From being the ugliest of ugly ducklings, AT&T Co’s computer operation is beginning to show the feathers of a swan, with sales in 1989 growing 30% to $2,100m, shooting the business past such stalwarts as Tandem Computers Inc and Amdahl Corp. So well is the company’s Workgroup 6386 family of personal computers going that Intel Corp can’t keep up with demand, and AT&T is finally activating the plan – first mooted three years ago – to build some of its requirement at its Little Rock, Arkansas plant. And later this quarter, reports the Wall Street Journal, AT&T’s lacklustre 3B line of Unix machines will get a major boost with the lauch of the MIPS Computer Systems Inc R-series RISC-based transaction processor sourced under AT&T’s agreement with Pyramid Technology Corp. Sales to other AT&T companies are now 30% of the total, down from 50% in 1986, and, most inspiring of all for the often demoralised Data Systems managers at AT&T, the unit is on target to break even this year, and may show a small profit.
