Following the decision to license Steve Job’s NeXTStep 486 object oriented operating system on its line of Intel Corp 80486 systems (CI No 2,148), Hewlett-Packard Co yesterday bit the bullet and said NeXTStep version 3.1 will be available on its Precision Architecture RISC-based HP Apollo 9000 series 700 of Unix workstations from the middle of next year. Talks between Job’s NeXT Computer Inc and Hewlett-Packard date back to the beginning of the year (CI No 2,080), and the two are now teaming to offer a bundled range of NeXT software on Hewlett-Packard systems, targeted at the financial services industry, under the name Object Enterprise. In addition, NeXT’s Portable Distributed Objects system for distributing applications across a network will enable NeXTStep objects to be deployed on HP-UX servers from the end of the year; the company’s NetInfo network management software will interoperate with Hewlett-Packard’s OpenView system management tools and will also be available on HP-UX servers from the fourth quarter of this year. The two say Open Software Foundation Distributed Computing and Distribu ted Management Environments and the Object Management Group’s Common Object Request Broker Architecture will feature in Object Enterprise.
