News clippings of Blair Newman
Blair Edit
HL
Technology: U.S. Inventors Thrive at Electronics Show
----
By Stephen Kreider Yoder
Staff Reporter of The Wall Street Journal
DD 01/10/90
SO WALL STREET JOURNAL (J), PAGE B1
CO J.MBE J.SRP SNE J.CAS SELE FDOS TXN GOVO
IN HOME ELECTRONICS, FURNISHINGS, APPLIANCES (HMF)
ELECTRICAL COMPONENTS AND EQUIPMENT (ELQ)
TX LAS VEGAS, Nev. -- Most gadget hounds seeking the latest
offerings at the Consumer Electronics Show went to the huge
booths of the Japanese heavyweights.
But some of the more innovative and fun gadgets at the
show, which ended here yesterday, were in tiny booths and
out-of-the-way displays run by little-known U.S.
entrepreneurs.
VCRS With Good taste
At Howard Hughes's old underground fallout bunker two
miles from the convention center, for example, a
* frizzy-haired inventor named Blair Newman was taking orders
for his brainchild, a $3,500 computer-and-television hybrid
that will automatically record the programs that its owner is
likely to want to watch.
Mr. Newman's company, Metaview Corp., may be no match for
the Japanese, who are uncontested in the mainstream of
electronics technology. On the other hand, none of the
Japanese are making "telecommunicating VCRs" like Mr.
Newman's. The system, called the TVCR, makes a three-minute
call once a week to a central computer, run by Metaview, that
electronically looks through the following week's TV
schedules. The computer instructs the TVCR to pick out and
record programs that the owner might like based on a
questionnaire filled out previously. The user picks from an
on-screen menu of the recorded programs, and the computer in
the TVCR learns what type of programs the user plays back to
help it in making future recordings.
Mr. Newman, who expects to ship the first TVCRs in a
month, said he wants to sell the telephone service, called
SmarTV, for about $5 a month. He also offers a $10,000 TVCR
model with a built-in robot that can change 48 video
cassettes and 432 compact disks jukebox-style. "Americans
want this," he enthused.
HL
The Automatic Ad-Zapping Machine
---
BY M.J. Wilcove Special to The Bee
DD 11/12/89
SO THE SACRAMENTO BEE
Edition: METRO FINAL
Section: FORUM
Page: FO1
Credit: SACB0077
TX
KEYWORD-HIT.
LAST, long-suffering television viewers have a chance to strike back
at those commercials that continually and obtrusively invade the privacy of
our homes.
Welcome to the emerging world of SmarTV, a clever product -- introduced
this year by a San Francisco firm -- that, among other things, allows you to
zap all TV ads. Indeed, this tentative opening salvo from a little band of
venture capitalists on the West Coast may prove to be as ominous a threat to
the East Coast broadcasting moguls as David was to Goliath.
Imagine turning on the tube this evening and seeing the screen light up
with neither a five-minute string of commercials nor the last 20 minutes of a
"Gilligan's Island" rerun. Instead, there's a menu of the week's best
programs. And imagine that there's no need to fumble with a timer or through
a stack of videocasettes. The TV itself has pre-recorded this week's
selections -- with your particular viewing taste in mind.
The system's technical designer, George Morrow, concedes he was motivated
by his own inability to learn how to instruct his VCR to tape shows
automatically; TVs and VCRs, he complains, have "a terrible user interface. "
That is, up until now. Just graze your menu's goodies and punch up a choice
with the remote control, the way you'd punch up a favorite song on a jukebox.
"They've made the thing idiot-proof," says one trial user with relief.
How does SmarTV "know" what to tape for you? While you're sleeping, the
system dials an 800 number into a central computer that keeps tabs on the
networks' programming schedules (think of it as an electronic TV Guide). It
also stores your viewer profile, a questionnaire you filled out (which your
system continuously modifies to correct for what you're actually watching)
that indicates your preferences for, say, comedy, football and national news.
The computer matches the two databases and instructs your home set to tape
each program it thinks you'll enjoy watching.
Built from off-the-rack VCR and television parts, along with an internal
robot arm that automatically grabs the right videocasette, the system takes
advantage of software that originally was developed to monitor news wire
services and "clip" stories to create a user-specific newspaper. SmarTV
stores up to 186 hours of programming for immediate, individual selection.
As the first example of a "smart set" to hit the market, the box (which
looks like a standard television) doesn't improve the quality of your
picture. Rather, it improves the quality of viewing time, a benefit that
initial test-market viewers say they prefer over the new high-definition TV
technology. The set accesses what The Media Lab at MIT terms "time shifting"
or "asynchronous viewing. " Or, as director Nicholas Negroponte quips: "
`Prime Time' becomes `My Time. ' "
In what could be seen as the broadcasting industry's worst nightmare,
SmarTV lets you zip through commercials at 30 times regular speed (that's one
commercial per second) -- or eliminate them entirely. The automatic
ad-killer.
* Blair Newman, former marketing consultant to a host of Silicon Valley
success stories and now president of the SmarTV start-up, originally kept
that capability under wraps when his Metaview Corporation introduced the
system in January. "It seems," he said at the time, "unfair to the
broadcasters. "
Acknowledging the $25-billion-a-year advertising industry as intrinsic to
America's free TV phenomenon and its international programming primacy --
capable of mounting such exceptional productions, for example, as "Lonesome
Dove" -- Newman even suggested that Congress pass a law to prohibit automatic
ad elimination. "We're not out," he said, "to kill the goose that lays the
golden egg. "
HOWEVER, IN February Forbes magazine ran a review of the venture, titled "The
Ad Killers," which submitted that SmarTV's automatic commercial elimination
feature (ACE) would probably prove legal in court, on the basis of First
Amendment rights, and that it's probably unstoppable now. Prompted by Forbes'
determination, Metaview announced in March that it is reconsidering making
ACE available to customers after all.
Newman (who has a reputation among Bay Area cognoscenti for seeing trends
ahead of others) remains concerned about what he may have wrought. In an open
letter to all major broadcasting and ad industry execs asking for help in
evaluating ad-zapping's long-term impact, he advised, "We had assumed most
customers would prefer making commercials optional, as with print media. It
came as an unpleasant shock to us," he wrote, that Metaview's research
indicates "the vast majority of prospective SmarTV purchasers will opt for
its capability to automatically eliminate all advertising. "
Is the TV-watching public so bored with, or irked by, sales pitches that
it will adopt SmarTV (and other interactive systems soon to debut) to ACE
them all?
It's widely recognized that couch potatoes are, in increasing numbers,
channel-hopping to avoid ad breaks. With close to three out of four viewers
now wielding a remote control that can consign to cathode-tube oblivion an
offending product pitch, grazing during prime time shows, according to the
best available data, jumped from 9 percent to 16 percent whenever a
commercial aired last year. Still, whether TV watchers, given the
opportunity, would deliver the coup de grace to every one of the 4,500 or so
commercial spots estimated by Nielsen to air nightly is a question capable of
generating hot debate.
Bill Evans, president of Clio Awards in New York City (which recognize
excellence in advertising), is an enthusiastic booster of the creative
pastiche by which "the best commercials manage to do in a 30-second spot what
it took the producers of `Gone With The Wind' three-and-a-half hours" to
portray. Moreover, Evans argues, "Consumers would be stupid to kill ads;
without commercials the networks are in trouble and you'd have to pay through
the nose to have TV in your home. "
Professor Robert Buzzell, rotating chairman of the marketing faculty at
Harvard Business School, says that while "some people would (opt for ACE) and
that would be a serious problem, I don't think as many people would opt for
it as say they will. They want to do their own zapping. And I don't think
that many people are that upset about ads, myself. "
Three thousand miles away and poles apart, Ben Bagdikian, a journalism
professor at the University of California, Berkeley, submits that "we're
assaulted by advertising, in print, billboards, radio and TV, and people are
begging for relief. " A Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and critic of
today's media monopolies, Bagdikian says:
"SmarTV is one of the healthiest things that could happen for the major
media. They have been socially and culturally irresponsible in their desire
for profits. The TV people have asked for it, and I have no sympathy for them
whatsoever. And I say that as one who doesn't want to see TV advertising die.
But let the TV people convince the consumers they will set moderate
standards. When the goose starts laying eggs that are contaminated, we should
kill that goose and get another goose. "
AT THE National Association of Broadcasters in Washington, D.C., news
director Bob Hallahan defends commercials' utility in educating consumers
about new products and keeping the economy going. And while he concedes that
if interactive viewing were to sweep America, "It would upset us," the NAB,
he reports, is unconcerned by the announcement of a fledgling smart TV set.
"We'll just have to face it when it comes. "
Metaview's Newman doesn't want to kill free TV anymore than the media
moguls do. A graduate of Harvard Business School (and the first student to
have a PC in his dorm room), Newman migrated West when Howard Hughes' Summa
Corporation tapped him in his senior year; he commuted between Cambridge and
Las Vegas until graduation.
As a consultant for years to Microsoft and Apple, among other Silicon
Valley microprocessing stars, Newman "has a lot in common with Steve Jobs,"
says Trip Hawkins, president of San Mateo-based Electronic Arts, the leading
publisher of computer games software. "Their minds are always running 1,000
miles an hour. Blair generates at least two ideas a day, each of which could
be built into a successful business. "
While Newman first conceptualized SmarTV (and published the idea) back in
1979, he's "picked it (over other ideas) and decided to run with it," he
says, because "it seems the most interesting over the long term and it has a
lot of implications for the industry. "
The venture has already raised "significant capital" towards its targeted
$3 to $5 million, but Newman's iconoclastic style is reflected in the fact
that the company hasn't set itself up in corporate offices: He prefers to do
business via the Bay Area's electronic bulletin board, known as The Well.
Newman's technical cohort, Fen LaBalme, the inventor of NewsPeek at MIT's
Media Lab, concedes to an almost religious zeal in promoting personalized
media. The company's long-range objectives may be gleaned from the knowledge
that Newman has already put SmarTV's specifications in the public domain and
invited all VCR manufacturers to freely develop compatibles. Metaview's goal
is to become the publisher of the first electronic rival to TV Guide, a
tactic Forbes appraised with the words: "Rupert Murdoch, watch out. "
To do so, however, Newman must address the question of keeping free TV
alive and kicking -- and the problem of ACE. As is often the case, Newman
notes, problems caused by new technology may be solved by new technology --
in this case, by what he calls selective distribution of TV ads. In other
words, SmarTV would charge ad and broadcasting execs to transmit truly
informative and entertaining commercial messages, and a variety of them,
which viewers may select the same way they'll choose SmarTV's program
schedule -- according to personal interest.
Advertising exec Denman Maroney of D'Arcy, Masins,
Benton & Bowles in New York City sees SmarTV as "a manifestation of a trend
that's been in evidence for some time. There used to be one set and all the
family watched; now each family member has his or her own TV, and most
households have VCRs. "
Maroney, who is preparing a white paper for his firm titled "Interactive
Media" to assess the implications of new technology that will allow consumers
to "talk back" to their television sets, notes: "TV is slowly on its way to
becoming fully personalized. "
And he describes the technology being explored at The Media Lab for
advertising's -- and our viewing -- future: "Suppose you're watching a show
and see your hero in an Allante. In The Media Lab's vision, if you're perhaps
interested in buying an Allante, you'll be able to draw a box around it on
your screen and pull up a 30-minute commercial for the car. "
FUTURIST WILLIAM Donnelly suggests that the new generation of media now
emerging will permit "control of communications . . . nowhere else but at its
reception point. " And not only permit. For an American public increasingly
disquieted about the quality of its plug-in drug (and for an adolescent
medium experiencing growing pains), SmarTV looks like the harbinger of
next-level viewing media that will bring about broadcasting policies more
accountable to the public -- and demand more responsible personal television
use.
For the present, SmarTV is already posing a first crucial personal
decision: With no time to waste in front of the tube anymore, when can we
sneak out to the kitchen for a cold drink and chips?
HL
Broadcasting Data at Low Cost: X-Press Information Services
(COLUMN)
COLUMN
---
By Steve Cisler
DD 05/01/89
SO Online (ONLI) Pg. 115
NS LIBRARIES (LIB)
TX Copyright Online, Inc. 1989
BROADCASTING DATA AT LOW COST-. X*PRESS INFORMATION SERVICES
Reference librarians who work for any amount of time on a public
desk usually come to know the strange characters and the odd patrons
who spend hours combing through your collection as they pursue some
private obsession. About ten years ago a young man came into our
branch each day; his eyes reflected the fires burning in his brain.
Without a greeting he would launch into his conspiracy theories,
share his knowledge about the spies working in McDonald's down the
street, about the people trying to hypnotize him, and about the
satellites bombarding him with endless messages of doom and civil
strife. Up to a point I did not mind having him share his view of
the universe with me. Some of these people are both brilliant and
crazy, and it is a challenge to see where the insanity starts and
the brilliance ends.
I thought the young man was totally wrong until I began writing
this month's column, which is not about difficult patrons or the
state of mental care in California. The young man was ahead of his
time; we are being bombarded with messages, stories, financial data,
press releases, and syndicated columns from satellites. We just
need some help from a data service called X*PRESS Information
Services in order to receive them. DATA ON A CABLE Tv NETWORK
X*PRESS is a partnership between McGraw- Hill, Inc., and
Tele-Communications, Inc., the largest multiple system cable
operator in the United States. X*PRESS offers two products to the
consumer market. X*Change is part of the basic cable service in TCI
cable systems, and is available in another 800,000 homes through
contracts with other cable companies. It is a 24hour-a-day news
feed comprised of information from 30 information providers. The
second product, X*PRESS Executive, is a premium service that costs
$19.95 per month and provides financial data that is on a
fifteen-minute delay. This X*PRESS Executive information includes
stock, mutual funds, and index quotations from various U.S. and
Canadian stock exchanges.
The data on X*Change and Executive are formatted and encrypted
and processed into a single data stream, uplinked to a Galaxy I
satellite using the digital audio signal of CNN, and then
transmitted on the Cinemax transponder at 9600 bits per second. For
$125 you can buy cables, software, and a General Instruments
Infocipher box that hooks your cable to the modem port on your
computer. Some cable companies don't provide the basic service
unless you subscribe to the premium Executive financial service.
The information providers on the basic service, provided without
surcharge, include: Agence France Presse Associated Press BYTE
magazine Cable News Network Cable Value Network and C.O.M.B.
Canadian Press Central News Agency Colorado TravelBank Copley News
Service Deutsche Presse-Agenteur Kyodo News Service Notimex (in
Spanish) OPEC News Agency The Sharper Image Shephard's/McGraw-Hill
Shop-At-Home Directory SportsTicker, Inc. Standard & Poor's
Corporation TASS TV Decisions/United Media USA Today/Gannett New
Media Services Washington Post Writers Group WorldGroup Companies,
Inc. Xinhua News Agency Zephyr Weather Information Service HOW DOES
IT WORK?
Figure 1 shows the startup screen for the Macintosh version.
Clicking on category Selection brings up Figure 2. The user has
selected Headlines, Business and Finance, People's Republic of China,
Japan, and Opinions & Editorials for capturing in the computer
memory.
Using the Navigate menu, proceed to Keyword setup. Up to 16
words can be stored in order to save the messages and stories that
contain one or more of the terms. In Figure 3 govern, uses the
asterisk as a wild card; ra?e will capture "rate", "rape", "race",
etc.
Figure 4 shows the News category. Notice that the "Count" box
has 15 stories from all the categories chosen beforehand. As you
watch the screen the numbers increase until your buffer overflows.
Figure 5 displays one of the stories from AP. The scroll bar at
the top of the window allows the user to move between the fifteen
stories. They can be saved to disk or printed out. Because of
copyrigl;t restrictions and contracts with the information providers,
X*PRESS software saves the file in a proprietary, nonASCII format.
This means that the stories cannot be stored in a full-text
retrieval package, but they can be printed out.
Figure 6 shows the Standard & Poor's Personal Portfolio. The
software allows investors to choose up to 128 securities, and
receive updates on only those stocks.
Third-party developers are working on enhancements to the basic
software as well as adding other features. File transfer for MS-DOS
and Atari computers is a service for downloading software or large
database files at a specific time. HOOKING UP THE SYSTEM TO YOUR
COMPUTER
At press time software and interfaces exist for IBM PC, XT, AT,
PS/2; Apple IIe, Macintosh, and Atari. If you can set up a modem,
you will find this is not difficult to install. After the coax
cable is connected to the Infocipher box, connect the box to your
modem port with the cable provided. With an A/B switch, the modem
port can be used for both cable and phone lines. Boot up the
software, and the newsfeed begins immediately. ONE USER LOVES IT
* Confirmed information hounds like the idea of X*PRESS. Blair
Newman, designer of SmarTV in San Francisco, California, shared his
ideas about the reality and future potential of this service. He
praised the service for its "blazing breadth", and his PC defaults
to this service. When he wakes up in the morning, he turns on the
PC, and by the end of his shower there are over 100 stories waiting
for him. If you multiply 9600 bps by 24 hours, the 83MB/day
capacity of the system seems overwhelming. He estimates that 13
million words can be pumped into a PC in one day. Newman's
interests are in consumer services, where most of the time will be
spent reading rather than typing. He hopes that X*PRESS will add an
integrated dial-in system for interacting with other users. X -
PRESS IN THE SCHOOLS
X*PRESS has been marketing this service in schools in rural and
urban settings. When X*PRESS donates the decoder kits, the school
only needs the basic cable service, a computer, and an imaginative
librarian to introduce the students to a world of information - one
that we as professionals are grappling with in a more structured and
expensive form.
Some students are printing out the stories for mock newspapers;
others are following news stories as they occur and comparing the
style and political slant from one news service to another. This
service is a real boon to rural schools which are far from any
packet-switching node to reach online services. X*PRESS has hired
moderators to launch another service to allow students to post
comments about a wide variety of topics. The posting is done by
mail, phone, or a modem-based device. The input is keyed in and
posted in the appropriate conference. TESTING AT APPLE
Apple Library will be testing the service as soon as we mount the
correct satellite dish. The service will be available for our
walk-in user as an introduction to our services. In its present
form there is no way it can replace our intensive use of commercial
databanks, but its timeliness and speed can supplement these dial-up
data services.
For more information contact X*PRESS Information Services, Ltd.,
P.O. Box 4153, Englewood, CO 80155; 800/7PC-NEWS (800/772-6397).
Communications to the author should be addressed to Steve Cisler,
P.O. Box 992, Cupertino, CA 95015; ALANET - ALA0728; OnTyme -
CLASS.ONLINE/SC; CompuServe - 73240,1016; BIX - scisler; Applelink
Cislerl; Internet - sac@well.uucp.
END ---------------------------------------------------------------------
DE Information services - X-Press Information Services Ltd.
SIC 7375 - 8231
AN 1053783
HL
Kentucky Fried, McDonald's in Fast-Food Feud
---
BY Jamie Beckett
DD 01/29/90
SO THE SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE
Edition: FINAL
Section: BUSINESS
Page: B5
TX
KEYWORD-HIT.
.
Kentucky Fried Chicken has put McDonald's on trial in its latest
advertising campaign.
The commercials, which depict a mock congressional investigation of
a shifty-eyed Ronald McDonald, are KFC's first direct attack on its
and it recently fortified its sandwich buns with calcium.
But the most telling indication of changing times in the fast-food
industry is in a list of items McDonald's is considering adding to its
menu. The list includes bran muffins, low-fat yogurt, chicken soup and
celery and carrot sticks.
COMMERCIAL BREAK?
Ad-free TV may one day be a reality, thanks to an invention of two
Bay Area entrepreneurs. The product is called SmarTV, but works more
like a VCR, automatically recording shows selected specially for a
particular viewer. The machine knows what to tape because you've filled
out a questionnaire indicating your TV preferences. It knows what's on
TV because it stores network programming schedules in a central
computer.
* Blair Newman, a former Silicon Valley consultant and SmarTV's
co-creator, is test-marketing two versions of the product in California
- one that sells for about $3,500 and a deluxe version that goes for
about $10,000. He expects the price of the SmarTV will drop to under
$500 within three years.
The product now offered does not automatically kill ads, although it
has the capability. Instead, it allows you to zip through commercials
at about 30 times the regular speed, a little faster than most VCRs
fast-forward.
""We're not offering ad elimination now because we don't want to get
* the broadcast industry mad at us," says Newman, president of Metaview,
the San Francisco-based company formed to market the product. He
expects he will later offer the service as an option at extra cost.
But Newman says he doesn't really want to eliminate all ads.
Instead, he wants to use the SmarTV to insert ads designed for specific
viewers. A doctor may get an ad for a pharmaceutical company, for
instance, while a data-processing executive may see an ad for Wang.
Although viewers could still choose to see no ads, Newman says his
research shows that most would choose to watch ads of particular
interest to them.
HL
SmarTV: New Video Toy Takes You Beyond the VCR
DD 06/11/89
SO THE SEATTLE TIMES, COPYRIGHT 1989
Edition: FINAL
Section: ARTS, ENTERTAINMENT
Page: L3
Credit: SCRIPPS HOWARD NEWS SERVICE
TX
KEYWORD-HIT
Most of us have mastered the VCR by now. It's almost the '90s; VCR
phobias are passe. We conquered our fear of flashing numbers, we made
our choices and we settled into a comfortable video pattern.
* So why can't Metaview Corp. leave well enough alone?
* Metaview is a San Francisco company that has invented a $6,000
recording system named SmarTV, and, according to company president
* Blair Newman, is, more or less, a ``souped-up VCR.''
SmarTV is a computer-run device that will monitor every TV
channel and record any program it thinks you'd enjoy watching - up to
186 hours worth. And it can automatically eliminate advertising.
You never touch a tape, you never program the VCR. You use your
remote control to choose a show from an on-screen menu and the machine
does the rest, like a video jukebox.
Someone has to tell the computer what you like, which is where
* you come in. The Metaview people interview you and put together a
``viewer profile,'' which gets fed into the master computer.
End of Document
HL
IBM Will Sell Portable Version of its PC Model
---
Concern Also to Offer System
That Allows Networking
Of Its Personal Computers
---
By Richard A. Shaffer
Staff Reporter of The Wall Street Journal
DD 02/17/84
SO WALL STREET JOURNAL (J)
CO IBM CDPI CMPQ EGLC KAYP
IN COMPUTERS (EDP)
TX NEW YORK -- International Business Machines Corp. said it
will sell a portable version of its Personal Computer,
putting pressure on makers of IBM look-alikes such as
Columbia Data Products Inc., Compaq Computer Corp. and Eagle
Computer Inc., as well as such makers of other portables as
Kaypro Corp.
The company also said it will sell a system of cables and
attachments that will enable its personal computer models,
including the PCjr, to talk directly with each other and to
share printers and very large files of information.
The new IBM computer, available March 1, will sell for
$2,795, slightly less than the suggested list prices of
top-of-the-line competitors. Because the electronic circuits
it uses are in short supply, however, the IBM portable will
be scarce at first. In addition, most of the machines are
expected to be sold directly by IBM to large companies, with
a typical retail dealer getting fewer than a half-dozen
machines a month.
The new portable has a nine-inch amber screen that can
display both text and pictures, but text is likely to be more
difficult to read on it than on the video screen sold with
most of IBM's desktop personal computers. That could be a
drawback in the two most popular uses for personal computers,
word-processing and financial modeling with spreadsheets.
In its standard version, the portable has 256,000
characters of main memory and a single disk drive. Another
drive can be added for $425. The 30-pound IBM portable is
slightly bulkier and somewhat heavier than its competitors.
Several brands of portables can use programs written for
IBM's desktop machines, but the most popular are those made
by Compaq, which grew to $111 million in sales last year, its
first in business. Most of the IBM clones are carried only by
stores that can't get the IBM line itself, and aren't likely
to be affected by the new product. But the Compaq is carried
primarily by IBM dealers, who presumably will carry IBM
portables if they can get them.
At an industry conference last week, however, the head of
one national chain of IBM dealerships, Businessland, said
that because demand for all of IBM's personal computers is
expected to exceed supply until at least midyear, the
look-alikes will continue to sell well if their price is at
least 20% less than IBM's, or if they offer many more
features for the same price.
Price comparisons are difficult, but the two disk-drive
version of Compaq's portable is already being discounted by
most dealers to $2,995, or $225 less than the list price of
the most comparable version of IBM's new portable. At
present, Compaq's portables sell for about the same price as
IBM's desktop models, although Compaq provides additional
features. One is a video screen that can display both
graphic images and very clear text, a feat that requires
either two video screens or additional circuitry to
accomplish on IBM's Personal Computer.
Compaq is generally expected to lower its prices soon on
its basic model, to place more emphasis on its Compaq Plus
model, which can store up to 10 million characters of
information, and to introduce at least one new model later
this year. "We've been preparing for an IBM portable for a
long time," says Rod Canion, Compaq's president. "They
haven't upstaged us."
IBM's other new product, which it calls the Personal
Computer Cluster Program, will make it easier for nearby
users of personal computers to send messages to each other.
It also will enable them to share expensive attachments, such
as letter-quality printers, thus lowering the overall cost of
supplying personal computers to everyone in, say, an office
or classroom.
Each part of the cluster product -- circuit boards,
cables, programs -- is separately priced, but IBM said that a
typical package that would tie together five machines -- a
PC/XT and four Personal Computers -- would sell for $2,540 at
its product centers.
Among other things, such a network would make it possible
for IBM's entry-level home computer, the PCjr, which lacks a
disk drive, to use programs written for the company's larger
machines, which have disk drives.
* In Solana Beach, Calif., Blair Newman, director of
strategic planning for Kaypro, said the IBM portable computer
entry sounded like "a me-too product in a market already
awash with them."
Kaypro, he said, is the largest maker of portable personal
computers, having sold more than 100,000 last year. Mr.
Newman said the Kaypro Model 10 is the same size and weight
as the IBM computer about to be introduced, but that for
about $100 less the Kaypro has greater disk storage capacity
and comes with free software.
In Los Gatos, Calif., Eagle Computer said it wouldn't
comment on IBM's new product.
Columbia Data Products, based in Columbia, Md., couldn't
be reached last night for comment.
IBM closed at $109.625, unchanged, in composite trading
yesterday on the New York Stock Exchange. Compaq closed at
$7.375, down 87.5 cents, in national over-the-counter
trading. Eagle closed unchanged at $6.25 also in national
over-the-counter trading. In regular over-the-counter
trading, Kaypro traded at $6.125 bid, down 50 cents, and
Columbia Data Products at $10.25 bid, down 12.5 cents.
---
Broadcatch Technologies
/ broadcatch@comedia.com
Last modified: Tue Jul 12 21:47:53 1994