Power Station in a Pizza Box

By J. Madeleine Nash/San Francisco

As befits a precocious seven-year-old company, the workers at Sun Microsystems enjoy a good prank. On April Fools' Day last year they turned the office of their 34-year-old chairman, Scott McNealy, into a putting green with authentic sod. This year they wrapped their headquarters building in Mountain View, Calif., with a layer of plastic wrap.

But when Sun's workers turn to business -- producing workstations, which are high-powered computers in compact packages -- they are all business. Already Sun has eclipsed Apollo Computer, once the dominant force in the booming workstation marketplace. Now Sun is crowding Digital Equipment, a company 25 years its senior and more than six times its size. This year, as Sun approaches $2 billion in annual sales, even IBM can no longer ignore its rise. Says Robert Herwick, who follows the industry for the investment firm Hambrecht & Quist: "Clearly, Sun is the answer to a question."

The question: How much computing power can be packed onto a desktop? Last week the company gave a startling new answer by delivering its lowest-cost and most compact computer yet, the SPARCstation 1. The machine is priced at $9,000, about the same as a top-of-the-line Apple Macintosh, yet Sun claims the SPARCstation 1 has more than five times the power. The Sun machine's main operating unit is only the size of a pizza box; older units with equivalent power were too big to fit on a desktop. Two years in the making, SPARCstation 1 is able to execute more than 12 million instructions a second. The computer also comes with a built-in audio system that can record and play back sounds ranging from voice mail to rock 'n' roll.

Until recently the clientele for Sun workstations has consisted mainly of scientists and engineers. But gradually other users in search of higher performance have been attracted to the machines. The Houston Chronicle has 65 Sun computers in place for its printers and artists, and will soon add 35 more; Greenwich Capital, a Connecticut bond-trading firm, uses five dozen Sun machines.

One reason Sun's computers have been so popular is that they use an industrial-strength operating system called Unix. First developed by AT&T, . Unix enables computers to do several jobs at once and allows a network of machines to share information and computing power. While Unix systems are generally too complex for casual users to operate, Sun's newer models are designed to be friendlier to novices. The SPARCstation 1 begins to bridge the gap between workstations and personal computers.

Yet Sun will not have the workstation market all to itself. Last week a major competitor, Hewlett-Packard, said it had reached an agreement to buy workstation pioneer Apollo for $476 million. The merger will give Hewlett- Packard more than 30% of the workstation market, supplanting Sun (28%) as the top manufacturer. But the workstation market is expected to grow some 44% this year, to nearly $6 billion, leaving plenty of room for expansion. Says William Joy, Sun's vice president of research and development: "The action is on the desktop. That's where most of the people are."