Turning up under the new name of ABC Workstation Solutions Ltd, Harpenden, Hertfordshire, the chequered antecedents of this UK start-up have taken some interesting turns. The trail begins with the now de-funct Whitechapel Workstations Ltd back in 1987, which ran out of money in April 1988 only to be bailed out by a European consortium funded by Barron International Holdings Ltd of Gibraltar. The consortium founded a company, Mistral Computer Systems Ltd, picking up Whitechapel’s MIPS R2000-based Hi-Tech 10 workstation along the way, which it prettied-up and renamed Mistral-20 (a 20MHz MIPS Computer Systems Inc R3000 8Mb system). It came a cropper in 1990 and had to be cut up and sold off, with the remains ending up at Amstral Workstation Solutions Ltd, a value-added reseller operation. Amstral has recently been through a combination of management buyouts and takeovers, including the acquisition of Crab Advanced Technologies’ sales and marketing division, and now goes by the name of ABC Workstation Solutions Ltd. Content with being a reseller, ABC sells Hewlett-Packard Co HP 9000 Series 700 and 800 systems as Macintosh file servers, and says it will be carrying Sun Microsystems Inc’s Sparcstations by the end of this week.
