Rexon Inc is a very different company these days from the firm Ben Wang founded with the cash he got from selling his Wangco tape drive firm to Perkin-Elmer in the mid-1970s. His first machine was based on the Intel 8086, which was then so new that there were no off-the-shelf operating systems for it, and Rexon had to write its own – a multi-user executive for small business users. Today that company is now just the Business Machines division of Rexon Inc, now a $100m-a-year company, which also takes in Wangtek – created by Ben Wang as a subsidiary – and Tecmar, acquired about a year ago. But Rexon has gone back to its roots to introduce a mid-range addition to its Summit series of multi-user systems. The Summit 2000 bridges the gap between the 16-user 80286-based Summit 2000 and the high-end Summit 4000, also recently introduced: it has an AT bus and can run Xenix, Pick or Business Basic operating systems, for up to 32 users. The Summit 4000 has a dual-bus architecture, with both 32-bit VME and 16-bit IBM AT data buses and an 80386 CPU – it can support up to 128 users. A future release will include multiple 80386 machines. Rexon says that it does up to a third of its business in Europe, and has an office in Versailles, from which it has completed 2,500 installations through dealers and distributors. Only 10% of these are currently Xenix but it says the percentage is growing.
Content from our partners
