Commodore International Ltd, West Chester, Pennsylvania, denies categorically the gossip that has been doing the rounds that suggests that it has abandoned its Unix development efforts. Being baseless, it says, it can’t explain how the allegation got started. Like most companies lately, it’s pulled in its horns a bit, but that has only cost it one Unix developer, and it is now about to come up with its next Unix System V.4 iteration. After months of waiting, Commodore finally unveiled its Motorola 68030-based Unix V.4 Amiga 3000 box at the UniForum show earlier this year. Progress since then, however, has been slow. Although the Unix machine is being sold into academic, and some commercial sites in the US, there has been no European introduction thus far. There are understood to be a handful of users in France and Germany – where some of the Unix development was done – but a full European debut is unlikely because Commodore is not able to support the machine on this side of the Atlantic. Commodore’s first brush with Unix was with a Zilog Corp Z8000-based machine dubbed the Z Machine in 1983-84, which was abandoned almost as soon as it was launched.
