First fruits of February’s OEM agreement under which Data General Corp is to get 88000-based desktops from Omron Corp is the Luna 2001, built around Motorola Inc’s latest 88110 RISC CPU and running the DG/UX operating system. Omron and Omron Data General Corp – the Japanese Data General subsidiary, which Ormon acquired in 1991 – are to manufacture and sell the Luna 2001 in Japan. Data General will market it elsewhere as part of its AViiON series, but won’t announce the box until later this summer when it plans to unveil other long-awaited 88110-based additions to its workstation and server line. Data General supplies AViiON servers and MV minis to Omron, and says it will be responsible for developing high-end 88110 workstations that the two will market. Luna 2001 uses a 40MHz 88110, is rated at 37.8 SPECint92 and 50.5 SPECfp92, comes with from 16Mb to 128Mb RAM, 425Mb or 1Gb disk, 19 colour screen and costs $18,000. Omron sold 6,000 Lunas in 1992 and expects to sell 3,000 Luna 2001s over the next 12 months. Data General is taking Luna boxes to cut its costs – Omron is still seeking other OEM customers.
