A list of exotic and for the most part unfamiliar and unlikely names was trotted out when the Advanced Computing Environment revealed its promised list of 40 additional companies that have joined the initiative. It was also reported that the first release of the Advanced RISC Computing specification has been completed. Among the better-known names was the surprise one of Research Machines Plc in the UK, plus Du Pont Pixel Systems Inc, another surprise in Lockheed Sanders Inc, Corollary Inc, which is a member of almost all such industry groupings, and three of the big Koreans, who also tend to hedge their bets in these matters, Daewoo Telecom Ltd, Samsung Electronics Co Ltd and Goldstar Co Ltd. The only big Japanese names are Epson America Inc and Sanyo Electric Co. Leading off the exotica are two Indians, Delhi Cloth Mills Pte Ltd’s DCM Data Products and Altos India Ltd, from Germany come Bruker Analytische Messtechnik GmbH, Specs GmbH and Itos Computer GmbH. Bull SA’s Bull Micral of America has joined in its own right, and Adaptec Inc is about the only other computer industry household name, although most of the others, all of them American apart from Taiwan’s Tyan Computers Corp, have had their moment or two of glory in Computergram. They are CSS Laboratories Inc, Deskstation Technology Inc, Gain System Inc, Heurikon Corp, JetFill Inc, Megatek Corp, Micro Computer Systems Inc, Parallan Computer Inc, Porro Technologies Ltd, Reply Corp, Ross Systems Inc, Set Technology Corp and Stereo Graphics Corp. Software vendors joining are Algorithmics Ltd, Banyan Systems Inc, BioSym Technologies Inc, the CAD Group Inc, Justsystem Corp, Migration Software Systems Ltd and Zycad Corp. MIPS Computer Systems Inc RISCmakers Integrated Device Technology Inc, LSI Logic Corp and Performance Semiconductor Corp all joined. The new release of the ARC specification, being distributed to members this week, defines minimum standards to ensure shrink-wrapped applications can be offered to run on all ARC-compliant systems. Minimum hardware is a MIPS CPU, CD- ROM or floppy, 8Mb memory, Ethernet 802.3 and Token Ring 802.5 interfa ces, SCSI, serial, parallel ports, audio input and output, 1,024 by 768 8-bit display, mouse and a 101- key IBM-style keyboard; addenda are two buses, EISA and Turbochannel.
