Unix operating system house Interactive Systems Corp has been put up for sale by its parent company Eastman Kodak Co, and announcement of a buyer is imminent. The most likely candidate to buy it is the new Sun Microsystems Inc subsidiary SunSoft, according to industry sources. Kodak, which bought Interactive in March 1988 on terms that have never been disclosed, was an early investor in Sun, is likely to keep hold of the Photo CD and electronic imaging technology it has been working on with Interactive, but does not see Interactive’s current prime business of selling desktop Unix packages for Intel Corp iAPX-86 machines as core to its activities. Talks have been taking place over the last few months with a number of companies. Sun is apparently the most interested, and also the best fit to take on the business – it’s keen to get into the Intel market with its new Solaris System Unix V.4 operating system (see page 2) – and behind the scenes, Interactive is said to have struck a gentleman’s agreement with Sun back in April to carry out the work on the Intel version of Solaris. Other prospective candidates mentioned to buy the Santa Monica, California company are Novell Inc and Unix System Laboratories Inc. Gossips say the company was also offered to Intel itself, but the chipmaker was not interested. The SunSoft implementation of Solaris for 80386 and 80486-based machines will require 8Mb memory, a 200Mb disk, an EISA bus, floating point co-processor and cache plus 1,000 by 800 pixel Super VGA. Sun hopes to see it on machines at $5,000 up.
