It’s getting harder and harder to identify the origins of the Acos machines in the Honeywell and Bull lines, but the Acos 3300 family introduced by NEC Corp and the NEC-Toshiba Information Systems Inc marketing joint venture left over from the days when Toshiba actually built the top-end mainframes in the joint family sounds as if it is derived from the original 24-bit Honeywell Italia Level 62/DPS 4/DPS 4000 machines: the line, pitched against IBM’s 9370, comes in five models ranging in price from $8,066 to $15,133 a month, and in performance from 0.5 to 2.3 MIPS; main memory runs from 12Mb to 60Mb (that sounds like a 24-bit word), the extended version of the operating system is called Acos-2/EVP, they come with a new app-lications generator and relational database, and the top Model 20 is a dual processor, set for next July; all models – the others are set for November – have up to 26 channels and aggregate data rate of 21Mbytes-per-second.
