NCR Corp will not be going to Santa Cruz Operation Inc for its 64-bit Unix technology, the company told our sister newspaper Unigram.X last week. The decision comes a month after a similar rejection from Sequent Computer Systems Inc. Neither company believes that Santa Cruz, with its commodity mindset and heritage, is culturally capable of producing a robust sophisticated high-end operating system. Like Sequent, NCR says it is now prepared to develop its own 64-bit operating system. If it does, it says, it will use pretty much the same approach as Sequent and go into 64 bits in phases rather than all at once, and take on some pieces of Gemini, such as the file system and library. Ironically, Santa Cruz was prepared to use some of NCR’s high-end technology in Gemini 64. It is unclear where that idea now stands. Gemini 64 is expected to incorporate the 64-bit 3DA technology application programming interfaces that Santa Cruz is working on with Hewlett-Packard Co – though Hewlett-Packard has just gone to its old pal Hitachi Ltd to get mainframe-style functionality among other things for HP-UX (CI No 3,088). Otherwise, Gemini 64 is a 64-bit version of Santa Cruz’s 32-bit Gemini, which merges the current SCO UnixWare and OpenServer product lines. It’s due in mid-1998 – roughly the same time as the full-blown 3DA project lands in HP-UX 12.0 according to Hewlett-Packard. Both are meant to coincide with the appearance of the 64-bit Intel-Hewlett-Packard chip, Merced.
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