Taking a major leap forward in its painful effort to make its symbolic processing systems affordable, Symbolics Inc, Burlington, Massachusetts has launched the XL1200 Lisp workstation, claiming that it offers 300% better performance than the XL400, 600% over the 3640 at a significantly reduced price. The XL1200 features Genera 8.0, the latest version of the company’s object-oriented Lisp development environment, and also supports the new FrameThrower high definition video graphics processor for high-definition television resolution graphics. The VMEbus-based XL1200 supports Ethernet, TCP/IP, Network File System, Remote Procedure Call and the X Window System. The new release 8.0 of Genera supports the ANSI Common Lisp Object Standard and the XL1200 with monochrome console, 20Mb memory, 380Mb ESDI disk, SCSI port, and Genera 8.0 is an introductory $50,000. Main memory goes to 80Mb and XL400 workstations can be field-upgraded. FrameThrower FT100 is $18,900 until September. Both FrameThrower and the new workstation are to ship next month.
