It’s lovely to hear the messianic zeal brought by IBMers involved in a pet project at the company, especially when it is an in-house product like VM, about which the company can never quite suppress its ambivalence, or one like Unix, which a full three-quarters of the company is determined to bury. Despite that widespread IBManevolence, The Unix workstation platform is driving many of our decisions at IBM revealed an IBM vice-president of Advanced Engineering Systems at the recent Computers in Engineering Conference held in New York. Andrew Heller also said that workstations are the most explosive part of the computer industry and pointed out that IBM’s Scientific Division has been moved to the Entry Systems Division in order to accelerate the porting of IBM’s Unix operating system, AIX, to the PS/2 Model 80. The PS/2 is an important part of our product line, said Heller, but visibly slower than the desktop systems that will appear later in this decade. (IBM chose not to display PS/2s at the exhibition but to emphasise its 3090 supercomputer vector processing family, notes Microbytes Daily.) Heller declared that there are three truly exciting developments in computer architecture: RISC, vector processing, and multiprocessing. Engineers will all have the equivalent of a Cray-1 on their desks within this decade, Heller told the American Society of Mechanical Engineers. He projected that between 1985 and 1990, the price per megaFLOPS will drop by a factor of 100; clock speeds will approach 75MHz on CMOS processors, 500MHz on ECL processors, and 3GHz on GaAs processors; distributed systems with centralised data access will no longer be a feature but a requirement in workstation systems, and they’ll be used to design software so that data-intensive parts of a program can be executed separately from screen-intensive parts, allowing applications to transcend machine boundaries. Engineers won’t need balsa wood or clay anymore. You’ll be able to visualise, design, and develop a model directly on the computer.