The Unix takeover of the telecommunications world is proceeding apace, and now Northern Telecom Ltd has taken a worldwide licence to use Hewlett-Packard Co’s HP-UX implementation in an agreement projected to generate several hundred million dollars in additional revenues for the two companies during the next few years. HP-UX will be used with Northern Telecom’s current DMS SuperNode switching systems, which are understood to be built around Motorola 68000 family chips, and with its emerging S/DMS fibre-optic transmission and S/DMS broadband switching products. But in January, Northern indicated a move to the use of MIPS Computer Systems Inc RISC chips in its products with a version of the DMS-10 rural exchange using the MIPS R-series (CI No 1,351), and converting HP-UX to run on MIPS processors would be a non-trivial task.Use of HP-UX is intended to provide a tighter integration of general purpose computers and telecommunications systems, enabling telephone companies to connect any Unix workstations and minicomputers. HP-UX will be used in transmission products from the fourth quarter of this year, and on access and switching products next year.
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