Oki Electric Industry Co’s Okidata is slowly getting it together for a formal launch of its Intel 80860 RISC box, the 45 MIPS Okistation 7300, previewed in the US back in October at Unix Solutions. The Japanese company, which has little experience of the US market as far as computers go, has set up a new sales and marketing arm in Framingham, Massachusetts, called Okidata Microsystems Division to push the box out to OEM customers and resellers. The new unit, which got started in January and is now 12-strong, was apparently delayed by the Gulf War and Oki’s dictum that executives should not travel, which prevented the division’s American managers from liaising with their Japanese masters. Current plans call for a June launch and immediate availability of the system which is said to have grown from a single prototype to a series of four or five machines. Supposedly entry-level 33MHz and 40MHz systems will be deliverable in June as well as something the division is calling a mid-range machine. The 7300, unlike the Set Technology machine (CI No 1,633), uses the 80860 as the CPU.
