Following the completion of its deal with Huntsville, Alabama-based Intergraph Corp last week, Visix Software Inc, Arlington, Virginia is piling the pressure on arch rival IXI Ltd with the announcement of new marketing deals with MIPS Computer Systems and Network Computing Devices for its Looking Glass Unix graphical desktop user interface. The two companies will be showing Looking Glass on their hardware and promoting it as their preferred graphical user interface shell. Whilst Visix also numbers Pyramid Technology Corp among its OEM partners, Cambridge, UK-based IXI Ltd’s X.desktop product has found favour with Acorn Computers Plc, Locus Computing Corp, which has developed an Xhibit version, Santa Cruz Operation Inc – which implements Xhibit as part of its Open Desktop interface application, Motorola Inc, BiiN Inc, Uniplex Ltd – which has X.desktop as the interface for its X Window System-based office automation software and is to announce it in the UK shortly, NCR Corp and Parallel Systems International Inc. IXI says that X.desktop will be shown on a range of systems from members of the 88open Motorola 88000 RISC fan club, and on DEC systems, at the forthcoming Unix Expo show in New York. The other players in the the same game, rounding off the quartet, are the Paris-based company Non-Standard Logics SA, which has a desktop manager called Wish, and the UK’s Torch Technology Ltd of Cambridge, which was showing off its own, rather overlooked offer ing – the curiously named Y Open Top – at London’s Personal Computer Show last week. The product is now available running under the Open Software Foundation’s Motif interface. It costs UKP300 and will also run on Sun Microsystems, Hewlett-Packard, Apple Computer and Acorn Unix based hardware.
