ICL yesterday announced formation of a new departmental systems development group with headquarters in Irvine, California, which merges its Unix minicomputer development team with that of the parent back home.The Departmental Servers Group will spearhead planning and development of all of ICL’s mid-range systems, including the new DRS 6000 series of Sparc-based Unix machines, which will be available in the US this year. The aim is to capitalise on high-end Unix expertise of the Irvine research and development group [which had been developing Computer Consoles Inc’s own proprietary RISC processor before ICL’s parent STC Plc bought the company and killed the project] while ensuring the cross fertilisation of world- class skills between the company’s Calif ornia and UK organisations. It looks for the merger to yield a family of systems offering unmatched price-performance for virtually any business and commercial en vironment ranging from entry-level systems to multinodal high-end Unix servers. The move is part of a larger ICL reorganisati on in which the new Departmental Servers Group becomes part of a new Computer Prod ucts Division under Tom Hinchliffe. The other groups in the division are Corporate Servers, structured around the Series 39 VME mainframes – new top models due short ly; Workstation Products, System Software; and Peripherals and Technology Products.
