Motorola Inc has now picked up the XDOS utility that enables MS DOS applications to run efficiently under Unix, and says it will bundle the XDOS binary compiler with each System V.3.2 and V.4 version that it sells for both the 68000 and 88000 microprocessor families. XDOS, from Hunter Systems Software Inc, Mountain View, California is claimed to be the most efficient means yet of harnessing the mass of MS-DOS applications for Unix, and was described in detail in CI No 932 – the 88000 is presumably the other RISC for which Hunter was doing an implementation, one for the Intergraph Clipper having been agreed upon (CI No 923). MS-DOS applications are claimed to approach the speed of native ones by virtue of binary compilation: XDOS consists of a binary compiler, which takes iAPX-86 binary code as its source and generates executable binary to run on the target microprocessor, and the XDOS PC interface library, which provides the link from the MS-DOS environment to the target machine’s operating system.
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