COMPUTERS: A Settlement for IBM

Peace negotiators have been meeting secretly for the past year at law offices in Manhattan and Minneapolis-St. Paul to settle a long and chafing conflict between two industrial powers. On one side was International Business Machines Corp. of Armonk, N.Y., the world's largest maker of computers; on the other was Control Data Corp. of Minneapolis, which ranks fifth in the U.S. computer industry. Last week the companies announced an agreement: Control Data lawyers consented to drop the company's four-year-old antitrust suit against IBM.

Both sides could claim a victory.

IBM, which controls at least two-thirds of the entire computer market and...