It must be hard for IBM to take, but there is a whole crowd of software developers out there who reckon that Apple’s A/UX Unix on the Macintosh II is an incomparably more sexy environment in which to work than IBM’s AIX, be it on the RT or on the PS/2. One overwhelming reason is that despite all Bill Lowe’s challenging words, very few observers are convinced that IBM really believes in Unix, feeling that underneath the bombast, it regards the operating system with the same distaste and contempt as it did X25 packet switching during the late 1970s and early 1980s. Apple Computer chose the opening of Uniforum to announce that A/UX had begun shipping, and UniSoft Corp and R Systems Inc chose Uniforum to announce availability of their product lines for A/UX. Oracle Corp also announced database management system support for TCP/IP on Apple machines. UniSoft Corp introduced a suite of compilers for A/UX: the C, Fortran, and Pascal compilers which the company says have been implemented specifically for A/UX and the Motorola 68000 series architecture, which will take advantage of the Macintosh interface. The UniSoft compilers have been optimised for the Motorola 68020 and 68881 floating point chips, and feature one-pass compilation for maximum throughput and the C compiler supports all Western Electric and Berkeley Unix extensions. UniSoft’s Fortran Compiler passes the US Government Fortran Compiler Verification Suite, and the Pascal Compiler implements the ANSI-standard Pascal language, passing the ISO Level O test suite. The compilers are available immediately, at $495 apiece. Also delivering A/UX support is R Systems Inc which has introduced its family of word processing and office automation applications. R Desk, R Word, R Word+ R Office Manager and R Office+ were ported to A/UX in less than two days, claims the company. Support for the Apple interface will be included in future versions of the R software. R Desk on A/UX costs $495, R Word is $995, R Word+ is $1395, R Office+ contains all of the features and functions found in R Desk, R Word and R Word+ and costs from $1,795. R Office+ requires 362Kb of memory in a single-user environment. In a multi-user environment the program requires the initial 362Kb for the first terminal supported and 44Kb per additional terminal.
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