Meanwhile, the two-stage Golden Gate development project that aims to get the 3DA Unix running on the Mips RISC chip (CI No 2,858) is now down to a one-company show. Originally also expected to include Mips’ vendors Siemens Nixdorf Informationssysteme AG and its Pyramid Technology Corp subsidiary, Sony Corp, Silicon Graphics Inc and Dansk Data Elektronik A/S, Golden Gate is now an NEC solo project. All NEC currently holds is a contract to supply the first stage of the project – dubbed Tower – to Dansk Data. Tower is an implementation of the Aspen 64-bit Unix extensions to Unix SVR4.2MP. The original plan was for Tower to be followed by Bridge, including the 3DA next-generation Unix kernel application programming interfaces currently being created by Hewlett-Packard Co and the Santa Cruz Operation Inc. Silicon Graphics Inc is now more interested in its own Cellular Irix Unix version, based on Hive from Stanford University (CI No 3,011, 3,020), while Siemens Nixdorf and Pyramid are also doing their own 64-bit Unix work for their Reliant systems, due out later this year. NEC’s Tower Unix is due next quarter. The future of Bridge awaits NEC’s negotiations with Hewlett-Packard, expected to be completed over the next few weeks. If NEC doesn’t deal directly with Hewlett- Packard, as Hitachi has done, then it will have to use the Santa Cruz Operation product as an OEM customer, and will be forced to wait until 1998 or beyond, when Santa Cruz implements the 3DA code it gets from HP.
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