NCR Corp yesterday kissed goodbye to its proprietary architecture retail computers and poured all its experience of the supermarket and department store point-of-sale business into a completely new family of modular retail systems, built around models of its 68010 and 68020 Tower line of Unix supermicros. The NCR 7000 Continuous Processing System also brings Unix as an option to the point-of-sale market, and fault-tolerance to the 68020-based Tower 32. NCR has developed a fault-tolerant hypervisor for the 7000 line that supports Unix as a concurrent option. Called CP/OS, the hypervisor supports full fault-tolerance with everything duplicated on the top 7032 model, which is a dual 25MHz 68020 machine, but also runs on 68010-based 7010 and 7011. There are four new terminals, the dumb 7050 and 7051, and the intelligent programmable 7052 and its preconfigured 7053 variant. The latter two are based on NCR’s PC8 AT-alike and run MS-DOS 3.1. Two local area networks, Mirlan and Starlan, are supported, plus three wide-area communications protocols, SNA/SDLC, X25 and bisync. A full complement of hand-held and slot scanners, magnetic stripe readers and electronic scales are offered. Prices for the processors range from $11,860 for the 7010 to $48,155 for the 7032, terminals are from $3,125 for the 7050 to $4,555 for the 7052, and equipping a 10-lane supermarket with fault-tolerant CPU and terminals would cost around $70,000. All but the 7052, 7032 CPU and 7053 are available for immediate delivery.
