Aucbvax.2375
fa.works
utzoo!duke!decvax!ucbvax!works
Mon Jul 20 06:19:25 1981
Another workstation - Excalibur Powerstation
>From MORGAN@WHARTON-10 Mon Jul 20 06:05:54 1981
Another personal or management workstation was shown this week
to a group of managers and consultants in NYC by Excalibur
Technologies - a New Mexico (Albequerque) firm headed by Jim
Dowe III, former Professor of CIS at University of New Mexico.
It had several features of interest to the WORKs community.
The basic POWERSTATION(tm) as they call it, consists of a
telephone handset, two green phosphor CRTs, a standard type-
writer like keyboard, and a numeric pad with a few extra keys.
The smaller CRT shows (always) 12 boxes which label the 12
numeric pad keys for different functions. THe labels appeared
to me to be 4 lines by about 20 characters each. The main CRT
(a standard 24 x 80) is used for most interactions. The phone
handset is used for their voice message system, which does store
and forward voice with some compression (down to 1 kbyte/sec of
speech) with very good fidelity for both male and female voices
(we tried both).
The actual hw is not very exciting - 3 Z-80s, 64K RAM, 10 MB
winchester built in, Potomac micromagic modem built-in, and S-100
bus to add other things to. They have added what they call your
"computer key". This is slightly larger than a credit card, and
holds a EEPROM with 8Kbytes (I think) on which are stored your
"patterns". You plug this into a socket next to the keyboard to
personalize the system for you.
One of the pieces of sw that runs on this (along with a special
board they call an associate pattern recognition processor), is
called SAVVY. It allows the executive user to enter commands in
natural language, and can "learn" new patterns. Their method of
handling language is radically different than the traditional
approaches, and I will make no value judegments about it. It
does not have any notions of grammar, or lexicons etc. Rather,
they claim, it learns like a two year old does, from matching
patterns and trying to generalize from them (I don't know if two
year olds really learn this way either). Basically, they do some
very fancy hashing of your inputs into a large n-space, and find
all previous queries which are "near" this one.
In any case, it does seem to work on the small databases
they have shown, and may also be used as a technique for speech
recognition. No firm prices yet for the powerstation, but it
appears it iwll be priced at around $12K. There appear to be
some neat ideas here, although their packaging and choice of
hardware is not as state of the art as it might be (the screens
were poor quality in the NYC demos).
Formal announcement is set for July 27 in Dallas. The company
has some info available and is located at 800 Rio Grande Blvd NW,
Mercado 18, Albuquerque, NM 87104. Phone 505/842-5421.
They are really focusing on managers as their target audience
and plan color and graphics for early next year. It looks to
me as if the WORKs game is just beginning to heat up. IBM is
now scheduled to announce some of their stuff near the end of
this month, informed sources report. If anyone else has seen
the POWERSTATION, I'd be interested in comments.
Howard Morgan
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