp. backtrack on its policy of fully
disclosing CPU errata to users.

Lonestar Evaluation Laboratories Inc., in tests on Intel and Advanced
Micro Devices Inc. 486 chips, found that some instructions for
invalidating cache memory were accessible from the user application
level. Normally, this access should be permitted only in protected mode
or at the operating-system level.

The bug is considered a breach of C2-level security for PCs used in
Department of Defense-related work, said Ed Curry, president of
Lonestar, in Georgetown, Texas. An Intel spokeswoman countered that the
chip has been given government clearance.

Last week, Intel officials said the Santa Clara, Calif., company has
informed software vendors of the errata. But the problem was not made
public to users and hardware OEMs.

"If anybody's foolish enough to invoke this instruction, they deserve
what they get," said Jerry Banks, a Dataquest Inc. analyst in San Jose,
Calif.

Microsoft's Blackbird Flies This Week

Microsoft will take the covers off its on-line-service publishing tool,
code-named Blackbird, this week at the Seybold show in Boston.

However, the Blackbird beta testing program is not slated to begin until
summer, according to sources close to the company.

SunSoft To Debut Web Browser

At the NetWorld+Interop exposition in Las Vegas this week, SunSoft plans
to introduce a new World-Wide Web browser, called HotJava, with a built-
in interpreter for a programming language to give users OLE-like
functions over the Internet.

Zeos Ships Pentium Laptop

Zeos International will begin shipping this week the Meridian 850, a
6.8-pound notebook based on a 75MHz Pentium processor.

A model with 8M bytes of RAM, a 520M-byte hard drive, a 16-bit sound
card, and a dual-scan display is priced at $3,495.

IBM Reiterates PowerPC Commitment

IBM is expected to ship its long-awaited PowerPC desktop systems in
June, but with a beta version of OS/2 for PowerPC, Lee Reiswig, general
manager of the Personal Software Products division, said at an analyst
conference in Orlando, Fla., last week. The final OS/2 release is due
later this summer.

IBM developers are also working on another iteration of Warp, code-named
Warp Server, that will be a combination of LAN Server and OS/2 Warp. The
product will include DCE-based directory services and is likely to go
into beta testing by year's end, sources said.

Shortages Hit 486 Suppliers

A worldwide shortage of 486 chips is starting to make life difficult for
system vendors as Intel shifts semiconductor production in favor of
Pentium chips.

Advanced Micro Devices is unable to meet demand for its processors,
according to Rob Herb, director of marketing and systems engineering for
the company's PC Products Division.

Briefly Noted:

Microsoft this week will ship Internet Assistant for Word 6.0.

3Com has agreed to acquire Primary Access and Sonix Communications.

Hewlett-Packard, Microsoft, IBM, and Novell will announce at
NetWorld+Interop this week a strategic network-printing initiative.

Shiva announced last week a licensing program for ShivaPPP, its remote-
access client software. Early adopters of the technology include
Microsoft, Netscape, and Farallon Computing.

Microsoft this week at its TechEd conference in New Orleans will
introduce a BackOffice developers kit that includes SQL Server
Workstation Edition, C++, Office Professional with Bookshelf, and
Project.

AST Research this week will drop prices on its Manhattan server line by
as much as 20 percent.

Microsoft last week issued a complete beta of its upcoming SQL Server
6.0 upgrade.

SAP will sign a pact with Intergraph this week.

Computer Associates and Texas Instruments will port TI Composer by IEF
client/server development environment to OpenIngres.

SunSoft is expected to show a new beta of Solaris for the PowerPC at
NetWorld+Interop.

Lotus plans to ask the U.S. Supreme Court to reverse a recent appeals
court decision that cleared Borland of copyright infringement.

Sony next week will slash pricing on its Magic Link PDA by 30 percent to
$699.

================================================================

FileNet tunes Visual WorkFlo, paves way for remote version

From PC Week for March 27, 1995 by Erica Schroeder

FileNet Corp. is revamping its workflow software with an upgrade that
improves performance and sets the stage for a major new release that
makes managing remote clients easier.

Visual WorkFlo 1.1, which will be announced in April at the Association
for Information and Image Management show in San Francisco, includes
performance enhancements for large-volume workflow processes, a revamped
interface for the software's authoring and monitoring module, and
streamlined methods of building business processes and workflow plans,
officials from the Costa Mesa, Calif., company said.

Later this year, FileNet plans to announce a major update that eases
configuration and maintenance of workflow systems accessed by remote
clients. This version, tentatively called Release 2.0, will let remote
users download business processes and workflow rules to a client and
automatically upload completed work when a connection to the network is
re-established.

FileNet also will expand server support, adding Windows NT to the
current HP/UX, Solaris, and AIX platforms. Support for NetWare will be
added later this year as well.

Visual WorkFlo represents an effective marriage of imaging and workflow
technology, users of the current release said.

"It's very responsive to clients as far as being able to pull up
information, and we have about 2 million documents loaded on disk," said
Craig Doering, senior programmer analyst with Unum Corp., in Portland,
Maine.

"As part of enabling the workflow process, we're rolling out
workstations to end users and giving them the ability to pull up
information themselves," Doering said.

Version 1.1 is priced at $495 for the Visual WorkFlo/Performer, $1,995
for the Visual WorkFlo/Conductor, and $4,995 for the Visual
WorkFlo/Composer. The server software, either Visual WorkFlo/Services
for non-imaging systems or Image Management Services for imaging
applications, is priced according to configuration.

================================================================

Bus design unites peripherals

From PC Week for March 27, 1995 by Steve Kovsky

SAN FRANCISCO -- The rat's nest of cabling that spills out from the back
of every PC may soon be a thing of the past, thanks to a Universal
Serial Bus unveiled jointly last week by Intel Corp. and Microsoft Corp.

Introduced at the Windows Hardware Engineering Conference here, USB
promises to replace the half-dozen peripheral connectors on the average
PC with one all-purpose plug for keyboards, mice, monitors, and other
devices.

USB will allow as many as 63 of these devices to be daisy-chained in any
combination, according to developers at Intel Architecture Labs, in
Hillsboro, Ore. It will support devices that transfer data at up to 5M
bps. By continually polling the bus for devices, users can "hot-plug"
peripherals into the system and use them without rebooting.

Intel and Microsoft plan to offer the specification to all hardware and
software developers royalty-free this month for early design and
prototyping work. The finished specification is due in June. In the next
quarter, Intel expects to be the first of several vendors to offer chip
sets supporting USB. Microsoft will include USB support in Windows 95
and Windows NT. IBM has also announced support.

The first systems to implement USB, expected late this year, will
probably offer one USB port in addition to the full panel of
conventional I/O ports.

"There's definitely some utility, though it's not an enormous
breakthrough," said Ray Grant, director of IS for Portland Community
College, in Oregon. "It looks like [with USB] it will be easier to
maintain, troubleshoot, and repair problems."

USB was perhaps the most significant of more than a dozen
specifications, proposed standards, and reference design platforms
discussed at the conference. All were aimed at bolstering the
performance and basic capabilities of PCs running Windows.

For example, Intel and Microsoft also extolled native signal processing,
Plug and Play, and InstantOn.

Separately, Motorola Inc. touted its PowerPC architecture at the
conference by introducing new firmware that works with industry-standard
PC chip sets. PowerPC firmware 3.0 was designed to isolate all platform-
specific code in the porting layer, accelerating the process of porting
to PowerPC, officials said. Beta copies of the firmware are currently
available to OEMs.

================================================================

Microsoft tempts potential converts

From PC Week for March 27, 1995 by Wendy Pickering and Lisa Nadile

Hoping to convert the majority of users to Windows 95 within 15 months
of its release, Microsoft Corp. has begun previewing Office for Windows
95 in an effort to entice corporate customers to embrace the new
environment.

The 32-bit suite, for which all applications will bear the 7.0 moniker,
is 50 percent to 60 percent faster than the current 16-bit applications,
officials said.

"The performance [increases] will be strong enough reason to upgrade,"
said Robert Bach, director of product marketing for the Redmond, Wash.,
company.

But most IS managers said that labor, upgrade costs, and retraining
issues will put them on a conservative Windows 95 path.

"Our position on migrating is that we probably won't do it right away,
and we'll do it gradually," said Mark Garrett, a network administrator
for Unocal Corp., in Santa Fe Springs, Calif. "We understand what the
values are, but there is nothing that would require me to upgrade."

Microsoft contends that in addition to improved performance, IS shops
will be tempted to upgrade to Windows 95 to gain new systems-management
facilities that will lower support costs.

To facilitate upgrades, Microsoft has maintained the same file formats
in both the 16- and 32-bit versions of Word and Excel. However,
PowerPoint's file format will change; the presentation-graphics package
will ship with a PowerPoint 4.0 filter for sharing data between the two
versions.

In general, the new suite, which Microsoft will ship this week to about
100 beta sites, is more task-oriented. For example, users can create an
icon that directly opens a frequently used document.

The suite also makes heavy use of multitasking and multithreading, but
users will have to learn when to invoke these capabilities because some
multithreading implementations will slow down the applications, such as
background recalculations in Excel. Other functions, like background
printing, will have no effect on speed.

The VBA (Visual Basic Applications) scripting language currently
included in Excel and Project will extend to Access in Office 7.0.
Eventually, officials said, VBA will be included in all applications.

Office Pro 7.0 also will include Bookshelf. The Exchange Mail client,
once mentioned by Microsoft officials for possible inclusion, is not
present in the suite.

Despite these advances, Microsoft will have to campaign vigorously for
IS support.

"If the main incentive is speed and new features vs. the trouble to
upgrade and retrain, I don't see many quick upgrades," said an IS
manager for a large Midwestern health-care corporation. "People will
wait for a certain level of stability, for the patch shipments to slow.
Performance only sells so much, especially when most of your users are
not at the power level."

Microsoft has not ruled out the possibility of another round of 16-bit
applications, especially if migration to Windows 95 is slower than
anticipated, Bach said.

================================================================

Gateway to bundle three-disk CD ROM changer

From PC Week for March 27, 1995 by Lisa DiCarlo

The 120MHz Pentium-based desktop PC that Gateway 2000 Inc. plans to
release will include a noticeably different component.

The P5-120, due to ship April 17, will feature a quadruple-speed, three-
disk CD ROM changer cartridge that fits into a half-height drive bay,
sources close to the company said.

Users can load three CD ROMs, which, combined, hold up to 1.8G bytes of
data, to locally access databases without adversely affecting network
bandwidth by calling large files from a remote server, the sources said.

The cartridge, manufactured in Taiwan, is similar to some audio CD
players that stack three or more CDs. Users can adjust volume, select a
CD ROM, and play or pause a computer or audio CD, all of which is
displayed via an LCD digital readout, sources said.

The cartridge will be sold as a standard feature on P5-120 systems and
will be offered as a $100 upgrade on all Pentium systems, the sources
said.

The $3,999 minitower PC will feature the CD changer, 16M bytes of
Extended Data Out RAM, a 1G-byte hard drive, 2M bytes of video RAM, and
a 17-inch Vivitron monitor, sources said.

Later in the year, Gateway will offer 1.6G-byte mode 4 hard drives on
some of its systems, sources said.

Although users can load up to three CD ROMs, only one can be played at a
time, unlike Packard Bell's Pentium PC, which has two separate CD ROM
drives. With that system, users can run two CD ROM applications
simultaneously or run one audio CD and one CD ROM.

Gateway officials in North Sioux City, S.D., declined to comment.

================================================================

Consistency of PCs' behavior drops when complexity level rises

From PC Week for March 27, 1995 by John Dodge

Electronic technology, especially small computers, are famous for being
unpredictable and unreliable. Depending on your temperament, you fall
into one of two camps on this issue: You swear like a trooper when a
product fails (99.7 percent of end users), or you've been associated
with computers for so long that you accept their fallibility as another
quirk of life -- a double-edged sword for IS because, while downed
computers drive them crazy, PCs keep many of them employed.

Real-world examples: My cellular phone fades badly within a 20-mile
radius of my home. A hard disk, a keyboard, and a battery failed within
the first six months of life in my latest notebook computer. In fact,
every major component except the screens has failed across the 10
notebook computers I've used in the past two years. The four Dells and
three Conturas were the most problem-ridden; a Zenith and two Compaq
LTEs were sturdier and more reliable. I alternately fumed and erupted in
a Seattle hotel room recently, where I burned through four notebooks
before I could access my E-mail lifeline.

Windows 95 is about to continue that timeworn tradition that PCs will
never behave exactly how you to expect them to. OS/2 Warp developers,
who took the heat last fall, have to be chuckling right now.

Don't get me wrong. Both are spectacular products that required
Herculean efforts by people a lot smarter than me. After a week using
M8, I love the Windows 95 user interface. It's faster, better-looking,
and enjoyable to use. Same kudos to Warp, which I'm evaluating for home
use.

The fact is, the M8 beta (.99999998 release) fried my machine after
installation. Microsoft phone techs were momentarily stumped, then
quickly got it running, blaming the problem on a possible virus.

My question is whether PC technology has hit a certain wall. Is
complexity outpacing the ability of its creators to keep up with respect
to reliability? New delays in OS/2 for PowerPC seem to confirm this. The
delays and, now, the public bugginess in Windows 95 say it loudly.

Will Microsoft ship it in August or go one more round of testing?
Microsoft officials have acknowledged that Windows 95 may be trying to
solve too many difficult problems at once.

OS/400 may be ugly and expensive, but darn it, it works. One of our
corporate partners, billion-dollar Washington Corporations, runs its
business in large measure on used AS/400s. And this is a young, growing
company.

Setting realistic expectations is one answer, but that runs contrary to
the PC industry's inherent desire to overachieve.

What's driving you nuts these days? As always, drop me a line:
jdodge@pcweek.ziff.com on the Internet, 72241,303 on CompuServe, or 239-
3520 on MCI Mail.

================================================================

Intuit has a dream, with or without Microsoft

From PC Week for March 27, 1995 by John Dodge

Intuit Inc. co-founder and Chairman Scott Cook had just left Citibank
and was on his way to sell his ambitious plans for electronic banking to
several Canadian banks when Senior Executive Editor John Dodge tracked
him down recently. Speaking from a cellular telephone in a cab bound for
LaGuardia Airport, Cook described that vision as well as the "what ifs"
of his company's pending merger with Microsoft Corp.

PC WEEK: What's the vision for the merger with Microsoft?

COOK: Our vision does not change even if we remain independent. My deal
with Bill [Gates] is that I won't tell him about our strategy and plans
and he won't tell me his. So I can only talk about where we are headed.

PC WEEK: Where are you headed, with or without Microsoft?

COOK: We want customers to instantly know about a bank's services 24
hours a day and feel they are hooked into that bank.

I have not met a bank that did not want to have closer relationships
with customers. I have not met a consumer who did not want to deal with
a bank more conveniently. Both groups want to be deeper and closer.

PC WEEK: What tangibles of electronic banking will we see first?

COOK: You'll see the basic stuff. We will automate your current
relationship so [you'll electronically be able to] get transaction and
balance updates, transfer between accounts [but not between banks], do
account reconciliation, and converse with your bank electronically.

PC WEEK: When? This year?

COOK: We don't preannounce products ... but this year.

PC WEEK: What will this all cost?

COOK: There is no magic price. The price will be elastic, which is the
way the world works, but we'll engineer it for an extremely low cost
structure.

PC WEEK: So does the sale of packaged software become incidental to the
services business? Will it be free and downloadable?

COOK: Software is one of 10 different elements, but it's not incidental.
... We get significant revenue from supplies like checks and invoices.
The largest [single product] is Quicken, but that's less than 25 percent
of revenues. ... The Deluxe CD ROM version of Quicken is 500M bytes of
stuff. That's not downloadable.

PC WEEK: You've said you need big partners to execute your vision. What
happens if the Microsoft merger does not happen?

COOK: It will happen. Anyone who knows antitrust law knows that.

PC WEEK: If you merge with Microsoft, do you foresee favoring The
Microsoft Network?

COOK: We already have our network.

PC WEEK: Would you merge into MSN?

COOK: No. It's a different architecture.

PC WEEK: What do you think of the Internet?

COOK: I don't know the answer to that yet, but it has a high cost
structure.

What is it, $30 a month? That eliminates most households.

PC WEEK: Did Bill Gates first contact Intuit about the acquisition?

COOK: He made the first call. As we talked, we both got excited.

PC WEEK: Do you trust Microsoft entirely?

COOK: I run my own business and that is what they want. They have to
trust us.

PC WEEK: Has the merger delay been a distraction?

COOK: Not at all. It's usually the little firm that worries about jobs
[in cases like this]. Here, it is the small company's people that are
survivors. Microsoft divested itself of Money and did it in advance of
being asked to by anybody.

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================================================================