Praxis Plc, the Bath, Avon company that is on its way to Touche Ross & Co (CI No 2,056), revealed that it has completed the initial version of an Architecture-Neutral Distribution Format installer for IBM Corp’s RS/6000. It has already developed an installer for the Sparc RISC CPU. The Distribution Format is based on UK Defence Research Agency technology and is conceived as a ground-breaking way of enabling software vendors to write, package and distribute one single version of an application to run unchanged on laptops, workstations, servers, mainframes, even supercomputers. Both the Open Software Foundation and Unix Systems Laboratories Inc are Defence Research Agency licensees of the technology. In a new development, Praxis has also been subcontracted by Intermetrics Inc to define the mappings from Ada9X languages to the Architecture-Neutral Distribution Format for the UK Defence Agency. It is hoped that an Ada version of the Distribution Format will enable government, defence and corporate procurers to exercise a much greater degree of control over their suppliers, by enabling them to separate hardware and software purchasing considerations.
