Nec

When Darrick Suber's buzzer-beating jump shot dropped through the net last Tuesday night, it gave Rider a 65-64 victory over Wagner in the Northeast Conference championship game and an automatic bid to the NCAA tournament. That was the good news. The bad news for Rider came Sunday, when the Broncos were seeded 16th in the Southeast Regional, giving them a first-round date with second-ranked Kentucky. Rider (19-10) will play the Wildcats (26-3) in Nashville on Friday. "We knew we were going to play a top-of-the-line team," Rider coach Kevin Bannon said.

Trumpeter Lee Morgan was shot to death on Feb. 19, 1972, by his common-law wife in the jazz bar known as Slug's on the Lower East Side of New York. He was only 33. When one is reasonably famous, young, and a jazz musician, and dies either by one's own excesses or under violent circumstances, the odds are very favorable that someone, sooner or later, is going to write a play about it. Sam Harps was only 15 years old and an Army brat living in Norfolk, Va., when the Philadelphia-born-and-reared Morgan met his end. Not until Harps had finished college, moved to Atlanta as a newspaper intern on the Journal- Constitution, learned to play jazz on a stand-up bass and begun to write one-act plays, did he come across the facts of Morgan's demise quite by chance - ironically, while researching a piece on another trumpeter from the Philadelphia area who had died young, famous and violently, Clifford Brown.

If you want to know what's hot in computer technology today just step on over to the Philadelphia Computer Conference and Exposition being held in the Civic Center and take a look around. Color thermal laser printers, notebook laptop computers and "windows" are taking over. And everyone is out to sell them to you. "This is the hottest, don't let anybody tell you differently," Jerry Selthoffer of Automated Systems Inc., said about the new color thermal laser printer. The printers generate high resolution graphics with bright, bold colors, similar to a magazine photo.

On the eve of Nintendo's entry into the 16-bit videogame wars with its Super NES system, rival NEC has taken a strong offensive move - dropping the price of its TurboGrafx 16-video-game console to under $100 - half the original price. Sega's Genesis system, currently the U.S. market leader among higher- resolution 16-bit games, was recently reduced to $150. Nintendo has yet to announce the price tag for its Super 16 bit system, due in stores this fall, but electronics and toy trade magazines have speculated that it would fall close to the $200 mark.

A decade ago, Sony's Walkman tape cassette player set us free to program our musical entertainment wherever and whenever we wanted. In the 1990s, our liberation will extend to a variety of hand-held products that supply us both with sound and sight on demand, using software that - like an audio cassette - slips readily into a slot or shirt pocket. One case in point is the TurboExpress portable game system from NEC, a nifty (albeit expensive at $250) new rival to the red-hot Nintendo Game Boy. Unlike the competition, NEC's multi-level games play in full color, with cartoon-quality animation and sometimes even stereo sound.

Japan's NEC Corp. and American Telephone & Telegraph Co. said yesterday that they would cooperate in developing and making a wide range of semiconductors and other computer technologies. The pact should enhance the U.S. company's access to Japan's world- dominating electronics market. Under the agreement, AT&T Microelectronics will receive a license to market, design and produce NEC's advanced gate-array computer chips, which are used widely in computers and other electronics devices.

With his unfolding series of dramas written under the overall title We, Charles Fuller has given the Negro Ensemble Company (NEC) enough black history to fill a season, let alone a month. The history is useful, but, so far, the drama has been negligible as the Pulitzer Prize-winning Philadelphia playwright has explored the contradictions and cruel deceptions of emancipation in the Civil War and the era that followed. This is true of the fourth installment, Burner's Frolic, which opened Sunday at the NEC's home base, Off-Broadway's Theater Four.

DEFICIT COMMISSION SHOULD ISSUE ITS REPORT NOW Drew Lewis, co-chairman of the 12-member bipartisan National Economic Commission created by the President and Congress to report to the President on how to trim the federal budget deficit, is reported to have said during an appearance of NBC-TV's Meet the Press that the timing of the commision's report would better serve the President if it were delayed to Sept. 1. He said that President-elect Bush deserved a chance to find out if his "flexible freeze" approach to budget reduction would work before the high-level advisory panel put forth its own strategies.

Tucked away in a Washington office building is a Compaq computer, which could turn out to be the most important piece of nonmilitary machinery in Washington. It belongs to the National Economic Commission (NEC), the now- obscure but soon-to-be-influential agency designed to shove the next president into taking a serious first-year whack at the inherited budget deficit. The NEC has a strange lineage. It was proposed by New York Gov. Mario M. Cuomo, a Democrat, taken up by Senate Republican leader Bob Dole and written into the budget agreement forged by Congress and President Reagan after last October's stock-market crash.