HP and Microsoft have agreed to make HP's New Wave shell compatible with Microsoft's OLE interprocess communication language. [SJM, 9/24.]

Apple says that its Pink operating system is more than a million lines of code, with 10,000 defined classes. [Rory J. O'Connor, SJM, 9/24.]

Tim Finin reports that IBM and Thinking Machines Corp. have agreed to work jointly on massively parallel supercomputing. (IBM also has a joint venture with Steve Chen's Supercomputing Systems Inc.)

MIT has a new 8-processor Monsoon machine for research in scalable dataflow architectures and languages. Motorola built the machine with DARPA funding, but has no plans to commercialize it. MIT wants a 1,000-processor "Start" machine for continued work on its Id parallel programming language. [Loring Wirbel, EE Times, 8/19.]

Stardent (Concord, MA) has gathered a 7-member consortium of supporters for its AVS visual programming environment for scientific visualization. (Others are Convex, DEC, Evans & Sutherland, HP, IBM, and Set Technology). They expect to have 1,000 object-oriented FORTRAN and C modules by year's end, to be integrated at a new International AVS Center in the North Carolina Supercomputing Center (NCSC; Raleigh-Durham). Stardent's parent company is Kubota Corp. of Japan. Rival visual-programming environments are IBM's Data Explorer and Silicon Graphic's Explorer. [Nicolas Mokhoff, EE Times, 8/5.] (Visual programming is fun, but underneath you need "real code." It's difficult to build environments for working at both levels. See Dan Shafer's column in PC AI, 9/91.)

Dan Corkill (cork@cs.umass.edu) has conference brochures available for the 1st International Lisp Users and Vendors Conference (LUV-91), Gaithersburg, MD, 10/28 to 11/1/91. A conference goal is to get LISP/Common LISP/CLOS back on track as the language of choice for advanced programming and systems development. Sponsors include Apple, Blackboard Technology Group, Chestnut Software, Franz, Gold Hill Computers, Harlequin, Ibuki, Lucid, Symbolics, and Top Level. Contact Laura Lotz, (215) 651- 0936. (See CACM, 9/91, for some good articles on LISP.)

Patrick Tierney, former VP and general manager of TRW's Information Services Division, has been named president and COO of Dialog Information Services (Palo Alto, CA) and of Knight- Ridder's Electronic Publishing Group. Roger Summit, 60, will stay on as chairman emeritus and consultant. [SJM. 9/19.]

Yogen Dalal, former VP of [software] product development and CTO at Apple's Claris, has joined Mayfield Fund (Menlo Park, CA) as a venture partner. Dalal will track software technological trends. [SJM. 9/19.]

Philips plans to launch CD-I to the U.S. consumer market in October, with players under their own label for $1000 (street price about $800). The current issue of CD-ROM Professional says there will be about 30 CD-I titles available. Professional authoring systems have been available for about three years. [Todd Earles (todd@mcrware.uucp), comp.multimedia, 9/9.]

A discussion thread in comp.org.eff.talk concerned the threat of New York State tax laws to BBS operators. The authorities want sales tax on all downloaded shareware and public-domain software unless the BBS operator receives no remuneration or "consideration" (e.g., uploaded software). [Bruce Barr (bruceb@informix.com), comp.society.futures, 9/10.]

The WELL (Sausalito, CA) is sponsoring an online writing contest. Submit any of your net-published writing, 50 lines or less, to (tex@well.sf.ca.us) by 9/30/91. Categories for these "gems of clarity or emotion" are review or commentary, narrative, and freeform. (One entry per person per category.) Include address and phone number, plus a header identifying the download source. You may get a $200 prize, plus publicity. Hardcopy can be sent to Online Writing Award, 27 Gate Five Road, Sausalito, CA 94965. [Gerard Van der Leun (van@eff.org), misc.books.technical, 9/13.]