Data General Corp has long soothed questioners anxious about where it goes after the 88000 RISC dies by saying quietly but insistently that it has written all its Unix software so as to be completely machine-independent, and so the choice of its next chip is simply not an issue. And now the company is out to demonstrate the veracity of that assertion by going all out to exploit the portability of the software. The Westborough, Massachusetts company says it is currently in negotiations with an unidentified number of companies interested in taking its Unix System V implementation on an OEM basis, Unigram.X reports. It believes it will see them turn the thing into products of their own in the next 18 months. The move reflects the fact that many Unix licensees regard Novell Inc and what was once Unix System Laboratories as having given up all pretence of being a source of technology. Novell is so far behind, Data General executive Joel Schwartz said, all it sees is NT biting its ass. Data General’s intentions are also a direct challenge to Sun Microsystems Inc which has been attempting, with little reward, to replace Unix Systems Group by offering its own Solaris Unix on an OEM basis: Sun, Data General sniffs, buys in technology that the General would consider core.
Top of the heap
Sun, and for that matter IBM Corp, Hewlett-Packard Co and Digital Equipment Corp – with all their petty workstation concerns – are too low in the food chain operating system-wise, for Data General to pay them much mind. It long ago set its sights on finer things and has managed to produce a hardened, toughened commercial operating system that analysts like Jonathen Eunice of Illuminata rate as top of the heap. Data General has been preparing for this day consciously and unconsciously ever since the mid-1980s when it was still majoring on its proprietary Eclipse minis and, realising it couldn’t stay with them forever, prepared for a shift to a bought-in processor by minimising the code that was unique to the Eclipse architecture. Then, when it finally went to the Motorola Inc 88000, it continued the discipline and made its code more and more portable. It is now implementing the code for several non-88000 architectures, apparently with a view to one day offering them OEM. It refuses to identify the chips but it’s already known to be going to Intel Corp for its own conversion to a P6 – possible quad – system in the foreseeable future. Data General sources have also reported an implementation for the 64-bit UltraSparc chip – if not for Sun then for Sparcsystem-builders and resellers or possibly as simple upgrades for systems in the field. However there are believed to be other architectures. Data General rejected the file system provided by Unix Systems Group as inadequate and wrote its own. It prides itself on its symmetric multiprocessing capabilities and its high availability – and claims that DG/UX is the only Unix operating system in the running for B2 security clearance. It has achieved scalability and can provide clustering modules. Now it’s working on moving to multiple architectures. It has even got a modular systems management kit, DG/UX Manager 2.0, to throw into the pot, which is based on Windows NT and presents the Windows face customers know and want. Moreover, in its bo ok, Sun, its only challenger, is guilty of avoiding the obvious logic of a single source tree and writing versions of Solaris that are different for each architecture – iAPX-86, Sparc, PowerPC – and now even character-based. It’s not an example Data General intends to follow.
