Dave Andrews
At last fall's Comdex, BYTE editors worked morning, noon, and night in picking the best products and technologies exhibited at the show. Winners and finalists are listed below.
Best of Show: Simon, a personal communications device, took top honors at the show (see the related story on page 28).
Most Significant Technology: Top honors went to the P1394 High-Performance Serial Bus draft standard, a new technology that should have a profound effect on computers and peripherals, as well as home electronics and industrial equipment. This bus interface is designed to be an inexpensive, universal interconnection for linking computers with hard drives; CD-ROM drives; printers; scanners; and consumer products like digital VCRs, TVs, and stereos at data transfer rates of up to 400 Mbps. The standard is being
developed by a committee within the IEEE. Companies receiving the award that participated in P1394 development included Adaptec, Apple, IBM's PC Company, Maxtor, Texas Instruments, and Western Digital.
Finalists in this category were µPol (pronounced micropol), from VRex (Hawthorne, NY); and Raven, from Intergraph (Huntsville, AL). The VRex technology includes hardware and software for inexpensively displaying 3-D stereoscopic images. Raven, a software/hardware combination, is designed to bring high-speed audio and video to Windows NT.
Best Portable: Simon won this. Finalists included the highly expandable, luggable PAC-586 Pentium system from Dolch (see the related story in this section), and Irvine, California-based Toshiba's PortŽgŽ T3400 and T3400CT subnotebooks.
Best System: The Quadra 610 with its DOS-compatible card took top honors (see the January News&Views). Finalists were the Express RISC server from NEC Technologies (Boxborough, MA), a dual-processor system that's based on NEC's VR
4400MC Mips processor; and DEC (Maynard, MA), which has introduced its DECpc XL series of modular 486- and Pentium-based PCs that will let you upgrade to the company's Alpha AXP CPU technology via a daughtercard.
Best Connectivity/Hardware: Largo, Florida-based AT&T Paradyne's DataPort 2001 Multimedia Communicator, a modem-size box with bundled modem/fax software and Data Beam's FarSite shared whiteboard program, lets you simultaneously talk and send and receive still images, graphics, and data on the same regular telephone line. Finalists included Solflower Computer (San Jose, CA), which developed a multihost controller that lets up to 16 Sun workstations share information at 8.3 MBps. Artisoft's (Tucson, AZ) Simply LANtastic, the other finalist, includes a scaled-down, simplified version of LANtastic 5.0 and ingenious self-terminating Ethernet adapters that can be daisy-chained and disconnected without interrupting the network.
Best Peripheral: SyQuest's SQ1080 offers the first PCMCIA removable hard
disk cartridge drive. Finalists were DSP Solutions' (Palo Alto, CA) portable 16-bit PCMCIA sound card and Philips Consumer Electronics' Brilliance 2130, a 21-inch digital monitor.
Best Connectivity/Software: DEC's LinkWorks software lets workgroups share information and collaborate over networks. Finalists were Visual Voice, a Visual Basic custom control from Stylus Innovation (Cambridge, MA), and BW-Server, from Raleigh, North Carolina-based Beame & Whiteside. BW-Server provides NFS (Network File System) functionality to an Intel-based PC without requiring a Unix-based machine to act as an NFS server.
Best Multimedia Hardware: Austek Microsystems' A1060 was named the winner (see the related story on page 28). Finalists included Fast Electronic U.S. (Natick, MA), which offers a video overlay, frame grabber, TV tuner, and video-editing system on one card with software for $549, and Microfield Graphics' (Beaverton, OR) Softboard.
Best Multimedia Software: Ultimedia Video IN/2 ($199) for OS/2 2.1 fr
om IBM Personal Software Products converts video input to Indeo or IBM Ultimotion format. Finalists were Lotus Development's ScreenCam (see the story on page 28), and Tempra Producer Pro, a $99 Windows-based modeler and rendering program from Mathematica (Lakeland, FL).
Best Printer: QMS (Mobile, AL) and its 2001 Knowledge System ($3999) took the top award in this category. QMS's system is based on Windows 3.1, and it combines a copier, fax, scanner, and laser printer. Finalists were the 360-dpi Canon (Costa Mesa, CA) $649 BJC-600 color ink-jet and LaserMaster's (Minneapolis, MN) $19,995 Digital Color Printer.
Best Software: Kai's Power Tools from HSC Software (Santa Monica, CA) won. Finalists were WizRule, a program developed by Rational of Tel Aviv that discovers exceptions and unknown rules in a database, and IBM's Personal Dictation System, which can handle up to 70 spoken words per minute.
Illustration: Microfield Graphics' Softboard is a $2995 peripheral that looks like an everyday wh
iteboard but displays information that you write simultaneously to a Mac or PC connected via a modem and phone lines. Softboard can greatly enhance a remote audioconference.
Illustration: When system manufacturers include the drive in their desktop and notebook computers, SyQuest (Fremont, CA) expects the price for end users to be less than $1 per megabyte. The drive accepts rugged, removable 60- and 80-MB cartridges.
Illustration: Kai's Power Tools, which works with any Windows application that supports Adobe Photoshop plug-in extensions, simplifies many of the complex operations in applying special effects to an image. The Texture Explorer lets you generate textures that go far beyond traditional textures like marble or wood.
Best of Comdex Awards
