Continuing its concerted effort to make the world believe that it’s serious about the computer business, AT&T Co yesterday confirmed that it has chosen the Sun Microsystems RISC in favour of its own RISC develop-ment as part of a planned computer platform that will be based on Unix System V.3 and the SPARC RISC set; the announcement confirms our story of September (CI No 773). Details of the agreement are sketchy but Sun has committed to deliver a System V Interface Definition-compatible version of its SunOS 4.2BSD-based implementation of Unix by mid-1988. By 1989 AT&T will have a Unix implementation that includes System V.3, 4.2, and SunOS. SunOS includes support for X.11 Window and Sun’s own NEWS windowing system as well as Sun’s Network File System. AT&T will then license the software as Sun licences SPARC to other hardware manufacturers. The SPARC-based systems will include a standard interface, known as an application binary interface which the two companies claim will run Unix system software programs as interchangeably as personal computers run PC software. AT&T’s own RISC effort, the CRISP or C Reduced Instruction Set Processor, is dead, but the company will continue with the 32100 and 32200-based 3B series. An AT&T spokesman said that our customers who require high-performance computers will be able to migrate easily to SPARC-RISC technology while protecting their current and future investments in 3B and 6386 software and system training.
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