DEC’s first fault-tolerant VAX will be launched in Paris on February 27, hears Computerworld, along with a new version – 5.4 – of DEC’s proprietary VMS operating system environment: the paper says that an entry-level Cirrus One – described as two MicroVAX 3800s bolted together, will cost from $230,000, and will feature DEC’s DSSI bus and 32Mb memory on each processor; the announcement may also provide some clues on the progress of DEC’s efforts to produce a Posix-compliant version of VMS, the paper said – why France? Well the paper seems to have forgotten, but DEC already has a fault-tolerant version of the MicroVAX II, consisting of two CPUs in a single box linked via Ethernet, with a software switch so that if a malfunction is detected in the active processor, its switches to the standby – called Mira, it was designed by DEC France (CI No 686).
