32by32 - Macintosh History from the 1980s

Macworld Expo 1987 Boston

Trade Show

Dates: August 11-13 (Tuesday-Thursday), 1987
Location: Bayside Exposition Center
Exhibitors: 270
Attendees: 25,000

N.B. — In 1987 Macworld Expo was often referred to as “Mac Expo,” in sources both informal (user group newsletters) and professional (the pages of MacWeek magazine). The official Program Guide used “Macworld Exposition.”

Keynotes

Day 1 – John Sculley (President & CEO, Apple): The Second Generation: The Revolution Continues…
Day 2 РJean-Louis Gass̩e (EVP, Apple): Are Personal Computers There Yet?
Day 3 – William Campbell (President & COO, Claris): Success in Software: The Next Decade

Hardware

In the run-up to the summer exposition, MacWEEK described Apple as hoping to “solidify its new-found success in the business community with the release of a strong line of peripherals, communications products and systems software.” As Apple slowly began to work through production delays with the Mac II, it could begin to place more emphasis on the open, expandable system — previous trade shows had focused on the much simpler (and more available) Mac SE.

Indeed, some vendors couldn’t contain their excitement at the new hardware expansion possibilities of the SE and II:

SuperMac Technology continues its innovation with exciting new hardware and software for the Macintosh family. Come by our booth and see! Now shipping: Spectrum and SuperView high resolution graphics boards and monitors for the Mac II and SE; DataFrame 40 XP and 20 XP, our 20 and 40 SCSI Hard Disks.

Sigma Designs pitched monitors at both the Mac II and SE as well:

Sigma Designs will exhibit its LaserView Display System, the highest resolution (1664 x 1200) monitor and display board system available in non-interlaced mode for Desktop Publishing and Engineering. LaserView monitors come as 15″ or 19″ landscape models and provide useful features such as dual resolutions, multiple cursor sizes, switching between screens, screen-save timer, and others. The LaserView Display System works with both Macintosh SE and Macintosh II.

Yet Macworld Boston did not turn the Mac II into an open platform overnight, despite expectations. “One of the more disappointing aspects of the MacWorld Expo held in Boston last August”,” wrote Macweek, “was a lack of NuBus product introductions, aside from color video and the data acquisition boards. It appears that Mac II users aren’t exactly clamoring for specialized hardware capabilities quite yet, and vendors aren’t rushing to introduce products.” With the benefit of several decades’ worth of hindsight, it’s clear that costs and complexities of next-generation card development hit both Apple and IBM as they tried to lure 3rd-party products to NuBus and MicroChannel, respectively.

Upgrades for the Mac SE, taking advantage of that machine’s processor direct slot, were on offer from Radius, General Computer, Levco and Peak Systems. But perhaps the most ambitious product aimed at SE owners was from Austin-based Second Wave Inc:

Second Wave, Inc. announces ExpanSE and ExpanSE II, expansion chassis systems for the Macintosh SE. ExpanSE expands the power of your Macintosh SE by providing a chassis with four expansion slots for Macintosh SE cards. ExpanSE II provides eight expansion slots for Macintosh II cards to operate with your Macintosh SE. Second Wave expansion systems include an SE interface card, cabling, and the expansion chassis which contains a power supply, fan, and external expansion brackets. The ExpanSE case (13″xl0″x8″) can be positioned vertically or horizontally on your desk. ExpanSE II is the same size as the Macintosh II. Expand the functionality of your Macintosh SE with an expansion chassis system from Second Wave!

Even the lowly Mac Plus had something to look forward to, as Radius (a company founded by ex-Apple hardware engineers) targeted it for the same big screen and acceerator that it offered for the much more expandable SE:

Radius, Inc.will show the Radius Accelerator and the Radius Full Page Display for both the Macintosh Plus and SE computers. The Radius Accelerator is an enhancement board which is capable of quadrupling the speed of the Macintosh. The Radius Full Page Display (FPD) is a 15 inch large display screen. The Accelerator and FPD transform the Macintosh Plus or SB computer into a professional desktop publishing system by adding greater processing speed and a larger display.

Apple announced a number of new physical products:

1. ImageWriter LQ
2. AppleFax Modem
3. AppleShare PC
4. HyperCard
5. MultiFinder
6. EtherTalk NuBus Interface Card

Of these, the ImageWriter LQ would not ship until the end of 1987.

Apple was still several years away from the Mac Portable, so show-goers had to make do with two third-party options: DynaMac and Colby. Both re-purposed a ROM chip that was only obtainable from a retail Mac, which made them expensive machines indeed.

As hard drives became more mainstream, companies such as Tecmar saw an untapped market for backup devices:

The Tecmar QT-Mac 40, a portable 40 MB tape backup system, is designed for use with all SCSI-based Macintosh systems. Combining the high speed flexibility of SCSI with industry standard QIC-100 compatibility, the QT-Mac40 makes the task of maintaining reliable backups quick and easy. Because of its unrivalled small size, the QT-Mac40 is portable and can easily serve the backup and archival needs of several users. The QT-Mac40 is the perfect complement to all Macintosh SCSI hard disks.

SuperMac’s software introduced Tapes Fit, a tape back-up system for the Macintosh that presumably worked with 3rd-party tape drives.

Apple Software New Versions

1. MacDraw 1.95
2. MacWrite 4.6
3. MacProject 1.2
4. MacTerminal 2.2

Hypercard

The big software story of the show. MacWeek was filled with articles about the new platform in the weeks leading up to the expo. Some of this speculation was prescient: “Apple’s decision to bundle the program will pay off in resulting sales,” while some was later proven wrong: “HyperCard in ROM is a tantalizing possibility for next year.”

Graphics Software

Perhaps the first 256-color paint program for the Mac, PixelPaint was developed by Pixel Resources and published by SuperMac. It was positioned as a software showcase for the latter company’s new Spectrum 8-bit color video card for the Mac II and accompanying 19″ monitor. Journalists noted that besides SuperMac, vendors such as PCPC (Personal Computer Peripherals Co.) and Mitsubishi were also shipping large-screen displays that would show off the software to good effect.

T/Maker released ClickArt PostScript Images, a $130 collection of 125 vector-based clip art images for laser printers, as well as a “vertical” product aimed at a specific demographic: ClickArt Christian Images.

A graphics product nevertheless aimed squarely at the DTP market, Symmetry Corp featured the PictureBase Art Management System, “designed for Desktop Publishers who incorporate graphics into documents they prepare. PictureBase is the first and only complete system which allows users to manage Macintosh graphics in an easy to use Library file system.”

MacroMind showed a category-defining product — although they themselves may not have known it at the time:

VideoWorks II — A new, more versatile and more powerful version of the acclaimed animation tool VideoWorks. Its new Over View window is an easy to use front end that adds slide show sequencing of animations and/or illustrations to the original animation system. The animation program features two ways to animate (real-time and cel), color capabilities (for the Macintosh II), and a unique scoring system. Animations may include elaborate sound effects including Macintalk, sampled and synthetized sound. VideoWorks II comes complete with everything you will need to leam the product; interactive tour disk, written tutorials, sample animation and art disks, and an extensive manual.

VideoWorks would of course grow into MacroMind Director, one of the behemoth multimedia authoring packages of the 1990s.

Word Processing Software

Ann Arbor Softworks showed off FullWrite Professional to big crowds (see photo above) but had no software to sell — the release date slipped to mid-September.

WordPerfect Corp had announced the Macintosh version of their leading software back in May, and was promoting it at the expo:

Wordperfect for the Macintosh includes features such as macros, merge, footnotes/endnotes, table of contents/index generation, paragraph/outline numbering, onscreen text columns, 115,000 word spelling checker, thesaums, and is file compatible with Wordperfect 4.2 for the IBM. Conversion from other word processing formats is provided, as well as support of the DCA format.

The software wouldn’t ship till April of 1988, however.

Microsoft showed Word 3.01, Works 1.1 and Excel 1.04, “working together in an office scenario on an AppleShare network.” New features in these products included Mac II compatibility and the removal of copy protection.

Symmetry Corp showed off their outline processor Acta, “designed for people who use the Macintosh to write. Use Acta to prepare and organize manuscripts, reports, journals, etc., and for almost any other kind of writing.”

T/Maker promoted WriteNow in the Program Guide as “one of the leading word processors available today.”

Desktop Publishing Software

The MACazine was eager to demo their own internal processes for desktop publishing the magazine itself:

The MACazine will be demonstrating the desktop publishing system used to put together our page layout. Our editorial staff will be available for questions and comments.

Letraset unveiled Ready, Set, Go! 4.0 with style sheets and text wrapping features.

Springboard Software introduced its own DTP package:

NEW! Springboard Publisher is an integrated desktop publishing program that offers page layout, word processing and graphics creation all in one program. Springboard Publisher is designed for people in home, school and business environments, enabling them to create professional looking pages quickly and easily. Springboard Publisher offers total page layout control, allowing users to change their design as easily as they change their minds. Text and graphics can be placed anywhere on the page.

Software Supply introduced Suitcase, a ‘long-awaited’ font management utility that would go on to play a large role in enabling Mac users to load and unload fonts as needed.

Quark XPress 1.10 was announced, featuring PostScript color separations and TIFF support, together with Works and WriteNow import. Quark promoted the following unique features in XPress:

word processing-includes auto-hyphenation, 80,000 word spelling checker global search and replace.

typography-auto or manual keming increments .01 em-space, leading to .001 of an inch, font sizes from 2 to 500 points, tracking and horizontal scaling.

page layout-hierarchical box system, precision placement, text pipelining, columns, continued to/from messages, auto pagination.

test runaround-automatically runs text around irregularly shaped graphics.

Multimedia Software

MaacroMind showed off VideoWorks II, featuring color support.

Games

Spectrum Holobyte showed off two simulators for the Mac:

Spectrum HoloByte will be showing the two latest additions to their simulation product line. Falcon is the F-16 fighter simulation that puts the user in the cockpit to perform fighter maneuvers while engaging enemy MiG’s in dogfight battles. Sound and digitized airplaine images lend to realism and playability of Falcon. Another new product PT-109, the torpedo boat simulation, takes you to battle on the seas. Enemy attacks will come not only by sea, but from the air as well, so the user must be prepared to make most effective use of his arsenal of weapons consisting of torpedoes, depth charges, rockets, and machine guns. GATO, ORBITER, and TellStar, are other products being displayed.

Silicon Beach presented “three new games for the Macintosh: Apache Strike, which features 3-D air-to-air combat, Android Arena, in which users program robots for battle, and Beyond Dark Castle, the much anticipated sequel to the most popular game of 1987.”

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Fastback 1

Backup Utility

In the runup to the summer Boston MacWorld Expo of 1987, MacWeek printed an August 8th press release announcing a new backup utility:

Fifth Generation set to launch Fastback for the Mac
BATON ROUGE, La. — Fifth Generation Systems Inc. will introduce Fastback for the Macintosh at Mac Expo in Boston.
Fastback is a software program that provides a hard-disk backup and restores data from dam­aged disks. It can back up a 10-Mbyte disk in less than 10 minutes. Fastback is priced at $99.95.
Fastback, which appears as an icon on a hard-disk menu, uses a proprietary-device driver that allows it direct access to the disk. It commands the disk to transfer documents that have been selected.

The same issue of MacWeek had a half-page ad for Fastback which featured the distinctive animal mascot — a cheetah that implied speed in a procedure that had a reputation for incredible slowness.

Fastback 1 was reviewed a few months later, in the November 3rd issue of MacWeek:

Fastback: Speedy, but some problems

Fastback 1.01
List price: $99.95 until Dec. 31.
Strengths: Remarkable speed; good interface and file-selection windows; error-correction for damaged backup disks; prints labels. Weaknesses: Poor handling of defective media; files not Finder-readable; floppies only; some customer support problems.

BY RON RISLEY

Although backup programs compete in many areas—file selection flexibility, friendly inter­ face, efficient use of disk space — none of these considerations is the real issue in the eyes of many users. Speed is. Because copying files to floppies is slow and tedious, a great many users simply can’t bring themselves to do what they know they should.
Fastback for the Macintosh, a new version of a popular MS-DOS program from Fifth Generation Systems, may prove to be part of the solution. The current version has some sig­nificant problems, but what makes it special is its raw speed—for backing up to floppies, Fastback is far and away the fastest program currently available for the Mac.
Fastback’s package prominently displays the words “ 10 megabytes/10 minutes,” and our tests substantiated this claim. Using a 4-Mbyte Macintosh Plus with a CMS SD-80 80-Mbyte external hard drive, Fastback backed up 476 files totaling 15.719 Mbytes in 17 minutes. This isjust over one-third the time that other popular Macintosh backup programs required to do the same backup using new disks. (See “Avoiding hard disk disasters,” Aug. 18.) Fastback’s extraordinary speed will encourage fre­ quent backups, perhaps the most important consideration with backup software.

Fifth Generation combines several tech­niques to give Fastback its extraordinary speed. Proprietary disk output routines allow the pro­ gram to write to floppy disks — it backs up to floppies only — while it is reading the hard disk. When it has filled one floppy and is wait­ ing for you to dig up the next, it won’t sit idle; it fills its internal buffers with data from your hard disk during disk swapping time. Finally, it uses a proprietary disk format that it creates as it copies, so you save even more time because there is no need for you to initialize new disks before writing to them. Because of the special format, the disks can be read only by Fastback. You can’t access backup files with the Finder as you can, for example, when you do your backing up with SuperMac Software’s DiskFit.

Incremental backups with Fastback are speedy as well. Twelve changed files totaling 1,136 Kbytes required only three minutes. In contrast to DiskFit, however, Fastback doesn’t recover space during an incremental backup; changed files are added to the end of the back­ up set, not written over the previous version. You end up with a more complete archive of your progress, but you also will go through a iot of disks: Your backup set will grow every time you use it until it becomes unmanageable and you take the extra time to do a new full backup.

No quick port
Fastback for the Macintosh is no quick port of its MS-DOS ancestor. It’s a friendly and intu­ itive program that makes good use of the Mac interface. One nice feature is an easy-to-use facility for selecting files or folders to be included in or excluded from a backup set. It displays an outline-style listing of folders in one window and in another displays the files in the last folder clicked on. Double-clicking on files or folders changes their selection status. You can start with no files selected, all files selected or all files modified after a certain date, then individually add or remove files from your backup list.

You cannot, however, automatically filter files by type; for instance, you cannot exclude system files or applications from your backup set. Nor is there any provision for saving file lists to disk. So if you have a certain set of files you like to archive regularly, you’ll have to pick them manually every time you back up.

Fastback also does not sufficiently indicate the progress of a backup. When the job is done, the program reports the total time spent back­ ing up and the time, if any, spent waiting for the user to insert floppies. But during the backup process itself, there is no indication of per­ centage complete or the number of files, kilo­ bytes or disks remaining, although the name of each file is displayed as it’s copied.

Fifth Generation touts Fastback’s reliab­ility as well as its speed, but we had mixed results with the program. Like the MS-DOS version, the Macintosh release puts error-correction codes on the backup floppies. Mag­netic media can degrade with time, causing parts ofthe disk to become unreadable. According to the manual, Fastback can correct errors and recover files from backup disks even if as much as 10 percent of the sectors on the backup disk are damaged. This is particularly important to those who archive records on floppies that might have to be accessed years in the future.

We tested this feature – don’t you try it! —by using a needle to put a small, tangential scratchon the surface of one of our backup disks. As Fastback read the damaged disk, the drive clicked and groaned, but eventually the programreported that seven tracks had been recovered by error correction. The restore was successful, even though the disk was so badly damaged the Mac later refused to initialize it.

A major problem…
Despite this impressive performance, Fastback doesn’t handle some other problems with such aplomb. The current version of the program does not deal properly with what it considers media errors on disks to which you are copying files. For example, you are 79 disks into a backup session on a large-capacity hard drive whenFastback detects an error on the next disk you insert. Instead of asking politely, in good Macintosh fashion, for a different disk, Fastback aborts the whole process. You’ll have to start your backup all over again!

This is serious. You don’t encounter bad media everyday, but it is statistically likely that you will sooner or later. The way Version 1.01 of Fastback handles the problem could easily cost you more time than the program’s fast copying ever saved you.

Fifth Generation is aware of the prob­lem and promises a fix early this month.

The upgraded release, to be labeled Version 1.02, will be distributed free to registered owners, but only if they complain to Fifth Gen­eration about technical problems with the pre­ vious version. This is a wrong-headed
approach to customer support. Most users won’t know about the problem until they
have already wasted their time with an aborted backup.

Some smaller problems
The new version also will clear up a few other problems. The current release does not restore information about the size, location and organization of folder windows. Version 1.02 will, as long as you completely restore the disk. The updated version will prevent you from restoring an old Desktop file, the invisible file the Mac system uses to keep track of what is where. In the current release, if you disregard the manual’s instructions, you can wreak havoc by restoring a Desktop file containing information that is no longer valid.

Another limitation — one that Fastback shares with most of the backup programs on the market, except for DiskFit — is that when a disk is restored, you can’t immediately double-click on a document icon and expect the appropriate application to be launched automatically. You must run the application itself once or else rebuild your Desktop – by holding down the Command and Option keys as you open the Finder — before applications and documents will be properly linked.

Manual and customer support
Fastback’s manual is clear and informative, and there’s a useful on-line help facility. But customer support could use improvement. Nei­ther of the two phone numbers listed on the Fastback box reach technical support; for that you have to place a toll call to another number (listed inside the manual) in Baton Rouge, La.

That number proved to be busy for days on end. Persistence did pay off, however. When we reached technical support, we courteously received answers to all our questions. Fifth Generation said a new phone system will alle­ viate the difficulty of getting assistance.

Fastback is the new speed champ in the Mac backup field. If you need no-frills backups to floppies, Fastback will do the job in a hurry — and print your labels to boot. Just watch out for bad disks and be prepared to spend some time on the phone to get the updated version.

Elsewhere in the issue, and no doubt a just-before-presstime addition, MacWeek gave notice of an impending 1.02 update with a crucial improvement — not failing an entire backup due to one faulty disk:

Upgrade to Fastback released
BATON ROUGE, La. — Fifth Generation Systems, developer of Fastback for the Mac, has announced an upgrade to its recently released backup software described in MacWEEK’s review of the product (Page 51). In a shift from previous plans, the company will send Version 1.02 of Fastback automatically to registered users, free of charge. Shipping is set to begin this week. The new release will elimi­nate several minor problems in the original version. If the program encounters a defective floppy disk while copying files from a hard disk, it no longer will abort the entire opera­tion. Instead it will ask the user to insert a dif­ferent floppy, according to the company.

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