Sony Press Release

[Scott Garren <garren@scrc-stony-brook.arpa>]

The following is the text of the recent press release announcing our
alliance with Sony.  If you have any questions about this please contact
myself or your sales representative.


Contact:
Scott Garren                                    Joe Grillo
Director of Marketing Communication             Hill & Knowlton
Symbolics,  Inc.                                Advanced Technology Division
(617) 621-7756                                  (617) 894-3100

Richard Mirabella                               Ned Madden
Director of Marketing                           dGWB
Sony Microsystems Company                       (714) 863-0404
(415) 965-4492


                                                FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE




            SONY AND SYMBOLICS ANNOUNCE STRATEGIC ALLIANCE,
                     SIGN MAJOR RESELLER AGREEMENT



NEW YORK, May 3, 1988 -- Sony Microsystems Company, based in Palo Alto,
Ca., and Symbolics Inc., based in Cambridge, Ma., today announced a
strategic alliance in which Symbolics will act as a reseller and,
pending completion of contractual arrangements, original equipment
manufacturer (OEM) and third-party service organization for Sony's NEWS
family of UNIX technical workstations.

The agreement, which is for a term of three years, together with the
proposed service and OEM agreements, will result in one of the most
strategically important pacts to date in the workstation industry,
according to Masahiro Morimoto, Sony Microsystems president.

The first shipments of the U.S. -manufactured NEWS workstations,
introduced here in February 1988, have begun.  Sony will ship NEWS units
to Symbolics beginning this month.

"This agreement demonstrates again that Sony produces world class
workstations and is an important player in the global workstation
market," Marimoto said.  "We've identified symbolic processing as a
workstation market stronghold and Symbolics as the leading player in
that market, and we are investing substantial engineering and marketing
resources in this effort.  This will enable us to move beyond our
software engineering and electronic publishing markets and extend into
symbolic processing as well."

Noted Ronald L. Derry, Symbolics president and CEO, "We are pleased to
join in this major cooperative effort with Sony.  Our company's strong
commitment to industry standards such as NFS and X-Windows enables
Symbolics to offer its customers the best of both worlds: powerful
development of complex symbolic processing software and thousands of
applications from the UNIX universe."

Symbolics will initially incorporate the Sony NEWS NWS-711 and NWS-841
workstations into its product offering.   The Sony NEWS workstations
will add high-performance UNIX functionality to Symbolics computer
networks, used worldwide by industry, universities and government
agencies in a variety of applications.  These include artificial
intelligence (AI) research, planning, diagnosis, computer-aided software
engineering (CASE), computer-aided design and engineering (CAD/CAE),
finance, image generation and image processing.

Symbolics' customers can use NEWS as general-purpose workstations for
the development and delivery of UNIX applications.  They can use
Symbolics workstations for the development and delivery of complex
strategic applications using technologies such as expert systems,
hypertext, and object-oriented databases.  Customers can also connect
NEWS and Symbolics systems in a network using multiple NEWS as network
stations to access Symbolics "knowledge servers".

As part of the alliance, Sony and Symbolics will share new product plans
and engage in technical and sales training, and cooperative marketing
programs, including advertising, marketing communications, seminars and
trade shows.  In addition, Symbolics will be one of several companies to
participate in building the Sony "Synergy" catalog of third party
software and hardware.

In the future, Symbolics will offer systems based upon Sony's
next-generation, high-end NEWS workstations integrated with other
Symbolics hardware, software and peripherals.

In these future systems, Symbolics plans to embed its IvoryTM
single-chip symbolic processor for use in R&D and commercial AI
applications, giving general purpose workstation users access to
state-of-the-art symbolic processing techniques.

Symbolics also plans to provide a version of CLOETM (Common Lisp
Operating Environment) layered software package for use with the Sony
NEWS workstations.   With CLOE, AI applications developed on Symbolics
systems can be delivered on the Sony workstation without the need for
reprogramming.

Another Sony/Symbolics agreement currently in negotiation will have
Symbolics serve as Sony Microsystems' primary hardware and software
support organization in the United States, servicing Sony NEWS
workstation users via field system engineers and technical support.
Sony's technical support organization services Sony's value-added
resellers (VARs) through field service offices maintained in New Jersey,
Florida, Southern California and Palo Alto.  For VARs who want to
back-up their own customer support efforts with third party support,
Sony will refer VARs to Symbolics service organization to provide that
service and support.

"Symbolics has a world wide installed base of approximately 5,000
systems and its extensive service organization is one of the key
elements contributing to their leadership position in symbolic
processing," noted Morimoto.  "When this third-party service arrangement
is final, Sony will enhance its ability to support NEWS to end users."

Symbolics, Inc is the leading developer, manufacturer and marketer of
symbolic processing systems for the developing and using complex
strategic applications software, with revenues of $103 million for its
fiscal year ended June 30, 1987.   Symbolics has more than 20 sales and
service centers located throughout the United States and has
subsidiaries and distributors around the world.

Sony Microsystems Company, headquartered in Palo Alto, is a division of
Sony Corporation of America, a subsidiary of the $10.2 billion Sony
Corporation, Tokyo, Japan.  Sony Microsystems was formed in November
1987 to market state-of-the-art computer industry hardware and software
manufactured by Sony in the United States.  The company's first product
is the NEWS family of UNIX high-performance workstations, designed for
use in open distributed processing environments and conforming to
industry standards in hardware, operating systems, networks and
graphics.

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