California start-up Networking Computing Devices Inc, formed in Mountain View back in February, has plans for a network display workstation designed to come in below full diskless workstations, but offer more flexibility than a terminal. Founders included Mike Harrington, Ed Basart and Doug Klein from Ridge Computer, along with key figures from Priam and Wyse Technology, and man agement team Bill Carrico and Judy Estrin from Bridge Communica tions Inc, now part of 3Com. Having secured $5m in venture funding, the firm is completing development of its first product, the NCD 16, which uses a 16-bit 68000 CPU to host the X- Window Server and Ethernet TCP/IP – no operating system, disk or fan is included (CI No 1,006). We are tracking other windowing and connectivity options, said Harrington, but the first product will be X-based. A graphics chip to handle line drawing will also be included, but graphics capability is mostly aimed at text, at least initially. The idea is to price the systems between dumb terminals and diskless workstations. At Ridge, we saw a lot of manufacturers had a need for this sort of product, said Harrington. The company will sell OEM, and plans to push for European business simultaneously with the US. According to Harrington future products will be competitive with Apple Macs and MS-DOS boxes.
