The MacWorld Expo in Boston last month was awash with companies announcing new products to add value to the various models of Apple Computer Inc’s Macintosh. 3Com Corp of Santa Clara, California has developed an Ethernet adaptor called the EtherLink/SE, designed to enable the Macintosh SE to operate on a 10Mbits-per-second Ethernet and is written to Apple’s EtherTalk application program interface. 3Com will be connecting Macintoshes to the 3+Open Lan Manager open architecture OS/2 based network operat ing system. The EtherLink/SE adaptor is compatible with 3Com’s 3+ for Macintosh, Apple’s AppleShare, and Sun Microsystems’ TOPS network operating systems and the flacks at 3Com say it will connect the power and graphic capabilities of the Macintosh SE with the high data-transport rate of Ethernet networks. The faster transport rate of Ethernet is desirable on large networks using desktop publishing or computer assisted design and engineering applications requiring large file trans fers, comments 3Com, which says that the $595 EtherLink/SE adap tor will be out in December. On the software side Novell Inc’s NetWare for Macintosh, which was brought out in June, is compati bile with EtherLink/SE. NetWare compliance with Appletalk Filing Protocol enables Macintosh users running NetWare to continue to work in the native Macintosh operating environment.
Microsoft Corp will be shipping several new Macintosh packages this autumn, including an enhanced version of its Works windowgrated package, a Basic development system, and software that will enable MS-DOS micros to tap into a Microsoft electronic mail program running on AppleTalk. PC mail package will have a character-based windows interface and MS-DOS users will be able to hook into AppleTalk and use Mail features such as sending messages, transferring files, and using a background server. MS Mail for PCs on AppleTalk will be $125 when it arrives in October.
The biggest addition to Works 2.0 for the Mac is a set of drawing tools, geared primarily toward creating boxes and geometric shapes such as ovals, rectangles and polygons. LCD shutter page printer Among third-party Macintosh peripheral manufacturers, San Francisco-based Jasmine Technologies Inc introduced a liquid crystal shutter page printer called the Jasmine DirectPrint printer. It uses a strip of liquid crystal shutters similar to those used in watch faces and portable computer displays, and the claim is that the technique eliminates scanning distortions and provide for consistent print quality over the entire page. It will retail for just under $4,000. The GOfer high-speed text search and retrieval program from Microlytics Inc is now available to Mac users. It is able to find and display text inside files without prior indexing or text preparation, and users can initiate searches from within an application program and continue the search in the background, with or without MultiFinder. GOfer for the Macintosh is priced at $79.95.
Apple reviewed the Hypercard, its so-called interface toolkit which it introduced 12 months ago. HyperCard was shown as a front-end accessing four different types of networked servers. The company also introduced the Apple Scanner, an optical image scanner for inputting high quality images and text into the Macintosh computer, which is built for scanning text, line art, and images into any applications supporting PICT, TIFF or MacPaint file formats, at variable rates up to 300 dots per inch. The Scanner is $1,800. Apple also revealed a new configuration for the Apple Macintosh personal computer family, the Macintosh II 4/40. Based on the Macintosh II, it features a 40Mb internal hard drive and 4Mb memory, for $7,269. A 4Mb memory expansion kit for Macintosh II costs $2,400.
