A few months ago, I wrote a whimsical column about an upcoming consumer electronic device that would take 3-D rendering to such a level that it might be possible to generate from scratch my own poorly-written Star Trek episodes. You know: Bones becomes a mime; Spock gets a yeast infection — classic episodes that never were. That device I alluded to was the Sony Playstation 2, only I couldn't say so at the time. Revealing the name might have cost somebody a job or maybe a career. Like most of my pseudoscoops, this was just a matter of walking into the wrong room in Japan and saying, "What the heck is THAT?"

Well, the Playstation 2 has now been formally announced, though it's still mainly a paper introduction, since I'm the only person I know outside of Japan who has actually seen one. But since Sony has at least told the world what to expect, I feel this is a good time to ponder the impact of this introduction on the rest of us.

I am not a game player, contrary to what my many ex-wives may be saying. I can fly a real airplane, but I always crash in Flight Simulator. I never make it past the first level of any game unless I fall by accident into some glory hole, and that happened only once. But I know 3-D rendering and can appreciate what it takes to do it well. The short version of this is that the closest thing to a Playstation 2 is a high-end SGI box, and the Playstation is not only easier to use than the SGI, it's probably faster.

The impact of this thing is going to be huge. Of course, it will dominate the game industry. Sony's announcement was, I'm sure, timed to preempt Sega's Dreamcast debut. Dreamcast is a very nice system, but Playstation 2 blows it away. By announcing Playstation 2 at this exact moment, thereby distracting all those 12-year-old boys and their parents' wallets, Sega is pretty much destroyed. They'll have their arcade business and karaoke, which is a monster Sega success in Japan, but the days of Sega as a top console game company are over, killed by Sony.

It doesn't look that much brighter for Nintendo, either, but those guys have only themselves to blame, with maybe an occasional brickbat thrown at SGI as well. SGI designed the current Nintendo 64 system. This was when Jim Clark was still running SGI (pre-Netscape), and he saw that NT's licensing of SGI's OpenGL 3-D graphics libraries was going to kill SGI's cushy 3-D rendering business. The route to daylight, Clark said, was through the home, so SGI designed the Nintendo 64 as an entr�e to the console game business.

But somewhere along there the conviction wavered. Clark left to found Netscape and his successors at SGI wanted to return to the safe ways of big workstations, forgetting for a time the very real Microsoft threat. After finishing the N-64, SGI dropped Nintendo with a thud. Folks in Japan who thought they had access to world-class SGI design talent for a follow-on machine suddenly found that they didn't. Nintendo panicked, fumbled around, then made a few false starts toward a true 64-bit or even a 128-bit machine to replace the N-64. Along this crooked path Nintendo considered and then rejected the custom graphics chip that is one of the four chips at the heart of Playstation 2. That could have been Nintendostation 2, but they blew it.

Blew what? What's so special about the Playstation 2? It's easy for those without small boys to realize that the console game business is big business, with annual unit sales comparable to PCs. Playstation 1 is the clear champ right now with zillions sold, each of which will probably be replaced in a year or two by a Playstation 2. So what? Compare that Playstation 2 to the network appliances, zero-impact PCs and other names being thrown about for the Web browser for the next decade. The Playstation has more graphics power than any PC ever built in a package that will cost less than any PC ever built. That power can be used just as well to drive a browser as to defend the universe. If millions of homes are going to buy a Playstation 2 no matter what, and if that Playstation 2 can perform extra functions of these other networked devices, why will people bother to buy those networked devices? Why, indeed.

Playstation 2 has a DVD drive, an IEEE1394 FireWire (Sony calls it I-Link) connector, and at least one PC Card slot. Sony has been very cagey about whether or not Playstation 2s will play DVD movies, but I can't imagine they won't at some point. That 1394 port is a 200 megabit-per-second serial connection to video cameras, digital televisions, printers and PCs. Sony is building 1394 into everything that makes or shows a picture. The PC Card slot can contain a model, a network (even a cable TV) connection, or a storage device. This thing is looking more and more like a diskless PC. Just add a PC or Mac emulator. And don't bet that a Connectix or some other company won't build one.

Here is a multi-threat device with low price, top performance, dual or even triple functionality, the lust object of every 11 year-old in the world and the strategic weapon of the most focussed and determined consumer electronics company of all. And notice there isn't a bit or byte of Microsoft code anywhere in it.

Windows CE? Forget it.

The only real threat to Playstation 2 isn't really a threat so much as an alternative, and it comes from a company nobody has even heard of. The platform is called Nuon and the company is a little outfit from Mountain View, California called VM Labs run buy Richard Miller, who long ago headed the team that designed the Atari Jaguar.

NUON replaces the MPEG decoder currently found in digital video products. The NUON processor (hey, doesn't that look like Motorola chip?) provides the raw horsepower to decode digital video and audio, while delivering advanced trick modes and an enhanced user interface. Consumers will not only be able to play thousands of movies and audio discs on their systems, but will enjoy high performance video games, and educational and reference applications, all with highly sophisticated film quality 3D graphics.

NUON is a DVD player that can also be a set-top box, Web browser, or a video game, while Playstation 2 is a video game that can also be a DVD player, Web browser, or a set-top box. One has the Sony name while the other will have lots and lots of non-Sony names, many of which will be familiar from other electronic devices around your house. The PC industry has nothing to compare with either of these devices. Nothing.

The only name sure not to be present in either device is Microsoft.