Many Firms See Profit in New PC Design Standard
While one industry pundit called announcement of a new computer design standard “one of the major events” in the history of personal computers, some Orange County computer company executives said Wednesday they anticipate no dramatic effect on business.
On Tuesday, a group of more than 60 rivals of IBM Corp. unveiled a plan for a new computer “bus” to control how different parts of a computer communicate with each other. The new design is an alternative to a competing bus configuration used inside IBM’s Personal System/2 machines.
Despite the hoopla surrounding the announcment, local executives said they do not think the new standard will require drastic changes in their business plans. Most said they believed that any impact will be mostly favorable.
“It can only serve to increase our business,” said Ted James, marketing manager for CMS Enhancements, a Tustin manufacturer of data storage equipment for IBM personal computers and clone machines. James said his company plans to begin work on developing products to support the new Extended Industry Standard Architecture, or EISA.
“It will be a positive move for our side,” agreed Saleem Jawad, president of Dolphin Systems Technology, a Santa Ana maker of storage devices for IBM computers. “Anything we do to standardize the technology helps cut costs” of developing new products. “When we have to keep coming up with different hardware to support different configurations, it gets very expensive.”
Proponents of EISA say a major advantage of the new computer bus is its compatibility with the bus used in the popular IBM AT-class computers. For computer customers, that means that add-on circuit boards used to boost the performance of AT-type computers will also work with EISA machines, thus preserving their sizable investments. The first EISA machines, however, won’t be available until late 1989.
IBM introduced a new bus, called Micro Channel, when it launched its PS/2 line last year. IBM’s Micro Channel has been criticized by many computer buyers because of its incompatibility with the company’s old AT models.
An official at Western Digital, a leading worldwide supplier of microchips and storage devices for IBM-compatible computers, said the Irvine firm views the new standard as a positive development.
“Western Digital doesn’t care whether it’s EISA or Micro Channel,” said Collier Buffington, vice president of Faraday Electronics, a Western Digital subsidiary based in Sunnyvale. “We will supply products to either camp.”
Western Digital has more than a casual interest in the EISA versus Micro Channel situation.
The Irvine firm invested “tens of millions” of dollars to develop microchips and other enhancement products for PS/2-type computers. The Faraday unit was one of the first companies to begin marketing chips that duplicated the key element of IBM’s Micro Channel design. The chips have been marketed to companies seeking to clone the IBM machines.
But Compaq Computer, AST Research of Irvine and seven other personal computer makers said Tuesday that their next generation of computers will use the EISA design, not Micro Channel. That would seem to reduce the potential customers for Western Digital’s PS/2 products.
However, Buffington contended Wednesday that the broad industry support for EISA does not mean that the IBM standard is dead in the water, nor that Western Digital’s investment was wasted.
“Micro Channel does and will continue to have a strong following in the industry,” Buffington said. And he added that because the two bus designs are so “strikingly similar,” Western Digital expects to parlay its investment in Micro Channel designs into creating products for the EISA machines.
