IBM Corp’s Power Personal systems, to be launched on June 19 at the Grand Hyatt Hotel in New York, were much in evidence on the show floor at SunWorld last week, report’s today’s edition of our sister paper Unigram.X. IBM was touting Solaris for PowerPC on the Sun Microsystems Inc stand and at the booth of one of its partners, imaging software house Orion Systems Inc of Danvers, Massachusetts. The systems – now officially christened the Personal Computer Power Series – will include at least the two models shown at SunWorld, a 133MHz 604-based desktop system that will come in a slimline version as well as the more bulky, expandable system on the show floor, and the new 603E-based notebook, badged as the Power Series 800, which will also come in two versions, one with a built-in video camera for video conferencing. Both were running an early beta of Solaris 2.5. Although Sun only received a 604-based machine two weeks prior to the show, IBM is apparently quietly confident that it can resolve its 604 chip shortage to meet its schedules. And, in a show of equity at the launch, IBM will be showing AIX, Windows NT, OS/2 and Solaris, each running five applications. Pricing won’t be finalised until nearer the event. Meanwhile, Motorola Inc was also showing what it called technology demonstrations of Solaris running on its low-end PowerPC PowerStacks at SunWorld. While officially Motorola maintained a no announcements, no commitments stance to offering Solaris on them, unofficially it was talking excitedly about pent-up demand for the biggest Unix version out there. In any case Motorola’s PowerPC partner Compagnie des Machines Bull SA is already promising Solaris on re-worked PowerStacks it says it will be shipping by the year-end.
