Lucent Technologies’ Bell Labs took the lid off its Inferno network operating system and programming environment yesterday seeking to establish it as the dialtone for information services. It’s touted as the answer to regional Bell operating company and PTT prayers and is designed to glue network infrastructures together (CI Nos 2,854). It’s also supposed to prove a boon to content providers since it incorporates the security and automatic billing that they need. According to its creators, Inferno is designed primarily to support applications written for non-Internet networking environments, including cable and satellite television, telephony and private networks. However the company spent much of a call yesterday explaining how Inferno differs from Java, a space it would surely go after if Java weren’t already there. And, whilst Sun Microsystems Inc and Microsoft Corp are its admitted competition, it also plans to support both Java and ActiveX. Mike Skarzynski, general manager of a 20-strong Inferno team, says Bell Labs aim is to become one of two or three dominant players in what it expects to be a $200m market. Hard stuff
Inferno is a small portable distributed operating system largely written in C that runs standalone on PCs and as a user application under Unix, NT, Windows 95 and Bell Lab’s uncommercialized Unix update Plan 9. It will run applications on machines with only 1Mb memory. Bell Labs says there will be a small licence fee plus a per device or server charge for Inferno, which is currently in alpha release. An SDK and binaries will be freely available this summer. Inferno includes the C- and Pascal informed Limbo language and Dis virtual machine. Components can supposedly be broken down into services which can run locally or remotely and supported even on very very low-cost devices. Bell Labs says the interface could run on a local client whilst hard stuff, like conversion, security and URL processing can, unlike in Netscape, be done run remotely. An example it describes is an Inferno application being used as a point-of-sale network system to order and pay for broadcast services, such as a film or news, which then automatically switches over to a satellite-based network to deliver the service. Bell Labs is hoping the network service providers will put Inferno in their system design plans, however with no customers it still has to overcome hard-core skepticism that it can commercialize the thing.
