Visitors to Apple Computer Inc’s World Wide Developers conference last month say that the company was talking about two new servers due in the middle of 1995 which will run PowerOpen Unix, but will not include Macintosh Application Services. At least one of the two high-end servers is said to be a symmetrical multiprocessing box. The two new arrivals are apparently dubbed Milky Way and Andromeda. Attendees talk of them having six PCI slots, 1Mb secondary cache, and storage bays with hot swappable media. Apple is not commenting directly, but sources in Apple’s server division last week added weight to the suggestion that the machines would not come with either Macintosh Application Services or the Macintosh Application environment. They point out that users building a departmental Unix server are not likely to want to run Quark Inc’s Xpress on it. What’s envisaged is a large multiprocessing box running AIX. It sounds suspiciously like the the IBM-Bull Pegasus machine due out this autumn, though Apple UK’s Steve Everhard told our sister publication PowerPC News that the company has no plans to take third party hardware products. Whatever we come up with will be Apple developed he says, while acknowledging the expertise that Bull has made available to PowerOpen. Apple would not comment on reports coming from the conference that the existing AWS95 server is being phased out at the end of the year.
