It will be seen that this mere painstaking burrower and grub-worm of a poor devil of a sub-sub appears to have gone through the long Vaticans and street-stalls of the earth, picking up whatever allusions to whales he could anyways find in any book whatsoever, sacred or profane. Therefore you must not, in every case at least, take the higgledy-piggledy whale statements, however authentic, in these extracts, for veritable gospel cetology.
Herman Melville.
Ahab, standing on the deck of Pequod and searching for the great white whale, overlooked the real monster.
Ben, an editor for another magazine, recently moved to the West Coast. Drawn by the California curls, he went out to walk the waves. Last week the ocean drove his surfboard into his face.
It's been nearly seven years since moved to the Coast, but I still walk out on the rocks regularly to stand in awe of the big blue beast.
At last fall's Comdex, IBM rolled in with an announcement of the delivery of OS/2 and word that it will be promoting its proprietary Extended Edition of OS/2 over the Standard Edition. The Comdex daily declared the show Very Blue, while several frolicking whales spouted their support.
Among the whales, Lotus Development Corp. announced Agenda. Agenda is the information manager that Jerry Kaplan went to Lotus to develop. It is what he calls an item/category database: the items are short, free-form, textual entities, which the user can assign to points in a user-defined, evolving hierarchy of categories. Agenda could be wildly successful if it sufficiently models the naive view of computers held by many pre-users: that one should be able to type arbitrary information into the machine and retrieve it on demand.
Ashton-Tate's chairman, Ed Esber, had left no doubt as to who would define the dBASE standard when he dared dBASE add-on and compiler vendors to "make his day," which they could do by challenging A-T's claim on the dBASE language (the language itself, not just A-T's implementation). So it came as no surprise to see Marty Winston of Wallsoft at Comdex handing out make-my-day buttons decorated with the international red-circle-and-backslash negation symbol. (It was Winston who brought dBASE aftermarket companies together in a dBASE Standards Committee.) Can a language definition be a product? Esber has not only thrown down the gauntlet to the aftermarket companies but also challenged the industry to deal with this tricky question.
Despite the lukewarm response to IBM's RT, you can find RISC technology implementations for just about any broad-based hardware. Shortly before Comdex, Sun announced its SPARC (Scalable Processor ARChitecture) RISC architecture and by Comdex had licensed the technology to over 40 companies, including Arete. Products based on the Inmos transputer parallel RISC processors are also proliferating. Atari, which incidentally would have won any Most Outrageous Product Name at Comdex competition with its Moses Promiselan, demonstrated a prototype of the Abaq transputer, which can act as a backend for an Atari ST and provide mondo MIPS number crunching and near-photographic graphics. Levco, now a division of Scientific Micro Systems, announced the formation of a TransLink Transputer Developers Group to support developers using its transputer modules in Macs.
Comdex offered a few new implementations of familiar languages. Ryan-McFarland, now a division of Austec, announced an OS/2 version of its ANSI-77 FORTRAN, Lahey offered a PC ANSI-77 FORTRAN for $95, and Prospero had an ANSI-77 FORTRAN for GEM. A number of new Modula-2 implementations or versions were announced, including a new version of the well-regarded Logitech compiler, new FTL versions for several machines, and OXXI's Benchmark Modula-2 for the Commodore Amiga. California Software Products has ported RPG II to PCs. And Borland unloaded a number of language announcements, including Turbo Pascal 4.0.
Meanwhile amid the flotsam and jetsam of the show, I kept sighting ex-editors of ex-programmers' magazines who had jumped ship as their magazines sailed into strange waters. Finally, heading for the pressroom one last time, I ran into Scott Mace, who, having been with InfoWorld since before I moved to the Coast, must be the longest-tenured scribe for any personal computer industry publication. A real journalist and a survivor.
And Ben was in the pressroom, the stitches now out, working on his notes.