Making it appear that IBM Corp still isn’t up to speed on hitting the fast-moving pricing target in the low-end Unix market, even before the company announces its bottom end ES/6000s, said to have a base price of $7,000, San Jose, California-based Tatung Science & Technology Inc has come out with a colour micro Compstation at just $4,290 for a diskless system with a 15 colour monitor with 20MHz CPU delivering 12.5 MIPS. With 207Mb hard disk drive, 8Mb of memory and the screen, it’s $5,000. The 25MHz version of the same configuration is $6,000. The power may be modest, but vendors need to have rock-bottom pricing on low-end models if they hope to win large one-per-desk contracts that involve a couple of dozen big, profitable servers and scores of stations. Memory goes to 64Mb, disk to 680Mb and the monitor supports resolutions of 1,152 by 900 to 1,280 by 1,024.
