NY Times Business Day lead...

[DanKarron at UCBVAX.BERKELEY.EDU]

Here is my attempt to transcribe todays article that might be of interest
to this newsgroup.

This is from Page D1 of the New York Times, Business Day of Monday April 8, 
1991. All typos are my own, not the Times. 

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
New Computer Alliiance Forms

By John Markoff

In an extrodinary alliance, more than a dozen computer companies will
announce tommorow their comittment to a new and untried chip they hope will
dominate the computer world in the years to come.

... blab background filler about chips, micros, minis, mainframes blab...

Rapidly Changing Technology

Members of the new alliance say they are trying to capitalize on rapidly
changing technology to build support for this new style of computing.

"We're at the point to do some things that are technically feasible that 
haven't been done before," said Forest Baskett, vice president for research
and development at Silicon Graphics Inc.,... that is part of the consortium.

Tomorrow's announcement will center on a microprocessor made by MIPS computer
systems , a small company in Sunnyvale, Calif, that has risen to prominence by
attracting powerful backers, including Digital Equipment, Compaq Computers
and Microsoft. 

At tomorrow's news converence, Rod Canion, president of Compaq, will be joined
by William H. Gates 3d, chairman of Microsoft, Kenneth H. Olse, president of
Digital, and Larry Michels, president of the Santa Cruz Operation, a software
company. But industry analysts say there are still significant divisions
between members of the consortium. It will be several years, [market] analysts
say, before computers based on the MIPS R4000 chips are available in quantity.

By banding together, the alliance hopes to promote itself as an alternative to 
chips designed by Sun, Motorola, Inte, and IBM. Compaq and DEC fear that
they are being left behind by HP and IBM, which have been the most successful
companies in marketing networked computers. [Huh !]

"They're all trying to get into a market where they don't participate right 
now," said Stewart Alsop, publisher of the PC Letter.

...

The consortium, to be called the Advanced Computing Environment, will also
endorse chips made by Intel, even though Intel refuses to participate because
it does not want to endorse the MIPS chip.

Tens of Milions of Users

...

"These companies are trying to levitate the MS-DOS installed base and move it
forward to the next level of computing," said Roger B. McNamee, an industry
analyst with T. Rowe Price Associate. "But it's a hugh challenge. It's a smart 
business move, the there is no garantee it will work".

...

A Key Role

The executive, who insisted on anonymity, played a key role in creating the consortium. He said that he had been trying to negotiate an agreement with Compaq
for several years when he attended a speach by Sun's chairman, Scott McNealy,
in Silicon Valley in northern California last summer.

"Scott was ranting and raving that Microsoft was dead and that PC's were dead
and he was taking over the world," he said. "I realized that the guy was on the 
right track"

Compaq had been close to joining Sun's microprocessor camp last fall. But
representatives of companies already part of the MIPS camp were able to
convince Compaq executives that if they joined Sun, they would always be in 
role of followers. 

After years of imitating IBM, Compaq clearly preferred to be a leader, and in 
the MIPS consortium it is a big fish. Compaq was also convinced that it could enter the networked-computing business by adopting technology developed by
Silicon Graphics, which uses the MIPS chip. On Oct 13, Compaq invited three SGI
executives to Houston for talks that ultimately lead Compaq to buy 13 %
of SGI last week.

... more talk of the failures of OSF ...



| karron at nyu.edu (e-mail alias )         Dan Karron, Research Associate      |
| Phone: 212 263 5210 Fax: 212 263 7190  New York University Medical Center  |
| 560 First Avenue                       Digital Pager <1> (212) 397 9330    |
| New York, New York 10016               <2> 10896   <3> <your-number-here>  |