Following a successful first showing of the product at Comdex last November, SunRiver Corp, Jackson, Missoururi, has now appointed a distributor, S K Micro Systems Ltd of Letchworth in Hertfordshire, to sell its fibre optic workstation systems in the UK. SunRiver’s Cygna 386 system is claimed to make high speed graphics available for the first time on remote terminals by using fibre optic links between the host computer and individual SunRiver stations. Connected via a four port AT-bus adaptor card and full duplex fibre optic cable, allowing a data transfer rate of 32Mbits-per-second – against 10Mbps Ethernet and 20Kbps for an ASCII RS-232 terminal – each station is a host-dependent device that includes one parallel and two serial ports, and keyboard and video controllers. An 80386-based AT-bus host computer running Xenix could support up to 16 users, and a 386 machine with 32-bit internal bus up to 32 users. With standard driver support provided by both the Santa Cruz Operation’s SCO Xenix and Microport’s Unix System V, a system with VP/ix from Phoenix Technologies or Merge 386 MS-DOS under Unix from Locus Computing Corp can access the full bit-mapped graphics capabilities of MS DOS software. High-end Xenix-based computer-aided design and desktop publishing software previously limited to single users could also be accessed, and SunRiver looks fort Unix software houses to take advantage of fibre optic technology to begin developing graphcs-based software. EGA, CGA and Hercules graphics are supported: an EGA station will be sold by S K for UKP1,325 in the UK, with a four port adaptor card for UKP575 and 25 foot of fibre optic cable at UKP75. In the US, EGA stations start at $1,600.
