EPSON ANNOUNCES FAMILY OF PCS DESIGNED FOR NEXTSTEP FOR INTEL TORRANCE, Calif., May 25, 1993 -- EPSON today announced the Progression NX, the first of a line of personal computers optimized for the NEXTSTEP environment. The Progression NX is designed exclusively for NEXTSTEP developers and power users. This summer, the Progression NX will be joined by the EPSON NX, the first end user product designed, configured and preloaded with NEXTSTEP for Intel processors. "The hallmark of our Progression line is its top notch performance in graphics intensive environments. The development of NEXTSTEP for Intel processors provided a unique challenge for the Progression and we stood up to the test," said Steve Huey, vice president, PC product marketing, EPSON. "As a result of this technological relationship and the strong performance of the Progression, we developed our NX line of products specifically for NEXTSTEP. In fact, the motherboard of each machine has been developed and optimized for NEXTSTEP." "We are extremely excited about EPSON's new family of NEXTSTEP machines," said Warren Weiss, vice president of sales and marketing of NeXT Computer, Inc. "The graphics architecture built into EPSON's NX products has proven to be a big win for NEXTSTEP customers, and we're pleased that EPSON will be providing these systems pre-loaded with NEXTSTEP." EPSON Strength for NEXTSTEP The NX family of computers includes two distinct machines. The Progression NX features Intel's 486DX2/66 processor with support for future Intel OverDrive processors, including Pentium class processors. It is equipped with 36MB of RAM standard expandable to 68MB on the system board via SIMMS. The Progression NX has 2MB of Video RAM standard with RAMDAC support for 1120 x 832 resolution. In addition, the Progression NX comes standard with a 525MB SCSI hard disk drive, six ISA slots, five drive bays, a multimedia sound card and Ethernet LAN adapter. It also boasts EPSON's proprietary memory architecture, VirtualCache. With EPSON's VirtualCache architecture, the Progression NX outperforms standard cache in multi-tasking environments. As a result, it is able to display NEXTSTEP applications ten times faster than standard super VGA and up to five times faster than traditional local bus implementations. "Developers need speed, quality and reliability -- that is synonymous with EPSON and the Progression NX. This platform gives NEXTSTEP developers the best performance available and will propel the development of new applications for this operating system," said Huey. This summer, EPSON will begin shipping the EPSON NX, the first end user machine designed and configured for the NEXTSTEP operating environment. The EPSON NX will be preloaded with NEXTSTEP. The EPSON NX features a high performance 170MB IDE hard disk drive and 20MB of RAM standard expandable to 68MB on the system board via SIMMS. It also comes standard with 2MB of video RAM with RAMDAC support for 1120 x 832 resolution, four ISA slots and three drive bays. The EPSON NX will give users a truly plug-and-play solution for NEXTSTEP for Intel. The Progression NX is currently available to NEXTSTEP beta sites and NeXT-authorized independent software vendors for $5,349. The EPSON NX will have an estimated selling price of less than $3,700. EPSON America, Inc. sells and markets innovative computer products and peripheral devices. Headquartered in Torrance, Calif., the company is an affiliate of the Seiko Epson Corporation. # # #