One of the products that seemed to slip through the cracks when Eastman Kodak Co’s Interactive Systems Corp of Naperville, Illinois sold its packaged Unix division off to Sunsoft Inc was Norton Utilities for Unix. Interactive shared development of the product with Segue Software Inc, Santa Monica, and launched the product back in 1990 for iAPX-86-based machines, with Peter Norton Computing taking royalties (Norton has since been acquired by Symantec Corp, Cupertino, California). Now Interactive is looking for a buyer for the technology, which does not fit with its new brief as a networking technology specialist. Interactive says there is a lot of interest, and that implementations of the technology for Sun Microsystems Inc Sparc and IBM Corp RS/6000 systems are being proposed. One of the interested parties, and one of the only sources that can currently supply the Norton toolset for Santa Cruz Operation Inc and Sunsoft’s (Interactive) Unix, is Transparent Technology Inc of Los Angeles, California, which specialises in MS-DOS-Unix integration software. Company spokesman Chris Hipsher said there is a huge demand for the product, but that perhaps the most often requested implementation, for Santa Cruz Xenix, is still not available. Hipsher says another glaring omission is an equivalent of the Norton for MS-DOS disk fragmentation utility, but that the Crocodile utility from Australian multiport board manufacturer Stallion Pte Ltd fills the gap. The Norton product is in short supply, but Transparent Technology says it hopes to begin duplicating and packaging software itself in the near future. A solid deal, and possibly a relaunch of the product, will happen by year-end, says Interactive.
