【NEC】 NEC System 3100 Series

NEC announcde the NEC System 3100 Series, designed for the Strategic Information System (SIS) architecture, in May 1990.

This Series came into being when the products lines in the NEC System 3100A Series and the NEC system 3050A Series, both of which were first announced in October 1988, were updated, and the names were unified as the System 3100 Series. In this series, products corresponding to the System 3100A Series were called 3100 Series A models, and those corresponding to the System 3050A Series were called 3100 Series S models.

The features of this series were as follows:

1) The System 3100 Series was comprised of 22 models, covering a wide performance range from laptops to general-purpose small computers. This was a product line to enable what was referred to at the time as a "Strategic Information System (SIS)" architecture.
2) The higher level models -- the NEC System 3100 model A110 and model A120 -- were equipped with the IDP-3 32-bit microprocessor (CMOS-VLSI, 600,000 transistors) featuring a multi-processor configuration, expanded address space, expanded transfer processing capacity of the system bus, and multistage pipeline control capability in the CPU. The models A90 and higher enabled multi-processor configurations (up to a maximum of 4 CPUs) and disk cache of up to 4 megabytes, and thus processing capability was 1.5 to 5 times that of the model 90A (the top of the line machine in the NEC System 3100A Series), and RDB performance was improved (doubled).
3) Using the IDLII high-productivity language system (made by NEC) and the A-VX SEA/A software productivity tool (made by NEC to enable development of software for office computers(*) from the work station side), software productivity was improved by up to 10 times compared to using the COBOL language.

*: Office computers are small business computers specialized in office operation.

Note 1: only 3.5-inch FD for 10LAII and 10LA
Note 2: With cluster system configuration
Note 3: only for A30, A40 and A50