Want to be one step ahead of the Chancellor of the Exchequer in getting the prospects for the UK economy wrong? Policy Models Ltd of London, which markets HM Treasury’s computer model of the UK economy is recommending a coprocessor board for IBM ATalikes that makes making your own forecasts child’s play and leaves your micro looking little like an AT. The board, from Definicon Systems Inc of Newbury Park, California, packs a 20MHz 68020 microprocessor with 68881 maths coprocessor and 4Mb of memory. Policy Models supplies quarterly updates of the model and the latest historic data from the Treasury, and subscribers can run as many different models as they choose with no marginal cost apart from time. The model enables users to enter various assumptions such as setting the dollar at $2.10 and at $1.50 to the pound three months out, and the oil price at $20 a barrel and $6 a barrel, and seeing what impact those variables would have on the economy at the same time learning by experience the truth of the adage garbage in, garbage out. The benefit of the Definicon board is that it cuts the time to run a model to five minutes from 30 minutes when you use an AT with 80287 coprocessor, seven or eight minutes with an 80386 machine and 80387. The coprocessor software is designed to be loaded from MSDOS on the micro, and the highspeed DSI780+/4 board sells for UKP3,595.
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