After spending an eternity getting its Unix System V.4 version of the Amiga ready for its formal debut, Commodore Businesss Machines Inc, West Chester, Pennsylvania, finally had the 68030 machine make her bow at Uniforum. The sexy commercial box, which has the Unix System Laboratories folks gleeful, comes pre-loaded with X Window and Sun Microsystems’ Open Look as well as AmigaDOS. Commodore’s Unix manager Paul Calkin, who said Open Look was picked because of its programming consistency and superior number of applications, suggested that there would be some sort of joint marketing done with Sun Microsystems Inc, but was not specific about how that would work out. There are two Amiga 3000 configurations: an entry-level UXB machine with 4Mb RAM and 100Mb hard drive, priced at $5,500 and an upper-end UXD with 8Mb memory and 200Mb hard disk priced at $7,000. Neither price includes a monitor. Calkin said that 1,000 units have been shipped to beta-test sites. The company is also hopeful of upgrading a portion of its installed base, numbering around 2m Amigas, to Unix. Despite the time taken getting the 3000 to market, and its existing international base, Commodore is not quite ready for offshore sales. This month it will add foreign keyboard support, but the defaults will still be in English. Commodore is also toying with the notion of adding an alternate operating system in a couple of months, but has not specified what that might be.
