Intel says that there's no further progress to be made using its Pentium architecture, so it's assembling a Microcomputer Labs team of scientists and engineers to do long-term, original hardware/software design research in collaboration with Stanford, MIT, UCB, UNC, and other universities. [WSJ, 8/26/96, B4. EDUPAGE.] (Analyst Mark R. Anderson notes that Dr. Richard Wirt's initial $2M research budget is small, but it's backed up by Intel's $2B commercial R&D budget. Increased parallelism will certainly be one topic of research. [, SNS, 8/27/96.])

NCR has developed an architecture with up to 128 servers of 32 Pentium Pro chips each, for $140M. [IBD, 8/20/96, A8. EDUPAGE.]

Sun, Cadence, and 33 other companies have joined in a Virtual Socket Interface Alliance to develop modular "building blocks" for advanced chip design. [Janet Rae-Dupree, SJM, 9/4/96, 1C.]

HP's new Vectra XW workstations will use Windows/Intel ("Wintel") parallel processor technology rather than Unix and traditional HP technology. A two-chip processor for $8K-$10K is said to run 2.5 times as fast as comparable SGI workstations. HP also has a line of low-cost Wintel servers, introduced in May. [WSJ, 8/26/96, B6. EDUPAGE. Also SNS, 8/27/96.]

HP has introduced a $199 DeskJet 400 color printer, replacing the 600 and 600C. [SJM, 8/13/96, 1E.]

Entertainment software sales grew by 6% last year, but educational software was up 56%. The latter also has a much longer product life cycle. Indeed, much of last year's revenue was from products such as the 12-year-old Math Blaster. [SPA. IBD, 8/27/96, A8. EDUPAGE.]

Chase Manhattan Bank and Softbank Corp. of Japan will each be investing $25M in Flatiron Partners, a venture fund for the "Silicon Alley" new-media start-ups around Manhattan's Soho and Flatiron districts. [NYT, 8/23/96, C1. EDUPAGE.]

Sony is delaying introduction of its DVD video disc players until more content is available. Entertainment and software companies are arguing about copyright protection schemes. One analyst says it will take 5 years for DVD to become a major product. [IBD, 8/29/96, A5. EDUPAGE.] (Players will have lockouts by geographic region so that movies released in one part of the world can't be played elsewhere.)

"Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins of the Internet," a new book by Katie Hafner and Matthew Lyon, "rescues from oblivion the collection of geeks and nerds, bureaucrats and geniuses, who changed everyday life for millions of people all across the planet." [NYT, 8/21/96, B2. EDUPAGE.] ("Their account offers an intimate view into how nontechnical factors -- the pressure to justify funding, personality quirks, chance meetings -- affected the way the global network works today." [Newsweek, 9/9/96, p. 74.])