The story early this year that AT&T Co was thinking about buying 40,000 of Tandem Computers Inc’s three-processor fault-tolerant Unix workstations based on the MIPS Computer Systems Inc R3000 RISC (CI No 1,279) has resurfaced in a slightly different form. Initially it was thought that AT&T wanted the S-2 machines, due to be released on January 8 for volume shipments late next year, specifically for monitoring long-distance telephone lines, but Electronic News now hears that Tandem is hopeful that AT&T will adopt the machine for general remarketing as part of its 3B family of Unix computers. AT&T, which has 20% of Sun Microsystems and has implied it intends to build future 3Bs around Sun’s Sparc RISC, has still not announced anything firm along those lines, but has already signed to market Pyramid Technology Corp proprietary RISC-based servers. With Nixdorf Computer AG due to take the Tandem S2 and GEC Plessey Telecommunications adopting it to add a Unix capability to the System X digital public telephone exchange, the S2 – which are expected to start at about $250,000 in typical configuration begins look a very hot property even before it is launched. The development suggests that AT&T’s 3B machines, based on the proprietary WE32200 complex instruction set microprocessor, are not long for this world, because at the bottom end AT&T is expected to have a 6486 Unix Workgroup System based on the 80486 likely buying the processors OEM from Intel ready shortly.
