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Time - Man of the Year
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Time_Man_of_the_Year_Compact_Publishing_3YX-Disc-1_Compact_Publishing_1993.iso
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1993-04-08
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THE WEEK, Page 23BUSINESSEt Cetera
IF YOU CAN'T BEAT 'EM . . .
The cost of developing new computer chips has propelled some
formerly fierce rivals into unlikely alliances. The latest: IBM,
Toshiba and Siemens will unite to create memory chips 16 times
as powerful as any existing today, while Advanced Micro Devices
and Fujitsu will work together on flash memory chips, which
could one day replace disk drives. Suddenly a major weapon in
the U.S.-Japanese trade war looks more like a plowshare than a
sword.
END OF AN ERA
Starting out in 1957 with $70,000, M.I.T. engineer Ken Olsen,
66, founded the Digital Equipment Corp., which grew into the
world's second largest computer maker, a $14 billion firm. Now,
under the gun for DEC's financial woes -- a huge loss is
anticipated for the quarter just ended -- he is stepping down.
Olsen foresaw the decline of giant mainframe computers in favor
of smaller minicomputers, but he failed to anticipate the
revolution in even smaller workstations and PCs.
FINE TUNING
With domestic inflation running at more than 4% annually,
Germany's Bundesbank sought to dampen it by raising the
benchmark discount rate for lending to banks a hefty .75%, to
8.75%, the highest level since 1931. But to spur world economic
recovery, the board at the same time left unchanged, at 9.75%,
the so-called Lombard rate, which governs charges for overnight
loans among banks in Germany and has a wider international
impact than the discount rate.