IBM has been trying hard to push MS-DOS, and latterly OS/2, into a hard hat for the factory, but Lynx Real-Time Systems Inc from Campbell, California, has introduced two ruggedised Intel iAPX 86-based systems aimed at the industrial personal computer market that run under a proprietary version of Unix. According to Lynx, the IS/386 family has been built from the ground up, rather than modified from existing hardware, which is the usual approach, and uses special cooling and filtering systems, shock mounted and grime protected disk drives, a rack mounted chassis, and large capacity backplane for specialised adaptor cards. The 16MHz Model 40 uses the 80386SX processor and has a starting price of $7,000, which the Model 60 uses a 20MHz 80386 with 80387 floating point processor, and starts at $11,000. Both the machines run LynxOS, claimed to be a Unix-compatible real-time operating system developed by Lynx itself that contains no code owned by AT&T Co.
