Philips Business Systems first previewed its Motorola 68030-based P9050 systems at the Hannover Fair back in March, but has only just got round to announcing the full range of its next generation P9000 Unix departmental computers in Paris: the first UK airing will be at London’s Government Computing Exhibition on November 16. The new processor gives a boost to the price performance of the current P9050 and P9070 boxes, which are supplemented with a new high-end model, the P9090. The low-end model uses a highly integrated single board VME-compatible computer which includes 20MHz processor, floating point processor, 4Mb on board memory, Ethernet controller, SCSI disk and tape controller, four workstation ports and a printer port: the top-end models use a more conventional board with just processor and memory, but with faster – 25MHz and 33MHz – clock speeds and high speed off-processor memory. The Unix System V.3 compatible systems range from the four-terminal P9050 to the 100 plus terminal P9090, with 390Mb disk and up to 40Mb memory. Low- end system shipments have already begun around Europe, and the P9090 will be ready by January: no prices were given.
