Tandy Corp’s Fremont, California-based GRiD Systems Corp, which in its early days promoted the idea of plugging its portable computers into a desk-top base station when in the office, is going back into large fixed systems with an entry into the network server market. The GRiD 486ei-25/SVR is an 80486-based EISA bus machine with nine expansion bays for up to 4Gb of storage, and runs all the major network operating systems, supporting networks of MS-DOS, OS/2 and Unix machines. GRiD promises to offer both network interface and storage peripherals as 32-bit EISA designs to complement the thousands of AT bus products already supported. The 25MHz 80486 has 256Kb secondary cache and comes standard with 8Mb expandable to 64Mb and seven available 32-bit EISA slots, and is designed to be heavily loaded – it has a 450W power supply. It costs $12,000 without disk drives and comes out next month.
