Office products update.

• Author: Prata, Kathleen
• Position: Better prices for office equipment and supplies - Office Design & Products - Industry Overview

Better is getting cheaper, and cheap is getting even cheaper.

Although the paperless office has yet to materialize, there are a number of products on the market designed to save time, money and even paper, while continually increasing our productivity. Following are some of the highlights.

COMPUTERS

Larry Bradford, general manager of LMB Microcomputers in Indianapolis, says dwindling prices and increasing power continue to be the major trends.

"The original IBM PC with a monochrome monitor was priced at about $5,000," he says. Today, $3,500 will buy you a PC with CD-ROM drive, color monitor, video card, a gigabyte of hard-drive storage, 8 megabytes of RAM, a top-flight Intel Pentium processor and much more.

A major topic of excitement in the computer industry is the PowerPC, the result of a collaborative effort involving IBM, Apple Computer and chip maker Motorola. The PowerPC, which debuted in April, is a micro-processor chip that operates on so-called reduced instruction set principles. The RISC concept is a powerful improvement over CISC--complex instruction--chips. PowerPC chips are available on the new PowerMac line from Macintosh, and PowerPC-based IBMs are on the way. Also, many current Macintoshes can be upgraded with PowerPC chips.

Doug White, business integrator for LMB Microcomputers, says the PowerPC can run software five to six times faster than can the previous top-of-the-line processor chips, as long as it's so-called "native" software--upgraded versions of software that have been written specifically for the RISC chip. Many PowerPC software upgrades already have been released, and in the meantime, previous versions will work on the PowerPC platform but without the speed advantage.

In addition to speed, the PowerPC chip offers versatility. Not only can the Mac version run native software and older Macintosh programs, but it also can handle software written for the IBM world, in DOS or Windows formats. "The availability of multiple operating systems eliminates the need for two different types of machines, the Mac for creative or office work and the DOS machines for the data-collection work. They're evolving into one," White says.

IBM expects to release the PowerPC chip for PCs by the end of the year. This will allow users with the current top-of-the-line Pentium chips to upgrade. Mac programs, however, will not run on the PC version at first.

The other rage in the computer world is the laptop. It's predicted that by the end of 1995, sales of laptop computers will exceed desktop sales.

"Laptops are...