Compaq Computer Corp yesterday confirmed the speculation and announced that it would resign from the Advanced Computing Environment initiative that it rallied and cofounded just one year ago (CI No 1,900). The company also put on hold its plans for RISC-based commercial systems, effectively completing the dismantling of the strategy put in place for the company’s future by departed chief executive Rod Canion. Compaq says it had had engineering and marketing efforts to bring RISC-based commercial systems to market for the past two years and that they were initiated as a result of customer input that highlighted concerns over the lack of robust operating environments for the Intel Corp iAPX86 architecture and the overall priceperformance difference between RISC-based systems and anticipated next generation Intel processors. Compaq reckons that the basis for bringing a RISC-based product to market has changed significantly and that developments on the Intel and operating system front in the interim mean users are less willing to consider RISC-based alternatives; factors include anticipated higher performance RISC microprocessor systems being late to market, the joint venture between Novell Inc and Unix System Laboratories Inc, Sun Microsystems Inc’s intent to provide another version of Unix to Intel customers, and NeXT Computer Inc’s intent to offer NeXTStep on Intel kit Compaq is expected to announce support for NeXTStep at some stage and says it will introduce machines later this year capable of running Windows NT, Unix and other 32bit operating systems.
