Unisys Counting on USAF Contract to Make It a Major Micro Company
 
Copyright (c) 1989, McGraw-Hill, Inc.
WASHINGTON DC (Microbytes Daily News Service) --- Unisys
president Joe Tucci says he's counting on his company's win of
the largest microcomputer contract in history to propel Unisys
(Blue Bell, PA) into the forefront of desktop computing. In an
exclusive interview with Microbytes Daily, Tucci said that Unisys
will use the leverage created by the $700 million Air Force
contract -- for a quarter million 80386-based AT clones -- to
build up the company's commercial sales, including sales of
supermicros and minicomputers.
 
Tucci also said he expects the number of Unisys Personal
Workstation 2 computers delivered under the contract to
ultimately exceed the number anticipated by the Air Force in
the same way that a previous contract with Zenith Data Systems
sold more than five times the initial contract. "I think the
potential is certainly there," Tucci said. "We will probably
sell more than planned." Tucci declined to agree with industry
analysts who predicted that the sales from the award of the Air
Force Desktop 3 contract would reach $2 billion.
 
Unisys will be offering 2 computer configurations to the Air
Force initially, Tucci said. The primary difference between
them is the CPU speed. The less-expensive machine is based on a
16-MHz 386, while the other is based on a 20-MHz CPU. The basic
system unit will have a high-density floppy drive, a VGA card,
and 512K bytes of memory. Additional memory and hard disks, as
well as MS-DOS, OS/2 and SCO Xenix, are optional. Tucci said
Unisys plans to modify the contract to offer 80486 machines and
the EISA bus as those machines become available.
 
                              --- Wayne Rash
 
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