FORENSIC IMAGING NEWSLETTER

ISSUE:No. 3-6 -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------JULY 1, 1995 WHAT'S NEW

The "lazy days of summer" didn't happen this summer. You may have noticed that I missed the June issue of my newsletter and it wasn't that I ran out of things to write about. It has and continues to be a very busy time at IBIS Imaging Systems. So busy, that instead of exhibiting at the I.A.I. meeting in Costa Mesa, I will be installing another system in the L.A. area. We will be present at the American Society of Questioned Document Examiners in Chicago on Labor Day. I apologize to those individuals who were planning on visiting our booth in Costa Mesa. If you read any PC trade magazines you may already know that technology, or at least the hype, is continuing at an ever increasing pace. Intel continues to release faster Pentium chips and the next generation, the P 6, is due out soon, which of course will drive down the price of the Pentium. I have been doing a lot of testing in our laboratory and have found that in most cases a 486/100 MHz, or even a 66 MHz if available, is quite adequate for most types of "imaging". The amount of ram memory, hard disk size and speed, and a newer serial port UART (16550) are actually more important than the CPU as far as having a "fast" PC.

WINDOWS What Are They? Windows, whether they be Microsoft's 3.11, WFW, '95, NT, IBM's OS/2, or X-Windows, fall into the category of a GUI (Gooey), or Graphical User Interface. The idea of the GUI was to provide a point- and-click interface for application software,aka Apple's MacIntosh. A side benefit was standard ( ie. built in) interfaces to peripherals like printers, scanners, etc., albeit a programmer still has to conform to the Windows standard set of commands. In the beginning, when there was only DOS, programmers were forced to cram as much functionality into the tighest(smallest) package they could generate, which was good. DOS applications were (are) often faster, particularly if hardware devices (like hi res imaging boards) are addressed directly. You might even remember when a program came on a single diskette versus today when you might even have to have a CD-Rom drive to install some programs. As you may know IBIS has developed a new imaging package based on WINDOWS which incorporates all of our previous image enhancement along with the ability to "conference" on an image over dial-up phone lines. Although some peripherals, like the old Imagraph HIDEF boards, are as yet unsupported in WINDOWS, we believe WINDOWS,especially NT, is the platform to be operating under.