The one systems vendor community that has met the challenge from Unix head-on and looks like winning for itself the best of both worlds is the sturdy band of Pick-poppers, and having plunged into Pick with the acquisitions of Rexon Business Machines and Fujitsu Systems of America, Alpha Microsystems Inc, Santa Ana, California, which has vacillated over Unix in tha past, has now taken the plunge with a vengeance, announcing Apix, which it claims is its own concurrent Pick and Unix System V.4. Apix will become the company’s standard version of Pick, enabling execution of stand-alone Pick or Unix applications, or the concurrent execution of applications in both environments. It was made possible because Alpha Micro was a beta test side for System V.4, the AT&T implementation designed to pull together all the widely-used variants of Unix. The development and testing was done on AMS Pick Release 6 and an earlier version of Unix. Apix contains the necessary software bridges to move files and data between Pick and Unix applications, and supports environ ment switching, so that Unix and Pick applications can run under ope rator or program control, without requiring knowledge of which envir onment is being used. The company says that in its benchmarks there was less than a 1% decrease in per formance when multi-user Pick appli cations were run under Apix. The beta release is set for the fourth quarter and Phase I will exclude the Pick-based Common Network Architect ure communications, and the Unix networking and Graphical User Inter face, and Phase II will include the first production release of Apix, with early ships in the first quart er of 1991, volume the second. The firm’s core business remains its proprietary Amos operating system.
