The Santa Cruz Operation Inc says it has now manufactured a small number of Advanced Computing Environment Open Desktop developers kits, which are on its shelves bearing part numbers, but still awaiting first delivery. The organisation is not recommending, however, that anybody use them for development purposes. They are more in the way of evaluation kits, according to Santa Cruz. Exactly how functional the operating system is at this point remains to be seen. About 25 to 30 OEM customers and independent software vendors – companies still officially unidentified, but well associated with the ACE initiative, are expected to take delivery of the units, apparently this month. The software will run on the Advanced RISC Computing-compliant MIPS R3000-based hardware that Digital Equipment Corp has brought out in its 3100 and 5000 series. Santa Cruz describes this roll-out as the first of three phases. The second will be an operating system designed for the 64-bit MIPS R4000 encased in a new MIPS Computer Systems Inc box, codenamed Jazz officials reveal only that it is expected soon. The third will be a final iteration for the R4000. Santa Cruz, which has apparently backed off its responsibilities to develop ACE’s Unix operating system and thrown the ball back into DEC’s lap, has no dates for either the second or third phases, though the mid-year timeframe set for R4000 Open Desktop product announcements is said to be looking good. However, Santa Cruz previously told our sister publication Unigram.X not to expect the OSF/1-Intel version of Open Desktop before 1993, putting that part of the Initiative way behind schedule and giving Microsoft Corp a greater shot at dominating it with NT. Of course, the unplayed Unix card in this equation is still System V.4 – now accepted by ACE as a Unix alternative. Unix System Labs will have to come out with an ACE system soon if Microsoft’s advances are to be answered.
