Harris Corp, which launched its Night Hawk real-time Unix computer family in Europe in September, promising that it would come out with the first models in the line to use the Motorola 88000 RISC before the end of this year (CI No 1,271), has been as good as its word. The Night Hawk 4000, which is rated by Harris Computer Systems Division at 20 MIPS, is being pitched at major real-time applications such as aerospace simulation including training simulators, at signal processing, and at military command, control, communications and intelligence applications. The machine comes with 4M-bit dynamic RAMs for peak transfer rates of 100Mbytes-per-second, and up to 144Mb of main memory is supported. Operating systems offered on the Night Hawk 4000 include CX/RT, which offers a frequency-based schedule, performance monitor and data decoding; the CX/UX Unix-based system that supports both System V and Berkeley BSD services; and CX/SX for developing applications in a secure environment – but the key feature of the machine is that all three environments are object- and file-compatible and can reside on the same disk. It supports Ethernet, Network Fiel System and X25 and has realt-time interfaces to Mil-Std-1553B, Encore HSD and DEC DRIIW; it also supports the new Harris Nigh Hawk GS-1 VME graphics subsystem. The Night Hawk 4000 system nucleus with one CPU, eight VME slots and CX/RT operating system is UKP48,400 with 4Mb will be available in third quarter 1990, and the 16Mb version, UKP61,000 follows in fourth quarter.
