Headstart Technologies Inc in Great Neck, New York is Philips NV’s white hope acquisition to buy the Dutch company a slice of the US personal computer market, and the machines will in future be characterised by all the add-on technologies Philips wants to promote. So it is that, as Newsbytes reports, the company has become only the second in the world to offer a microcomputer with a CD-ROM drive as standard – and the first to offer an MS-DOS box with one. Headstart’s LX-CD is an Intel 8088-based machine at under $2,000, and like the bigger, 80286-based III-CD, comes standard with a 5.25 680Mb CD-ROM drive with stereo sound, one 1.44Mb 3.5 floppy and 40Mb hard drive. The Headstart III-CD at $3,000 has VGA, MCGA, EGA, CGA, and Hercules graphics where the LX-CD has only VGA. But the biggest attraction is the bundled text on CD-ROM – 1Gb including the New Grolier Electronic Encyclopaedia, Microsoft Bookshelf with the American Heritage Dictionary, The World Almanac and Book of Facts, US Zip Code Directory, Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations, The Chicago Manual of Style, Roget’s II Electronic Thesaurus, Business Information Sources, a spelling corrector, and usage verifier, PC Globe world atlas, Hotline Two telephone management software, National Directory of Addresses and Telephone Numbers, PC Globe, music CD Guide Optical Edition, and Audio Music Disk Sampler. The only other box with CD-ROM standard is Fujitsu Ltd’s FM-Towns – and that’s doing poorly because it doesn’t have a standard operating system or much software.
