Computer Chronicles Revisited 121 — COMDEX/Fall '88

The tenth fall COMDEX show was held in Las Vegas from November 14 to 18, 1988. During its first decade, COMDEX grew from a single ballroom with 157 exhibitors to dominate the Las Vegas Convention Center–and several nearby hotels–with over 1,700 exhibitors. Attendance had grown just rapidly, from about 4,000 visitors in 1979 to over 100,000 in 1988.

Christine Winter of the Chicago Tribune noted the product mix at COMDEX had also shifted from “large systems in the 1970s to an onslaught of personal computers in the early 1980s, followed by examples of the burgeoning ‘after market’ for add-on devices, peripherals and printers that grew up as PCs began to dominate the marketplace in the mid-1980s.” Now, in 1988, there was increased focus on laptops and low-end workstations.

This shift in product focus also meant a change in the typical COMDEX visitor. COMDEX was originally an abbreviation of “Computer Dealers’ Exhibition,” a reference to resellers of mini-computers for specific industries. By 1988, however, most COMDEX attendees were either retail stores that sold directly to the public, small- and medium-sized corporate buyers, or just members of the computer-buying public looking to see what was new. As Computer Bowl I East captain and Technologic Computer Letter editor Richard Shaffer told the Tribune’s Winter:

The computer dealers of today are so powerful they don’t have to go to a trade show to see new models; the manufacturers come to them. Somebody like Sears does not come to COMDEX to see new equipment for the first time, Instead, this has become a very efficient way for end-users to see a lot of products at once.

Similarly, Winter noted, major companies like IBM and Apple no longer saw COMDEX as a forum for making major announcements. Indeed, IBM’s biggest announcement at COMDEX/Fall ‘88 was an upgrade to its Token Ring local area networking product line, while Apple largely ignored the show. On the plus side, this left more room for the “little guys,” as Winter called the majority of the exhibitors, who could take advantage of the large media presence at COMDEX to introduce their products.

Confusion or Just More Choice?

Indeed, many of the little guys received for their first national exposure on Computer Chronicles, which returned to COMDEX for the third consecutive year with a dedicated episode recorded on location. Stewart Cheifet and Gary Kildall recorded a brief introduction from a perch above the exhibitor floor at the Las Vegas Convention Center. Cheifet observed that the personal computer business appeared to be in more disarray now than at any time since perhaps when Kildall introduced CP/M about 10 years earlier. There were battles over standards in bus architectures, user interfaces, and operating systems. Would any of this confusion get resolved at this year’s COMDEX?

Kildall said he didn’t think there was confusion so much as there was now a wide variety of applications for personal computers. Ten or fifteen years ago, there were only a handful of applications, such as accounting and word processing. Now there was a wider spectrum, from games and home computers to business and high-end scientific workstations. Another thing inherited from the mainframe and minicomputer industry was the idea of a vendor having a vested interest in not having standards applied to the whole industry–i.e., Apple with its Macintosh platform. So to answer Cheifet’s question, Kildall said he didn’t think the industry would ever fully resolve its standards issues.

Would DOS Continue to Dominate in the 90s?

Cheifet narrated coverage from COMDEX for the remainder of the episode. He began by noting that this year’s show was spread out over eight sites throughout Las Vegas, from the cavernous convention center to the high-rise hotels and casinos of the Strip, all of which were looking to attract their share of the over 100,000 visitors to COMDEX.

The massive size of recent COMDEX shows, Cheifet said, made it difficult for even an experienced visitor to unearth every new product or trend. Even if you managed to plot your path through the maze of exhibitors, there were conferences, workshops, and speeches in progress almost non-stop.

Cheifet noted that 1988 marked COMDEX’s tenth anniversary, and if there was a standard topic of discussion after a decade, it was the lack of standards in the computer industry. The “alphabet battle” of EISA-vs-MCA and OS/2-vs-UNIX was the subject on and off the exhibit floor, as AT&T, IBM, and the rebellious Gang of Nine battled for attention.

Byte magazine even took a poll to find out what operating system voters expected to dominate the 1990s. The results were hardly scientific, Cheifet said, but 33 percent chose extended DOS, while standard DOS received 22 percent. In third place was OS/2 (18 percent), followed by UNIX with a graphic interface (15 percent), standard UNIX (9 percent), and the Macintosh operating system (3 percent).

Asian Manufacturers Embraced MCA

On the hardware front, Cheifet said, the struggle was for IBM Micro Channel Architecture-compatible machines–or just finding one. And if you looked hard enough, you might have seen a few. For example, Taiwan-based MiTAC demonstrated an IBM-licensed Micro Channel PC, the MiTAC MPS 2386, which came with a 386 processor, a faster hard drive, and two kinds of floppy drives. Clement Lin, MiTAC’s director of marketing, emphasized Micro Channel’s high performance with respect to data transfer due to its 32-bit bus. He said this made MCA-based machines better for the office environment, especially with respect to single- and multi-user workstations, as well as local area networking.

Cheifet said there were also smaller clone-makers touting Micro Channel, at least in prototype form, such as Korea Computer, Inc. (KCI), which showed off its SL250, a 286-based PS/2 clone. The SL250 ran at 16 MHz and came with a 30 MB hard drive, two 3.5-inch floppy disk drives, and VGA graphics. Jeong Hun Lee of KCI said that since IBM announced the PS/2, the company thought it was time to get into the PC market.

Peering Into the Multimedia Future

Skirting the MCA fray was some interesting hardware in the peripheral category, Cheifet said. Intel displayed a CD-ROM application called DVI, or “Digital Video Interactive.” Unlike the still-image format of Compact Disc Interactive (CD-i), DVI discs could store up to one hour of full-motion, full-screen video. Intel’s demo showed video running at what Cheifet described as a leisurely 15 frames per second–about half the number of frames of a television monitor–but Intel expected to increase the speed in its released version.

Meanwhile, over at the Sony booth, the Japanese electronics giant demonstrated a rewritable optical disk drive using magneto-optical technology, the Sony SMO-S501 Subsystem. The 5.25-inch disks had a capacity of 650 MB and could access up to 3 MB of data in about 40 milliseconds. The SMO-S501 was available immediately for around $4,700.

The Latest in Fax Technology

For those who were more concerned with data transmission than data storage, Cheifet said, Gammalink Inc. offered a group of products for scanning and sending documents via fax-modem and PC. For example, the GammaFax CP modem came with a 10 MHz, 16-bit processor and 256 KB of RAM. And once you transmitted the document, a software package called TrueScan from Calera Recognition Systems, Inc., could transform the graphic information into correctable text using optical character recognition. The recipient could then edit the text using any one of 20 different word processors.

Another company, Glorious Union Information Systems (GUIS), unveiled its prototype of a combination fax, telephone answering machine, and copier all in one box. Cheifet said while it wouldn’t make coffee, the unorthodox GUIS Fax 14 ($1,200) was sure to be a boon for people with limited desk space. Henry Herrera, sales manager for GUIS America, Inc., told Cheifet that the Fax 14 could clearly distinguish when the user received a voice call or fax. It could also store up to 42 different phone numbers, 21 for fax and 21 for voice.

386 Laptop Power for a Hefty Price

Cheifet said that laptops were still popular items at COMDEX, and every year they seemed to get a little closer to desktop machines. Dauphin Technology, Inc., unveiled one of the first laptops using the new Intel 386SX chip, the Dauphin LapPRO 386. The LapPRO ran at 16 MHz and came with 1 MB of RAM and a 40 MB hard drive. The 16-pound machine supported VGA graphics, and the user could add up to 100 MB of additional hard disk storage. Dauphin expected to release the LapPRO in March 1989 for around $5,000.

Computer Translator Still No Substitute for the Real Thing

Scattered around the various hotel exhibit halls, Cheifet said, were some clever software packages for word-conscious computer users. The Wysiwyg Corporation presented a multi-lingual word processor called The Universal Word. The PC-based program offered a multi-window environment, true WYSIWYG (“What you see is what you get”), multiple font sizes, and proportional spacing.

Globalink Language Services took the wraps off its computer-assisted machine translation software, TWP. Cheifet said the program could do a rough-draft translation in either direction from French, German, Spanish, and soon Russian. Timothy Rowe, Globalink’s general manager, said TWP was a productivity tool. TWP wouldn’t provide a perfect translation–it wasn’t intended to–but it provided a quick draft translation for informational purposes. If the user needed a finished translation, they could hand off TWP’s output to a professional translator for editing. Rowe, himself an experienced Chinese translator, noted the typical translator could translate about 3,000 words per day. But by using TWP to create a draft translation, that same translator could translate between 10,000 and 12,000 words per day.

Cheifet said that for business users concerned with workgroups, Information Research Corporation introduced Syzygy, a workgroup management program that operated over a local area network. Syzygy organized objectives, projects, and tasks. The program then allocated staff and distributed assignments via electronic mail based on the project’s budget and deadlines. Information Research planned to ship Syzygy by Christmas 1988 for around $500.

The Wonderful World of Color

Cheifet noted that the popularity of color monitors had led to a healthy increase in the number of color printers and scanners on display at COMDEX. For instance, Sharp Electronics brought out a hand-held color scanner, the Sharp JX-100, which was capable of scanning a 4-by-6 inch area at 200 dots per inch (DPI). The JX-100 offered 24 bits per pixel and operated through a standard serial interface. Sharp expected to ship the portable scanner in early 1989 for under $1,000.

Sharp also introduced the JX-730, Cheifet said, which was a color inkjet printer. It was a wide-carriage machine designed to print on plain paper. The JX-730 sprayed ink through 48 nozzles to produce 180 DPI resolution. According to Sharp, the JX-730 could produce one B-sized (11-by-17 inch) page per minute.

Meanwhile, at the Tektronix, Inc., booth, Cheifet said visitors could see the Tektronix Phaser CP color inkjet printer, which the company claimed was the first color printer compatible with both Adobe’s PostScript and Hewlett-Packard’s HP-GL printer control languages. The Phaser CP produced 8.5-by-11 inch transparencies and paper with a virtually unlimited range of colors and shades. The printer came with 35 standard typefaces, 8 MB of RAM, and retailed for around $13,000.

Speaking of color, Truevision, Inc., had what Cheifet described as a colorful booth filled with demonstrations of color graphics cards and color paint programs. For instance, Linker Systems demonstrated a release version of Photon Paint ($295) for the Macintosh, the first color paint program to run on a computer with a 32-bit bus. This allowed the memory-intensive paint program to produce cleaner images at a reasonable speed. Truevision itself displayed its ATVista board and Truevision Image Processing Software (TIPS). The ATVista was a PC-AT graphics card that came with up to 4 MB of video memory and retailed for $2,500.

There was even more color at the Bi-Link Computer booth, Cheifet said, where visitors could get a look at the first transportable unit with an EGA color display. The Bi-Link TransData 286A was actually a computer kit that could be configured in almost any way imaginable, with a typical configuration costing around $2,200.

Gimmicks Abound at COMDEX

Opening the second half of his stroll around Las Vegas, Stewart Cheifet said that getting the customer’s attention at a show the size of COMDEX was a difficult task requiring some special gimmicks. This year, exhibitors tried a bit of everything. There were Vegas-style games, a pond containing motorized fish, and a giant model of a PC. Many exhibitors ran contests offering free software, hardware, and even a new car. There were performances from magicians and mimes, which Cheifet noted could remind visitors of the sometimes “illusory” nature of new products.

Some vendors showed the potential disasters that could be avoided by using their products, Cheifet said. For instance, the Merritt Products booth had a display showing a knocked-over cup pouring a continuous stream of coffee onto a PC keyboard. This clever prank promoted Merritt’s SafeSkin keyboard protector, a transparent cover designed to remain in place while the keyboard was in use.

European Companies Look Ahead to Common Market Completion

Standing outside the International Business Center tent, Cheifet said there was a substantial increase in the number of foreign exhibitors at this year’s COMDEX, many of them clustered in World’s Fair-style pavilions. These international companies were often small, but their products were notable:

Cheifet noted that the increased European presence at COMDEX was accompanied by greater attention to European markets among conference speakers. With the consolidation of Common Market countries expected in 1992, Peter Cregut of Mercatus International talked about the movement towards a single European computing standard. Cregut told Cheifet that these standards would continue to change and evolve over the next 3 or 4 years. So instead of a diverse set of standards that had no relation to each other, there would likely be at least a common set of European standards.

India, Hong Kong Made COMDEX Debuts

But European exhibitors were not the only international presence at COMDEX, Cheifet said. Asian countries were also looking for business, including several newcomers to the show. India opened its first COMDEX exhibit–Software India ‘88–a pavilion filled with Indian companies that specialized in overseas software development in the areas of computer-aided design, engineering, graphics, expert systems, and application software. Cheifet noted there was a recent trend of American companies, such as Texas Instruments and Unisys, working with Indian companies due to their low development costs.

Another first-time participant at COMDEX ‘88 was the Hong Kong Development Council, which brought along a cross-section of the British colony’s computer industry, whose products ranged from IBM clones to printers, joysticks, keyboards, floppy drives, and scanners. Because Hong Kong’s dollar was tied to the American currency, Cheifet noted, prices could be very convncing.

One of the Hong Kong exhibitors was Skyworld Technology Ltd., which unveiled a line of hand-held scanners under the “SkySCAN” name in both monochrome and color models. Cheifet said the scanners came with utility programs for desktop publishing, word processing, graphics, and OCR software. There were models for both the PC and Mac, with prices ranging from $300 to $400.

A Plethora of New Input Devices

Before doing business in a foreign language, Cheifet said, you might want to adapt your computer keyboard. That was the idea behind COMMANDPATCH 2 from California-based Genest Technologies, Inc. The COMMANDPATCH was a 32-key auxiliary keyboard that added all European characters and symbols to a standard US keyboard. COMMANDPATCH 2 came with different templates for different languages and connected through the PC’s printer port. Genest also demonstrated its outboard keyboards for laptops, which added separate numeric, cursor, and function keys.

Another company, RapidText, Inc., offered a product to translate shorthand. Cheifet said the company introduced a steno machine-to-PC interpreter that automatically translated a stenographer’s marks into English and displayed it instantly on a screen. RapidText claimed this was the fastest way to enter data into a computer. The program could differentiate between homonyms and was available with auxiliary dictionaries for different professions.

Cheifet said that if COMDEX couldn’t always promise Earth-shaking announcements, the show usually offered a good share of innovative products designed to improve and refine existing technologies. For example, a clever peripheral from the Soricon Company, the DataSweep PencilWand, combined a bar code reader and optical character reader into one pencil-shaped input device.

Billy R. Anders, Soricon’s president and CEO, told Cheifet there were a lot of creative new devices at the show this year. They tended to be devices looking for a problem, and at some point in time there were problems and solutions married together. Soricon’s approach was that keyboards were a problem because there was a lot of keyboard illiteracy. Soricon’s solution was the PencilWand, which brought literacy into the data entry marketplace through the use of a hand-held device. Basically, the PencilWand was a lot friendlier to use than a keyboard.

For engineers and artists, Cheifet said, Kye International offered the Genius Dynamouse ($99), a mouse with continuously variable dynamic resolution. Dynamic resolution was proportional to the speed of the user’s hand movement, so the faster you moved your hand, the faster the cursor traveled. The resolution level from 200-to-800 DPI was software selectable, and the mouse came with 20 pre-designed menus. Kye also unveiled a compact hand-held scanner, the GeniScan ($279), with 200 DPI resolution and multi-window scanning.

Laser Printing in 256 Shades of Gray

Switching from input to output, DP-Tek, Inc., offered LaserPort GrayScale, a $1,300 controller card that printed up to 256 shades of gray on a Hewlett-Packard LaserJet II. There were actually two boards: one for the PC and one for the printer. The GrayScale’s software could then recreate an image without distortion, and an additional utility allowed the user to change the different gray values.

Allen L. Frazier, the president of DP-Tek, told Cheifet the problem they were trying to solve was the inability of desktop laser printers to print a really good picture. Laser printers did an excellent job with letters but it just wasn’t possible to print a photograph that looked photographic. But with the LaserPort GrayScale, users could now easily incorporate photographs into a finished desktop publishing document.

Vaccinating Your PC Against New Threats

Noting the recent surge in computer viruses, Cheifet said Computer Integrity Corporation introduced Vaccinate Plus, an anti-viral software package to cure one of the most terrifying of computer illnesses. Lawrence DeMartin, Computer Integrity’s president, said the software included “vaccine modules,” which functioned just like a biological vaccine. That is, the module attached itself to the viral site and monitored it for activity, enabling it to detect the virus before damage occurred.

Cheifet noted that while a PC owner might never face the massive problems that can occur on a mainframe network, the threat of any virus was enough reason to take precautions. DeMartin added that Vaccinate Plus stopped viruses at the “reproduction” bottleneck. By definition, a virus was a program that reproduced itself by modifying other files. Vaccinate Plus could catch such modifications, and as a side effect, the software could also detect program corruption from other sources, such as hard disk errors, operator errors, or deliberate tampering.

Finally, Cheifet said the most clever way to save space came from Silver Reed, which introduced the SP-30, a combination printer, scanner, and copier. The SP-30 scanned at about 200 DPI, while the thermal printer and copier was capable of about 1600 dots-per-line resolution.

DP-Tek the Little Lawrence Company That Could

Allen Frazier’s DP-Tek was one of the hundreds of small companies attempting to make a name for itself at COMDEX. In the case of DP-Tek, its LaserPort GrayScale card definitely grabbed the media’s interest, although there was skepticism–if not outright disbelief–that an 11-person company based in Lawrence, Kansas, could actually produce such a product.

Allen Frazier, Wayne Bradburn, and Darryl Roberts formed DP-Tek, Inc., in November 1980. Frazier, a native of Oklahoma, grew up in his family’s home construction business before moving to Wichita, Kansas, to attend college. While working towards his mathematics degree at Wichita State University, Frazier took a day job writing modeling software for Cessna Aircraft Co. This sparked his interest in computers, and after graduating from Wichita State, Frazier opened his first company, Data Systems, Inc., in November 1974.

Data Systems primarily served as a reseller for terminals manufactured by Texas-based Datapoint Corporation. Datapoint was best known for the Datapoint 2200, a programmable terminal that could also be used as an early personal computer. Through Data Systems, Frazier sold customized Datapoints to small businesses. He also designed and built printers, along with the necessary interface boards and software, which were fully Datapoint compatible. Wayne Bradburn, an engineer for a local testing equipment manufacturer in Wichita, assisted Frazier part-time with this work.

Eventually, customer demand for the printers and printer accessories led Frazier and Bradburn to create a standalone electronics design and manufacturing business called DP-Tek. (Darryl Roberts, the third co-founder, left DP-Tek in the early 1980s to start his own business focused on educational software.) While this initially remained a side business, Frazier decided to sell Data Systems in January 1983 to focus full-time on DP-Tek. Bradburn quit his job a few months later and became DP-Tek’s vice president of engineering.

Although Frazier’s new company, like his old one, was initially built around Datapoint terminals, by the mid-1980s DP-Tek began to diversify. At first, this meant building industry-specific computer systems. For example, DP-Tek designed and manufactured DataNet, a computer system for auto salvage shops. Frazier told the Wichita Eagle in May 1985 that DP-Tek expected to sell and install about 500 DataNet computers that year, representing about 70 percent of its total revenue.

DP-Tek was still a very small operation. Even when Frazier appeared at the fall 1988 COMDEX, his company employed just 11 people, including himself and Bradburn. No doubt because they were a small private company that didn’t answer to outside shareholders, Frazier and Bradburn continued to tinker with new side projects. This included a computer program that could integrate text and gray-scale graphics to produce print-shop quality documents on a laser printer–a process that had stymied industry giants. As Stan Finger reported for the Eagle, this turned out to be “exacting, time-consuming work”:

“We’d try something and print it out, and take it over to a printing shop down the street and say, ‘How’s this’” Bradburn said. “And they’d say, ‘You’re getting close, but you’re not there yet. You need this and this and this.’ And we’d go back and try again.”

The key, Bradburn said, “was not knowing any better. We didn’t know enough” to let existing theories cloud their thinking.

“We tried to approach it from a printing standpoint, instead of a picture graphics standpoint,” Bradburn said. “It turned out that was the way to do it.”

Bradburn and Frazier’s breakthrough was LaserPort, which they took to the 1986 COMDEX show. According to Frazier, “Nobody could believe what we had done.” Two years later, they brought an updated version, LaserPort GrayScale, to the 1988 show. DP-Tek held a press conference at COMDEX ‘88 to demonstrate the GrayScale’s ability to print black-and-white photographs in a text document at 212 DPI.

While there was what the Eagle described as a “panel of experts” at the news conference extolling Bradburn and Frazier’s revolutionary work, the tech press still could not believe that an unknown engineering company (with no marketing budget) like DP-Tek had found a solution to a problem larger companies like AT&T and Hewlett-Packard had tried–and failed–to solve.

One person who did believe was Intel analyst Wynn Smith, who talked his bosses into signing a licensing deal in late 1988 for the original LaserPort technology. Intel subsequently released its own version of LaserPort called Visual Edge, which the Eagle said was “easier to use and [] compatible with more systems than the original LaserPort,” which only worked with the Hewlett-Packard LasertJet.

Frazier said the Intel deal “legitimatized” his company. Yet there were still concerns over DP-Tek’s long-term viability. Bradburn and Frazier were engineers, not marketers, and they struggled to sell their own GrayScale cards even as the royalty checks from Intel started coming in. Fortunately, other companies followed Intel’s lead, and by the mid-1990s, DP-Tek’s technology–which now fit on a single chip–had been licensed by Apple, Digital Equipment Corporation, and Xerox Corporation, and others for use in their own printers.

In November 1994, DP-Tek signed an agreement with California-based Integrated Data Technology Inc., (IDT), a semiconductor manufacturer. IDT acquired a minority stake in DP-Tek and agreed to serve as its chip manufacturer. As Frazier told the Eagle, he expected the deal would help his company grow. At that point, DP-Tek had 45 employees, and Frazier expected to increase his headcount to about 100 people.

About 18 months later, however, Frazier and Bradburn did an about-face and decided to sell their company. Not surprisingly, the buyer was Hewlett-Packard, one of the largest printer manufacturers in the world. Technically, HP did not buy DP-Tek itself. Rather, HP acquired most of DP-Tek’s assets and patents for an undisclosed amount. Bradburn and Frazier also joined HP’s Boise, Idaho, division, while most of their employees back in Lawrence received severance packages. DP-Tek then formally dissolved in December 1996.

Frazier served as the Boise division’s research and development manager until he retired from HP around 2003. He remained in Idaho afterwards where he continued to tinker with various inventions and ideas. This included developing his own airplanes.

On the morning of September 24, 2009, Frazier, also an experienced commercial pilot, conducted a test on his latest design, the Frazier Tangent, at the Nampa Municipal Airport about 20 miles (32 km) west of Boise. The single-seat, twin-engine Tangent had not yet made its first flight, but Frazier and his co-designer, Frank Miller, wanted to test the plane’s taxiing and ground handling. Miller later recalled that during their previous ground testing, the aircraft’s pitch had been “non-responsive,” meaning the nose did not reach the necessary angle of attack to achieve takeoff.

After making some modifications to the Tangent, Frazier conducted two high-speed taxiing tests that morning at Nampa. During the second test, the airplane became airborne, reaching a height of about 122 feet (37.1 meters) before making a sharp right-hand turn, stalling, and crashing into the ground. According to Miller, he ran to the still-intact aircraft expecting to see Frazier get out. But he found Frazier still in the pilot’s seat and unresponsive. He died at the age of 62 due to the blunt force trauma of the collision. The National Transportation Safety Board later determined the probable cause of the accident was Frazier’s “failure to maintain pitch control of the airplane.”

Remembering his longtime friend and colleague to the Idaho Statesman, Wayne Bradburn praised Frazier as an innovator:

He could really see the future of technology. He was thinking all the time. He came up with these ideas. Every once in awhile we’d figure out how to make one of them work.

Notes from the Random Access File