Digital Equipment Corp has confirmed that its November 10 announcement of the the first Alpha-based machines will include five systems range in power from a desktop workstation to a mainframe-class machine: initially, the systems will be targeted at VAX customers that require the VMS operating system, with OSF/1 Unix only becoming available early next year; according to PC Week, the Alpha desktop workstation will include three Turbochannel expansion slots, 16Mb to 128Mb of memory, integrated Ethernet, ISDN and a SCSI controller and is expected to begin at about $18,000; the Alpha data centre system, with one to six processors to generate performance ranging from 175 to 900 SPECmarks, offers input-output at 100Mbytes to 400Mbytes per second through a multichannel Futurebus+ and as much as 14Gb of memory, priced at some $200,000 and up.
