IBM and DEC shares have been bombed out pretty much since Meltdown Monday in October 1987, but at around $92, DEC has been hurt the worse by the deteriorating market outlook for its business: now, however, the Wall Street Journal’s influential Heard on the Street column detects signs of renewed investor interest that could cause DEC stock to recover some of the ground it has lost; most immediate interest is focussed on the July 11 announcements of a VAX 6400 processor to perform at about 7 MIPS, 80% faster than the current – and almost new – 6300, plus a low end MIPS Computer Systems Inc RISC-based workstation that will compete head to head with Sun Microsystems’s Sparcstation 1, coming in at about $7,000, some $4,000 less than the MIPS-based DECstation that came out in January; and once those have been digested by the market, the main course is the launch of the top end Aridus processor, which some look for as soon as September, and which is expected to be a 30 MIPS uniprocessor selling $900,000 or $30,000 per MIPS, which are of course VAX MIPS, rather lower than IBM MIPS, but not so much lower that the price won’t substantially undercut IBM’s 3090s, which go for around $90,000 per IBM MIPS; the one fly in the ointment is the possibility of the European market going soft, and if there are signs of that in DEC’s fourth quarter figures, the shares will slump.
