Ing C Olivetti & Co SpA’s new additions to its LSX 5000 range of high-end servers includes a 60MHz Pentium processor (CI No 2,233) and a commitment to promoting Windows NT on the system. But the range will soon share shelf space with Olivetti’s first Alpha RISC-based workstations. Olivetti will start buying them in from Digital Equipment Corp this autumn and in (an unspecified) time will start making them itself and will then progress to Alpha servers. Unix System V.4 will go onto the Alpha machines, with DEC’s OSF/1 running as an internal kernel. Unix will remain the server environment for Olivetti’s open system architecture strategy with Windows NT being phased into selected applications. The phase-in period will depend on several factors: the market response to NT, how quickly NT technologies mature and what other NT products are launched. Executive vice-president Lucio Pinto confirmed that Olivetti will stop buying Pyramid Technology Corp Unix boxes, likely in a year’s time: There will be a transition from Pyramid to Alpha.
