Having failed to cause a ripple with its first two attempts at a portable computer, IBM has so lost confidence in its ability to read the market that it is loth to tool up to make its third attempt, announced yesterday, itself, and has handed manufacture of the thing over to Matsushita Electric Industrial Co. The PS/2 P70 386 is billed as Model 70 packaged as a portable – weighing in at nearly 21 lbs and featuring a 16-grey scale gas plasma display with VGA, 20MHz 80386 CPU, 4Mb memory, 1.44Mb floppy and 60Mb or 120Mb disk, at $7,700 or $8,300 – UKP5,390 and UKP5,820 here. It has one full and one half Micro Channel slots, and an external device can be attached via a $100 cable. No batteries – it is mains powered. The PS/2 55SX is the 16MHz 80386SX-based machine intended to consign Micro Channel 80286 machines to the dustbin of history. It comes with 2Mb to 16Mb memory, with the 30Mb disk model costing $3,900 in the US, UKP2,560 here; with 60Mb disk, it’s $4,300, UKP2,790 in the UK. It also offers the new 80387SX maths chip as an $800 option. The 60Mb disk version will run AIX in the future. At 19 lbs it weighs less than the portable – but that’s without a screen. There is a new external 5.25 floppy disk drive available from IBM as well as dealers – sounds like there’s been some resistance to the rush to 3.5 – and in the US, a string of inducements to try to persuade more people to adopt OS/2 – rebates on on memory expansion options for 80286- and 80386-based PS/2s and on IBM communications adaptor cards, an internal modem, 60Mb fixed disk drive upgrade, and more than 100 OS/2 applications offered by IBM and other software developers. Full details will be given here in a day or two.
