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November 1, 1987

TEKTRONIX RETURNS TO THE WORKSTATION FRAY WITH A BANG AFTER RETIRING HURT LAST TIME

By CBR Staff Writer

Tektronix UK Ltd last week filled in the details on its belated attempt to reenter the workstation market (CI No 798). The company has announced 14 new graphics products all told: eight graphics workstations, five graphics terminals and a standalone applications processor. At the top of the range is the 4337 three-dimensional colour graphics workstation based on dual Motorola 68020s, 68881 co-processor, custom gate arrays with a pipelined graphics architecture. Tektronix claims that the system can redraw up to 450,000 2D and 340,000 3D vectors, and up to 20,000 shaded polygrams per second. The 4330 series supports 2D and 3D wireframe, shaded surface and stereoscopic representations – the 4237 terminal also supports these capabilities. The 3D 4330 range also includes the 4335 and 4336 workstations, and 4235 and 4236 terminals which offer wireframe and shaded surface capabilities respectively. The two dimensional products, the 4320 series, are based on a single 68020 processor with the 68881 floating point co-processor with a floating point accelerator as an option. The workstation range in the 2D series include the 4324 and 4325; 4224 and 4225 denote the terminals in the range. Bottom of the range is the 4310 series of bit-mapped workstations which again uses the 68020 and 68881 and has three models in the range: 4315, 4316, and 4317. Software on the workstations includes UTek, Tektronix’ implementation of Berkeley Unix with System V extensions, Sun’s Network File System, C, Fortran, X Window, and the new products are also compatible with Tektronix’ Plot-10 graphics standard. Tektronix also announced in London that 13 European graphics software companies are supporting the new workstations following the US anouncement that 50 companies worldwide would be doing so. The Europeans include Byg, Cisigraph, Dalim, DeltaCAM, Fegs, Gable, High-Tex-Systems, MCS, Pafec, PDA, Sarasota, SDRC, and Uniras. Prices for the 3D workstations start at UKP32,950 and the terminals in the series range between UKP19,950 and UKP34,950. In the 2D range the workstations cost UKP24,950 and UKP27,950 with the terminals coming in at UKP11,950. Prices for the 4310 series start at UKP9,250 and go up to UKP17,500. The company added that it would be using new processors from Motorola as they become available, indicating that Tektronix is probably considering taking the forthcoming MC78000 RISC chip.

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