Hewlett-Packard Co was scheduled to announce its next Precision Architecture RISC Snake workstation – the 710 – at Adus/UK, the annual HP/Apollo workstation user society meeting in Solihill, Birmingham last month. And apparently, so keen was a competitor to discover the details of the latest wriggler, that Prime Computer Inc’s Computervision operation in nearby Coventry received a desk message from the president of a certain Californian workstation supplier, asking it to send along a keen pair of ears, and to report back pronto. Unfortunately, as later reported, Hewlett-Packard decided to put the announcement back until January, so the signatory of the message, one Scott McNealy, didn’t get the Snake spec. However, for the benefit of Mr McNealy, and anyone else interested in the elusive Snake, the performance marks and prices quoted in CI No 1,792, were run past a Hewlett-Packard Snake charmer, who confirmed that they are on target, as far as the latest thinking in the company’s marketing department goes. Speaking of which, by the time the young Snake reaches the ripe old age of nine months, the firm is also expected to have announced its own RAID system, redundant array of inexpensive disks, based on the Hewlett-Packard disk technology that everyone else is using for their own RAIDs. And, not to be left out where supporters’ clubs are concerned, Hewlett has also confirmed it is forming an independent organisation that’ll promote its Precision Architecture RISC technology. Hewlett-Packard and Precision licensees will form the supporters club, which will pitch itself against the Advanced Computing Environment initiative, Sun Microsystems Inc’s Sparc International, the 88open group that promotes Motorola Inc’s RISC, and IBM’s PowerPC processor.
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