Corel Corp. announce an agreement to acquire from Novell Inc. Perfect Office, Word Perfect, Quattro Pro, Group Wise, Envoy and others small programs for ~ 20 million dollars. The first integrated suite from Corel is Office 7 Professional.

Navigator 3.0 and Internet Explorer 3.0 browser programs.

Adobe announces Adobe PostScript Level 3, which includes Enhanced Image Technology, which ensures that documents print faster and easier and Advanced Page Processing which increases the performance of an imaging system.

Microsoft develops ActiveX set of technologies to enable interactive content on the WWW.

IBM launched OS/2 Warp 4 operating system.

In October ACIS 2.1 is released.

Windows applications represent 81% of the software sold, with 32-bit applications making up to 48% of that number. Macintoch applications. were 11% and DOS applications. were 5% of overall sale.

Microsoft dominates the Suite-Office market applications with over 70%. It's followed by Lotus.

Till the end of this year over 250,000 copies of AutoCAD LT has been sold.

An estimates 40 mil. copies of Netscape Navigator in use.

In January Intel ships the new Pentium 150 and 166 MHz processors and in June Pentium 200.

Intel and Quantum have announced a new ATA/IDE hard drive interface protocol Ultra DMA / 33 that will double the burst data rate to 33 Mb/sec. The first systems with new technology will hit the market in early 1997.

Toshiba has demonstrated the first working model of its Digital Video Disk (DVD-ROM) system. The new disk consists of two 0.6-mm plastic layers with the metallic layer sandwiched between them. Allow up to 4.7 Gb storage. MPEG-2 standard is necessary.

Cyrix has introduced its 32-bit 6x86-P133 (at 110 MHz), 6x86-P150 (at 120 MHz) and 6x86-P166 (at 133 MHz) processors.

NEC and Packard Bell merged together forming the world's largest PC company.

Gateway Japan is the first company to release a PC with a built-in CD-R drive for recording CDs.

Seagate Tech. introduced the Cheetah line of disk drives, Ultra SCSI and Fiber Channel, the fastest disk drive in the world with 2.99 milliseconds average time to access the next data called for (latency), and 10000 r.p.m. Came in 4.5 and 9.1 Gb sizes.

Intel installs the world's fastest supercomputer at Sandia, Texas, USA. It uses 9072 Intel Pentium Pro 200 and 608 Gb memory. It has a peak performance of 1.8 teraflops/sec.

There are 9,472,000 computers connected on the Net.

International Telecommunication Union (ITU) approved the introduction of an enhanced V.34 standard for modems. It includes transmission rate of 31.2 and 33.6 Kb/sec. over standard analog telephone lines.

DVD-Video specification 1.0 is released in October.

Optical Storage Technology Assoc. adapted a new file format, UDF (Universal Disk Format) designed like ISO 9660 to enable interchange of data stored on optical media independent of the operating system.

Pentium Pro 200 will perform 33% faster than the first Pentium Pro.

Intel 's first 64-bit PCI bus which runs at 66 MHz with a transfer rate of 266 Mb/sec.

SDRAM (Synchronous DRAM) memory is developed.

UMA (Universal Memory Architecture) is developed, but many companies don't support it.

Hewlett Packard sold 2 mil. scanners this year holding 45% of the world market. The total number of scanners in use worldwide by this year reaches 250 million.

There are 3054 Internet Service Provider (ISP) worldwide.

ISP's in Europe : 30 - UK, Switzerland, Germany, 28 - Italy, 27 - Sweden, Netherland, 19 - Norway, 17 - Austria, 15 - Finland, 9 - Denmark, 6 - France, Spain + Portugal, 4 - Ireland, Belgium, 2 - Luxembourg

22 mil. Pentium systems have been sold in USA and 1.1. mil. Pentium Pro systems. PC shipped this year grew by 13% in US and by 10% worldwide. Compaq lead the list with the biggest grew of 24%.

US market:
1. Compaq (14.4%),
2. IBM (9.1%),
3. Apple (7.3%).

Notebook market share (1996): Toshiba 20%, IBM 10%, NEC 9%, Compaq 8%, Texas Inst. 5%, Apple 5%, Fujitsu 4%, Dell 3%, Sharp 2%.

700 mil. CD titles have been sold this year. From the 14000 CD titles available, only 1000 (~7%) are profitable.

850,000 CD-R Drive units sale this year. CD-ROM drives market share:
1. Matsushita/ Panasonic 18%,
2. Mitsumi 15%,
3. Toshiba 14%,
4. Hitachi 10%,
5. Sony 9%.

40% of the US households have a computer.