Hewlett-Packard Co this week made a string of announcements in its personal computer product line. The HP Vectra 486s/20 EISA bus personal computer is the Palo Alto company’s first 80486SX-based machine. It has a new graphics-accelerator board, the HP Ultra VGA with specialised graphics accelerator with 512Kb or 1Mb memory, claimed to be up to 400% faster than existing VGA designs for graphics-intensive software such as Windows and AutoCAD. It takes up to 64Mb of memory and can be used as a departmental server as well as a design workstation. It has five EISA slots and four mass-storage shelves for SCSI devices. The machine has 4Mb standard and is $4,500 with a floppy but without graphics accelerator; with accelerator and a 120Mb disk, it’s $6,000, later this year. The new Vectra 386/16N and 386/20N are network stations that can also be used stand-alone and can be preconfigured with an unshielded twisted pair Ethernet interface board with 32Kb buffer to speed networked-data transmission. A boot ROM enables the box to boot from the network server. They start at $1,800 with 2Mb and no disks for a 16MHz 80386SX model, rising to $3,200 for a 20MHz model with floppy and 120Mb disk. The company also expanded the HP EtherTwist family of local-area network products by adding low-cost, 10Base-T modles for entry-level networks. The new line includes EtherTwist Hub/8, EtherTwist 10:10 LAN Bridge LB and adaptor boards that support NetWare 3.11 and LAN Manager 2.0 drivers. The Hub/8 is a 10Mbps multiport repeater and costs $90 per port – it has eight twisted-pair ports using eight-pin modular plugs. The 10:10 LAN Bridge LB is an Ethernet extender and costs $2,500 with two AUI ports and one BNC port. The HP Storage System to SCSI-2 and can be configured with up to three full-height or seven half-height devices are supported. Hewlett-Packard disks in capacities of 673Mb, 1.0Gb and 1.3Gb with seek time of 13.5mS and synchronous-burst data transfer rate of 5.0Mbytes-per-second are supported, and 3.5 drives are now also available. The company offers these in capacities of 234Mb, 328Mb and 422Mb in half the cabinet space of a 5.25 drive. Seek time is 12.6mS with the same burst data transfer rate. The Digital Audio Tape drive in the system also has been replaced with a new 2Gb DDS-format 3.5 drive, and there is now a 600Mb Compact-Disk Read-Only-Memory drive with average access time is 325mS with burst transfer rate of up to 1.5M bytes-per-second. The 590Mb erasable optical drive announced in March is also supported. Operating systems supported now include NetWare 2.x and 3.x, Santa Cruz Operation Inc Unix, LAN Manager, LAN Server, OS/2 and MS-DOS. And the company’s new HP DAT PC Backup Solution is a digital audio tape unit with 2Gb drive and SCSI-2 adaptor. It saves 300Mb of data in 30 minutes and restores at the same speed. The drive is $2,850.
