IBM yesterday accompanied limited new models in the PS/2 family and price cuts on some Model 30s and 70s with a pre-emptive strike against the Extended Industry Standard Architecture bus: the company revealed that the existing Micro Channel can run at 160Mbytes-per-second against the orginally announced 20Mbytes-per-second – without the need for any Micro Channel Two. A Synchronous Channel Check and Subsystem Control Block Architecture in the Micro Channel also enables a fault to be isolated on a multi-user system without bringing the whole thing down – but observers say that the features are not likely to be widely used for a long time. There is a 20% price cut on the Model 70 with 120Mb disk to $6,400 and the PS/2-30 286 is cut 5.8% to $2,445 while the 30Mb disk for it falls 16% to $800. OS/2 Standard Edition 1.2 are available with new functions, notably a Dual Boot Utility that enables OS/2 and MS-DOS to boot from the same fixed disk. There is a new 1.1 release of the PS/2 RPG II Application Platform and Application Toolkit – presumably California Software Products Inc’s Baby 36 for OS/2 – with support for up to 16 workstations, up to eight of which can be on async ports, the rest on a newly supported local net. It supports messaging between workstations and costs a one-time $3,150 plus $1,575 for the tools. There is a 1 high 3.5 floppy for the PS/2 Model 25, which can therefore have two 725Kb drives installed; it costs $155. A new 20MHz 80386-based Model 70, the 061 with 60Mb disk and 2Mb memory is $5,800; a 25MHz A61 model with the same disk, plus 64Kb cache is $8,400. The Model 30 E01 and E21 now come with 1Mb memory instead of 512Kb at no extra charge and the Model 70 E61 2Mb instead of 1Mb. And the AS/Entry versions of System 36, launched in Europe two weeks ago, were ann ounced for the US market yesterday.
