At UniForum a couple of weeks ago, Unisys Corp, the first and, as we recall, the only hardware vendor to lend its support to UnixWare way back when, flashed an overhead slide showing how it planned to standardise on something called UnixWare 3.0 in 1997 for all its Unix systems. Last week, however, when our sister paper Unigram.X asked about the seriousness of its intent, it decommitted – its own word – faster than you can say Bob Frankenberg. Unisys feels that it was mislead by Novell Inc’s glib promises – bragging Unisys called it – of how a legion of independent software vendors and resellers would fight each other for position behind the red UnixWare pennant. All of which has obviously never materialised any more than volume UnixWare sales. It has worked out that UnixWare currently has an installed base of 70,000. Having resolved some performance issues that were bothering it, Unisys is feeling a lot more cheerful these days about its own rendition of Unix System V.4 and this week is upgrading to version 1.3. Unless somebody can present it with a stronger case, it is likely to continue with what it has.
