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December 18, 1996DATA GENERAL READIES THIINSERVER AND INFORMATION SERVERWestborough, Massachusetts-based Data General Corp is readying two new Internet appliances for an expected beta release in the first quarter of next year. The products are to be the first fruits of the company's new ThiinLine business unit, headed up by Tom West. The ThiinServer is a hardware device for the home or department for serving a number of clients - whether they are network computers, personal computers or some other thin device. The ThiinServer will offer wireless local area network capabilities so that clients need not be cabled up - users will be able to wander around with their laptops if they have a wireless local area network card. It will also include routing and proxy serving; it will come pre-configured so that all a user need do is plug it into a wall socket and a phone line; it will use a standard 80486-class central processing unit; and it will probably have a hard disk of some sort to offer file saving and/or sharing to clients so thin they have no state of their own. Commonly-used Web pages could be stored in a cache to avoid going on-line to get them all the time. The prototype foam model is about the size of a large Walkman, and can hang on a wall in a cupboard as there's no need to touch it. It's not clear yet just how many thin devices it could serve, but development diagrams show it serving six. West says a good distribution model for the things would be if the Internet service providers included them in the price of getting on-line - talks are said to be under way. The Information Server is a dedicated Web server for internet service providers; the ThiinLine unit says Web servers available today are too complicated and not tailor-made for Web serving. Again the idea is ease of use - plug it in and ignore it. There is no information concerning prices yet.© APT Data Services Inc, 1996.
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