Forgetting all the pop science of 375 average-sized novels per square inch, a paper pile taller than a five-story building and transcription 10,000 years of the Wall Street Journal between mistakes, IBM Corp’s new magnetic recording technique (CI No 2,635) has plenty of pretty dramatic ooh-aah technical features: the 3G-bit per square inch densities translate to a 3.4Gb twin-platter 2.5 drive or a 20Gb 3.5 drive (that sounds a low estimate); the aluminium platter is coated with a thin film of magnetic Cobalt alloy which is protected by a hard film; the head uses an inductive write element and a magnetoresistive read element, and IBM says it demonstrated a data rate of 4M-bytes per second with the combination using its partial-response, maximum -likelihood recording channel; the gap between the head and the disk is less than two millionths of an inch – although the so narrow that even visible light can’t pass through claim is greeted with a degree of scepticism around here; the company also makes the case for magneto-resistive read heads over inductive ones, which we thought was already a battle well lost and won in favour of the former, but the reason magnetoresistive heads are better is that they use a property inherent in the material and the effect is not affected by speed of rotation where with inductive heads, at a given rotation rate, bits on a smaller-diameter disk travel beneath the head at a slower speed because they are closer to the center of rotation and the signal from an inductive head decreases as the linear speed of the magnetic bits passing beneath the head decreases; look for drives using the demonstrated densities to hit market between 1998 and 2000.
Compaq Computer Corp says its deal with Nexgen Inc on the Nx586 and follow-on parts does not close the door on possible supply agreements with other chipmakers, including Cyrix Corp – it currently uses Advanced Micro Devices Inc’s Am486 and is said to be playing off that company’s K5 against the Cyrix M1.
Herlev, Denmark-based Dansk Data Elektronik A/S has a 200MHz MIPS Technlogies Inc R4400 RISC version of its Supermax Enterprise Server.
While 37 police forces in England and Wales have had to revert to revert to a manual system to manage their fingerprint databases, because the computerised system they were to have installed doesn’t work (CI No 2,634), New Scotland Yard is pressing ahead with the National Fingerprint Integrated System: at the moment an Exabyte Corp EXB-210, with 8,000, 8mm tapes, is being installed, along with Exabyte’s hierarchical storage management software for image archiving; the project at Scotland Yard is part of a #6m upgrade of computer systems.
Macrovision Corp reports that Apple Computer Inc has licensed its proprietary copy-protection technology for its planned line of digital television set-top decoders, which are based on a modified Macintosh and use MPEG-1 and MPEG-2 compression algorithms; the copy protection technology is incorporated into off-the-shelf NTSC or PAL digital-to-analogue colour encoder chips.
Motorola Inc reduced its stake in In Focus Systems Inc to 10.66% from a prevous 19.45%, and may sell more of its remaining shares in the flat panel display developer and maker.
AT&T Corp reports an $81.6m contract to supply a digital local network in the Philippines for Globe Telecom Ltd: AT&T will supply digital toll exchanges, outside plant and fibre and copper cable for more than 106,000 new lines.
Richardson, Texas-based Convex Computer Corp reports a $2m contract from the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign for a 64-CPU Exemplar Scalable Parallel Processor with 8Gb of memory and 160Gb of disk capacity.
Minneapolis-based Nortech Systems Inc has completed its acquisition of the assets of privately-held Monitor Technology Corp, Plymouth, Minnesota, which manufactures large-screen, high-resolution video monitors for use in radar, document and medical imaging applications. >
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The Hellenic Telecommunications Organisation or OTE, the Greek state phone company, will increase its stake in the Inmarsat satellite communications system, becoming the eighth largest shareholder it it. – o – Software AG and ICL Plc have been brought in by Electronic Data Systems Corp to provide software and mainframe capabilities to the UK’s Inland Revenue as part of the #1,033m, 10 year contract awarded last month (CI No 2,619): Software AG’s Adabas will run on an ICL VME mainframe to provide central management accounting on the new income tax self assessment programme.
Apple Computer Inc is to support Opcode Systems Inc’s Open Music System in its QuickTime multimedia software: Opcode’s MIDI-enabling software enables composers to communicate musical information between the computer and MIDI instruments.
Mercury One-2-One Ltd reports that it had 205,000 digital cellular subscribers by December 31, giving it a 6% share of the national UK telephone market: this represents a doubling of its market share since March 1994, the company points out.
Amdahl Corp says its year-long association with Foster City, California-based nCube Corp is not dead, it’s merely resting between engagements, and that the company is looking at taking the nCube 3.
Sacramento, California-based Unify Corp is shipping the promised version 2.0 of its Vision application development system: it runs with the major databases and has its own messaging application programming interface; Tuxedo support is promised by mid-year; it’s from $5,000.
ICL Plc will offer UnixWare 2.0 on its iAPX-86 TeamServers this month.
Canon Inc has launched an optical memory card system, designed to plug into iAPX-86 and Macintosh personal computers: Canon’s write once card, based on its own technology and developed to the Society for Interchange of Optical Card standard, can hold 4.2Mb of data and the company is claiming read-write rates of 7.5Kbps and 3.8Kbps; this appears to be the system Canon has been working on since 1989, a year after it bought optical memory card technology from Mountain View-based Drexler Technology Inc (CI No 952) – Canon says the technology was developed in-house and that Drexler’s cards are not compatible.
Continuus Software Inc, Irvine, California, which used to go by the name CaseWare, has put its configuration management software up on Silicon Graphics Inc Indy and Indigo workstations, at from $4,000.
ParcPlace Systems Inc has a Japanese language version of its VisualWorks 2.0 Smalltalk development environment at $8,500 under Solaris 2.3, and $5,500 for Windows and NT.
Northern Telecom Ltd and Hewlett-Packard Co have announced an initiative to deliver Advanced Intelligent Network implementations for communications providers: the deal will involve computing and signalling systems from Hewlett – initially HP 9000 servers, workstations and Signalling System 7, combining with Advanced Intelligent Network services equipment and applications software from the Canadian company.
The Taiwanese government is to ease regulations barring foreign involvement in the country’s telecommunications services in order to fulfil its commitments when it joins the World Trade Organisation: the Ministry of Transportation has, however, attached certain conditions, which require investors to form joint ventures with Taiwan partners, with foreign holdings no more than a third of the total.
The Indonesian government has announced that shares in Telkom, its state-run domestic telecommuncations company will be listed locally and overseas this year.
You could put me down as hotly denying it, Mercury Communications Ltd spokeswoman Emma Tarring told Reuters when approached about the story in the Mail on Sunday that suggested that AT&T Corp wanted to buy BCE Inc’s 20% stake in Mercury; she said Mercury had a routine policy of not commenting on rumour and speculation, but said there was no basis to the report; the speculation does not come as a surprise
, because Canada’s BCE has looked the most catatonic of sleeping partners since it took its stake in Mercury.
Capitalising on the excitement generated by Compaq Computer Corp starting to use its Nx586 chips (see front), San Jose-based NexGen Inc registered for a global initial public offering of 3.4m shares yesterday, looking for $37m or so.
Intel Corp is hustling the market so energetically to Pentium that those unwilling to be rushed are facing a shortage of 80486 parts – and even Advanced Micro Devices Inc is not benefitting as much as it would like because it can’t meet the demand at present: the company says it has shipped 7m Am486s since it started production in 1993, and plans to bring additional Am486 manufacturing capacity on-line this summer through a fabrication agreement with Taiwan-based Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co and ramp-up of the company’s Fab 25 facility in Austin later this year.
Bertelsmann AG says it is not talking to Matsushita Electric Industrial Co about MCA Inc although it says it is still interested in acquiring a film studio and intensifying its film production activities; the Wall Street Journal sees a deal for MCA will come this week.
The US Justice Department has decided to support the regional Bell telephone companies in their efforts to offer long-distance service within their territories, department officials said yesterday: the department will recommend to US District Judge Harold Greene that he approve a request by Chicago-based Ameritech Corp to offer long-distance services in Illinois and Michigan on a provisional basis.
IBM Corp is to contribute $25m in computer equipment, staff support, scholarships and grants to Chinese universities under an agreement with China’s State Education Commission, and will further the development of the China Education and Research Network, which will connect universities around China.
South Africa will take its first big privatisation step this month by announcing that it is seeking an international investor to take a substantial stake in the state phone company SA Telkom, the Sunday Telegraph reported: leading contenders are seen as AT&T Corp, Nippon Telegraph & Telephone Corp and Cable & Wireless Plc, it suggested.
Vodafone Group Plc announced yesterday that connection figures for the first quarter of 1995 rose to more than 310,000 gross connections and more than 180,000 net connections, taking its subscriber base to 1.818m; arch-rival Cellnet Mobile Communications Ltd added 172,500 subscribers in the quarter to take it to 1.734m subscribers; and Cable & Wireless Plc said the subscriber base of its Mercury One-2-One joint venture grew to 260,000 from 205,000 subscribers at end-December.
Also reporting first quarter figures yesterday was Mannesmann Mobilfunk GmbH, which claimed 930,000 subscribers for its D2 network.
ST Electronic & Engineering Ltd of Singapore and Hong Kong’s Universal Appliances Ltd formed a joint venture company, Smart Asia Ltd, incorporated in Hong Kong, to explore business opportunities in the development and distribution of telecommunications systems in China and the Asia-Pacific region; ST holds 45% of Smart Asia, putting up $2.7m; Universal holds the balance.
Telecom Italia SpA has formally started marketing its digital mobile cellular service in Italy defiance of the European Commission.
DSP Group Inc reports that a Santa Clara County superior court judge granted it a preliminary injunction against Rockwell International Corp granting royalty-free licences for its DigiTalk speech compression and decompression technology; DSP reckons the injunction arises from specific finding by the judge that Rockwell is in clear violation of the California Unfair Practices Act that prohibits below-cost pricing.
Koninklijke PTT Nederland NV cut international leased line rates for business users by as much as 30%.
Toshiba America Information Systems Inc cut prices on its high performance notebook computers
by up to 16%: the T4800CT and T4850CT notebooks with 75MHz 80486DX4 processor were reduced by 15% to from $4,200.
Trouble is that these days they are more likely to be 1-800-SEX RATED than anything cosy like 1-800-DRY CLEAN or PIZZA2GO or the old WHItehall 1212 for Scotland Yard: according to the Evening Standard, British Telecommunications Plc would like to reintroduce letters onto telephone keypads in Britain.
IBM Corp is resorting to a variant of pyramid selling in its determination to garner a critical mass of applications for OS/2 before the predicted stampede to Windows95 crushes everything in its path: according to Infoworld, chief executive Louis Gerstner has ordered 100 IBM executives at the vice-president level and higher each to contact 10 Windows and MS-DOS developers personally and convince them of IBM’s corporate commitment to OS/2, and make sure they know of everything IBM has in place to help them to convert their applications – and Gerstner has even assigned himself 10 Windows developers to contact; technical help includes the Developer Connection compact disk containing a wide range of development tools, including One Up Corp’s Smart Tool, which is claimed to converts about 80% of a Windows application’s 16-bit code to native 32-bit OS/2 Warp code – in days.
Zeos International Ltd, San Jose says its Pantera personal computers with 75MHz Pentium and up now include built-in SCSI and Ethernet links made possible by a single Advanced Micro Devices Inc chip.
L M Ericsson Telefon AB has a $180m order to supply Personal Communications Network infrastructure equipment and phones to Malaysia’s Multiara Telecommunications Sdn Bhd.
Sonnet Technologies Inc, Irvine, California is rushing to the aid of orphaned Amiga users with the Doubler 4000 for the Amiga A4000/40 – the Doubler 4000 is a 50MHz 68040 accelerator and it sells for $600.
NEC Corp has developed a method for recycling printed circuit board waste by pulverising and separating circuit board residues into Copper-rich powder and powder containing glass fibre and resin: the recovered glass fibre and resin powder can be used as a high-quality filler for resin-based coating materials.
Ottawa-based Corel Corp licensed InContext Systems Inc’s Spider technology, which enables users to create dynamic Web pages while they are browsing on the World Wide Web.
It’s clear that Integrated Micro Products Inc gets homesick for good old Medomsley Road, Consett when it’s across the Atlantic, but to try to feel a little more at home, it sited its North American headquarters in Bannockburn, Illinois.
