Encore Computer Corp must be wondering whether it did the right thing in selling the Annex server product line to Xylogics Inc. The Burlington, Massachusetts company already has OEM agreements on the things from ICL Plc, Siemens Nixdorf Informationssysteme AG, NCR Corp, Sequent Computer Systems Inc, Intergraph Corp and Unisys Corp, and now Sun Microsystems Inc has joined the party. Its Sun Microsystems Computer Corp unit yesterday announced the Network Terminal Server, which enables 64 terminals or other serial peripheral devices to to be connected easily and economically anywhere on a Unix host-based local area network. The Network Terminal Server can be connected to any Sun server, including the new Sparccenter 2000, Sparcserver 10 and Sparcserver 600MP. Multiple Network Terminal Servers can be integrated into one network: each has 64 serial ports and one parallel port per unit, and the thing can be managed by SunNet Manager. It offers network security through data encryption, audit trails and user password, and TCP/IP support enables simultaneous connection to multiple systems with a variety of network protocols. Serial Line Internet Protocol and Compressed SLIP support remote personal computers and X Window System terminals. Sun will start ships next month at $7,000. Until a year ago, Xylogics used the National Semiconductor Corp NS32000 microprocessor family in the Annex servers that are the subject of the deal with Sun, but it then switched to the Intel Corp 80376, which is the embedded version of the 80386. It says it may switch to a RISC microprocessor in future iterations of what is becoming an extremely popular product on the OEM market.
