IBM Corp is expected to aim its NC offerings squarely at the corporate market, but the Oracle-designed NC is to be aimed at consumers as well as businesses from the off. Acorn Computer Group Plc is expected to be first out the gate with an Oracle NC in September. Ellison predicted some devices eventually being given away by telecom companies and revealed that an unnamed telco or telcos had placed orders for two million NCs, but wouldn’t reveal the manufacturers that had won the orders. France Telecom SA’s, North America division – one of the endorsers, along with British Telecommunications Plc and Cable & Wireless Plc (Deutsche Telekom was not mentioned) – said it will definitely be among the first to experiment with the new Internet terminals as they become available, but was unavailable further to confirm whether or not it had placed any orders. Other Oracle NC manufacturing partners include Funai Ltd Electric, Nokia Oy, Ing C Olivetti & Co SpA, SunRiver Data Systems Inc – the only US company – Wyse Technology and Tatung Co (CI No 2,915). IBM had some examples of its NC implementations to show off, and contrary to earlier reports that the company would not be making the things, IBM has in fact built a PowerPC 403-based AS/400 thin client. It will announce six such devices by the year-end, said John Thompson, head of IBM’s Software division, but speaking here for the entire company. The thin clients will have no local storage and will run on a 403 embedded PowerPC processor with 4Mb to 32Mb RAM, Token Ring or Ethernet connections, running a thin AS/400-like operating system with printer, serial and audio ports, a PC Card slot, mouse and keyboard. It will reportedly be sold by all the IBM divisions and OS/400 will include software to attach the thin clients to IBM and non-IBM servers. It appears to be an AS/400 device only inasmuch as that division designed, developed and built it. It will be able to access any Java- enabled server. Thompson said IBM has six pilot programs underway, for airline, banking, automotive and other vertical industries. Some of the devices being used are priced at around $500, some $1,000 or more, he said. But he downplayed the cost of the hardware, emphasizing once more the total cost of maintaining an NC versus a PC. Thompson admitted that the company was a little bit further behind with consumer products.
Subsets of MacOS
Significantly, Sun sent along SunSoft Inc president Janpieter Scheerder, and made no mention of its Java terminal, concentrating on the Java language and pointing out that all Sun Sparc-based machines running Solaris already comply to the profile, claimed Scheerder. For Apple, CEO Gil Amelio said Pippin [Apple’s PowerPC-based entertainment console platform] supports the spirit of what we’re talking about and the company is looking to license that to third parties and to make further simpler subsets of MacOS.S And Netscape co-founder Marc Andreeson optimistically said the profile would generate hundreds of millions, if not billions of Netscape Navigator licenses in the future. Referring to the future of network computing and reliability and bandwidth of the networks themselves, Ellison’s reasoning was that we’ve migrated from having our own cows for milk and our own wells for water supply, so why not migrate from our own bloated desktop PCs to NCs with the software on the server? The cost of these things will be so low, he believes that we can give every child [in the US] a low-cost NC, because so often where computers are needed most is where computers are found least, he concluded.
