What with getting joined at the hip to Microsoft Corp on Windows NT and increasing its committment to designing and reselling Hewlett-Packard Co PA-RISC systems as well as contributing technology to HP-UX it looks as though NEC Corp’s MIPS-based Unix development effort has hit the wall. What Unix operating system for MIPS development effort is left appears to have been transferred back to Japan from the company’s San Jose, California labs. Unix system software architect Steve Stone is no longer with the lab and all enquiries were referred to Japan. When we contacted NEC in Japan the company said it had no comment to make about its Unix business. Last year NEC Corp completed the first part of what was to have been a two-stage project to develop a next-generation Unix operating system for use on the MIPS RISC servers it sells. Tower, a 64-bit MIPS version of Unix SVR4.2 MP NEC was developed in conjunction with Denmark’s Dansk Data Elektronik A/S after a host of other partners dropped out. It was to have been followed by Bridge, a kernel incorporating the 3DA Unix architecture that Hewlett-Packard Co and Santa Cruz Operation Inc were to define under their wide ranging 1995 Unix pact. Tower and Bridge started out with the backing of a handful of MIPS systems vendors, including Siemens Nixdorf Informationssystemes AG, under the working name Golden Gate. NEC and DDE were left carrying the can when all other partners dropped out and had effectively no where to go once SCO and HP’s grandiose scheme went belly-up. NEC, which still offers a line of MIPS-based 4800 servers, recently increased its committment to HP by designing its own PA-RISC technical server to market alongside the HP servers and workstations it already resells in some territories, and contributing Unix system software technologies to HP’s HP-UX team.