Canadian Posix house Mortice Kern Systems Inc, Waterloo, Ontario is offering to bring Unix and non-Unix operating systems up to Spec 1170 with a repackaged version of its InterOpen Posix and XPG4 source code products and services. It has honed a superset of its XPG4/Posix.2 commands and utilities and XPG4 terminal interfaces to provide conformance with key Spec 1170 applications programming interfaces; XPG4/Posix.2 commands and utilities account for 51% of the Spec 1170 applications programming interface set. Vendors will have to put the completed work through X/Open Co Ltd’s test suite. Mortice Kern is wary of saying exactly who it is working with, given the competition among the vendors to be first out with a Spec 1170 operating system, but it expects to tap its existing licensees, especially the non-Unix operating system crowd, where it counts Digital Equipment Corp OpenVMS, Hewlett-Packard Co MPE/iX, IBM Corp MVS, OS/400 and Unisys Corp CTOS as wins. Many Unixes are close to meeting the full applications programming interface set, it admits, though getting them up to the mark, and putting them through the testing process, will not be quick. Mortice Kern says conforming products should be around in six months time.
