Into The Wild Blue Yonder

By Philip Elmer-DeWitt

It was an impressive debut, even by the standards of Big Blue. Some 2,000 computer dealers from across the country gathered in Miami Beach last week for a Beach Boys concert, the premiere of new print and TV commercials reuniting members of the M*A*S*H cast and, most important, an elaborate presentation beamed live to 20,000 customers, analysts, employees and reporters nationwide. Before the spectacle ended, the world's biggest computer company had set a new standard against which personal computers will be measured for years to come.

Ever since IBM began losing sales to low-cost domestic and Asian knockoffs of its original IBM PC, the companies that made the clones -- and millions of PC users -- have been awaiting Big Blue's response. At the gala unveiling, IBM introduced more than 100 interconnectable hardware and software products, including four models that IBM Group Executive Edward Lucente called the "next generation in personal computing."

The big surprise, however, was not what IBM did, but what it did not do. The firm had been expected to strike back at its competitors either by dropping prices so low as to drive them out of business or by raising such formidable technical barriers against copycats as to make the new machines impossible to imitate. They did neither. "These are not clone killers," said John Roach, chairman of Tandy Corp., which has sold about a quarter of a million PC knockoffs. "We're thrilled that IBM has left our turf alone."

The computers, part of a family known as Personal System/2, range in price from $2,065 for the desktop Model 30 to $13,300 for the fully equipped Model 80. All are packed with advanced, IBM-designed technology, from the custom- made chips that replace plug-in cards to an optional laser disk that can hold 800,000 pages of text. But the basic components -- the microprocessors, floppy disks and operating system -- are made of readily available, off-the- shelf parts, which should make it relatively easy for other firms to legally reproduce the new machines.

A PC user who sits down at a PS/2 will be struck by the improved keyboard, the smaller system box and the disk drives (3 1/2-in. microfloppies rather than the original 5 1/4-in. disks). Although the new models can handle most of the old PC programs, software written for the PS/2s will not run on the PCs, which could doom the older machines to obsolescence.

The software for the new computers will be built around Microsoft's Windows, a mouse-driven control system similar to the easy-to-use operating system that has brought such success to the Apple Macintosh. Though the basic PS/2 is already being shipped and the higher-priced models will go on sale later this year, the new software will not be available before next year, a delay that gives breathing space to Apple, IBM's biggest competitor. Apple's computers already offer many of the features, including an advanced graphics capability, that will not be available on the PS/2 until 1988. In the hours following IBM's announcement, Apple's stock rose 5 points. Nonetheless, IBM proved last week that it can still set the agenda for the rest of the computer world.

With reporting by Thomas McCarroll/New York