Digital's Market Move

Digital's Market Move

The New York Times

October 19, 1981

The Digital Equipment Corporation, the nation's leading manufacturer of minicomputers, is expected to announce today that it is entering the personal computer field.

The company will not offer a completely new machine, as International Business Machines, Xerox and other companies have recently done. Instead, Digital will offer attachments that will convert its VT-100 computer terminals into personal computers.

Digital reasons that such a strategy will allow it to capitalize on the 250,000 users of the VT-100 to establish a quick foothold in the personal computer market. But primarily the effort is intended to make the terminals more attractive to buyers, company officials indicate.

''Our primary thrust is to sell more terminals,'' said Arthur T. Campbell, terminals product group manager. He and other Digital executives would not rule out a more orthodox entry into the personal computer market later.

The strategy carries some risk. Mr. Campbell acknowledged that the largest use of the VT-100 terminals now is to enter data into a large computer. But data entry clerks have little need for a personal computer.

The attachments, consisting of a card containing an eight-bit microprocessor and two mini-floppy disks, will sell for $2,400 and be available in January. The terminal itself costs $1,500.

In contrast to personal computers, Digital's main products, minicomputers, cost as much as hundreds of thousands of dollars and can be as large as refrigerators.

The personal computers, involving 64,000 characters of internal memory, would use a common microcomputer operating system called C/PM. That will allow the Digital computer to run a lot of programs for such tasks as word-processing and accounting that have already been written for use on other machines. Xerox and, to a lesser extent, I.B.M., followed that strategy as well. The programs must be slightly modified for each different brand of computer, however, so at first only five programs will be available to run on the Digital machines.

The computer attachments will be sold through distributors, through direct telephone orders and through Digital's 25 retail stores.