Digital Equipment Corp’s Alpha RISCs clocked at 433MHz that run only Windows NT will ship late next month. A 466MHz version will run both NT and Unix but will cost twice as much as the 433MHz..
Sun Microsystems Inc vice-president for Internet Strategy Bud Tribble says we ought to think of the company’s Joe Corba object request broker, which is implemented as a Java applet as a remote procedure call for objects. Tribble believes it inevitable that the Object Management Group and Microsoft Corp distributed object models will co-exist in much the same way as TCP/IP and IPX/SPX do today, with companies such as Iona Technologies Ltd building the bridges.
Still looking for hidden value in its $2,500m Lotus Development Corp acquisition, IBM Corp is considering pulling out features of Notes, such as replication and offering them separately, possibly licensing them to other companies for use on the Internet, industry executives advised the Wall Street Journal.
The US Patent & Trademark Office has thrown out the claims of Gilbert Hyatt, that he is the inventor of the microcontroller. It affirmed that Texas Instruments Inc engineer Gary Boone is the inventor of the single-chip microcontroller, with the TMS1 00 and TMS1000 microcontroller families.
Hyundai Electronics Industries Co Ltd has cut its production of 16M-bit memory chips by 22% to 11m a month from the 14m it had planned.
Digital Equipment Corp miffed that the Boston Herald should report that it is planning to close one of its Hudson, Massachusetts wafer fabs and shift the work to the other one. It says it’s true the 0.5 micron Fab4 will progressively close as the 0. 35 micron Fab6 comes on line, but that the process started over a year ago.
PictureTel Corp has bought rights to a video telephone technology owned by Vivo Software Inc, which can be bundled on personal computers or with modems for less than $200. PictureTel is planning to license it to manufacturers.
Chortles of derision are greeting an announcement from Netscape Communications Corp that its Navigator client now has an installed base of more than 38m users because the number may be solid as a rock, but only a fraction of those are actually paid for, and many users have more than one browser installed – and many have two or three different beta releases of Navigator. The company also claims that Navigator is the most widely-used application – but it can do this only by treating Microsoft Corp’s Word at 21m users and Office at 22m separately. Netscape also says it surveyed 20,000 of its corporate customers, and found their intranet and Internet server plans split 50-50 between Unix and NT.
In a couple of years, you’ll see how effective [IBM Corp is] as a software company, Bill Gates told PC Week scathingly: They used to do a lot of in-house development – OfficeVision, SAA, AD/Cycle and OS/2… to me those are famous things – that you can spend so much money and come up with nothing!
