With Apple chairman John Sculley booked as keynote speaker at the next Dexpo show, Dexpo East 88, and the promise that the show will include a room devoted to an event billed as the world’s first Apple-DEC Computing Center, observers are convinced that the Maynard minimaker and the Cupertino Macmaker are cooking up a formal relationship that will enable them together to offer Fortune 500 companies an integrated alternative to IBM’s Systems Applications Architecture. DEC’s singular failure to crack the personal computer market leaves the company critically short of an attractive low-cost computer to deliver the power of its VAXes to users’ desk-tops, while the Macintosh needs commitment from a major manufacturer to be acceptable to the generality of major corporate users. Asked outright by MIS Week whether a formal relationship was in the works, Apple acknowledged that the two companies had been talking, while DEC said simply that its micro integration strategy applied to all personal computers and that the Mac was a personal computer.
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