Canadian firm Consensys Computer Inc, Markham, Ontario, since 1985 a vendor of intelligent input-output boards, is laying claim to the first shipments of Unix Laboratories Inc’s Unix System V.4.2 Destiny shrink-wrapped binary operating system for Intel Corp iAPX-86 architectures. Prices go from $400 to $900 with development systems costing $1,000 to $1,500. Disk mirroring, MS-DOS and Windows links and support for RAID disk (for Consensys V4.2) array technology are planned before the end of the year. Consensys, which also has offices in San Antonio, Texas and Reading in the UK, already offers a standard System V.4 implementation, though it had previously spent a year getting that release into shape as a product after taking delivery from Unix Labs. It claims over 3,000 installations of Consensys V.4 in 10 months, 800 in Europe and expects around 60% of those users to upgrade to V.4.2, half of them immediately. It’s aiming for deliveries of 1,000 copies of V.4.2 a month for the first six months from October. The company’s only criticism is of Destiny’s Moolit toolkit that doesn’t provide for application development under the Motif graphical user interface (although it is compatible) as it lacks Motif libraries. Consensys is looking to add a native Motif implementation for those that require it. Consensys had taken on Interactive Systems Corp and SunSoft Inc refugee Doug Miller to be vice-president of European sales.
