A new British player launched itself into the workstation market at the end of last week – Lynwood Scientific Developments Ltd of Alton in Hampshire, which first revealed its intentions back in June last year (CI No 954), has now launched the Open 30 family of 16MHz, 68030-based Unix workstations with two models, the 100 and 200. Aimed at the lower end of the market for office administration applications, and with a starting price of UKP3,000 when you buy the minimum quantity of 10, Lynwood hopes to cash in on the growing number of customers looking at distributed networks, who are unwilling to pay the price of a full-blown workstation and are considering personal computers. The entry level Model 100 provides around 3 MIPS performance, and comes with 4Mb RAM, a SCSI controller, thick and thin Ethernet, two serial lines and a 14 mono screen, while the 200 has up to 8Mb RAM and a 20 mono screen. Optional floating point, 160Mb hard disk, and cartridge tape units are also available, but long-time ASCII terminal manufacturer Lynwood sees the majority of machines being sold as diskless nodes. Operating system is Lynwood’s Lynx version of Unix System V.3 with Berkeley extensions, and the workstations include X-Window, Network File System, and Hunter Systems’ X-DOS MS-DOS-to-Unix converter. A colour version is planned for September, and Lynwood also plans to launch a compatible terminal range over the next few weeks, and later on will produce X-Window terminals, according to Lynwood spokesman Frank Turner. Systems will be sold mostly via through value added resellers, and OEM. Lynwood was acquired last year by Hunting Associated Indsutries Plc, which has strong defence electronics interests, and Lynwood revealed that it has been shipping Tempested versions of the workstations for over six months, and that it has shipp ed over 1,000 to defence customers.
