European Stars And Stripes (Newspaper) - August 29, 1988, Darmstadt, Hesse                                What s new in compact disks by Janice Fioravante new York times if there is a Silvery glint in the eyes of music Sellers and listeners it is the reflection of millions of compact disks being popped into compact disk players. About 7 million compact disk players have been sold in the United states since 1983, the year they were introduced. Over the past five years they have been Selling better than videocassette recorders of which 1.1 million were sold from 1983 through 1987, according to link resources a Market research group based in new York. As for the disks themselves 102 million were sold last year for a total of about $1.6 billion according to the recording Industry of America a Trade association. Compact disks have gained popularity because they last longer and have better sound Quality than records. It also helped that makers of compact disks offered Consumers a Standard product any cd recording can play on any cd player. In contrast sales of videocassette recorders were hampered by the Competition Between two formats Beta and Ems. But after scoring a tremendous Success among serious music lovers compact disks have yet to achieve the same kind of popularity in the mass Market. After experiencing an annual growth rate in sales of individual disks of More than 100 percent in the mid 1980s, growth in 1987 fell to 93 percent still robust but a sign that a slowdown May have begun. Harold Vogel an analyst with Merrill Lynch has compiled statistics showing that Only 9 percent of . Households have compact disk players a number that gives a notion of future sales potential. A second generation of compact disk related products is coming to Market there Are compact disks that Combine video with cd sound to provide music videos. There Are cd that offer graphics that allow the user to sing along with the music videos. Sony has come out with Small cd called cd-3s, that carry three or four songs on a disk. So far none of these products has generated much in the Way of sales. Consumer electronics experts Are hopeful that this new generation of products May Widen the audience for compact disks but they believe that the real breakthrough will come with the introduction of erasable compact disks. The Tandy corp. Has announced that it has come up with a disk that is capable of recording music As Well As playing it. But it says that the disk will not be available in stores for at least 18 months to two years. In the meantime other companies such As the Eastman Kodak co., Philips . And the Sony corp., Are racing to come up with their own versions. Compact disks Are being combined with televisions so people can watch As Well As listen to music. The two leading products Are cd video made by Warner Electra Atlantic lbs Sony poly ram and Ria and cd graphics made by a division of Warner communications inc. To play cd videos a special piece of equipment is needed a combination player costing Between $750 and $1,500, that must be connected to a television and a stereo system. Cd video offers a 20 minute sound and five minutes sound and picture music video. Cd videos can also be played on Standard compact disk players providing Only sound cd graphics creates graphics and sound on television through a graphics adapter that is connected to a regular cd player and a television set. What comes out looks like a baseball scoreboard said Thomas Friel a vice president of the electronics Industry association. The graphics Are either words or drawings. It can for instance show guitar chords for the viewer to play along. These products however have been slow to catch on. David Bolotsky an analyst with Goldman Sachs & co., said that cd video initially fell Flat on its face because retailers did not want to confuse customers by stocking them. Video disks Are being reintroduced with a new name laser video disks. The disks which look like 12 Inch record albums failed As a mass Market product after their introduction in 1979. They have succeeded in some Industrial uses like Trade shows. Now laser video disks the word laser has been added to make the product sound newer can be played on the same machine As cd video. People with old video disk players can use the new laser video disk if their players use a laser some of the old players use a stylus like the earlier version the new video disks show such things As musical concerts and ballets but now they provide cd Quality sound. A new match is being made of compact disks and computers. It s called cd rom for compact disk read Only memory and it can drastically increase the storage capacity of a computer. A cd rom is a 51/4 Inch laser disk that contains the same amount of information As 1,200 floppy disks. To use a cd rom a computer must be equipped with a special cd rom Reader which costs about $600 to $1,200. This High Price plus the availability of such alternatives for information storage As microfiche cards and on line data bases has hindered cd rom sales. What cd rom offers according to its advocates is microcomputer Speed and flexibility with enormous capacity. For instance the 12-volume Oxford English dictionary can be stored on two cd rom disks. With a cd rom Reader a writer can Leaf through the dictionary instantly on a word processor. Cd rom promises to be useful in medical settings. The greatest application May be a data base for Hospital emergency rooms which tells information about Poison antidotes said Jeffrey Detray publisher of a Trade Magazine. With cd rom for example a doctor could find the antidote for an overdose of a prescription drug by using just the code number from the prescription bottle even if no other information is available. Another use May be in the storage of business illustrations technical drawings diagrams and maps. Bulky parts Cata logs can be stored efficiently on cd rom. Phillip Blama who is the optical laser disk manager at Sony said the maintenance Catalon for the Boeing 757 is seven feet tall and weighs Between 150 and 200 pounds. As you can imagine it is hard to search through All that Blama said. But with cd rom you can get what you want in  one of the biggest makers of cd rom is the Lotus development corp., which has captured about a Quarter of the Market with sales last year of $20 million. Lotus has a variety of cd rom products. One contains Stock information another has data on Public companies. A Leader among the hardware makers is Apple computer which makes a cd rom disk drive for about $2,000. It also offers customers the option of bringing in their hard disks and putting the data on a cd rom. The next phase in the development of the compact disk is interactive compact disks or cd i. These disks which Are still in the developmental stages allow the user to in essence talk Back to a television set to get information. Philips and Sony Are among the companies working on making cd i available for the mass Market they Hope to have their products in stores As Early As next summer. A cd i works like this for an interactive multimedia tour of the smithsonian institution viewers watching the presentation on their television screens could Stop the tour at any Point and request additional information on a particular subject. A viewer interested in say aviation could Point to a Corner of his screen and get More information on the Wright Brothers. The information might consist of text graphics or a film clip. Interactive disks Are already used in Many commercial settings. A common use is Bank lobbies where customer information is provided on screens that customers can touch to get the information they want. American airlines Sabre reservation system is offering a cd i product that is placed in travel agencies. With this system customers can get visual and text information about hotels beaches and tourist attractions from a computer screen. Digital video interactive or div developed by the David Sarnoff research Center in Princeton n.j., is perhaps the most efficient Way of storing video images on compact disks. Its strength is that it converts into digital format Only the changes that occur Between two frames of a videotape so it can store More information on a single disk. Audio cd disks contain about 74 minutes of sound. With digital video interactive a single compact disk can hold 72 minutes of pictures and sound. A crucial question for the manufacturers of these products is whether Consumers want to go to the trouble of using them. Do Consumers want this level of interactivity asked Detray. Or Are we really Couch potatoes Janice Fioravante is a technology writer based in new York w ref perfect leaps Forward by Peter h. Lewis new York times t he Gulf Between word processing system Sand desktop publishing systems has Bee getting narrower in recent months in the United states and the recent introduction ofor perfect version 5.0 brings the two classes of software even closer together. Word perfect is the leading word processor for computers using the is Dos operating system. The previous version 4.2, was released in 1986 and quickly became the Standard against which other word processors were judged. For manipulation of text the traditional role of word processors it had few rivals. The program was especially popular because it was easy to learn and easy to teach and it satisfied a wide Range of needs from handling simple memos and correspondence to creating Complex documents. Now with version 5.0 list Price $495the word perfect corp. Of Orem Utah has provided even More Power and sophistication. Its text processing has been improved but the most startling change is the addition of advanced graphics capabilities the sort that used to be associated exclusively with desktop publishing programs. Word perfect 5.0 makes it relatively easy to bring in charts and designs from other programs or to incorporate scanned images like photographs or company logos. Once the graphics Are in the document the user can make them bigger or smaller move them around rotate them or plunk them Down across columns of text the Type will automatically adjust to flow around them. That makes word perfect Well suited for creating simple newsletters and reports. The latest version also allows for far More manipulation of Type. Word perfect can support multiple fonts a font is one Type face of a specific style and size like 12-Point courier bold for example. More than 100 fonts can be included in a single document although anyone who tries that ought to be arrested by the aesthetics police. The ability to employ those fonts and graphics in documents is one thing the ability to see them on the computer screen is another because the video card inside the computer limits what can be displayed. When word processors did nothing More than manipulate text a computer with a monochrome adapter and display was just right it could show bold underline or video reverse characters. The Basic monochrome adapter cannot display graphics however and some of the More dazzling features of 5.0 would be lost without a More sophisticated card. That makes a More powerful video card a Good investment something like the Hercules ram font graphics card plus $299 or in color $349. These allow As Many As 12 different fonts to be displayed on screen at once. A graphics card will also allow the user to employ word perfect s Page preview. That feature provides a look at what a Page will look like after it has been printed before it is sent to the Printer. The image can be reduced so that two facing pages can be viewed. Word perfect 5.0 also enables users to take better advantage of their printers. Margins tabs and columns can be made absolute that is fixed in inches centimetres or Points so the user does not have to worry about the effects of changing Type sizes or styles within a document. The program handles All the necessary computation including horizontal and vertical spacing relieving users of the nearly impossible task of specifying top and Bottom margins in lines per Page and Side margins in characters per line. It even makes adjustments automatically if the document is printed on a machine other than the one for which it was formatted if for example the writer selects fonts to use with his Dot matrix Printer but then takes the file to the office and sends it through a laser Printer. All this sounds More like a desktop publishing program than a word processor. But word perfect is still a word processing program. Word perfect can do a lot but desktop publishing does More and does it with a More polished look the Best systems can handle an unlimited number of graphics images and Type manipulation changes. Word perfect has added dozens of other new features to version 5.0. Macros the keyboard shortcuts that can reduce commonly used phrases and actions to a Keystroke or two have been made More powerful. Many people use macros to set a style for documents such As subheads and margins for memos or movie scripts. Many of these style formats have been taken Over in 5.0 by style  these permit a company to insure that All documents produced by any department have the same look. There is also an Art Library of 30 drawings like a smiling Man for Good news and a weeping Man for bad news that can be used to spice up documents Fine for newsletters perhaps but not for the company s annual report. These new features add some serious bulk to the program which now eats up 384 kilobytes of ram earlier versions used about 200. If you use a memory resident program like sidekick or hotline your system will be crowded unless the computer has 640k memory. Indeed word perfect practically demands a hard disk. Word perfect has always prided itself on ease of learning and ease of use and its latest documentation has been greatly expanded. A 400-Page tutorial guide takes the user step by step through the program. Page 14 the stars and stripes monday August 29,1988 the stars and stripes Page 15