Where The Action Is

By J. Madeleine Nash/San Francisco

Like a prima donna basking in applause, the personal computer has long held center stage in the electronics world. But now the limelight is shifting to a more glamorous cousin: the workstation. Small enough to fit on a desktop, the workstation may look like a personal computer, but it acts more like a powerful mainframe. Says Charles Boesenberg, executive vice president of MIPS Computer Systems, one of the many players in the fiercely competitive workstation market: "What we've done is put the power and capability of an ocean liner into a speedboat."

Workstations are easily the fastest-growing segment of the computer industry. Sales reached $4.1 billion last year, a 53% increase over 1987. "This is a new era in computing," enthuses Data General President Edson de Castro. "It is the opportunity of a corporate lifetime." Last week the hottest, newest workstations went on display at San Francisco's UniForum. Once an obscure trade show, it attracted more than 22,000 computer buffs this year, and they were not disappointed. Some 250 exhibitors, from Apollo to Zenith, put their wares on display. Motorola rolled out a new line of workstations with up to 60 times the power of a PC. Data General may have started a price war by introducing a workstation for $7,450, far less than the typical $20,000 $ cost. Meanwhile, industry giants IBM and Digital Equipment were trying to rev up interest in their latest models. All these competitors are trying to knock off Sun Microsystems, the clear leader in the workstation business. Launched only in 1982, the Mountain View, Calif., firm has become a billion-dollar company on the strength of the new machines.

Until recently, workstations were arcane tools employed mainly by engineers and scientists. But price reductions and technological changes have made the computers more practical for many other uses, such as financial trading and desktop publishing. Says Mark Tolliver, workstation marketing manager at Hewlett-Packard: "When people see all the whizzy stuff these machines can do, they want to try them out." Most workstations now use a standardized internal operating system known as Unix (which explains why the trade show is called UniForum). The increasing prevalence of Unix in the computer industry makes it easier for workstations made by different manufacturers to communicate with one another and with larger machines.

Moreover, the newest workstations contain microprocessor chips endowed with an advanced technology called RISC (reduced instruction-set computer). Because the instructions embedded in the circuitry of the streamlined chips are simpler and relatively few in number, they take less time to execute. The computers that have RISC chips are faster and more powerful than standard models. One result is that a workstation can produce graphics that are far more detailed than those generated by personal computers.

Major players in the RISC-chip business include Sun Microsystems, MIPS, IBM, Hewlett-Packard and Motorola. Last week Intel, the world's largest microprocessor manufacturer, put its seal of approval on the workstation revolution by introducing a million-transistor chip that incorporates RISC technology.

The only thing holding back the inexorable advance of workstations is their well-deserved reputation for being as hard to use as mainframes. To help solve the problem, Sun Microsystems last week introduced three new software packages -- called SunWrite, SunPaint and SunDraw -- that will make it much easier for workstation users to edit text and create dazzling graphic images on the screen. In addition, the company is working on a line of machines that would contain a superfast, superpowerful RISC chip called SPARC and yet be as simple to use as Apple's Macintosh personal computer. Naturally, computer insiders have dubbed the new project Sparcintosh.

Industry experts foresee a convergence of the workstation and personal- computer markets. "A workstation is really a second-generation PC," notes David Burdick, a senior analyst for the Dataquest research firm. But the power of the latest machines puts them in a different class altogether. No wonder, then, that Opus Systems, a small Silicon Valley company, has given a distinctive name to its new workstation: Personal Mainframe.