Paris-based Pick-popper Intertechnique Informatique has finally made it to the UK, and the new IN2 Ltd of Newbury, Berkshire, is on the lookout for acquisitions in the Pick software world and says it hopes to have an agreement wrapped up some time in October. The UK arm of the UKP80m-a-year French firm also unvei-led the […]
Paris-based Pick-popper Intertechnique Informatique has finally made it to the UK, and the new IN2 Ltd of Newbury, Berkshire, is on the lookout for acquisitions in the Pick software world and says it hopes to have an agreement wrapped up some time in October. The UK arm of the UKP80m-a-year French firm also unvei-led the IN8000 series of fault tolerant multi-user Pick systems, around 70 of which have been sold in France since they were announced in September last year (CI No 520). The IN8000 is based on one to eight of the company’s Modex processor modules comprising Motorola 68020 processors, proprietary co-pro-cessors and 1Mb of memory. And, according to IN2, the floating point capability it includes now gives Pick the arithmetic power of Unix. The system can be configured with one to eight modul es, each capable of supporting a specific function but all able to share the workload thereby speeding up processing time and providing fault tolerance. Transaction logg ing to a Winchester disk further enhances fault tolerance. This typically degrades performance by up to 28% but IN2 says its modular approach means one CPU can be dedicated to logging. Fault-tolerance is further enhanced by a mirror disk facility, again handled by a dedic ated processor so performance is not reduced. The IN8000 includes a C compiler – thought to be a first for Pick – supports X25, Bull DSA, IBM SNA and viewdata. All SMA Standard Pick software will run on the machines. An entry level 8100 is some UKP50,000, a fully configured 224-user 8300 is UKP750,000 or so.
