After months of people finding fault with his plan, it was a trip to Taiwan last year that convinced Larry Ellison that his network computer (NC) strategy was flawed.

At the Taipei headquarters of Acer Group, the chairman and CEO of Oracle Corp. saw the inner workings of a $6 billion company built on the strength of low-cost PC manufacturing. Acer officials drove home the point they and many others had expressed before: You can build it, but the industry will not come if it does not have Intel inside.

``It just hit me,'' Ellison said. ``It took me a while to see that we needed to go with the flow of the existing industry.''

With the announcement last week of the world's first NCs based on the just-released software from Oracle's Network Computer, Inc. (NCI) subsidiary, Oracle disclosed that it has garnered broad support from Intel Corp. Intel's support could prove to be a turning point in transforming the NC into reality.

Intel-based NCs had been discussed for at least a year, but Oracle's design was centered on another chip, the StrongARM RISC processor, designed by Digital Equipment Corp. and U.K.-based Acorn Computer Group plc.

``If you look at our story six months ago, it wasn't very appealing to the PC manufacturers because our reference designs and our software were built totally around the ARM architecture,'' NCI President Jerry Baker said. ``To walk into a PC manufacturer who was very Intel-oriented. . .and ask them to look in a totally different direction just proved to be totally impossible.''

``[And as for corporate users,] ``nobody had ever heard of the ARM chip, and jumping not only to a totally new paradigm of computing, but using all totally new technology underneath, was a little frightening to some,'' Baker said.

By embracing the Intel processors, the NC has a better chance of becoming part of the corporate mainstream. Ellison's speech de-scribed the idea of a ``network in a box'' - a complete system involving NC clients and NC servers, all of which can be quickly set up.

``I think there is the opportunity there for a Compaq or a Dell, or an AST or Akai to provide a complete package with not only high-volume, lower margin clients but also higher margin servers,'' Baker said. ``It's technology that they live and breathe every single day, so basically going from what they're doing today to building Intel-based NCs is a very, very small step.''

NEC Corp. announced last week it will target an NC server at small and mid-size businesses. Baker declined to name other PC vendors that might jump on the NC bandwagon, saying only that NCI is talking to most top-tier vendors.

Other vendors building Pentium-based clients that will hit the market in coming months include Funai Electric Co., network vendor Accton Technology Corp., cordless phone maker Uniden Corp. and Philips Business Electronics.

Accton's first NC models are powered by Pentium procesors with clockspeeds ranging from 133 MHz to 200 MHz. The machines will be marketed by Accton and NCI under their respective brand names.

The client features between 8M bytes and 256M bytes of Extended Data-Out RAM, 256K bytes of synchronous RAM Level 2 cache, 126K bytes of BIOS software, and S3 graphics accelerated with 1M byte of onboard video dynamic RAM and a 16-bit stereo sound subsystem with line-in, line-out and microphone support.

The Accton NC is designed specifically to connect users to the Internet using NCI's NC Desktop client software and will initially ship with the NC operating system.

It is available now, at a retail price of less than $900.

Source: Network World