Hostages long held captive in the highly defended bastion of the proprietary Apple Computer Inc Macintosh could be liberated soon by the intervention of a tiny start-up called Quorum Software Systems Inc. The two-year-old Menlo Park, California company is promising to unveil technology this week at UniForum that will enable Mac applications to run on any RISC system, starting with Sparc, R-series and RS/6000-based boxes. The 20-person start-up has spent $2m of venture capital developing a full and portable software implementation of the Macintosh application programming interface called the Quorum Compatibility Engine. What it has done is duplicate the hooks or interfaces offered to developers by the fabled Mac ROM, the Apple treasure house jealously guarded by its legions of lawyers. Quorum’s attorneys have apparently surveyed Quorum’s situation and pronounced it hazard-free. No employee ever worked for any Apple entity and it says it started from scratch using public information, bypassing the clean room approach taken by the likes of Phoenix Technologies Ltd. The Engine is said to enable Mac applications to run in native RISC mode at RISC speed under graphical user interfaces such as Open Look and Motif. Initially what will come of the work are two products, Quorum Latitude and Quorum Equal, the first for software developers, the second for end-users. Latitude, now in beta test and due to ship this quarter, will enable independent software vendors to recompile and enhance Mac programs to suit the Quorum Engine while retaining all the functions they have under the Mac interface. Equal, however, will be a hybrid, shrink-wrapped product consisting of the Quorum Engine and a Motorola 68000 emulator coming in the second half priced between $500 and $1,000 in single quantities. It is called a hybrid because the emulator is needed only 20% to 40% of the time. Functions such as graphics, fonts, menus and printing that a Mac directs to the Tool Box will be done by the Quorum Engine in RISC native mode. Quorum’s performance is said to equal to a Macintosh IIsi. The firm hopes its environment will answer the Unix industry’s calls for graphical user interface-based applications, which has been sounding increasingly shrill the last few months. At the same time, it could release those held prisoner to the Mac hardware – perhaps even Apple itself. Quorum is said to be going into UniForum armed with technical co-marketing pacts with SunSoft Inc and Silicon Graphics Inc to encourage independent software vendors to adopt the technology, and with endorsements from Adobe Systems Inc and Aldus Corp, which are planning product announcements down the road. Developers can expect to be told of vast savings in conversion time and costs with Quorum over starting from scratch. Quorum is currently raising a second round of finance, looking for $2m to take it through productisation and marketing. Later on, it hopes vendors will buy in as strategic partners.
