Most people thought the recent price cutting by workstation manufacturers was sparked off by DEC’s new offerings. Not so, according to Televideo Systems Inc of Sunnyvale, California – the bottom fell out of the market only after its Telstar 386 workstation was launched at Comdex in Atlanta during June – billed as the first engineering workstation to use the Intel 80386 chip and offering industry standards. Within four weeks DEC, Sun, Apollo and Hewlett-Packard had all dropped their prices. The effect, says David Harris-Evans of recently launched Televideo International Ltd in Woking, Surrey, from which shipments will begin in anger next month, has been to halve the cost of entry-level workstations. Televideo Systems Inc owns 75% of the shares of Unix System V supplier Microport Systems Inc, and has done a lot of porting in Europe to get software up and running. Harris-Evans is now seeking distribution channels and resellers.
