Jim Goodnight, president of Cary, North Carolina-based SAS Institute Inc, recently told Computerworld New Zealand that the only chips that can be considered as industry-standard RISCs are Sun Microsystems Inc’s Sparc and MIPS Computer Systems Inc’s R-series, and that IBM’s RISC processor RS/6000 will always be a proprietary system. Goodnight reckons that Unix will be the dominant system of the 1990s – not so much because of its specific advantages over other systems but more specifically because of its advantages in the workstation domain where almost all manufacturer are opting for Unix. The improved performance and growing market penetration of RISC computers stems from the demand from users for graphic user interfaces, he reckons. According to the SAS president, when it comes to a manufacturer-independent industry standard, Sun’s Sparc processor and the MIPS RISC chip are the only two processors in the running. And, he says, the 88000 from Motorola is too small and comes too late to compete with IBM’s RS/6000. On the destructive schism in the Unix world wrought by the Open Software Foundation, he reckons that a defective standardisation could hinder the propagation of Unix – SAS Institute’s SAS System is portable, but still runs up maintenance, training and quality assurance costs each year amounting to $500,000 for each version and Goodnight fears that such large investments for multiple implementations could present a block to the development of further Unix applications.
