Codar Technology Inc, which is based in Longmont, Colorado has a ruggedised version of Sun Microsystems Inc’s Sparcstation 2 in the works, and due to be available in three to four months. The 28.5 MIPS machine will include a ruggedised 19 Multisync monitor, ruggedised keyboard and trackball and ruggedised and Tempested system chassis. The rack-mountable 305M-S2 is designed and tested for a variety of mission-critical military applications including ground-mobile, shipboard and airborne environments. It provides shock and vibration isolation for the CPU and up two full-height or four half-high 5.25 removable SCSI peripherals or a total of 2Gb of internal storage. Mean time between failures is rated at 21,500 hours – but it is rather doubtful that the machine has really been operated for two years, 23 weeks and six days in simulated conditions of all-out nuclear war. The workstation is claimed to feature extensive built-in test capabilities via a proprietary systems monitoring board that reports temperature, voltage and power supply load status, plus time, date and fault conditions on a 16 character front panel liquid crystal diode display. Mean time to repair is claimed to be rated at 30 minutes or less. Options include optical disk drives, mouse and power supplies for ground mobile applications. Codar is an 11-year-old ruggedised and Tempested computer systems integrator.
