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Technology / AI and automation


Having equipped itself with a fully-configured Macintosh, and the line drawing program from Adobe and the painting program from Fractal, the graphic arts studio of tomorrow will need a comprehensive filing system in which to keep all the designs that its brilliant commercial artists create on their screens. No, no, not a bank of cold grey filing cabinets or hangers – a relational database. And, as reported briefly, (CI No 595), Nantucket Corp of Culver City, California reckons that it has the answer. Capitalising on its experience of database management systems, Nantucket has announced McMax, a relational database management system for the Macintosh, Macintosh Plus and Macintosh XL computers. Nantucket, which claims that its Clipper dBase III and dBase III Plus compiler leads the industry with more than 30,000 copies sold, demonstrated McMax at the Macworld Expo/San Francisco earlier this month. The company claims McMax to be the only relational database manager to be truly dBase-compatible, and includes a compatible programming language, so that users can develop applications in either McMax or dBase and run them interchangeably on either a Macintosh or an IBM Personal or Personalike without rewriting. With over a million dBase packages sold, Nantucket reckons that there is a vast number of people familiar with the dBase programming language who will be able to create custom business applications for the Mac. McMax is priced at $295 and will begin shipping next month. In the US it will go through software distributors Ingram and Softsel Computer Products Inc. Internationally, McMax will be available through subsidiaries in the UK and West Germany and through distributors in other countries worldwide. Why should a company based in the suburbs of Los Angeles call itself Nantucket? Our US associate Technology News of America puts forward the theory that it’s for the same reason that the city sprawling over Manhattan Island was successively New Amsterdam and New York – nostalgia, this time for woods and streams and beaches and the shingled houses of Massachusetts.

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