A UK company, The Low Hanging Fruit Company Ltd, based in Cheltenham, Gloucestershire, is hoping to do for manufacturers and developers building hardware and software products around Intel Corp’s 80860 RISC part what it believes the processor’s offical supporters’ club – Mass860 – can’t. Can’t, because it’s staffed by large companies, is non-commercial and therefore works too slowly, says Low Hanging’s director Tim Worstall. The firm wants to act as a commercial clearing house, marketing and contact service for firms with 80860-based products, to increase the flow of information – and sales – between them. Worstall reckons that there are now some 25 companies building Unix systems and personal computer add-in boards based upon the part, many compliant with Intel’s application binary interface for the processor, some not. For instance, Indian firm Godrej & Boyce Pte Ltd, Bombay, has an 80860 workstation that is only little-known about – its CAD/CAM software runs on Sun Microsystems Inc’s Sparc and the IBM Corp RS/6000 in addition to the 80860 – while UK firm Division Ltd of Chipping Sodbury, Avon, has a graphics acceleration software package that is claimed to double the graphics performance of the 80860 for UKP3,000. Low Hanging is also offering an 80860 port of Stardent Computer Inc’s DORE three-dimensional graphics rendering environment from UK firm Myriad Ltd. What we’re doing is an adjunct to Mass860, says Worstall, we started out doing direct marketing for the likes of NEC Corp, Oki Electric Industry Co, Hitachi Ltd and ICL Plc, and saw a market gap for Intel 80860 products. There is no Mass860 representation in the UK – the nearest is in Munich. Low Hanging says it has channels already established in Korea, Japan, the US, Germany and India for small software companies that would be unable to afford to take products to these places themselves. Meanwhile Mass860 is said to have given its blessing to Low Hanging’s efforts. For the curious, the company’s name is said to come from an IBM sales manager, who was reported, while trying to motivate his sales team, to have told them to go out into the garden and pluck the low-hanging fruit.
