Having focused most recently on its security business, and its still unrequited pursuit of Concurrent Computer Corp, Harris Computer Systems Corp’s launch last month of the PowerPC 604-based Night Hawk systems (CI No 2,646) brought the Fort Lauderdale, Florida company back to its traditional real-time business. First model in the new 6000 Series is the 6200, which comes with one or two 100MHz 604s configured as a desktop, deskside, rackmount, cabinet or ruggedised system with from five to 21 slots. As a uniprocessor with 32Mb RAM and 1Gb disk it costs from $46,000. Ford Motor Co gets one of the first 6200s to design and test engine controllers. Existing Night Hawk users can upgrade via processor and memory board swaps, from $30,400. Software will have to be recompiled. The 6000s will ship alongside Harris’s five-year-old 3800 and 1200 real-time systems that use Motorola Inc 68000s, the four- and eight-way 4400s and 4800s which use 88100 RISCs, and eight-way 5800s introduced in 1993 which are based upon 88110s. Real-Time/Power comes in for the company’s CX/UX real-time Unix. The bulk of Harris’s business remains in the real-time market area. The company is meanwhile gearing up for a wide-ranging secure product announcement in a few weeks’ time. At that time it is expected to detail how it will begin selling the Compagnie des Machines Bull SA PowerPC Escalas it is taking OEM, configured with B2 Secure/Power Unix, which uses the same Unix kernel as the real-time variant. The security announcement is also expected to flesh out the work Harris is doing with Novell Inc on the Enhanced Security version of Unix System V.4.1 and its efforts selling Secure/Power on IBM RS/6000s. Harris, which already ships PowerPC-based Secure/Power systems, is working on software that will sit on top of both operating system releases in order to provide PowerOpen application binary interface compliance.
