Claiming to have talked to over 3,000 households before deciding on the design and specifications of the machine, IBM duly launched its PS/1 home computer in New York yesterday: the only material piece of information on the plug-in-and-go machine not previously published is that it has an IBM Selectric typewriter keyboard so that Mom will feel at home with the machine from her long experience of juggling the golfball. We asked moms and pops to tell us what they need in their systems, PS/1 marketing manager Skip Gladfelter told Reuters. All models come with 10MHz 80286, 2,400bps modem, mouse, Prodigy viewdata software, MS-DOS 4.0 and Microsoft Works 2.0 and VGA graphics. The $1,000 model has black-and-white screen, 512Kb and 1.44Mb 3.5 floppy, a system with colour screen, 1Mb and 30Mb disk is $2,000. Buyers are offered three months’ free use of Prodigy, which is $10 amonth thereafter. It is available now in Chicago, Minneapolis and Dallas, elsewhere in the US in September. IBM France helpfully issued an advisory confirming, as revealed here (CI No 1,440), that it will be launched in Europe with different features to meet the needs of the European market – accents on the keyboard, no Prodigy!
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