Tektronix Inc was the very first company to declare for the Motorola Inc 88000 RISC microprocessor, but allowed Data General Corp to beat it to market with products, but the Tek line is now ready to go, and makes its debut as the XD88 family. There are two XD88 workstations, an applications processor and a file server, all of which are compatible with Tektronix’s existing workstations and netstations. The VMEbus-based systems – which also include Future Bus for the 88000 – clock at 20MHz and have from 8Mb to 176Mb memory. Rated at 17 MIPS, and 12 MFLOPS, the compute engines have four 64Kb units of cache memory. All run Unix System V.3 with Berkeley extensions and X Window, and have TCP/IP, Network File System, PLOT 10, GKS, PHIGS and IBM AT emulation. The XD88/30 is a three-dimensional graphics workstation in wireframe, shaded solid and or true colour configurations, supporting 256, 4,096 or 1.3m colours respectively, from UKP29,950. The XD/88/20 is a two-dimensional model with 256 colours, costing UKP24,950. The XD/88/01 applications generator can drive existing Tektronix terminals or netstations, priced UKP19,950. Finally, there is the XD/88/05 file server with 1.8Gb of disk. The workstations will ship in June, and the file server will be available in September. Tektronix has added raw compute power to its existing graphics engine in preparation for future expansion into the arena of visualisation technology. Later this month – and over the course of the year the Wilsonville, Oregon based firm is to introduce animation techniques into the graphics side of its systems, based on technology from the television and video subsidiaries it owns. Visualisation and animation are expected to become the standard technologies for graphics systems in the near future. When running, applications will resemble video, but the images will be generated by the computer rather than by camera.
