Siemens AG has enhanced its Unix workstation offerings with a new release of its Sinix implementation of Unix – well Xenix actually: Sinix is the German transliteration of Xenix, adding interfaces for additional peripherals, and increasing the capacity of hard disks supported, as well as improving security. The new Terminal Attachment Concept Sinix, TAC-SI, increases the number of freely configurable interfaces to 256 from 96 on the MX 500 multi-processor system and to 44 from 30 on the multi-user MX 300. TAC-SI uses conventional phone wire to connect peripherals over a mile away from the computer with a terminal connection concentrator, over which four terminals can be linked via SS97 or V24 interfaces: accordingly, a two-wire lead would connect eight terminals. With the Terminal Attachment Concept LAN, TACLAN, eight terminal connections for every server are concentrated and linked directly to the local area network. The new Sinix release also enables disk drives up to 760Mb capacity to be supported: the previous limit was 310Mb. The 760Mb drives are supported on the MX 500 and from Model 10 upwards of the MX 300: with a maximum of 12 disks on the MX 500 this gives a total capacity of 9.1Gb. Security options have been added to safeguard the higher capacity – a tape cassette back-up device using 8mm video tape standard enables up to 2.3Gb of data to be stored.
