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Technology Stocks : Dell Technologies Inc. -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Meathead who wrote (45114)	5/27/1998 11:54:00 PM
From: freeus	Respond to of 176387

***off topic*** I think these are delightful. So here are some Imagine if, instead of incomprehensible geeky text strings, yhour computer produced error messages in Haiku... A file that big? It might be very useful. But now it is gone! The Web site you seek cannot be located. But endless others exist. Chaos reigns within. Reflect, repent and reboot Order shall return. Aborted effort. Close all that you have. You ask far too much. A pleasant evening to all. More some other time. Go Dell! Freeus

To: Meathead who wrote (45114)	5/28/1998 12:04:00 AM
From: Bilow	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 176387

Hi Meathead; About those workstations, and ASPs. I am in complete agreement regarding Wintel getting the workstation market. I've been expecting this for 10 years, my only surprise is that it has taken so long. Every time I have to work on a Unix box it takes me a couple days to relearn all the stupid commands. The operating systems are now point and click, but you always end up having to write little chunks of "batch" code to generate test vectors, or whatever. I got sent down to SI valley 18 months ago to get a chip development office running. We needed work stations to do some number crunching. After some experimentation, it turned out that our problem was dependent only on CPU clock speed and memory bandwidth. The hard drive wasn't being used much, and adding memory didn't speed anything up. So I went over to Frye's and bought the parts for a couple bare-bones 200MHz systems. The problem at hand was routing of FPGAs using Xilinx software. My ex's home computer finally got replaced last week. A $500 system (kept old monitor and printer) was all it took. My view on corporate is that they are now beginning to reduce costs on the kind of computer they supply to the employees. I'll ask my buddy in IS about that.... Back in 1986 I had a job designing for a mini-super computer CPU. (I did the floating point arithmetic on a CRAY clone at SCS.) As engineers, we could see technology reducing the cost of making mini-supers as integration allowed putting a larger and larger system onto a chip. The problem we saw was that the ASP on mini-super computers was starting to go down. We knew that the market for them was not increasing sales enough to counteract the reduced ASPs. So I bailed out of the industry while it was still easy. Sure enough the reduction in ASPs heralded the destruction of the industry. By the way, the workstation we used was a Unix box, based on the Fairchild "Clipper" processor, since defunct. The company that made the box was Intergraph. Workstation makers back then carried high P/Es cause they could sell at very high margins. You think DELL has high margins, they are nothing compared to what proprietary hardware commands. But Wintel workstations are going to be sold as a commodity at low markup. No one has a permanent advantage, so the companies deserve low P/Es, especially when E's are at historically high levels. -- Carl