Motorola Inc, Unisoft Corp and a claimed 30-odd other vendors, mostly unnamed, in the 68000 Unix camp last week hit back at Intel, Sun and AT&T’s applications binary standards interface developments with the previously anticipated announcement (CI No 153) of a Binary Compatibility Standard for systems based on the Motorola 68020 and 68030 processors and the forthcoming 68040 and the 78000 RISC. The announcement was backed by Apollo Computer, Hewlett-Packard Co, NCR Corp, Tektronix Inc, and Motorola’s Microcomputer Division, covers the binary executable-operating system interface and removable media formats, conforms to the Posix standard and is also said to include source-level compatibility with Motorola’s forthcoming RISC to ease future software applications migration. The Uniforum announcement was weakened, however, by the absence of any representation or endorsement from AT&T and the fact that the rest of the 30 vendors said to be supporting the standard declined to be named. Unisoft’s Robin Schlee pointed out that it was unlikely that chip manufacturers would in future release major new processors without specifying a binary standard.
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