A tiny employee-owned 11-man start-up in San Diego, California called Research Development Innovations has got an 8.5 lb (weighed without batteries) battery-run Sparc laptop which it claims can run Unix, Macintosh and DOS applications. Called Brite Lite, the product also boasts a proprietary screen technology that offers a high resolution 1,152 by 900 pixel count – normally found on workstations – on its 11.25 liquid crystal display. Brite Lite is based on an LSI Logic 20MHz Sparc motherboard offering 12.5 MIPS and 1.6 MFlops. There are two co-processors: a 386 and a 68030 but DOS and Mac applications will be run as software emulations. The thing will be configured with a standard 8Mb – expandable to 16Mb – static RAM and a standard 1.44Mb floppy disk; it will be available either without a hard-drive or with a 100Mb or 200Mb drive. Entry-price for the product will be around the $6,000 mark, with fully-configured versions costing about $9,000. The whizzy screen technology was developed by Research Development with an unnamed Japanese partner, which has never been involved in computers before. Although, Brite Lite can have a colour screen, the cost of such screens is so prohibitive (costing approximately $6,000 each) that when Brite Lite debuts at Comdex/Fall in November it will be as a monochrome unit. Research Development expects to cash in on all the companies that are known to be working on Sparc clones by offering them the opportunity to re-badge Brite Lite. Indeed, company founder Rick Schrameck believes that Sun, which is itself working on a laptop may agree to use Research as an OEM. Brite Lite will be produced by Korean company TriGem.
