Digital Equipment Corp wants to give struggling Silicon Graphics Inc a run for its money with a new low cost family of workstations aimed at the media creation market. The Creation Studio family is made up of Windows NT based personal workstations targeted at desktop publishers, graphic artists, animators and video editors. For $5,000, says DEC, you can buy a fully loaded media creation system with a 17 inch monitor, pre loaded with Microsoft Internet Explorer 4.0, CorelDraw, MetaCreations Fratal Painter and Dragon System Inc’s Naturally Speaking voice recognition software (CI No 3,285). The systems can be powered by either an Intel Corp 300MHz Pentium II chip or by DEC’s own 500MHz Alpha processor. DEC says rival systems such as the O2 workstation from Silicon Graphics and systems from Intergraph Corp, won’t be able to compete. Silicon Graphics recently admitted that sales of the O2 workstation had been light this year (CI No 3,265). DEC has also signed a series of agreements with software vendors who will engage in joint marketing and sales activities, including Quark Inc, MetaCreations Inc, NewTek Inc and Corel Corp. Creation Studio is available now from DEC value added resellers.
