Network Computing Devices Inc, the Palo Alto, California venture capital start-up that is developing an X-Window-based network display station for release early next year, has revealed its first OEM agreement, with Ardent Computer Corp, Sunnyvale, California. Ardent says it will reference sell and selectively direct sell the Network Computing product for use with compute server configurations of its Titan superworkstation. Initially launched as a dedicated, single-user graphics machine, the Titan can now be purchased without its specialist graphics hardware as a server aimed at department-level scientific and engineering applications. Its maximum four-processor configuration provides performance of 64 MFLOPS and 64 MIPS, according to the company. Ardent’s Steve Blank claims that the Network Computing Devices workstation will provide the cheapest method of adding users to the Server while retaining a high-resolution, windowed graphics interface. This will provide the same display capability as a diskless workstation, which with a share of the server, costs about $10,000, says Blank. The NCD16, due out in the first quarter of 1989, should sell for under $3,000. The product is designed to enable simultaneous access to multi-vendor computers via the emerging X-Window System standard, and will be initially available for Unix and DEC VMS operating system environments. In a separate announcement, Ardent has announced VMS emulation software on the Titan from Boston Business Computing Inc of Lawrence, Massachusetts. The two packages are the VCL digital command language emulator, and EDT+, which emulates the VAX EDT editor, and together gives the user the familiar feel of a VAX/VMS screen.