With the rush by the likes of DEC and IBM to endorse the X Window screen windowing system for Unix systems developed at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Microsoft with Windows and Sun Microsystems with its emerging NeWS Network-extensible Window System, are beginning to look exposed. The two companies have therefore decided to pool their resources and have an agreement under which Microsoft will licence Sun’s NeWS technology, which takes advantage of the Adobe Systems PostScript imaging model. The two companies will also exchange information on technical developments and future products plans. The pair look to the relationship to further development of technology to bridge the high-end technical workstation and the personal computer markets. Microsoft says it wants to look at the Sun technology to evaluate ways to bring even higher quality screen output and faster display performance to Windows in the future. While this announcement will have no immediate impact on Microsoft Windows, we have a long-term interest in understanding ways of transferring data and sharing information with high-end technical workstations. There will be more overlap in these markets with the arrival of powerful 80386-based machines, it says.
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