When display terminal specialist Lynwood Scientific Developments Ltd of Alton, Hampshire gave details of its plans to be acquired by Hunting Associated Industries Plc last month, it made tantalising mention of a plan to diversify into Unix workstations (CI No 926) bit declined to elaborate. But now it is ready to lift the veil a little on its plans, and says that it intends to launch a series of workstations by the Autumn of 1988. The company is now on the final stages of development on the systems, basically an upgrade of Lynwood’s existing visual display terminal hardware to full Unix workstation with large memory and high resolution screen. Unix System V.3 has been ported by a joint development team from Lynwood and North London Unix consultants The Instruction Set Ltd, and has been modified to run on both disk and diskless workstation configurations. The stations will use 68030 or 68020 microprocessors and there will be four models, ranging from a 4 MIPS monochrome system with 14 screen called the 14M, a 15M variant, a 19C colour system and a 20M. The systems will be offered with a range of file servers, and the workstations will be connectable to the servers via coaxial or fibre optic cable using Sun’s Network File System and the Sun NeWs windowing system as well as standard X.11 version of X Window from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Lynwood has also licensed Uniplex Ltd’s office automation software for the systems. Although prices have not yet been set, the company says its intention is to sell the low-end model at the price of a terminal. Lynwood says that Tempested radiation protected versions of the new systems for military and other sensitive applications are currently under consideration.
