Motorola Inc has made so many false starts in the computer business – the takeover of Four Phase Systems proved a near unmitigated disaster and little seems to be left of the company, and efforts to become a major player selling direct to end-users have not been outstandingly successful – that it is encouraging to be able to report that the company has suddenly leaped up the league table of OEM suppliers of Unix systems built around its own microprocessors – in the UK market at least. The $5m one year deal with UK mini-maker Ferranti Computer Systems Ltd, under which the Manchester, is to take the Delta systems to sell under its own name, is joined by new OEM agreements with Bleasdale Computers Plc of Lutterworth in Leicestershire, Syfa Data Systems, Watford, Hertfordshire (a $2m deal said to have been signed back last April), and a deal with British Telecommunications Plc to supply over 200 Motorola MVE 224 memory boards for the British Telecom M6000 series launched last month. In a deal worth at least $500,000, former Telecom supplier Bleasdale will use 68030-based Delta systems, the MVME147 single board sets, and Unix System V/68 – V.3 – operating system as the basis for its future Sentinal and Senator families.
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