Data General Corp’s bet-the-company gamble on a plunge into Unix running on Motorola Inc’s 88000 RISC came to fruition at UniForum with launch of the AViiON computer system, servers and workstations (CI No 1,125), and the company outlined its plan for building a distributed, networked computing environment around them. The Marlborough minimaker reckons that the AViiONs are the firct industry-standard, RISC-based systems and servers to incorporate two processors, and new with the machines is the DG/UX 4.1 implementation of Unix – which it claims is compatible with System V.3.1, BSD 4.2 and Posix, and which it hopes to license to other vendors. The system or server version of the AViiON uses a VMEbus and one or two 88000s, making it the first 88000 box to support symmetrical multiprocessing, Data General believes – the machine as a multi-user system is claimed to support up to 250 users and the dual processor model is rated by the company at 40 MIPS. The workstations come in a 2.5 high enclosure, with 4Mb to 28Mb of memory, with up to three 322Mb disks and 150Mb tape cartridge drives – choose your combination, performance is from 17 MIPS to 20 MIPS or so on the Dhrystone benchmark. Workstation prices start at $7,450, system/servers at $52,000. Production ships to software developers and system builders begin next month.
