Arden Hills, Minnesota-based Control Data Systems Inc intends to

build itself again by acquisition, and has now signed a letter of intent to acquire Antares Electronics Inc, a privately-held systems integration company based in Ottawa: terms of the transaction are still being negotiated, it is expected to be completed next quarter; Antares, provides specialised microcomputer-based systems for enterprise-wide networking and integration, and generates annual revenues of about $50m from its 170-strong workforce.

Storage Technology Corp's Iceberg disk array "appears to be working well, and the company plans to ship between 50 and 100 of the things in the fourth quarter of this year, senior vice-president of finance Gregory Tymn told a Bear Stearns & Co technology conference: the company expects to see revenues from first Iceberg shipments in first quarter 1994, Reuter reported; the company plans to have 13 other product announcements this year, including another RAID-5 device, Nordique, which complements Iceberg.

Westboro, Massachusetts-based Data General Corp warns that revenues and financial results for the June 26 fiscal third quarter are expected to be lower than analysts' expectations because of weaker than expected order rates from Europe, which is still suffering negative economic conditions - not half!

Hewlett-Packard Co accompanied those new HP 9000 Series 800 servers (CI No 2,198) with price reductions of from 10% to 30% across the rest of its line of entry-level and mid-range HP 9000 800 Unix servers.

Eagan, Minnesota-based Cray Research Inc reports an order from the Korean Institute of Science & Technology of Deajon, Korea, for a Cray C916 supercomputer; the system is scheduled for installation in the fourth quarter at the Korean Institute's Systems Engineering Research Institute; the machine ranges in price from $20m to $40m in the US.

Apple Computer Inc accompanied the new schools computer (see front) with the Apple Portable StyleWriter, a lightweight portable printer small enough to fit in a briefcase and "powerful enough to print laser-quality text and graphics": it weighs 4 lbs 8 oz and comes standard with 39 scalable TrueType fonts and rechargeable battery, and costs $440; the Auto Sheet Feeder is $85.

Pacific Telesis Group Inc is paying $153m for a 51% stake in the NordicTel Holdings AB to the three Swedish industrial holders of 25% each, Volvo AB, Trelleborg AB and Spectra-Physics AB; Vodafone Group Plc also has the option to sell part of its 25% stake in NordicTel to the San Francisco phone company.

L M Ericsson Telefon AB executives told the Bear, Stearns conference in New York that the company expects a "substantial increase in earnings in 1993" and that it expects to cut in half the number of factories it has by 1995; the company says its Etna transport network system "can be as big as" the company's AXE exchanges in the future, and expects production of its digital cellular phones to "more than double" over next year.

AT&T Co's NCR Corp has a $32m pact with Chemical Bank to upgrade the New York bank's 385 branches in Fun City with its branch automation sytems and self-service terminals.

Northern Telecom Ltd warns that it will report a loss for the second quarter of 1993, and that full-year results are likely to be much lower than those of 1992: the company blames lower-than-expected public switching sales and continued price pressures which will reduce gross margins in the quarter and year.

Louisville, Colorado-based Storage Technology Corp reports that it has received a subpoena from the US Securities & Exchange Commission's Denver office as part of an investigation into possible violations of federal disclosure, reporting or insider trading requirements in connection with announcements and disclosures about its Iceberg disk array made last year; the company will co-operate with the request.

Fremont, California chip capital equipment maker Lam Research Corp has definitive agreement to buy the assets of General Signal Corp's Drytek Inc, whose product line includes oxide etching equipment.

Marlborough, Massachusetts-based Stratus Computer Inc has signed an agreement with Femcon Associates Inc to develop NuCOLT, the next generation of Femcon's COLT on-line securities trading software, for use on Stratus XA/R computers running under Unix; the new software is expected to be out next quarter.

British Telecommunications Plc has finally bowed to the outrage over the sex lines, which attract 700,000 calls a week at a cost of 48 pence a minute - but its control measures will not take effect until July next year: after then, the dirty raincoat brigade will be issued with a security number and an account number before gaining access to the lines and the call will be billed directly to their account; the so-called adult phone lines account for 12% of the premium rate industry, which clocked up #200m overall turnover in 1992.

Poor old state-owned and state-ridden France Telecom and Deutsche Bundespost Telekon really do look like the last of the dinosaurs: while the soon-to-be-privatised Swedish and Dutch phone companies proceed apace with expansion of their Unisource BV telecommunications services joint venture that has just brought the Swiss on board as an equal partner, the Franco-German Eunetcom is still not off the starting blocks: the European Commission said yesterday it was reviewing the plans to form the joint venture to operate international corporate networks to private users, which was submitted for review on June 3.

The Bosch Telecom GmbH unit of Robert Bosch GmbH says that turnover in its mobile phone division would top $60m this year, compared with just $4.1m last year, Reuter reports from Bonn: the firm says it supplied over 50,000 of the 450,000 mobile phones currently in use on Germany's D1 and D2 networks, where overall, the number is growing by 40,000 to 50,000 a month, it said.

Orem, Utah-based Wordperfect Corp has launched WordPerfect 6.0 for MS-DOS with 639 user enhancement requests incorporated: spreadsheet functionlity is now built in and computing functions and cell formatting features are now a part of the Tables feature and enable users to accomplish more spreadsheet functions without having to use a separate spreadsheet package; users can also fax directly from within WordPerfect; it sells for $500.

Novell Inc, a bit uncomfortable at the number of new shares now in circulation following its acquisition of Unix System Laboratories Inc, says it plans to buy in the same number as it issued, 11.1m, using its cash resources and buying from time to time in the market; unless they sell, the move will up the stakes in Novell held by former Unix Labs owners, notably AT&T Co, whose current stake is about 3%.

Sun Microsystems Inc held its regular conference call with analysts, and said it was experiencing good demand in the current quarter - strongest in the US, next best in Asia and weak in Europe; sales for the full year, which ends June 30, are expected to be good; Sun said its Sparcserver 1000 was its most important box since Sparcstation 2.

Richardson, Texas-based Convex Computer Corp reports that more than 20 of its C Series computers have been installed in Eastern Europe and Russia since the fall of the Berlin Wall - in Poland, Hungary, Russia, Slovenia, the Slovak Republic and the Czech Republic: that's the good news - the bad is that for the second quarter Convex expects to report a loss on sales of less than $55m; chief executive Robert Patrick said the number of new orders the company anticipates this quarter "will not be enough to allow us to reach our financial objectives"; for the second quarter of 1992 Convex reported earnings per share of $0.03 on $57.5m sales.

Fanuc Ltd, Japan's market leader in robotic and computer numerical control manufacturing systems, warns that its slump in profits last fiscal (figures, CI No 2,198) is more than a blip: it expects group net profits to fall again in the year to next March - by 11% to $138m.

In another indication that the cost of doing business in Germany is just too high these days, robot maker Fanuc Ltd says it will move the head offices of its wholly-owned subsidiaries in Europe from Dusseldorf, Germany, to improve efficiency: Fanuc Robotics Europe SA, Fanuc's main robot sales arm in Europe, will move to Luxembourg in September, to share a building with GE Fanuc Automation Europe, the joint venture in factory automation systems; Fanuc Robotics Deutschland, a German sales unit headquartered in Dusseldorf, will move early next year into GE Fanuc's building in Stuttgart, Germany.

AT&T Co's Largo, Florida-based AT&T Paradyne unit says it has a cellular protocol that offers lower communications costs and improved user productivity: Enhanced Throughput Cellular will be out next month for the company's KeepInTouch PCMCIA credit card modem and DataPort modems; support for the Comsphere modems will follow later next quarter.

We reported the story pretty much in full in January, but you have to realise that these are phone companies that have not yet moved out of the dinosaur age of state control, so it has taken six months to complete the deal under which Berne-based Swiss Telecom will take a one-third stake in Unisource Holding BV, the Amsterdam-based telecommunications services joint venture in which Koninklijke PTT Telecom Nerderland NV and Televerket were previously 50-50 shareholders: the three partners will merge their data communications services in Switzerland, the Netherlands and Sweden and Swiss Telecom's Telepac and arCom 400 data transmission systems will become part of a new Swiss Unisource subsidiary called Unisource Business Networks/UBN-CH: Swiss Telecom will invest about $92m in the new company and transfer equipment it values at $113m.

Robots were not spared Japan's recession - their birth rate tumbled 29.4%, a record fall, to 56,374 last year, the Japan Industrial Robot Association said on Friday: according to Reuter, Japan's robot population had been rising 10% to 20% a year since 1980, apart from 1986 when it dipped slightly in a recession caused by a steep yen rise; "The job situation for robots is still tight this year as many manufacturers are holding back on capital spending," said Kiyohide Chojima of the Robot Association; by value, the production of industrial robots last year slumped 28.8% to $3,880m, from $5,450m in 1991.

Apple Computer Inc chairman John Sculley, who last week announced he would step down as the company's chief executive, says he sees his future role as focusing on the new world of digital technology, Reuter reports from the Seybold Digital World fourth annual conference in Los Angeles: "It's incredibly confusing," he said, "no one is quite sure where all of this goes, but we know it takes a huge amount of time to be able to sort out what the possible options are," he said.

Mountain View, California-based Trident Microsystems Inc says that based on current market conditions it believes its recently introduced TGUI9420/30 graphics chip will not capture significant market share, and so it is refocussing its product development efforts and offerings to accelerate development of its pin-compatible graphical interface accelerator product family - the realignment of engineering resulted in a "minor" staff reduction; it will focus on two major product introductions in the second half, the PC View processor multimedia video chip, and TGUI9400CXi mixed signal user interface accelerator.

@MOG The Microprocessor Report notes that John Cocke, the IBM Fellow known as "father of RISC," is now at HaL Computer Inc as chief scientist after he decided to take IBM Corp's retirement money and run.

@MOG Ivrea, Italy-headquartered Ing C Olivetti & Co SpA reports that it shipped 8,300 Unix systems last year - a 48% increase on the 5,600 it delivered in 1991: it reckons that gives it a 7.1% share of the European Unix system market, compared with 5.8% the previous year.

@MOG Following Sun Microsystems Inc's civil lawsuit charging misappropriation of trade secrets and theft of layout and manufacturing blueprints for a new system board, Hyundai Electronics Co, San Jose, California-based Axil Workstations has redesigned its Model 230 and 310 Sparcstation 10-compatibles and renamed them the 240 and 311 respectively: Axil can sell the 311 but is awaiting clearance to market the 240, which comes packaged in a Sparcstation 2-compatible chassis.

@MOG Silicon Graphics Inc is working on a new-generation low-end workstation under the code name Guinness, which is due out this summer - presumably before Siggraph in August: we hear it's based on the R4000-R4400 chips but some competitors think it might use the new low-cost R4200; it's expected to use digital media stuff, fancy digital audio and video and set a new Silicon Graphics price point below $10,000.

Syseca SA, the information services subsidiary of Thomson-CSF SA, reported its 1992 revenues up 23% over 1991, to $280 million: of the 23% growth, 10% was internal and 13% external, the company said; the external growth resulted from the acquisition of telecommunications companies LIR and Cirel Systemes and of Ada software engineering specialist Telesoft AB; the share of Syseca's revenues coming from international sales grew slightly, from 25% in 1991 to 28% last year.

St Helens, Merseyside-based document management software supplier Active Document Solutions Ltd, has revamped ICL Plc's Powervision developers' toolkit and made a real-time application from it, provisionally called Lambdavision, which enables the personal computer user to capture, store and retrieve documents; the program costs from #15,000 for a single user and sells through Northampton ICL reseller Danetre Business Systems UK Ltd.

Wyse Technology UK Ltd has signed Bicester-based Misys Plc subsidiary TIS Ltd as a second distributor for its Unix systems range to complement Computer Service Technology Ltd of Leeds; TIS is currently exclusive distributor for MIPS, now owned by Silicon Graphics Inc, and expects this business to dry up.

A Cruise missile gets quite heated on its journey, and those cunning little microprocessors that guide it to its destiny get a kingsize headache if they get too hot, so a coolant is needed: now, reports the Daily Mail, because of the ban on clorofluorocarbons, while the world waits for a low earth orbit Davy Crockett to patch up the hole in the ozone layer, the US Air Force is to refit all its nuclear missiles with CFC-free cooling systems - "so that on their way to deliver terminal global warming, they won't further erode the ozone layer..."