Japanese industry assumes an opener-than-thou demeanor at Tokyo’s big Data Show 91
Japan’s computer vendors and users turned out in force to Japan’s second largest computer show, the Data Show 91. Held over four days late last month, with between 50,000 and 60,000 visitors a day, the show annually acts as a focus for release of new products and previews of technology still in development. Immediately obvious was the prominence of openness in the company’s slogans. IBM Japan Ltd proclaimed that open systems start with IBM, while right next door Hewlett-Packard Co shouted its slogan of Openism in its display of HP/Apollo Series 700 Precision Architecture RISC workstations and its HP9000 servers. NEC Corp’s stand placed emphasis on Unix applications and on NEC’s early implementation of System V.4 to its 4800 range of workstations, as well as to the FT-20 super-tolerant transaction processing box bought OEM from Stratus Computer Inc. Unix has also been made available on the SX-3 supercomputer, which has a claimed 33 GFLOPS peak performance. At the personal computer level, NEC has been busy choosing its desired environments for Unix on micros – Santa Cruz Operation Inc’s Open Desktop (the original version, not the one for the Advanced Computing Environment) has been Japanised and is available along with X Window, and OSF-Motif. Alongside, Hitachi Ltd was displaying a range of products, particularly the Flora series of personal workstations as well as its CICS and type 3050 workstations.
Message 90s architecture
Interesting was its NetMaster II B5 size small communications terminal which consists of a large touch panel on top of a personal computer, which when separated from the keyboard can be used as a portable workstation on customer visits. Fujitsu Ltd made its Message 90s architecture the key point of its stand with the display organised to target three main groups: operational data, management information and office automation data – obviously viewing of the corporate video was required to understand the specifics of this strategy. As well however, the newly-released DS/90 7000 series of Unix computers was displayed. Both Mitsubishi Electric Corp and Oki Electric Industry Co focussed their presentations on client-server information strategy and the products they are buying in OEM to achieve this aim – Mitsubishi with its Precision Architecture workstations from Hewlett-Packard Co and Oki with its Sun Microsystems Inc workstations and its own Intel Corp 80860 RISC-based server. Oki launched an improved line-up of client-server offerings including a new model of the Okistation-7300 Unix desktop workstation, the 7300 Model 75, along with the Okiserver-8500 Model 221S, a mid-range – 55 MIPS – server based on a 50MHz 80860 chip and incorporating the FutureBus+. It has a maximum file capacity of 15.6Gb, working as a plug-in module. The server is being sold in its minimum configuration – 32Mb memory, 670Mb disk – in Japan at around $56,000 and will ship from December with Oki expecting to sell 5,000 units over three years. The Okistation-7300 Model 75 is based on a 40MHz 80860 chip, with 16Mb to 64Mb memory and 200Mb to 5.2Gb disk. Both new models provide as standard seven slots for 32-bit EISA boards for connection of machines such as its if486VX series desktop personal computer series. This is designed to the AX Japanese AT specifications, a standard which that has been supported by many of the minor personal computer manufacturers including Sony, Mitsubishi, Sanyo Electric Co and others. The top-of-the-line 80486 model, the if486VX550, contains plug-in interfaces for SCSI file devices and supports high-performance local area network server functions using the likes of LAN Manager 2.0 and NetWare 386 v 3.1J. The 80486 boxes are priced from $5,800 – if486VX510E based on a 20MHz 80486SX with 3.5 floppy drives and 40Mb hard disk with 2Mb memory, ranging through three models to the top of the line if486VX550 using a 33MHz 80486, with 4Mb memory and priced at around $13,600. Oki hopes to ship 20,000 units of the n
ew if486 models in the first year of Japan release.
PowerBooks
The Apple Computer Japan stand was crowded with people wishing to lay hands on the new laptop PowerBook and Classic II machines – both low-end models already run Japanese operating systems but the Quadras are available only with English operating system at the moment. Next door, in addition to its touch and feel sessions with the PalmTop electronic notebook and the Data Discman, Sony Corp displayed its two recently announced NEWS workstations – the maximum 64Mb main memory NWS-3470 based on a 20MHz R3000 chip plus an R3010 co-processor, and the NWS-3880 workstation based on a 25MHz R3000 and up to 128Mb memory, as well as its experimental server using a Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks – RAID – incorporating up to eight units of 2Gb 5.25 drives, as well as an uninterruptible power supply and error correcting mechanisms. Finally Matsushita Computer Systems was demonstrating a new version of the Solbourne Computer Corp S3000 Sparc-based workstations developed in conjunction with Solbourne, with a new monochrome thin film transistor screen that is claimed to be much easier to read than previous orange plasma displays. Sales of the Solbourne machines have reached the high 100s since commercial release in Japan in February this year. Meanwhile Matsushita Electric Industrial Co was demonstrating a Unix terminal with a colour thin-film transistor screen, which is claimed to be binary-compatible with Sun applications. No dates have been announced for the product release. On a lighter note Nippon Data General Corp did not let its recent buyout by Omron Corp dampen its taste for outrageous stands and again took the cake this year for a stand designed to resemble an underwater cave, complete with companions dressed as scuba divers and with hardly a computer in sight. – Anita Byrnes
