Separate the two by a language and an ocean and all kinds of confusion sets in. Compagnie des Machines Bull SA’s Zenith Data Systems subsidiary tells us that its latest ZPower units (CI No 2,703) use the guts of Motorola Inc’s PowerStacks – 100MHz 603e and 100MHz 604 motherboards taken OEM – cloaked with Zenith’s own components, peripheral set and cabinetry running AIX and Windows NT. They are not, it said, re-packaged versions of its parent’s 66MHz 603-based Estrella (CI No 2,682). Meantime, Bull whose promised Mississippi clustering technology has been delayed until next year (CI No 2,685), has won Japan Computer Corp for its symmetric multiprocessing PowerPC servers. It said Tokyo-based Japan Computer will sell Escalas, future clustering and PCI bus technology running AIX, throughout Asia from September, probably under a localised name. Japan Computer already offers FirePower Systems Inc’s Crusader desktops running a PowerPC Reference Platform-compliant version of the University of California at San Diego’s 4.4 BSD-Lite freeware Unix. The firm reckons it has at least 100 public domain software packages running under Unix including Mosaic, LaTex text editor and X11.5. It was founded in 1977, has revenues of some $35.3m and has mainly designed Sparc-based workstations, X terminals and network servers.
