British Olivetti has come out with a low-end MS-DOS micro that is pitched primarily at the higher education market. Positioned between its PC1 – launched in Italy in July, 1987 and now distributed here by Dixons – and the bigger M240, the M200 is based on the NEC V40 highly-integrated version of the V20, making it equivalent to an Intel 80188. It comes with display, 640Kb 8 MHz CPU, twin 720Kb floppies, serial and parallel ports and MS DOS 3.3 and two XT slots for UKP850, UKP1,100 with one floppy and a 20Mb hard disk. Options include EGA graphics for colour display, and Mulitlan local area network. The system, manufactured in Italy, is to be distributed through selected specialist dealers, and is said to be suitable for networking in commercial environments. There is a 20% discount for educational establishments; Lincolnshire County Council has already ordered eight, and Olivetti hopes the M200 will win it a substantial proportion of the 623,000 micros International Data Corp sees installed for further and higher Education by 1992.
