Sords may be assembled in N.Z.

Press, 6 March 1984, Page 28

Sords may be assembled in N.Z.

By

NEILL BIRSS

The possibility of New Zealand assembly of microcomputers from the Sord Computer Corporation of Japan was raised by the president of the corporation, Mr Takayoshi Shiina, at a news conference in Wellington last week.

This could be done along the lines of “completely knocked down” kits, as in the motor-vehicle industry, Mr Shiina said.

A driving entrepreneur in the Honda mould, Mr Shiina founded his company 14 years ago with a capital of $2OOO, borrowed from friends and relatives. His office was a spare room in his mother’s house.

The growth of Sord has been impressive. In the year to February 20, 1984, sales were about $l4O million, 40 per cent up on the previous year.

In microcomputers, Mr Shiina ranks Sord second equal in Japan, behind NEC and on a par with Fujitsu. At present Sord is negotiating a share exchange with a big Japanese private railway company with the ob-

ject of developing cable television networks with the capability of transmitting two-way information and computer data to homes and offices as well as television programmes. The railway company is interested in diversifying by making use of its communi-cations-signal network on its lines; Sord’s interest comes from the possibility of a market for about a million terminals. Sord distribution in New Zealand, formerly under the Fletcher Challenge umbrella, is now under a new company which with Sord, of Japan, and Mitsui the huge Japanese group which is agent for Sord in Australia, are now setting up a joint-venture company in New Zealand to handle Sord products. Any New Zealand assembly of Sord products will be under the aegis of this joint-venture firm. Mr Shiina indicated that Sord was not associating closely with the merging Japanese computer standard, MSX, but gave indications that customers are increasingly being given

alternative choices to the firm’s own software system, PIPs, in products.

Amongst the interesting products coming from Sord is a new 128 K RAM, 16-bit machine which runs BASIC and should be in production in October, and might sell in New Zealand for about $l2OO. There will be other 16-bit

machines including machine running MS-DOS and UNOS, from the UNIX family. Mr Shiina suggested at least one of the machines would be fully IBM PC compatible.

But the star of the new products announced in Wellington was a lap portable, the ISII, not unlike the lap portable fom Radio Shack

which is selling strongly in the United States. The ISII is the size of a very slim portable typewriter, and comes with 32K of RAM in CMOS technology and 64K of ROM. Total memory can be expanded to 400 K.

External memop' is by a micro-cassette which comes in a detachable module including the read-write head. The portable has PIPs in ROM and an R 5232 and printer port. The tiny screen displays eight lines of 40 characters when in nonPIPs format.

This genus of computer is designed for the traveller to use for word-processing or calculations in aircraft or trains, or when visiting clients.

Sord had thought of another use, Mr Shiina said. It was putting out demonstration micro-tapes for the ISII. The user listened to the tape on a micro-cassette recorder, and then ran the programs from the other side of the tape in the machine. He believes that the ISII will create a demand from educational users, such as

correspondence schools. These could send out combination sound and program cassettes to be used in pupils’ computers. The ISII, to be released in New Zealand in May, will retail for about $2OOO, fully tax paid.

Mr Shiina believes that there will be further rapid advances in microcomputer technology in the next 10 years, with spin-offs from the Japanese computer industry’s quest for the fifthgeneration machine with greatly increased speed and parallel processing. Among the other farreaching developments would be optical-disk technology, which would provide greatly increased external storage and faster access, Mr Shiina said. He does not believe that one or even two firms will dominate world production. There would be two or three big firms in microcomputing in both the United States and Japan at least, and there would always be innovative firms growing with new products, Mr Shiina maintained.