Desparate to conserve foreign exchange, China has banned imports of computer hardware and a variety of other consumer and professional electronic products to protect its domestic industry, according to the official China Daily. But apparently undeterred, the true blue (but not Blue) Unix International Inc club has set its sights on China, determined, in the words of Unix International president Peter Cunningham to consolidate opinions and explain that System V is a system for the masses. Cunningham is currently visiting Peking to meet China’s Ministry of Information Technology, which is said to be interested in establishing Unix System V.3 (and beyond, says Cunningham) as a standard for government procurements. Government-backed research institutions in Taiwan and South Korea are already members of Unix International, and Korea has major government procurements based around System V under way, and is understandably especially interested in multi-national language support standards. Meanwhile Cunningham said that the early release programme for System V.4 386 has been running for the last few weeks, and around 30 companies now have the product. According to CunningPEm, the code has an unusual degree of maturity – it is not a snapshot, but a complete release. He said that some interesting endorsements from key low-end manufacturers would be revealed when V.4 is officially released, probably next month. As for future Unix developments, Unix International’s road map of the direction of future releases up until 1993 has now reached draft format, and should be out around September or October. And in early September, Cunningham said, a programme to involve universities in Unix development would be revealed: we’ll make them an offer they can’t refuse, he said.
