Last week’s Unix 89 trade show in Stockholm was the fifth annual show to highlight the Swedish marketplace, and revealed what is now a remarkably mature sector of the industry in Sweden. Show visitors were typically representing government institutions, large companies or academia, and there was no sign here of the industry simply selling to itself. Many of the companies and visitors said that they had been using Unix since the late 1970s and early 1980s, and expressed the belief that the Swedish private sector, which has been lagging behind the Government and Defence Department’s widely publicised commitment to Unix, was now ready to look again and move away from its traditional dependence on IBM mainframes. The Government’s preferred list of hardware suppliers – currently Diab, Nokia Data, NCR and Unisys – is now again under assessment, and a new list is to be issued in January.
