Stratus Computer Japan is collaborating with Nippon Telegraph & Telephone Corp for application of its Captain viewdata service to the development of a cost-effective fault-tolerant system for use in applications such as building on-line distribution systems for order entry and so forth; the Captain service is uses dial-up lines and costs a competitive 22 cents for three minutes: the Stratus system will consist of an XA2000 series machine, running communications software developed by Tokyo software company called IPA Inc and systems will cost from $450,000; Nippon Stratus, expects to sell 50 systems in the first year; it established its own direct sales operation in Japan three years ago and in parallel still has a major distributor in C Itoh Techno-Science, but while IBM Japan Ltd and NEC Corp are both offering the company’s new models running its implementation of Unix System V.4, Nippon Stratus concentrates on packaged systems running its proprietary VOS.
