A sign of the times, or a portent for Mac sales? The University of California's nine huge campuses plus the nineteen California State campuses have signed a deal with Apple to sell Macs for as little as half its $2,500 list price.

The lucky MacPeople will be faculty, full-time students and those staff members who need computers in their work, and their computer freak friends of course - to whom MacPeople with no love of computers have been turning all over the country to find their cheap but unwanted Mac a good home.

Elsewhere, Commodore dropped the other shoe and announced its purchase of Amiga Corporation for an undisclosed amount. Recently CBM chairman Marshall Smith was quoted as saying that Commodore would introduce a machine similar to the Mac but priced below $1,000.

Amiga is known to have developed a 68,000-based micro with many striking features, including clear 80-column text on a normal TV set. This will undoubtedly become Commodore's new entry next year.

Certainly Commodore will need something new and zappy. At least ten major Japanese firms are about to launch MSX micros here, to be priced between $200 and $400. Actual retail prices could be much, much lower as the giants grapple for market share. More expensive home computers could be wiped out. Some analysts view the Commodore 64 as vulnerable if the MSX hordes turn up with an adequate software catalogue.

The news of another Japanese thrust into the personal computer market came from Sharp, which is about to introduce the first 25 by 80 flat panel LCD screen.

This is a forerunner of a profusion of large area flat panel (LAFP) LCD screens we're likely to see in the next year and thereafter. Indeed a new struggle is shaping up between small US firms and Japanese majors over LAFPs. The Americans are ahead in technology at the moment, led by tiny companies such as Crystalvision of Sunnyvale, California, which will gross less than $1 million this year but may hit $100 million in two years' time.

These firms are working on advanced LCD systems that offer much better visibility for LCD characters. They are also racing towards full colour LCD panels and will have such devices available sooner rather than later. The crucial thing is cost. Today's bulk price on CRT screens is less than $100 per unit. Sharp plans to market its LAFP for $120 early next year. The question being asked in US industry is simple - what happens when LAFP colour screens become that cheap?

Crystaloid of Ohio, for instance, sells custom-tailored LCDs into the automobile industry, which is busy adding a plethora of screens to the cockpits of modern cars. Indeed, LCDs are proliferating at an astonishing rate in electronic boxes of every kind. A well-equipped home may present seven or eight blinking rime displays glowing on the TV, stereo, VCR all together - an unnerving sight first thing in the morning.

At the same time audio chips, like the Texas Instruments TMS 5220, have become an increasingly common component of everyday equipment. Generations of Americans have learned to pronounce English through TI's Speak and Spell. But even those accustomed to computer voices may not be ready for such items as the talking dashboard in the new Dodge 600ES. Where's all this heading?

Well, take a look at Digital Equipment's DEC talk, a $4,000 unit that offers sophisticated speech synthesis and a lot more. DECtalk has 256K of ROM, 32K RAM, two phone jacks, two RS232C ports, an internal speaker with volume control, audio and headphone jacks, and software that pronounces English ultra-precisely. It sounds a little remote, like a Scandinavian reporting from deep space.

However, DECtalk has seven different voices, including Huge Harry, Uppity Ursula, Kit the kid, and Rough Rita - who must be the first speech-synthetic bag lady. If you have a phone with letters as well as numbers, you can listen to them yourself on 0101-617 493 TALK.