Microsoft Corp has at last begun shipments of its LAN Manager/X to OEM customers, six months later than originally promised. Among the first to receive LM/X, the portable version of the OS/2 LAN Manager operating system which Microsoft has developed in conjunction with Hewlett-Packard Co, are Hewlett-Packard itself, Groupe Bull, AT&T, The Santa Cruz Operation, Interactive Systems Corp and Tandem Computers. According to Microsoft’s general manager of the network business unit will extend the benefits of Microsoft’s distributed client-server computing into key heterogeneous environments such as VMS and Unix. We expect to see final products from our OEM partners beginning this quarter. LM/X was re-written in C over standard interfaces on Unix System V/386 Release 3.2, and is independent of the underlying transport layer and can support a variety of protocols, such as TCP/IP, ISO, NetBEUI and XNS. It provides named pipes as its interprocess communication (IPC) mechanism to support distributed applications across the network, giving application developers increased portability to other operating systems supporting LM/X. OS/2 LAN Manager, and Microsoft Networks for MS-DOS and Xenix clients are also fully supported. Database vendors committed to support the product include Sybase, Informix, Ingres and Oracle, and LM/X will be integrated into the SCO Open DeskTop package. Interactive Systems Corp says it will release its own version during the second quarter of the year, promising the integration of its TCP/IP facilities and the addition of a Unix client capability, enabling transparent access to and from Unix, MS-DOS and OS/2 systems.
