Atari Corp and Commodore International are both determined to be seen as suppliers of business machines as well as home computers, and the first step towards making any 68000 family machine look like a serious business box is to put Unix onto it. Accordingly, Atari Corp has gone to Computer Tools Ltd in Seattle, Washington for a licence to the Idris Unixalike. Idris was developed by Whitesmiths Ltd in Concord, Massachusetts, and was chosen by Atari because it doesn’t need a memory management unit – there is no memory manager in the 68000-based 520ST and 1040ST machines. The company has also chosen the Informix relational database manager from Informix Software Inc, Menlo Park, California, and picked up between 400 and 500 Informix applications. The company is preparing an open architecture version of the 1040ST and called the Mega ST for September, when Unix is likely to be announced; open architecture simply means that it has vacant slots into which third party add-ons can be plugged. Idris will be Atari’s first pass at Unix, but according to Computer Systems News, the company is also working on a 68020-based Mega-ES that will have a memory manager and will run full System V.
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