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BBN 21:50 Acer to Sell $500 Internet computer with Iomega's Storage Drive
Acer to Sell $500 Internet Computer With Iomega's storage Drive
Taipei May 22 (Bloomberg) -- Acer Inc. will introduce next
month an In@ernet-ready Personal computer with a disk drive for
less than $500, the first computer at that price with storage
capacity, a company spokeswoman said.
The inclusion of a storage drive is a major difference from
so-called network computers planned by International Business
Machines Corp., Apple Computer Inc. and others, which plan to
market their computer as inexpensive hook-ups to larger networks
such as the Internet, World Wide Web.
The Acer Basic will include Intel Corp.'s Pentium processor,
four megabytes of random access memory and lomega Corp's 100
megabyte zip drive, said Jane Chen, an Acer spokeswoman. The
computer will be usable with a television or a computer monitor. It will work on the DOS operating system and will come with Microsoft Corp.Is Windows 3.1, the penultimate generation of windows software. "Unlike a pure network computer, the Acer Basic is a fully functional PC," Acer said in a statement. "When not connected to larger computer servers, these pure network Computers are essentially useless."
Acer plans to launch the computer, advertised as a fully
functional personal computer, this June.
The inclusion of the disk drive is a boon to Roy, Utah-based
lomega, already one of the fastest-growing makers of computer
peripherals.
"This is monstrous news," for Tomega, said Joe Besecker,
an analyst at Emerald Research in Lancaster, Pennsylvania.
"They're positioning themselves to be the catcher's mitt of the
Internet."
Demand for Iomega's disk drives is growing at a torrid pace
asi companies beef up their storage capacity to distribute more
information to clients linked by networks. Iomega earned $10.1
million in the first quarter on revenue of $222 million, compared
with a loss of $1.5 million on sales of $40 million a year
earlier.
Individual computer users are also a hot market for lomega,
as consumers buy drives to store information and graphics culled
from the world Wide Web.
Taiwan-based Acer is the world's Seventh-largest PC maker<<
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