Longmont, Colorado-based Matsushita Electric Industrial Co affiliate Solbourne Computer Inc, which announced plans in September to base a new range of superworkstations around an ultra large scale integration version of Sun Microsystems’ SPARC processor, is gearing up to introduce its first products as early as January 1989. Last week the company opened area headquarters with sales offices in San Jose, Chicago and Boston, and sales offices in Denver, Minneapolis and Syracuse. Two more offices are planned for Washington DC and Los Angeles. According to David McDonald, senior vice-president at Solbourne, beta testing is now well under way and has been very successful, with early customer shipments set to begin in December. Solbourne has also announced a distribution deal with Template Graphics Software Inc, San Diego, California, for its Figaro implementation of the PHIGS Programmer’s Hierarchical Interactive Graphics System standard. Funded to the tune of $50m, much of it from its Japanese partner, Solbourne now employs around 100 staff, and is developing its ULSI version of the Sparc in conjunction with Matsushita for use in the Sun-4-compatible workstations.
