Wealth of X Terminals in all shapes and sizes dominate the Unix Fair ’91 in Tokyo

It was a big week for Unix in Japan last week with the annual Unix Fair 91 held on December 4 and 5, and a host of accompanying announcements and events. Held under the auspices of the Japan Unix Society, this year’s Unix Fair was bigger than ever, with more than 28,000 attendees viewing exhibits from 53 companies. The programme included keynote speeches by Robert Lewin of X/Open, Michael Zadig of SunSoft and William Sandve of IBM, as well as a range of seminars on topics such as the Mach kernel, network programming, Unix internationalisation, local networks, software engineering and computer architectures. At the accompanying exhibition, a number of companies were displaying new hardware and software, including products in development. Thin plasma display-based X-terminals were in evidence at a number of companies’ stands, from Anritsu – its DX2000 flat personal X-station Peta, in a compact size with a 1,280 by 1,024 dot high-resolution electroluminescent panel; and from Takaoka Seisakusho, the XMiNT-F with a 3.5 deep plasma display with the same resolution, in a design with a separate keyboard, and claimed to be the fastest plasma display X-terminal. At Takaoka’s stand, another X-terminal in the series, the XMiNT-H, with a 1,664 by 1,200 pixel display was on show, equipped with a 25MHz 68030 CPU and up to 12Mb of memory, aimed at high-capacity applications. Japan Computer Corp, which claims the premier fully dedicated graphics workstations and X-terminal manufacturer, had on show the Xface series of flat plasma panel X Window terminals, including a low-end model with the same electroluminescent screen technology, measuring 11 by 5.3 and based on a 33MHz MC68030; while at the high-end Japan Computer offered the SuperXR, based on an R3000 chip and incorporating a Trinitron monitor. Sony Tektronix displayed the XP29P X-terminal, supporting the PEX5R1 PEX implementation, as well as a four-model range of low-cost X-terminals, the XP10 series. Other new terminal hardware included Network Computing Devices Japan’s RISC-based 19 colour X-terminal, based on the 88100 chip and a high-end model to the best-seller NCD17c. Network Computing has seven distributors in Japan, including majors such as Science Research Associates, Rikei and Bussan Advanced Systems. In other hardware news, Hitachi was displaying its latest model in the 2050 G-series of engineering workstations, based on a 25MHz or 33MHz 68040 microprocessor, and supporting Hitachi’s own windowing system as well as OSF/Motif 1.1. Both Fujitsu and PFU had on display the DS/90 series of servers from ICL Plc, seven models in the 7000 series. At the Fujitsu stand, new software included a Fujitsu-developed graphical user interface builder for window-based application development, and Open Gift, an object generator tool, for use on the DS/90 series; a production planning support system developed with Open Gift was said to have taken under two man-months to develop 2,000 lines of Lisp code with OpenGift used for the user interface. A Japanese version of the Framemaker desktop publishing system was on display at the SRA stand; and on the Matsushita Computer System stand, where the 31 MIPS per CPU Solbourne Series 5E/700 was displayed for the first time in Japan. The Matsushita company says it targets the Solbourne 5E/7000 for use in medium-to-large database machine applications. The Kubota Computer stand displayed both the Titan range of graphics supercomputers, displayed with Energe, a new rendering software package from Japanese company Namco, CG Project; and the MIPS RS3330/3230 RISC workstation and the RC6260 server. Both Nissho Electronics and Digital Technologies exhibited the Auspex-developed, Fuji Xerox-manufactured transaction processing machine, known respectively as the Argoss 9450 or the NS5000S Network File System server. In new relationships in evidence at the Fair, Sumitomo Corp has tied up with Opus Systems Inc of Fremont, California to distribute the Sparc-based family of works

tations and engines, with the Personal Mainframe board enabling the personal computer in which it is installed to switch between SunView and MS-DOS applications. Currently positioning is for the IBM AX series of IBM-compatible – running American MS-DOS – personal computers. Sumitomo also exhibited the TriCord PowerFrame super server, which is targeted at organisations that have existing networks based on NetWare. Finally Canon was exhibiting a NeXT Computer System-based Group IV facsimile server system that enabled transmission of text and graphics created on the NeXT to be sent via a wide area network over ISDN to Group IV facsimile machines; installed via an ISDN interface board, it can also receive facsimile messages, and they can then be edited as image data on the NeXT workstation.

IXI sitting pretty with Tomen’s backing

Tomen Corp’s Tomen Electronics Co, which last month announced that it was taking a stake in IXI Ltd of Cambridge, UK and jointly establishing IXI Japan KK for the support of its Japanese OEM business (CI No 1,814), expanded on its new relationships. In the two and a half years since its initial tie-up with IXI, Tomen has established 10 OEM vendor relationships, with companies including NEC Corp, IBM Japan, Kubota, Sanyo Electric, Omron, Matsushita and Nippon Unisys; Tomen expects that with release of X.desktop 3.0 in its Japanese version, and a Deskterm terminal emulator that enables the addition of OSF/Motif graphical user interfaces, an additional five companies will sign on for the IXI products. Atsushita Suzuki, now non-executive director of IXI, attributes Tomen’s relative success in Japan to the fact that it beat rival products such as Visix Software Inc’s Looking Glass to the Japanese market, was faster out with a Japanese version (Japanised by Unix specialist Astec) and gained the early support of major vendors. Looking Glass is distributed in Japan by Science Research Associates, and is available for both Sparcstations and Sony NEWS workstations. Japanisation of Looking Glass was a bigger task than doing X.Desktop, according to Visix’s director of international sales, Mark Steffler, but he said SRA would make major announcements in the near future.

Unix International programme for 1992

Last week also saw the Pacific announcement by Unix System Laboratories Pacific, of Unix Labs’ recent investment of $1m in Chorus Systems Inc, the US subsidiary of Chorus Systems SA of Paris. Stanley Dolberg, vice-president of marketing at Unix Labs, and Hubert Zimmerman, founder and president of Chorus made the announcement, accompanied by Peter Cunningham of Unix International. M Zimmerman explained the basic concepts of the Chorus microkernel, emphasising that the benefits of real-time systems and memory management from the microkernel technology were available today. Japanese press interest focussed on the comparison of the Chorus microkernel with Open Software Foundation technology and on Unix Labs’ stance on development or buying in of new Unix technology. Stanley Dolberg emphasised that the equity investment method of obtaining technology would be one of the options used by Unix Labs in the future, but probably not the most common. On the prospects for the open systems market for 1992, Peter Cunningham indicated that he was delighted that with the start of volume ships of Solaris, System V.4 installations would increase enormously. Lately, he said, there had been tremendous interest from MS-DOS software firms in converting their applications for System V.4. He saw significant developments in three areas in 1992, in each of which Unix International was working with Unix Labs: development of desktop System V.4; growth of commercial open systems transaction processing systems, which would not occur overnight but for which first major steps would be taken in 1992 – Cunningham sees Unix transaction processing initially running alongside proprietary systems; and provision of system software by Unix Labs to meet the needs of Unix International members – including a wide-area network version of Network F

ile System, object-oriented system framework and implementation of a common look-and-feel graphical interface across Open Look, Motif and Windows.