EI Z-NEWS 708 18 May 1987 ============================================================================== Of Significance. Event of the season, early summer sees first board released using Zilog Z280 chip (Z-News 705-4, 707-4). High Tech Research of Redding, CA, offers ULTRABOARD as an add-in to their K20 hard disk CP/M machine, and '84 Kaypros. Priced at $495, board runs at 12MHz and is said to be up[ to 10 times faster than a 4MHz Kaypro. Knowing the Z280 cache data and instruction capability, we at Echelon believe it will. Board has one megabyte of RAM-- expandable to 16--as RAMdisk and print buffer. And new driver is said to re- write screens 25 times faster than standard Kaypros. And driver increases screen resolution to 640 by 400 pixels. With an UltraBoard add-in, the K20 longs for our upgraded Z-System (ZOS), just as present CP/M systems crave present Z-System. Call or write High Tech Research for more information, address and telephone numbers in Hardware Beat below. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ From Our Mail Box. "I want to thank Echelon for opening the doors to a new world of eight-bit computing...your products and documentation have helped me make the leap into assembly language programming...breathed new life into my modified, but ageing, Kaypro II...low-level programming has given me insight to greater computer fundamentals..." from Jim Thompson, New Britain, CT. Thanks for the praise, Jim, and glad to hear you think programming with Assembler is worth initial effort to learn it. Also, thanks for the software order. "...always eager to get Z-News for both technical and human stuff," writes Dan Kelly from Coos Bay, OR 97420. Dan, we are just as eager to produce both. Some may think we care not, but...if you are a minister in a church, or simply an interested Christian, and use CP/M computers for your work, we suggest a subscription to Clergy KUG. Six issues per year for $12.00. Editor, Elmer F. Little, Jr., does a super job of blending religion and technology, passing on many tips useful in getting your job done, sowing and cultivating the many fields for harvest. Write Editor, Clergy KUG, 3868 Centorbi Court, Florissant, MO 63034, to place your order. By the way, for material to send our mailbox, think of the things you would like to see in the new Z-System (ZOS), beyond features of ZCPR v3.3 and ZRDOS v1.7. Jay, Ken, Malcom, and Bridger are looking for your ideas--we have ours but yours are just as important. Therefore, we need to be informed about yours before they can be merged with ours. So, send in your wish list. We are listening... David Johnson, Campbell, CA, writes to correct our use of mHz, instead of MHz, to indicate megaHertz, a measurement unit of frequency. We stand corrected. David also tells of other things that occasionally puts him ill at ease: incorrect word hyphenation at line ends and reverse negatives in the grammar world, and robots, taxation, planning for near- versus long-term profits, production efficiency, etc., in the truly it's not a perfect business world. "I highly enjoy Z-News and will continue to subscribe...wish more software supported ANSI terminals...sending you my master of ZAS and ZLINK v2.4 so you can upgrade me to 2.6..." from Allen McDonald, Washington D.C.. Allen, enjoy the free upgrade as a symbol of our dedication to making ZAS- ZLINK the best assembler-linker combination available. ANSI terminals may be going the way of dinosaurs--ASCII Wyse outsells DEC ANSI and bit-mapped screens become so popular ANSI appears in the lurch. Z-Node Activity. Just a reminder...as Z-News 707-1 stated, Z-Node Central has moved and has a new telephone number: 415/948-6656. Please use this number instead of the old one. We should provide better service from Los Altos location. If using PC-Pursuit, it's a San Jose (408) connection, not San Francisco (415). Thanks. Software Update Service Report. SUS #11 is filled...shipping in June. One new file, TX.LBR added since we last showed directory. TX, by Harris Landsberg, Brooklyn, NY, is just about the best of the text file listers, straight, squeezed, or crunched, and from in libraries. Output can be redirected to a file or to printer, as desired. Has other neat command-line options, but doesn't recognize user areas or named directories and has no built-in help. Let's get Harris to make program a full Z-System utility (his phone number is in LBR file). Of course, you could be using JetFind and get all the above plus string searching from multiple files (Z-News 701-1, Item 66 now $49.95, as stated in 705-3, plus shipping and handling). XDIR III, Version 2.0 Horizontal Listing by File Name/Type Disk: F User: 0 Name: BACKUP, File Attributes: Non-System Filename.Typ Size K RS Filename.Typ Size K RS Filename.Typ Size K RS -------- --- ------ -- -------- --- ------ -- -------- --- ------ -- -SUS .011 0 R ACOPY14 .LBR 26 EDITND .LBR 36 SH11 .LBR 22 SHVAR11 .LBR 14 TX120 .LBR 12 WDRAW .LBR 62 WINDOM2 .LBR 70 8 Files Using 242k, 8 Files on Disk and 540k Left Z-News 705-2 has details of WDRAW and WINDOM; 707-1, EDITND and ACOPY. Utilities SH and SHVAR come from Z-Shell expert Dreas Nielsen, Bellvue, WA. Z-User's Corner. In your work, if you find yourself constantly leaving your wordprocessor and then re-entering another text file to get lines for the first, you need Backgrounder II. BGii permits you to hold in memory (a disk buffer) a place in one program, go to another, return to the first and be in exactly your original place. Transfer pieces of text of one file to another without leaving either program. At any time within a program you have access to operating system commands, like DIR, ERA, etc. You do all these things while you are automatically, sequentially, several files in the background. If these features sound good to you, order BGii from us. It's Item 10 on EI Price List and is offered for $75 plus usual shipping and handling charges. We only recommend BGii to those who have hard disk, RAMdisk of over 128k- bytes, or both. More details in Z-News 704-1, and in demonstration library on Z-Nodes everywhere. Get file BGIIDEM3.LBR. More power to those using desktop publishing. The mainline media (the press) goes where the money is. When you look at IBM's recent offerings and the coverage given them--too much over nothing--you know we are not receiving information we need to set us free. Now, let's get back to the business of being innovative and creative--the heck with IBM and the media. More power to those using desktop publishing. A once-over the elements of high resolution printing, laser-beam (xerographic process) and digital phototypesetters (optical-chemical), and why the ASCII terminal is so efficient compared to a bit-map terminal. But first, a little background. ASCII terminals have built into their memories the character sets they can display, and can be accessed using one byte per character. The host computers using them do not have much to do to have requested characters displayed. A bit-mapped terminal or a laser printer, on the other hand, requires many bytes to display or print one character, if that character is not already stored in local machine memory. A 300-dot per inch resolution laser requires 90,000 bits per square inch (300 X 300) to fully cover that area with dots, characters, or other graphics. Our dream laser, the one with 720 dots per inch capability, requires 518,400 bits per square inch. Assuming 8 bits to the byte, an 8.5" by 1" printed-page of 8" by 10.5" requires 945k-bytes for definition with present day laser printers, or 5.4 megabytes if our dream machine is used. Think what that means if you have to transfer the data from computer host to printer, page by page. Wow! Now we know why printers are using Centronics parallel instead of 9600-baud serial interfaces. Now we know energy being expended by those people in the bit-map image field to reduce page printing delays--lots! Digital phototypesetters use over 1200 dots per inch to get their jobs done. Wonder no longer why they take up to 10 minutes to process one page. (We noticed using B/Printer to save files coming from Newword or WordStar justified text, a three-to-one expansion of file size occurs--and that with straight ASCII characters, no graphics. All the extra code comes from commands sent to printer to microspace-justify lines and auto-print headers and footers, and the like.) We pay a price to produce documents beyond dot-matrix and daisy-wheel overall quality...so be it. There was a time when, for very personal notes, only hand-written would do, then in business typewritten became appropriate. Now a near-letter- quality dot-matrix seems so impersonal as to be considered rude. Daisy-wheels these days are being replaced by lasers around offices (HP HAS sold over 250,000 of them.) Who thinks of essence these days? Form over substance, substance over form! This And That. "Don't take life too serious. It ain't nohow permanent."-- Walt Kelly, Pogo comic strip author. Our EI logo, created by graphics artist, Michelle Kimler, Mountain View, CA, has been selected for inclusion in High Tech Trademarks, authored by Professor John Mendenhall, California Polytechic State University, San Luis Obispo, CA. Book, published by Art Direction Books, New York City, comes out this fall. "Graphic designers and "huge sketch of eagle" ad agencies who have clients in the computer hardware/software, semi- conductor, laser technology and related fields," should find this a great reference manual. Worldwide distri- bution is planned. By the way, Z-News 303-3 covers relationship of Echelon's logo to eagles. Action, action. Oh! The joy of action...not just what can be done, but what ought to be done--yes, asking that ought, that's the on-slaught of wisdom. Hardware Beat. Something to rave about: K20 and Handyman are fully compatible with ZCPR3 and Z-System. High Tech Research, 1135 Pine Street, Suite #107, Redding, CA 96001, 800/446-3220 (inside Calif. 800/446-3223), RAS 915/243-9358, offers super Z80 computer based on Kaypro-10 but with fast 20 megabyte Seagate 225 hard disk and 96-tpi floppy for backup, TurboROM that adds additional speed. Machine offers advantages of integrated desktop calculator, calendar, note pad that transfers text to and from open WordStar files, voice phone dialing from library file of telephone numbers, and concurrent file management from within an application program. Those into speed and text generation and control should look into the K20. Contact Bill Nesting at High Tech for more information. (Columnist, Ted Silveira, Santa Cruz, CA, has thorough review of K20's features in Volume 4, Number 22 Issue of Computer Currents newspaper, Z-News 608-1.) "The Art of Typography provides crucial services and render unlimited assistance to society. It informs the citizen, advances the progress of science and art, nurtures and cultivated the intellect, and elevates the soul: its duty is to be the communicator and interpreter of wisdom and truth. It is the depictor of the mind. Therefore it is truly the art of all arts and the science of all sciences."--Pierre Simon Fournier, 17th Century French Typographer. Reliable sources say National's 32532 chip is being designed into Canon's next-generation laser printer, the one to be used by Hewlett-Packard and Apple, but not likely by IBM. It's this engine that is to upstage Ricoh's present 6-page-per-minute engine used by Epson and Okidata, and used by IBM, their version shipping late summer, with its PS/2 computers. This engine, not the one in HP's present Series II printers, will give real publishing power to the rest of us. For printers using Postscript (HP, IBM, and Apple) and DDL (HP, as a compatible language to PCL, their language for LaserJet series) page description languages (Z-News 607-5), a chip of National's 32532 throughput-- one that's significantly higher than Motorola's 68020--is dearly needed to process large amounts of bit-map data in a reasonable time, to not slow printing down. What's the sense having 6- and 8-ppm printers when solving the algorithms takes nearly a minute per page, as is presently the case in so many cases with Apple's Laserwriter. Ink hardly dry covering deals for Ricoh's 6-ppm laser printer by IBM, Okidata, and Seiko Epson when C. Itoh, Torrance, CA, a Japanese trading company, announces Jet-Setter, a 5-ppm Konica-engined machine, for $1795, retail. Printer has standard 300 by 300 dot resolution, 512k-bytes of memory, 3 internal fonts, and emulates the HP LaserJet Plus. Options include a 1.5 megabyte memory expansion board, Diablo 630 and Epson FX-86 emulations, and 11 font cartridges. Dealers get up to 40% discount--$800 lasers of Z-News 705-3 are near our grasp! Digital Equipment (DEC) new terminal line, VT330/340, near-ready for delivery, replaces present VT220, with both monochrome text-only and color text/graphics modes. Such machines cause Wyse and TeleVideo (TVI) to rethink their strategies in the ASCII market. Since Wyse is the present value, volume, and quality leader, we continue to pull for them to remain so, to keep DEC and TVI on their toes. We hope Wyse comes out with an IBM 3270 compatible terminal, just to see what happens. New WY-99GT ANSI/ASCII graphics terminal, priced at $649, works with Z-System TCAP, IBM PS/2 Model 30, Lotus 1-2-3, AutoCAD, and Ventura Publisher, priced at $649, should show world what Wyse people are made of, what is up their sleeves--they are innovative leaders, period. Their words, their attitude, their actions create success. A little put aside each week will permit WY-99GT to be our next desktop computer terminal. Japanese designers have difficulty keeping up with features of these hard drives. Conner Peripherals has been shipping their 40-megabyte (formatted) 3.5" hard disk drive (CP340) with SCSI interface. Average access time is a mere 29 milliseconds. That is one drive our Ampro Bookshelf computer could use. Conner is about to ship a 100-megabyte (formatted) 3.5" with 25 msec access (CP3100). Cost? About $10.00 a megabyte! For more information, contact Scott Holt at 2221 Old Oakland Road, San Jose, CA 95131, 408/433-3340. Software Beat. Digital Research, Inc., creators of CP/M, may have finally found their place-in-the-sun with new president, Richard Williams. He pushes desktop publishing with economical package called GEM Desktop Publisher, handles two typefaces and three styles with sizes from 7 to 72 points, priced at $395.00, running on IBM PC-compatible computers. Group that developed Ventura Publisher and marketed by Xerox are all ex-DRI employees. These are the people that formed their own company when, in 1985, DRI cancelled internal development of such software packages. Under Williams, Gary Kildall, DRI founder and chairman, is taking a hands-off attitude. We wish DRI good fortune. Z-Team member, Ken Taschner, updates SYSLIB, Z3LIB, and VLIB. Routines optimized, use Zilog mnemonics and opcodes--complete re-write. Reductions in code size (2 to 10%), improvements in speed (up to 23%) result. All Z utilities using the libraries benefit; in alpha test now, should be ready for shipment at summer's end or early fall. In Other Words. Learning: The Next Frontier--tied to risk management and life-styles...partnerships necessary as jobs get too big to be handled by one individual. Time and effort combine to make our contribution seem trivial, but nothing could be further from reality. A chain is no stronger than its weakest link. So also our contributions to the whole. Learning manifest itself by our ability to invent new strategies to deal with old situations. That we dearly need now! On a serial production line, each previous step is performed before the next is attempted. If a step is not done correctly the next step may not be able to be performed at all. We each depend on others, we are not islands. The whole is made up of parts. We are of one planet called Earth! What is our value-system? Big house, cars, boats, money =/ Happiness. These days, we don't live anymore--we have lifestyles. If we don't love what we do on a day-to-day basis, there is no happiness. ============================================================================== Of Angels and Eagles. After you have heard two different eyewitness accounts of the same automobile accident, you begin to wonder about the validity of history. How do we know, for sure, what ever happened anywhere? History! Bah! Humbug! We ask a new hand be dealt us, one with different cards than destiny appears to have given us. Pray we not be judged for our weaknesses, but for our loves. Love, not an art form to us but our lives. It's deep into evening, as we finish up learning differences between mandolin and lute, so off to have a moonlight cocktail. Hope Magdalena likes potion we have blended... Time to close our eyes, look at the stars--be gentled by their touch. See you down the lines... Echelon, Inc. 885 North San Antonio Road Los Altos, CA 94022 USA Telephone: 415/948-3820 Telex: 4931646 Z-Node Central (RAS): 415/948-6656 Trademarks: Little Board, Ampro Computers; SB180, SB180FX, GT180, Micromint; ON!, Oneac; DT42, The SemiDisk, Deep Thought 42, SemiDisk Systems; XLR8, M.A.N. Systems; VT-220, DEC, Digital Equipment; Laserwriter, Apple; Z80, Zilog; HD64180, Hitachi; 32532, National; 68020, Motorola; Z-System, ZCPR3, ZRDOS, ZOS, Z-Tools, Zas, Zlink, Z-Msg, Term3, Quick-Task, NuKey, Z80 Turbo Modula-2, Lasting-Value Software, Echelon; CP/M, Digital Research; 3270, PS/2, IBM, International Business Machines; TurboROM, Advent; AutoCAD, Autodesk; Graphix Toolbox, Turbo Pascal, Borland Int'l; 1-2-3, Lotus Development; Ventura Publisher, Xerox; Postscript, Adobe; DDL, Imagen; WordStar, Newword, MicroPro Int'l; K20, Handyman, High Tech Research; JetFind, Bridger Mitchell; WY-99GT, Wyse Technology. * * Fly with Z! * * Z-News 708 is Copyright MCMLXXXVII Echelon, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Permission to reprint, wholly or partially, automatically granted if source credit is given to Echelon.