I went to Intel’s N-10 (i860) announcement last week, and the image that came into my mind was of that guy on the rocket sled.

You’ve seen the old Air Force footage of this guy’s face as he blasts down the track, g forces trying to stretch the skin off his skull. And there I sat at the Intel announcement, feeling myself being sucked into the future and wondering whether there’s a 17-year-old on the planet who could survive a game of flight simulator run on an N-10 machine.

Maybe I’m a chicken, maybe I’m just growing old, but the progress of computer technology is amazing for an old PDP-8 hand like me, and often scary. Watching the IBM guy brandish his MCA N-10 board, it occurred to me that if the automobile had followed the same development cycle as the computer, a Rolls Royce would today cost $100, get a million miles per gallon, and explode once a year, killing everyone.

EISA DOES IT. Conspicuously absent from the IBM-dominated N-10 party was Compaq, which I understand has no immediate plans for the chip. The boys and gisls from Houston are instead working like mad on their EISA machine, which will be introduced shortly after spring Comdex.

As expected, AST will have the first EISA machine, which may steal some thunder from Compaq’s 33-MHz 386 Comdex announcement. But weep not for Rod Canion because the Compaq EISA will be a 486 -- first of the breed.

REVISIONIST UPGRADES. With all the MIPS and megaflops that were being bandied about, it was reassuring to learn when I got back to the office that the Lotus 1-2-3, Release 3.0 betas are beginning to surface. Now there’s sturdy old technology, I thought incorrectly.

One beta tester ran 3.0 on a slow machine, found some bugs, and reported them to Lotus. The response from Lotus? “You shouldn’t even run Release 3.0 on that machine.”

Remember when an upgrade meant new software that you could run on your old hardware?

BUSINESS AS USUAL. I used to wonder what could be done with the power of these new, fast processors. After all, how fast does an Excel recalc have to be to be fast enough? Mashing more data faster seemed an invitation to disaster to me until I realized that the power of the force could be used for good as well as evil, for creating new software environments with neat stuff like Display Postscript, which actually can use the extra cycles.

In the category of old business and business practices, there’s a terrific product just out called Coreldraw, which on top of its other features comes with a clip-art catalog filled with images that look mighty familiar to folks at some other clip-art houses receiving no royalties.

On a more positive note, I hear that Peter Norton, in the mood to roll down his sleeves, is considering selling 70 percent of his company to have more time and money to devote to his love of modern art.

SCULLY TAKES NEW JOB! Having bought all that high-priced DRAM last summer, I’m hearing that Apple is planning to auction the stuff soon. Why would the kids in Cupertino be interested in selling at a loss memory that they obtained so dearly? My guess is that last summer’s seller’s market landed Apple with less than terrific chips that won’t run in the new 030s, and maybe not even in the Pluses and SEs.

But please don’t think the DRAM debacle is responsible for John Sculley having to take his new job at Creative Strategies Research International, where he will work on a newsletter called Multimedia Computing & Presentations. Sculley, who just graduated from Stanford, probably doesn’t want to work for his dad over at Apple Computer.

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