Five members of our group, Gene Wilson, Greg Dupuy, Neal Elias, Jon Kaczor and myself travelled to Dayton for the 1994 Computerfest. This show seems to attract more people each year. The flea market area produced books, superanuated programs and hardware and many odd bargains. This show is becoming known as the poor manโs COMDEX. It seemed that every other vendor was selling CD ROMS, and most CD’s were quite heavily discounted. Single speed CD ROM players were being sold for as little as $40, new. Hard drives were typically priced at $200 for a 360 meg drive. VFAST modems were being sold for $139 for internal versions and $179 for external models by several vendors. One has to wonder if this is the future pricing of PC hardware? Microsoft put on a demonstration of the Chicago software, a next generation windows replacement, which their representative termed as a make or break product for them. In a packed auditorium, he was fairly candid about some of the past mistakes Microsoft had made in writing Windows. For example, he mentioned the terminal program, which was a module purchased by the company, should have supported some protocols other than Xmodem.
After the show on Saturday, we had a picnic at Tim Swenson’s house in Dayton with about 30 Sinclair computer enthusiasts. Tim and his wife provided a good spread with entertainment on a steel drum. Among those attending were Paul Holmgren, Frank Davis, Bob Swoger and Gary Ganger. Bill Bell of Columbus, who wrote an excellent DOS for the TS-1000, was there too. Bill remarked that he uses a 386 now but it is a work machine which lacks the thrill and enthusiasiam provided by the ZX machines. Bill still has his DOS available for anyone who is interested and his address is still the same as in old advertisements. Dave Lassov may have travelled the furthest to Dayton comming all the way from Tuscon Arizona. Dave is looking for the Clifford RS-232 Interface that allowed the Specterm program to run up to 9600 baud. Keith Watson of Semco demonstrated the TS-2068 emulator based on Gerton Lunter’s Spectrum Emulation. Keith has not implemented several of the 2068 functions like SOUND and STICK. There are a couple of bugs that he is trying to work out. He hopes that he can support the Aerco disk interface as well.
At the show Paul Holmgren demonstrated a OL outfitted with a hard drive and told me that an IDE hard drive interface is in the works. This ought to really help mainstream some of the QL hardware. Paul also showed me the SuperGold Card, which seems impressive although I really don’t have the specs on it.
John Impellizzeri reports that QBox-USA is now running on the new QUBIDE hard drive interface with a 212 Mbyte drive. Just in time to celebrate our first year of operation! With the increase in storage space, they will be adding more message and file areas soon! Plenty of room for uploads now! Lots of new files for download too!
Qbox-USA is a BBS set up by QL enthusiasts for all Sinclair computer users.
Dave Walker informs us that there will be a new release of C68 coming out in about a months time. He says he will put this (the RUNTIME 1 disk at least) on the QBOX network, or may, assuming it is wanted, put it up on Compuserve.
He further says he sends such products to Tim Swenson in the USA via internet email (which is free) and which might be a better route for getting into general circulation on the US side of the Atlantic.
Paul Holmgren tells us that his company, Mechanical Affinity, has just received our FIRST shipment of the NEW IDE hard drive interface for the OL (November). Operating capacity is in excess of 200MEG of space allowed.