Tatung Co of Taipei, Taiwan has won the race to become the first to show a low-cost clone of Sun Microsystems’ Sparcstation-1, putting pre-production desk-top and deskside models of the TWS-5000 on show at the Comdex show in Las Vegas this week. Tatung, which sells MS-DOS personal computers OEM to Wang Laboratories, Tektronix Inc and Packard Bell Inc and others that prefer to remain anonymous, is using the 25MHz Cypress Semiconductor version of the Sparc chip set and claims 15 MIPS and 3.0 MFLOPS for the machine, rather more than Sun claims for the Sparcstation-1. The TWS-5000 has support for up to 1,152 by 900 pixels in eight colours, Ethernet and SCSI controllers, and 8Mb to 32Mb memory. Tatung wants OEM agreements on the new machine and says that software companies like Oracle Corp are keen on bundling arrangements. The deskside system, ostensibly multi-user, will start at some $8,000, $1,000 below Sun’s base tag and the desktop model is expected to be from $7,000. Production – at an initial 1,000 a month, is planned for second quarter of 1990.
