Having sold a 1.5% stake to Sun Microsystems Inc for several million dollars at the end of last year in return for a licence and development agreement around NeXTstep, NeXT Computer Inc is now said to be looking for additional investors and partners. It is still talking up the notion that there is another firm close to climbing on board. At that time Digital Equipment Corp and Silicon Graphics Inc were seen as potential converts to NeXT’s brand of object technology. DEC is already working on an Alpha version and NeXT has put its Portable Distributed Object System up under OSF/1. Silicon Graphics apparently hasn’t decided which way its going to blow in the object wind yet, but has been developing a new object-type operating system for the set-top converter boxes to be supplied to Time Warner Inc as part of the firms’ interactive television trial in Orlando, Florida. NeXT reports that it did $11m business in software in the second half of last year.
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