Mitsubishi Electric Corp yesterday announced that it would be the second Japanese company – Hitachi Ltd was the first – to offer Unix machines built around the Hewlett-Packard Co Precision Architecture RISC. It appears that Mitsubishi will be buying the machines OEM, and it is to sell the workstations at prices ranging from the equivalent of some $16,500 to $62,500. Mitsubishi is aiming to get more than 15,000 away over three years, implying business in the low hundreds of millions of dollars for Hewlett-Packard. It will offer the HP-UX implementation of Unix on the machines, and will also work with the Cupertino company on Unix software and technology. This month, Mitsubishi ended mainframe development and agreed to buy ES/9121s and operating software OEM from IBM Japan Ltd (CI No 1,670).
