April 1996 / News & Views

First Web PCs Arrive Peter Fonda, Will You Test Drive?? URL Surfing Comes to the Web Yea or Nay...Time Will Tell	Ven dors of inexpensive network PCs have shown proof-of-concept systems, and in some cases have begun limited field trials. Here's a look at the first $500 network PCs. - by Dave Andrews
Java Chips Boost Applet Speed	Three new microprocessors from Sun Microelectronics (formerly Sparc Technology Business ; Mountain View, CA) are the first CPUs dedicated to running Java software. - by Tom R. Halfhill
Web Crawlers to Index Java	A testimony to the expected popularity of Java on the Internet comes from developers of Internet search engines who are investigating ways to index Java applets. - by Dave Andrews
R5000 Cuts 3-D Cost MIPS R5000: What's New R5000 vs. Pentium pro	Programmers usually write their software to the metal, but now chip engineers are bending the metal to fit the software. - by Tom R. Halfhill
New CPUs Signal Better Multimedia PCs	Talk about strange bedfellows. Former blood enemies Intel (Santa Clara, CA) and Advanced Micro Devices (Sunnyvale, CA) have signed a landmark cross-licensing agreement that will allow them to introduce CPUs with new multimedia x86 instructions by the end of this year. - by Tom R. Halfhill
Intel: 200-MHz Pentiums to Arrive This Year	By the end of the year, the fastest Pentium will run at a blazing 200 MHz and CPU prices will drop so fast that businesses will regard PCs with 120- and 133-MHz Pentiums as entry-level boxes. - by Tom R. Halfhill
New NT to Offer Win 95 Look, Internet Links Windows NT 4.0 Highlights	Microsoft was expected to release by March a beta version of Windows NT that incorporates the Windows 95 interface, Network OLE, and links to the Internet.
120-MHz Pentium Power for Under $400 CPU/FPU Operations Scale Proport ionally Overdrive Boosts Application Performance	Tests of a preliminary version of Intel's Pentium Overdrive processor for upgradable Pentium PCs indicate that with a $399 upgrade, your applications can run more than 50 percent faster.
Still Cameras Approach Picture Perfect Digital Camera Freeze Frame Sony's Colorful Digital Camera Offering Kodak Does It Again	Thanks to falling prices and improved performance, digital cameras could soon become popular peripherals for PC and Mac users. - by Jon Pepper
Keyboard Scanner Cuts Clutter Faxing at Your Fingertips	Compaq Computer (Houston, TX) and Visioneer (Palo Alto, CA), developer of the PaperPort input system, have combined their talents and their products.
Phar Lap's Embeddable Kernel Leverages Win32 API Quick Configuration with ETS	In my first Code Talk column, I wrote about Phar Lap's TNT DOS Extender. - by Rick Grehan
Proprietary Services Move to the Web	Being on-line used to mean being on a proprietary service, like CompuServe or Prodigy. - by Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols and Rachel Schmutter
Benchmark Update New BYTEmarks Show Stronger UltraSparc FPU The Latest SPEC Estimates	The new SPEC95 benchmark suites have replaced the old standby SPECint92 and SPECfp92 benchmarks, but not without a minor parting controversy.

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