Digital Equipment China Ltd is celebrating a $10.4m contract with the China National Technical Import Corporation that keeps the minimaker’s feet firmly under the table in the educational and research market in the People’s Republic. The contract is to provide 13 VAX 8300 minicomputers and 129 MicroVAX II supermicros with associated software for use at 57 key provincial and local universities, as well as installation service and training. It is estimated that over 200,000 undergraduades from science, engineering, management, and social science fields will get to use the new machines, and university lecturers and graduate students will also have access to them. DEC says that it won the business in competition with 19 other contenders on the basis of operating system continuity from the bottom to the top of the DEC VAX line. DEC notes that there is a large number of PDPs already installed in Chinese universities, and reckons that after two previous deals that involved over 20 VAX-11/750 and over 50 MicroPDP-11s, it is now the number one supplier to the Chinese educational market when measured by the number of computer systems installed.
