Cincom Systems Inc, Cincinnati, Ohio, which calls itself the world’s largest privately held software company, yesterday finally cemented itself to the Unix world by announcing that its Supra SQL relational database will be available on five Unix boxes by January. Cincom, which has been making noises about a Unix strategy since 1988, also revealed MS-DOS and OS/2 support and client-server versions of the database software for DEC, IBM and Unix environments. The five systems are IBM’s RS/6000 under AIX – an OSF/1 version will follow when IBM adopts it – Sequent Computer Systems’ Dynix/ptx, Pyramid’s OSx, Sun Microsystems’ Sun-4 series running SunOS, and Intel 80386-based personal computers with Interactive Systems’ Unix. Additional Unix versions of Cincom’s Mantis fourth-generation applications development environment – which is already available on Hewlett-Packard’s 9000 Series 800 range of Unix systems – are under development, the company said. A version of Supra exchanging data between Unix and VMS systems is currently in beta-test, and Cincom says its aim is to develop a fully-distributed edition of the database that will run across a network of multi-vendor systems. Prices will be on a per-user basis but none have been revealed.
