IBM has formed a company called Patriot Partners with its long term partner Mountain View, California-based Metaphor Computer Systems Inc in order to develop software which will act as a go-between for each application and different types of computers. This new software will support software technologies such as object-oriented programming, multimedia support, end user visual programming capabilities and structured access to expert system facilities. The software will be designed for use with either OS/2 or AIX and other versions of Unix. According to the Wall Street Journal the software will not mean that someone using an OS/2-based application on a personal computer could use it on a workstation as a Unix application. However, it should make it easier for a programmer to translate software from one operating system to the other. David Liddle, chairman of Metaphor said 200 programmers will be involved in the development work. A product is expected to come to market in two to three years – IBM will sell the software on its own machines, while Metaphor will have the right to sell it to other hardware vendors. In 1988 IBM took a 10% equity stake in Metaphor (CI No 911) to get its man machine interface technology into its Data Inter-pretation System. The Metaphor system consists of Ethernetworked workstations linked to file, database and communications servers. The workstations are based on the 68000 family and run a proprietary operating system with an icon-and-mouse user interface similar to Xerox Star and Apple Mac.
