Whenever you start reading about a super-secret IBM project to develop a super-hot new product, don your heaviest mantle of scepticism and take cover – chancec are the thing will turn out to be a dog when it hits the market: classic examples include the Series/1 minicomputer, the 8100 distributed processor and the RT Unix workstation – but few have flopped so completely as the IBM 6152 Academic Workstation – back in 1984, the US lay press was sending shivers down the spines of IBM’s competitors with word of a project at Carnegie Mellon University to create a monster, the 3-M workstation – 1 MIPS, 1Mb memory and 1m pixels on screen (CI No 49); the thing was finally launched in February 1988 (CI No 860), almost nothing has been heard of it since, and last week came the final indignity – effective August 31, 1990, IBM will withdraw from marketing all models and associated features of the 6152 Academic Workstation; after that date, customers will no longer be able to obtain this product – sic transit gloria mundi.
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