IBM Corp and AT&T Co’s AT&T Paradyne in Largo, Florida have now firmed up their August agreement to work together to extend IBM’s Enterprise Systems Connection Architecture, Escon, channels to unlimited distance over T3 lines for support of printers and tape drives – but not disk drives – at speeds up to 45M-bits per second (CI No 1,728). IBM is working with AT&T Paradyne as a result of requests from our customers to complement and extend the reach of Escon, IBM said. The IBM 3172 Model 2 Interconnect Controller will be the basis of the new channel extension hardware and AT&T Paradyne’s new XL/4000 and XL/5000 products will provide channel extension capability via hardware and software enhancements to the 3172. The new products will also be compatible with AT&T Paradyne’s existing Pixnet-XL channel connection products, and Paradyne rather than IBM will market and support them, and says it is planning to ship the first products in fourth quarter 1992.
