Phoenix Technologies Inc and Texas Instruments Inc are reportedly close to an agreement that will make available all the necessary chips and software to enable manufacturers to build true clones of Sun Microsystems Inc workstation built around the Sparc microprocessor. Texas, one of the string of companies that have signed to fabricate versions of the Sparc, would offer the chip sets and Phoenix would offer firmware and software kits for Unix similar to the ROM BIOS kits that it supplies to builders of IBM-compatible personal computers. According to Computer Systems News, Phoenix reckons that its ROM BIOS is used in more than 70% of the estimated 10m clones of the IBM Personal in use worldwide. Under the proposed agreement, on which the two companies declined to comment, it is believed that Texas and Phoenix – which has licences for the SunOS Unix so that manufacturers do not have to run the risk of showing their hand to Sun by licensing the software direct – would design mo therboards and other building block hardware and market them jointly to people wanting to build Sunalike workstations, with the majority of manufacturers likely to be in the Far East, where Sun was last year encouraging companies to build low- end workstations around the Sparc. Phoenix would also offer its OpenPC software emulation of the MS-DOS environment for Unix machines so that the workstations could run the enormous base of MS-DOS software. Phoenix is expected to make major OEM customers of its MS-DOS ROM BIOS its first target for the kits.
