Mountain View, California-based Opus Systems Inc is shipping the Sparcard 2, a Sparc co-processor board that adds the performance and functionality of the Sun Microsystems Inc Sparcstation 2 to any IBM AT-alike. It uses a 40MHz Sparc and enables the box to run both MS-DOS and Windows applications and the 3,500 or so Sparc applications concurrently. The board, rated at 28.5 MIPS, features specialised system software that tightly integrates MS-DOS and Unix environments and allows for switching back and forth between the two with single keystroke or mouse click, and supports file transfers between the two. It comes with 8Mb, on-board Ethernet, SCSI connectors, two SBus connectors, one serial port, one audio port and an AT interface that support the AT’s keyboard, mouse and floppy drive. The PC3i Colour Frame Buffer occupies an SBus slot on the Sparcard and an adjacent slot in the AT and supports 1,152 by 900 displays at 256 colours, as well as 1,024 by 768, 800 by 600 and 640 by 480 displays. A 213Mb disk drive comes pre-installed with Solaris 1.0 including SunOS 4.1.1, Open Windows, Network File System, TCP/IP, C compiler, SunView, and SunOS utilities. The board on its own costs $4,145, and the full kit sells for $6,265.
