Although we wanted mainly to discuss real, marketable systems and no experimental, special purpose, or even speculative machines, we want to include a section on systems that are in a far stage of development and have a fair chance of reaching the market. For inclusion in section 3 we set the rule that the system described there should be on the market within a period of 6 months from announcement. The systems described in this section will in all probability appear within one year from the publication of this report.
However, there are vendors who do not want to disclose any specific data on their new machines until they are actually beginning to ship them (an example is the Convex C4). We recognise the wishes of such vendors (it is generally wise not to stretch the expectation of potential customers too long) and will not disclose such information.
Below we discuss systems that are expected to appear on the market between
somewhat more than half a year to a year from now.