Now that AT&T Co is shot of Unix and all its works, it retains no a priori commitment to the operating system it created, and these days treats it impartially with upstarts such as Microsoft Corp’s Windows NT. The Software Products Division of AT&T Global Information Solutions Corp, as we must somehow learn to think of NCR Corp, is distributing alpha versions of Pegasus source code, its next generation of LAN Manager for Unix, to a narrow band of OEM customers. Pegasus will enable LAN Manager for Unix sites, which represent roughly 50,000 servers or 10% of the network operating systems population worldwide, to interoperate with Windows NT Advanced Server and co-exist with it seamlessly on a peer-to-peer basis. Pegasus essentially puts Advanced Server’s networking components and some of its key attributes such as security and interdomain trust relationships, onto Unix, enabling Unix users to experiment with NT and possibly providing them with a migration path. Global, which has had sole res ponsibility for LAN Manager for Unix since Microsoft stopped supporting it last year, expects to release the Pegasus code to a wider OEM base early next quarter, with end user implementations due later in the year. Pegasus will initially be available for System V.4 environments but Global also plans to put out a binary product, its first such endeavour, for Novell Inc’s UnixWare this quarter.
