IBM Corp says that while water-cooled mainframes are still sold out to the end of the second quarter, CMOS mainframes are only sold out to the end of this quarter.
AT&T Corp has roped in Sharp Corp to help it with the next generation of its Global VideoPhone 2500, which is currently sold in 38 countries; the two hope to have a new one on the market by early 1996. – o – In the wake of the Pentium fiasco, Intel Corp has put in place a new disclosure procedure to inform customers and the public about flaws in its chips – new flaws will be disclosed as they are discovered and analysed, first to its hardware and software customers, and then to the publicm, in an addendum to the design handbooks for each of its chips; it has compiled a 40-page document of other Pentium flaws, he said, but stresses that the replacement guarantee extends only to the division flaw – but when the document becomes public, possibly as soon as next month, it is expected to generate new concerns about the reliability of the Pentium.
Bell Atlantic Corp confirmed that it is interested in a partnership or ownership stake in the US Public Broadcasting System, which often offers the only television worth watching in the US at any particular hour, if the law is changed to allow it, but says it is not actively seeking a change in the law.
The UK fingerprint automation contract has finally been won and the victor is the TRW Inc consortium: the Home Office awarded the $150m eight-year contract to TRW over the remaining rival consortium led by IBM Corp – Digital quipment Corp and Computer Sciences Corp withdrew earlier; the system will connect the Home Office with 43 police forces and 1,200 charging stations throughout England and Wales and police will be able to use the system to submit prints to a national database for identification and verification using the system.
Computer Sciences Corp has a three-year contract with the UK Inland Revenue to provide desktop computing equipment and services to support tax offices across the UK: the company will supply, replace and upgrade computer facilities to support the Inland Revenue’s staff of 69,000 across the UK and will subcontract Computacenter Ltd to support the delivery and installation of personal computers; terms of the agreement were not revealed.
Commenting on its agreement with Sony Corp, Microsoft Corp told Reuter that interactive television set-top boxes based on Microsoft software are expected to be available to consumers beginning in 1996, and manufacturers could include NEC Corp, Hewlett-Packard Co, General Instrument Corp as well as Sony – there would be four different set-top boxes using the same software, it said; the agreement also covers a plan for Sony to develop video servers for private networks using Microsoft’s Tiger.
Afro-Asian Satellite Communications Ltd, an Indian company, is yet another contender in the satellite cellular phone business, and ity has given Hughes Aircraft Co a $700m contract to set up the mobile telephone services for hand-held receivers in lower Asia and Africa; the service will use two high-altitude geostationary satellites, and will carry more than 16,000 simultaneous calls from points in 54 countries from Singapore to the Middle East, India and all Africa.
Commenting on its figures (page 7), Sunnyvale, California-based Weitek Corp expects its losses to continue through at last the first half of 1995: Weitek in the 1994 fourth quarter had a loss of $3.7m on revenues of $6.4m; results included a charge of $800,000; the quarter also reflected a manufacturing yield problem, which reduced gross margin by about $1.1m; the firm said it has already taken steps to correct the manufacturing yield problem for the first 1995 quarter.
Lotus Development Corp announced yesterday that the estimated retail price of the full Lotus Notes client and server software will now be $275 per copy, down from $330.
IBM Corp has finally got all its new people in place with the appointment of Bob Stephenson,
formerly general manager of IBM Asia Pacific, to be general manager of IBM North America, overseeing all marketing and sales activities in the US and Canada, in succession to Bob LaBant: David Thomas, formerly general manager of the AS/400 division, will replace Stephenson as general manager, Asia Pacific and Dennie Welsh has been appointed general manager of Global Services, the company’s European divisions that sell computer services and devise computer applications for specific industries; he succeeds Robert Dies, who gets the AS/400.
Sabotage! US West Inc said 17 telephone cables were severed over the weekend, causing numerous outages for customers in Fargo and over the state line in Moorhead, Minnesota: there were at least four acts of vandalism in different parts of Fargo, causing disruption for at least 20,000 customers in Moorhead and 2,000 in Fargo; police and Federal Bureau of Investigation officials are investigating the case; complete restoration may take several days, especially because of below zero temperatures, the Denver, Colorado-based company said; US West has offered a $10,000 reward for the arrest and conviction of the persons that did the damage.
The UK cable industry will create a further 6,400 new jobs this year, bringing the total in the sector to some 26,200 people, according to the Cable Communications Association: out of that, most will be full-time, permanent, skilled jobs in engineering, construction, sales and customer services; cable is currently available to some 4.1m UK homes; 915,000 homes have bought cable television packages and 740,000 are telephone subscribers, with a high degree of overlap; the industry is currently spending around #2,000m a year on building the cable network, which will cover around a third of the country by the end of this year; it estimates some 25,000 people will need to be employed by the sector long-term once the networks are finished.
Bayerische Motoren Werke AG, which confirmed that it is in talks with Viag AG, says it sees strategic opportunities in telecommunications – BMW no longer sees itself as simply an automobile maker, but is concerned with all aspects of individual mobility, including communications, the company declared.
Tandem Computers Inc reports that the Korea Securities Computerisation Corp has bought 36 NonStop Himalaya massively parallel RISC servers as the vehicles for transactions between the Korea Stock Exchange and brokers and their branch offices throughout South Korea.
Minneapolis-based Ceridian Corp said its Ceridian Employer Services division has awarded a 10-year, $100m facilities management contract to the Integrated Systems Solutions Corp unit of IBM Corp. – o – The latest issue of Digital Equipment Corp’s inForm magazine for VAX and Alpha users, lists the DEC technical support and order line as 800-DIGITAL [(800) 344-3825] – but an I converts to a 4, not a 3, and the number should be (800) 344-4825 and according to PC Week, the 3825 number is a telephone sex service: so that’s how come DEC managed a profit last quarter…
