At Comdex in November of 1995, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison called an impromptu press conference to proclaim his vision for the Net Computer. He argued that PCs were too expensive and too complicated for consumers, declaring that in the future everyone would have inexpensive terminals connected to big servers—and software would come to the consumer over the Internet. His target was to create a network PC under $500. Not long after, Bill Gates and Intel, seeing a potential threat, created something called the Net PC. While they disagreed with Ellison's view that the PC was on a death march, a Wintel network computer was their way of influencing these designs, and assuring that their technologies would be in these connected devices—if they ever took off.
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