ipment manufacturers (OEM), and by creating the 3090 main- frame, which had its own vector facility (VF). However, this was too little and too late. It would take one more IBM iteration, with offerings of really powerful reduced instruction set computer (RISC) workstations and departmental machines, before it would be able to compete in the new realm. In the early 1980s, IBM sensed that the growth in the mainframe community would not be sus- tainable. It had to react to the emergence of departmental computing both as a defense against the ero- sion of its traditional IT dominance and as a new source of potential growth. If it could replace some of these departmental computer systems, it would increase its own market share. The question was how to go about doing this. IBM chose a three-pronged approach that enabled and ratified the client- server computing model: The creation of the personal computer (PC). The development of IBM's own midrange systems for scientific and engineering users. A wholehearted embrace of UNIX. MOVING MAINFRAMES ONTO DESKS: PC AND WORKSTATIONS While all of this was happening, other companies such as Apollo and Sun Microsystems appeared introduced a new breed of machines: engineering workstations. These were powerful, beautifully packaged, sleek computers geared toward a single user. These workstations possessed a superb high- definition graphics display, a powerful computationally capable CPU with floating-point processing capabilities, lots of memory for heavy-duty computing, a big hard disk drive, and standard LAN inter- faces. Most of these machines initially had a proprietary operating system (for example, Apollo had its own Aegis system); however, UNIX soon became the standard offering, although it was originally available in a palette of quasi-incompatible platforms. For example, UNIX versions were released- from AT&T Bell Labs, Ultrix from DEC, UNIX BSD from the University of California at Berkeley, Xenix, and other less prominent industrial players. Less commercially successful ve