Intergraph Corp has lowered the cost of entry to its graphical workstation family by introducing a new range of low-end systems – the Series 2000. With prices starting from around $16,000, the Huntsville, Alabama-based company is claiming that the new models – configured as fully functional and production ready are priced well below competitive machines once those have been set up to run real two- and three-dimensional colour applications. The InterPro 2020 comes in single or dual 19 screen versions, either as a desktop machine or with integral furniture and digitising table, and uses Intergraph’s own Clipper C300 RISC chip, which is rated at 12.5 MIPS. Standard features include 16Mb memory (expandable to 64Mb), 200Mb hard disk, 1.4Mb floppy, SCSI port, three RS232 serial ports and one parallel port. The graphics engine is capable of 360,000 two-dimensional vectors per second and 100,000 three-dimensional vectors per second. Running Unix System V.3.1 – Intergraph is planning a move to the Open Software Foundation’s OSF/1 – the systems come with the Looking Glass interface from Visix Software Inc, and support XNS and TCP/IP communications – and Intergraph claims to have built up over 900 in-house and third party applications for the range. They are available immediately. And the company has lowered the price of its mid-range and high-end 6000 Series workstation, which were introduced back in January at the UniForum show. The cuts range from 10% to 35%, with a 27, 2-Megapixel display workstation now available at $26,000, a price comparable with rival 19 display workstations, Intergraph suggests.
