evans@mhuxt.UUCP (09/09/83)
Does anyone know anything about the Sanyo MBC - 55 PC (their IBM PC look alike)? Supposedly it has 128k RAM a single sided floppy, 8088 etc. for $800 - $900. thanks in advance Steve Crandall mhuxt!evans
evans%ucb-vax@mhuxt.UUCP (09/09/83)
Article-I.D.: mhuxt.296 Does anyone know anything about the Sanyo MBC - 55 PC (their IBM PC look alike)? Supposedly it has 128k RAM a single sided floppy, 8088 etc. for $800 - $900. thanks in advance Steve Crandall mhuxt!evans
STILLMAN@RU-BLUE.ARPA@sri-unix.UUCP (09/20/83)
From: Rich Stillman <STILLMAN@RU-BLUE.ARPA> I saw a demo of a prototype Sanyo 555 about 3 weeks ago. It is their stab at an IBM PC clone at a very low price. Base system (single 160k drive, 128k, 640x200 color graphics, a parallel port, MSDOS, WordStar, CalcStar, Easywriter I and Sanyo BASIC) lists for $999. Dual drive systems ($1395 with 160k per disk) also come with either MailMerge, SpellStar and InfoStar or Easywriter II, Easyfiler and Easyplanner. Drives also come in 320k (add $100 per drive) and 640k (add $200 per drive) flavors. No monitor is included in these prices. A serial port is an option, but apparently expansion memory is not. It looks like Sanyo is planning to offer aggressive discounts to the educational market. With MSDOS, the 160 and 320k drives will read the corresponding IBM disk formats, and Sanyo is supposedly negotiating with all of the major vendors of MSDOS software, except for Visicorp, for Sanyo versions. First customer ship is expected in October. Also- it may just be an offer by our local distributor, but units come with a 1 year warranty, with extended warranties for years 2 to 4 available at $50 per year. Service is strictly carry-in, but $150 for 4 years worth of service is hard to beat. The bad news: The system is incompatible with the IBM PC in some major ways. The internal bus is Sanyo's own, as is the BASIC. The graphics is also incompatible with IBM. A hard disk is planned for February, expected to be 10 mB for $2000, but it will be non-Seagate standard. The outcome of this is that most software packages will need to be released in special Sanyo versions. This will be no problem if the machine catches on. My personal concern is that it will get lost in a sea of low-cost IBM PC knockoffs, including the Peanut, and could end up a short lived machine. The future of this machine is very hard to guess. If its natural competitors are late to the market, and if it's on time delivering on 1-2-3, and, and, and....it ought to sell well, with third party vendors filling in the gaps in the product line. Otherwise, people will probably walk right past it to buy Peanuts or whatever the latest sub-$1000 Lotus/word processing engine is. I guess my gut reaction is, I would buy this system for only one reason: price, and it should soon have strong competition in that area. Rich Stillman stillman@rutgers -------