 Jackpot at Comdex
February 1998
/
Features
/ Jackpot at Comdex
You and nearly a quarter-million of your closest friends converge once a year on Las Vegas to witness the spectacle that is Comdex.
BYTE Editors
Each year at Comdex, new innovations share the floor with remakes of old products. BYTE editors separate the wheat from the chaff and tell you what really matters in several categories.
We were impressed with the maturity of some technologies that we've been following for a while. Chief among those were alternate input systems, which dominated our productivity applications category with voice and handwriting-recognition systems. The computers on
the show floor ranged from very-low-end $500 PCs to near-$10,000 multimedia entertainment centers. And IBM demonstrated a new car.
[NOTE: In each category, the winner is the first item, followed by runners-up.]
Best of Show
Hewlett-Packard Laserjet 4000
It's not anything you can see that makes the top-of-the-line HP LaserJet 4000 our Best of Show winner. Instead, implemented inside the LaserJet 4000 is Hewlett-Packard's JetSend protocol. This is a TCP/IP-based protocol that enables network devices to talk to each other without using a computer as an intermediary. If you want to send a document that you just scanned on a JetSend-enabled scanner direct to a JetSend-enabled printer, all you have to do is select the printer from the scanner's control panel and off it goes.
Hewlett-Packard
Palo Alto, CA
Phone: 800-527-3753
Internet: http://www.solutionjet.hp.com/LJ4000/
Systems
TriStar StarStation SXE
If you're looking for the ultimate entry into the world of great 3-D graphics, look no further than Tri-Star's StarStation SXE. This $2600 system is built on the 533-MHz Alpha 21164 PC and sports a 16-MB Elsa Gloria graphics card and a 6-GB EIDE drive.
Tri-Star
Phoenix, AZ
Phone: 800-800-7668
Internet: http://www.tristar.com
IBM IntelliStation M Pro
This Windows NT workstation features one or two 300-MHz Pentium II processors, is Accelerated Graphics Port-ready (AGP), and has a price starting at $3500.
IBM PC
Research Triangle Park, NC
Phone: 800-426-7255
Internet: http://www.pc.ibm.com/intellistation
Gateway Destination DMT
Gateway improves on a good thing with its Destination DMT. It offers a marriage of PC and home theater in one system. The new version offers a 36-inch display, a DVD-ROM (digital versatile disc) drive with an MPEG-2 decoder, and a six-piece surround-sound stereo system. Prices range from $3100, for an entry-level system with a 166-MHz processor and 32 MB of RAM, to $4999, for a unit powered by a 300-MHz Pentium II.
Gateway 2000
North Sioux City, SD
Phone: 800-846-2000
Internet: http://www.gateway.com
Multimedia Hardware/Software
ATI All-in-Wonder Pro
The addition of ATI's 3-D Rage Pro chip increases the All-in-Wonder Pro's 3-D graphics performance by a factor of three over its predecessor, setting up 1.2 million triangles per second. This PCI card also has competitive 2-D graphics acceleration. But its multimedia capabilities are what set the All-in-Wonder Pro apart. A TV tuner with NTSC output, video zooming and 10-second instant replay, still- and full-motion video capturing to disk, and close-captioned text searching and recording top this list. The suggested retail price is $325, with street prices under $300.
ATI Technologies
Thornhill, Ontario, Canada
Phone: 905-882-2600
Internet: http://www.atitech.com/
Creative Labs Sound Blaster AWE 64D
Here's a PCI sound card with a unique twist: a special motherboard connector that improves backward compatibility with programs that expect to find ISA sound cards. The Sound Blaster AWE 64D's motherboard component tricks the software into thinking the PC has an ISA sound card installed, so DOS games and other older programs should run without balking. A large number of motherboard manufacturers support the special connector -- including Intel, the leading motherboard maker, A-Open, Asus, Chaintech, FIC, and Gigabyte.
Creative Labs
Creative Resource, Singapore
Phone: +65 895 4000
Internet: http://www.soundblaster.com/
Pinnacle Systems' miroVideo DV300
The miroVideo DV300 is a hardware/software digital-video editing package that has an amazing range of professional-level features for $799. The DV300 lets PCs communicate with digital-video camcorders through an ISO-1394 FireWire interface to enable frame-accurate control of the camcorder. It automatically retrieves and replaces dropped frames, so the DV300 can create error-free digital-video captures. An on-board SCSI controller frees up the PCI bus, delivering better disk performance. It has a plug-in for Adobe Premiere that renders only the newly added special effects and transitions in reedited scenes.
Pinnacle Systems
Mountain View, CA
Phone: 650-526-1600
Internet: http://www.pinnaclesys.com/
Storage
Sony HiFD
It's easy to ignore the good old 3-1/2-inch floppy drive. Fujifilm, along with Sony, the inventor of the 3-1/2-inch floppy drive, has released the HiFD. It offers 200-MB capacity in drives that can read 1.44-MB disks.
Sony
San Jose, CA
Phone: 800-352-7669
Internet: http://www.sony.com/storagebysony
IBM Deskstar 16GP
IBM has had its share of patents in hard drive technology. One of the latest is giant
magneto-resistive (GMR) heads, which are two to three times more sensitive than existing heads and thus able to handle higher medium densities. This $875, 5400-rpm drive is the first in a line that IBM says could lead to affordable desktop drives of 32 GB or more by 1999.
IBM Storage Systems Division
San Jose, CA
Phone: 800-426-7777
Internet: http://www.ibm.com/storage
Iomega clik
Iomega says it wondered how small a Zip disk could be. The answer is 2 inches wide -- small enough to fit in most hand-held PCs (HPCs) and digital cameras. The clik disk holds 40 MB and sells for $10. Add a cell-phone-size external drive (for about $100) and you have the most portable storage device yet.
Iomega
Roy, UT
Phone: 800-697-8833
Internet: http://www.iomega.com
Server Systems
Axil Northbridge NX803
The eight-way multiprocessing battles have been joined, and Axil has a serious force. Axil's unique motherboard design plans for future Intel processor upgrades, allowing customers a longer product life cycle. Its rack design includes three power supplies with hot-swap capability and a hot-swap fan tray.
Axil Computer, Inc.
Concord, MA
Phone: 978-371-8100
Internet: http://www.axil.com
Land-5 Icebox
Land-5's I2O-capable Icebox server sports unique disk and tape RAID components that do not require drivers for any server OS. The RAID3 tape-drive array is capable of 20-MBps data transfer.
Land-5
San Diego, CA
Phone: 619-566-2514
Internet: http://www.land-5.com
Productivity Applications
ParaGraph Calligrapher 5.0
HPC keyboards are too small for most of us. Enter Calligrapher 5.0, the product of years of research into handwriting recognition. Designed to interpret cursive handwriting -- even the particularly inscrutable handwriting of BYTE senior contributing editor Jerry Pournelle -- Calligrapher is one package no HPC should be without.
ParaGraph
Mountain View, CA
Phone: 650-933-3000
Internet: http://www.paragraph.com
Lernout and Hauspie VoiceXpress
VoiceXpress from Lernout and Hauspie is continuous speech-recognition software with up to a 65,000-word vocabulary. Big deal, you think? Not so fast. VoiceXpress's editing capabilities set it apart from the pack. After transcribing what you say, it's a snap to format your text with simple voice commands, changing properties such as fonts, point size, and alignment.
Lernout and Hauspie
Waltham, MA
Phone: 781-238-0960
Internet: http://www.lhs.com
Lexicus Japanese Handwriting Recognition
The Japanese Handwriting Recognition software, from Motorola's Lexicus division, works with several Japanese character sets, including kanji and katakana, and recognizes roman characters that frequently appear in Japanese writing. The software comes bundled with a graphics tablet, and it lets you insert the characters directly into applications such as Microsoft Word and Eudora Pro.
Motorola (Lexicus division)
Palo Alto, CA
Phone: 650-494-0800
Internet: http://www.mot.com/lexicus
Portables
Sony PCG-505
Some vendors had mini-notebooks, and others had ultrathin systems, but only Sony, usin
g a magnesium alloy and a 10.4-inch thin-film transistor (TFT) SVGALCD, created a system as small and powerful as the amazing PCG-505. Hold it in your hand and feel its 0.95-inch-thick, 2.97-pound case. Boot it, and play with its 133-MHz MMX Pentium and usable keyboard. This is the system most mini-notebooks aspire to be.
Sony Electronics
San Jose, CA
Phone: 800-325-7669
Internet: http://www.sony.com
IBM ThinkPad 560X
IBM's ThinkPad 560X puts a 233-MHz Pentium with MMX in a highly portable, 4.1-pound, 1.2-inch-thick form factor with a 12.1-inch TFTSVGA screen for $4299. When locked into its docking station, it has all the functionality of its heavier, bulkier, high-end competitors.
IBM
Armonk, NY
Phone: 914-288-3589
Internet: http://www.ibm.com
Sharp Mobilon
You think all Windows CE2.0 computers are the same? Think again. The Sharp Mobilon uses a camera add-on to double as a 640- by 480-pixel screen. It comes with either a color or monochrome LCD and starts at $599.
Sharp Electronics
Mahwah, NJ
Phone: 800-237-4277
Internet: http://www.sharp-usa.com
Peripherals
Hewlett-Packard LaserJet 4000
BYTE's Best of Show winner, the 1200-dpi, 17-ppm HP LaserJet 4000 comes with two 250-s
heet paper trays and up to 8 MB of memory. What's most important for us, it uses the revolutionary JetSend protocol, which allows devices to communicate over TCP/IP.
Hewlett-Packard
Palo Alto, CA
Phone: 800-527-3753
Internet: http://www.solutionjet.hp.com/LJ4000/
Ositech Jack of Spades
This combination 10-/100-Mbps Ethernet card/56-Kbps PC Card modem lets you make connections not only through analog phone lines, but through digital lines, too. Ositech's Digital Phone Interface (DPI) technology enables you to connect the modem between the handset and the base of the phone on virtually any phone.
Ositech Communications, Inc.
Guelph, Ontario, Canada
Phone: 888-674-8324
Internet: http://www.ositech.com
Sony 400PS
The 400PS monitor sports digital dynamic convergence, enhanced elliptical correction, and active signal correction. You get a high-quality picture with superb clarity across the entire screen.
Sony Electronics
San Jose, CA
Phone: 800-426-7255
Internet: http://www.sony.com
Network Infrastructure
3Com U.S. Robotics Cable Modem VSP and VSP Plus
Cable modems promise some of the biggest pipes for most of us. But infighting over standard
s is holding products out of the reach of most of us. No longer. First to market with an MCNS-standard cable modem, 3Com uses either your own modem or an included 33.6-Kbps modem to provide upstream communication, while letting cable companies deliver up to 27 Mbps downstream. Pricing is $199 for cable only or $250 with the modem.
3Com Corp.
Santa Clara, CA
Phone: 408-764-5000
Internet: http://www.3com.com
Bay Networks' Instant Internet (100)
Instant Internet (100) offers the lowest-cost proxy server and firewall yet for small IPX and IP networks. For $750, this modem-size box provides easy installation and configuration for small workgroups to connect to the Internet quickly at 56-Kbps analog modem or 128-Kbps ISDN speeds, using a low-cost
ISA-card design.
Bay Networks
Santa Clara, CA
Phone: 408-988-2400
Internet: http://www.baynetworks.com
AT&T WorldNet Virtual Private Network Service
Virtual private networks have traditionally been obscurely priced, and service guarantees have only begun to emerge. AT&T's contribution is clearly priced, including flat-rate dial-up service starting at $34.95 for 20 hours or $103 per month for a 16-Kbps frame-relay service. Customers with outages as short as 10 minutes can receive refunds.
AT&T
Bridgewater, NJ
Phone: 973-331-4000
Internet: http://www.attnet.net/worldnet
Network Applications
Citrix piCAsso
These days, it seems everybody's doing the thin-client thing (even if they aren't sure what thin client means). Citrix has been doing it since long before it was the flavor of the week. You've probably been hearing quite a lot about Microsoft's Hydra -- a technology letting thin clients access applications on Windows NT servers. Hydra is built on the core technologies inside Citrix's WinFrame, and pICAsso is the code name for an enhancement to Citrix's ICA technology that enables cross-platform connectivity (i.e., it runs on Mac, OS/2, and Unix systems) and audio to run over ICA.
Citrix
Fort Lauderdale, FL
Phone: 954-267-3000
Internet: http://www.citrix.com
Novell Storage Services
Novell Storage Services (NSS) represents the future file system for NetWare. Its main feature, aside from its high capacities (Novell has already created a 2-TB file and a 3-TB volume), is its reliability. If a server goes down, NSS can rebuild a volume quickly -- in a demonstration for BYTE, it was able to rebuild a 100-GB file system in a little over a minute.
Novell
Orem, UT
Phone: 801-861-7000
Internet: http://www.novell.com
Inferno 2.0
Inferno is a small-footprint, extremely modular, highly portable operating system for embedded applications. Version 2.0 enhances the previous version with full support
for Sun's PersonalJava, a subset of Java designed for network-connectable products used in homes, while traveling, or in the office. It also includes a suite of general-purpose productivity apps for small devices.
Lucent
Murray Hill, NJ 317-322-6848
Internet: http://www.lucent.com
Development Tools
NuMega Technologies TrueTime VB Edition
Is your code feeling sluggish lately? Debugging-tool vendor NuMega Technologies attacks the problem with TrueTime Visual Basic Edition. This code-optimization tool puts ActiveX components in its sights. It spots the sluggards in your code -- even components without source code.
NuMega Technologies
Nashua, NH
Phone: 603-578-8400
Internet: http://www.numega.com
GEO Publishing Emblaze Web Chargers
On the Web, the most notorious bandwidth hogs are those images that make sites so appealing. Rather than scaling back the images, GEO Publishing's Emblaze Web Chargers lets Webmasters drastically reduce the size of graphics files by selectively compressing parts of images. A little snip here, a little trim there, and you can have a beautiful -- and fast -- site.
GEO Publishing
Woodland Hills, CA
Phone: 800-576-7751
Internet: http://www.emblaze.com
NEC Systems Laboratory's Auraline Java Multimedia Creation Kit
Java programmers who struggle with JavaScript to animate their Web sites might appreciate NEC Systems Laboratory's Auraline Java Multimedia Creation Kit. This $20 toolkit packages popular Web-site multimedia tricks such as ticker tapes and rollover effects in Java applets that you call from a time-line interface. It can save hours of tedious coding.
NEC Systems Laboratory
San Jose, CA
Phone: 408-433-1358
Internet: http://www.auraline.com
The Damnedest Thing We Ever Saw
It runs on gas and Java. It has power steering and multiple processors. Fuel injection and five LCDs. It's the IBM network vehicle. A joint project of Sun, Delco, and IBM, the network vehicle is a remade Chevy Bl
azer. The user interface is written in Java and appears on several LCDs around the vehicle. Passengers can check e-mail, browse the Web, or download a movie, all courtesy of a DirecPC satellite connection that comes in through the vehicle's phased-array antenna. Voice recognition gives drivers control over a heads-up display and lets them ask for directions.
IBM North America
White Plains, NY
Phone: 520-574-4600
Internet: http://www.ibm.com/TradeShows/comdex/Fall97/1117s.htm
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