Apple Computer Inc is set to clarify its Unix strategy this week, as well as announcing a few products that are unlikely to appear for another four months or so. It should tell us that it has those three new PowerPC-based Quadras that run the System 7 operating system native (CI No 2,309). At least one will be a mult-iuser version that also runs A/UX Unix. The company may also reveal an intent to roll its well-respected A/UX Unix implementation into IBM Corp’s AIX. That decision wouldn’t be entirely market-driven – it appears that the time has come for Apple to put something more into its relationship with IBM. As for its Macintosh Application Services binary-to-binary conversion software, sources say the company is likely to declare it is working on a version for Sun Microsystems Inc, Hewlett-Packard Co and IBM Corp environments, although products won’t appear until springtime. Finally, Apple’s work with Symantec Corp on Bedrock, an object-oriented cross-system application framework that is intended to allow the development of applications, running under both Microsoft Corp Windows and System 7, seems to be struggling a bit. The two were supposed to be adding support for Unix on the PowerPC, but we reckon Apple is going to scrap that proposition because it is such a difficult technical task. Apple declined to comment.
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