Nippon Kokan KK, one of Japan’s major steelmakers, has teamed up with a venture capital startup, Zestech Inc of Yokohama to build a personal computer designed specifically for scientific and engineering applications: it is being designed to deliver 10 MFLOPS and to take concurrent input of 1,024 data items, and to outperform existing data analysis machines many times: the hardware will be developed by Zestech and the software by Nippon Kokan, which has considerable experience in building wave-form analysis and vibration analysis systems; the machine is being designed to sell for around $25,000 against $80,000 to $240,000 for a minicomputer delivering the same data analysis performance.
