A good question the company should be called upon to answer is whether with no operating system of its own, no database, no disk business, and a RISC chip few expect can survive many more years, the company has any future beyond becoming the Windows NT integration, support and service arm for Microsoft Corp: Digital Equipment Corp is holding an analysts’ briefing in New York tomorrow morning and key speakers will be the chief executive Robert Palmer and the chief financial officer Vincent Mularkey.

The Arab blacklist lives: a parliamentary committee recommended yesterday the annulment of the contract between Lebanon’s communications ministry and Cable & Wireless Plc, under which the UK company had a three-year consultancy contract, because Cables dared to buy a 10% stake in Israeli phone company Bezeq: The recommendation comes in accordance with Lebanese and Syrian opposition policies towards the Israeli enemy and all companies dealing with the Israelientity, a spokesman fulminated.

Sacramento, California-based Packard Bell Electronics Inc has now finalised its agreement to sell a 19.99% stake to NEC Corp for $170m: the two will co-operate on research and development, manufacturing and procurement and work to develop technical standards and products for the world multimedia market; Compagnie des Machines Bull SA also has a 19.99% share in Packard Bell.

Reuters Holdings Plc yesterday denied market speculation that it would merge with Reed Elsevier NV-Reed International Plc: There is no truth in these rumours, a Reuter company spokesman told Reuters.

Chilean phone company TelexChile SA is close to signing Sprint Corp as its strategic foreign partner, El Diario reports: the paper says the companies have been in talks for the last four months on a deal in which Sprint will buy new shares.

The Optus Vision pay television affiliate of Optus Communications Pty Ltd, where the latter and Continental Cablevision Inc each has 46.5%, has double the number of homes planned for connection by the end of next year, and is looking for the move to shoot it into a strong position in local telephony in competition with national phone company Telstra Corp; Optus Vision plans to connect 2.3m homes by the end of next year; Optus plans to start its services on September 20.

Fujitsu Ltd expects to have soared to a 30% share of Japan’s personal computer market in the current year to end-March 1996, compared with 10%, executive director Tadayasu Sugita told Reuters: the drive, good news for ICL Plc, which makes some of the machines sold in Japan, is intended to take Fujitsu to a 40% share of the market next year; the company now expects to sell 1.5m machines in Japan this year, up from an earlier forecast of 1.3m; Sugita attributed the explosive growth of its sales to attractive pricing and the popularity in Japan of the IBM-compatible DOS/V.

IBM Corp yesterday announced three additional Pentium-based ThinkPads, the 755CD, 755CDV and 755CV, which now have 75MHz Pentium processors and faster built-in 28.8Kbps modems; they come with 810Mb or 1.2Gb disks and cost $5,450 and $6,650.

The cosy situation where you got your local telephone service from GTE Corp or Pacific Telesys Group Inc’s Pacific Bell depending on where in California you lived looks set to end: both companies plan to apply for permission from the California Public Utilities Commission to enter each other’s territories.

Oracle Corp president Larry Ellison said about 100,000 copies of the company’s Power Objects software development tool has been sold since the thing launched in June.

Tele Danmark A/S says it is very unhappy with a decision by Denmark’s Telecommunications Board to force it to lower its mobile telephone charges, saying the move would hurt its cellular arm’s turnover: the board told the phone company to cut its ordinary basic charge by the equivalent of $0.05 to $0.43 and by $0.05 to $0.22 for cheap rate calls; the company estimated that it could lose 10% of its $197m mo

bile telephone turnover.

Shares in Sydney modem maker Netcomm Pty Ltd have soared over 17% to a 16-month high after the company announced a strategic alliance with ADC Telecommunications Inc last week: It is a very good deal for Netcomm because ADC is one of the world’s leaders in cable modems and it gives Netcomm access to future technologies and it puts them at the cutting edge, said Kirsten Thomson, technology analyst at Hambros; the alli ance will cover development of cable modems; ADC will take a 15.7% stake the Australian.

Hail to the Internet: the women of the world meeting in the muddy tent city outside Peking – and who’s crazy idea was it to give such a conference to such a benighted and repressive company as China? – are giving thanks daily for the Internet because it is their only source of news not only of what is going on in the outside world but even within their own conference, where according to Reuter, women, especially those from industrialised countries, described an information vacuum about the debates surrounding the Non Governmental Organisations forum and the parallel United Nations World Conference on Women that opened in Peking yesterday; the hottest controversy at the forum, police surveillance and harassment, of course does not rate a mention on the relentlessly good news Chinese news bulletins, and the Forum Daily has walked a careful editorial line since last Friday, when contract printer s at the China Daily refused to print it for a day because of a reference to China’s bete noire Taiwan that touchy officials found offensive; the dearth of communications facilities is all the more ludicrous when one remembers that China wanted to host the 2000 Olympic Games.

Santa Clara, California-based Catalyst Semiconductor Inc has licensed Intel Corp’s Flash memory designs.

Those assets are having to work a whole lot harder to justify their keep, and IBM Corp has thrown its employee country clubs in Poughkeepsie and in Endicott, New York open to hoi polloi, Associated Press reports: they will continue to charge lower fees to IBMers.

Plenty of exotic raw materials – everything from gold – pricey, used for contacts that will stay bright and good come hell and high water, to sand, which must come very nearly free and is the stuff of silicon, go into the electronic components and subsystems that keep the computer industry humming – and the Daily Mail finds that manufacturers that are significant users of gold in their connectors have reason to cheer, because the metal still does its stuff just as well, but it has been an absolutely lousy investment over the past decade, rising just 14% in price… So what basic mineral should you have invested in instead? The answer, believe it or not, is gravel, which, the paper revealed to a stunned populace over the Saturday breakfast tables, has risen over 50% in price over the decade; still, I wouldn’t expect central banks to put gravel into their reserves, says Andy Smith at UBS, while the World Gold Council said sniffily you can’t hang two tons of gravel round your neck – or load it into your computer and expect good electrical contacts…