Having brought out new generation DPS 7000 successors to the low end and mid-range of the DPS 7 mainframe line, Groupe Bull has now completed the task with four new top-end systems, and added several operating software enhancements, including a Tempus-Link micro-to-mainframe connection that enables the departmental mainframes to be used as file servers to MS-DOS micros. The new DPS 7/1X07 line comes in one- to four-processor config-urations, and consists of the 7/1007-S, 1007, 1107, 1207, 1307 and 1407, offering 30% to 40% better price performance than their predecessors, the 1007-S costing 30% less than the previous smallest to-end machine, while the 1407 is 10 times as powerful as the new mid-range DPS 7/717. Users of the existing 1017 and 1027 can field-upgrade to the new models, in particular adding third and fourth CPUs. Fault-tolerant configurati-ons of the new 1207, 1307 and 1407 are available, and the new line feat-ures new 3Mbyte-per-second channels. The new machines will be shipped from the Angers factory, with the first four in April, the top two in the fourth quarter. A 24Mb 7/1007-S, 4Gb disk, two tape drives, 1,500 lpm printer and Datanet 7132 communications processor with 40 lines is about $1.5m. A 7/1107 with double the main memory, disk, and lines is $3m. The new machines will be added by Honeywell Bull in the US and the UK in due course. On the software front, there is a new release, V5.1, of the Oracle/GCOS 7 relational database, developed jointly with Oracle Corp, and represents a first step towards SQL*STAR distributed database. There are new releases of the Sindia 7 transaction processing, GAV 7 viewdata server, and Graph 7 graphics programs, and a new release of IMS 7 includes support for the Just-In-Time or Kanban manufacturing regime.
