Interactive Systems Corp, Santa Monica, Cali-fornia, is to distribute its own version of the Unix/Xenix merged operating system it has been working on with AT&T and Microsoft by the first quarter of next year, according to Interactive president Ronald Fisher during a visit to the UK the other day. The new product will be a subset of the eventual AT&T certified version due out towards the end of 1988, not including some of the Xenix functionality that will eventually appear, but allowing 90% of Unix applications to run unchanged. Interactive will be issuing a list of working applications. The Interactive version is based on a Unix model, with a Xenix emulation that provides compatibility at a binary level. But, says Fisher, many Xenix software vendors are not waiting for the merged version, and are already porting their applications to Unix System V.3 in anticipation of the merge. The emulation approach adopted for the merged product might result in some performance degradation when running Xenix applications, but was felt to be the most flexible approach – and contrasts with the Altos’ merged Unix/Xenix due out at the end of this year for its own hardware, which has been implemented mostly in the kernel. Interactive’s own implementation of Unix V.3 for the Intel 80386, 386/ix, ships this month, and will be distributed in Europe through Sphinx and the ICUS network, already distributors of the VP/ix combination of MS-DOS and Unix developed in conjunction with Phoenix Technologies, which will now be marketed as an extension of 386/ix. Also included is the Ten/Plus user interface, and in-built networking including Streams and RFS. Fisher believes that Unix will soon account for between 20% and 40% of the total 80386 market, and that similar bridge products to VP/ix, linking MS-DOS, Unix, and OS/2 on the same network will play an important role. We see the 80386 running at 16MHz as about equivalent to the 68020, a 4 MIPS chip, he said. Already some 20MHz machines have been released, and Intel is promising 24MHz versions by the end of the year.
