(FORTUNE Magazine) – CLUB MED 1 The outfit that calls itself ''the antidote for civilization'' is taking a shot at the fast-growing cruise business with a big, big sailboat. The newly christened Club Med 1, a 617-foot, eight-deck vessel, plies the Caribbean with 425 passengers, who can leave the ship to snorkel, windsurf, water-ski, or sightsee. But there's plenty of civilization on board: Club Med 1's accommodations have more in common with the QE2 than with the sparse, no- frills rooms typical at most Club Med villages. Besides the customary casino, swimming pools, boutiques, and restaurants, the ship boasts cabins with closed-circuit TV, telephones, minibars, and 24-hour room service. A suite can cost $3,545 a week -- 30% to 35% more than landlubbers pay for Club Med's village rooms.

IBM PHONECOMMUNICATOR The phone rings. A synthesized voice on the other end begins: ''Hello, this is Phil. I have a hearing and speech impairment, so I am talking with the help of my computer. To talk to me, you will have to press the buttons.'' The caller is Phillip Bravin (pictured here), a deaf IBM product administrator, who typed the message out on his keyboard. Bravin was using IBM's new PC-based PhoneCommunicator system, which lets the deaf talk to others without the help of operators or special equipment on both ends of the line. The hearing party needs only to punch words on the keypad of a Touch-Tone phone; the message is displayed on the disabled person's computer screen. The process is cumbersome. For example, since each phone key represents three letters, the caller keying in the word ''home'' is also conjuring up ''good,'' ''gone,'' and ''hood.'' The deaf person has to figure out the right word from the context. Such a conversation could take twice as long as a normal call, even after the owner gets adept at handling the system. No matter: PhoneCommunicator offers the deaf more phone freedom than they've ever had before. Cost: $600 for software and telephone hookups. Users will also need an IBM-compatible personal computer.

MOTOROLA 68040 MICROPROCESSOR So what if Motorola was late with its latest superchip? The 68040 is more powerful than expected, good news for people who buy Macintoshes, Hewlett- Packard workstations, and other computers based on 68000-series chips. Motorola claims the chip can process 3.5 million floating-point operations per second (important in scientific calculations), vs. just one million for rival | Intel's 486 chip. Says Michael Slater, the editor of the Microprocessor Report newsletter: ''From a technological point of view, the 68040 is more impressive than the 486.'' The popular 68000 chips use an old design known as complex instruction-set computing (Cisc). The reduced instruction-set computing (Risc) used in many newer chips is generally faster. Like the 486, the 68040 keeps Cisc in the race with Risc -- no small advantage to 68000 customers, for whom 6,000 software programs have been written.

DODGE STEALTH If executives at Chrysler's Dodge division have their way, the Stealth most folks chat about will fly on the highways, not for the Air Force. Styled by Dodge but engineered by Mitsubishi in Japan, the new car has wowed critics at auto shows and will make its debut this fall. Dodge is pitting it against hot sports cars like the Nissan 300ZX twin turbo and Corvette ZR1. Stealth packs more technology than the competitors. The most expensive of the four versions, costing around $30,000, will sport all-wheel drive, four-wheel steering, antilock brakes, and an electronically controlled suspension. Powered by a twin-turbocharged 3.0-liter V-6 engine, Stealth's top speed is projected to be around 160 miles per hour. It'll zip from zero to 60 mph in 5.4 seconds. Says Christopher Cedergren, an auto analyst at J.D. Power & Associates: ''You think you're driving something much more expensive.'' Dodge plans to produce between 25,000 and 30,000 Stealths a year. Mitsubishi expects to sell up to 10,000 a year of a sister version, called the 3000GT, in the U.S.