In a bizarre joint announcement, Intel Corp and Siemens AG yesterday said that they had tapped Joseph Kroger to head a planned joint venture computer systems company with the excruciating name of BiiN. Kroger was president and chief operating officer of Sperry Corp until it was acquired by Burroughs Corp, whereupon he assumed the post of vice chairmanship of the Unisys Corp combination. The company will be equally owned by the two partners, will operate on a worldwide scale, and will have US headquarters in Hillsboro, Oregon, European headquarters in Nuremburg. It will begin manufacturing in both the US and West Germany before the end of the year. But that’s it: there is no indication of the scale of the investment and little indication of what the company plans to do, beyond the fact that it will build and market dedicated systems for applications such as transaction processing, manufacturing, medical computing and so forth. It will be officially inaugurated today, and it is possible that the hardware will be based on a development of the ill-fated Intel iAPX-432 32-bit object-oriented chip set that Intel has been quietly working on with funding from Siemens. Siemens is the European second source for the iAPX-86 family. The partners say they’ll give more details on BiiN in second half 1988. In the UK, Trinitec Plc has been appointed a distributor for Intel Corp, initially concentrating on the System 302 OEM board level box that uses the super-fast 25MHz version of the 80386. Based on London NW, three-year-old Trinitec says it did UKP1.3m business in May alone and its pitching for UKP13m this fiscal.
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