Stakes in the battle for control of the Unix skies were raised again when clouds of fallout from the Advanced Computing Environment consortium’s launch began to drift ashore last week. It seems, for all intents and purposes, that Digital Equipment Corp is giving up on the bulk of its RISC Unix operating system effort and transferring responsibility for development of its future requirements to the Santa Cruz Operation Inc. DEC says it will supply the commercial OSF/1-Ultrix implementation it is currently working on to Santa Cruz, which will integrate DEC’s source code with its AT&T Unix-derived Open Desktop operating system superset. Santa Cruz will license the new OSF/1-Open Desktop back to DEC, which it will market as its standard offering across its entire range of MIPS Computer Systems-based RISC Unix systems after adding functionality for specific application environments such as transaction processing, fault-tolerance and multi-media where and when it is needed. Santa Cruz has promised to make the Open Desktop it will build around the OSF/1 kernel binary and source code-compatible with DEC’s existing RISC Ultrix Unixalike. Joe Maynard, DEC’s Ultrix manager, expects most DEC customers to phase over to Open Desktop, but says the firm will continue to develop its Ultrix implementation for an unspecified length of time – presumably at least until the beginning of next year when Santa Cruz begins to roll out production versions of OSF/1 Open Desktop. The cocktail of OSF/1, Ultrix and AT&T Unix System V.3.2 technology will also form the basis of the Unix operating system that is to be offered on the Advanced Computing Environment group’s MIPS R4000 RISC-based system. Importantly, Santa Cruz says it will also make that technology available on the Intel Corp iAPX-86 machines that make up the majority of its business via a seamless upgrade path for existing Open Desktop customers to the new Open Desktop. It’ll be a single piece of software code for MIPS RISC and Intel architectures, said Santa Cruz’s Steve Spill. Moreover he said the technology will also conform both to Unix System Laboratories’ System V Interface Definition release 3 – which includes most of the requirements for compatibility with Unix System V.4 – and to the Open Software Foundation’s AES, which defines OSF/1 compatibility requirements, as well as to X/Open’s XPG3 portability guide. Spill said Santa Cruz is still trying to figure out whether Unix V.4 applications will run on the initial release, though we expect some to run immediately. Furthermore Santa Cruz says it will remain a member of Unix International Inc and if things go well we’ll continue to take Unix Labs technology. A developer’s kit, expected by late autumn, will enable applications to be converted from Intel across to MIPS architecture – in readiness for the R4000-based standard – and Santa Cruz says that everything running on its products, from Xenix up to the multi-processing 80486 Unix will be able to run, after source-level recompilation, on MIPS’ R3000A and R4000 architectures. The new Open Desktop bundle will include existing application technology – including the latest version of IXI Ltd’s X.desktop manager – as well as an MS-DOS emulator and a common interface layer for running on LAN Manager X, Novell NetWare and X25 networks. Santa Cruz is also reported to be working on a subsequent, bi-endian version of Open Desktop that will enable applications written to a big-endian byte-ordering scheme to run unchanged. The Advanced Computing Environment vendors have chosen to support a little-endian operating system because MS-DOS and OS/2 running in Intel architectures and Ultrix running on MIPS and VAX processors are based upon little-endian schemas. Santa Cruz says the future contents of Open Desktop will be decided by an advisory council that will include OEM customers and end-users, including the Open Software Foundation and Unix International. With this alignment Santa Cruz appears to be tying future of its business perilously close to the success or failure of the Softwar
e Foundation’s operating system technology and the Advanced Computing Environment’s ambitious low-cost workstation gambit.
