Underlining the excessive number of incompatible proprietary computers Unisys Corp still has to support, the company has announced new models in two of its least fancied lines, the V-series successors to the B29-39-4900s, and the System 80. The V460 is a dual processor offering nearly 80% better performance than the single-processor V430, expanding the on site, in-cabinet growth range of the V400 series to 3.6 times the performance of the entry-level V410. The V460 has of two CMOS CPUs, 20Mb expandable to 40Mb, input-output system with combined data transfer rate of up to 16Mbytes per second, and a B28 maintenance subsystem. It’s $535,000 from March. The new System 80 Model 50, presumably made by Mitisbishi Electric in Japan, is aimed at the IBM System 36 upgrade market and is offered with transaction processing software from Allinson-Ross Inc under the OS/3 operating system. Claimed to offer three times the performance and quadruple the memory – 16Mb to 64Mb – of the Model 20, it starts at $350,000 with 40Mb system disk. The new 80 means that Unisys now has two rival and completely incompatible alternative upgrade paths for IBM System 36 users in September, it launched a set of aids to migrate 36 users to the A-series (CI No 1,515).
