Declaring that he was presenting the New Olivetti, Carlo de Benedetti, chairman of Ing C Olivetti SpA yesterday duly took the wraps off the Italian’s Open Systems Architecture and its LSX 3000 integrated family of – currently seven – processors that support from two to 200 users and are rated at 2 MIPS to 9 MIPS. The standards embraced by Open Systems Architecture – a name filched from ICL, which announced its own Open Systems Architecture about five years ago – include Unix, OS/2 and MS DOS, the Intel and Motorola microprocessor families, X25, IBM SNA and Open Systems Interconnection networking, X400 messaging, and Ethernet and Starlan local area networking. The Stratus Computer fault-tolerant machines, sold by Olivetti as CPS-32, as well as Olivetti’s new generation M-series personal computers, are embraced in the new strategy. Despite the apparent product conflict, Olivetti will continue to market the AT&T 3B Unix machines. No doubt for the benefit of Vittorio Cassoni, head of AT&T’s computer operations, who was present at yesterday’s meeting at Westminster’s new Queen Elizabeth II Conference Centre, it was said that the 3B machines offered better security and better networking and communications than the LSX 3000. The LSX models are the 3005, 3010, based on the 68010, and the 3020, the 3030, with two CPUs, and the 3040 with three, are all based on the 68020. There is then a gap (for 68030 models?) to the 3070 and 3080, which are based on the Edge Computers processor, which is com patible with the 68020 but substan tially more powerful. The machines run Unix and Olivetti’s proprietary MOS operating system – not concurr ently – and Olivetti has decided not to offer Pick, which is availa ble in the US on the Edge machine. MOS users will generally get away with simply recompiling to move to MOS on the new machines, but moving to Unix will require a rewrite, al though MOS Cobol will be available under Unix next year. The LSXs go $17,000 to $500,000, and although Olivetti gave prices in dollars, it will not offered them in the US. The 3005, 3010, 3020 and 3080 are available now, and the others will follow in the second quarter 1988.
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