From: cyberoid@milton.u.washington.edu (Robert Jacobson) Subject: Division Ltd. (UK) in the news. Date: Sat, 27 Jul 1991 01:24:41 GMT Organization: Human Interface Technology Lab, Univ. of Wash., Seattle From The WELL's vr conference: July 22 issue of ELECTRONIC BUSINESS has a brief article on Division in the July 22 Business Trends. Here's some excerpts: "Iann Barron,... inventor of the Transputer while at Inmos Ltd., is chairman of Division. Barron just introduced the first general purpose open systems, client/server workstation meant to make virtual reality applications easy to develop at a reasonable cost..." "Priced at $51,000, Division's PROvision system is unique in that it is based on parallel processing architecture, using Imos Transputers and Intel i860s. 'To do really interesting things requires gigaflops and that means parallel processing,' says Barron." PROvisions acts as a 3-d terminal that is hardware independent, meaning it runs on such hosts as the SparcStation or IBM PC, but Division is developing its own hardware. PROvision has a parallel operating system that controls one dedicated processor for each of the several parallel processes including touch, sound, and body gestures." "Baron... hopes for a payback from his seed investment in two-year-old Division in four years. Aside from VPL... there are few serious contenders in the field except IBM and Washington state-based U.S. consortium. "While Division is the European virtual reality leader, the tiny company has only 10 employees..." --