S U N Forget about a 64-bit Sparc chip from Sun Microsystems Inc for the next three years: Sun says it’s going to do one eventually but not until it makes sense to Sun – maybe not for four or five years. S U N S U N A microphone in every machine is in Sun’s plan. S U N S U N As part of what it calls Operation Commitment, Sun last week sent out Solaris 2.0-on-Sparc beta code, otherwise described as an early production release, to 750 early access customers: not beta site, these guys represent most of Sun’s revenues. S U N S U N The first of Sun’s low-cost Tsunami boxes are scheduled towards the end of the year – previous expectations of imminence having been a tad exaggerated – Tsunami Plus boxes will follow a year later: things happen in threes so you’d be safe in figuring Sun is currently speccing out a Tsunami 3 part for a machine that should appear towards the end of 1995. S U N S U N Ditto with the high-performance SuperSparc chip Viking: there are reportedly three increasingly sexy iterations of the thing that’s the one currently being tuned; its successor slated for late 1993 and then a third generation due in late 1994. S U N S U N Sun had this notion of getting 5,000 Viking boxes out the door by the end of June but now it’s saying that’s going to be a tough schedule to meet: it’s concerned about channel readiness, getting the operating system tuned and – most especially getting volume yield on the chips; it expects to have production up into the thousands-per-month this summer. S U N S U N Reportedly no name or date’s been picked yet for the SparcStation 3 announcement but May is a nice month; Sun, by the way, reckons that the Viking will be competitive with Hewlett-Packard Co’s 720, maybe even the 730. S U N S U N Sun apparently also has a multi-team Nomadic Technology project under way, and rather than selling silicon to the Sedoin the idea is to figure out the requirements of optimising the laptop in a network environment: software is key and they’re also looking at stuff like infra-red wireless communication. S U N