University of Utah spin-out Hippo Software Inc, the little company with the Unix commands and libraries that are supposed to help developers write NT and Unix programs that will be source code-compatible, is selling off its inventory and withdrawing its Hippix software from the market due to a funds crisis, reports our sister publication ClieNT Server News. Support ends June 30. The company said it spent its resources on an earlier version that ran under OS/2 and did not sell well. Although the NT version sold better, Hippo apparently did not have the money to promote it. Hippo is selling off copies of the package, developed by the university’s Center for Software Science, for $50; it was originally priced at $240. As recently as Comdex/Spring, Digital Equipment Corp said it expected to experiment with an Alpha version to help in converting Polycenter to NT. Hippix was considered a competitor of NuTcracker from Datafocus Inc and Portage from Consensys Inc. Its commands included most of the IEEE Posix 1003.2 and 1003.2a draft standards like the famous Unix awk, grep, sh and vi and its libraries had most of the Posix 1003.1 applications programming interfaces.
