Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!cs.utexas.edu!mailrus!ncar!tank!mimsy!mojo!SYSMGR@KING.ENG.UMD.EDU
From: sysmgr@KING.ENG.UMD.EDU (Doug Mohney)
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Re: What's a personal computer (Re: Yet Another Killer Micro?)
Message-ID: <00933399.8ACEFBE0@KING.ENG.UMD.EDU>
Date: 5 Mar 90 17:06:52 GMT
References: <9748@portia.Stanford.EDU>
Sender: news@eng.umd.edu (The News System)
Reply-To: sysmgr@KING.ENG.UMD.EDU (Doug Mohney)
Organization: The U. of MD, CP, CAD lab
Lines: 25

>In article <ZQ:1N+5xds13@ficc.uu.net> peter@ficc.uu.net (Peter da Silva) writes:
>|| Uhhh, it isn't a microcomputer unless I can buy three of them for under
>|| $10,000, and still have money to put gas in the car. 
>|
>|That's a good way of putting it. I like to say a personal computer should
>|cost no more than the down-payment on that car.
>
>We'll never see prices like those unless we encourage such cutthroat
>competition that the market reaches a point of critical mass
>at which a shake-out is almost certain.

Being an ECON major at heart, the market does its own thing, so long as
no one has a monopoly. IBM's move with it's RISC machine keeps DEC and
Sun and HP honest. 

>In other words, I can hardly wait for the day when we'll be
>flooded with all sorts of cheap RISC work-station clones.
>(Remember the PC clone wars?)  Then, you'll probably see
>a Parcstation I (clone of the Sparcstation I) go for about 
>...oh...  $1000.

The Japanese and Taiwanese and the Koreans (South, of course) all have
plans to go do SPARC implementations; look for Toshiba to give us portable
SPARC, Taiwan and Korea to give us $5K SPARC boxes which will compete with
Sun and DECs low-end machines.