DEC had a quiet time at last month’s Uniforum, but the company did show a sneak preview of the X.11 Window System on an Ultrix VAXstation, where it provides sharper resolution and different fonts from the previous X.10 version, according to a DEC representative. Also on show was an 8000 series VAX running Ultrix and attached to an HSC70 VAXcluster coupler, allowing large amounts of disk storage to be supported. Meanwhile DEC and Systems Strategies Inc, one of the primary suppliers of mainframe communications software for Unix, said that DEC would distribute Systems’ VAX Link Ultrix products, which provide Ultrix systems with on-line and batch communications with IBM hosts. Not surprisingly, there was no sign of a multiprocessor Ultrix system – DEC would anyway hardly be likely to release such a product before it could offer customers a symmetrical multiprocessor VMS – but over at the Usenix technical conference at the other end of Dallas, DEC researchers were describing an Experimental symmetric multiprocessor Ultrix kernel. The presentation, by Graham Hamilton and Dan Conde of DEC’s Palo Alto facility, described a three-processor system built around a modified VAX 8300 – but the design was targeted at larger systems of around 10 processors.
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