The decision by Intel Corp and Siemens AG to throw in the towel on their BiiN Inc joint venture, which had absorbed over $100m in investment, came in the same week that Electronic News ran a story highlighting plans at the Hillsboro, Oregon company to diversify into the commercial fault-tolerant Unix market: BiiN’s BiiN/OS operating system, 2m lines of Ada code, implements a Unix shell and conforms to the System V Interface Definition and Posix, but does not have a Unix kernel; Joseph Kroger hired from the vice-chairman post at Unisys Corp to run B{iN, will oversee the rundown and efforts to sell the company, which will be liquidated if a buyer has not been found within a few weeks; Intel Corp will take a $35m one-time charge with its third quarter figures to cover the write-off, and does not expect to take further charges on BiiN.
