DuraSys News and Views

In this space, we will from time to time comment on new products and trends in the industry, and point you to new information that we have included in the site, as well links to sites of other manufacturers. Some of this information will be pertinent to your use of our products, and some will just be of interest to us, and hopefully to you. Any trademarks here are the property of their respective owners.

Current topics:

DuraSys now offers quick ship on pre-configured models.
New RC-1400T Passive Backplane Portable or Rackmount offers Pentium III or Celeron in 9 lb package!
New configurations have More Horsepower!
What is a NetPC or a Network Computer anyway?

The DuraSys Version of e-Commerce

DuraSys now offers quick ship on the RC-1100 and RC-1400 computer systems listed on the site. You won't find a click to order button because we feel that personal contact is best when dealing with industrial systems.

We don't want to sell you something that does not meet your needs or have sufficient growth potential designed in, and we are sure you don't want to receive such equipment. We find that we can usually make suggestions that save you money and result in better performance for your application.

We also find that we learn something from the engineers we talk to. So get in touch with us, talk requirements and check price and delivery. We are here to serve you.

Portable computer offers Pentium III power to go!

DuraSys now has available the RC-1400T passive backplane portable computer weighing in at only 9 lbs. before you add your own cards.

The RC-1400T is an excellent choice for portable server or workstation, network monitoring, data acquisition, or any requirement where light weight, significant processing power, and rugged construction and component choice are important.

The RC-1400T is housed in an aluminum case measuring 8.25"H x 4.37"W x 16.5"D and comes with an optional handle to make it easy to carry. Alternatively, four units may be mounted side by side in a rack space only 8.75" high.

A PICMIG industrial single board computer offers the Intel BX chipset for 100 MHz bus operation, the Socket 370 for Intel Pentium III Coppermine or Celeron processors, 4 DIMM memory sockets, 10/100 network interface, 4 MB AGP video, watchdog timer, and the standard I/O including 2 USB ports. Models are also available with optional Solid State Disk, SCSI and audio.

A choice of backplanes offers up 4 PCI slots or 2 PCI and 2 ISA. See the data sheet for more specifications, and call today with your questions.

More Horsepower Under the Hood!

We now have available "Coppermine" Pentium III processors from Intel with Streaming SIMD extensions to the instruction set and MMX technology, and the Celeron with full speed cache and MMX at faster speeds than we have seen before. AMD (Advanced Micro Devices) is shipping the Athlon chip which has a significantly improved floating point math unit. Cyrix is now part of the Via chipset house, and their technology will start showing up in low end consumer machines. You can now get more performance than ever before.

As grating as it may seem to some, we continue to feel that the most stable and reliable systems for use with Microsoft operating systems and applications are built around a mainboard or system board using, most importantly, Intel BX or newer chipsets.

The Intel BX chipset continues to be the mainstay of the 100 MHz bus, and now Intel has introduced the 810 shipset at 100 MHz, the 810e and 820 at 133 MHz.. These chipsets support the Advanced Configuration and Power Interface (ACPI) which allows, among other things, reliable suspend operation (Win98SE) and monitoring of the CPU fan for failure.

The BX chipset provides the improved UltraDMA/33 IDE transfer rate of up to 33MB/s. Couple this with a disk drive supporting UDMA33, and you have performance exceeding ultra (narrow) SCSI at a fraction of the price. Intel 810 and 820 chipsets support UDMA66 drives for yet faster performance. SDRAM memory is supported by the BX and 810 chipsets for fast memory performance at an attractive price while the 820 chipset supports the Rambus memory interface.

NetPC, Network Computer/Thin Client (NC), and Windows Terminal

Confused about what these devices are? Don't feel alone. What follows is an admittedly simplified attempt to clarify some of the hype we have seen in the trade press.

First, the term NetPC refers to a specification for a PC developed by Microsoft and Intel, and endorsed by a bunch of other companies. At Comdex and PCExpo, 8-10 BIG COMPANIES were showing prototypes or shipping units.

The Network Computer/Thin Client (NC) refers to a spec put forth by Sun and Oracle, among others, in an effort to keep everything from going more Microsoft/Intel (sometimes referred to as Wintel) than it already has. At Comdex, Bill Gates suggested that the Network Computer is called the NC because it is "not compatible."

The Windows Terminal is something like the familiar monochrome text terminal scaled into the Windows color graphics world with LAN support, and requires the use of multiuser extensions (Citrix Winframe) to Windows NT, or Windows 2000 Server.

The driving force behind all these devices is the now overpowering need to lower the cost of administering, deploying new software to, and fixing problems users create when using networked desktop PCs, especially in large companies.

The NetPC employees the familiar Intel architecture we know to permit the continued use of Microsoft applications on the NetPC in a client/server network, but with operating system features (Microsoft Zero Administration Kit) to allow much administration to be done remotely and to keep users from doing things to their PC which prevent it from working.

The Network Computer/Thin Client (NC) splits processing work between the server and the NC client by using applications which are written in Java. These applications are stored on the server until they are needed, at which time they are downloaded to the NC and are executed by something called the Java Virtual Machine, which is resident in the NC. Note that Intel has announced that it is developing Java compilers speed up execution of Java programs on Intel processors. Have you bought your Intel stock today?

With the Windows Terminal, the multiuser extensions to NT create a number of virtual machines in the server, and all application processing occurs in the server with only screen and I/O information being passed over the network to the Windows Terminal. This is the easiest of all to centrally administration, and most difficult for users to break.

Why do we who use rackmount equipment, or are on the factory floor care about this stuff?

Well, there seems to broad agreement that the Network Computer/Thin Client (NC) or the Windows Terminal is best suited for use by people doing tasks (production), or by people who are now using a text terminal, or by someone who has had no PC, rather than by "knowledge workers" using applications such as word processing or spreadsheets.

This would mean that quite a bit of what we do on the factory floor could be done by a device which is more immune to operator problems.

Is this all a new invention? Not exactly. In the OLD days we had multiuser DOS or Unix and serial character terminals. Look around your doctor's office, or in small to medium retail stores or restaurants and you will see plenty of this still going on.

How can DuraSys help you use this technology if it makes sense in your company?

The NetPC, NC, and Windows Terminal from various vendors all have a small footprint and easily integrate into our RC computer case or into our ICM monitors. This gives you the choice of the amount of processing power you need, with ease of administration, and greater immunity to operator problems.

Stay tuned, it can only get more interesting.