The Guardian from London, Greater London, England • 15

Thursday September 17 1987 15 i VA VA WW fA 7 YA 'WW va wwir VA Pushing the boat out The Guardian Innovation Challenge Today we are launching a competition to find innovative ideas for the use of computers and their associated technology. You could win a trophy, 1,000, and have your innovation developed commercially Treasury (CCTA); the Department of Trade and Industry (DTI); Imperial Metal Industries; the National Computing Centre (NCC); and the Open University. We are grateful to these organisations for their enthusiastic support. Now it's up to you. To request an information pack containing the full details and rules of the Guardian Innovation Challenge and an entry form, you can do one of three things: clip the coupon here (or write in with the same details on plain paper) telephone our 24-hour hotline on 0895 72617 and leave your name and address type Request.Challenge on the Telecom Gold electronic mail service.

Your full entry, along with any drawings, floppy discs, etc, must be submitted by 10 0 am, on November 9, so there is no time to lose. UK Organisation, the Open University. In addition, the panel will be assisted by technical experts and specialist advisers from: the Association of British Chambers of Commerce; Barclays Corporate; British Standards Institution (BSD; the Central Computer and Telecommunications Agency of HM THE BRITISH are supposed to be good at innovative thinking. We have, after all, come up with radar, television, the jet engine and the hovercraft, not to mention the umbrella, cats-eyes, the sandwich, and a good reason for apples falling off trees. Some aspects of computing have also been pioneered in the UK.

The world's first electronic computer was built in Dollis Hill, north London, before being moved to Bletchley Park to break the German Enigma codes during the Second World. War. The world's first stored program computer was run at Manchester University in 1948. Viewdata and distributed array processing were pioneered here too. Today, of course, we seem to be almost overwhelmed by products of fast-changing technology that sweep across the Atlantic or, increasingly, the Pacific.

Ironically, some of these are based on British research and development. The accusation is all too often that our information technology (IT) companies have failed to develop innovative ideas into successful commercial products. Now here is a chance to prove that British genius is alive and kicking. And we hope that British industry is still capable of successfully taking innovative ideas into the marketplace. The Guardian, together with the Akhter Group, a British computer manufacturer and distributor, and nine companies associated with the computer industry, are combining, to issue a challenge to anyone who can think of an innovative way of using or developing information technology.

We believe there are lots of ideas for innovations, gadgets, devices, and computer methods being thought up in schools, colleges, and industrial and commercial workplaces. The main purposes of this competition are to stimulate original thinking, and to help channel these new ideas to organisations who can develop them. We also want to encourage people who have already developed an innovation to put it to the test and to give them the chance to have their idea developed commercially. Anyone can enter. You don't have to be a computer expert You don't have to have a working program, technical drawings or a finished prototype.

You just have to be willing to think through an idea. Prizes some benefits to the disabled and disadvantaged, with developments ranging from educational programs to speech synthesis, but a lot more needs doing in this area. Any other. We do not want to preclude any innovations which do not fall into the above categories. Send them to us anyway.

Note that all submissions qualifying for detailed consideration will be covered by non-disclosure agreements to protect entrants. The judges The judging panel will be chaired jointly by Jack Scho-field of the Guardian and Andrew Seal of Akhter Group pic. With such a wide range of possible innovations, it will clearly be necessary for the panel to draw on a wide range of expertise. The panel will include senior technical representatives from each of the nine supporting companies: Falcon Systems, Genicom Limited, G-Com Systems, the International Data Corporation, Newbury Data Recording, Philips Interactive Media Systems, Transdata, the Cherry To: The Guardian Innovation Challenge, Room 17, The Guardian, 119 Farringdon Road, London EC1R 3ER. Iwe wish to enter the Guardian Innovation Challenge Competition, please send me an information pack and entry form, Name Address Signed Date Other outstanding entries will, at the discretion of the judges, receive a Guardian Trophy, and will have the opportunity to discuss the commercial development of their innovation.

A separate trophy will be presented for the best entry from a student or group of students still at school. The winner will be invited to receive the trophy and cheque during the Which Computer? Show at the National Exhibition Centre in Birmingham on January 20, 1988. Categories For judging purposes, entries will be divided into five categories: Data Security. With computer fraud, hacking, the arrival of the provisions of the-Data Protection Act and widespread concern about the privacy of personal data, this is clearly a key area. Possible innovations could be hardware or software mechanical devices or computer programs or a combination of the two.

Manmachine interface. The keyboard represents a barrier in industry and in universities. An example of the latter, and possibly Scet's front-runner for a software standard, is Unix. Unix is an operating-system awaiting the march of the megabytes. Created by the American telephone company AT in the early Seventies for use on minicomputers, Unix initially gained popularity only in the universities.

Recently, however, the commercial world has been taking a greater interest in the system, and more and more applications are now being written to exploit the vast Unix capability for microcomputers. Computer Guardian recently reported a demonstration of the potential Of Unix which involved linking 12 different computers; each with an idiosyncratic architecture, from 12 manufacturers. Unix allowed each of the 12 machines to run the same soft Scots will ttake the low road to comiDiputoR' compattibilitty The prize list is as follows: The Guardian Innovation Challenge Trophy. 1,000. Guaranteed commercial development of the winning innovation, with the inventor's involvement at some level, from simply receiving royalties to managing the company.

common, national operating-system: a software standard which would be powerful, flexible, and extensible enough to be highly "future-proof." An operating-system working identically across a variety of machines would greatly enhance the effectiveness of computer education in all its aspects. The ability to concentrate resources and expertise on a single system would be a considerable advance on the present dissipation of effort. Machines vastly more powerful than the old BBCs and Spec-trains are becoming available at lower and lower costs. At the same time, operating-systems designed to take full advantage of these large memory machines are being developed. Other systems have been transported to the micro-computer environments from the mini-and mainframe computers used have to consider more than simply the bare bones of a software standard.

It will also have to decide on a standard programming language for Scottish educational computing. Here we are not talking about a "systems" language used to write operating-systems and other sophisticated programs. Scet will have to choose a language which will be a powerful programming tool and yet will be able to introduce learners at lower levels to the first principles of programming. So why not Logo? There is already a kind of standard in Logo in the versions written or marketed by Logo Computer Systems Inc. (LCSI) a standard with which many teachers and pupils are already familiar.

But Logo is often condemned by the faint praise of "serious" computer programming continuity all the way from the simplicity of the primary classroom to the complexities of computer science and artificial intelligence. Its handling of property lists can be used to write powerful databases. It has immense computer-aided design potential. It is a natural contender for many computer-aided learning techniques. Its ability to deal with symbols, in the form of words and lists, in a simple, interactive way is unparalleled (Logo's progenitor, Lisp, is more powerful but difficult to use).

And, in a large-memory environment, its number-crunching and mathematical capabilities generally could be designed cope with any practical requirement. Logo, tied to Unix or GEM or Windows or whatever, could become the prime, Scottish computer-learning tool. told often that they were tlie only people versed in the neiv technology to have visited the agents. Here the manufacturers, and their local have a role to play, particularly as the report urges some agents to invest in further The important point the report makes is that education in industry must nowadays be an ongoing procedure. No doubt ABTA, the trade association, will be looking into this but local colleges and polytecH-nics could well run short courses.

The quoted figures indicate that agents both need and could afford them. To be valuable to the travel agents, short courses would have to be an amalgam of technology and management skills. Leisure is a growing industry and travel is an integral part. What this report does is to show that education is not a soil option -to pad out coursed. It pinpoints the needs, and shows that ignorance is costing a lot of money.

The report. Technology and the Travel Agent. Istel SurvetJ, 1987, 95. Copies from: Travel Business Group. Commercial Division, Istel Ltd, PO Box 5, Redditch.

Worcs B97 4DQ Telephone (0527) 339954. The free booklets mentioned in the article are also obtahi-able from the same addrest Travel agents miss connection The holiday industry has failed to exploit its pioneering links with new technology, says Dan Valence experts as little more than a useful toy. Part of the problem is that Logo is not easy to implement on the small micros used in schools. Where a tiny Basic can be fitted into as little as 3K of memory, even the simplest Logo will take up 30K and fuller versions will easily fill 60K (the first versions of Logo were actually implemented on mainframe computers and were much larger still). The result is that present versions of Logo suffer by comparison with other languages used in schools.

However, Logo has the potential to be valuable across the board, at all ages, and in almost any educational environment It can be used; to teach the fundamentals ibf sound programming just as easily as it can be used as a powerful language in its own right. As such, it could provide the country, agents have learned to treat videotex as a useful ally to be paraded in front of the customer as part of their sales technique. But how can the trade cut out its wasteful expenditure? The first objective should be staff training on telephone charges and time bands. A free booklet is obtainable from BT's telephone shops. Prestel page 383614 gives the geographical situation of all STD codes throughout the UK, and page 3836135 the Jocal Prestel access points throughout the country.

(Other firms should also list their local access points!) The free booklet offered by Istel will also be helpful, may not in itself be sufficient if staff are timid about, the new technology. One of the more- striking sections in the report is the welcome that the researchers reported receiving; They were DIGITAL Equipment Co (DEC) has just floated more new pro-duets at its 11-dav DECWorld extravaganza in Boston, for which the 0E2 was hired as an hotel. The major launch was the MicroVAX 3000. delivering three times the power ol the popular MicroVAX II at around twice the price. A 3000 can pack up to 32M of memory, two 280M discs and a 662M disc with typical system prices ranging from 62,000 to 200.000.

It would be described as an IBM 9370 killer, if the 9370 could be said to be alive. Other new products included workstations, discs, printers, X.400 and other OSI-based software and Ethernet working over twisted-pair telephone wire rather than expensive shielded coaxial cable. Over 50.000 people were said to be attracted to the show to see that "DEC has it now" a slogan that hits at an unnamed rival's promises to deliver comparable benefits at some time in the future, maybe. DECWorld reputedly cost DEC a cool $20 millions, but executives were expecting to take $1 billion in orders at the show. Red Acorn ACORN is in the red again.

Figures for the half-year to June showed turnover down slightly to 19.0 million and a 310,000 profit turned into a 1.38 million loss. The company suffered from having only the inadequate and overpriced BBC models to sell, with no income for the new Archimedes. Turbo GREAT news! Turbo Pascal, the most popular programming language on the IBM PC and compatibles, introduces a fantastic new feature with Version 4.0 you can write programs bigger than 64K! This would be funny if Turbo Pascal wasn't a superb language with 750,000 users on the most popular micro in the world. As it is, only the users of unmentionable cheap micros can. afford to wet themselves laughing.

MSX dead? MOST people realised the Japanese Z-80 based MSX home computer standard was dead on arrival, but news has finally got back to Japan. Newsbytes on The Source reports that "the Tokyo branches of Microsoft and ASCII have thrown out the MSX standard and begun to push another." This time it's IBM PC AT-compatible. uses the Phoenix BIOS, and is called AX. Fourteen Japanese companies have expressed interest and one, Sanyo, has already launched an AX machine. What, backing old technology again? The IBM PC AT is already three years old.

even though IBM hasn't yet come up with a proper operating system for it. PopeBase AFTER Pope John Paul II hit the tarmac in Miami recently, all 45 of his speeches were handed to William Thorn, a journalism professor at Marquette University. He used an OCR (optical character reader) to add the texts to a database of papal information which includes itineraries, speeches from the 1979 visit and other data. Access to PopeBase was then sold to newspapers for $300. Thorn put the total cost of the database at $50,000 and claimed it would cost newspapers more than $300 to type the new speeches into their own systems.

Maybe someone should give the Pope a micro and Word Perfect so the speeches could be handed out on disc. Hacker hacked THE Prime Minister's mailbox has been broken into. Unfortunately, the PM in question is only Jim Hacker, in Mosaic's computer game version of Yes, Prime Minister, which is being launched to tie in with a new BBC TV series. In the game, programmed by Oxford Digital, the player is Jim Hacker and must raise his popularity over the course of a week. This involves coping with Sir Humphrey's problematic nuances and hazards like the Trade Secretary being arrested for drunken driving just as you launch a road safety campaign.

Is a cover up desirable but not possible, possible but not desirable, or both possible and desirable? From October 1, owners of Amstrad CPC. BBC, Commodore 64 and Spectrum micros will be able to find out. Owners of PC-compatibles and PCW's will have to wait until mid-November. Computer Guardian is edited by Jack Schotield THE GUARDIAN INNOVATION CHALLENGE to many people's use of computers, as do complex and incomprehensible screen displays. At present we have touch-screens, voice controllers and "mice" used with pictorial software which works by analogy with people's desktops.

How can they be improved? And what's next? Connectivity. Standalone computers are useful, but limited, whether they be micros, minis or mainframes. But increasingly we need to enable computers to connect to their peripherals and to other computers in better ways. What new ideas can you think up? Social welfare. Information technology has already brought ware and talk to each or all of the other 11.

The commercial and educational implications of this demonstration are enormous. There are, of course, alternatives to Unix. Recent developments by IBM and Microsoft might point Scet towards the possibilities of the "coming standard" of OS2 fronted by its own Wimp environment, Presentation Manager. Even the existing MS-DOSWindows partnership might be worth considering. Another possibility is GEM, Digital Research's answer to the Macintosh user-interface.

GEM can claim some virtue as an existing "standard" since it already runs on processors as divergent as the Motorola 68000 (e.g. the Atari ST) and the Intel 8086 (e.g. the Amstrad PC1512). Whatever decision Scet finally makes, it will eventually SOMETHING like 8 millions a year is being handed on a plate to British Telecom, simply because travel agents are ignorant about how to make the best use of their viewdata systems. This has just emerged from a survey of a thousand English travel agents by Istel, the computer and communications company which is a major carrier of bookings systems.

Telephone charges amount to over ten per cent of the operating costs in the travel industry; hence the staggering size of the waste. The average real saving that could be made by the travel agents surveyed was equivalent to 1,500 each. Because of the speed and ease with which it switched from using telephones to using on-line videotex systems, the travel industry has long been considered a leader in the use of information technology. But in 1986, Istel which carries major tour operators like Horizon, Townsend Thoresen and Wings on its booking system network became concerned that travel agents were not making the best use of the facilities it offered. It therefore commissioned some research to see how agencies were using their new technology.

The main problem is that BT's zonal pricing structure (plus time bands) has not been assimilated by either independents or managers of multiples and certainly not by their counter clerks. Because of this, not enough attention has been paid to the telephone' numbers programmed into the videotex sets for ease of use. The second factor is that the majority expressed fear andor ignorance regarding their ability to change these numbers. In consequence, Istel cites an agent in the West Midlands accessing a Prestel node in Edinburgh. Another agent in the West of England owned a set capable of autodialling 10 numbers.

Because he did not have the knowledge to program the numbers into the set, he was still dialling manually. A third, though minor factor, was the users' inability to move around databases once inside. Usually they sign off and redial if they wish to move to another reservation base. As it is the first second of any call that is the most expensive, this also results in giving money to BT. An element of under-resourcing is also revealed.

Sixty-seven per cent of agents have only one videotex machine, and a further 20 per cent have two. This means that at the peak of the booking season, staff abandon the use of videotex and revert to the telephone. This results, of course, in two people being tied up in conversation, losing the advantage that videotex has brought to the industry. Extra sets and addi tional telephone lines could I The Synclavier in action: cloning for clarity increase output at comparatively trivial cost. Given the facts and figures set out in the report, it is difficult to argue with Istel's conclusion that the time has come for a programme of re-education within the travel industry.

They are following up the report with a free booklet on how to change the numbers programmed in autodial facilities. The hardware can be covered because 80 per cent of the companies visited were using machines supplied by only four manufacturers. (In order of significance these were Sony, Philips, Tandata and Bishopsgate, with Sony supplying a hefty 40 per cent.) All surveys throw up curious, unlooked-for information. In this report it is the surprising fact that quite a high proportion of London agents tend to keep their machines backstage in the rear office. Elsewhere in megastore John Connell on Scotland's decision to establish a software, rather than hardware, standard for schools WITH title fuss, the Scottish Council for Educational Technology (Scet) has changed direction in the search for a standard in educational computing.

In its national plan, published in two parts over the last couple. of years, Scet has moved decisively aWay from the holy grail of a hardware standard for Scottish schools and colleges. Instead, it has proposed the establishment of a otiSDC MUSIC requires too much storage space for computer discs or RAM (random access memory) chips to be viable as a replacement for conventional records and tapes. When it comes to professional music recording, however, several firms are now selling systems which are designed to solve the problems if not the expense of using hard discs. Although designed to store text and data, which flows in packets, hard discs can be made to cope with a continuous flow of music or speech by pro viding a buffer of memory chips to bridge the gaps between the spurts of data flowing on and on the disc.

The result is (as near as makes no difference) a solid state recorder with almost instant access. Valuable studio time is no longer lost on rewinding tape: "taking it from the top" is virtually instantaneous. Sound can be "word eg the same sound section can be cloned and recorded on top of itself. If this is done with a very slight change of tone or timing, the result is a sound which gets larger and larger, not just louder and louder. After repeated cloning, one helicopter and jet fighter sound like a squadron.

Pop musicians conventionally overdub by playing the same rhythm tracks over and over again and recording different solos on separate tracks of the tape. But conventional tape physically degrades. Analogue recordings lose high frequencies, and digital tapes accumulate errors. If the rhythm tracks are copied from tape to a computer disc before over-dubbing begins, however, there is no degradation at all. A hard disc system also lets producers re-shape and mould the tempo and pitch of music, speech and special effects, to fit video pictures synchronised on screen.

Editing which would ALLIED DUNBAR ASSURANCE BRADFORD BINGLEY BRITISH AEROSPACE BRITISH GAS NORTHWESTERN BRITISH SHOE CORPORATION CAP- CGS (UK) CO-OPERATIVE INSURANCE SOCIETY CWS COMPUTER GROUP DATA LOGIC FERRANTT COMPUTER SYSTEMS FINE ART DEVELOPMENTS FRASER WILLIAMS GIROBANK GRATTAN IMPERIAL CHEMICAL INDUSTRIES- LITTLEWOODS ORGANISATION NORTH WEST SECURITIES NORWEB ELECTRICITY OCEAN MANAGEMENT SERVICES PETERBOROUGH SOFTWARE PLESSEY MAJOR SYSTEMS PROVIDENT FINANCIAL GROUP ROYAL INSURANCE (UK) TSB ENGLAND WALES UNITED BISCUITS (UK) WILLIAMS GROUP of video recorders so that Townshend can mix and match film sequences in synchronism with the music. There are four Winchester hard discs, to give a total storage capacity of 4.8 gigabits. This is partitioned into eight parallel streams to create the equivalent of an 8-track digital tape recorder. Each of the tracks can store 13 minutes of music. TVS, the Southern television station, uses the AMS Audiofile to generate almost instantaneous sound effects for quiz games.

The same system can be used for drama; a toy gun sensed live through a microphone can trigger the sound of a real gun off disc. For musical applications, the sound of one instrument sensed live can trigger the sound of a different instrument off disc. This is one way to make animals talk or sing. The aircraft industry is now experimenting with hard disc recorders for flight simulators, to give pilots running sound effects. One secret police body in Eastern Europe wanted to buy an Audiofile, for who knows what reason.

In 1984 an American company, Compu-sonics, made world news at a Chicago exhibition with the promise of a domestic system which would record 45 minutes of stereo on one 5.25in floppy disc. Whenever I called at the exhibition stand it was always just the wrong time to hear the system working. Patents, published later, detailed a mass of interesting theory. But the system finally offered, two years later, for storing radio station jingles, not home recording, stores only four minutes of reasonable quality stereo on a superhigh density (6.6M) floppy. In computer audio, as in every other field of technology, the laws of physics dictate that there is no free lunch.

Recording music has never been easier if you have the money. Barry Fox explains take hours on tape can be done in minutes off disc. The leaders in the field are the British company, AMS of Burnley, with Audiofile and New England Digital of Vermont, with the Synclavier. The Synclavier system came out of work begun at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire. As with RAM-based systems, sound can be stored in either of two ways as an exact digital replica of the original, or as a sequence of musical instrument key strokes.

When live sound is recorded in a studio it is usually sampled at 50kHz and coded in 16 bit words to give a full 20kHz audio bandwidth. Although the error rate off disc is very low one error in 10 (to the power of) 12 bits some extra correction is needed. With this, and labelling, each megabyte of disc capacity stores around 10 seconds of audio. NED's disc drives for the Synclavier each store 150 megabytes. The control computer can handle up to 32 separate channels of sound simultaneously.

The channels are recorded either on separate discs or interleaved in the data stream for a single disc. Eventually there will be a 32-track Synclavier system recording for up to 30 minutes. Pete Townshend of The Who fame is currently using Synclavier hardware to record an album in his studio near Richmond. The hardware system, which cost over 100,000, also controls a bank DON'T MISS THE BEST JOBS. These employers will be at the Computer Recruitment Fair at New Century Hall in Manchester.

Don't miss it. NcwConlury Hall is opposite Victoria Station. SO yards from thuCIS buildup. Opening hpurs are on Friday 25 September and 101)0-1700 on Saturday 20 September. Organised by INTRO UK, telephone 0491 681010.

Sponsored by COMPUTER WEEKLY in association with IBM Computer Today and Computer Talk. GowuPer 25-26 SEPTEMBER 1987.