Third Party Watch
by
Shawn M. Gordon
President of S.M. Gordon & Associates
01/94
Interex, WOW (part II). First off I want everyone to know that I don’t appreciate them writing numbers under my picture for the column, I don’t look like a terrorist, or a convict. As a matter of fact, Dave Merrit from oRbit software physically grabbed me
at the show and took some pictures of me to give to Interex. So if my picture doesn’t get updated soon, you can call Dave (thanks Dave for being so concerned about my image).
So this month I want to finish up reviewing Interex, and talk about some other products that I saw.
This brings me up to a new product that Lund Performance will be releasing a product called De-Frag/X. This finally brings to the Spectrum what the Classic computers have had all along, an ability to consolidate their disk space. As much as HP has insisted that disk fragmentation isn’t a problem (and on the off chance that it is then you can just re-load your system), we are always seeing it be a problem. So now you can run this program to either see a report of fragmentation, do an equivalent of a VINIT CONDENSE, or do like a Norton Utilities file shuffle to get your free space all put together. There are some other options, but you can call them to find out more.
I reported a while back that Kemp Software was going out of business and decided to donate their batch scheduler to the CSL. Well Carl Kemp won an outstanding CSL contribution award for his generosity. Congratulations Carl.
It seems that Bill Miller of RIGHT! has found a new home for his compression software. He is now associated with VESOFT somehow or other, they were handing out sheets on his product DB-Compress in there booth. I had looked at his software a few years ago, and he is doing some real amazing data compression and preserving the ability to read and write that data as well, this will also work on IMAGE data bases, and considering the amount of wasted space in a Data Base it is probably a real god-send for people
on the edge.
My old friends at Cygnet Software were showing a new and improved version of OPSession that I think I might want to write a new review of. It is completely re-done and much faster. They also had some blurb sheets on their OPSTape product, but I don’t think it will actually be done till first or second quarter of 94.
Now I would like to digress into the hardware arena. HP was showing it’s massive 200 page per minute laser printer that just blew me away. If you have about a quarter million dollars to spend and want a real fast printer, this is for you. I heard a rumor about a smaller slower laser printer coming out soon that will be in the 25k range I think. Ideal Computer has just release their 480D Plus Printer which is specifically targeted to replace the HP 2934A. It supports all the HP characteristics as well as some really great enhancements geared toward making operation much faster and easier. Check it out.
Ok these next guys have me totally confused because the booth said Holland House, but all my glossy ad sheets say it is API International. Anyway, these are the guys who are marketing Frontender! as Faces. They also have a couple of other packages that I saw called Vantage and Gensys. Now Gensys was a really amazing piece of code, this thing will basically let you configure any event or program and set up rules and alarms and actions. It is really weird, but the more you think about it the more amazing and versatile it is. It runs on the PC and will connect to virtually any type of host system on your network giving you full monitoring and notification control. Vantage gives you remote console management of all types of CPUs and peripheral devices. These two programs go way beyond the bounds of anything I have ever seen for network management, granted it was a demo, but it really looked neat.
Ok, the last guys I want to talk about weren’t at the show, but they did go to the trouble to get a hold of me on Compu-Serve and send me out some information (see, it’s not that hard to do). Anyway, Racal-Gurdata Inc. has just release their Host Security Subsystem on the HP 3000. What this little beauty does is, data encryption, authentication, and access control to services and applications. Their is piece of hardware that you use that will actually encrypt data at the terminal before it ever goes across the data line. This is for people like Banks and Governments that really have to make sure the data is secure, so this package conforms to all sorts of ANSI standards for encryption and EDI type of stuff. As a side effect it can even be used to implement regular access level security to the HP.
Well this is the last season of Star Trek TNG, the only real consolation is that they are supposed to start up another series. If they don’t then I might end up in some serious therapy sessions, so write, call, fax, do whatever, but make sure Paramount keeps the Star Trek legend alive (let’s bow or heads for a moment).