Tandon Corp has officially launched its new PCAsl/486 machine, heralded from the US as a breakthrough (CI No 1,438). However, Jamie Minotto, managing director of Tandon Plc, unflatteringly describes it as the Mustang of the personal computer world. Manufactured in Venice, it uses Tandon’s own MIAT chip set, a standard AT bus, and runs at 8MHz and 16MHz. It accepts up to 32-bit writes from the processor at zero wait states, and enables support of pipelined writes to the chip set. The PCAsl/486 includes an on-board video graphics adaptor, colour VGA monitor, 1Mb of random access memory which is expandable to 5Mb on the motherboard, a 3.5 1.44Mb floppy disk drive, one parallel and two serial ports, and three 16-bit slots and one 8-bit slot. The 110Mb version costs UKP4,000 until June 29, and rises to UKP5,000 thereafter. Tandon says it isn’t intended as a network file server, but as a standalone system running spreadsheet applications and Windows 3.0., and the company is targeting it at the corporate marketplace. Tandon has also launched an entry-level PCSsl/386sx, with an initial selling price of UKP1,500 for the mono version with a 40Mb hard disk, and UKP1,800 with the 110Mb disk drive. The 386sx has 32-bit processing, 1Mb of random access memory, a 3.5 1.44Mb floppy disk, two serial and one parallel port, three 16-bit and one 8-bit expansion slots, the Hercules graphics adaptor, and mono monitor. Both products have been launched in Europe which accounts for $338m of Tandon’s $377m worldwide sales, and the UK alone contributes $73.6m. They will be launched onto the US market in the third quarter.
