Digital Equipment Corporation [NYSE:DEC] demonstrated its "Network Appliance Reference Design," the plans for which are available to any manufacturer.

The idea behind opening up its NC design to others is simple, explained Digital's director of Internet appliances, Mark Foster, "This is the IBM PC of the NC world. We realize that Digital alone cannot make the NC big, so, like IBM when it introduced the PC, we want to open up the design to create a market."

According to the executive, the company has already signed ten companies that are building NCs based on the design and, although he wouldn't name names, has been visiting "large Japanese makers" while in Tokyo this week.

Digital's first NC has a Strong ARM microprocessor at its heart. The chip, running at 233 megahertz (MHz) makes it a very fast machine, said Foster. "It's a low price, high performance network computer." A 512 kilobyte (KB) flash memory holds the boot information, needed when the computer starts up.

The operation of the machine is supported by between four megabytes (MB) and 64MB of synchronous dynamic random access memory (SDRAM), a higher performance than that normally found in personal computers. Foster explained, "this is very fast workstation RAM, because of the fast processor."

Additional configuration of the device can be written onto a ROM card, a new PC Card format developed for the NC, said Digital. The ROM card can hold up to 64MB of memory and would typically be used in consumer versions of the device. The card could hold some applications or any details specific to a certain service or connection.

An Industry Standard Architecture (ISA) and Peripheral Component Interconnect (PCI) bus are also built into Digital's design, which allows users to connect extra equipment, such as 100Base-T network cards or integrated services digital network (ISDN) adapters. As standard, the business version comes with a 10Base-T network adapter and the consumer version has an analog modem.

A Zip drive has also been added to the design for consumer use versions. Home users will be using much slower networks than those of business users and so the ability to locally cache software, in the form of Java applets, and some Web pages and graphics will greatly improve performance. Until fast networks are available to the home, the Zip drive, or something similar, will be necessary.

Foster estimated the cost-price of the base Digital NC to be about US$200 with the fully featured version costing around US$400. With maker mark-ups, consumers can expect to see them on sale for around US$400 to US$800 each.

Source: Newsbytes