The spectre of IBM Corp negotiating an agreed bid for Apple Computer Inc, which first surfaced at the beginning of the year (CI No 1,583) resurfaced on Friday when the Wall Street Journal quoted an Apple source saying that the company was considering licensing the Rios RISC used in the RS/6000 for its forthcoming top-end workstations, and suggesting that the deal would involve IBM licensing some Apple software technology. Any agreement is clearly far from firm, although sources close to Motorola Inc confirmed that Apple was reconsidering its earlier plan to use the 88000 RISC in the new machines; the Hewlett-Packard Co Precision Architecture RISC is also said to be in the running. Although the Journal suggests merely that IBM is simply interested in having Apple’s Claris Corp develop applications for OS/2, that cannot be the whole story, because Claris has no world-beating applications. Apple’s most attractive software asset is probably the Macintosh user interface, which IBM might want to put on the RS/6000 to counter any threat from Compaq Computer Corp with the forthcoming Advanced Computing Environment machines.
