San Diego, California-based start-up Research Development & Innovations Inc is having name trouble. The company has, as already reported, now decided to call itself RDI Computer Corp, and its original name for its Macintosh emulation software, now available to any Sparc-based machine, didn’t last very long either. It’s already gone from Softmac to Companion, even though Apple didn’t give it any grief about the original name. Of all the Sparcettes, RDI’s Brite Lite Sparc laptop also seems the fastest out of the blocks. President Rick Schrameck is claiming January sales of 5,000 units, worth $39m, which is a pretty hefty figure for a company that hasn’t started delivering yet. As we went to press, Schrameck was saying that the first 500 units were on the water, coming to the states from RDI’s manufacturing partner TriGem Computer Co in South Korea, and would go out to customers at the end of this week. The January sales flurry, a lot of it created by US government orders, means Brite Lite will be backlogged until at least mid-March. Schrameck said that the delay is being caused by the inability of LSI Logic Corp and Sun Microsystems Inc to deliver chip sets and motherboards, rather than any difficulties at TriGem’s end.
