Fujitsu Microelectronics Advanced Products Division, Interactive Systems Corp, Insignia Solutions Inc and Via Technologies Inc came together at Comdex yesterday to announce a two-staged strategy aimed at significantly accelerating the proliferation of Sun Microsystems Inc Sparc-based desktop personal workstations. Fujitsu will license to computer makers a Sparc VME Board Set manufacturing package with all the specifications, layout, drawings, bill of materials and such needed to produce a Sparc-based three-board set running SunOS at 12 to 15 MIPS, and include Insignia Solutions’ SoftPC so that the resulting machines can also run the over 50,000 MS-DOS applications out there. SoftPC comes with a pre-installed version of MS-DOS 3.3 and the Microsoft manual, MS-Mouse driver, GW-Basic 3.0 and SlavePC for direct cabling between the host and an MS-DOS box. And to make the things much cheaper to build, Via will provide support chip sets that will help reduce the Sparc three-board set to a single board by late 1990. The board set will support both the S-20 and S-25 processors operating at 12 and 15 MIPS respectively. Fujitsu supplies the Integer chip, Memory Management Unit and EtherStar Ethernet controller; the set will also use Weitek’s 3170 Floating Point Processor and support Sun’s graphics frame buffer. It will come with 8Mb and support up to 64Mb.
