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“Groupware,” “groupwork,” “workgroup computing,” “computer‐supported cooperative work,” and “distributed processing” are buzzwords that refer to a new way in which personal computers are being used in offices. Personal computers hooked together into local area networks (LANs) represent the latest stage in the evolution of automated technology. Of the eleven million personal computers in business, over 950,000 are arranged in some sort of LAN set‐up. The future for this configuration of computers and workstations will grow enormously in the next few years. By 1991, a conservative estimate of 6.7 million computers will be linked together in LANs in the workplace.

A little over three years ago, Apple introduced a new kind of software called HyperCard. Then, as now, this program defies definition. The users of HyperCard essentially fix the boundaries of the program, making it a database, a graphics catalog, an audio resource, a book, or some combination of all of these categories. Apple, in its latest manuals for the program, calls HyperCard “an ”information tool‐kit,” and in its most creative applications, the program truly lives up to this billing.

RENOVATING APPLE: THE MACINTOSH IIFX AS EVIDENCE. Last month Apple released a new high‐end Macintosh, dubbed the IIfx, aimed squarely at the technical workstation market. Utilizing a 68030 processor speeding along at 40 MHz, the IIfx is competitive with products such as Sun Microsystems' Sparcstation. Are there clues to Apple's future plans with the Macintosh product line imbedded in the novelty of the IIfx, or is it an evolutionary extension of IIci, IIcx, and IIx into the realm of veritable workstations? More important, does the IIfx represent a new direction for Apple, in light of its turbulent history over the past six months? Let's examine some of these events and place the IIfx in context.

Thanks to the demands of technical and scientific users, personal computers and workstations are going through a phenomenal evolution in terms of performance. Third‐party vendors are leading the way in developing accelerators in the shape of coprocessors that push the speeds of commercially available CPUs into the range of more specialized and expensive workstations and minicomputers. YARC Systems, of Agoura Hills, CA, recently announced the availability of a new NuBus board, utilizing a Am29000 RISC chip operating at 67MHz. This product, appropriately called MacRageous, will produce a performance level on a Macintosh of 27 million instructions per second (MIPS). Tests at the University of Virginia have indicated that MacRageous outperforms IBM's System 6000 SuperStation, one of the fastest workstations currently on the market. Of course, a product such as MacRageous will require the development of customized applications to take full advantage of its horsepower. In anticipation, YARC will make available a full line of compilers and debuggers. MacRageous will be available for prices starting around $2,000.

Copyright Clouds Multimedia Prospects. Imagine a computer program that gives a fire department an edge in dealing with hazardous spills, toxic materials threatening life and property — where a quick and accurate response literally has consequences for thousands. This program stores information on thousands of chemicals from manuals and technical treatises. By selecting an icon of a map, an entire city comes up on the screen with details on the locations of schools, hospitals, and businesses. With another click of a mouse, the program calculates the direction of the plume from a leak and provides clues to arrest the accident and move citizens out of harm's way.

In combination with a controllable pitch propeller and means for driving the same, hydraulic means for automatically changing the blade angle of said propeller, valve means for controlling said hydraulic means, a governor actuated pilot valve for adjusting said valve means in response to the speed of said propeller driving means to cause said driving means to drive said propeller at substantially constant speed, and manual means operatively associated with said valve means having three operative positions, one of which is a neutral position for maintaining said hydraulic means under the control of said governor actuated pilot valve, the other two of which are control positions for rendering said governor actuated pilot valve ineffective and controlling said valve means to maintain the propeller in a condition of positive high or low blade angle independently of the action of said governor.

Motorola, Intel new processors. Microprocessors are the core of all personal computers and workstations, literally the computational heart on which hardware and software manufacturers depend to provide increasing power within ever shrinking packages. The two main microprocessor firms, Intel and Motorola, have accelerated the pace of processor design to the point that hardware and software takes months to fully take advantage of the new processor capabilities. At April's COMDEX/Spring 89 Conference in Chicago, Intel announced its newest extension of the 80x86 microprocessor line in the form of the i486. Motorola replied with its latest invention in the 680x0 family, the 68040 processor. Both chips check in with a million transistors or more, claim incredible calculation speeds, promise to be downwardly compatible with their slower relatives, and adopt a hybrid architecture.

Reduced Instruction Set Computer (RISC) processors represent a different way to design a CPU for a workstation. They are not magical elixirs to supercharge a personal computer into a mainframe; rather, they are simply a different approach to handling information. RISC design has already affected the architecture of more traditional CISC (Complex Instruction Set Computer) processors and will continue to do so well into the next decade. Given the wealth of software written for CISC processors and the pau‐city of RISC shaped applications, combined with the usual lag in software development behind any hardware breakthrough, a full‐fledged RISC library workstation may not appear for some time. Nevertheless RISC has earned a great deal of attention since its practical birth at IBM in 1976 by John Cocke and its pursuit in academic circles at Stanford and the University of California, Berkeley in the early 1980s. Bom from the simple idea of devising a way to complete a computer instruction in a single cycle of a processor, RISC architecture has been called the de facto standard of the next decade for workstations by some and a mere fad by others. Will these chips replace CISC processors entirely? Will they have an impact on library workstations? And will they ever appear in one form or another in the Macintosh? With RISC processors available from MIPS Computer Systems, Motorola, and Sun, and RISC‐based computers produced by Apollo, Sun, Everex, Hewlett‐Packard, and others, RISC is certainly a harbinger of the future of processors in workstations. The market for RISC‐based worksta‐tions is heating up as some manufacturers — Sun, DEC, Data General to mention a few — battle for customers by lowering prices and raising performance.

LIBRARY WORKSTATIONS AND THEIR SOFTWARE: PLATINUM'S BIBLIO‐TECH FOR THE MACINTOSH. Applications over the last half decade designed specifically for libraries and their workstations have of‐ten been expensive, erratic, and frustratingly inadequate in providing solutions to daily routines for library staff. Librarians in turn have switched to the more difficult but less costly option of using off‐the‐shelf, commercial software in libraries, modifying applications for their own purposes. As a result, the history of software usage in libraries over the past five years essentially is a story of template creation and inventive reprogramming on the part of librarians and their staffs to create easy‐to‐use yet effective tools.