IBM Corp turned up at the UniForum bash a couple of weeks ago with its three prospective PowerPC boxes – but the poor little things haven’t even been granted the dignity of code names. One is a 6 lbs 603-based laptop known simply as the Mobile. It includes a 500Mb drive, 16Mb of memory, two PCMCIA slot, stereo, thin-film display, a tiny camera on a swivel above the screen for video conferencing, a track point on the keyboard and a CD-ROM that IBM is thinking about making removable so users could choose between it and a floppy drive. It is shooting for three-hour battery life and is promising speech recognition. There is also a 601-based desktop with specifications in about the same neighbourhood. Then there is the highly modularised ergonomic three-piece Executive whose tiny tower unit is designed to grace a bookshelf and whose screen and keyboard are intended to be tucked away when not in use. IBM envisions progressing the futuristic design first to optical tethering and then a wireless link to hook the hard drive to the display. Desktop versions of AIX 4.1 for IBM’s PowerPC machines will be called PC Client, PC Week has learned. One of them will be for character-based terminals, the other, a Personal Productivity client, will incorporate Motif, X Window, and Common Desktop. Three-dimensional graphics, speech and video are optional. AIX 4.1 will also come in two packaged options for servers Location ApplicationServer for entry-level, departmental servers, and the Enterprise Server for high-volume applications.
