The Open Software Foundation last week announced the general availability of Release 1.1 of its OSF/1 operating system (CI No 1,949) and trundled out the first snapshot of the Distributed Management Environment for its members. The Foundation also rolled out some future development plans in its Open Road plan. Compiled versions of OSF/1 release 1.1K – integrated kernel are out on three reference systems, Intel Corp’s 80386-based 302, Digital Equipment Corp’s MIPS Computer Systems Inc RISC-based DECstation 3100, and Encore Computer Corp’s National Semiconductor NS32532-based Multimax. Other releases will follow for Intel Paragon, DEC Alpha, Apple Computer Inc A/UX 4.0, Convex Computer Corp MPP, Intergraph Corp Clipper, IBM Corp ESA, Hitachi Ltd MJ, Advanced Computing Environment and Hewlett-Packard Co systems. OSF/1.1 is essentially a modularised effort, in a similar vein to Unix System Laboratories Inc’s Destiny product. It can run in just 4Mb of memory and has a range of modules that can be loaded and unloaded as required, including Network File System, TCP/IP, or a System V file system. Most important, for compatibility’s sake, OSF/1.1 includes conformance to Unix Labs’s System V Interface Definition version 3, which means any application written to the Interface Definition 3 base and kernel extensions – the backbone of Unix System V.4 – will run under OSF/1.1 with a strict re-compile, the Foundation says. OSF/1.1 has in creased foreign language support and costs $85,000 to resellers with full distribution rights. Upgrades from OSF/1.0 are $25,000, binary royalties are $65 per copy.
