Data General Corp was last night due to announce its entry into the industry standard workstation business with launch of the first of its Motorola 88000-based RISC machines, which were still unnamed as we went to press. The new hardware includes a 17 MIPS workstation and a multi-user/server system, both based on single board computers and running the firm’s DG/UX 4.1 Unix implementation. The workstation, using a 16.7MHz or 20MHz 88000 with integrated floating point and two 16Kb cache and memory management units, comes in a 16 by 16 inch chassis, 2.5 high, with from 4Mb to 28Mb memory (using single in-line memory modules), 20 mono or 19 colour monitor with 1,280 by 1,024 resolution at 70Hz, graphics hardware accelerators, Ethernet and RS-232 and RS-422 communications, SCSI bus, and up to three desktop housings for 5.25 disk drives. The stations support X Window and can be used as a diskless Network File System node. No prices were available before the announcement, but the company was promising that the workstation could be had for the price of a PC. The first of Data General’s new multi-user and server hardware range is a deskside unit supporting single or dual 20MHz 88100 processors, with two CPUs and up to 16Mb of error code correction memory on the single board. A 10-slot VMEbus allows further memory and VME board extensions. As a multi-user system, Data General reckons the machine can support up to 512 asynchronous devices using only four VME slots, through a terminal services system that handles character interrupts and buffers data at the cluster control level. Up to three 322Mb disks can be housed within the cab inet. Both workstation and system models will be the first of a new family, according to Data General.
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