Nippon Telegraph & Telephone is to form a new artificial intelligence systems joint venture company with Oki Electric, which will particularly concentrate on marketing the Elis workstation, a popular knowledge engineering platform designed by NTT and manufactured for it by Oki – NTT is not permitted to manufacture itself; the joint company will be set up in June with capital of about $2m and will be 50% owned by NTT, 30% by Oki, with Tokyo banks holding the balance; Elis runs at 1 MIPS, supports Common Lisp and other artificial intelligence languages, with maximum main memory of 128Mb; it costs around $700,000 and is used for software development and machine translation.
