The price war in the low-end Unix-based engineering workstation market has spread to Japan, where Yokogawa-Hewlett Packard Co has reduced the price of its low-end HP9000 model 318M – 2.3 MIPS, 4Mb main memory, expected sales 2,000 this year – by 20% to $10,468 – which is still high by US standards: Nippon Sum Microsystems has dropped its prices 10% to 25% across the range, with low-end Sun 3/50M coming down to the equivalent of $6,918, and top-end Sun 3/200 series down by average of 10% – the Sun 3/260 is now $65,199; Nippon Apollo has gone further, reducing the price of its DN3000L by 43%, and hoping to sell 1,500 machines to universities; from a standing start three years ago, the engineering workstation market in Japan has grown rapidly, and with tags now coming down into the personal computer price bracked of under 1m yen – that’s $7,000 – demand is expected to grow even more.
