Underlining the problems IBM faces with its System 36, widely regarded as old-fashioned, Unisys Corp has already dumped the proprietary Burroughs machines that were aimed at the same market, and has turned the BTOS line of iAPX-86 family derived from the Covnvergent Technologies N-Gen line as its flagship product for the System 36 end of the market. And this week, Unisys launched the protected-mode version of BTOS, BTOS II, derived from Convergent’s new CTOS/VM operating system that is designed to run multiple MS-DOS tasks and to support Xenix as well as running CTOS/BTOS applications (CI No 560). It enables the 80386-based B38 and 80286-based B28 to access up to 4Mb of user memory and take advantage of variable memory partitioning. BTOS II also provides data transfers within clusters of up to 64 workstations at 1.8M-bits per second. Unisys also announced a positive polarity monochrome black-on-white monitor in $490 12 and $1,150 15 versions – Unisys says you’re dead in Europe without flicker-free black-on-white these days. An $1,210 graphics adaptor puts up 720 by 348 pixels and supports line drawing and rasters.
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