Spurred on by recent announcements from Sun, Motorola and Intel, National Semiconductor Corp is planning to publish its own binary compatibility specification for Unix within the next six months. The company claims that it is already closer to such a standard than its rivals, and its largest microprocessor customer, Siemens, already tells its customers that new system models will not require any changes to software. The only thing we need to do is small modifications to the object file format, so that all systems can load from a.out or the common object file format. This will involve the modification of linkers, and the the announcement will be primarily a marketing exercise.
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