IBM Corp’s Personal Computer Co realises that, with its market dominance gone, almost certainly for good, it can no longer afford to be tightlipped and lofty about its future plans, and it has been talking about a whole hatful of wizardry in the works for next year or soon after. Among the hotter properties, according to Computer Reseller News, is the Green Machine, so-called because it dissipates just 30 Watts compared with 200W for big PS/2s. More soberly called the Energy Desktop System, it uses IBM’s 486SLC2 chip and there are four PCMCIA slots that can take 105Mb hard disk drives developed by IBM. It uses an active matrix screen with XGA II graphics, and is expected to appear as a PS/2 after mid-1993. Audio is to become standard on the PS/2 motherboard with a programmable 16-bit signal processor for audio capture and playback; the company plans to use it for telephony, speech recognition and also to drive a facsimile modem and do image compression. The company has developed its own personal digital assistant, which looks like a cellular phone, weighs 1 lb and has an 8088-compatible CPU with MS-DOS 5.0 to handle diary, calculator, editor and address book while doubling as a mobile phone. It has a touch-sensitive screen. On local bus, the company plans to use Intel Corp’s Peripheral Component Interface on PS/2s, and the Video Electronics Standards Association’s VL-bus on ValuePoints. And the company is trying to reduce main memory requirements for OS/2 to 4Mb from the present 8Mb.
