adapter and a 100 MB or 120 MB SCSI hard drive (typically a Conner CP30100). It booted in the same style as the earlier R140, but was normally configured for customers to boot straight into RISC iX. The machine was supplied with an Ethernet adapter. The system was released in 1990 priced at £3995 plus VAT, having been announced with a price of £5000 plus VAT. A floating point accelerator or "arithmetic co-processor", the FPA10, was made available in 1993 for the R260, as well as for the A540 and A5000 machines, priced at £99 plus VAT. These machines were designed to support the FPA device via a dedicated socket on the processor card (or, in the case of the A5000, on the motherboard), and offered a peak throughput of 5 MFLOPS at 26 MHz. A similarly configured A540 could run RISC iX. Production of the A540 and R260 was discontinued in mid-1993. R225 The R225 was a diskless version of the R260. It required a network file server or an R260 to boot. The system was released alongside the R260 priced at £1995 plus VAT, having been announced with a price of £3000 plus VAT. Peripherals As well as industry-standard Ethernet, Acorn's own Econet was supported, facilitating connectivity between Econet and IP-based Ethernet networks. Moreover, the Econet interface on a RISC iX workstation could be treated as a "Unix networking" interface, permitting TCP/IP requests to be sent over Econet to hosts capable of handling them. In 1991, with Ethernet becoming more widespread on campus networks, Acorn offered a Network Gateway Starter Pack featuring the R140 equipped with Econet and Ethernet adapters at a price of £2499, with a licence for the TCP/IP Protocol Suite included to allow Archimedes computers to be able to communicate with such Ethernet-based networks via the gateway. Similar Econet gateway capabilities were eventually extended to computers running RISC OS with Acorn's TCP/IP Protocol Suite product and with the broader Acorn Universal Networking (AUN) suite of technologies, and a device driver update eventually provided a similar means of routing TCP/IP communications over Econet networks for RISC OS machines. Application software In 1989, Acorn announced support for the R140 from a number of application software vendors, including Informix, along with applications such as Uniplex, Q-Office (from Quadratron), Tetraplan, Sculptor (from MPD), Sea Change (from Thomson), Recital ("a dBase compatible relational database") and Q-Calc ("a Lotus, key-compatible spreadsheet").