Hitachi Ltd has expanded its M-series mainframe family with the Hitac M-840 series designed for use in an office environment. A new version of Hitachi’s proprietary flag-ship VOS operating system, VOSK was also released, with support for office personal computers and database servers in a multivendor environment via TCP/IP or direct connection to ISDN. The M-840 processor group uses 0.8 design rule 150,000 gate CMOS arrays, and multiprocessor configurations enable a single installation to be expanded to provide a 14-fold increase in performance. The main cabinet which occupies just three square feet, can take up to 13.2Gb of disk. The M-840s have a new H6906-K1 semiconductor memory unit, with an access time of 500 microseconds, data transfer rate of 4M-bytes per second and maximum capacity of 120Mb; and H-6485-5 cartridge tape unit, with transfer speed of 1.5m-bytes per second and autoloading and demounting of up to eight cartridges. VOSK supports the Eagle development environment, and a new release of Hitachi’s RDB1E2 database. M-840 prices range from $86,000 for the Model 10 rigt up to $2m for the Model 90.
