Having more or less given up on its Windows-based NewWave environment, Hewlett-Packard Co is in talks with Steve Jobs’ NeXT Inc about licensing the NeXTstep environment, which sits atop Unix and includes full object-oriented development capabilities, the New York Times reports. The report, citing three unidentified executives familiar with the talks, says that the talks originally extended to the possibility of Hewlett making an investment in NeXT, and in NeXT, which plans to move to a RISC architecture, adopting the Precision Architecture RISC, but that both those options were rejected by Hewlett-Packard executives. The paper expects an announcement on any agreement to come as soon as this month, but Hewlett-Packard is also known to be weighing up Microsoft Corp’s Windows NT and the object-oriented environment in development at IBM Corp and Apple Computer Inc’s Taligent Inc joint venture. Of late, Hewlett-Packard has been closest to Sun Microsystems Inc on object-oriented software technology, collaborating on Sun’s Distributed Objects Everywhere project. NeXTStep consists of a graphical operating environment and object-oriented development environment overlaid on the Mach Unix kernel, and currently runs only on the Motorola Inc 68000 family – the NeXTStep 486 version is very late and is still in development. The problems with getting that out the door might cast doubt on the possibility of getting NeXTstep up quickly on the Precision Architecture RISC except that Hewlett-Packard must have unrivalled skills for that particular conversion, because all its Unix system and application software started life on 68000-based machines either the HP 9000 Series 300s or the Apollo Computer Inc Domain networked workstations.
