Intel 80486based machines built around the EISA bus will soon be flooding out, and in order to make a splash, manufacturers will have to add something to differentiate their machine from all the others. Tandon Corp, Moorpark, California has done that by adding a removable erasable optical disk drive that stores 650Mb. The machine is being launched at the Systems ’89 show in Munich today, with first ships in Europe planned for the end of the year. The system includes a proprietary combination of external data cache and a write posting unit that enables the computer, under many circumstances, to achieve better than zero wait-state performance, Tandon claims, suggesting that the machine is up to 100% faster than 33MHz 80386-based machines. The Tandon 486 will start at $9,000 with 2Mb memory and a 1.2Mb 5.25 floppy drive. The top model, at about $25,000, will have 760Mb plus the optical drive, which will be offered as an option on the other models. Tandon claims that the optical disk drive represents a new generation in the removable drive market, which Tandon pioneered with its Data Pac magnetic disk drives.
