The Mini and Micro Industries

Market pressures have forced marginal computer firms out of business. Looking to compatibles, wary customers are helping create de facto standards. W ith today's multitiered, over-W lapping set of programmable computer classes, where and how computing can be done and how much it will cost can vary considerably. Computing costs can be anywhere from $100 to $10 million (Figure 1). In addition, computing devices can include electronic typewriters with built-in communication capability, further increasing the choices to be made and the complexity of the information processing market. What is happening to mini and mainframe companies as the micro continues to pervade the industry? One thing is that several traditional mainframe suppliers, Burroughs, Univac, NCR, CDC, and Honeywell (or BUNCH, for brevity's sake), are experiencing a declining market share as mainframe customers select IBM-compatible hardware as a standard and turn to other forms of computing. Fujitsu, Hitachi, Mitsubishi, and NEC supply commodity main-frames, which are distributed through Amdahl, National, Univac, and Honeywell. The microprocessor-based systems are the newest alternative for distributed computation. New companies are forming to develop these products ; Burroughs and NCR have distribution agreements with new microprocessor suppliers such as Convergent Technology. As microprocessor technology continues to be substituted for that of traditional minicomputers, these suppliers find themselves in a situation similar to BUNCH's dilemma. For example, SEL and Prime, minicomputer manufacturers, have marketing/ distribution agreements with Con-vergent Technology, but mini companies must compete with systems built from high-performance, commodity,oriented, 32-bit MOS-based microprocessors-processors that provide the same performance as the traditional TTL-based processors at a small fraction of the cost. In short, the forecast could be gloomy for mini companies. Just as the mainframe companies were unable to respond to the mini, the mini companies will have difficulty moving to meet the micro challenge Table 1. Minicomputer technology cir-ca 1970.