Fueling Creativity in System Design
Verbal battles over the best way to build high-performance personal computers were waged by IBM and its competitors last week at the Comdex computer show in Las Vegas.
IBM was out to forcefully demonstrate that its proprietary Micro Channel Architecture--its computers’ internal electronic pathway--really is superior to the design of its older personal computers. Controversy over the new design has raged since April, 1987, when IBM abandoned the internal design of its popular PC-AT for the much different Micro Channel structure of its PS/2 models 50, 60, 70 and 80.
The controversy was fanned by the recent announcement from a group of computer manufacturers, including Compaq, Zenith and Tandy, of an alternative to Micro Channel called EISA, for Extended Industry Standard Architecture.
They were on hand last week to ballyhoo the advantages that they claim for their design, even though computers built to the EISA specification are nearly a year away from dealers’ shelves.
In the meanwhile, many companies large and small introduced new high-speed computers utilizing the old PC-AT design that IBM abandoned, computers that rival any of IBM’s new machines in speed using software available today.
Nonetheless, IBM showed convincingly how its new computers beat the older-style machines when they are expanded with new circuit board cards containing their own microprocessing chips, so-called “bus master” cards. (A bus is the internal electronic pathway in a computer where expansion circuit boards are connected.)
According to Chet Heath, the IBM senior engineer who led the Micro Channel design team, such co-processor boards are able to carry out many tasks without burdening the computer’s main microprocessor, or “brain.” But with the older PC-AT internal design, the main microprocessor has to get into the act no matter what co-processors exist on expansion cards.
Most of the expansion boards that IBM showed are still in the prototype stage and are too complex to explain here. But a good analogy showing the advantage of bus master co-processors is comparing the way two different businesses run--one in which every decision is made by the chief executive and another in which the CEO delegates authority to lower echelon managers. Clearly, requiring a single executive to make all of a company’s key decisions limits how much the company can do. Likewise, computers channeling all their work through a central microprocessor are limited, too.
Cards Not Interchangeable
Corporate, scientific, engineering and academic computer users--users who need to connect computers and run complex programs performing large tasks simultaneously--will be the ones who benefit most from the new co-processor boards.
Spokesmen for the EISA-design group pointed out that their new architecture also will be able to house bus master cards and gain similar advantages in performance. They won’t be able to use the bus master cards built for IBM computers, however, because the Micro Channel and EISA designs use cards of different sizes and connectors. The advantage that the EISA group touts for its design is that expansion cards for older-style IBM and compatible computers--of which there are millions--will fit in their new computers but not in the Micro Channel designs.
Compaq and Zenith design engineers said their companies have abandoned plans to copy the IBM Micro Channel design, but Tandy has a foot in both camps. It was showing its Micro Channel-based Model 5000 at Comdex.
Advanced Logic Research, headquartered in Irvine, introduced what promises to be the fastest PC yet, a Micro Channel design that includes performance enhancements not found in IBM’s designs.
But the reaction to all this from dealers, who are the bulk of the 100,000 who attend Comdex, was not particularly warm. The last thing many of them want is yet another computer design to confuse their customers.
Thankfully, most computer users--especially those whose computers do not have to connect to any others--don’t need fancy enhancements. As long as their machines do what they want them to do, they’re happy.
With that type of user in mind, Vendex, the company with the ads featuring wrestler King Kong Bundy learning how to use its computer, showed its new Headstart III computer featuring an 80286 microprocessor, a 32-megabyte hard disk and a wealth of software.
The Headstart III is about as close to a no-hassle PC as I’ve seen, coming as an all-inclusive package that eliminates troublesome decisions about which components to buy. It also has a wonderful on-screen system for helping you use and understand the basic disk operating system commands and for running your programs. Typical selling prices should be about $3,000 with a color monitor.
Impressive Program
IBM and compatible machines are not the only kinds of computers out there, of course. Joel Shusterman, new marketing vice president at Commodore Computer, explained how Commodore thinks it can promote its graphics-rich Amiga family of computers into a third standard, behind those of IBM-style machines and Apple Computer’s Macintosh.
The one edge that the Amiga seems to have is in low-cost titling and other graphics superimposed on video recordings. Particularly impressive was a $2,000 three-dimensional graphics design and animation program called Caligari, published by Octree Software of New York City.
Pushing to be taken seriously, Commodore has at last begun supplying hard disks (20 megabyte) for its Amiga 2000 and shown the new Amiga 2500, which sports a more powerful Motorola 68020 microprocessor.
Apple filled a room with an impressive showing of the kinds of serious business applications now done on its Macintosh family of computers. Apple has a tremendous ease-of-use advantage over everybody else--even Vendex--since all models of its computers work alike and every program shares many common functions.
The many ways in which software developers are using HyperCard, the Macintosh system for easily searching through reams of pictorial and textual data to find exactly what interests you, is something that those who don’t own or use Macintoshes can only envy.
Sometimes I think it would be a simpler world if there weren’t so many conflicting and competing computer designs.
That’s a wrong-headed approach, however. These differences fuel the creativity that leads to so many innovative products in today’s computer market place. If we lose that, we have lost more than we will ever gain by having fewer tough choices to make.
Computer File welcomes readers’ comments but regrets that the author cannot respond individually to letters. Write to Richard O’Reilly, Computer File, Los Angeles Times, Times Mirror Square, Los Angeles, Calif. 90053.
