Wang Laboratories Inc has launched its VS 12000, which is based on a BiCMOS chip set designed by Wang and fabricated by Hitachi Ltd rather than the ECL CPU used in the VS 10000. The only model is the 550, which is claimed to be 50% faster than the 10000, and Wang has found that there is enough demand for the machine to continue development of the VS line, including new processors as well as additional configurations of the 12000, despite its OEM agreement with IBM Corp on the RS/6000 and reseller agreement on the AS/400 – of which, we hear, none have been sold in the UK yet. It says it is still spending half its engineering budget on the VS line. The VS 12000 550 costs $780,000 with 64Mb memory, plus $130,000 for the licence to use the VS/OS operating system.
