Comdex special
Crowds flock to Palm booth
Plus: Unisys eats, sleeps and crunches data
By Brenon Daly, CBS MarketWatch
Last Update: 5:57 PM ET Nov 15, 1999 NewsWatch
One of the largest changes the technology industry has seen is the incredible shrinking computer, as designers pack more processing power into smaller packages. Maybe that's why the crowd at Comdex made the 3Com Palm products booth one of the heaviest-trafficked area in Las Vegas on Monday. One reason: Palm, a subsidiary of 3Com (COMS: news, msgs) said Sony will license the Palm platform to create wireless consumer gadgets that play music and show videos. The number of handheld computers is expected to soar to 13 million by 2001, up from 3 million just two years ago, according to IDC.
Unisys rolled out a system that is capable of processing 30 times the entire holiday season's online purchase orders in just 5 days.
Chief executive Larry Weinbach said that the so-called "data center of the next millenium" can handle four thousand transactions per second, or more than 3 billion hits per day. The system is part of a package that also includes Microsoft (MSFT: news, msgs), EMC(EMC: news, msgs) and others.
Weinbach said the cost of a system from Unisys (UIS: news, msgs) will cost just one-third to one-fifth that of a Unix system. |
