The Future

By Philip Elmer-DeWitt/New York

Intel chairman Andy Grove, co-developer with Microsoft's BILL GATES of the industry standard "Wintel" PC, has seen the future of computing and it is...a Macintosh. Grove told TIME last week that he believes the extraordinary growth of the Internet is leading the industry into what he calls "the Valley of Death," a chaotic, destructive period of turmoil in which "the players will change, the technology will change and the devices will change." The PCs that sit on most people's desktops today are essentially general-purpose computers to which networking has been added as an afterthought. Future computers, Grove says, will be networking machines that also do computing. And what will the next generation of PCs look like? "The iMac embodies a lot of the things I'm talking about," says Grove. "Sometimes what Apple does has an electrifying effect on the rest of us." The iMac, it should be noted, is built around processors made by Motorola, not Intel. Grove is not uncritical of the translucent blue box; like other die-hard Mac fans, he misses the floppy-disk drive.

--By Philip Elmer-DeWitt/New York