Any schoolboys that managed to sneak past the doorman at London Olympia’s PC User Show yesterday would have been disappointed: games and home computers have given way to high powered business tools and PC workstations showing sophisticated graphics. In fact its its hard to think of South London-based MicroWay Ltd’s MultiPuter as a personal computer at all: inside the basic Northstar Computers shell are multiple Transputers, which according to MicroWay can yield performances of 600 MIPS or more for around UKP80,000. The company is offering two configurations with either 19 or 61 T800 Transputers, with the machine’s 80386 processor acting as the input-output interface for the user through MS-DOS. MicroWay was joined in a Transputer village at the show by other companies including Definicom Systems with its UKP2,495 TG-2 graphics accelerator card, and Lattice Logic spin-off 3L with a range of parallel compilers, including a new Parallel Fortran product. And at the other side of the hall was the PC CAD Show, inevitably dominated by AutoCad, showing its latest version, Release 10, for PCs, Unix and VMS workstations, and the Apple Macintosh II. Walters International, High Wycombe, Buckinghamshire, a hard disk laptop, a 386-based file server, a floor-standing multi-user system running SCO Xenix/386, and a 19 rack mounted server. Mission Computers’ FlexCache 386 was amonst the more exciting boxes at the show: the UK company based in Huntingdon is better known for its high quality hi-fi equipment, but in conjunction with Advanced Logic Research in the US has designed a system for high performance to rival systems from the likes of Compaq Computer Corp. The most noticeable boom this year is in the personal computer facsimile board business, Softech of Tonbrige, Kent with its PC-Faxwriter, and Firdata of Perivale in Middlesex with Microlink are only two of the many such to be seen at the event. The show continues today and tomorrow, from 10am to 6pm, with a 4pm close on Thursday.
