News Briefs

Dick Shaffer’s Technologic Partners (New York, NY) has announced a Pen Computing 1991 Industry Guide, which includes the “views of key industry figures” and product information on a variety of pen-based products. This 600 page boxed set sells for a mere $395. Seems a bit steep, but, hey, that’s show business.

Chips and Technologies (San Jose, CA) has introduced a “single chip PC” based on the 8086 architecture. The F8680 chip includes all of the functions of a PC system board, such as memory, keyboard, and graphics control, timer and interrupt control, DMA emulation, and so forth. While this is an impressive achievement, the real success story will be the single chip PC based on the 80386.

Grid Systems President D. Bruce Walter told a conference of business and government business leaders recently that 20 million pen computers will be sold worldwide during the next four years. Walter cited the calculations of research analyst, Bill Lempesis (publisher of Pen Vision News based in Pleasanton, CA). These numbers seem wildly optimistic, to say the least.

A startup company in Boulder, CO., has introduced a 1.8 inch hard disk which is slightly over one-half inch thick, about half the size and weight of 2-1/2 inch hard drives. Integral Peripherals is developing 20- and 40 Mbyte versions of the drive, which consumes only 0.5 watts of power and includes a “sleep mode” which draws only 15 milliwatts. The 20-MB drive will be available in production quantities at the end of this year and the 40-MB version in 1992. The drives will be relatively expensive (between $10 and $15 per Mbyte), but still considerably cheaper than PC cards and Flash memory, and therefore should be an attractive storage medium for pen computers.

Peripheral Vision of Somerset, U.K., has introduced its PenOp “pen to peer biometric security system” for verifying and authenticating electronic signatures. The product is based on a “client/server” model, with client software accepting the signature from the pen-based computer and the server software performing the verification. The verification process measures “not only what the eye can see, but also stroke order, velocity, and acceleration.” The company sees applications in banking, electronic document interchange, time and attendance recording, among others.