NCR Corp’s proprietary top-end mainframes are largely history in the US and Europe, where the Tower Unix machines and the company’s personal computers account for the bulk of its general purpose computing sales – but NCR is also big in Jaapn, and there, some of the biggest banks in the world are NCR mainframe users. Accordingly, NCR Japan Ltd gets first crack at a new top-end version of the fault-tolerant NCR 9800: the 9800-4 series continues the distributed internal processing architecture pioneered in the Criterions 15 years ago, but each of the application processors in the central processing complex is duplicated for fault-tolerance. The machine runs the fault-tolerant version of the VRX operating system and is rated at 320 transactions per second, five times that of the existing 9800. No indications of prices were given for it.