Under the new co-operation agreement between Oki Electric Industry Co and and Hewlett-Packard Co, which involves mutual purchasing arrangements and licensing, as a first step Oki will incorporate the Hewlett-Packard RISC workstations into its own product line-up, along with the HP-UX Unix operating system for the Precision Architecture RISC, and will push the products as part of its systems integration portfolio; the Cupertino, California company says that it may use Oki communications-related technology in its products in the future; the two companies are of course already bes’ friends, with a joint plant making printed circuit boards for computers in Puerto Rico, and since last October have had an agreement to link Hewlett-Packard workstations with Oki PABXs; Oki is seen in Japan as the weakest of the six original computer manufacturers that started in the late 1960s to produce computers under Ministry of International Trade & Industry guidance in loose partnership with Mitsubishi Electric Corp on the Cosmos line, derived from Xerox Corp Sigma licences; it was soon relegated to being a terminal manufacturer; coincidentally, Mitsubishi has over the last two years given up computer manufacturing on its own account, and as well as also selling Hewlett-Packard workstations under an OEM agreement, it last year became the first company in the world to sign an OEM agreement with IBM Corp to take on and market large-scale ES/9000 mainframes under its own logo.
