DARPA has a new emphasis on manufacturing, according to Deputy Director Gary Denman. DARPA wants to push implementation to the point that industry can take over with little technological risk. [Brian Robinson, EE Times, 9/30.]

Although DARPA is cutting back on neural-network research, other agencies are providing plenty of funding for applications. Accurate Automation Inc. (Chattanooga, TN) has won funding from NSF, ONR, NOSC, the National Aero-Space Plane Joint Program Office, Naval Surface Warfare Center, U.S. Marine Corps, and the Dept. of Transportation. [R. Colin Johnson, EE Times, 9/30.]

The Justice Dept. has approved Borland's acquisition of Ashton-Tate, and Borland has announced that it will drop Ashton-Tate's interface-copyright suit against Fox Software. Philippe Kahn has long been critical of such litigation. [Rory J. O'Connor, SJM, 10/12.]

Apple seems to be subcontracting manufacturing in order to focus on operating system and application development. IBM is dismantling its Desktop Software Unit, leaving PC application development for others. [The American Computer Exchange. The Business Journal, 10/7.]

IBM says it will provide native OSF-1 Unix (called AIX/ESA) on its mainframes. This is seen as a move toward open systems and as a thrust into scientific and technical markets. Ted Jarosh has been made VP of IBM's growing Dallas-based division of Technical Computing Systems (formerly Scientific and Technical Computing). Fujitsu, Hitachi, and NEC have similar plans for Unix-based mainframes. [Richard Doherty and Margaret Ryan, EE Times, 9/16.]

IBM and Thinking Machines Corp. (Cambridge, MA) have agreed to combine supercomputer expertise. One goal is to make Connection Machines work with IBM mainframes. [EE Times, 9/30.]

The Edinburgh Parallel Computer Center (EPCC) at UEdinburgh is getting a CM-200 Connection Machine from Thinking Machines. Collaborative projects are planned. [Roger Woolnough, EE Times, 10/7.]

HP and Caere Corp. (Los Gatos, CA) are collaborating on advanced page-recognition systems. HP's AccuPage software identifies coffee stains, highlighter marks, colored sidebars, rotated pages, and other complications. Within each region, Caere's OmniPage Professional provides rapid -- 115 cps -- multifont recognition via active control of an HP ScanJet IIc scanner. Caere software also exports text to common DOS/Windows applications. [Richard Doherty, EE Times, 9/16.]

MCC (Austin, TX) has spun out a second start-up, Corporate Memory Systems Inc. Jeff Conklin and Michael Begeman will market gIBIS, a graphical hypertext-based corporate decision-making and MIS product. Initial application will be in the utility industry. The first MCC spin-off was Evolutionary Technologies Inc. [EE Times, 10/7.]

Texas Instruments Inc. needs about 100 researchers for its new $40M Tsukuba R&D Center. Research areas include speech, video, semiconductor materials, computer systems, and consumer projects. TI also expects to participate in government-sponsored co-op research projects and standards efforts. Don Shaw, from the semiconductor materials area, is founding director. [David Lammers, EE Times, 10/7.]

Iterated Systems Inc. (Norcross, GA) claims 2,456:1 compression of a complex 24-bit color image. Their fractal technology is proprietary, but hardware and software toolkits are available for developers. Michael Barnsley has also published a PC FloppyBook diskette, available from Jones and Bartlett Publishers (Boston, MA). Compression produces a set of equations, which can be used to reconstruct a reduced image (or "thumbnail"), the full image, or any portion of the image. Reconstruction is faster than compression, and can be done on inexpensive PCs. Several companies are planning to market applications, with one from Micro Mall Corp. (Federal Way, WA) packing 100 256-color images and 100 pages of text into a 1.2-Mb floppy. [Richard Doherty, EE Times, 9/30.] (The company claims less mean-square error than with DCT, but a [mislabeled?] EE Times graph shows the opposite.)

Texas Instruments is planning a $300 virtual-reality helmet for the home market by Christmas of 1993. The company expects to sell about three million. Game cartridges would sell for about $50 to $60. [Mike Langberg, SJM, 10/13.] (Intelligent game software is a growing -- but cutthroat -- market. Will AI be a part of it? Will VR helmets find use in AI applications?)

SunSoft, a business unit of Sun Microsystems, is purchasing the products division of Interactive Corp. (Santa Monica, CA) from Kodak. This will give SunSoft a variety of DOS emulation and TCP/IP networking tools. SunSoft is also providing an operating system that will work on both Sun and Intel processors. [Loring Wirbel, EE Times, 10/7.]

James Klecknew is the new director of technology development at C.ats Software Inc. (Palo Alto, CA). [SJM, 10/11.]