The furore over the Pentium bug is causing uncomfortable schizophrenia among manufacturers, who want to boast about how wonderful their new Pentium machines are yet feel constrained to acknowledge that they know there is something not quite right about them: it hit Compaq Computer Corp this week when it wanted to extol the virtues of its most powerful 90MHz Pentium desktop with its TriFlex/PCI architecture and virus detection software, but had to admit that while like a safecracker randomly spinning for the right combination of a bank vault, the chance of a user hitting on just the right numbers to divide is extremely remote, it could happen and Compaq is doing all it can to minimise inconvenience to customers; the machine starts at $4,000 with a 535Mb disk and 16Mb memory.
