reduction in the cost of memory, coupled with increases in processing performance, will force the workstation into the personal computer market space by default for nearly all but a few high-performance applications. Buhoy of Sun Microsystems has predicted the "300M workstation" by 1992 and the "3G workstation" by 1995. Each of these workstations will provide 100 million and 1,000 million (giga-) instructions per second, respectively; carry out 100 million and 1,000 million(giga-) floating point operations per second; and have 100 megabytes and 1 gigabyte of primary memory.
Intel's 1989 announcement of the 80860 microprocessor and graphics processor chip as a "Cray on a desk" could have a great effect on technical computing, because it means a single chip can deliver both computational and graphics performance. In this way, the PC and the technical workstation could be merged by any development team capable of assembling a few chips together. This confluence of technology to make a technical workstation/PC using both the 486 and 860 chips would pit the UNIX world against the PC (DOS and OS/2) world. On the other hand, OS/2 is evolving toward a full-scale, general-purpose, multiuser operating system that will no doubt support both the UNIX and DOS programming environments. Thus, an evolutionary path for most PC users appears to exist.
In short, technology evolution beats revolution every time it can get there fast enough and do the job.