DEC Computers Meet New Standard

Digital Equipment Corp. introduced two desktop computer workstations Tuesday that it said were compatible with standards being developed by the 21-company Advanced Computing Environment (ACE) consortium.

With prices starting at $6,500, the new machines are aimed directly at the most popular low-end workstation offered by market leader Sun Microsystems. The machines feature a novel upgrade capability that allows the central processing unit to be replaced.

The products fill out Digital Equipment’s family of workstations that use a computer-on-a-chip from Mips Computer Systems. The ACE standards, not yet fully defined, will include the Mips chip and a software operating system that closely resembles one of Digital Equipment’s.