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TIME: Almanac 1990
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1990 Time Magazine Compact Almanac, The (1991)(Time).iso
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time
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042489
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04248900.012
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1990-09-17
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BUSINESS, Page 51Power Station in a Pizza BoxFast-rising Sun Microsystems delivers a hot new computer
As befits a precocious seven-year-old company, the workers at
Sun Microsystems enjoy a good prank. On April Fools' Day last year
they turned the office of their 34-year-old chairman, Scott
McNealy, into a putting green with authentic sod. This year they
wrapped their headquarters building in Mountain View, Calif., with
a layer of plastic wrap.
But when Sun's workers turn to business -- producing
workstations, which are high-powered computers in compact packages
-- they are all business. Already Sun has eclipsed Apollo Computer,
once the dominant force in the booming workstation marketplace. Now
Sun is crowding Digital Equipment, a company 25 years its senior
and more than six times its size. This year, as Sun approaches $2
billion in annual sales, even IBM can no longer ignore its rise.
Says Robert Herwick, who follows the industry for the investment
firm Hambrecht & Quist: "Clearly, Sun is the answer to a question."
The question: How much computing power can be packed onto a
desktop? Last week the company gave a startling new answer by
delivering its lowest-cost and most compact computer yet, the
SPARCstation 1. The machine is priced at $9,000, about the same as
a top-of-the-line Apple Macintosh, yet Sun claims the SPARCstation
1 has more than five times the power. The Sun machine's main
operating unit is only the size of a pizza box; older units with
equivalent power were too big to fit on a desktop. Two years in the
making, SPARCstation 1 is able to execute more than 12 million
instructions a second. The computer also comes with a built-in
audio system that can record and play back sounds ranging from
voice mail to rock 'n' roll.
Until recently the clientele for Sun workstations has consisted
mainly of scientists and engineers. But gradually other users in
search of higher performance have been attracted to the machines.
The Houston Chronicle has 65 Sun computers in place for its
printers and artists, and will soon add 35 more; Greenwich Capital,
a Connecticut bond-trading firm, uses five dozen Sun machines.
One reason Sun's computers have been so popular is that they
use an industrial-strength operating system called Unix. First
developed by AT&T, Unix enables computers to do several jobs at
once and allows a network of machines to share information and
computing power. While Unix systems are generally too complex for
casual users to operate, Sun's newer models are designed to be
friendlier to novices. The SPARCstation 1 begins to bridge the gap
between workstations and personal computers.
Yet Sun will not have the workstation market all to itself.
Last week a major competitor, Hewlett-Packard, said it had reached
an agreement to buy workstation pioneer Apollo for $476 million.
The merger will give Hewlett-Packard more than 30% of the
workstation market, supplanting Sun (28%) as the top manufacturer.
But the workstation market is expected to grow some 44% this year,
to nearly $6 billion, leaving plenty of room for expansion. Says
William Joy, Sun's vice president of research and development: "The
action is on the desktop. That's where most of the people are."