Sony NWS Workstations

[Rob Gabbard]

In article <18...@pdn.UUCP>, reg...@pdn.UUCP (George W. Leach) writes:
> Has anyone heard anything about or seen the Sony NWS line of
> workstations?

I read in a recent issue of BYTE that SONY was having problems with
import tariffs on the News so they are going to build a US factory to
produce the machines.

[j...@iuvax.cs.indiana.edu]

There was a short blurb about the new Sony workstations in
INFOWORLD (Feb 1, 1988 page 3, "AT DEADLINE").

...Internally called the "Sun Killer," the NWS-841 will sport
two 16-MHz 68020 microprocessors, a 68881 math coprocessor, 8M of RAM,
a 286- MB floppy drive, six I/O ports, including an EtherNET
interface, one rep. said. The machine will sell for about $19,900.
Supported software will include BSD4.2, NFS, and X.

The NWS-711 model is a diskless workstation that will sell for
$3,995. Both systems will ship in March.

(paraphrased from Tom Moran's article)

[Mark Shand]

Prof. Richard Newton's group at Berkeley has a Sony NWS. I saw it
there last July. I believe he had it specially imported.

[Cs661s02]

In article <18...@pdn.UUCP> reg...@pdn.UUCP (George W. Leach) writes:
> Has anyone heard anything about or seen the Sony NWS line of

>workstations? I have seen the article in the August, 1987 issue of
>UNIX/WORLD and nothing more on these products. Has Sony decided upon
>it's pricing strategy for the US Market? Are these machines
>available in the US? If so, where? And has anyone had any
>experience using these machines?
>
> Any and all comments are welcome. The UNIX/WORLD article was
>quite interesting and if nothing else the entry of this machine in
>the US market could start pricing wars that will drive down the cost
>of the low end engineering workstation products offered by the US
>companies.

I saw Sony NEWS machines in Japan last year in certain firm that was
writing software for that machine. It was running X window V10.4(I
think). The machine itself is quite attractive and occupies less
footspace than SUN. It uses two 68020 running 16MHz. First 68020
acts as main cpu and second do all the I/O handling. They claim that
this design reduces amount of hardware as well as increasing
throughoutput of the system. There are two models of NEWS(at lease in
Japan) one with b/w and other with 256 colors The SONY itself has
ported quite of software including most compilers as well as most of
unix utilities.

I think the problem with Sony NEWS is not with it's technical aspect
but marketing expertise of Sony. It will be interesting how Sony who
is mainly known for cosumer eletronics will be fare in engineering
workstation market.

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