Hewlett-Packard Co duly announced its Gecko ultra-low-cost Unix workstation yesterday, launching it as the 712/60 at a knock-out $4,000. The price includes the 60MHz PA-7100LC RISC processor, 16Mb memory, 260Mb disk and a 15 colour monitor. The chip includes multimedia support. The 712/60 is aimed at the financial trading, document and image mangement, customer service and application development markets, and there is also a 712/80i variant with 80MHz chip. The announcement also included the new HP 9000 Model E-class business servers, which use the same low-end chip, and start at $6,000, and low-end Entria X-terminals, which start at $1,000. On the software front, the luanch included HP Wabi 1.1 and Insignia Solutions Ltd’s SoftWindows for high-performance emulation of Microsoft Corp Windows and MS-DOS applications.
