Data General Corp took advantage of the conference to announce several artificial intelligence products resulting from a unique development and marketing agreement with Gold Hill Computers Inc, Cambridge, Massachusetts. Through the agreement, a variety of Gold Hill software products will be offered for the Dasher/286 AT-alike terminal for Data General users, and on Personals incorporated into networks managed by the recently announced DG/PC*I Personal Computer Integration platform. The Data General and Gold Hill relationship makes available the only combination of network-based, expert systems and Lisp applications on PCs, says Stan Curtis – and he’s not from Data General, he’s a co-founder and vice-president of Gold Hill. Data General is the only computer vendor with which Gold Hill has an agreement of this depth.
Inference engine
The Marlboro minimaker will market and support versions of the Gold Hill GoldWorks, GCLisp 286 Developer, and Golden Connection, and has also completed an independent hardware vendor agreement with Gold Hill for the 80386 HummingBoard accelerator. Under the agreement, Data General will recommend the HummingBoard to users wanting additional processing power for the Dasher/286 workstation or for Personalikes managed by DG/PC*I. GoldWorks is an expert system development and delivery environment for Intel 80286- and 80386-based Personalikes and Gold Hill reckons that it is the first PC-based tool to offer the same power and functionality as high-end expert systems tools without requiring specialised workstations. GoldWorks provides knowledge representation capabilities, inference engine, two user interfaces – menu and developer toolkit – and an interface to Lotus 1-2-3 and dBase files. It also includes two on-line tutorials, on-line examples, and complete documentation. The Data General implementations of GoldWorks and GCLisp 286 Developer are extended to provide access to the Infos II file management system and the company’s 32-bit Common Lisp implementation. This access is made possible through DG/PC*I and Golden Connection and enables developers to build PC-DOS expert systems that have access to corporate databases, and Common Lisp applications can be distributed between Personasl and 32-bit Eclipse MV minis. The 386 HummingBoard is an 80386-based plug-in board with memory designed to run in Dash-er/286s, XT- and AT-alikes. Designed specifically to improve performance of Gold Hill products, it comes with 6Mb to 24Mb of on-board memory. Data General and Gold Hill will market the 386 HummingBoard, and Gold Hill will sell and support it. Data General will market GoldWorks and GCLisp for use on stand-alone Dasher/286 Personalikes. It will also will market them in networks of Personals managed by DG/PC*I, regardless of manufacturer. Golden Connection, also available from Data General, is needed on any Personal managed by DG/PC*I. The Data General price for GoldWorks is $7,500; GCLisp 286 Developer is $1,995; and Golden Connection is $2,500. The 386 HummingBoard prices are available from Gold Hill Computers, and the products are all offered on 120 days’ delivery.
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