Japanese companies are rushing to come up with their own versions of IBM’s Systems Applications Architecture, and following Fujitsu’s introduction of System Integrated Architecture in May, Hitachi has unveiled Hitachi Application Architecture. The first product to support the new programming environment is the 68020-based 2050/32 workstation, due to be launched today, Wednesday. Hitachi Application Architecture is designed to international standards, and will be supported for IBM-compatible mainframes and Unix-based workstations. It implements three common interfaces, the Application Programming Interface for development of applications on any machine implementing the architecture; Communication Support Interface, designed to enable applications on dissimilar machines to communicate; and Common Operation Interface, which is the operating system interface to which developers have to write in order to ensure portability. The new 2050/32 workstation incorporates a Hitachi Token Ring Network local area network interface. It will be available in October. Meantime Fujitsu’s System Integrated Architecture is slightly more ambitious than the Hitachi offering in that it is designed to be used on personal computers as well as workstations and mainframes. Fujitsu is offering the new architecture as part of an overall Systems Development Architecture and Support Facility, which in addition provides Tool Use Standards to support automatic program generation from design specifications, and Package Use Standards, designed to simplify development of packages for vertical markets. It also implements an overall Systems Planning Method.
