Is IBM prepared for the swarms of third parties that will be gathering around the lucrative IBM RS/6000, selling their memory and peripherals at greatly reduced prices compared with IBM’s own? Whereas System 36 and System 38 users never had a history of buying large parts of the system from third parties, it’s a way of life in the Unix world, and that means considerably less business for IBM. This week comes news of two companies offering cut-price memory for the RS/6000. Cambex Corp, Waltham, Massachusetts, has launched the Certainty 6500 Series of low-cost memory in 16Mb and 32Mb increments for the IBM RS/6000 models 320, 520, 530, 730 and 930, at prices up to 50% below IBM list prices (CI No 1,628). And the company also has a low-cost family of SCSI disk subsystems, the Certainty 6200 Series, with disk capacities in increments of 330Mb, 670Mb and 1Gb, which can be connected to the standard IBM RS/6000 SCSI attachment cards, and used in conjunction with IBM external disk and tape models, or Cambex 525Mb quarter-inch tape drives. model. Meanwhile, Meltek Data Ltd of Feltham, Middlesex in the UK, has also launched add-in memory expansion modules of 16Mb, 32Mb and 64Mb for the RS/6000. Called the CR6000 family, they can be used to expand memory on a RS/6000 Model 320 to 64Mb, the 520, 530, 730 and 930 to 128Mb, the 540 to 256Mb, and the 550 to 512Mb. The boards are sourced from an Australian company called Castle Rock Pty Ltd. Meltek, which also has offices in the US and Germany, also plans to offer disk and tape drives. Prices start from UKP1,650 for the 16Mb kit up to UKP3,200 for the 32Mb and UKP6,075 for the 64Mb kit. Others waiting in the wings to target the market for add-ons for the RS/6000 that undercut by a wide margin IBM’s own offerings include Parity Systems Inc, of Sunnyvale, California, and Clearpoint Inc, Hopkinton, Massachusetts.
