The Boston-based Helios Systems division of Dynatech Co’s Piiceon Inc reckons that the market for Sun Microsystems Inc’s Sun-3 workstation board set has reached the point where it justifies the doubtful accolade of a line of plug-compatible memory boards – and that Sun’s pricing is sufficiently conservative that it can make money while undercutting Sun’s prices. Helios is offering 4Mb, 8Mb and 12Mb memory boards compatible with the Sun-3 Eurocard VME board set, and the MSE boards plug directly into Sun’s Eurocard VME system, and operate on the Sun P2 bus. Systems designers can expand the 4Mb Sun Eurocard system in increments of 4Mb, building 8Mb, 12Mb or 16Mb systems using a single add-in Helios MSE board – and the boards are the smaller 6U format against Sun’s 9U boards – and Helios suggests that there are also more input-output boards available for the 6U configuration than for 9U. The 4Mb board lists for $3,000, the 8Mb board, which has no Sun counterpart, is $5,000 and the 12Mb is $7,000.
