Groupe Bull SA in France has been talking for two or three years about a Unix implementation for the DPS 6 family of 32- and 16 bit minicomputers, implying that it would be native, but Honeywell Bull UK Ltd yesterday came out with an alternative solution – a co-processor board built around the 80386 to support the AT&T operating system on the DPS 6 Plus Models 410 and 420. Tortuously called XC-UPP, for eXtended Capability Unix Peer Processor, the board comes with System V Interface Definition compliant implementation of Unix System V.3, and a user with the board fitted can concurrently run proprietary applications using the IIVS6 Plus operating system and Unix applications on the 386 processor. No price was given for the co-processor. The company also introduced a 300Mb disk drive, 150Mb streaming tape drive and fully integrated local area network support that enables Model 200 and Model 400 systems to be configured together on a local network. The company also announced an entry-level model 201 in the DPS 6 Plus 200 family, aiming it at departmental sites where four to five users need to be supported. The base price is UKP8,000, and a system with four terminals, 142Mb disk, printer, streaming tape and floppy is UKP16,000. The 201 can be upgraded to a 211. On the software front, Cincom Systems’ Mantisfapplications generator, already available on DPS 7 mainframes, is now available for DPS 6 Plus, as is Oracle Corp’s Oracle 5.1 with SQL*Net. The announcements follow the UK launch earlier in the month of the new DPS 7000 models – but not the DPS 4000 ones – launched at the same time by Bull in France (CI No 1,012) – as well as some DPS 7000s that had already been introduced in France. The new UK models are the 7000/10-E, 20-E, 30-E, 40-E and 50-E, and the 30% improvement in raw performance derived from new implementations of the chips is accompanied by price cuts that enhance price-performance further at the low end. The company says the 10-E offers 51% better price performance than its earlier counterpart; the 20-E, 64%; the 30-E, 47%; the 40-E, 35%; and the 50-E, 26%. Hardware maintenance charges are reduced up to 53% and there is a new 12-month warranty on the entire system including major peripherals. A new CNP7 communications processor comes on one board and is integrated into the system cabinet for users who want up to 20 communications lines. New software includes the Sindia7 development tool for generating on-line systems and an ANSI 85 Cobol compiler. Prices go from UKP86,000 for a DPS 7000/10-E system – maintenance, UKP200 a month – to UKP600,000 for a 600-user 50-E.
