Workstations as PC's?

[Michael Summers]

I would like to find out if the community thinks that RISC workstations
will eventually replace the high end PC's. 

For example SUN's new 4/50 will start selling for about $5,000, diskless.
It will probably eventually sell for about $3,500 with a modest disk. This
would be a 8 meg UNIX/X machine with eithernet, mouse, 16" High Resolution
Monitor, and say a 400 meg disk.

Given the example will people be buying such machines for PC's? Is this
why Ashton-Tate, and Lotus are developing SPARC products?

What would the limitations be to the wide-spread acceptance of RISC
machines (SUN was just an example) as PC's? Will the available SW base
have to grow first? Will PC and MAC like SW have to be abundantly
available? Will X applications be a big market?

Does anyone have any data on the number of installed RISC workstations?
Does anyone have any data on the projected number of such workstations?

Any references to such data?

Please mail and data to:

summers at cs.buffalo.edu   Thanks.