Personal Computers

It was only a matter of time before the do-it-yourself home improvement market merged with the consumer software market. Check the shelves of a local computer software store or the pages of a discount mail-order software catalogue and you'll find programs that can set up any ambitious homeowner with projects for many months of Sundays. Happily, home fix-it or build-it programs for personal computers are generally easy to learn and user-friendly.

After years of hiding behind the high-tech mystique of their goods, personal computer merchants are rapidly learning that they are no different from any other retailers. And that, like so much else in the retailing world, means being vulnerable to the onslaught of the deep-discounting, warehouse-operating mass merchandisers: the computer-stocked versions of Price Club.

You want to take a look at the newspaper of the future? You'll need an America Online disk, a personal computer and a modem. Sign on, and three clicks of your mouse get you to Mercury Center, the cyberspace home of the San Jose Mercury News. On screen, you're facing a colorful array of icons representing different features: "Entertainment," "Sports," "Communication" and others.

Buoyed by the success of its new high-performance personal computers and cost-control programs, AST Research Inc. on Tuesday reported the highest quarterly profit and sales figures in the company's 10-year history. The Irvine personal computer maker earned $9.6 million on revenue of $137.2 million for its fiscal third quarter ended March 30, contrasted with a loss of $1.3 million on revenue of $113.8 million a year earlier.

Joao Batista de Souza doesn't know much about computers, but he knows he needs one. Since he started his video-rental business six months ago in the Sao Paulo suburb of Carapicuiba, his list of customers has grown to about 1,000. "There are a lot of customers and a lot of merchandise to keep track of, and it gets hard," said Souza, 32, as he waited to sign a purchase contract for an AT&T Station 500 personal computer.

Going unnoticed in the spring's annual deluge of Oscars, Grammys and Tonys were the Codies, a relative newcomer to the world of awards. The Codies (named for computer codes) are handed out by the Software Publishers Assn. for excellence in personal computer software. Traditionally, PCs have been associated with such home chores as word processing or Lotus spreadsheets, with a few games thrown in.

The list of inventions that have truly changed the world is short. But by almost any standard, the roster should include the little machine introduced 20 years ago this Sunday by the world's biggest computer company. The IBM personal computer, unveiled Aug. 12, 1981, was not the first PC on the market. Nor was it the cheapest, the most powerful or the most technically advanced.

Imagine what would happen if thousands of bright but bored Nintendo fanatics, Walkman freaks and TV channel flippers went to college and studied computer science. What would happen is the personal computer of the 1990s--a blend of 3-D television and quadraphonic stereo with the hand controls of a video game machine and more speed than car-sized mainframes of the 1980s.

Intel Corp.'s handling of the outcry over the flaw in its Pentium microprocessor is shaping up as a textbook case of how not to handle a crisis, management experts said Monday. As did Exxon Corp. after the Valdez oil spill and USAir after its recent string of plane crashes, Intel is turning a difficult but isolated problem into one that threatens long-term damage to the company's reputation. "Everybody will have a crisis sooner or later.