Wang Laboratories Inc has shunned RISC technology and settled on the new Intel 80486 as the basis of its belated plunge into Unix, Computer Systems News reports. The company plans to build a family of 80486 workstations that can be integrated with the company’s proprietary VS business computers, and in multi-vendor open architecture networks. The product line is to include systems, servers, dumb asynchronous terminals and X Window workstations. Wang has evidently decided not to take sides in the Unix wars, and has joined both Unix International and the renegade Open Software Foundation formed to wrest the soul of Unix away from AT&T Co. It plans to mix and match from the various standards available, going for Posix compliance, the AT&T System V Interface Definition, some System V.3 extensions, the X/Open Co Ltd Common Application Environment and the X Window System. It does plan to incorporate the Open Software Foundation’s Motif user interface on X Window workstations for graphic applications such as it white hope, image processing, and desktop publishing and database applications. In particular it will put its WIIS Wang Integrated Image System up under Unix on the X Window stations. The products, due to start appearing late this year, will also include 80486-based Unix systems for character applications such as word and document processing. Wang’s four chosen vertical markets are financial services, government, manufacturing and professional services, and its Unix offerings will be in particular pitched at the government market. Apart from TCP/IP communications, the Lowell, Massachusetts company’s only real nod in the direction of Unix so far has been the IN/ix implementation, which is designed to run side by side with the VS operating system on its small mainframes. Crisis at Wang – see page four.
