Claiming that the summer silly season is officially over, DEC UK yesterday staged its biggest ever launch. In addition to the expected new family of MicroVAXes and VAXstations, the company also introduced three VAXservers, two Winchesters, a high performance cartridge tape, and several new networking products including twisted pair Ethernet at 10Mbps. The MicroVAX products and the VAXstations all have new DEC designed and built two micron CMOS microprocessor, memory management chips and input-output processor. The new chips is claimed to offer three times the performance of the three micron NMOS – ZMOS in DECspeak – chips used in the MicroVAX II at twice the price. The MicroVAX 3000 has twice the storage capacity of the MicroVAX II and comes in two models, both with up to 32Mb of memory. The 3500 office system and the 3600 computer room system also include the new 296Mb TK70 cartridge tape and up to two of the new 19mS access time, 280Mb formatted RA70 5.25 disk drives. The TK70 has three times the capacity and twice the speed of the old TK50, but is supported by the PDP-11/83 and the MicroVAX II and can read TK50 cartridges. The MicroVAX 3600 additionally includes another new disk drive, the 14 622Mb RA82 which has a data transfer rate of 2.4Mbytes-per-second. Up to four can be fitted. A 16Mb MicroVAX 3500 with RA70, TK70, Ethernet interfaces and full operating software licences costs from UKP62,000 – $74,000 in the US, while the MicroVAX 3600 starts at UKP82,000. The three VAX-servers – the 3500, the 3600 and the 3602 – are essentially lower-priced single-user versions of the MicroVAX 3000s. The 3500 and 3600 come in the same packaging as their MicroVAX counterparts while the 3602 consists of two 3600s in one cabinet. The servers start at UKP42,000. The new VAXstation 3000 series consists of the pedestal-mounted model 3200 which has 1,024 by 864 resolution mono or colour screen, 8Mb of memory and Ethernet interface, starting at UKP16,000, $19,900 in the US, and the similar 16Mb, expandable cabinet, model 3500 also offers RA70 and TK70 support. Both stations support X-Window, TCP/IP and DECnet protocols and are claimed to offer 2.5 to 4 times the power of the II/GPX; the new machines will be available here in January.
