Fujitsu Ltd says it is betting the shop – or at least its personal computer business – on its 80386-based FM Towns machine, which it hopes will enable it to close a little the yawning gap between its own sales and those of market leader NEC Corp: running under the proprietary true 32-bit Towns/OS operating system, with Towns System Software 1.1 and Townsgear application development tool, and Japanese MS-DOS 3.1 as options, the thing comes standard with a Compact Disk-Read Only drive and one or two 3.5 floppies, a mouse and icon-driven menu system: with strong sound and graphics functions providing three-dimensional image processing and high-quality playback of musical Compact Disks, it is aimed mainly at the fun-and-games end of the market, and is priced very competitively at $2,640 for single floppy model and $3,110 for the dual drive model, not including monitor and keyboard – backed by heavy TV advertising, those prices should enable Fujitsu to sell 100,000 in the first year, the company reckons, and Matsushita Electric Corp has already announced an OEM contract with Fujitsu to sell the Town FMs under its own name.
