Quote from: Wed 9 Jul 1986

    A Macintosh computer was recently a star witness in the first-degree-murder trial of Sagon Penn, who was charged with the shooting deaths of two San Diego policemen.

    The defense contended that shots had been fired in self-defense as Penn attempted to escape a brutal beating by the police.  The defense's case centered on a 2.3-second tape sequence recorded by the police dispatcher that contained the voices of citizens complaining of police brutality;  the voice of the dispatcher; and, faintly in the background, six sounds that both the defense and prosecution agreed could be gunshots.  Determining the exact timing of these shots was critical to Penn's claiming of self-defense.  Defense attorneys hired speech expert Tito Poza to assist in analysis of the brief tape sequence.  Poza used a Macintosh with the Mac-ADIOS audio digitizer and MacSpeech Lab signal-processing program (both produced by GW Instruments of Cambridge, Massachussetts) to locate and time the gunshots and represent the data graphically on the Macintosh screen.

    According to Poza, "I knew the only way I could get my specialized findings across to the jury was to play the critical section of the tape to them over and over, with millisecond timing .... [With the Mac] there were none of the false starts you get with an ordinary tape recorder."  Although a verdict in the case had not been reached at press time, Poza said that the attorneys, the judge, and the jury were impressed with the Macintosh technology and its contribution to the analysis of important evidence.

John Scully, chairman of the board, announced that Apple will offer MS-DOS support via an add-on board for the Macintosh personal computer.  Furthermore, they will also add ATT Unix in a renewed bid to penetrate the business and technical markets.  The announcements were made at a closed meeting of financial analysts at the company's Cupertino headquarters.

Development of the UNIX system for the Macintosh is taking place inside Apple, the company says, using proprietary software bought from Cadmus Computer Systems, Inc. of Lowell, Mass.  The MS-DOS implementation, on the other hand, is being done by a third party, and will be supported as an add-on board.

The publisher of the California Technology Stock Letter, Michael Murphy, was at the meeting and said, "Sculley specifically said they are going to announce, during the next 12 months, more products than Apple has announced in its entire corporate history to date."

Apple has asked its current employees to help find good people to fill the numerous new job openings here. I've decided to do my part by referring all the good people I can find through Usenet.  Of course, I'm not motivated soley by loyalty to my old net buddies -- if you end up getting hired, then I get a gift certificate to the company store and a slim chance at a free vacation somewhere.

The kind of people Apple is looking for are those who are "willing and able to jump into Apple and start making things happen" and "whose dedication to achievement, innovation, and quality match our own."  If you're one of those people, send me your resume and I'll refer you. I'm especially interested if you're qualified for one of the job descriptions listed below since I think I get some kind of additional prize if you're hired for one of those.

Dan Winkler
Advanced Development Group
Apple Computer, Inc.
20525 Mariani Ave., MS: 22Y Cupertino CA 95014
408-973-2695 winkler@apple.csnet


SOFTWARE ENGINEERING MANAGER: Networking and Datacom.  Strong background in SW development and testing, SNA, OSI, and datacom architecture.  Oversee staffing, drive design reviews, and develop junior management.  BSCS/EE and 10+ years experience.

SENIOR HARDWARE ENGINEER, I/O INTERFACE: Design I/O interfaces for a next generation computer.  BSEE, 4+ years experience in digital circuit design.

PRODUCT DESIGN ENGINEER: Electronics packaging design.  Design sheet metal and plastics, address thermal, EMI, cost and testing issues. BSME and 4+ years experience in product design.

AREA ASSOCIATE B:  Fluency in English, and Japanese or Chinese. Perform basic support tasks and assist in projects.

CONTINGENCY PLANNER: Design Apple's disaster recovery plan.  Establish procedures for life safety, building safety, etc. in the event of a disaster.  BS and 3 years contingency planning.

TELECOM SPECIALIST B/A:  Consult with users to assess telecom needs. Responsible for providing service at work sites; prepare work orders for installation techs.  Need telecom courses/college.

ADVANCED TECHNOLOGY MANAGER:  Manage research for Apple's Advanced Development Group.  Prototype, evaluate future technologies.  Run group of 12 working with hardware, software, and VLSI technologies.  BS/MS in EE/CS;  8+ years in development and mgmt.

SENIOR FINANCIAL ANALYSTS:  Positions in Sales, Marketing, and Engineering groups.  BS Finance or Accounting and MBA required;  2-5 years in finance, financial/strategic planning, or comp. analysis.

SENIOR HARDWARE ENGINEERS:  Work in Communications/Networking group, evaluating and enhancing 3rd party products, designing new datacom hardware.  BSEE, 6+ years digital design experience; VLSI, Motorola chip set, and comm hardware exposure helpful.

I arrived at the expo Thursday morning after a wonderful week in New York. The show was very large, with all the major vendors there.

Apple announced the APDA, (Apple Programmers and Developers association), which, as was mentioned in an earlier posting, will handle the sales and distribution of all programmer type stuff.  This includes Tech Notes, Software Supplements, MPW, MDS, Third party compilers, books (they didn't have mine available yet...argghhh), just about anything that could be remotely related to software development.

The membership is $20, which at the show included a copy of Scott Knaster's book "How to write Macintosh Software", (which by the way is an awsome book), a poster, a catalog, and a newsletter.

You can order the beta version of MPW from APDA, $100 for the shell and assembler, $75 for the C Compiler, $75 for the Pascal Compiler, and $50 for MacApp.  There is NO upgrade path to the finished version however.

There's also a new version of Smalltalk, version 0.3, for the MacPlus...$50. The address for APDA is:

Apple Programmer's & Developer's Association
290 SW 43rd Street
Renton, WA  98055
(206) 251-6548

There was dBase for the Mac by Ashton Tate. I know nothing about IBM dBase so I can't say if it is similar or not.  It did however, have a nice normal Mac Interface.  Big bucks..$495.

LightSpeed Pascal was there, list $125, ComputerWare had it for $89. It almost makes me want to go back to Pascal.  Tremendous debugging facilities. The little hand tracing through your code, a la MacPascal, as well as a low level debugger like TMON.  The object code is not compatable with LS C. The next version of the C compiler will be available sometime in September.

There were two companies at the show selling large external screens. MegaScreen from Micrographics Images lists for $2995, E Screen from E Machines Inc lists for $1995. I liked the E screen better, it didn't have the flicker the MegaScreen had.  There was also a third company showing a monitor to a few people at their hotel room, it is perhaps the best of all the monitors and will be announced at the Seybold Desktop Publishing Conference in early September. 

The U.S. company that was writing MacAuthor, which got purchased by Next Inc., was showing their word processor, (now called WriteNow I think), at the T/Maker booth.  It won't be available until October, but it looks like, (from what I've seen), the best of the new word processors. Better than Multi-Write, MacAuthor (UK), HabaWord, WordHandler, etc...

Andy Hertzfeld gave a talk and demonstrated "Servant", a program that will replace the finder, switcher, resource editor, font/da mover, and who knows what else. This program has so many features (in only 40K of code), it's disgusting.  I won't even try and describe it here, you just have the see it.  At the show he sort of gave out version .79 by putting it on one of the hard disks in the hands-on area. One funny thing about the .79 version is that at midnight on Halloween, the program will self destruct and turn into a pumpkin.  Honest.  His reason for doing so is that by that time, there will be a new improved version available, and he wants people to use the latest version. 

Consulair had version 5.0 available. It allows you to declard Pascal functions, and supposedly compiles twice as fast. 

Aztec was showing their source level debugger, which will be available sometime later this year. 

Zillions of SCSI hard disks and tape backups.  Hyperdrive had an external SCSI - $1195.  It supports disk tags.  SuperMac's dataframe also supposedly supports disk tags as well. The only two hard disks beside Apple's. 

Farallon computing had wired up a bunch of the booths with Phone-Net before the show began.  During the show, Centram had Tops running over the Phone-Net between Macs, PC's, and Unix machines.  It was pretty impressive. 

BMUG and MacroMind threw big parties every night, throughout the suite were a bunch of Macs, all phone-netted together so that people could play  MacroMind's new game: "Maze Wars Plus".  It was a lot of fun. 

InfoSphere was showing "LaserServe", a print spooler for Mac and LaserWriter.

There was a company showing a flat-screen Mac called "DynaMac". The company apparently puts a 512K mother board in a new case with a built in drive, modem, 2 or 4 megs, and an electro luminescent orange screen.  Some of my friend thought it was neat, I thought it was horrible. Decide for yourself. 

I can't think of anything more right now, the products I mentioned above were the "neat" new things.