The masses were effectively kept out of the big PC94 Personal Computer show at Darling Harbour last week.
Signs said: “”No children under 18 allowed”. And if that was not enough, there was a $15 entry fee. Naturally serious buyers could get free tickets, in the same way serious gamblers get free beer at the casino.
So it was all suits and ties and mobile phones in a great exhibition hall with 300 exhibitors (three of Exhibition Centres five halls were joined for purpose). None the less, having excluded the kids, the sounds were unlike past computer exhibitions. Instead of soothing elevator music being piped homogeneously throughout the hall, a cacophony emerged from competing computer sound and games systems such that it was impossible to hear yourself talk on a mobile phone.
Business and kids stuff dominated the show. Education took back desk. Accountancy packages and games dominated the software displays. We have heard so much about multi-media. Well the junk is coming first. Movies, movies, movies. Games, games, games. And dinosaurs. Pick a movie; click the director; up comes a head shot; and there are all the other films she directed. There are one or two encyclopedias on CD ROM and the birds of Australia and a couple of Atlases. But there is a long way to go on the range of CD ROM books. It’s a pity because keyword and concept searching is a superior way to work, learn and research.
This is a piece of impressionism because it was all that any visitor could hope to absorb. Like visiting an art gallery, you can only look at three of four pictures seriously before wanting to sit down, eat, sleep or get fresh air.
My three were dictation and art software and some laptop hardware. The Apple-and-PC-in-one got a lot of attention from others, but it needs little explaining. It is an Apple and a PC in one box.
The art software was stunning. The dictation software was promising and the laptops/notebooks pose a couple of serious dangers, but more on them later.
Pryor will say, “Never!” “Over my dead body!” etc etc. Sharpe and Tiedemann will join him. But before too long they will be doing their work on computer, especially if The Canberra Times prints in colour (coming to a lawn near you sometime in the next half decade).
Computer programs have be devised for artists, but till now have never looked like being satisfactory for the freehand artist. Now we have Painter 2.0 which was demonstrated with some aplomb at the computer show at Darling Harbour this week. It was a major crowd drawer (pardon the pun).
The artist uses a pen (without a nasty wire attached to it) and draws on an electronic pad.
The program will imitate various sorts or paper: rice, smooth, rough, stipple, patterned etc. It will also allow the pen to be charcoal, chalk, felt pen, ink pen, pencil etc at various thicknesses and angles. The ink, of course, can be various colours and the pen pressure can also be controlled. The program allows fade-out or sharp lines and there is a waterwash which acts like you have put water on your fingertip and dabbled in the ink for special effect. Very messy in real life. Very clean on the computer.
There is also an air-brush. Have you every watched an artist use an air-brush? This is a very messy, fiddly, time-consuming business: cutting out little bits of stick-on, spraying, cutting out another layer and so on. Sharpe, a consummate air-brush artist, will be first in the queue for the new tool.
Corel, Ventura, PowerPoint, Harvard, Publisher, Paintbrush and so on are good graphic-arts tools, in about that order. Corel has the best range of those, mixing freehand capability with text and shapes, but its freehand is fiddly and not intuitively easy to use. Painter, on the other hand, is a serious substitute for the pen, brush and paper of the freehand artist, though it lacks the excellent range of typography and clipart and some of the photo manipulation of Corel.
Incidentally, with Painter, as with Corel, the user can print out the result in four-colour separations, ready for commercial reproduction.
I don’t think it will replace oils or water-colours, nor indeed the market for original black and white work, but for freehand artists working the grind of daily or weekly publication work, it will be well worth testing the water, so to speak. It costs about $600, depending on what deal you can extract, and is published by Fractal Design.
But do not imagine that spending $600 on some computer software will make you a good freehand artist. You have to go to art school to do that.
Now to the dictation software, the IBM Personal Dictation System. This was being demonstrated in a red phone box (Superman style) to cut out the background cacophony.
The demonstrator said immediately that this was not a set up test.
Are computer sellers joining used-car sellers, real-estate agents and journalists in the group of least-trusted professions before long? I suspect so. He dictated into a microphone and the words appeared on the screen. He dictated a sentence: “”It is too nice a day to spend two dollars.” Notice the three “”to”s, he said. “”See how the software got them right. This is no set up job.””
No, I thought, triumphantly giving him a piece of my own text and feeling a bit like white-Australia-policy immigration officer. “”Dictate this,” I said.
It made a good fist of it. However, the software has to learn your voice and learn proper nouns. The more you use it the better it gets, the theory goes.
As you dictate each word at first can pop up wrong. For example: “This is hour finest our . . .”. Then the software will suddenly correct according to context: “”This is our finest hour . . . ”.
The demonstrator could not get it to type New York, however, but he said you could teach it. And he did.
It runs at about 70 to 100 words a minute.
It does not make coffee, nor does it file sexual harassment suits. But it costs serious money: $2300 for the software and a lot extra in other software and hardware requirements: OS/2, a 486DX-66, 340MB HD and 16MB RAM. You could get away for a little less.
The demonstrator said a Windows version is coming out soon. So despite the launch of the Apple-PC, Big Blue recognises marketing reality. Queries to 1-800-815-514. My inclination would be to wait awhile. This is pioneering stuff and should get better and cheaper quite quickly (though if everyone takes that advice it won’t; it’s called a self-denying prophesy.)
The laptops and notebooks look like having great potential as technological colonisers to me.
Why have a great stand-up job tied to a desk when you can have a delightful toy that folds into a brief case? Cost, colour, add-ons and upgrades; that’s why. Laptops cost $1000 more than stand-ups. But the differential is coming down. Laptop colour is getting better and better and they are carrying all the ports that stand-ups do. Some will now come apart so you can up-grade the hard disk, motherboard, screen and keyboard separately.
When you add developments in E-mail by voice and by radio rather than telephone wires, laptops/notebooks get more attractive. You have a portable message system as well as computer. (Goodbye pager and perhaps portable phone.) And you can chuck away the silly personal organiser with notebooks’ weight coming down you may as well carry the notebook with its better software with you everywhere.
Also, forget about portable printers. If you are travelling and you are near a fax machine you can fax yourself whatever document or spreadsheet you need through tiny in-built fax modems.
New laptop/notebook technology is colonising other technologies fairly smartly. But before leaping in ask yourself: honestly now, do I really need this gizzmo to make my life easier or more profitable. Some people do. Many do not.
Three hundred exhibitors can be quite daunting. How does one keep up? For people who have to buy technology out of their own pocket, there is some simple advice: wait. Stay a year or two behind the technology and buy dirt cheap second-hand. Today’s cutting edge is tomorrow’s blunt instrument. But blunt instruments can be quite effective.