Two phased releases of code are planned by NEC Corp and its MIPS ABI Group partners involved in the Golden Gate project. Golden Gate is the effort to create an R-series RISC reference release of the iAPX-86-oriented Hewlett-Packard Co-Santa Cruz Operation Inc 64-bit 3DA Unix. With the idea that Golden Gate will bridge vendors’ existing MIPS application binary interface-based Unixes to 3DA, the group, which in addition to R-series fabricator NEC includes Siemens Nixdorf Informationssysteme AG, Sony Corp and Dansk Data Elektronik A/S, will deliver an implementation of Unix System V.4.2MP, called Tower – almost equivalent in functionality to UnixWare – to run on 64-bit MIPS hardware. 3DA is being constructed upon a foundation of UnixWare. Memory addressing, other system parameters and the creation of a 32-bit compatibility mode are said to be key to it. Design work for Tower was completed in July, and the team now has the 32-bit mode working. A first beta version is expected in early 1997 although Oracle Corp is already working with an early one. The second phase is Bridge, an implementation of the Hewlett-Santa Cruz modular 3DA architecture for MIPS. NEC has received 3DA specifications from Hewlett-Packard (CI No 2,858), and conversion will begin in January. The 22-strong Golden Gate team is based at NEC’s Systems Laboratories Division in San Jose, California. It has four engineers from NEC in Tokyo, two from Dansk Data, and other Sony staffers joining this month. It is headed by vice-president and chief architect Steve Stone and director of development Larry Hemstreet, who both report to Shawn Toshira, president of NEC Systems Labs. MIPS parent Silicon Graphics Inc is contributing compiler technology to Golden Gate but does not plan to offer Tower or Bridge for its systems. It already offers a 64-bit version of its Irix operating system, and in any case bought its Unix license out from Novell Inc some time ago. NEC executive vice-president Masao Toka who heads up the company’s computer business, is apparently pleased there is a Japanese element to this particular Unix initiative; most Unix development projects have been driven from US companies. Of course we have the ability to develop a new operating system if we wanted to, said Toka, but we learned from our experience in the mainframe world – I believe our mainframe ACOS system was technically at least as good as IBM’s, but what the customers wanted was SAS, or Nastran, in other words third party applications, and a consistent system to run them on. Toka asserts that NEC accepted leadership of the MIPS group because there needs to be a de facto standard used by at least 60% to 70% of the market.
