With all its competitors coming out with hot new tape drive properties, IBM Corp did not want to get left out, and made a preannouncement announcement in the UK yesterday of its New Technology Protocol or New Tape Product: seems the terms are interchangeable as this won’t be the system’s real name when it appears some time in the second half of this year and, as IBM admitted, after Storage Technology Corp’s helical scan-based Redwood ships; IBM uses linear tape technology but a metal particle medium and second generation magneto-resistive heads to increase the number of tracks from 36, pushing capacity to 10Gb; the official announcement will be next quarter but it will ship first in the third quarter with SCSI-2 interface, and the MVS version and Escon channel support will follow.
Compagnie des Machines Bull SA says consolidated 1994 turnover rose 5.9% to the equivalent of $5,880m.
The Irish Business & Employers’ Confederation called for prompt and radical moves to introduce competition in Ireland’s telecommunications market in a controversial report released yesterday: it called for state-owned Telecom Eireann to sell its major interests in cable television networks unless it could show a development plan, ideally on a joint venture basis, and wanted a regulator to create the right climate for private investment this year and it wants Ireland to renounce the option under European Community rules to suspend introduction of competition until 2003.
State-owned Swedish post and telecommunications company Telia AB should be privatised and listed on the Stockholm exchange this year managing director Lars Berg told a seminar Telia: he wants the sale this year to get in ahead of the Deutsche Telekom AG flotation, which is likely to give would-be investors in the sector acute indigestion; Berg said there had been a deathly quiet from the five-month-old centre left government about Telia privatisation plans.
IBM Corp cut Thinkpad prices for the second time in a fortnight, trimming 6% to 11% off six models.
Bill Gates has changed the name of the wholly-owned company he formed to buy licences to and exploit digitised versions of paintings to Corbis Corp, eliminating the confusion caused by the previous Continuum Productions Corp and Interactive Home Systems names it used.
Why did NEC Corp stress uses such as storing four hours of music or 15 minutes of video for its 1G-bit memory chip (CI No 2,602)? Reason is that it may be dynamic, but it is not a truly random access device, and is only fast in streaming or sequential access mode; Hitachi Ltd says that its rival part is a conventional dynamic memory chip.
Stamford, Connecticut-based IMRS Inc changed its name to Hyperion Software Corp after its flagship product, and added a new line of client-server accounting software, Hyperion Financials, which starts at $100,000 per product per site.
Electricite de France says it has asked the government to investigate alleged overbilling for electric cables by Alcatel Cable SA, but the company reiterated that it had not overbilled the state power company.
Thomson-CSF SA says turnover for 1994 rose 6.2% to the equivalent of $6,912m; turnover rose 3.5% in constant terms but the company consolidated Sextant Avionique and Hughes Rediffusion Simulation Ltd into the full year 1994 accounts.
Apple Computer Inc cut prices on its Apple PowerBook 500 series notebook computers, mostly by 14%.
MCI Communications Corp has bought a 23.5% stake in Belize Telecommunications Ltd from partner British Telecommunications Plc: the Belize government took the remaining 1.5% of British Telecom’s 25% holding.
Apple Computer Inc is celebrating its powers of persuasion after the Federal Communications Commission acceded to its request that it allocate 10MHz of radio spectrum to low-power wireless data communications or Data-PCS: the band is 2.39GHz to 2.4GHz, and is shared only with ham radio operations, which are compatible with Data-PCS devices; man
ufacturers can now produce radio modems so that educators and other users can set up their own wireless campus area networks.
Sprint Corp has signed up Sega Enterprises Ltd’s Sega Channel interactive games service for its broadband information highway trial at 1,000 homes in Wake Forest, North Carolina: Sega Channel provides video games on demand, with a range of games, tips, games news and promotions, developed with Time Warner Inc’s entertainment partnership and Tele-Communications Inc.
In one of those strange about-turns, the former Control Data Corp started out with a 20% stake in Silicon Graphics Inc, in major restructurings sold the stake, and when it spun out Control Data Systems Inc as a separate entity, Silicon Graphics ended up with a stake in the new company: now Control Data Systems has bought back 1,185,224 of the shares on undisclosed terms; it says Silicon Graphics will remain one of several suppliers of computer systems to Control Data Systems integration.
Raytheon Co, largest private employer in Massachusetts, is threatening to move its defence manufacturing operations to another state unless it gets concessions from unions, utilities and the state, the Wall Street Journal reported.
Hopkinton, Massachusetts-based EMC Corp actually did have plenty to crow about regarding its share of the mainframe storage market, if only its public relations people had given out the right figures (CI No 2,600): the authorised International Data Corp figures for 1994 show EMC in second place with a 27.2% share of the market, behind IBM Corp’s 45.3%, not the 16% we were told, and comfortably above the 20% EMC forecast in May (CI No 2,418); IDC reckons that during 1995 IBM’s share will slip to 40.5%, EMC’s will rise to 29.4% but each will have about the same share of the Gigabytes shipped, some 34%.
Jackson, Mississippi-based Mobile Telecommunication Technologies Corp says construction of its two-way US-wide wireless network is on target and that it will be serving the top 300 US metropolitan markets in the second half of this year.
Irvine, California-based Pinnacle Micro Inc cut prices on its 5.25 1.3Gb optical storage system by about 20% or $500: the Sierra optical drive will now be sold at a retail price of $2,500 for the Macintosh version, and $2,700 for the Windows and the Unix versions.
The mere fact that many competitors were too scared of reprisals to testify openly against Microsoft Corp should have been enough to persuade the US Justice Department that there was something seriously wrong and that a mild rap over the knuckles was inadequate, but now that Judge Stanley Sporkin has administered sharp chastisement to Justice, Hesh Wiener at Technology News of America Co Inc believes that Justice has got to work a lot harder to get testimony: he suggests that companies willing to testify should be guaranteed full protection, complete with a new name and a new identity, and relocation to Florida – hey, isn’t that Novell over there in a false beard?
