Tech News from October 1992
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| Tech News from October 1992 | |
| Number | 3435 |
| Broadcast Date | DECEMBER 24, 2018 |
| Episode Length | 40:25 |
| Hosts | Tom Merritt, Sarah Lane |
| Guests | Rich Stroffolino |
The DTNS gang go back in time to Oct 1992 to debate the wonders of the nascent consumer CD-ROM technologies.
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Top Stories
- Robert Calem at the New York Times profiled the rise of fax mail services from telecom providers. Similar to voice mail, fax mail allows for documents to be collected electronically, with the ability to send to more than one party simultaneously, and attach voice messages as well. AT&T introduced the service on September 9th, with Bell Atlantic, US West and Ameritech offering fax mail in select markets. Fax mailboxes increased to 60,000 this year, with an estimated 600,000 installed by 1994. Costs vary by provider, but can run around $0.70 per page before regular monthly subscription costs. Is this the tech that will enable telecommuting for the masses?
- Novelist Orson Scott Card just published his last column for Compute! Magazine. For the last four years, he's been writing game reviews and criticism for the publication. In his last column, he calls out the game industry for being overly competitive. Card argues that art creates its own audience, and that just like novels and movies, video game success isn't a zero-sum ecosystem. One, what do we think of Card equating games with art? We're less than a decade out from the video game bubble, doesn't that kind of invalidate Card's thesis?
- Commodore announced the Amiga A4000, it's first major release since the A3000 in 1990, which it hopes can compete against the Apple Quadra line and MS-DOS alternatives. The A4000 comes with a slot installed 25Mhz Motorola 68040 CPU, up to 16MB of 32-bit RAM, and Amiga's new Advanced Architecture Graphics chips. The later improves on the A3000's 4096 color palette with true 24-bit color, supporting up to 16.7 million colors, and up to 256 different colors on the screen regardless of resolution. The A4000 comes with AmigaDOS 3.0, with read write compatibility for MS-DOS, Postscript printer support, and the ability to customize sounds and background images. Pricing starts at $4100. Enough to make Amiga competitive again?
- The New York Times had an interesting article about the future of digital music. Pacific Microsonics has developed a new audio standard called High Definition Compatible Digital designed to make audio quality sound more authentic while maintaining compatibility with existing CD and digital tape players. HDCD would use both an encoder used at the time of audio recording, and a decoder for playback for best results. Developed by Keith Johnson and Michael Pflaumer, HDCD uses 20-bit samples and at a much higher frequency than typical CDs (16-bit, 44.1k Hz). HDCD uses on the fly signal analysis and storage to fit it on a standard capacity audio CD. Pacific Microsonics plans on having preproduction devices to engineers for evaluation by early 1993 and a home decoder on the market in twelve months.
- IBM launched a new product line with the release of the IBM ThinkPad 700C. This notebook marks a major leap for IBM's portable computer efforts. With DOS pre-installed, the 700C starts at $4000. It comes with a 25MHz 486SLC CPU, 8MB of RAM, with a 120MB hard disk. Most impressively, the 700C has a market leading 10.4-inch DTI color display, all in a svelt 7.6 pound, 2.25-inch thick package. Connectivity includes an internal modem, seriel, parallel, VGA, and mouse ports, although sadly no PCMCIA. Is this kind of sleek portable going to be the new business standard?
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| Preceded by: "Glitter Busted" |
Tech News from October 1992 |
Followed by: "2018 Listener Co-Host Show" |