After two years of flak from Apollo Computer Inc system users in fact ever since it bought the company back in April 1989 Hewlett-Packard Co is now getting around to addressing some of their outstanding requirements. As part of a plan to bring Apollo Domain/OS into the HP-UX and OSF/1 Unix operating system fold, Hewlett-Packard will reveal what it is calling DM Lite at the Adus meeting of Apollo users. DM Lite is a version of the well-liked object-oriented Apollo user interface display manager, previously a tightly integrated part of Domain/OS. Its point-and-click features and graphics functionality – which preceded many desktop environments only now coming onto the market by several years – will be made available as a front-end to the company’s Motif-based Visual User Environment, with built-in hooks to the Open Software Foundation’s Distributed Computing and Distributed Management technologies. Hewlett-Packard’s US salespeople are said to be pleading for consistency in the firm’s long-term plans for its Unix operating system offerings – so that users won’t have to shift from one environment to another every year – so Hewlett is going to migrate the OSF/1 kernel into HP-UX, with VUE on top, in such a way that one day HP-UX users will come into work and find they’re actually using OSF/1, but won’t know the difference, it says. As the two will be binary compatible, Domain/OS users will be able to move over to both HP-UX and OSF/1 in one fell swoop, and still retain their Apollo display manager via DM Lite. Hewlett-Packard hasn’t worked out a name for the combined operating system – it even may stick with both OSF/1 and HP-UX monikers, even though they will be more or less indis tinguishable. It says it will initially concentrate on getting conversion tools out to software developers to bring applications over to the environment. Work on integrating HP-UX and OSF/1 will take at least 12 months, and the thing won’t figure on end-user machines until 1993, the company says.
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