It’s quite common for computer manufacturers to give a first airing to new machines at trade shows, but ICL went one better at Unix Expo by leaving the machine at home and logging into it on the Unix International stand. The machine was none other than one of ICL’s new Sparc-based systems – codenamed Unicorn in some quarters – residing at the AT&T development labs in Princeton, New Jersey. Here it has been used as part of ICL’s joint work with AT&T’s Unix Software Operation on the reference implementation of Unix System V.4 for Sparc architectures. ICL’s UK-based software development team has been working with AT&T on the project for the last 18 months, and recently shipped an initial release of the implementation to AT&T, which will distribute it to other Sparc vendors as an Applications Binary Interface reference environment. Although ICL was keeping tight lipped about its new Sparc systems, designed to broaden its DRS (previously Clan) Unix- based systems at the high end, it did say that systems had been out at customer test sites for some time now, and that work on a substantial amount of applications software would be completed by the launch date. Expect to see the machine towards the end of January 1990 for 50 users and upwards.
