Human Designed Systems Inc is now into its second generation X-terminals, and claims the best price-performance on the market. The company, based in one of the most unlikely-sounding towns in the world, King of Prussia, in the Philadelphia, Pennsylvania suburbs, plans to sell heavily on the OEM market and says it can easily customise the units, dis guising the fact that vendors will all be selling the same box. OEM customers, for instance, could configure the Human Designed units with mice, keyboards and screen purchased from other suppliers. Human Designed Systems reckons this will help avoid over-distribution, a factor it believes will impede its top competitor, Mountain View, California-based Network Computing Devices Inc. The new machines, the Viewstation Plus, reportedly offer a six-fold increase in speed over their predecessors. They come with up to 10Mb memory; 14, 15, 16, 17, 19 and 21 screens; and 256 displayable colour, grey-scale and monochrome. Prices start at $2,000 for a monochrome unit and top out at $6,000. Uniquely, the Viewstation Plus can be upgraded from small screen to large or from mono to colour and come with a new four-year warranty. Human Designed Systems has gone over to the high-end 60MHz Texas Instruments Inc TI 34010 graphics signal processor chip backed by a 16MHz Intel 80186 used as a communications processor. Quoting Dataquest and International Data Corp figures, the company estimates that 60,000 X-terminals will be sold this year, and it would be more but for the lack of office automation software, and 250,000 next year. In the X-terminal market since last year, Human Designed Systems declined to discuss its installed base but it noted that it shipped 1,000 units last month.
