Our source on the Pinnacle Data Systems Inc story a week or two back (CI No 1,956) was stretching things a bit when he described the five-year-old Columbus, Ohio firm as a $40m outfit: a Dun & Bradstreet report on Pinnacle projects sales at $5m a year. Industry folks are also sceptical that Pinnacle can pull off an LSI Logic Corp-based Sparcstation 10 clone as quickly as claimed. They say that LSI is still negotiating starter kit rights with Sun Microsystems Inc which is said to be asking LSI for $250,000. Even if that’s ironed out, the manufacturing kit is incomplete and needs some re-engineering. Then after that it’ll be back to Sun for its proprietary (and pricey?) static RAMs and equally proprietary power supply. Some cloners think that Sun regrets making previous Sparcstations too eles in of buildings, 34m roubles of manufacturing capacity and 120m roubles of intellectual property in the shape of fibre-optic equipment. Other partners are PO Start (Penza-19) contributing buildings worth 130m roubles, MMZ (Mias) investing the right to use its facilities worth 225.3m roubles,
