What You See Is What You Get was the promise made by announcement SBC made at the launch of its new Document and Layout Printing System, aimed at both the DTP market and the demanding WP user. Those who like communicating by means of these hideous simian sounding acronyms will divine that the company is aiming at the desk-top publishing and high-end word processing market, but will likely be bemused by SBC until they learn that it is the business computer division of Spectrum Group Plc in Luton, Bedfordshire. The message refers to the monitor’s 72-line display which enables A4 documents to be viewed in full and then printed exactly as they appear. Simultaneous display of both text and graphics can be achieved by splitting the screen into two, the top half showing a standard 25-line text screen and the bottom half a Colour Graphics Array emulation. With a 70Hz screen refresh rate, the display is claimed to be almost flicker free. Another feature of the system is the Speedlaser LP6 printer, which has both HP LaserJet and FX100 emulation drivers, and turns out on average six pages per minute, since data is transferred from the computer via a video port at a rate of 2.54Mbps. The SBC 286AT AT-alike is claimed to come with drivers for over 250 software programs, such as Aldus Systems’ Pagemaker, Microsoft Windows and Digital Research’s GEM Graphics Environment Manager. Optional extras for the system include a Microsoft compatible mouse and an uninterruptable power supply facility. Finally, if you like what you see, you can get the complete system for UKP5,000.
