Joining NCR in going after the departmental Unix systems market is Encore Computer Corp, Marlboro, Massachusetts, which has come out with a low-end model in its Multimax family (CI No 857). The Multimax 310 is based on the National Semiconductor 32032 and 32332 processors and is said to support up to 200 users. The system has a performance range of between 4 MIPS and 20 MIPS depending on the number of CPUs installed, and implements tightly coupled, symmetrical parallel processing. Like the 320, the 310 runs Encore’s menu-driven Unix interface, supporting System V.3 and 4.2 BSD, and the UniVerse Pick-under-Unix environment. Ethernet and TCP/IP are bundled with the system and Network File System is supported. The 310 has support for Informix, Oracle, C, Fortran, Ada, Lisp, Pascal, Basic and Cobol. Encore intends to sell the 310 as a departmental system for applications such as database management; transaction processing; software development; image processing; artificial intelligence; computational chemistry; and specialised government applications using concurrent Ada. The company claims to have pre-sold the Multimax 310 to around a dozen customers including VMark Software Inc, of Natick, Massachusetts and Matra Datasysteme SA – Encore’s partner and distributor in France, Spain, Portugal and Italy. An entry-level 4 MIPS Multimax 310 with 16Mb memory, 300Mb disk, tape cartridge and Ethernet adaptor is $89,000. A top-of-the range system will cost upwards of $500,000.
