Canaan Computer Corp, the Trumbull, Connecticut company that is way out in front in the small but growing business of building and marketing dedicated workstations that run IBM’s VM operating system with the CMS Conversational Monitor System development environment, has answered IBM’s new 9370s with the DCS 6000, an upgraded version of the year-old DCS 5800, featuring the same proprietary TTL CPU, but adding support for more users, and for a wide variety of new peripherals. The 6000 adds an SCSI bus so that 5.25 Winchesters can be used with the machine, and performance has been speeded up with cache memory on some models. The new 6100 model offers the same performance as the 5800, the 6300 is claimed to be between 30% and 50% faster. The 6000s now support up to 16Mb of main memory, up to 3.4Gb on disk, and up to 36 users. They also feature the Multibus interface, and support a 1,600/3,200 bpi tape and 125Mb tape streamer as options. Ethernet and IBM bisync and SNA/SDLC communications protocols are supported. The 6100 with 2Mb CPU, 170Mb disk, streaming tape and support for four users is $42,500, and a 12-user version with 4Mb CPU, 310Mb on disk and half-inch tape drive is $58,000. The DCS 6300 with 16Kb cache memory, tape drive and support for 20 users is $80,000. Canaan has absorbed $40m in venture capital but is not yet profitable, though it hopes to remedy that this year. It has sold about 80 DCS systems all told, and looks for $18m turnover this year.
