Memorex Telex International NV yesterday called a vast meeting in Paris to preview a grab-bag of new products from top to bottom of its business spectrum – but without giving prices or delivery dates on anything. At the top, the company announced the 3500, an optical storage subsystem believed to come from Hitachi Ltd that, fully configured, can store up to 1,362Gb on 2,620 12 optical disks. Best feature of the system is that it can emulate the IBM 3480 tape drive and therefore can attach to any IBM operating system and machine that supports the 3480: that’s the A80 version. The A20 is aimed primarily at image processing applications and is supported by the three current MVS variants, VM/XA and VM/SP. It consists of a controller and one to four libraries, each with from two to five drives, each drive handling up to 131 disks. Next down the company’s 6890 solid state disk alternative now comes in an Expanded Ca-pability Feature version supporting 4.5Mbyte-per-second and 6Mbps channels and quadruples memory capacity in only twice the floor space, going from 16Mb to 256Mb in 64Mb increments. The 3262 tape subsystem for the AS/400 will be shipped two months after IBM ships the 3422 or 3430 for the new machine, although in the UK it has indicated that demand is such that it won’t wait for IBM (CI No 996). The company also stressed local networking with a 7070 Token Ring file server for the IBM 3270 environment, and four versions of Novell Inc’s NetWare. In printers there is a 2,000 lpm offering for the System 38 and six new 3270 printers, plus a 90 page per minute non-impact printer for the 38 and an 1808 desk-top laser printer for personal computers with 1Mb internal store, and eight page per-minute printing at 300 dots-per-inch. In displays, there are new 1192 3270 screens the C2 and F2 being 14 colour displays, the D2 a 15 mono and the W2 a 15 black-on-white. There are advanced function and basic function 1197s in mono and colour, and for the AS/400, three 12 196s, one in colour. And a line of 80386SX workstations is planned.
