Data General Corp chose the opening day of the UniForum show in Washington to take the wraps off three new series of its AViiON systems – 10 new workstations and servers in all – built around Motorola’s 88000 RISC chip and running the DG/UX Unixalike – not bad for a company that until the launch of the original AViiONs back in March of last year was regarded as one of the most stubborn opponents to the general computer industry rush to open standards. The AV/400 series of graphics workstations has two uniprocessor and two dual-processor models. At the low-end are the 17 MIPS-rated AV/400 and 20 MIPS AV/410 single processor systems using 16.7MHz and 20MHz versions of the 88000, at $9,500 and $36,890 respectively. The dual-processor AV/402 uses two 16.7MHz 88000s to deliver 34 MIPS, and the 40 MIPS AV/412 uses two 20MHz versions of the chip; tags are $12,500 and $43,890 respectively. Each comes with 8Mb RAM, Ethernet, two expansions slots and user-installable graphics processors, an 8-bit one at $5,500, 24-bit at $9,500 or 24-bit Z-buffer at $4,000. The AV/4000 server series again includes single and dual processor models, the $17,000 AV/4000 has a 16MHz 88000 for 17 MIPS, the AV/4020 has two of the things with 34 MIPS and costs from $25,545. They are configured with 8Mb memory, two expansion slots and Ethernet. Both the single-chip AV/400 workstations and AV/4000 servers can be upgraded to dual-processor configurations, 4Mb memory boards to a maximum of 32Mb are available, and they support up to 2.5Gb disk. At the high end Data General has pitched in with AV/5200 and 6200 servers using 25MHz versions of the 88000. The AV/5200 and 6200 uniprocessors offer 25 MIPS, the dual-processor 5220 and 6220 are rated at 50 MIPS. They are available in deskside (AV/5200/5220) and rackmounted (AV/6200/6220) boxes, coming with 208Mb memory, 10 expansion slots and support for up to 5Gb storage. The AV/5200 starts at $55,000, the AV/5220 at $94,400, the AV/6200 has a tag of $81,875 and the AV/6220 costs from $116,875. All are available now, except the AV/410 and 412 which are out in June. New software is version 4.2 of Data General’s DG/UX Unix, OSF/Motif, Visix Software Inc’s Looking Glass desktop manager, and DG/AVlib, a graphics library. A new communications facility supported under DG/UX 4.2 to connect AViiONs to IBM hardware is the Application Program Interface for LU 0, 1, 2, 3 and 6.2. A DG/UX 4.2 licence is $500, now, APILU 0, 1, 2, and 3 are $3,000 – 6.2 is $2,000 – Looking Glass is available in the spring and DG/AVlib will be bundled with DG/UX in June. Also new are a range of terminals for use with Data General’s AOS/VS and Unix environments.
