Sony Microsystems Co yesterday launched the first laptop computer built around the MIPS Computer Systems Inc R-series RISC in the US. The News 3250 Laptop Workstation is designed to enable Unix engineers, scientists and researchers to take their machines into the field and is also pitched at software development and technical publishing. It comes with Unix System V.4 on a 20MHz MIPS R3000 RISC delivering 17 MIPS, with 20MHz R3010 co-processor to do 1.8 MFLOPS. It has the Motif user interface, X Window protocols, TCP/IP and Network File System. It comes with 240Mb disk for $9,900 starting in March and 406Mb disk for $11,900 in May. External SCSI devices are supported.
