Casio Inc gave a new pocket computer its first US outing at the Winter Consumer Electronics Show: the $350 PB-2000 can be programmed in either C or Basic, comes with 32Kb to 64Kb memory and offers RS232 and parallel ports and a 3.5 floppy disk drive as options; software for the machine can be developed on an MS DOS micro and transferred to the hand-held using available development and utility software, and it has its own spreadsheet, financial, and personal-organisation programs, a Qwerty keyboard, a ROM-card-resident operating system, and the Casio DataBank database utility. Defence contractor Hunting Engin-eering Ltd is to use Deductive Systems Ltd’s Generis intelligent knowledgebase management system which uses object-orientated representation techniques, to improve its storage, tracking, and retrieval of information: Generis holds expertise about the data it stores so conclusions can be drawn which are themselves stored and auto matically updated within the knowledgebase, enabling operational applications to be produced without conventional programming; Hunting is using a VMS version of Generis on DEC’s MicroVAX, but there are also versions for Unix environments.
