Tandon Computers has confirmed that its European operations are of vital importance to worldwide profitability, contributing $73m to worldwide sales of $83.8m in the third quarter alone. James Minotto, UK managing director, believes that Tandon UK will achieve a turnover UKP50m this year, an increase of UKP22m on 1988 figures, and he says that the US market is assuming niche proportions, which seems a realistic assessment of its 12.9% share of the $83.8m. The company has also revealed two new laptop machines and availablity of the Tandon 486 (CI No 1,284) in the first quarter of 1990, inevitably subject to Intel meeting committments and schedules. The LT/286 and LT/386 have 3.5 1.44Mb disk drives with 20Mb and 40Mb hard drives respectively. The 286 runs at 12MHz with an average access time of 28mS, and the 386 runs at 16MHz. The 286 has an EGA monochrome backlit LCD screen with 16 shades of grey, and the 386 version is VGA monochrome. Both have an RS-232-C serial port and an IBM compatible parallel port on the main board, plus a 16-bit slot with AT bus and RS-232-C signals. Options include 2Mb memory modules, external 5.25 disk drives, and Windows/286 or 386. The 386 was advertised at UKP3,300 and the 286 at UKP2,500. However, Tandon has announced that the machines have been discounted to UKP2,500 and UKP2,000 respectively. The new Tandon 486 is scheduled for production at the end of this year, and the 25MHz version is claimed to have higher performance than the 33MHz 80386/80387 combination. Unix and OS/2 enable MS-DOS to run in conjunction with other applications, and is claimed to be suitable for network server functions. Memory can be expanded up to 64Mb without expansion slots, and 32-bit memory can be added by using EISA slots. Memory read performance is enhanced by a 64Kb external cache, and a write posting unit enables the processor to write data without wait states. A write buffer gathers byte, word, and double word writes for updates to main memory, and the combination of external cache and posted writes facilitates zero wait state under some circumstances. The EISA bus has 32-bit addressing and data transfer, and disks are connected through an intelligent cahing SCSI controller. The system disk is a formatted 760Mb SCSI Winchester drive, and the Ricoh read-write magneto-optical disk drive stores 300Mb per side on an ISO standard cartridge. The new machine will have an entry level price of UKP8,000 going up to UKP24,000 for high-end models.
