Symbolics Inc yesterday followed the lead of Texas Instruments with its MicroExplorer, based on the Apple Macintosh by coming out with MacIvory, a system that combines its own Ivory microprocessor and Genera symbolic processing environment with an Apple Macintosh II. The Cambridge, Massachusetts company is pitching the system at developers wanting a standard machine on which to deliver applications developed on Symbolics 3600 workstations and the company’s new XL400 system. The MacIvory adds a Symbolics board containing the Ivory symbolic processor and NuBus interface, and is the first product based on the Ivory microprocessor, as well as the first Symbolics product based on a non-proprietary machine. The machine with 1Mb Mac II, the board and Genera, 8Mb of NuBus memory, the Apple mouse and extended keyboard, a 12 mono screen and 300Mb SCSI disk is $21,900, with limited ships in early October. The board with 8Mb and software for existing Mac IIs will be $10,900 from next March.
The new high-end Symbolics XL400 development workstation that also includes the Ivory processor is VMEbus-based and fully compatible with the Symbolics 3600 series. It consists of Genera development software, Ivory processor board with 2M-words, input output board with ESDI, SCSI and Ethernet interfaces, an ESDI 380Mb unformatted disk and 19 mono screen with seven VME slots is $64,900 from March 1989. The company is also making its Cloe Common Lisp Operating Environment available to support applications delivery on 80386 MS-DOS systems where previously it supported delivery only on Unix systems. Cloe consists of the Developer for writing applications on the 3600, Application Generator for fine-tuning the application on an 80386 system, and Runtime for delivery of the application on the micro; the first two together cost $4,000; Cloe Runtime is $625 down to $60 according to volume, from next month.
The Open Software Foundation has chosen Symbolics Inc’s Cambridge, Massachusetts headquarters, already half-vacated, as its permanent home. The alternative Unix club will move in next month, and Symbolics will completely vacate the building a couple of months later, once it has found smaller premises more suited to its straitened means near Boston.
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