The Mission Cyrus Corp US end of Mission Electronics Ltd of Huntingdon, Cambridgeshire was showing working prototypes of the first Micro Channel Architecture protable at Comdex/Spring last week. The Darius ProPortable is based on a 25MHz 80386, has two Micro Channel slots, and according to Mission will be 100% compatible with the IBM PS/2 models 70 and 80. It weighs in at 20 lbs, has static RAM cache, sockets for 80386 and Weitek floating point accelerators, with 1Mb standard, 16Mb supported on the motherboard. SCSI and MFM disk controllers are also included, as is a 10Mbps Ethernet controller – and, more importantly, because no portable is really complete without hard copy output – a built-in ink-jet printer based on Hewlett-Packard Co’s drop on demand technology. The upmarket machine uses a gas plasma VGA monitor with 16 shades of grey, and you can add a VGA CRT display. Options include 40Mb, 100Mb, 200Mb disks, 2,400bps internal modem and tape unit, with facsimile and cellular telephone communication options to follow. Not surprisingly it won’t be cheap – Microbytes Daily was told in the $10,000 range. The company is al-so playing with the Sun Microsystems Sparc, and says it is working on Micro Channel machines with the Sparc as a coprocessor or main CPU.
