Hewlett-Packard Co supporters club, the Precision RISC Organisation, says it will release the first Precision Architecture versions of its 88open-based testing tools by the third quarter of 1993. Although the Organisation won’t confirm that it paid some $600,000 for the suite, the decision to plump for 88open’s testing technology was thought to be purely financial: we couldn’t afford to spend that kind of money developing our own alternative, so we bought in. The Organisation says the first application binary interface specifications will be put before its board in December, with beta tests scheduled for January 1993. The group also plans to launch an independent software developers programme in 1993. Add-on testing tools for the Precision Architecture RISC are to be released by the end of 1993, and will include features such as data instruction analysis, security and integrity, and application performance. Following the trend to ensure compatibility of hardware and software developed on dissimilar systems, Sparc International is also reportedly working on another range of testing tools for the Sparc architecture.
