Motorola Inc and UniSoft Group received AT&T Co’s blessing this week for their Binary Compatibility Standard that was lacking at the UniForum announcement (CI No 870). Additionally Motorola announced that it would be taking a small stake in the London based software house in a bid to tie the companies more closely together. The exact terms of the deal were not disclosed but UniSoft has committed to deliver ports derived from Unix System V for Motorola’s 68000 and 88000-based hardware. President of AT&T’s Data Systems Group Vittorio Cassoni said that its goal is to have binary application portability within each of the major Unix-based architectures as well as to simplify the porting of applications across architectures. Motorola says that the three companies will be working together to ensure the consistency of the Binary Standard with other Advanced Binary Interfaces that AT&T is developing with the aid of its partner Sun Microsystems for the SPARC and Microsoft and the Intel camp for the 80386. AT&T has also gone some way to allaying the fears of the Hamilton Group (CI No 874) by saying that it will involve more manufacturers in the beta test programme for System V.4 than it did for V.3 in order to ensure a consistent and timely Release 4.0 for Motorola and other key microprocessor architectures used across the industry. Motorola is negotiating terms and conditions on this with AT&T.
