We weren’t able to drag it out of them at the time but it seems the folks over at Microprocessor Report used a bigger stick: according to the December issue, the advance royalty Sunnyvale, California-based MIPS Computer Systems Inc is demanding for using its instant Advanced Computing Environment kit is $1m $500,000 ($100 per system on the first 5,000) for the paper schematics, HAL binaries and boot ROM code; another $500,000 for software source code and machine-readable designs for the hardware. No wonder they were shy – makes Sun Microsystems Inc’s prices look like a giveaway scheme. Microprocessor Report also traces the Acer Group and Ing C Olivetti & Co SpA R4000 prototypes to these MIPS kits.
