Digital Equipment Corp has at last announced its OSF/1 Unix-based operating system for Alpha-based AXP systems, giving its Alpha hardware customers an alternative to VMS. OSF/1 V1.2 is its 64-bit implementation that will run applications originally designed for System V, BSD and OSF/1 Unix, according to DEC. It ships immediately. Real-time performance is the highest available from general purpose systems, claims the company. Software houses supporting the launch included Acceler8 Technology Corp, Crosswind Technologies Inc, Informix Corp, Ingres Corp, Micro Focus Plc, Progress Software Corp and Sybase Inc. Along with the operating system, DEC introduced its Polycenter advanced file system and utilities, providing high availability for large-scale storage systems, multi-disk support and performance tuning: available from May. DEC plans a further release of OSF/1 mid-year, adding further layered products, including the object-based Application Control Architecture Services application integration layer. OSF/1 V2 will support symmetrical multiprocessing and clustering, and it is due to be released between October 1993 and April 1994.
