Intergraph Corp, Hunstville, Alabama, says an implementation of the OSF/1 operating system will figure on its range of Clipper RISC workstations and servers from the end 1992, and not next March, when the firm is due to unveil new 33 MIPS, 9 MFLOPS-rated desktops based upon its latest C400 Clipper. It does not expect to get a stable 1.1 release of OSF/1 from the Foundation until March at the earliest. Along with OSF/1, Intergraph will also have an implementation of the Open Software Foundation’s Distributed Computing Environment on its boxes by that time. Intergraph currently uses a BSD-based implementation of Unix, and is working to convert its application base for the Mach-derived OSF/1. Existing customers will get OSF/1 as a normal software upgrade, says Nick Simpson, acting European product marketing manager in Swindon, Wiltshire, who will return to the system product marketing group in Huntsville, once a permanent appointment has been made. Intergraph will not implement OSF/1 on the Sun Microsystems Inc Sparc workstations that its Dazix software subsidiary markets. However the popular MicroStation mechanical design package, which comes from Exton, Pennsylvania-based Bentley Systems Inc, a firm half-owned by Intergraph, will be available for Sparcstations from January 14, priced at $3,450. The low key announcement is said to reflect the internal marketing problem that Intergraph now has in trying to keep its proprietary Clipper customers happy enough with the higher priced – $20,000 – but more functional, I/EMS mechanical design package, and precluding a stampede to Sparc MicroStation systems. A high-end version 2.0 of I/EMS for Sparc has also been announced, but the firm expects less than 50% of I/EMS 2.0 sales to be on Sparc. MicroStation, which has been described as a low-end competitor for AutoDesk, doesn’t include all of I/EMS’ functionality, but Electronic News reports that Bentley has acquired the Cedar constraint modelling technology from MCAE Technologies which it will include in future versions of MicroStation to make up for it.
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