Workstation wars get personal

Once the bastion of costly Unix workstations, high-performance desktop computing is starting to move to less expensive Windows NT machines. About 90 percent of the market in personal workstations consists of Pentium-based machines and, of those, 80 percent are Windows NT machines while the remainder are Unix boxes. Personal workstations are the fastest-growing segment of the workstation market. For every two that shipped in 1994, three shipped in 1995, conversely, shipments of traditional RISC-Unix based units increased only 4 percent. Further, International Data Corporation (IDC) predicts that 1996's shipments of personal workstations will rise to 930000 units and make these units the majority of workstations being deployed. By the end of 1997 IDC acknowledges that desktop units could make significant inroads into the core markets for traditional workstations.