IBM duly gave its first major facelift to the Personal System/2 family – and the result was more like a swift nip and tuck than the full-scale beauty treatment. And the last-minute speculation proved correct: the company announced only the three models of the desk-top 80386-based Model 70, a bigger disk model of the Model 80, and a bigger faster disk version of the Model 60, as described in yesterday’s issue – and price cuts were very limited. In the US, there was also a version of the Model 25 with built-in Token Ring Adaptor – but the Model 25 has still not been announced in Europe and may never be. Most striking feature of the new desktop Model 70s is that the top model, with 25MHz 80386, includes the Intel 82385 cache controller and 64Kb of cache, as well as 2Mb of 80nS main memory. It has a 23mS access 120Mb disk, as does the 20MHz 386 model, which eliminates the cache and uses 85nS memory. The low-end 16MHz model has a 27mS 60Mb ESDI disk. Prices are $11,300, $8,000 and $6,000 respectively. The new 50Z model uses a 10MHz 80286 with no wait states and is claimed to offer up to 35% better performance than the much-maligned Model 50. It comes either with a 39mS access 30Mb ST506 disk or the 27mS access 60Mb ESDI disk, at $4,000 and $4,600 respectively. The new Model 25 LS – based on the cut-down version of the 8086-based Model 30, repackaged with built-in screen and pitched at the North American schools market, uses an 8MHz 8086 and includes a pre-configured IBM Token Ring Adaptor. It comes with one 720Kb 3.5 floppy with options of a second or a 20Mb hard disk. It is $2,140 with mono screen, $2,500 with colour. The new 300 dot-per-inch PageScanner is $2,400 from August and an IBM ImagEdit program 2.0 enables photos from the scanner to be incorporated into text: it is $500. In the US, some 60 and 80 models are cut by 5% to 18%, with most cuts at the low end.
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