IBM's new computers will challenge clones

With the announcement of an entirely new family of computers, itappears IBM has made a start toward pulling its chestnuts out of thefire.

It is no secret IBM's personal computer arm was in deepdifficulty, the result of a long series of abyssmal decisions thatbegan with underestimating the personal computer market and reachednew depths with the concept of the PC Jr. as a toy.

IBM ultimately was beset on the one hand by a horde of clones,most of them imported, nearly all of them cheaper and some of themmore technically advanced, and on the other by Apple's burgeoningMacintosh line.

It was widely suspected that IBM's big announcement this monthwould be a new line of computers with gimmicks that wouldsimultaneously render them uncloneable and incompatible with MS-DOSand the vast body of software that runs on that system.

The thinking was that in a suicidally arrogant move, IBM wouldforsake its faithful and try to establish an entirely new standard.

So the experts were widely confounded when IBM made no such moveat all. It announced a bewildering array of new machines, but all ofthem will run under the MS-DOS, or PC-DOS, standard.

It seems to me the philosophy underlying the lower-priced end ofthese products is to enter into direct battle with the clones bygiving customers more for their money.

What advanced technology there is has gone into the higher end,and that end is rather too high, at $10,000 or so, for the likes ofme. The major interest for home and small business users will be inthe new Model 30 and Model 50.

The Model 30 runs on the old 8086 processor chip, the same asthe PC and XT use now. The attraction is that IBM has made standardin the new machines a good many things that are high-priced add-onswith the old ones.

For instance, the Model 30 machines will come with 640K ofrandom access memory installed and color graphics already in place.A clock, parallel and serial ports and a mouse port are standard.The Model 30 in a two-floppy configuration lists for $1,700; onefloppy and a 20-megabyte hard drive runs $2,300.

The Model 30 will still cost more than a lot of comparablyequipped clones, but not a real bundle more. The problem is thatmany of those clones are running 80286 processors and will be a wholelot faster. Still, I imagine many customers will sacrifice the speedand a few bucks to go with Big Blue.

The product literature says the new DOS - which won't beavailable until around this time next year - is a three-in-onesystem. It will work with programs written for MS-DOS. It alsoestablishes something called Family Environment, which evidently is ahybrid of standard DOS and the third system, which is the full-blownOperating System-2.

I was a little staggered by the idea of charging more than $300for an operating system until I saw what this thing can do. It has afully relational onboard database and communications facility, aswell as the multi-tasking capability - which simply means you canhave a number of programs running concurrently - and the ability toaddress up to 16 megabytes of RAM.

To make use of that system, however, you've got to go at leastto the Model 50, an 80286-based machine that comes with all theon-board goodies of the Model 30 plus a 20-megabyte hard drive, amegabyte of RAM and the ability to accept up to six more megabytes.