Welch%osu-20@OHIO-STATE.ARPA (Arun) (10/28/87)
Yesterday, at the Edge conference, Xerox announced a number of things: 1) Xerox has signed a "Memo of agreement" for technology transfer with Sun Microsystems. What this means, is that in the near future Xerox and Sun will make an official announcement about the agreement. Xerox is going start moving off of it's own workstations to the Sun SPARC architecture (the current implementation is the Sun-4), and Sun will develop things like XNS for SunOS. The Sun SPARC machine will be the successor to the 6085/1186 workstation. This crossover will take aprox. 2-3 years, with the SPARC machine being initially a delivery vehicle, and later a development vehicle. In the case of Xerox Lisp, their probably isn't much difference between the two, but in the case of XDE/MESA/Viewpoint, it probably means that the Viewpoint environment is going over first. While the Sun-4 currently costs ~80K, by the time the systems are ready to deliver the price should be around that of a dove, and the performance should also increase to around 10 times the current performance of the Sun-4. 2) By early Jan the 1186's will have a 190Mb disk drive as a field-upgradeable option. 3) By Jun, the 1186's will have a field-upgradeable memory enhancement of either 8 or 16 Mb, depending on whether they can get the 16Mb ready by then or not. 4) PC Emulation in Lyric has completed beta testing, should be available in Nov. 5) Supported LOOPS (KOTO) has completed Beta testing, will be available in Dec. The Lyric version is targeted for April. An enhanced Loops with extended rules capability will be ready 3 Q 88. 6) They're currently testing an RS-232/3270 translator which allows an 1186 to emulate an IBM 3278, with targeted delivery date set at Jan. 7) DEI 8.0 is expected to be deliverd in Jan, and it should provide support for Microvax as well as VAX 8XXX, a Leaf server, VMS 4.5 compatible, compatible with Lyric, and Koto modifications available. 8) A multifont printing capability for 1186/4045's, allowing the printer to print Modern, Classic, Helvetica, Times Roman, and terminal fonts, consisting of a hardware and software upgrade, being provided at no extra cost. Delivery date: Jan. 9) Xerox Quintus Prolog 2.0 will be ready by ~ March, running in Lyric, with interpreted code running 5 times the speed of XQP 1.5, and having a garbage collector. Now see what you missed by not coming to EDGE? ...arun -------